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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Visored: A Controlled-Natural-Language Prover for LLM-Generated Mathematics

arXiv:2606.17581v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a dependent-type-based prover designed around the way LLMs (and humans) tend to write mathematics, complementing existing systems such as Lean and Rocq. Its core design choices are a surface that imitates mathematical natural language and a rule-driven automation layer that closes the routine steps a textbook would omit, so that an accepted proof can be re-emitted as a checked Lean file. Early experiments suggest that, even without any prover-specific training data, LLMs can learn to use it effectively on the miniF2F benchmark. Lean output excerpts: https://github.com/xiyuzhai-husky-lang/visored/

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Protein Representation Learning with Secondary-Structure and Energy-Filtered Hydrogen-Bond Graphs

arXiv:2606.19374v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Graph-based representations are widely used in protein modeling, yet many existing approaches rely primarily on sequence adjacency or geometric proximity, which only partially reflect the principles governing protein folding. Proteins instead adopt complex three-dimensional conformations organized around secondary structure elements, such as $\alpha$-helices and $\beta$-sheets, which encode recurring local motifs and stabilizing hydrogen-bond interactions. In this work, we introduce a secondary-structure-aware graph neural network for protein representation learning. Residue-level node representations are augmented with secondary structure assignments, and graph edges are constructed from hydrogen-bond interactions filtered by their energetic strength. This design enables the model to capture both local structural context and long-range couplings that are central to protein stability and function. We evaluate the proposed approach on commonly used protein benchmarks and observe consistent improvements over existing graph-based methods. In addition, the resulting graph representations offer enhanced biological interpretability, as the learned connectivity aligns with established structural motifs. These findings suggest that incorporating secondary structure and energy-filtered hydrogen-bond topology provides an effective inductive bias for protein representation learning. The code is released at https://github.com/mohamedmohamed2021/SSProNet

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Latent World Recovery for Multimodal Learning with Missing Modalities

arXiv:2606.12362v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study multimodal learning under missing modalities, with particular motivation from bioscience applications in which heterogeneous modalities are often only partially available when decisions need to be made. We propose Latent World Recovery (LWR), a framework built on two key ideas: (i) modality-specific embeddings from different modalities are aligned in a shared latent space, and (ii) a unified representation is constructed by fusing only the embeddings of the modalities that are actually available at both training and inference time. Rather than imputing missing modalities or requiring a fixed modality set, LWR treats each modality as a partial perception of an underlying latent state and performs availability-aware representation learning directly from the observed modalities. This combination of neighbor-based latent alignment and availability-aware modality fusion enables robust multimodal prediction under partial observation, while avoiding error propagation from explicit reconstruction of missing modalities. We evaluate the proposed framework on real-world incomplete multi-omics benchmarks and demonstrate that it provides an effective approach to downstream tasks such as cancer phenotype classification and survival prediction.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Communication Policy Evolution for Proactive LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.14314v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents have rapidly evolved into autonomous systems, yet a persistent information gap remains between users and agents: communication is costly, while users' identical preferences further limit information exchange. To investigate how agents should communicate across modalities, this paper formalizes Communication Policy, establishes textual and UI-based policies, and then evaluates communication policies across diverse environments, personas, and model combinations. Building information asymmetry for proactive agents, we set up two complementary settings, User-Agent and Planner-Executor. Experimental results reveal complementary strengths between interaction channels: text-based interaction often facilitates task performance, while structured UI improves agents' response quality and persona compliance. Motivated by that, a hybrid method combines these advantages. We further propose Communication Policy Evolution (CPE), a self-evolution framework for refining communication policies through rollout and prompt-level evolving. Without model modification, CPE achieves the best task success across multiple settings using prompt refinement alone. Our findings identify communication behavior as a critical yet underexplored design dimension for LLM agents.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

