Forskningsradar

Science Journals

Peer-reviewade publikationer — 54516 artiklar

An Energy-Efficient Approximate Posit Multiply-Divide Unit
arXiv:2605.24665v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In modern computing units, division operations are generally slower than other arithmetic operations and require more resources, such as area and power, than multiplication. To reduce the delay, fast division algorithms use an initial approximation of the reciprocal of the divisor and iteratively approach the correct value, followed by multiplication with the dividend. The hardware architecture and choice of algorithm can significantly alter the overall performance of the division unit. This paper proposes a reduced-accuracy division method for the posit number system, which is an alternative to the traditional floating-point system. The proposed design uses a Look-Up Table (LUT) and a single subtraction operation to perform approximate divisor reciprocation by leveragingthemathematicalsymmetriesofthepositnumbersystem.The paper also presents a hardware architecture that combines multiplication and division units. The reciprocal calculation has been incorporated into the posit Decoder, a common unit required to perform any hardware operation with posits. Compared to existing hardware implementations of division, the proposed method requires significantly fewer operations at the cost of perfect rounding for division. The proposed architecture was simulated using the Cadence RTL v7.1 E2 compiler at the TSMC 90 nm process node and achieves a Power Delay Product (PDP) reduction of 78.8% compared to an existing design that performs exact division, while only 46.33% of the area is required. The experimental results also demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system in improving the efficiency of multiplication in posit-based systems.
CArtBench: Evaluating Vision-Language Models on Chinese Art Understanding, Interpretation, and Authenticity
arXiv:2604.11632v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce CARTBENCH, a museum-grounded benchmark for evaluating vision-language models (VLMs) on Chinese artworks beyond short-form recognition and QA. CARTBENCH comprises four subtasks: CURATORQA for evidence-grounded recognition and reasoning, CATALOGCAPTION for structured four-section expert-style appreciation, REINTERPRET for defensible reinterpretation with expert ratings, and CONNOISSEURPAIRS for diagnostic authenticity discrimination under visually similar confounds. CARTBENCH is built by aligning image-bearing Palace Museum objects from Wikidata with authoritative catalog pages, spanning five art categories across multiple dynasties. Across nine representative VLMs, we find that high overall CURATORQA accuracy can mask sharp drops on hard evidence linking and style-to-period inference; long-form appreciation remains far from expert references; and authenticity-oriented diagnostic discrimination stays near chance, underscoring the difficulty of connoisseur-level reasoning for current models.
Mycoponically Integrated Network Device for Multimodal Sensing with Living Mycelial Networks
arXiv:2604.22947v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Living mycelial filaments integrate chemical, optical, mechanical, thermal, and biological information via electrophysiological cellular trans-membrane potential. The challenge is to create a mycology interface that sustains metabolism, standardizes electrode geometry, and tolerates mechanical damage. Using mycoponics we overcome these factors that limited prior demonstrations to single modalities, and operational windows of days to weeks. We present MIND, an engineered biophysical interface integrating antimicrobial nutrient delivery (ceramic size exclusion) with non-invasive electrophysiology, in cylindrical (MINDTube) and planar (MINDPixel) form-factors. The platform sustains colonized \textit{Pleurotus ostreatus} mycelium beyond 11 months and distinguishes 14 stimulus classes from a single unmodified device. Steady-state intensity responses follow Hill-type calibration functions across five phylogenetically diverse fungi grown on the identical interface, making strain selection a tunable design parameter. Multichannel decoding from the standardized electrode geometry recovers stimulus duration, location, and trajectory. Continuous nutrition provided by mycoponics recovered complete electrophysiological function within 72 h after mechanical excision. MIND converts living mycelium networks into universal, self-repairing, biosensors.
