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Science Journals

Peer-reviewade publikationer — 56948 artiklar

ToolRec: Calibrated Preference Alignment for Query Recommendation in On-Device Assistants
arXiv:2606.08466v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced generative query recommendation. However, existing alignment methods primarily focus on standard chatbot scenarios, falling short in on-device intelligent assistants where users predominantly expect the rapid invocation of system-level tools. Moreover, directly aligning LLMs with real-world click logs introduces severe noise due to varying user activity levels and the failure to emphasize execution-oriented queries. To address these challenges, we propose ToolRec, a calibrated preference alignment framework tailored for on-device query recommendation. To ground query recommendation with executable actions, we first construct SysToolKit, a comprehensive repository of 708 system tools, paired with a context-aware tool retrieval mechanism to ensure recommendation relevance. We then propose a dual-level calibration mechanism to refine raw click data, effectively mitigating user behavioral noise by calibrating signals based on user activity levels, while simultaneously up-weighting click signals on system-level tool-invoking queries. Guided by these refined preference signals, we then align the model using a sample-level weighted Kahneman-Tversky Optimization (KTO). Extensive online A/B tests on our mobile assistant platform OPPO Xiaobu, which has over 150 million monthly active users, demonstrate that ToolRec can significantly improve Click-Through Rate (CTR) and total clicks volume over strong baselines while maintaining high query relevance.
OctaOctree Neural Radiosity for Real-time Glossy Material Rendering
arXiv:2606.08469v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modeling high-frequency outgoing radiance distributions remains a fundamental challenge in global illumination, especially for glossy and specular materials. Existing neural-based radiance caching methods commonly rely on positional feature encodings or spatially organized caches, which makes it difficult to represent sharp directional radiance variations without increasing the model complexity or sampling cost. To address this challenge, we propose OctaOctree, an efficient spatial-angular radiance representation for global illumination. OctaOctree organizes outgoing radiance with an adaptive octree in 3D space, and associates each spatial node with an octahedral directional map. By coupling the spatial hierarchy with direction-dependent storage, our representation allocates fine spatial resolution to local illumination and visibility changes, while using coarser spatial levels with richer angular resolution to capture glossy and specular radiance distributions. This design embeds a reflectance-aware spatial-angular prior directly into the radiance representation, reducing the burden on neural networks or reconstruction modules to recover high-frequency view-dependent effects from positional features alone. As a result, OctaOctree provides a compact and expressive neural encoding for a wide range of indirect illumination effects, from diffuse interreflection to sharp glossy reflections. Experiments demonstrate that our method produces high-quality, direction-aware global illumination with single network query at primary intersections, achieving improved fidelity and real-time performance compared with baseline neural radiosity and radiance caching approaches.
A Variability-Based Framework for Interpretable Naming in Formal and Relational Concept Analysis
arXiv:2606.08477v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge extraction from symbolic data often produces abstractions that are formally defined but not immediately interpretable by users. Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) and Relational Concept Analysis (RCA) provide representative settings for this issue: they generate explicit conceptual structures, implications, and relational dependencies from object descriptions and relations. Although these structures are explainable by design, their concepts are often identified by technical labels, which limits their use as human-interpretable knowledge units. Assigning meaningful names to such concepts is therefore a key issue for interpretation, navigation, validation, and reuse by domain experts. This paper investigates concept naming in FCA and RCA from a symbolic knowledge representation perspective. We first characterize the linguistic and terminological challenges involved in naming generated symbolic abstractions, including ambiguity, discrimination, concision, and consistency across related concepts. We then propose a configurable framework for LLM-assisted concept naming. The framework relies on a variability model that controls which sources of information are exposed during naming, such as intent, extent, inherited information, neighboring concepts, implications, and relational attributes. It thereby makes explicit the semantic choices involved in moving from formal concept descriptions to human-readable names. The approach is illustrated as a proof of concept on a small relational dataset in the pizzeria domain. This illustration shows how different configurations influence the names suggested by an LLM, and how naming variability can reveal interpretation choices, relational dependencies, and possible modeling issues in the underlying symbolic data.