EvoMemBench: Benchmarking Agent Memory from a Self-Evolving Perspective

Recent benchmarks for Large Language Model (LLM) agents mainly evaluate reasoning, planning, and execution. However, memory is also essential for agents, as it enables them to store, update, and retrieve information over time. This ability remains under-evaluated, largely because existing benchmarks do not provide a systematic way to assess memory mechanisms. In this paper, we study agent memory from a self-evolving perspective and introduce EvoMemBench, a unified benchmark organized along two axes: memory scope (in-episode vs. cross-episode) and memory content (knowledge-oriented vs. execution-oriented). We compare 15 representative memory methods with strong long-context baselines under a standardized protocol. Results show that current memory systems are still far from a general solution: long-context baselines remain highly competitive, memory helps most when the current context is insufficient or tasks are difficult, and no single memory form works consistently across all settings. Retrieval-based methods remain strong for knowledge-intensive settings, whereas procedural and long-term memory methods are more effective for execution-oriented tasks when their stored experience matches the task structure. We hope EvoMemBench facilitates future research on more effective memory systems for LLM-based agents. Our code is available at https://github.com/DSAIL-Memory/EvoMemBench.

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

Smol-GS: Compact Representations for Abstract 3D Gaussian Splatting

We present Smol-GS, a novel method for learning compact representations for 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Our approach learns highly efficient splat-wise features to model 3D space, which capture abstracted cues, including color, opacity, transformation, and material properties. We propose octree-derived positional encoding, which explicitly models spatial locality and enhances representation efficiency. We further apply entropy-based compression to exploit feature redundancy and compress splat coordinates using a recursive voxel hierarchy. This design enables orders-of-magnitude reduction in storage while preserving representation flexibility. Smol-GS achieves state-of-the-art compression performance on standard benchmarks with high-level rendering quality.

07.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Combinatorial docking and molecular generation to navigate over 100-billion molecules for prospective ligand discovery

Commercially available make-on-demand libraries now exceed 100 billion compounds, requiring over 50 years to screen on 2,000 CPU cores using conventional docking. We present two complementary approaches to address this challenge. CombiDOCK, a combinatorial docking framework, enables exhaustive screening at the 100-billion scale within 40 days. MINT-Dock, a generative framework, accelerates navigation of this space by integrating CombiDOCK with Monte Carlo Tree Search. Benchmarked on 46 diverse targets, CombiDOCK matched full-molecule docking accuracy, and MINT-Dock achieved a 4,800-fold enrichment over random selection. Compared with prior billion-scale brute-force campaigns against {sigma}2, VMAT2, and VAChT, prospective CombiDOCK screens of the 100-billion-molecule library yielded higher hit rates and more potent ligands, while MINT-Dock achieved comparable outcomes across single- and multi-target objectives with >20-fold computational cost reductions. Docking-predicted poses of the best VAChT-binding compounds were confirmed by cryo-EM structures. These methods provide exhaustive and generative paths for navigating the trillion-molecule frontier of drug discovery.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

ALAS: An Automatic Latent Alignment Score for Audio Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are extended into Speech-LLMs, and the quality of the audio–text alignment they learn affects most downstream Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) behavior. Yet despite a growth of fusion strategies, there is no standard way to measure how well a Speech-LLM internally binds audio frames to text tokens. We introduce ALAS (Automatic Latent Alignment Score), a model and task-agnostic metric that probes the LLM's per-layer hidden states, scoring the cross-modal cosine similarity between audio and text representations against a Whisper-derived reference. ALAS needs only a frozen forward pass and an off-the-shelf ASR reference, with no training or fitted classifier, and is calibrated to an interpretable uniform baseline comparable across tasks. Applying ALAS to four open-source Speech-LLMs (AF3, Qwen2-Audio, Qwen-Omni, SALMONN) across emotion recognition (IEMOCAP), open-ended SQA (LibriSQA), and multi-choice audio understanding (MMAU-speech), we find that the depth and strength of alignment reflect each model's audio-encoder design and the acoustic-versus-semantic demands of the task, and that ALAS tracks but does not duplicate task accuracy, exposing models that score well without genuinely grounding in the audio. We release ALAS as an open-source library so that practitioners can probe their own Speech-LLMs or try it on new tasks.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Muse Spark Safety & Preparedness Report