Complex Stochastic Gradient Descent and Directional Bias in Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces
arXiv:2604.23017v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a known stochastic iterative method popular for large-scale convex optimization problems due to its simple implementation and scalability. Some objectives, such as those found in complex-valued neural networks, benefit from updates like in SGD and Gradient Descent (GD) with a newly defined ``gradient'' that allows for complex parameters. This complex variant of the SGD/GD methods has already been proposed, but convergence guarantees without analyticity constraints have not yet been provided. We propose a variant of SGD (complex SGD) that allows for complex parameters, and we provide convergence guarantees under assumptions that parallel those from the real setting. Notably, these results extend to GD as well, and with the same set of assumptions, we confirm that some directional bias results extend from the real to the complex setting for kernel regression problems. We provide empirical results demonstrating the efficacy of the complex SGD in kernel regression problems utilizing complex reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces. In particular, we demonstrate we may recover superoscillation functions and Blaschke products from the Fock Space and Hardy Space, respectively, as the optimal functions for a particular choice of a loss function.
Human-1 by Josh Talks: A Full-Duplex Conversational Modeling Framework in Hindi using Real-World Conversations
arXiv:2604.23295v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Full-duplex spoken dialogue systems can model natural conversational behaviours such as interruptions, overlaps, and backchannels, yet such systems remain largely unexplored for Indian languages. We present the first open, reproducible full-duplex spoken dialogue system for Hindi by adapting Moshi, a state-of-the-art duplex speech architecture, using a custom Hindi tokeniser and training on 26,000 hours of real spontaneous conversations collected from 14,695 speakers with separate speaker channels, enabling direct learning of turn-taking and overlap patterns from natural interactions. To support Hindi text generation, we replace the original English tokeniser and reinitialise text-vocabulary-dependent parameters while retaining the pre-trained audio components. We propose a two-stage training recipe -- large-scale pre-training followed by fine-tuning on 1,000 hours of conversational data. Evaluation through the prompted dialogue continuation paradigm with both automatic metrics and human judgments demonstrates that the resulting model generates natural and meaningful full-duplex conversational behaviour in Hindi. This work serves as a first step toward real-time duplex spoken dialogue systems for Hindi and other Indian languages.
On the Distillation Loss Functions of Speech VAE for Unified Reconstruction, Understanding, and Generation
arXiv:2604.12383v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Continuous speech representations based on Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) have emerged as a promising alternative to traditional spectrogram or discrete token based features for speech generation and reconstruction. Recent research has tried to enrich the structural information in VAE latent representations by aligning with self-supervised learning (SSL) features, aiming for better generation performance. However, it remains unclear whether the widely-used alignment approach based on time-axis distillation is optimal when considering more tasks. To address this problem, this paper systematically explores different alignment approaches and analyzes their impact on the performances over three axes: reconstruction, understanding, and generation. We investigate various design choices in the distillation loss. Extensive experiments show that the joint-marginal alignment approach with adaptive weighting can achieve the best overall performance while allowing for a controllable balance.
Talking Slide Avatars: Open-Source Multimodal Communication Approach for Teaching
arXiv:2604.23703v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Slide-based teaching is widely used in higher education, yet in online, hybrid, and asynchronous contexts, slides often lose instructor presence, narrative continuity, and expressive framing that help learners connect with course content. Full lecture video can partly restore these qualities, but it is time-consuming to record, revise, and reuse. This study presents a practice-based implementation and analytic reflection of an open-source workflow for creating talking slide avatars. The workflow integrates OpenVoice for text-to-speech and authorized voice-style conversion with Ditto-TalkingHead for audio-driven talking-image synthesis, enabling instructors to transform a short script and an authorized or synthetic portrait image into a narrated video for slide decks or HTML-based lecture materials. Rather than treating this workflow only as a technical solution, the study frames talking slide avatars as multimodal communication artifacts at the intersection of digital pedagogy, aesthetic education, and art-technology practice. The paper documents the production pipeline, analyzes communicative and aesthetic affordances, and proposes practical guidelines for script length, image selection, pacing, disclosure, accessibility, consent, and ethical use. Its contribution is not a validated learning intervention, but an educator-oriented open-source production model and communication-design framework. The study concludes that short, transparent, and carefully designed avatars may provide a reusable communication layer for introductions, transitions, reminders, and recaps when used selectively and with appropriate ethical safeguards.