STELLAR: Spatio-Temporal Environmental Learning with Latent Alignment and Refinement for Long-Tailed Species Distribution Modeling
arXiv:2606.08484v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Joint Species Distribution Modeling (JSDM) is a key enabler for biodiversity monitoring and conservation planning. However, accurate JSDM faces two coupled challenges: environmental drivers and species distributions are inherently spatio-temporal, while species co-occurrence patterns exhibit complex non-linear community structure and severe long-tail imbalance driven by rare species. Existing approaches often address these factors in isolation, learning from static covariates or neglecting the historical trajectories of dynamic community structure. To overcome these limitations, we propose STELLAR (Spatio-Temporal Environmental Learning with Latent Alignment and Refinement), a novel framework that learns a shared latent space where dynamic habitat context and community structure are optimized jointly. Our approach integrates three complementary components: (1) a Graph-Temporal Encoder that employs graph attention and recurrent units to aggregate spatial neighborhood effects and capture the co-evolving historical dynamics of environmental context and community structure; (2) a Context-Anchored Latent Alignment mechanism that structures the latent space using a label-activated mixture prior and supervised contrastive learning, actively clustering species based on shared environmental preferences; and (3) an Imbalance-Aware Decoupled Decoding module that utilizes Asymmetric Loss to focus learning on hard, rare species samples, preventing mode collapse in the long tail. Experiments on the large-scale eBird dataset, curated with domain experts, demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, particularly in predicting rare species and revealing interpretable species interactions.
TRADE: Transducer-Augmented Decoder for Speech LLM
arXiv:2606.08486v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speech Large Language Models (Speech LLMs) lack a principled mechanism for streaming inference: their label-synchronous generation has no acoustic-frame alignment, making real-time decoding and end-of-utterance detection difficult. We propose TRADE TRansducer-Augmented DEcoder, which augments a multimodal LLM with a transducer branch that shares the audio encoder and uses the LLM's hidden states directly as the prediction network -- coupling frame-synchronous acoustic alignment with the LLM's linguistic reasoning. Three design choices make the system accurate, streamable, and long-form capable: (1)Tightly coupled dual vocabularies -- a compact transducer vocabulary derived from the LLM vocabulary, enabling zero-cost score fusion; (2)Chunk-synchronized streaming training with gradient stopping, eliminating the train-inference mismatch at offline-equivalent memory cost; and (3)Localized Decoder Audio Attention (LDAA), a causal sliding window that caps KV-cache memory independently of utterance length. A single TRADE checkpoint supports offline and streaming decoding across a continuous range of latency operating points. TRADE achieves 6.71% average WER on the Open ASR Leaderboard, while the streaming recognition with 960ms chunk size reaches 8.40% from the same checkpoint. On long-form speech, it obtains 3.64% WER on TED-LIUM and 10.88% on Earnings-22 without external segmentation. TRADE provides sentence-end punctuation timestamps that, when combined with acoustic voice activity detection (VAD), improve end-of-utterance detection by +0.03 F_1 over acoustic VAD alone.
Back on Track: Aligning Rewards and States for Reasoning in Diffusion Large Language Models
arXiv:2606.08501v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) holds immense promise for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of diffusion large language models (dLLMs). However, progress is fundamentally constrained by a dual misalignment between authentic generation trajectory and the gradient update process: (i) Process-reward misalignment. Sparse, terminal rewards are indiscriminately assigned to all intermediate steps of the generation process, failing to provide discriminative credit assignment. (ii) State-trajectory misalignment. Policy updates are often diverted toward artificial, out-of-trajectory states, squandering gradients on less informative samples. To address these limitations, we introduce Process Aligned Policy Optimization (PAPO), a novel framework that holistically aligns the RL update with the dLLM's generative trajectory via Step-Aware Process Rewards (SPR) that transform sparse terminal rewards into dense, step-wise credit, and Entropy-Guided Historical Re-enactment (EHR) that replays authentic trajectories at high-uncertainty steps. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate that PAPO significantly outperforms baselines, achieving gains of up to 4.5% on GSM8K, 4.8% on MATH500, 42.2% on Countdown and 16.1% on Sudoku.
