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01.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-19

Efficient site-specific gene addition using R2 retrotransposons in tobacco and rice

作者:

Precise integration of multikilobase DNA fragments remains a major technical barrier in plants. Here we introduce non-long terminal repeat (non-LTR) R2 retrotransposons as a versatile system for targeted gene integration in plants. We reconstituted R2 activity in Nicotiana benthamiana and benchmarked insertion efficiency and fidelity using a TMV-based episomal reporter system. We demonstrate site-specific integration of GFP (2.2 kb) and recombinase-compatible landing pads (0.6 kb) into 28S rDNA arrays, with intact cassette insertion frequencies up to 75% and 53%, respectively. To temporally constrain donor availability and avoid DNA intermediates, we combined in planta effector expression with recombinant RNA virus-mediated donor delivery. We apply R2 retrotransposons for targeted insertion of resistance cassettes within the rDNA of rice callus, achieving integration efficiencies up to 17%. These results position R2 retrotransposons as a double-strand break-free system for RNA-templated insertion of multikilobase gene cassettes at rDNA loci, for safe-harbor trait stacking in plants with potential applications in crop improvement and synthetic biology. Retrotransposons are applied in plants for safe-harbor transgene integration.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Let's Ask Gauss: Improved One-Run Privacy Auditing

arXiv:2606.12733v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Privacy auditing provides an important safeguard by estimating the actual information leaked by a model, thus ensuring that theoretical privacy guarantees hold in practice. We study empirical privacy auditing for differentially private (DP) machine learning, focusing on efficient one-run methods for mechanisms such as DP-SGD. Prior one-run approaches threshold training examples or "canaries" into binary membership guesses, which discards useful information. We show that, in the white-box DP-SGD setting, canary-aligned signals naturally form a sequence of random variables whose normalized sum is asymptotically Gaussian. Leveraging this distributional perspective, we develop a DP-auditing framework that leads to tighter privacy lower bounds from a single training run.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Existence Precedes Value: Joint Modeling of Observational Existence and Evolving States in Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.13571v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-world time series are often highly incomplete and irregular due to sensor dormancy, transmission delays, and event-driven sampling, making reliable forecasting fundamentally challenging. Existing methods have evolved from impute-then-forecast pipelines to continuous-time models such as Neural ODEs and continuous-time graph networks. While these approaches improve the modeling of historical irregularity, they still rely on an implicit oracle assumption at inference time: the timestamps of future valid observations are presumed to be known in advance. This assumption limits practical relevance, since in many real systems the more fundamental question is not only what the future value will be, but also whether a valid observation will occur at all. In this paper, we propose Timeflies, a unified framework that reformulates forecasting as a joint problem of future observability inference and value estimation. To explicitly model the interaction between observation dynamics and state evolution, Timeflies adopts an observation stream and a value stream, coupled through three dedicated modules for reliability-aware embedding, observation-guided dependency modeling, and joint prediction. We further construct Shadow, a benchmark that combines natural missingness from public datasets with real-world industrial data, and introduce the Observation-Value Joint Entropy (OVJE) metric to comprehensively evaluate this coupled predictability. Extensive experiments show that Timeflies consistently outperforms existing methods, highlighting the importance of explicitly modeling future observability in time series forecasting with missing values. Code and dataset are available in https://github.com/ant-intl/Timeflies.

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

OpenAnt: LLM-Powered Vulnerability Discovery Through Code Decomposition, Adversarial Verification, and Dynamic Testing

arXiv:2606.19149v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated vulnerability discovery in large codebases remains challenging: traditional static analysis produces high false-positive rates, while dynamic approaches such as fuzzing require substantial infrastructure and often target narrow classes of bugs. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) enable semantic reasoning about program behavior, but applying LLMs to repository-scale security analysis introduces challenges related to context management, cost, and verification. We present OpenAnt, an open-source vulnerability discovery system that integrates static program analysis with LLM-based reasoning in a multi-stage pipeline. OpenAnt introduces three key techniques. First, codebases are decomposed into self-contained analysis units filtered by reachability from external entry points, reducing the analysis surface by up to 97% while preserving attack-relevant code. Second, candidate vulnerabilities undergo adversarial verification through constrained attacker simulation, where the model evaluates exploitability under realistic attacker capabilities. Third, findings are validated through dynamic verification, in which exploit environments are generated automatically, executed in sandboxed containers, and discarded after use. Evaluation on widely used open-source projects including OpenSSL, WordPress, and Flowise shows that this architecture can identify previously unknown vulnerabilities while maintaining manageable analysis cost and substantially reducing false positives. Our results suggest that closed-loop vulnerability discovery pipelines, combining semantic reasoning with exploit validation, provide a practical path toward scalable automated security analysis. OpenAnt is released as open source under the Apache 2.0 license at https://github.com/knostic/OpenAnt.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Hierarchical Consistency Learning for Test-time Adaptation in Camouflage Perception