arXiv:2606.12429v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Muse Spark is the latest large language model developed by Meta. In this report, we first present evaluations for catastrophic risk domains under Meta's Advanced AI Scaling Framework, along with the evidence that informed our launch decision. We then discuss additional considerations, such as Muse Spark's broader content safety and behavioral profile, that are relevant to overall safety but fall outside the catastrophic risk domains governed by the Framework. Our preparedness results covering Chemical and Biological, Cybersecurity, and Loss of Control risks assess Muse Spark's deployment within Meta AI as presenting acceptable levels of residual risks under our Advanced AI Scaling Framework. We conducted a broad set of evaluations targeting dual-use and high-risk capabilities across these catastrophic risk domains. Those evaluations identified elevated risks prior to mitigations, with Chemical and Biological capabilities assessed as likely reaching the "high risk" category under the Advanced AI Scaling Framework before safeguards were applied. We have implemented a multi-layered set of mitigations that address the identified risks, and Muse Spark demonstrates state-of-the-art refusal across a range of benchmarks related to hazardous workflows in chemistry and biology. We therefore release Muse Spark as the underlying model of Meta AI.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

TLA-Prover: Verifiable TLA+ Specification Synthesis via Preference-Optimized Low-Rank Adaptation

arXiv:2606.06133v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: TLA+ is a formal specification language for verifying distributed systems and safety-critical protocols. Large language models (LLMs) frequently produce TLA+ specifications that fail the TLC model checker for semantic reasons. Across 25 LLMs, the best public baseline is 26.6% syntactic parse and 8.6% semantic model-check. We present TLA-Prover, a 20-billion-parameter model for TLA+ specification synthesis. Training combines supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on verified examples with repair-based group-relative policy optimization (GRPO). In the GRPO stage, the model learns to fix its own rejected specifications. We also train a direct preference optimization (DPO) variant from the same SFT checkpoint as an ablation. TLC provides the reward signal directly, with no learned reward model. Four tiers grade each output: Bronze (parses), Silver (no warnings), Gold (passes TLC), and Diamond. To reach Diamond, the model's correctness property is automatically altered in a small way; TLC must then detect a violation. If TLC still passes, the property was always-true and contributes nothing; the output fails Diamond. TLA-Prover reaches 9/30 (i.e. pass@1 = 30%) at both Gold and Diamond on a held-out 30-problem benchmark. This is roughly 3.5x the 8.6% untuned baseline. The DPO variant reaches 20% at Diamond. Gold and Diamond coincide at every checkpoint; this prevents the trivial-property failure mode.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Enhancing Generative Auto-bidding with Offline Reward Evaluation and Policy Search

arXiv:2509.15927v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Auto-bidding is a critical tool for advertisers to improve advertising performance. Recent progress has demonstrated that AI-Generated Bidding (AIGB), which learns a conditional generative planner from offline data, achieves superior performance compared to typical offline reinforcement learning (RL)-based auto-bidding methods. However, existing AIGB methods still face a performance bottleneck due to their inherent inability to explore beyond the static dataset with feedback. To address this, we propose AIGB-Pearl (Planning with \textbf{EvaluAtor via RL}), a novel method that integrates generative planning and policy optimization. The core of AIGB-Pearl lies in constructing a trajectory evaluator to assess the quality of generated scores and designing a provably sound KL-Lipschitz-constrained score-maximization scheme to ensure safe and efficient exploration beyond the offline dataset. A practical algorithm that incorporates the synchronous coupling technique is further developed to ensure the model regularity required by the proposed scheme. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real-world advertising systems demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our approach.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Automated Creativity Evaluation of Language Models Across Open-Ended Tasks

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in language understanding, reasoning, and generation, sparking growing interest in their creative potential. Realizing this potential requires systematic and scalable methods for evaluating creativity across diverse tasks. However, most existing creativity metrics are tightly coupled to specific tasks, embedding domain assumptions into the evaluation process, and limiting scalability and generality. To address this gap, we introduce an automated, domain-agnostic framework for quantifying LLM creativity across open-ended tasks. Our approach separates the measurement apparatus from the creative task itself, enabling scalable, task-agnostic assessment. Divergent creativity is measured using semantic entropy, a reference-free and robust metric for novelty and diversity, validated against human annotations, LLM-based novelty judgments and baseline diversity measures. Convergent creativity is assessed via a novel retrieval-based multi-agent judge framework that delivers context-sensitive evaluation of task fulfilment with over 60% improved efficiency. We validate our framework in three qualitatively distinct domains: problem-solving (MacGyver), research ideation (HypoGen), and creative writing (BookMIA), using a broad suite of LLMs. Empirical results show that our framework reliably captures key facets of creativity, including novelty, diversity, and task fulfilment, and reveal how model properties, such as size, temperature, recency, and reasoning, impact creative performance. Our work establishes a reproducible and generalizable standard for automated LLM creativity evaluation, paving the way for scalable benchmarking and accelerating progress in creative AI.