Look Less, Reason More: Block-wise Attention Skipping for Efficient Multimodal LLMs
arXiv:2606.08511v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) face a significant inference bottleneck due to the quadratic computational cost of self-attention over long visual token sequences. However, we identify a critical inefficiency in current architectures: Visual Attention Saturation. Our analysis reveals that visual tokens rapidly establish their spatial structure and intra-modal relationships in early layers, rendering visual-to-visual self-attention in deeper layers computationally redundant. Conversely, Feed-Forward Networks (FFNs) in these layers remain essential for projecting visual features into the evolving textual semantic space. Leveraging this insight, we present Visual-Skip (V-Skip), a training-free inference paradigm that decouples spatial interaction from semantic evolution. Rather than discarding tokens, V-Skip imposes block-wise structured sparsity by selectively bypassing saturated visual self-attention modules. Furthermore, recognizing that varying downstream tasks demand distinct reasoning depths, V-Skip employs a lightweight, few-shot calibration to dynamically route the task-optimal sparsity path. Extensive experiments demonstrate that V-Skip effectively bypasses redundant vision attention to achieve block-wise sparsity, maintaining a 94.16% to 100.31% performance retention across diverse MLLMs. Ultimately, we prove that to reason more effectively, models do not need to discard what they see -- they simply need to "look less" at the right depth.
OmniTryOn: Video Try-On Anything at Once!
arXiv:2606.08514v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Although video virtual try-on (VVT) has achieved significant progress, existing methods still exhibit two fundamental limitations: first, they are restricted to single-garment transfer, rendering simultaneous multi-object try-on highly impractical; second, their heavy reliance on explicit external priors (e.g., garment masks) inevitably destroys crucial physical dynamics and degrades visual quality. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes the novel Try-On Anything task, which aims to simultaneously transfer diverse wearable objects onto a person in a video in a single inference pass. To support and standardize this paradigm, we introduce TryAny-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark encompassing a paired video dataset alongside a tailored evaluation protocol. Furthermore, we present OmniTryOn, an external-prior-free generative framework designed to tackle this task. Specifically, OmniTryOn employs a First Frame Wearable Cache strategy, which directly provides diverse wearable objects for the generation process through the initial video frame. To maintain consistency, we propose the Spatiotemporally Consistent RoPE (STC-RoPE), which inherently establishes robust spatiotemporal anchors to strictly preserve complex human motions and background dynamics. Optimized by the proposed Gradual Try-On (GTO) training strategy, our model progressively masters robust multi-object synthesis. Extensive experiments on TryAny-Bench demonstrate that OmniTryOn significantly outperforms existing specialized video virtual try-on models and general video editing baselines, establishing a powerful new standard for the Try-On Anything task. Our dataset, code, and models are available at https://github.com/xcltql666/OminTryOn.
Incremental Sheaf Cohomology on Cellular Complexes: O(1)-in-n Lazy Edit Processing under Bounded Local Geometry
arXiv:2606.04227v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present an algorithmic framework for incremental maintenance of first sheaf cohomology $H^1(X; \mathcal{F})$ on dynamically evolving 1-dimensional cellular complexes equipped with finite-dimensional cellular sheaves. The classical computation of $H^1$ via factorization of the coboundary matrix requires $O(n^3)$ time; when the complex evolves with a stream of $m$ edits, full recomputation after each edit costs $O(mn^3)$. Under a bounded local geometry assumption -- bounded cell size $v_{\max}$, bounded stalk dimension $d$, and bounded nerve degree $D$ -- each edit (vertex insertion, edge insertion, restriction map update) affects only a bounded set of local coboundary blocks. The algorithm therefore processes lazy streaming edits in $O(1)$ time with respect to the total complex size $n$ (with cost polynomial in the local geometry parameters $v_{\max}$, $d$, and $D$, which are treated as constants independent of $n$), deferring local eigensolves and Mayer-Vietoris global assembly to synchronization points (Flush). At synchronization, the maintained state agrees with the corresponding batch assembly of the partitioned sheaf model; we observe zero measured drift in all batch-verified runs (through $V = 10^6$). We also give an amortized $O(|E|)$ streaming construction for the cellular decomposition and discuss an adversarial algebraic-RAM barrier arguing that unpartitioned non-trivial sheaves ($d \geq 2$, non-identity restriction maps) do not admit the same locality. Experiments on Barabasi-Albert graphs with up to $5 \times 10^6$ vertices and $1.7 \times 10^7$ streaming edits show 35 $\mu$s median lazy per-edit update latency (excluding flush); query time (global assembly at synchronization) is $O(n)$ per flush in the implemented full-traversal path. Exact synchronization costs are reported separately.