Camouflaged object detection (COD) aims to localize targets that exhibit minimal perceptual differences from backgrounds through physical attributes. Existing methods, constrained by the static train-then-freeze paradigm, suffer from domain rigidity and annotation dependency, limiting their adaptability to scene variations and unseen camouflage patterns. To overcome these, we propose the hierarchical consistency learning (HCL) framework, which integrates test-time adaptation for dynamic representation recalibration. Specifically, we design the hierarchical representation reconstruction (HRR) to alleviate feature entanglement by synergizing spatial reconstruction with dual-stream frequency-domain decomposition, enhancing robustness against appearance homogenization. The pixel and spectrum inference provide structural and contextual priors. We further introduce task affinity guidance (TAG) to propagate knowledge across branches via channel-wise affinity, aligning local discriminative cues and mitigating semantic drift. To ensure semantic invariance, we formulate the prototype consistency calibration (PCC), which aggregates region features into compact prototypes and establishes prototype-feature similarity. This imposes implicit and hierarchical constraints that bridge task and representation gaps. Extensive experiments across four camouflaged and four underwater object benchmarks, under three degradation settings, demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, highlighting its robustness and generalization under distribution shifts.

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

InfoGeo: Information-Theoretic Object-Centric Learning for Cross-View Generalizable UAV Geo-Localization

Cross-view geo-localization (CVGL) is fundamental for precise localization and navigation in GPS-denied environments, aiming to match ground or UAV imagery with satellite views. Existing approaches often rely on global feature alignment, but they suffer from substantial domain shifts induced by varying regional textures and weather conditions. This issue becomes even more pronounced in UAV-based scenarios, where the broader perspective inevitably introduces dense, fine-grained objects, creating significant visual clutter. To address this, we draw inspiration from Object-Centric Learning (OCL) and propose InfoGeo, an information-theoretic framework designed to enhance robustness and generalization. InfoGeo reformulates the optimization as an information bottleneck process with two core objectives: (i) maximizing view-invariant information by aligning the object-centric structural relations across views, and (ii) minimizing view-specific noisy signals through cross-view knowledge constraints. Extensive evaluations across diverse benchmarks and challenging scenarios demonstrate that InfoGeo significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Upper airway disease in primary ciliary dyskinesia: Clinical management and factors influencing decision-making, a multicentre analysis

Background Upper airway disease is common in primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD), but management evidence is limited. We aimed to describe management practices and identify factors influencing management decisions. Methods Using data from the Ear-Nose-Throat (ENT) Prospective International Cohort of patients with PCD (EPIC-PCD) and an ENT-specialist survey across participating centres, we described management practices recorded at routine follow-up. We assessed clinical factors associated with practices via mixed-effects logistic regression models. In a subgroup of patients, we assessed factors associated with initiation or discontinuation of practices. Results We included 579 patients: median age 15 years, 46% female. Nasal rinsing (54%) and nasal corticosteroids (22%) were most frequently prescribed. Among 466 patients with available data, 47 had grommets (10%) and 42 hearing aids (9%). Nasal corticosteroids and rinsing were more frequently prescribed in patients with polyps (odds ratio [OR] 3.74, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.80-7.76; OR 3.39, 95% CI 1.37-8.37) or turbinate hypertrophy (OR 1.89, 95% CI 1.03-3.47; OR 2.89, 95% CI 1.55-5.38), and upper airway nebulisation in patients with frequent nasal symptoms (OR 2.86, 95% CI 1.11-7.39). Management practices differed between centres, as seen also by the specialists survey responses. In 177 patients with multiple visits, initiation of nasal rinsing was associated with frequent nasal symptoms (OR 3.18, 95% CI 1.24-8.18) and turbinate hypertrophy (OR 3.21, 95% CI 1.20-8.59). Conclusion Upper airway disease management in PCD varies and is partly guided by symptom burden and clinical findings. This variation across centres highlights the need for care standardisation and PCD-specific management guidelines.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

