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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Token-to-Token Alignment of Text Embeddings for Semantic Blending

In modern generative models, images are specified and controlled through text prompts. In practice, images are generated from sequences of tokens derived from these prompts. However, the space of token sequences lacks a consistent accessible structure: semantically similar images may correspond to sequences that differ in wording, ordering, and placement of concepts, while similar token sequences may encode very different semantics. This apparent lack of structure makes it difficult to perform smooth transitions in this space, hindering applications such as image blending and continuous control of edits. We argue that this limitation stems not from the absence of semantic structure, but from misalignment between representations. To address this misalignment, we introduce Token-to-Token alignment, a framework that establishes explicit semantic correspondence between tokens across prompts. Our approach transforms prompts into a structured representation in which semantically corresponding concepts are mapped to consistent positions across prompts, and then aligns their token embeddings based on semantic similarity. Concretely, the method consists of two stages: a structural alignment that rephrases prompts into a shared structured form, followed by an embedding-level alignment that matches token representations across prompts. With this alignment in place, simple linear interpolation becomes a meaningful operation, producing smooth and coherent semantic transitions and enabling applications such as blending and continuous editing. Our results show that text embedding spaces in text-to-image models implicitly encode a continuous semantic structure that becomes accessible once representations are properly aligned, suggesting that semantic control can be achieved by organizing existing representations rather than modifying the generative model.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Hardy-type self-testing and exposedness of tripartite GHZ correlations

arXiv:2512.16242v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Nonlocality can be witnessed either through Bell-inequality violations or through logical contradictions such as Hardy's paradox. In the bipartite two input two outcome scenario, these two routes have distinct geometric behavior: CHSH-maximal correlations are exposed points of the quantum set, whereas known Hardy-type self-testing correlations on the no-signaling boundary are non-exposed. Here we show that this bipartite intuition fails in the tripartite two input two outcome scenario. We study the tripartite instance of a multipartite Hardy-type paradox and prove that the correlation attaining the maximal Hardy success probability self-tests the Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger state and the associated measurements. Although this correlation lies on the no-signaling boundary, we show that it is an extremal and exposed point of the quantum correlation set. Moreover, it coincides with the correlation attaining the maximal violation of the Mermin inequality. Thus, in the tripartite GHZ scenario, the logical-paradox and Bell-inequality routes to nonlocality select the same exposed quantum boundary point. We also establish a robust version of the self-test, showing that small deviations from the ideal Hardy constraints imply quantitative closeness to the target state and measurements. Our results reveal a qualitative geometric difference between bipartite and tripartite Hardy-type nonlocality and suggest a broader investigation of exposedness for multipartite Hardy correlations in the multiparty setting.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

A Deep Generative Model for Resting-State EEG Synthesis and Transferable Representation Learning

arXiv:2503.02636v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Resting-state EEG provides a non-invasive view of spontaneous brain activity, but extracting meaningful patterns is often limited by scarce high-quality data and reliance on manually engineered features. Generative adversarial networks (GANs) can synthesize neural signals and learn transferable representations directly from raw data, a dual capability that remains underexplored in EEG research. Here, we introduce REST-GAN, a GAN-based framework for resting-state EEG that combines adversarial training with an auxiliary self-supervised reconstruction objective to support signal synthesis and unsupervised feature extraction. Although trained only on raw time-domain signals, without explicit frequency-domain or sensor-topographic supervision, the generated time series reproduced key temporal, spectral, and connectivity properties of real EEG. In band-power feature space, generated samples showed high precision and recall across eyes-open and eyes-closed conditions (EO: 0.91/0.67; EC: 0.87/0.65), while group-average spectral coherence matrices showed low mean absolute differences from real data across frequency bands (~0.01-0.03). The representations learned by the model's critic transferred to independent resting-state demographic classification tasks, outperforming models trained directly on raw EEG and showing competitive performance relative to a recent EEG foundation model, while requiring substantially less training data and computational resources. These findings highlight a computationally efficient, architecture-driven strategy in which generative models serve not only as EEG signal generators, but also as unsupervised feature extractors. This approach may support more data-efficient EEG analysis while reducing reliance on manual feature engineering. The implementation code for REST-GAN is available at: https://github.com/Yeganehfrh/REST-GAN.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Robustness of Similarity-based Positional Encoding Under Rotations: Theoretical Analysis and Experimental Validation