Two Bridges, One Pathway: From VLMs to Generalizable VLAs with Embodied Trajectory-Coupled Data
arXiv:2606.08520v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) are powerful general-purpose reasoners, yet converting them into robot control policies (VLAs) is surprisingly difficult. The root cause is a two-fold gap: VLMs are trained on internet-scale images with language-understanding objectives, while VLAs must perceive robot scenes and predict motor actions. Fine-tuning a VLM directly on robot action data forces the model to cross both gaps at once -- the learning curve is steep and the rich generalizations learned during pretraining tend to degrade rather than transfer. We argue that this gap can be bridged gradually with the right intermediate data. We introduce \emph{embodied trajectory-coupled (ETC) data} -- vision-language supervision derived from the same robot scenes and trajectories used for action learning. Because ETC data shares the visual context of robot operation while retaining familiar language-understanding objectives, it provides a natural stepping stone between VLM pretraining and VLA fine-tuning. Building on this, we design a three-stage training recipe. Distribution Bridging first adapts the VLM to embodied visual-language semantics. Objective Bridging then gradually shifts the model toward action prediction while preserving the acquired representations. Retentive Adaptation finally specializes the policy to the target deployment domain. We further show that mixing task-relevant out-of-distribution ETC data with a small amount of action data enables the model to generalize to novel visual-language conditions without requiring additional robot demonstrations. Simulation and real-robot experiments confirm that this gradual bridging strategy is the key to transferring VLM generalization into robust, deployable robot policies.
Exploring CKKS Parameter Trade-offs for Privacy-Preserving Personalized Federated Learning
arXiv:2606.08521v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Privacy-preserving Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) enables clients to collaboratively train personalized models without exposing raw data, but exchanged model updates remain vulnerable to inference attacks from honest-but-curious servers. Homomorphic Encryption (HE) addresses this by allowing server-side aggregation directly on encrypted updates, with the CKKS scheme being particularly suitable due to its native support for approximate floating-point arithmetic. However, no prior work has examined how to configure CKKS for PFL deployments, leaving practitioners without principled guidance on parameter selection that directly affects privacy, precision, and computational cost. This paper presents pFedCKKS, a generic framework integrating CKKS into PFL, and provides the first systematic parameter selection guide for practitioners. We derive the full CKKS parameter constraints under 128-bit security for the PFL setting, showing the selection problem reduces to choosing just two values: the inner and outer ciphertext prime. Implemented using the Flower framework and TenSEAL library, pFedCKKS is evaluated on the FEMNIST, CelebA and Sentiment140 datasets with FedFinetune, Ditto and FedPer which represents PFL algorithms. Experimental results reveal an empirical trade-off between precision and computational/communication costs. This allows us to draw a concrete guideline for selecting proper CKKS parameters that balance efficiency and accuracy in real-world deployments of pFedCKKS.
Knee-xRAI: An Explainable AI Framework for Automatic Kellgren-Lawrence Grading of Knee Osteoarthritis
arXiv:2604.23435v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Grading knee osteoarthritis (KOA) on plain radiographs is poorly reproducible across readers. A single-grade disagreement on the Kellgren-Lawrence (KL) scale can alter surgical management or redirect a patient from conservative therapy to intra-articular injection. Meanwhile, deep learning models that outperform human readers often offer no explanation for their decisions. We present Knee-xRAI, a pipeline that decomposes the grading process by mimicking clinical radiological workflows. It independently measures joint space narrowing (JSN), osteophytes, and subchondral sclerosis, then combines these findings into an explainable KL grade. Specifically, a U-Net++ architecture quantifies JSN via contour segmentation, an SE-ResNet-50 multi-task network grades osteophytes per anatomical site on the OARSI scale, and a hybrid texture-CNN detects binary sclerosis. This pipeline yields a 50-dimensional feature vector evaluated via an XGBoost-SHAP classifier (Path A, audit) and a ConvNeXt hybrid predictor (Path B, deployed). On 8,260 OAI-derived radiographs, the JSN module achieved a Dice score of 0.8909 and an mJSW ICC of 0.8674. Path A reached a QWK of 0.6294 and an AUC of 0.8046, confirming the structured feature vector carries substantial diagnostic signal. Path B achieved a QWK of 0.8436 and an AUC of 0.9017. SHAP analysis identifies JSN as the dominant feature, with osteophytes adding a consistent increment and sclerosis contributing marginally. Removing JSN evidence collapses KL3-KL4 recall while early grades remain intact, aligning with the KL diagnostic criteria. Knee-xRAI grounds every prediction in an auditable chain of measured radiographic findings, providing clinical transparency at the point of care.