FEnc$^2$: Unifying Data Packing for Efficient Private Inference via Convolution and Architecture-Aware Fragment Encoding

arXiv:2606.16359v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) enables privacy-preserving machine learning but incurs extreme computational and memory overhead. These costs come not only from expensive low-level primitives, including Number Theoretic Transform (NTT), rotation, and key-switching, but also from inefficient ciphertext packing at the application level. Existing packing strategies typically preserve either neighboring data elements or feature grouping, but not both, leading to wasted ciphertext slots, excessive rotations, and inflated ciphertext counts. We propose FEnc2, a unified and principled fragment-based encoding framework for CKKS-based private convolutional neural network inference. FEnc2 optimizes slot utilization, rotation complexity, and ciphertext density through two components: 1)Conv-aware Encoding, which analytically selects an optimal fragment size to decouple spatial dependencies and jointly minimize inner-outer rotations across layers, and 2)Arch-aware Ct Compression, which restores ciphertext density after feature- or channel-reduction layers. Together, these transformations reshape encrypted workload structure and reduce homomorphic operations by one to two orders of magnitude. With full memory capacity utilized, i.e., at maximum batch size, FEnc2 achieves end-to-end latency speedups over the state-of-the-art Orion of up to 228.83x on GPU and 226.06x on CPU for LeNet on MNIST, and up to 4.55x on GPU and 9.43x on CPU for MobileNet on ImageNet. FEnc2 is hardware-agnostic yet architecturally transformative: by optimizing encrypted tensor layout before execution, it reduces ciphertext count and workload pressure on hardware, complementing primitive-level optimizations such as NTT and keyswitch accelerators. These results show that application-level data layout is a first-order architectural design dimension for encrypted inference and an important enabler for next-generation FHE systems.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Benchmarking Physics-Informed Time-Series Models for Operational Global Station Weather Forecasting

The development of Time-Series Forecasting (TSF) models is often constrained by the lack of comprehensive datasets, especially in Global Station Weather Forecasting (GSWF), where existing datasets are small, temporally short, and spatially sparse. To address this, we introduce WEATHER-5K, a large-scale observational weather dataset that better reflects real-world conditions, supporting improved model training and evaluation. While recent TSF methods perform well on benchmarks, they lag behind operational Numerical Weather Prediction systems in capturing complex weather dynamics and extreme events. We propose PhysicsFormer, a physics-informed forecasting model combining a dynamic core with a Transformer residual to predict future weather states. Physical consistency is enforced via pressure-wind alignment and energy-aware smoothness losses, ensuring plausible dynamics while capturing complex temporal patterns. We benchmark PhysicsFormer and other TSF models against operational systems across several weather variables, extreme event prediction, and model complexity, providing a comprehensive assessment of the gap between academic TSF models and operational forecasting. The dataset and benchmark implementation are available at: https://github.com/taohan10200/WEATHER-5K.

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

Diversity-Driven Offline Multi-Objective Optimization via Nested Pareto Set Learning

arXiv:2606.15115v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-objective optimization (MOO) has emerged as a powerful approach to solving complex optimization problems involving multiple objectives. In many practical scenarios, function evaluations are unavailable or prohibitively expensive, necessitating optimization solely based on a fixed offline dataset. In this setting, known as offline MOO, the goal is to find out the Pareto set without access to the true objective functions. This setting suffers from the out-of-distribution (OOD) issue, where the surrogate model is not accurate for unseen designs. Due to the OOD issue, surrogate errors may cause the optimizer to select solutions that do not lie on the true Pareto front and are biased toward its extremes. To address this, this paper proposes Diversity-driven Offline Multi-Objective Optimization (DOMOO), which aims to find out a diverse and high-quality set of solutions. First, DOMOO incorporates an accumulative risk control module that estimates the potential risk of candidate solutions and alleviates the OOD issue between the training data and the generated solutions. In addition, a nested Pareto set learning (PSL) strategy is proposed to jointly learn preference and PSL parameters, then optimize them, enabling adaptation to diverse Pareto front geometries. To further enhance solution quality, we design a diversity-driven selection strategy that extracts a representative and well-distributed set of final solutions. To achieve this diversity-driven selection strategy, we propose $IGD_offline$, a tailored indicator for the offline setting that considers both diversity and convergence, and avoids the bias of hypervolume indicator. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks show that DOMOO achieves the best average rank across tasks in both convergence and diversity among the compared methods.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Learning from Own Solutions: Self-Conditioned Credit Assignment for Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards