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

Gated QKAN-FWP: Scalable Quantum-inspired Sequence Learning

arXiv:2605.06734v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fast Weight Programmers (FWPs) encode temporal dependencies through dynamically updated parameters rather than recurrent hidden states. Quantum FWPs (QFWPs) extend this idea with variational quantum circuits (VQCs), but existing implementations rely on multi-qubit architectures that are difficult to scale on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices and expensive to simulate classically. We propose gated QKAN-FWP, a fast-weight framework that integrates FWP with Quantum-inspired Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (QKAN) using single-qubit data re-uploading circuits as learnable nonlinear activation, known as DatA Re-Uploading ActivatioN (DARUAN). We further introduce a scalar-gated fast-weight update rule that stabilizes parameter evolution, supported by a theoretical analysis of its adaptive memory kernel, geometric boundedness, and parallelizable gradient paths. We evaluate the framework across time-series benchmarks, MiniGrid reinforcement learning, and highlight real-world solar cycle forecasting as our main practical result. In the long-horizon setting with 528-month input window and 132-month forecast horizon, our 12.5k-parameter model achieves lower scaled Mean Square Error (MSE), peak amplitude error, and peak timing error than a suite of classical recurrent baselines with up to 13x more parameters, including Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks (25.9k-89.1k parameters), WaveNet-LSTM (167k), Vanilla recurrent neural network (11.5k), and a Modified Echo State Network (132k). To validate NISQ compatibility, we further deploy the trained fast programmer on IonQ and IBM Quantum processors, recovering forecasting accuracy within 0.1% relative MSE of the noiseless simulator at 1024 shots. These results position gated QKAN-FWP as a scalable, parameter-efficient, and NISQ-compatible approach to quantum-inspired sequence modeling.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Speaker Verification with Speech-Aware LLMs: Evaluation and Augmentation

arXiv:2603.10827v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Speech-aware large language models (LLMs) can accept speech inputs, yet their training objectives largely emphasize linguistic content or specific fields such as emotions or the speaker's gender, leaving it unclear whether they encode speaker identity. First, we propose a model-agnostic scoring protocol that produces continuous verification scores for both API-only and open-weight models, using confidence scores or log-likelihood ratios from the Yes/No token probabilities. Using this protocol, we benchmark recent speech-aware LLMs and observe weak speaker discrimination (EERs above 20% on VoxCeleb1). Second, we introduce a lightweight augmentation that equips an LLM with ASV capability by injecting frozen ECAPA-TDNN speaker embeddings through a learned projection and training only LoRA adapters. On TinyLLaMA-1.1B, the resulting ECAPA-LLM achieves 1.03% EER on VoxCeleb1-E, approaching a dedicated speaker verification system while preserving a natural-language interface.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

How Does the ReLU Activation Affect the Implicit Bias of Gradient Descent on High-dimensional Neural Network Regression?

arXiv:2603.04895v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Overparameterized ML models, including neural networks, typically induce underdetermined training objectives with multiple global minima. The implicit bias refers to the limiting global minimum that is attained by a common optimization algorithm, such as gradient descent (GD). In this paper, we characterize the implicit bias of GD for training a shallow ReLU model with the squared loss on high-dimensional random features. Prior work (Vardi and Shamir, 2021) showed that the implicit bias does not exist in the worst-case, or corresponds exactly to the minimum-$\ell_2$-norm interpolating solution under exactly orthogonal data (Boursier et al., 2022). Our work interpolates between these two extremes and shows that, for sufficiently high-dimensional random data, the implicit bias approximates the minimum-$\ell_2$-norm solution with high probability with a gap on the order $\Theta(\sqrt{n/||\lambda||_1})$, where $n$ is the number of training examples and $\lambda$ denotes the spectrum of the data covariance matrix. Our results are obtained through a novel primal-dual analysis that carefully tracks the evolution of predictions, data-span coefficients, as well as their interactions, and show that the ReLU activation pattern quickly stabilizes with high probability over random data.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Genome-wide association and multi-omics functional screens reveal the genetic architecture of foveal development