ClawTrace: Cost-Aware Tracing for LLM Agent Skill Distillation
arXiv:2604.23853v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Skill-distillation pipelines learn reusable rules from LLM agent trajectories, but they lack a key signal: how much each step costs. Without per-step cost, a pipeline cannot distinguish adding a missing step to fix a bug from removing an expensive step that never affected the outcome. We use the cost-attribution gap to ask whether the rule types inside a distilled skill transfer the same way to new tasks. ClawTrace records cost-attributed agent traces and compiles each session into a TraceCard; CostCraft reads TraceCards and writes three kinds of skill patches: preserve, prune, and repair. We find a pattern aggregate metrics hide. On 30 held-out SpreadsheetBench tasks across two seeds, removing prune patches roughly tripled the quality-regression count without lowering median cost. Across the full 84-task SkillsBench transfer, CostCraft saves no aggregate cost. All three quality regressions trace to the preserve lane, and both quality wins trace to the prune lane: prune patches act as quality guardrails while preserve patches drive regressions. We argue that reusable agent skills should be evaluated at the rule-type level, not as monolithic instruction packages. To support this, we release ClawTrace, the TraceCard schema, and the full set of typed skills.
Safety Generalization Under Distribution Shift in Safe Reinforcement Learning: A Diabetes Testbed
arXiv:2601.21094v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Safe Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are typically evaluated under fixed training conditions. We investigate whether training-time safety guarantees transfer to deployment under distribution shift, using diabetes management as a safety-critical testbed. We benchmark safe RL algorithms on a unified clinical simulator and reveal a safety generalization gap: policies satisfying constraints during training frequently violate safety requirements on unseen patients. We demonstrate that test-time shielding, which filters unsafe actions using learned dynamics models, effectively restores safety across algorithms and patient populations. Across eight safe RL algorithms, three diabetes types, and three age groups, shielding achieves Time-in-Range gains of 13--14\% for strong baselines such as PPO-Lag and CPO while reducing clinical risk index and glucose variability. Our simulator and benchmark provide a platform for studying safety under distribution shift in safety-critical control domains. Code is available at https://github.com/safe-autonomy-lab/GlucoSim and https://github.com/safe-autonomy-lab/GlucoAlg.
Rethinking LLM Ensembling from the Perspective of Mixture Models
arXiv:2605.00419v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Model ensembling is a well-established technique for improving the performance of machine learning models. Conventionally, this involves averaging the output distributions of multiple models and selecting the most probable label. This idea has been naturally extended to large language models (LLMs), yielding improved performance but incurring substantial computational cost. This inefficiency stems from directly applying conventional ensemble implementation to LLMs, which require a separate forward pass for each model to explicitly compute the ensemble distribution. In this paper, we propose the Mixture-model-like Ensemble (ME). By reinterpreting the ensemble as a mixture model, ME stochastically selects a single model at each step to generate the next token, thereby avoiding the need to explicitly compute the full ensemble distribution. ME is mathematically equivalent to sampling from the ensemble distribution, but requires invoking only one model, making it 1.78x-2.68x faster than conventional ensembling. Furthermore, this perspective connects LLM ensembling and token-level routing methods, suggesting that LLM ensembling is a special case of routing methods. Our findings open new avenues for efficient LLM ensembling and motivate further exploration of token-level routing strategies for LLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/Kamichanw/Mixture-model-like-Ensemble.
When LLMs Stop Following Steps: A Diagnostic Study of Procedural Execution in Language Models
arXiv:2605.00817v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often achieve strong performance on reasoning benchmarks, but final-answer accuracy alone does not show whether they faithfully execute the procedure specified in a prompt. We introduce a controlled diagnostic benchmark for procedural execution, where models are given a step-wise arithmetic procedure and two numeric inputs, and must return the final computed value. Complexity is varied through procedure length and look-back dependencies over intermediate variables. Average first-answer accuracy drops from 63% on 5-step procedures to 20% on 95-step procedures. Generation-level analysis shows that failures often involve missing answers, premature answers, self-correction after an initial error and under-executed traces. These findings suggest that apparent reasoning ability can mask substantial weaknesses in faithful long-horizon procedural execution.