Cross-Modal Masking for Robust Silent Speech Synthesis Using sEMG and Lipreading
arXiv:2606.09667v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speech restoration through silent speech interfaces (SSIs) has emerged as a promising assistive technology for individuals with impaired or absent laryngeal voice production. Among non-invasive SSI modalities, surface electromyography (sEMG) and video-based lipreading provide complementary articulatory information, yet their integration for continuous speech synthesis remains underexplored. Moreover, existing multimodal approaches rarely address robustness to modality degradation or temporary sensor failure, limiting their applicability in realistic scenarios. In this work, we propose a masked multimodal speech synthesis framework that jointly leverages sEMG and lipreading signals through modality masking during training. Under multispeaker settings, the proposed approach reduces word error rate by up to 14 absolute percentage points compared to the strongest unimodal baseline. Experimental results not only show that masking strategies are critical for these performance gains and robustness under low-bitrate conditions, but also that they generalize better than degradation-specific data augmentations in the presence of modality absence conditions. Phone-level analyses further reveal complementary contributions across modalities, with particularly strong benefits for vowels and for specific consonant groups. Overall, these findings demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of masked multimodal integration for silent speech synthesis, although adaptation to laryngectomized speakers remains an open research challenge.
Adaptive directional gradients for parameterised quantum circuits
arXiv:2606.09734v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Training parameterised quantum circuits (PQCs) on quantum hardware is bottlenecked by the measurement cost of gradient estimation, which under the parameter-shift rule scales linearly in the number of trainable parameters and dominates the total shot budget of training at scale. In this work, we propose a framework of forward gradient estimators for PQCs, based on the forward mode of automatic differentiation, that yields an unbiased estimator of the gradient by averaging a freely tunable number of random directional derivatives and recovers SPSA, random coordinate descent, and the parameter-shift rule as limiting cases, with no ancilla qubits or controlled-gate overhead. We prove that stochastic quantum forward gradient descent converges under standard assumptions, with an explicit second-moment expansion that interpolates between the single-direction extreme of SPSA and the full-gradient extreme of parameter-shift. Within this framework we derive QUIVER (Quantum Iterative V-adaptive Estimator Rule), an adaptive optimiser for parameterised circuits whose update rule follows from a closed-form minimum measurement-cost allocation. We show numerically that forward gradients train Hamming-weight-preserving orthogonal quantum neural networks with up to 60 qubits and 1770 parameters on the ECG5000 and MNIST datasets orders of magnitude more efficiently than the parameter-shift rule. We also demonstrate that our proposed QUIVER optimiser can outperform iCANS and gCANS measurement-frugal optimisers on optimisation problems using the quantum approximate optimisation algorithm and quantum simulation with the variational quantum eigensolver.