Foveal hypoplasia causes visual impairment across congenital eye disorders, yet the genetic programmes governing foveal development remain poorly characterised and no tractable model exists for foveal disease. In the first genome-wide association study of foveal hypoplasia, we identified 42 sentinel variants mapping to 54 effector genes supported by >= 2 criteria from a variant-to-gene framework incorporating developmental multi-omics. Disruption of six effector genes using mutant lines and CRISPR knockouts in the zebrafish high acuity zone recapitulates structural, functional, and ultrastructural hallmarks of foveal hypoplasia, establishing the first vertebrate disease model. Integration with human foetal single-cell and spatial transcriptomics reveals two temporal waves of effector gene expression and identifies Muller glia as critical mediators of foveal patterning. Phenome-wide analyses reveal foveal variants are pleiotropic with refractive, lenticular, and metabolic traits, connecting foveal development to anterior segment and systemic disease biology. These findings should inform mechanistic studies of macular disease.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

OmniTraffic: A Controllable Generation Pipeline and Benchmark for Spatio-Temporal Traffic Reasoning

Traffic scene understanding requires models to reason beyond object recognition, including lane topology, multi-view geometry, temporal evolution, and signal-phase semantics. However, existing traffic-oriented multimodal benchmarks largely emphasize passive visual recognition or isolated video understanding, offering limited support for evaluating structure-aware traffic reasoning under controlled conditions. We introduce OmniTraffic, a controllable generation pipeline and benchmark for spatio-temporal traffic reasoning. Built around 12 real-world intersections reconstructed into editable 3D traffic environments and complemented by surveillance footage from two countries, OmniTraffic supports both controlled and natural-condition evaluation. It defines a three-level task hierarchy spanning scene perception, multi-view and temporal reasoning, and decision support. Using structured traffic metadata, OmniTraffic generates synchronized multi-view VQA samples covering vehicle states, lane functions, view–BEV correspondence, temporal dynamics, and signal-phase analysis, resulting in 8M VQA samples and a 3K human-verified test set. Evaluation of eleven frontier MLLMs reveals a large human–model gap, with the most pronounced failures in topology-grounded and spatio-temporal reasoning tasks. Fine-tuning a lightweight MLLM on simulated OmniTraffic data further improves performance on real-world traffic scenes, demonstrating the value of simulation-generated supervision for traffic-specific multimodal reasoning. Beyond a fixed dataset, OmniTraffic provides an extensible pipeline with configurable intersections, camera views, traffic demands, signal phases, visual conditions, and rare events.

18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

A quantitative coordinate system for developmental dynamics

Quantitative comparison of morphogenesis across individuals remains a fundamental challenge, as developing embryos vary in shape, orientation and developmental tempo. Moreover, real-time three-dimensional imaging generates large, heterogeneous four-dimensional datasets that are difficult to directly align. As a result, developmental variability is typically described qualitatively rather than measured. Here we introduce STERN, a quantitative framework that learns continuous spatiotemporal representations of morphogenesis directly from in vivo 4D imaging data. By embedding embryos into a shared spatiotemporal space, STERN defines a quantitative developmental coordinate system that enables direct comparison of developmental trajectories across individuals without requiring explicit registration or staging. Applied to mouse embryogenesis, STERN reveals that embryos follow conserved developmental trajectories while progressing at distinct temporal rates, providing a quantitative measure of developmental heterochrony. Extending this framework to zebrafish neural crest light-sheet timelapse imaging, we further show that developmental order is preserved across distinct imaging views even with altered anatomical coverage, supporting the generality of the learned representation across vertebrate imaging contexts. Finally, in developing mouse hearts, where morphogenesis proceeds through subtle and continuously evolving structural changes, STERN resolves fine-scale developmental dynamics at minute-scale temporal resolution that are difficult to localize reproducibly using human experts or general-purpose multimodal AI. Together, these results establish a shared quantitative coordinate system for morphogenesis, in which developmental trajectories become directly comparable across individuals and developmental variability becomes a measurable property.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