Evaluation of Convolutional and Transformer-Based Detectors for Weed Detection in Tomato Plantations
arXiv:2605.00908v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper presents a comparative evaluation of convolutional and transformer-based object detection architectures for early weed detection in tomato plantations. Representative models from each paradigm are considered, including YOLOv26-nano, a recent variant of the YOLO family, and RT-DETR Large and RF-DETR Medium as transformer-based architectures. The evaluation was conducted on the GROUNDBASED_WEED dataset, considering six weed classes and an additional category corresponding to unidentified plants, which allowed for the assessment of performance in terms of detection accuracy and computational efficiency using metrics such as precision, recall, average precision, and inference speed, as well as non-parametric statistical tests. The results highlight a clear trade-off between efficiency and contextual modeling: CNN-based detectors achieve high performance at a lower computational cost, while transformer-based approaches offer better global context capture at the expense of higher resource demands. These results provide practical criteria for model selection in precision agriculture applications.
Psychologically Potent, Computationally Invisible: LLMs Generate Social-Comparison-Eliciting Posts They Fail to Detect
arXiv:2605.01017v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce Xiaohongshu Social Comparison Reader Elicitation (XHS-SCoRE), a reader-grounded benchmark for detecting whether text-only Xiaohongshu (RedNote) posts elicit Upward, Downward, or Neutral/no clear social comparison from a first-person reader perspective. The task targets a socially meaningful relational, behaviorally real signal not reducible to sentiment. Across prompted LLM classifiers and supervised Chinese encoders, we find a consistent generation--detection mismatch: the signal is textually learnable in-domain, but not robustly accessible to prompt-based classification. Prompted LLM classifiers show stable failures, especially neutralization of comparison-eliciting posts and model-specific directional skew. A controlled pilot shows that LLM-generated Xiaohongshu-style posts can shift perceived standing and comparison-related affect even when prompt-based detection of the same construct remains fragile. XHS-SCoRE contributes a benchmark for reader-grounded comparison detection and a diagnostic framework for studying when socially meaningful relational cues remain only partially visible to prompt-based inference.
Chain of Evidence: Pixel-Level Visual Attribution for Iterative Retrieval-Augmented Generation
arXiv:2605.01284v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Iterative Retrieval-Augmented Generation (iRAG) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for answering complex multi-hop questions by progressively retrieving and reasoning over external documents. However, current systems predominantly operate on parsed text, which creates two critical bottlenecks: (1) \textit{Coarse-grained attribution}, where users are burdened with manually locating evidence within lengthy documents based on vague text-level citations; and (2) \textit{Visual semantic loss}, where the conversion of visually rich documents (e.g., slides, PDFs with charts) into text discards spatial logic and layout cues essential for reasoning. To bridge this gap, we present \textbf{Chain of Evidence (CoE)}, a retriever-agnostic visual attribution framework that leverages Vision-Language Models to reason directly over screenshots of retrieved document candidates. CoE eliminates format-specific parsing and outputs precise bounding boxes, visualizing the complete reasoning chain within the retrieved candidate set. We evaluate CoE on two distinct benchmarks: \textbf{Wiki-CoE}, a large-scale dataset of structured web pages derived from 2WikiMultiHopQA, and \textbf{SlideVQA}, a challenging dataset of presentation slides featuring complex diagrams and free-form layouts. Experiments demonstrate that fine-tuned Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct achieves robust performance, significantly outperforming text-based baselines in scenarios requiring visual layout understanding, while establishing a retriever-agnostic solution for pixel-level interpretable iRAG. Our code is available at https://github.com/PeiYangLiu/CoE.git.