arXiv:2606.18810v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has driven substantial progress in training LLMs for reasoning tasks, but representative methods such as GRPO assign uniform credit across all tokens, wasting gradient on routine tokens while under-crediting pivotal reasoning steps. Existing token-level credit assignment methods require resources beyond the model's own rollouts. GRPO variants rely on process reward models or ground-truth answers. Knowledge distillation assigns credit through per-token divergence but requires external teachers (On-Policy Distillation) or privileged information (On-Policy Self Distillation). However, these dependencies limit applicability in the pure RLVR setting. We observe that conditioning the model on its own verified trajectories induces a measurable per-token KL divergence between the original and conditioned distributions, and prove that distilling from a self-teacher constructed by verified trajectories leads to infeasible weighted-average solutions when multiple verified trajectories exist. We propose SC-GRPO (Self-Conditioned GRPO), which uses KL divergence mentioned before as a multiplicative weight on GRPO gradients. Across five benchmarks spanning math, code, and agentic tasks, SC-GRPO consistently outperforms 8.1% over GRPO and 5.9% over DAPO with stronger OOD performance. Moreover, SC-GRPO achieves higher performance than OPD.

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

Deep Temporal Modeling and Ensemble Fusion for Multimodal Emotion Recognition from Physiological Signals

Physiological stress and emotion recognition are important for health monitoring and affective computing. In this work, we present a comprehensive evaluation of deep learning models such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCN), and Transformer on the WESAD dataset for multimodal affect recognition using wrist and chest sensor signals. We perform ablation studies to assess the individual contributions of each modality by training models on wrist-only and chest-only inputs. In addition, we implement a late-fusion ensemble strategy that combines predictions from all three architectures trained on multimodal input. We also employ early fusion at the sensor level by concatenating wrist and chest signals before feeding them into each model. Our results show that Transformer models consistently achieve the highest accuracy in multimodal settings, while TCN models perform best in the wrist-only configuration. The ensemble method yields the highest overall accuracy (98.91 +/- 0.13%) and macro-F1 score (98.56 +/- 0.17%). These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of sensor fusion and ensemble-based fusion in developing robust systems for physiological emotion recognition.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Optimizing LLM Inference: Fluid-Guided Online Scheduling with Memory Constraints

arXiv:2504.11320v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models now serve millions of users daily, with providers incurring costs exceeding $700,000 per day. Each request requires token-by-token inference, making GPU scheduling central to latency, capacity, and cost. The difficulty is endogenous memory growth: generated tokens expand the Key-Value (KV) cache, and overflow can evict in-progress requests and waste prior computation. We formulate inference as a multi-stage online scheduling problem with endogenous memory growth, linear iteration times, and GPU-resident KV-cache constraints. We introduce a fluid model that characterizes equilibrium batch composition, memory requirement, and stability region. Guided by the fluid model, we design WAIT (Waiting for Accumulated Inference Threshold), a threshold-based admission rule for known output lengths, and Nested WAIT, which extends the rule to unknown output lengths by regulating how requests advance across decode-stage segments. Both algorithms approximate the fluid benchmark asymptotically under the stated memory conditions. Nested WAIT uses an additional safety buffer of moderate scale to hedge against memory-overflow-induced evictions under unknown output lengths. In Vidur simulations configured for Llama-2-7B on an A100 GPU, with supplemental real-GPU validation reported in the appendix, the policies enlarge the empirically observed stable operating range relative to widely used baseline algorithms and reduce latency especially in near-overloaded and overloaded regimes.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Token-Level Entropy Reveals Demographic Disparities in Language Models