NoRD: A Data-Efficient Vision-Language-Action Model that Drives without Reasoning
arXiv:2602.21172v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are advancing autonomous driving by replacing modular pipelines with unified end-to-end architectures. However, current VLAs face two expensive requirements: (1) massive dataset collection, and (2) dense reasoning annotations. In this work, we address both challenges with NORD (No Reasoning for Driving). Compared to existing VLAs, NORD achieves competitive performance while being fine-tuned on <60% of the data and no reasoning annotations, resulting in 3x fewer tokens. We identify that standard Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) fails to yield significant improvements when applied to policies trained on such small, reasoning-free datasets. We show that this limitation stems from difficulty bias, which disproportionately penalizes reward signals from scenarios that produce high-variance rollouts within GRPO. NORD overcomes this by incorporating Dr. GRPO, a recent algorithm designed to mitigate difficulty bias in LLMs. As a result, NORD achieves competitive performance on Waymo and NAVSIM with a fraction of the training data and no reasoning overhead, enabling more efficient autonomous systems. Website: https://nord-vla-ai.github.io/
Experimental Characterization of Bulk Micromegas for Development of Active Target Time Projection Chamber for Nuclear Astrophysics Studies
arXiv:2602.21238v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A Micromegas-based active target Time Projection Chamber, namely Saha Active Target TPC (SAT-TPC), is under development at Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics for its application in nuclear astrophysics experiment to measure the branching ratio of the direct and sequential decay of the Hoyle state of $^{12}$C. A bulk Micromegas was characterized to optimize its operating parameters and its performance for $\alpha$-particle tracking was investigated using gas mixtures Ar + CO$_{2}$ (90:10) and Ar + i-C$_4$H$_{10}$ (95:5) at atmospheric pressure using 5.9~keV X-ray and 5.48~MeV $\alpha$-particles from radioactive sources. A hydrodynamic transport model was used to simulate the charge-deposit profile of the $\alpha$-particle track on the Micromegas readout and compared to the experimental data to complement the experimental measurement as well as validate the numerical model. A good agreement was observed that confirmed the suitability of the choice of the bulk Micromegas in the development of the SAT-TPC prototype and the hydrodynamic modelling of the detector dynamics
SODA-CitrON: Static Object Data Association by Clustering Multi-Modal Sensor Detections Online
arXiv:2602.22243v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The online fusion and tracking of static objects from heterogeneous sensor detections is a fundamental problem in robotics, autonomous systems, and environmental mapping. Although classical data association approaches such as JPDA are well suited for dynamic targets, they are less effective for static objects observed intermittently and with heterogeneous uncertainties, where motion models provide minimal discriminative power with respect to clutter. In this paper, we propose a novel method for static object data association by clustering multi-modal sensor detections online (SODA-CitrON), while simultaneously estimating positions and maintaining persistent tracks for an unknown number of objects. The proposed unsupervised machine learning approach operates in a fully online manner and handles temporally uncorrelated and multi-sensor measurements. Additionally, it has a worst-case loglinear complexity in the number of sensor detections while providing full output explainability. We evaluate the proposed approach in different Monte Carlo simulation scenarios and compare it against state-of-the-art methods, including POM-based filtering, DBSTREAM clustering, and JPDA. The results demonstrate that SODA-CitrON consistently outperforms the compared methods in terms of F1 score, position RMSE, MOTP, and MOTA in the static object mapping scenarios studied.
Imagination Helps Visual Reasoning, But Not Yet in Latent Space
arXiv:2602.22766v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Latent visual reasoning aims to mimic human's imagination process by meditating through hidden states of Multimodal Large Language Models. While recognized as a promising paradigm for visual reasoning, the underlying mechanisms driving its effectiveness remain unclear. Motivated to demystify the true source of its efficacy, we investigate the validity of latent reasoning using Causal Mediation Analysis. We model the process as a causal chain: the input as the treatment, the latent tokens as the mediator, and the final answer as the outcome. Our findings uncover two critical disconnections: (a) Input-Latent Disconnect: dramatic perturbations on the input result in negligible changes to the latent tokens, suggesting that latent tokens do not effectively attend to the input sequence. (b) Latent-Answer Disconnect: perturbations on the latent tokens yield minimal impact on the final answer, indicating the limited causal effect latent tokens imposing on the outcome. Furthermore, extensive probing analysis reveals that latent tokens encode limited visual information and exhibit high similarity. Consequently, we challenge the necessity of latent reasoning and propose a straightforward alternative named CapImagine, which teaches the model to explicitly imagine using text. Experiments on vision-centric benchmarks show that CapImagine significantly outperforms complex latent-space baselines, highlighting the superior potential of visual reasoning through explicit imagination.