Positional encoding is a fundamental component of Transformer architectures, as it injects information about the spatial or sequential arrangement of inputs. Among recent alternatives to standard absolute and sinusoidal encodings, similarity-based positional encoding (simPE) has emerged as a flexible framework for representing positional structure through pairwise relations. simPE was originally designed for medical imaging applications, where geometric robustness is especially relevant: small rotations naturally arise during image acquisition, induced by imaging instruments, patient positioning, or slight acquisition misalignments. Despite its empirical promise, the theoretical behavior of simPE under geometric perturbations has not been fully characterized. In this paper, we study the robustness of simPE with respect to rotations, combining formal theoretical analysis with experimental validation. We first show that simPE is generally not rotation-invariant. We then prove that, under mild Lipschitz assumptions on the elementary components, simPE is stable under rotational perturbations and derive explicit perturbation bounds in Frobenius norm. We validate these findings experimentally on four controlled datasets–a synthetic Arrow dataset, a synthetic Shapes dataset (four geometric shape categories), a synthetic Digits dataset, and a benchmark image classification dataset (FashionMNIST)–in which training and validation images are kept in a fixed canonical orientation while test images are subjected to increasing rotation angles. Across all datasets, simPE consistently outperforms standard learned positional encoding in terms of accuracy, F1 score, precision, and recall under rotation, particularly in the small-to-moderate angle regime, corroborating the theoretical stability guarantees.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Factor Analysing Predictive Processing: No Evidence for a General Factor Across Tasks

Background & Hypothesis: Dysfunctional predictive processing (PP), specifically the aberrant weighting of priors, is a frequently-proposed mechanism for psychosis and psychosis-like phenomena (schizotypy). Evidence for this theory mostly originates from single-task studies, which assume that all tasks load onto a single latent construct of PP performance, but the underlying factor structure of PP tasks is unknown. PP deficits in psychosis may be better described by a two-factor, hierarchical model: weakened lower-level (perceptual) priors compensated by higher-level (cognitive) priors. Study Design: This study implements a multi-paradigm approach in healthy participants to investigate latent constructs underlying PP and their relationship to schizotypy. Participants (N = 73) completed 6 tasks measuring reliance on priors across language, memory, visual, and auditory domains. A factor analysis investigated whether performance across tasks is captured by a single or two-factor model. Study Results: Although a two-factor model best described performance, factors reflected within-task correlations rather than a PP hierarchy. Cross-task PP measures were poorly correlated, suggesting that individuals' weighting of priors was task-specific. A full model including all task outcomes (not factors) significantly predicted the severity of schizotypal aberrant beliefs but no other schizotypal measures. Conclusions: These results do not evidence a single factor underpinning PP performance. It is therefore inappropriate to use results from single tasks to propose a generalised PP deficit in psychosis. Variation was also not captured by a two-factor hierarchical model of priors. Further multi-paradigm research is required to evaluate alternative models or additional variables that describe aberrant PP in psychosis.

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

Probing Low Frame Rate Degradation in Neural Audio Codecs

arXiv:2606.16969v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low frame rates in neural audio codecs are attractive for autoregressive speech synthesis, where the generation cost scales linearly with the sequence length. Recent work has demonstrated that codecs can operate at 12.5 Hz and below, but the mechanisms underlying low frame rate degradation remain insufficiently understood. We investigate these mechanisms through a controlled frame rate ablation. We reproduce a quality cliff at 6.25 Hz reported in previous works and evaluate candidate explanations: phonemic collisions and codebook saturation, neither of which shows evidence of a fundamental barrier. The cliff is instead caused by suboptimal training configuration: fixed clip duration during training yields too few tokens at low frame rates, starving the decoder of inter-token context. Once corrected, WER degrades smoothly with phonemic load down to 3.1 Hz and 1.6 Hz, suggesting the inference-time efficiency gains of low frame rate codecs are more accessible than previously assumed.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

VeriPilot: An LLM-Powered Verilog Debugging Framework

arXiv:2606.23759v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Verilog debugging remains one of the most time-consuming stages in digital circuit design. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled automated debugging; however, most existing approaches rely solely on test outputs and compiler feedback in an end-to-end manner, limiting their effectiveness on complex bugs. A key challenge is that the root cause of an error may be far removed from its observable outputs, making it difficult for LLMs to trace long dependency chains in code. This challenge is further exacerbated in large codebases, where long context lengths hinder efficient reasoning. To address these limitations, we propose VeriPilot, an LLM-powered debugging framework that leverages golden reference models to enable fine-grained bug localization and repair. VeriPilot goes beyond output-level comparison by aligning internal variable semantics between the Verilog design and its corresponding golden model through LLM-based analysis. It then performs step-by-step signal tracing using Control-Data-Flow Graphs (CDFGs) derived from static analysis, identifying a minimal set of suspicious code regions along with their correct counterparts from the golden model. These structured insights are subsequently provided to the LLM to guide reasoning and automated code repair. Experimental results on the Comprehensive Verilog Design Problems (CVDP) benchmark from NVIDIA demonstrate that VeriPilot improves the repair success rate of GPT-4o from 54.3\% to 85.71\%, significantly enhancing both bug localization accuracy and repair effectiveness for complex Verilog designs. The source code and benchmark are publicly available at Github https://github.com/YihanWn/VeriPilot.git.