UBP2: Uncertainty-Balanced Preference Planning for Efficient Preference-based Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.19328v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Preference-based RL provides an approach to learning reward models from pairwise comparisons of behaviors, bypassing the need for explicit reward design. However, existing methods typically rely on passive data collection and suffer from poor sample efficiency, especially during the early stages of learning. We introduce a model-based approach that actively directs exploration by jointly reasoning over uncertainties in the reward, dynamics, and value functions. Our method, Uncertainty-Balanced Preference Planning (UBP2), uses ensembles of reward, dynamics, and value function models to evaluate candidate trajectories according to a unified score that combines expected reward, terminal value, and epistemic uncertainty. Planning under this objective yields an explicit tradeoff between exploitation and information acquisition without requiring ad hoc exploration heuristics. Under standard regularity assumptions, we establish sublinear regret guarantees for both finite-horizon and infinite-horizon settings. Empirically, experiments on the Meta-World benchmark show UBP2 achieves substantially higher sample efficiency than model-free preference-based methods and non-optimistic model-based baselines.

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

A Fully First-Order Layer for Differentiable Optimization

arXiv:2512.02494v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Differentiable optimization layers enable learning systems to make decisions by solving embedded optimization problems. However, computing gradients via implicit differentiation requires solving a linear system with Hessian terms, which is both compute- and memory-intensive. To address this challenge, we propose a novel algorithm that computes the gradient using only first-order information. The key insight is to rewrite the differentiable optimization as a bilevel optimization problem and leverage recent advances in bilevel methods. Specifically, we introduce an active-set Lagrangian hypergradient oracle that avoids Hessian evaluations and provides finite-time, non-asymptotic approximation guarantees. We show that an approximate hypergradient can be computed using only first-order information in $\tilde{O}(1)$ time, leading to an overall complexity of $\tilde{O}(\delta^{-1}\epsilon^{-3})$ for constrained bilevel optimization, which matches the best known rate for non-smooth non-convex optimization. Furthermore, we release an open-source Python library that can be easily adapted from existing solvers. The source code is available at https://github.com/guaguakai/FFOLayer.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

BrainDINO: A Brain MRI Foundation Model for Generalizable Clinical Representation Learning

Brain MRI underpins a wide range of neuroscientific and clinical applications, yet most learning-based methods remain task-specific and require substantial labeled data. Here we show that a single self-supervised representation can generalize across heterogeneous brain MRI endpoints. We trained BrainDINO, a self-distilled foundation model, on approximately 6.6 million unlabeled axial slices from 20 datasets encompassing broad variation in population, disease, and acquisition setting. Using a frozen encoder with lightweight task heads, BrainDINO supported transfer across tumor segmentation, neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental conditions classification, brain age estimation, post-stroke temporal prediction, molecular status prediction, MRI sequence classification, and survival modeling. Across tasks and supervision regimes, BrainDINO consistently equaled or exceeded natural-image and MRI-specific self-supervised baselines, with particularly strong advantages under label scarcity. Representation analyses further showed anatomically organized and pathology-sensitive feature structure in the absence of task-specific supervision. Our findings indicate that large-scale slice-wise self-supervised learning can yield a unified brain MRI representation that supports diverse neuroimaging tasks without volumetric pretraining or full-network fine-tuning, establishing a scalable foundation for robust and data-efficient brain imaging analysis. Code is available at https://github.com/mclwu22/BrainDINO