We ask whether demographic identity, signaled by a name alone, systematically reshapes the generative distribution of a language model. Measuring full-vocabulary Shannon entropy at temperature zero across six open-weight base models and 5,760 implicit sentence-completion prompts (e.g., "Tanisha walked into the office on a Monday morning and"), we find that Black-associated names produce higher first-token entropy than White-associated names across all six architectures - opposite to the output-level homogeneity bias documented under explicit demographic prompting (Lee et al., 2024) - and Black-associated names always produce greater entropy above identity-neutral baselines than White-associated names ($\Delta\Delta > 0$ in all six models). Women-associated names co-occur with lower first-token entropy (DL-pooled $\hat\beta = -0.041, p = .019$) and more homogeneous outputs ($\hat\alpha = +0.024, p < .001$) than men-associated names - a pattern convergent with homogeneity bias; race and gender effects are additive. Instruction tuning does not attenuate the race gap (matched-format DL-pooled $\hat{\beta}=+0.153$). Running the same templates with explicit group labels instead of names yields null race effects in 10 of 12 models where implicit probing is significant - establishing that probing methodology is a primary determinant of which distributional structure is recovered.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

A Concavity Theorem for the Parisi PDE

作者:

arXiv:2606.15432v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove that the map sending the diffusion profile to the solution of a time-changed Parisi PDE evaluated at time-space $(0,0)$ is concave. This result strengthens the raywise concavity result proven by Auffinger and Chen (2016). As an application, for the balanced multispecies Ising spin glasses, the lower bound of Bates and Sohn (2025) matches the Hopf-type upper bound given by the Hamilton–Jacobi framework developed by Mourrat, Chen and Xia.

16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

WorkBench Revisited: Workplace Agents Two Years On

作者:

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

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

A Cryogenic Uniaxial Strain Cell for Quantum Devices

arXiv:2606.11485v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mechanical strain is a powerful resource for tuning quantum systems, but existing piezoelectric strain cells are generally optimized for fragile, high-aspect-ratio single crystals rather than the thick, square-profile chips typical of semiconductor quantum devices. Furthermore, adapting these cells for qubits requires accommodating dense RF and DC wiring while maintaining strict electrical isolation from high-voltage piezo actuators. Here, we present a piezoelectric uniaxial strain cell designed to homogeneously strain thick, square-profile substrates. We introduce a highly symmetric dual-chip loading configuration that effectively suppresses flexural deformation and shear stress. The cell integrates a high-density RF/DC interposer to support standard wire bonding and encloses the actuators in a grounded Faraday cage to prevent unwanted Stark shifts in the device layer. Finite element simulations confirm that combining stiff actuators with this symmetric mounting drastically improves strain homogeneity. Finally, we validate the apparatus experimentally by applying uniaxial strain to a 200 $\mu$m thick silicon die. Surface strain measurements demonstrate an applied strain of 215 $\mu\epsilon$ for 200 V applied piezo bias.

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

Signature filtering: a lightweight enhancement for statistical watermark detection in large language models

arXiv:2606.18430v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Statistical watermarks help organizations attribute large language model (LLM) outputs, yet existing detectors often struggle when watermark signals are weak, texts are repetitive, or watermarks are edited. We propose signature filtering, a detection-time module that enhances watermark detection without modifying watermark embedding and text generation. It learns a small set of ``signature'' tokens whose presence makes watermark tests unreliable, and removes these tokens before detection. The signatures are obtained by solving a mixed-integer linear program on a small training set, with constraints that maximize the true positive rate. We additionally derive finite-sample and asymptotic bounds under several attacker models (color-blind, color-adaptive, and distributionally correlated). On four well-known watermark families (Kgw, Sweet, Unigram, Exp), four benchmark corpora (C4, MBPP, HumanEval, Code-Search-Net), and six LLMs (Opt-1.3b, Opt-6.7b, Llama2-13b, Llama3.1-8b, Qwen2.5-14b, Phi-3-medium-14b), 2- and 3-gram signatures raise detection rates in weak-signal and low-entropy settings from 8~31% without filtering to 78~99% with filtering, while keeping false positives controllable and often negligible. In stress tests where we scramble sentences and perturb 25~50% of tokens by dilution, deletions, and substitutions, 2-gram filters for Kgw-style watermarks preserve most of the clean-text detection gains, often matching or outperforming the advanced WinMax watermark detector. Signature filtering thus provides a simple, scalable, and model-agnostic add-on to strengthen watermark-based provenance checks for LLM text in information processing workflows.