Two-Pass Zero-Shot Temporal-Spatial Grounding of Rare Traffic Events in Surveillance Video
arXiv:2605.01512v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Grounding traffic accidents in real CCTV footage is a rare-event problem where training on labeled accident video is often prohibited, yet accurate joint localization in time, space, and collision type is required. We present a no-fine-tuning pipeline that elicits this joint output from frozen vision-language models through two ideas. First, a coarse-to-fine two-pass decomposition: a full-video pass at 1 fps produces a coarse (t, x, y, c) tuple, then a second pass at 5 fps within a +/- 3 s window refines time and location, with two deterministic confidence gates that revert to the coarse estimate on boundary hedges or edge-clamped coordinates. Second, a specialist role assignment: Qwen3-VL-Plus handles grounding, Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite handles typing on a centered video clip. On the ACCIDENT@CVPR 2026 benchmark (2,027 real CCTV videos) we reach ACC^S = 0.539 (95% CI [0.525, 0.553]): +0.127 over the benchmark paper's best-of-baselines oracle (0.412), +0.143 over the strongest single-VLM baseline (Molmo-7B, 0.396), and +0.250 over the naive baseline (0.289). The VLM path uses up to three API calls per video (17% fall back to physics on API failures); the full run costs ~$20.
Error estimates for an unregularized optimal control problem for the stationary Navier-Stokes equations
arXiv:2605.01633v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider an unregularized optimal control problem subject to the steady-state Navier-Stokes equations. We derive the existence of optimal solutions and prove first- and second-order optimality conditions. To approximate solutions to the optimal control problem, we consider the variational discretization scheme. We analyze convergence properties of the discretization and prove a priori error estimates for locally optimal controls that are nonsingular and which satisfy a growth condition which implies a bang-bang structure. We also propose a residual-type a posteriori error estimator that accounts for the discretization of the state and adjoint equations, and prove suitable reliability properties for such an error estimator.
Reliable AI Needs to Externalize Implicit Knowledge: A Human-AI Collaboration Perspective
arXiv:2605.02010v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This position paper argues that reliable AI requires infrastructure for human validation of implicit knowledge. AI learns from both explicit knowledge (papers, documentation, structured databases) and implicit knowledge (reasoning patterns, debugging processes, intermediate steps). Implicit knowledge remains unexternalized because documentation cost exceeds perceived value -- yet AI learns from it indiscriminately, acquiring both beneficial patterns and harmful biases. Current reliability methods can only verify explicit knowledge against sources, creating a fundamental gap: the most valuable AI capabilities (reasoning, judgment, intuition) are precisely those we cannot verify. We propose Knowledge Objects (KOs) -- structured artifacts that externalize implicit knowledge into forms humans can inspect, verify, and endorse. KOs transform verification economics: what was previously too costly to verify becomes feasible, enabling accumulated human validation to improve reliability over time.
VILAS: A VLA-Integrated Low-cost Architecture with Soft Grasping for Robotic Manipulation
arXiv:2605.02037v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present VILAS, a fully low-cost, modular robotic manipulation platform designed to support end-to-end vision-language-action (VLA) policy learning and deployment on accessible hardware. The system integrates a Fairino FR5 collaborative arm, a Jodell RG52-50 electric gripper, and a dual-camera perception module, unified through a ZMQ-based communication architecture that seamlessly coordinates teleoperation, data collection, and policy deployment within a single framework. To enable safe manipulation of fragile objects without relying on explicit force sensing, we design a kirigami-based soft compliant gripper extension that induces predictable deformation under compressive loading, providing gentle and repeatable contact with delicate targets. We deploy and evaluate three state-of-the-art VLA models on the VILAS platform: pi_0, pi_0.5, and GR00T N1.6. All models are fine-tuned from publicly released pretrained checkpoints using an identical demonstration dataset collected via our teleoperation pipeline. Experiments on a grape grasping task validate the effectiveness of the proposed system, confirming that capable manipulation policies can be successfully trained and deployed on low-cost modular hardware. Our results further provide practical insights into the deployment characteristics of current VLA models in real-world settings.
