#01Jul 22, 2026
cs.CL
LKValues: Aligning Large Language Models with Sri Lankan Societal Values
Nethmi Muthugala, Supryadi, Surangika Ranathunga and 7 more
Value alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) has been shown to be culturally biased toward Western norms. This results in the mishandling of local values in multilingual societies such as Sri Lanka that have their unique cultural dynamics. Existing benchmarks overlook Sri Lankan-contextualized values in its official language Sinhala, hindering culturally sensitive evaluation and fine-tuning. To bridge this gap, we propose LKValues, the first survey-grounded resource suite for Sri Lankan value alignment. From a trilingual survey of 205 respondents, blending adapted global frameworks and LLM-elicited local constructs, we derive 40 majority-endorsed societal values. Using these values, we construct LKvaluesIT, a Sinhala-English news-derived instruction corpus containing 150k scenario-based instances, and LKvaluesBench, a value-sensitive evaluation benchmark of 1,000 instances. We evaluate a set of proprietary and open-weight LLMs with LKvaluesBench. We fine-tune three open-weight base models (Qwen3.5-4B-Base, Qwen3.5-9B-Base, and Aya-Expanse-8B-Base). Our experiments show that newer and larger LLMs still exhibit low-resource and cultural value-alignment gaps. LKValues fine-tuning improves Qwen-family models in English and Sinhala, reducing invalid outputs and cross-lingual disparities, though gains remain model-family dependent. These highlight LKValues efficacy in embedding Sri Lankan values, offering a replicable pipeline for low-resource, country-specific pluralist value alignment. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/NextME14/LKValues.
#02Jul 22, 2026
cs.CV
Look Less, Think Faster: Joint Token-Compute Adaptation for Multimodal LLMs
Pengcheng Wang, Zhiquan Wang, Jayoung Lee and 5 more
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently demonstrated strong performance across vision-language tasks. However, their high inference cost, arising from both the large number of input visual tokens and the heavy computation of the large language model (LLM), remains a key barrier to practical deployment. Recent work attempts to reduce the cost by adaptively optimizing individual dimensions, e.g., pruning redundant visual tokens or skipping LLM layers and heads. Nonetheless, prior approaches typically treat these dimensions independently and overlook a fundamental coupling: the available compute resources must be dynamically allocated across all dimensions based on the input content. To bridge the gap, we propose SmartVL, a unified adaptive inference framework that jointly controls vision token number and model compute capability in response to varying input contents and compute budgets. SmartVL introduces a vision-side token controller that dynamically selects informative visual tokens and an LLM-side compute controller that adaptively adjusts LLM computation. Importantly, these controllers are trained to coordinate with each other so that the overall inference cost satisfies a target budget. To allow this joint scheduling, we connect the controllers using a shared budget encoding and leverage a differentiable latency estimator for end-to-end training. This design enables SmartVL to learn cross-stage allocation strategies that adapt to both input complexity and runtime compute constraints. Experiments across multiple MLLM benchmarks demonstrate that, with joint scheduling, SmartVL consistently outperforms prior adaptive methods and achieves superior accuracy-efficiency Pareto frontiers. Project page: https://www.schaterji.io/publications/2026/jointtokencompute.
#03Jul 22, 2026
cs.LG
Multi-modal transformer for signal classification in nanopore blockade experiments
Sandro Kuppel, Julian Hoßbach, Samuel Tovey and 1 more
Nanopore devices have emerged as powerful tools for single-molecule sensing, with potential for rapid, portable diagnostics. They detect changes in ionic current as analytes enter nanometer-scale pores, providing a means of identifying diverse biomarkers from their characteristic signal patterns. However, these signals are highly complex, and reliably assigning them to specific molecules remains a major challenge. Here, we address this by introducing a multi-modal deep learning architecture that jointly processes multiple signal representations, including raw time-series data, wavelet-based images, and static feature vectors. Our approach surpasses existing methods by more than 10 percentage points on a 42-peptide benchmark and transfers to a 20-amino-acid dataset with near-perfect accuracy. The model integrates complementary information from these representations, with attention analysis showing that the time-series and wavelet-image inputs emphasize different features of the same event. Together, these results demonstrate the potential of machine learning to enable robust, high-accuracy molecular identification with nanopore sensors.
#04Jul 22, 2026
quant-ph
Statevector-Referenced Geometry Survival of a Four-Qubit ZZ Quantum Kernel on IBM Quantum Hardware: A Fixed-Subset Diagnostic Across Three Execution Configurations
Rostyslav Sipakov
Quantum-kernel methods encode a dataset's geometry in a Gram matrix, so learning claims on hardware kernels assume the intended geometry survives execution. We measure that survival for one frozen four-qubit ZZ feature-map kernel on $N=24$ real indoor air-quality windows, reconstructed on ibm_fez (1024 shots per circuit) under baseline, dynamical decoupling alone, and gate twirling alone, each a single non-interleaved job. Every configuration returned a complete, finite, positive-semidefinite Gram matrix and preserved the centered statevector geometry to a substantial but incomplete descriptive degree (full-matrix centered kernel alignment, CKA, 0.933-0.989). Gate twirling was most faithful on every reported geometry axis, with the only jackknife-resolved improvement over baseline (persisted Spearman, mean absolute error, and full-matrix CKA diagnostics); dynamical decoupling alone was not separated from baseline at the frozen-window scale. Residual hardware distortion, not finite sampling, dominates the discrepancy. Yet fidelity and label alignment were reversed: the most faithful configuration had the lowest centered kernel-target alignment, which sits at or below label-permutation references for statevector and hardware alike. We read the small hardware uplift as a normalization property of the non-affine distortion, not captured signal. These are descriptive results for single jobs on one backend, not causal mitigation-efficacy estimates; no quantum-advantage, hardware-classifier-superiority, or forecasting claim is made. Implementation fidelity and task relevance are distinct axes; hardware quantum machine-learning studies should report both.
#05Jul 22, 2026
math.OC
Lipschitzian SLLNs for random functions
Lai Tian, Johannes O. Royset
We prove strong laws of large numbers for locally Lipschitz functions in the Lipschitz pseudometric. Our results hold under either a topological or a model-theoretic condition, with the latter encompassing functions jointly definable in o-minimal structures but extending substantially beyond this class. Applications include uniform convergence of limiting and Clarke subdifferentials and finite-sample identification of solutions. Consequently, we identify broad classes of functions for which the failure phenomena revealed by our previous negative results [Tian and Royset, arXiv:2511.16568, 2025] do not occur.