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

Flow Map Denoisers: Traversing the Distortion-Perception Plane for Inverse Problems

arXiv:2606.19802v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Image restoration faces a fundamental tradeoff: methods that minimize error produce blurry reconstructions, while those that maximize perceptual quality yield sharp but less faithful images. Existing approaches either commit to a single operating point on this distortion perception (DP) frontier or require paired-data supervision, auxiliary models, or hyperparameter tuning of the sampler to access different points. We show that flow map models, a recent extension of flow matching for few-step sampling that learns an average field, implicitly define a one-parameter family of denoisers that continuously spans the DP frontier. The lookahead parameter t acts as a control knob between the MMSE and perceptual regimes. For Gaussian targets, we prove that varying t exactly recovers the optimal DP frontier; for natural images, we observe similar behavior empirically. Within a Plug-and-Play solver, the same mechanism extends to general inverse problems, where it controls a tradeoff between perceptual alignment and data consistency. Despite the lack of exact optimality guarantees in this setting, a single trained flow map spans the DP tradeoff, matching or exceeding specialized baselines at both extremes. Extensive experiments on CelebA ($128\times 128$) and AFHQ ($256\times 256$) across several linear and nonlinear inverse tasks validate our findings.

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

The Quality-Utility Paradox: Why High-Reward Data Impairs Small Model Mathematical Reasoning

arXiv:2606.16152v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge distillation from powerful reasoning models is widely used to improve Small Language Models (SLMs) on mathematical reasoning, often assuming that traces with higher reward model scores provide more useful supervision. We identify a counterintuitive Quality-Utility Paradox in mathematical reasoning distillation. Data refined or synthesized by a stronger Oracle obtains higher perceived quality according to reward models, yet consistently underperforms traces generated by the SLM itself and selected through rejection sampling across Qwen2.5, LLaMA-3, and DeepSeek families. Our analysis shows that Oracle refinement couples logical repair with distributional drift away from the SLM's native reasoning distribution. This drift increases the learner's adaptation cost and can outweigh the benefit of improved reasoning logic. To test this mechanism, we introduce Style-Aligned Refinement, which preserves the native trajectory of the SLM while retaining logical repair from the Oracle. This intervention lowers adaptation cost and restores downstream utility. These findings suggest that effective mathematical reasoning distillation should jointly optimize perceived solution quality and learner-data compatibility, rather than relying solely on reward-model scores. The datasets and code are available at https://github.com/Dracoqhl/Quality-Utility-Paradox.

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

Incentives and Evidence in Learned Service Orchestration

arXiv:2606.16555v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning for service orchestration has been the subject of sustained research for over a decade, yet it is not used in production at scale. The usual explanation is that learned controllers degrade under delayed and noisy telemetry, workload shifts, and uncontrolled tenants. We test whether existing evidence supports that explanation. We evaluate three highly influential RL-based orchestration systems spanning resource allocation, DAG scheduling, and autoscaling, using pre-registered predictions about comparative degradation under production-relevant perturbations and paired inference with family-wise error correction. Across the tests, most predicted performance reversals do not occur. Diagnostic analyses show that these outcomes often reflect comparator collapse, artefact limitations, or evaluation choices rather than evidence that learned controllers tolerate the perturbations. One apparent advantage under observation lag is roughly fortyfold compared to a Kubernetes HPA-equivalent controller. Another widely cited result cannot be reconstructed from its released artefact, and the strongest reproducible margin is far smaller than the published results. Conclusions also reverse under changes in perturbation magnitude and evaluation mode. Based on these results and broader patterns in the literature, we identify an institutional problem. Publication and review incentives favour benchmark gains against convenient comparators, even when those gains provide little evidence of deployment performance. We argue that the problem is not solely technical. Rather, it is institutional, so learned orchestration needs production-grade comparators, registered perturbation models, separate operational metrics, and publication criteria that reward reproducible operational evidence. Without these changes, the literature can grow without establishing whether learning improves orchestration.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Estimating COVID-19 Cumulative Incidence from Seroprevalence Surveys accounting for Time-Varying Seroreversion: A Fully Bayesian Methodology