NeuroViz: Real-time Interactive Visualization of Forward and Backward Passes in Neural Network Training
arXiv:2605.02044v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Training neural networks is difficult to interpret, particularly for newcomers. We introduce NeuroViz, an interactive visualization tool that supports real-time exploration of fully connected neural network training. Users can configure network architecture, activation functions, learning rates, and datasets, then observe activations, weight updates, and loss progression. NeuroViz visualizes weight changes in direct correspondence with activation signals in both forward and backward passes, enabling users to distinguish pre- and post-update states within individual epochs and view dynamically updating per-neuron equations. We conduct a comparative user study with 31 participants against six established visualization tools and we achieved the highest usability score (SUS 80.97, in the 'excellent' range), with mean rankings of 2.47 for clarity and 2.23 for usefulness (lower is better). Over 70% of participants reported that the visualizations substantially increased their perception of neural network training transparency. The implemented instance is accessible at https://neuroviz.org.
Soft-to-Hard Routing in Sparse Mixture-of-Experts Models
arXiv:2605.02124v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Softmax routing approaches hard top-1 routing as the temperature tends to zero, but the limiting passage is singular at router ties. This paper develops a boundary-layer calculus for this soft-to-hard limit in population squared-loss mixture-of-experts regression. For a router with logits $a_k(x;\phi)$, the relevant local quantity is the top-two margin $\Delta(x;\phi)$, and the relevant global quantity is the boundary mass $\mathbb{P}(\Delta(X;\phi)\le w)$. Under smoothness and transversality assumptions, coarea and tubular-neighborhood estimates show how this mass scales with the slab width; in the binary case the leading coefficient is an explicit surface integral over the routing interface. These geometric estimates give quantitative bounds between the soft objective $L_\tau$ and the hard objective $L_0$, including an $O(\tau^\alpha)$ uniform comparison under a margin-tail condition, and yield $\Gamma$-convergence of the soft objectives on compact parameter spaces. The main conclusion is that the zero-temperature approximation is controlled by the probability carried by an $O(\tau)$ neighborhood of the routing interfaces, not by temperature alone. After isolating this boundary-layer part of the problem, we record a conditional landscape-transfer theorem from hard to small-temperature soft routing and a reduced two-expert Gaussian calculation illustrating local symmetry breaking. Synthetic diagnostics are included only as controlled checks of the boundary-layer predictions.
MoBayes: A Modular Bayesian Framework for Separating Reasoning from Language in Conversational Clinical Decision Support
arXiv:2604.20022v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for conversational clinical decision support, yet they conflate next token prediction with probabilistic decision making. We argue that this conflation reflects an architectural limitation: such systems lack explicit posterior tracking, controllable abstention thresholds, and auditable reasoning chains. We introduce MoBayes, a Modular Bayesian dialogue framework that separates reasoning from language. The LLM acts only as a language interface, parsing patient conversation into structured observations, while a Bayesian module performs probabilistic inference over these observations to update posteriors, select follow-up questions via expected-information-gain and determine when to stop or defer through calibrated decision thresholds. This design enables explicit posterior tracking, controllable selective decision-making, and replaceable population-specific statistical backends without retraining the language model. Across empirical and LLM-generated knowledge bases, MoBayes outperforms standalone frontier LLM doctors, including matched model-family comparisons where inexpensive sensor models paired with MoBayes exceed larger autonomous models at lower cost. The advantage persists under adversarial patient communication styles and across varying diagnostic scenarios. These results suggest that reliable conversational clinical decision support systems should separate probabilistic reasoning from language generation rather than scaling model size alone. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MoBayes/
Taming Request Imbalance: SLO-Aware Scheduling for Disaggregated LLM Inference
arXiv:2605.02329v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In production environments, large language model (LLM) serving is required to meet stringent service-level objectives (SLOs) amid highly variable request patterns. In practice, request lengths follow a long-tail distribution, which gives rise to head-of-line blocking on the prefill side and underutilization caused by stragglers on the decode side in disaggregated serving architectures. Current systems, which adopt first-come-first-served (FCFS) scheduling for prefill and continuous batching for decode, lack the ability to adapt to this imbalance, resulting in compromised SLO attainment and reduced throughput. To address these challenges, we propose Kairos, an SLO-aware scheduling system equipped with two complementary mechanisms. On the prefill side, Kairos employs urgency-based priority scheduling: it predicts prefill completion times and dynamically selects requests to maximize the attainment of time-to-first-token (TTFT) SLOs. On the decode side, Kairos introduces slack-guided adaptive batching, which leverages the gap between per-step decode time and the time-per-output-token (TPOT) SLO to greedily pack short requests. This approach maximizes throughput while strictly adhering to SLO requirements. We implement Kairos and conduct evaluations using an online serving dataset and a state-of-the-art LLM. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared with state-of-the-art baselines, Kairos improves TTFT SLO attainment by up to 23.9\%, TPOT SLO attainment by up to 27.1\%, end-to-end SLO attainment by up to 33.8\%, and decode throughput by up to 19.3\%.