Atom Interferometry with Transverse Optical Modes
arXiv:2606.04430v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We experimentally demonstrate atom interferometry using the transverse phase profile of an optical mode. As proof-of-principle, we use the helical phase windings of Hypergeometric Gaussian beams for Ramsey interferometry with ensembles of ballistically-expanding cold Rb87 atoms, and we show that the interferometer can measure rotations induced by a motor with a sensitivity that scales linearly with orbital angular momentum and interferometer time. We characterize the thermal decoherence of the interferometer, deriving and experimentally confirming a closed-form expression for the spatially-varying interferometer visibility arising near the singularity of the helical phase winding, motivating the use of condensed atoms in ring-shaped traps.
EdgeFM: Efficient Edge Inference for Vision-Language Models
arXiv:2604.27476v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong applicability in edge industrial applications, yet their deployment remains severely constrained by requirements for deterministic low latency and stable execution under resource limitations. Existing frameworks either rely on bloated general-purpose designs or force developers into opaque, hardware-specific closed-source ecosystems, leading to hardware lock-in limitation and poor cross-platform adaptability. Observing that modern AI agents can efficiently search and tune configurations to generate highly optimized low-level kernels for standard LLM operators, we propose EdgeFM, a lightweight, agent-driven VLM/LLM inference framework tailored for cross-platform industrial edge deployment. EdgeFM removes non-essential features to reduce single-request latency, and encapsulates agent-tuned kernel optimizations as a modular library of reusable skills. By allowing direct invocation of these skills rather than waiting for closed-source implementations, it effectively closes the performance gap long dominated by proprietary toolchains. The framework natively supports mainstream platforms including x86 and NVIDIA Orin SoCs, and represents the first end-to-end VLA deployment on the domestic Horizon Journey platform, enhancing cross-platform portability. In most cases, it yields clearly better inference performance than conventional vendor-specific toolchains, achieving up to 1.49 times speedup over TensorRT-Edge-LLM on the NVIDIA Orin platform. Experimental results show that EdgeFM delivers favorable end-to-end inference performance, providing an open-source, production-grade solution for diverse edge industrial scenarios.
Convolutional Sparse Coding via the Locally Competitive Algorithm on Loihi 2
arXiv:2606.08584v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse coding provides a principled framework for signal representation by expressing an input as a linear combination of only a small number of basis functions. The Locally Competitive Algorithm (LCA) is particularly attractive in the context of neuromorphic computing because its dynamics, leaky integration, thresholding, and lateral inhibition map naturally to neuromorphic hardware. While prior work has studied non-convolutional LCA on Loihi 2, the convolutional setting is of particular interest because it introduces spatial structure, weight sharing, overlapping receptive fields, and scaling behavior that are more representative of practical sparse inference workloads. In this work, we present a Loihi 2 implementation of convolutional sparse coding via the LCA and evaluate it against a conventional GPU baseline on the same inference problems. The implementation follows a one-layer recurrent LCA formulation and extends it to convolutional feature maps with local inhibitory kernels derived from pairwise filter interactions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first implementation and benchmark of convolutional LCA on Loihi 2. Our goal is not only to demonstrate feasibility, but also to clarify in which operating regimes convolutional sparse inference becomes attractive on neuromorphic hardware. The resulting study positions convolutional LCA as a useful benchmark for structured sparse inference on emerging neuromorphic systems.
Multilingual Fact-Checking at Scale: Fine-Tuned Compact Models vs LLMs
arXiv:2606.08605v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a multilingual fact-checking system deployed at Factiverse, designed for high-throughput and low-latency operation across diverse languages. The system follows a modular pipeline with three stages: claim detection, evidence retrieval and re-ranking, and veracity prediction. We fine-tune XLM-RoBERTa-Large for claim detection, mmBERT-base for three-label stance classification (Supports/Refutes/Mixed), and a SetFit-based multilingual re-ranker for claim--evidence matching. We compare these components against strong LLM baselines, including GPT-5.2, Claude Opus~4.6, and Qwen3-8b. Experiments on production data spanning 114 languages for claim detection and 28 languages for veracity prediction show that task-specific fine-tuning provides strong and stable multilingual performance, while the fine-tuned retrieval model remains competitive with modern proprietary embeddings. Same-hardware latency measurements further show large efficiency gains for encoder-based components, supporting their use in production deployments with tight cost and privacy constraints. Overall, compact fine-tuned, self-hosted models remain a practical and effective foundation for multilingual fact-checking at scale. Code and data used for this study are available at https://github.com/factiverse/factcheck-editor.