Seroprevalence surveys reveal the extent of humoral immunity against pathogens such as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and under some circumstances represent cumulative incidence of prior infection. However, antibody waning - or seroreversion - biases these estimates by reducing assay sensitivity in a time-varying manner. Because assay sensitivity decays over time, naively using serosurveys can substantially bias estimates of SARS-CoV-2 cumulative incidence and fatality rates. The Bayesian assay-specific, time-varying sensitivity adjustment developed in this paper can reliably correct for this bias and account for the delay between infection and serosurvey. In seroprevalence studies conducted in the United States in 2020, adjusting for time-varying sensitivity increased cumulative incidence by up to 1.4-fold, with an adjustment of 1.08 for a national study. Our estimates contrast with a previously published 2-fold adjustment that did not account for assay design. This suggests that previous analyses overestimated cumulative incidence by applying seroreversion corrections that did not account for assay-specific effects, or underestimated cumulative incidence by not applying seroreversion corrections. These biases imply fatality rate underestimation and overestimation, respectively. Our model provides a framework for design-specific time-varying sensitivity corrections in seroprevalence surveys for other pathogens.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Compressed minimum-purity time evolution for late-time quantum dynamics

arXiv:2606.11392v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unitary time evolution of initially simple quantum many-body states rapidly generates entanglement and complex correlations, which limits direct numerical simulations. The late-time dynamics of physical observables, however, typically exhibits an effective simplicity in the form of hydrodynamics or kinetic theory. This leads to the question whether microscopic equations of motion can remain accurate and tractable up to long time scales by discarding irrelevant information in a controlled manner. Here, we introduce compressed minimum-purity time evolution (CoMPuTE) as an approach to keep track of a consistent set of reduced local density matrices, closing the hierarchical equations of motion using a minimum-purity principle. In benchmark applications we demonstrate (i) accurate description of energy diffusion in the one-dimensional mixed-field Ising model, (ii) the applicability to genuinely out-of-equilibrium Floquet dynamics starting from a pure state, and (iii) the limitations of the local reduced density matrix approximation when describing transport in the XXZ chain at $\Delta=1$ that is governed by increasingly non-local integrals of motion. The CoMPuTE method enhances computational efficiency in comparison to the closely related local-information time evolution algorithm, opening a possible route towards an extension to systems in higher spatial dimensions.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Real-Time Execution with Autoregressive Policies

arXiv:2606.13355v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-time execution, enabled by asynchronous inference that ensures both smooth action trajectories and fast reactivity, is critical for realistic deployments of large-scale Vision-Language-Action models. However, recent work on real-time execution primarily focuses on variants of diffusion policies, even though it is more critical for autoregressive policies given their slower rollout speed in synchronous inference. In contrast, we demonstrate that autoregressive policies can achieve real-time execution by adjusting the tokenization horizon and applying constrained decoding, thereby guaranteeing strict latency bounds that enable multi-trajectory decoding to maximize performance. Across simulated and real-world environments, we find that the autoregressive policy consistently outperforms its equivalent-level flow-matching policy counterpart while achieving significantly improved task completion speeds from synchronous inference. Coupled with the inherent advantages of autoregressive policies, such as faster convergence and better generalizability in instruction-following, these results confirm that autoregressive policies can remain a competitive policy type supporting real-time execution.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Limited Marginal Benefit of Reasoning-Heavy LLM Deployment in ESG Narrative Scoring: A 4-Model Consensus Study on Japanese Listed Firms

arXiv:2606.13693v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated scoring of ESG narrative disclosures with large language models (LLMs) is gaining traction, yet whether reasoning-heavy frontier models add value commensurate with their cost remains empirically unsettled. We evaluate this question on a corpus of ten Japanese listed firms across three rubric axes – quantitative targets, progress-tracking infrastructure, and external-standard alignment – using a four-model consensus design that combines a reasoning-on frontier model with three reasoning-off contemporaries. Across 120 firm x axis x model scores, the pooled mean absolute deviation between the reasoning-on model and each reasoning-off counterpart is 0.38 on a 5-point scale; only 2% of pairwise comparisons reach a two-point deviation, and none exceeds two points. Per-firm cost accounting shows the reasoning-on arm alone costs roughly 5.6x as much as the three-provider reasoning-off ensemble, for outcomes that differ only within small margins. We conclude that in span-based ESG narrative scoring, reasoning-heavy deployment does not materially improve outcomes relative to reasoning-off consensus, while substantially increasing operational cost. We discuss implications for cost-effective ESG auto-scoring pipelines and LLM deployment governance in applied accountability settings. An earlier version of this work is available on SSRN (Abstract ID 6683303).