Efficient Preference Poisoning Attack on Offline RLHF
arXiv:2605.02495v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Offline Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) pipelines such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) train on a pre-collected preference dataset, which makes them vulnerable to preference poisoning attack. We study label flip attacks against log-linear DPO. We first illustrate that flipping one preference label induces a parameter-independent shift in the DPO gradient. Using this key property, we can then convert the targeted poisoning problem into a structured binary sparse approximation problem. To solve this problem, we develop two attack methods: Binary-Aware Lattice Attack (BAL-A) and Binary Matching Pursuit Attack (BMP-A). BAL-A embeds the binary flip selection problem into a binary-aware lattice and applies Lenstra-Lenstra-Lov\'asz reduction and Babai's nearest plane algorithm; we provide sufficient conditions that enforce binary coefficients and recover the minimum-flip objective. BMP-A adapts binary matching pursuit to our non-normalized gradient dictionary and yields coherence-based recovery guarantees and robustness (impossibility) certificates for $K$-flip budgets. Experiments on synthetic dictionaries and the Stanford Human Preferences dataset validate the theory and highlight how dictionary geometry governs attack success.
FoR-Net: Learning to Focus on Hard Regions for Efficient Semantic Segmentation
arXiv:2605.02764v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present FoR-Net, an efficient semantic segmentation framework that focuses on identifying and enhancing hard regions. Instead of relying on heavy global modeling, FoR-Net adopts an efficient strategy that selectively emphasizes informative regions through a learned importance map and a Top-K activation mechanism. Specifically, a selector module predicts region-wise importance, enabling the model to focus on challenging areas such as thin structures and object boundaries. Multi-scale reasoning is achieved using convolutional branches with different receptive fields, allowing diverse spatial context aggregation. We evaluate FoR-Net on the Cityscapes benchmark under limited computational resources. Despite its efficient design and standard training configuration, FoR-Net achieves competitive performance and exhibits improved attention to difficult regions. These results suggest that selective region-focused reasoning can serve as a practical and efficient alternative for semantic segmentation. This work explores region-focused reasoning under resource-constrained settings and provides insights for developing efficient and region-aware segmentation models.
From Muscle Bursts to Motor Intent: Self-Supervised Token Modeling for Heterogeneous EMG
arXiv:2605.03462v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Surface electromyography provides a practical way to infer human movement intention from wearable muscle recordings, but models trained under a single acquisition setting often lose reliability when the user, session, electrode layout, or gesture protocol changes. This paper proposes AEMG, a self-supervised learning approach designed to extract reusable neuromuscular representations from diverse EMG sources. Eight public gesture datasets are first transformed into a shared signal format to reduce discrepancies in channel configuration, sensor topology, and recording protocol. Instead of relying on fixed-length sliding windows, AEMG identifies contraction events from energy variations and represents them as compact neuromuscular tokens, while ordered token groups describe the coordinated activity of multiple muscles during motion. A spatially and temporally conditioned Transformer is then used to encode these token sequences, preserving information about electrode position, activation timing, and sequential structure. For pre-training, the model constructs a discrete library of contraction prototypes through vector-quantized reconstruction and further learns contextual dependencies by recovering masked neuromuscular tokens from surrounding observations. Experiments under leave-one-subject-out and low-label adaptation settings show that the learned representation improves robustness to unseen users and reduces the amount of calibration data required for gesture recognition. These findings suggest that event-level token modeling offers a scalable route toward adaptable and data-efficient EMG-based motor-intent understanding.