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Learning Credal Ensembles via Distributionally Robust Optimization

arXiv:2602.08470v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Credal predictors are models that are aware of epistemic uncertainty and produce a convex set of probabilistic predictions. They offer a principled way to quantify predictive epistemic uncertainty (EU) and have been shown to improve model robustness in various settings. However, most state-of-the-art methods mainly define EU as disagreement caused by random training initializations, which mostly reflects sensitivity to optimization randomness rather than uncertainty from deeper sources. To address this, we define EU as disagreement among models trained with varying relaxations of the i.i.d. assumption between training and test data. Based on this idea, we propose CreDRO, which learns an ensemble of plausible models through distributionally robust optimization. As a result, CreDRO captures EU not only from training randomness but also from meaningful disagreement due to potential distribution shifts between training and test data. Empirical results show that CreDRO consistently outperforms existing credal methods on tasks such as out-of-distribution detection across multiple benchmarks and selective classification in medical applications.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

HoloRec: Holistic Encoding and Interleaved Reasoning for Generative Recommendation

arXiv:2606.15331v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative recommendation models that formulate the task as sequence generation overcome the objective fragmentation problem of traditional cascade architectures, yet existing approaches still suffer from flat semantic representations lacking hierarchical structure for multi-step reasoning and an externally constructed chain-of-thought (CoT) that requires expensive annotations and remains disconnected from the generation objective. We propose HoloRec, an endogenous chain-of-thought recommendation mechanism that unifies representation, reasoning, and generation by constructing a hierarchical semantic encoding matrix via multi-granularity nested residual quantization optimized by a holistic reconstruction loss. HoloRec supports two inference modes: a non-thinking mode that uses lightweight multi-granularity supervised alignment for fast prediction, and a thinking mode that employs an interleaved reasoning scheme to generate CoT steps on the fly, directly embedding reasoning into the generation process without external data. Experiments on multiple public recommendation datasets demonstrate that HoloRec consistently outperforms baselines, with especially significant gains in sparse scenarios, and the thinking mode achieves better accuracy than the non-thinking mode with only modest inference overhead.

24.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

Tox21mer, A transformer foundation model for Tox21 high-throughput concentration-response curves data

The U.S. Tox21 collaboration has generated a large reference library of high-throughput concentration-response assays. Here we present Tox21mer, a 43.5-million-parameter transformer that encodes each Tox21 concentration-response curve together with assay metadata into a 768-dimensional representation. Tox21mer was pretrained on ~2.5 million curves from 102 assay protocols and 6,727 compounds using masked-response reconstruction as the primary objective, with low-weight auxiliary supervision on assay outcome and AC50. To evaluate the learned representation, we trained lightweight probes on frozen embeddings from concentration-response curves of held-out compounds. The representation supported a macro-F1 of 0.985 for three-class outcome prediction (agonist, antagonist, inactive), a binary F1 of 0.994 for active/inactive prediction, and an R2 of 0.87 for log10(AC50). The learned embeddings formed coherent groupings by curve-class category. A masked-only pretraining variant retained near-baseline probe performance, indicating that the representation is learned largely from the self-supervised objective rather than from auxiliary labels. Ablation analyses further showed that predictive performance depends mainly on curve-level response-value distributions conditioned on assay context, with limited reliance on detailed within-curve ordering. Tox21mer thus provides a reusable foundation representation for Tox21 concentration-response data that can support extrapolation to untested compounds through integration with chemical features or distillation into chemistry-only student models for large-scale external screening.

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

Graph Learning Should Move Beyond Restrictive Views of Spectral and Message-Passing GNNs

arXiv:2602.10031v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs) are commonly divided into message-passing neural networks (MPNNs) and spectral GNNs, reflecting two largely separate research traditions in machine learning and signal processing. While MPNNs have a precise definition, there is no widely accepted criterion for what makes a mapping a spectral GNN. Most existing work restricts spectral GNNs to layered architectures based on linear spectral filters. Under this restriction, we show that spectral and spatial GNNs have largely equivalent expressive power. To promote progress in the field, we propose a precise definition of spectral GNNs based on eigenbasis symmetries, in contrast to the definition of MPNNs via neighborhood permutation symmetries. We further argue that the two perspectives offer complementary strengths. MPNNs provide a natural language for discrete structure and expressivity analysis through tools from logic and graph isomorphism, while the spectral perspective offers principled tools for understanding smoothing, bottlenecks, stability, and community structure. Overall, we argue that progress in graph learning will be accelerated by clarifying the similarities and differences between these perspectives and by moving toward a unified theoretical framework.