Bayesian Optimization of a Multi-Product Chemical Reactor Using Composite Models and Partial Physics Knowledge
arXiv:2606.08611v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study data-driven real-time economic optimization of a multi-product chemical reactor when no reliable first-principles model is available beyond a steady-state energy balance. Instead of learning the economic objective directly as a black-box function, we use a composite formulation in which Gaussian process (GP) models predict physically meaningful outputs, including product concentrations and reactor temperature, while profit is computed analytically from these predictions together with raw-material, product, and utility prices. This preserves the structure of the economic objective, makes it parametric in changing prices without needing retraining, and allows candidate operating points to be checked against the available energy balance through a physics residual. The GPs also provide predictive uncertainty, which is exploited in a Bayesian optimization (BO) framework both for data-efficient exploration and for conservative enforcement of the reactor temperature constraint through an upper confidence bound. The acquisition function additionally penalizes large energy-balance mismatch obtained by substituting the GP-predicted outputs and candidate inputs into the available steady-state energy balance. The approach is demonstrated on a benchmark simulation of a non-isothermal multi-product reactor. Relative to a trust-region safe BO implementation, the proposed method achieves better simulated economic performance within the available iteration budget. Relative to a purely data-driven BO approach that does not use the available physics information, it avoids reactor temperature constraint violations.
Trivium: Temporal Regret as a First-Class Objective for Causal-Memory Controllers
arXiv:2606.04421v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many current agentic systems and LLM pipelines correct mistakes by optimizing outcome reward. This addresses only the what of failure: when an outcome diverges from prediction, the why and when of the mismatch are not systematically logged, reviewed, or corrected, so the same error can recur episode after episode. We argue that this is a structural problem, not merely a model-capacity one. We propose long-horizon temporal regret as a first-class objective alongside outcome regret and epistemic regret over the working causal model. Temporal regret captures when failure persists: how long a miscalibrated causal model is tolerated before correction. Epistemic regret captures why failure persists: residual uncertainty or error in the working causal model. Together, the three regrets give a falsifiable account of what, why, and when a long-lived agent can fail. Modeling the agent as a stream of E episodes, we prove three conditional results under explicit causal-probing, persistence, and detectability assumptions. First, under observationally equivalent confounding, outcome-only learning cannot distinguish causal from spurious structure without an intervention channel, so temporal miscalibration can persist linearly even after outcome regret is driven to zero. Second, with a persistent causal log and budgeted probes, total probe complexity is logarithmic in the episode horizon, inducing O(log E) temporal regret. Third, under K detectable change-points, the rate extends to O(K log E). We instantiate Trivium and pre-register five falsifiable predictions. On CausalBench-Seq, Trivium follows the predicted logarithmic envelope while outcome-only baselines grow linearly. A pilot real-LLM stream provides preliminary external-validity evidence across one full E = 500 run and three E = 100 frontier-model pilots. Self-learning here means revising an external causal model, not retraining LLM weights.
SpeechJBB: Probing Safety Alignment and Comprehension in Large Audio Language Models under Code-Switched Speech
arXiv:2606.06037v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large audio language models (LALMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, yet their safety alignment is still primarily evaluated on monolingual, text-based harmful prompts. This leaves their generalizability under multilingual and spoken settings, particularly code-switched speech, largely underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce SpeechJBB, an audio jailbreak dataset for benchmarking across multiple state-of-the-art LALMs. The extent of safety weaknesses is further probed by introducing an augmented setting where phonologically plausible pseudo-words are inserted around safety-critical terms to simulate localized obfuscation. Across models, code-switched harmful audio yields substantially high jailbreak success rates (JSR), with non-English monolingual and non-English code-switched pairs exhibiting the highest attack success. Pseudo-word insertion further reduces refusal rates, which demonstrates that natural-sounding obfuscation can effectively bypass safety policies.