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Large Deviations for the Nonlinear Schrödinger Equation with Randomized Quasi-Periodic Initial Data in Higher Dimensions: Subcritical Case

arXiv:2604.17253v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the cubic weakly nonlinear Schrödinger equation with randomized spatially quasi-periodic initial data in higher dimensions. Under a polynomial decay assumption in Fourier space, we establish a Large Deviations Principle for rogue waves in the so-called subcritical time regime. The proof proceeds in two main steps. We first characterize the distribution of the linear solution and establish the corresponding linear large deviations principle. The lower bound is obtained via pointwise estimates, while the upper bound follows from a combination of truncation and probabilistic arguments. {The method used in this step appears to be new; compare with [GGKS23].} We then perform a detailed combinatorial analysis of the Picard iteration, deriving an effective bound for the Duhamel term and thereby establishing the nonlinear large deviations principle.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Metabolic quantum limit to the information capacity of magnetoencephalography

arXiv:2511.06401v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Magnetoencephalography measures the magnetic fields generated by neural currents using quantum sensors such as superconducting quantum interference devices and atomic magnetometers. Here we combine the energy resolution limit of magnetic sensing with the metabolic power available to neural currents to derive a technology-independent bound on the information capacity of MEG. The bound factorizes into geometry, metabolism, and Planck's constant, and gives an estimated maximum information rate of 2.2~Mbit/s for representative human-brain parameters. Further, we show that the externally measurable magnetic field has a finite angular bandwidth, with high multipole components being geometrically attenuated and falling below the quantum-limited noise floor. This yields an information-limited spatial scale of order $1~cm$ and renders the accessible measurement space effectively finite-dimensional. The energy resolution limit therefore defines an information-theoretic Nyquist scale for magnetoencephalography, beyond which denser spatial sampling provides redundant measurements rather than additional recoverable information. Since the energy resolution limit also makes the noise variance grow linearly with measurement bandwidth, temporal and spatial bandwidths compete, producing a fundamental spatio-temporal trade-off. These results show how quantum-limited measurements constrain the observable complexity and information content of noninvasive brain imaging, providing a quantitative link between fundamental physics and neuroscience.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Cost-Optimal LLM Routing with Limited User Feedback under User Satisfaction Guarantees

arXiv:2606.19376v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inference costs for large language model (LLM) applications are rapidly growing, driven by surging demand and rising infrastructure cost. Users expect high-quality responses, and in commercial settings this is formally codified in Service Level Agreements (SLAs), creating a fundamental tension between cost and quality. Recent progress on cost-aware LLM request routing has shown potential to resolve this tension, but existing approaches rely on complete feedback signals, offline training, extensive per-workload tuning, and most lack SLA guarantees or inference-time adaptivity. We introduce SLARouter, an online routing algorithm that learns a cost-optimal policy from the sparse, one-sided user feedback available in production systems. SLARouter provides theoretical guarantees for both cost optimality and strict SLA compliance. Experiments across a wide range of LLM benchmarks show that SLARouter satisfies SLA constraints without the need for per-benchmark tuning, reducing operating cost by up to 2.2x over existing baselines.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Uncertainty-Aware Longitudinal Forecasting of Alzheimer's Disease Progression Using Deep Learning

arXiv:2606.24604v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Longitudinal modelling of Alzheimer's disease progression is clinically useful only if it can describe not just the most likely next diagnosis, but how a patient may evolve over time and how reliable that forecast is. Most deep learning approaches reduce this problem to single-step classification, treating cognitively normal, mild cognitive impairment, and dementia as flat categories while providing limited insight into how uncertainty accumulates across future visits. We propose a probabilistic framework that combines ordinal diagnosis prediction, multi-horizon trajectory generation, and decomposed uncertainty estimation. A Temporal Fusion Transformer encoder is adapted with a CORAL ordinal output layer, asymmetric loss weighting, and converter oversampling to respect disease-stage ordering and improve sensitivity to MCI-to-dementia transitions. Conditioned on the learned patient-context representation, an autoregressive Mixture Density Network generates five-year probabilistic trajectories for diagnosis state, CDR Sum of Boxes, MMSE orientation, and hippocampal volume. On ADNI, the model outperforms linear, recurrent, and transformer baselines for next-visit diagnosis prediction, with the strongest gains on MCI-versus-dementia discrimination. Generated trajectories achieve near-nominal 90% credible interval coverage, widening uncertainty across the forecast horizon, and biomarker dynamics consistent with expected Alzheimer's disease progression. We further separate aleatoric from epistemic uncertainty using analytic mixture variance and a five-member bootstrap ensemble, which provides the strongest encoder diversity and output-level epistemic signal. Epistemic uncertainty is higher for rare progression archetypes, MCI and dementia patients, and under external evaluation on OASIS-3, where it increases alongside prediction error.

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

RE4: Transformation-aware Imitation of Object Interactions Using Manipulation Modes

arXiv:2606.24403v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Object interaction tasks have been a focus of advances in imitation learning. End-to-end methods, dominated by diffusion and flow-based variants have shown leaps in performance while sacrificing interpretability. Object-centric and pose-informed variants have had a role in learning from demonstration in manipulation tasks. In this paper, we revisit a few modern imitation learning benchmarks for object interactions, with the aim of composing a framework that repurposes principled theories of manipulation, preserving both performance and interpretability. For image observations, lightweight training is proposed for model-free pose estimation of the target object, using self-supervision over the demonstration data available for imitation learning. This information is then used to inform a manipulation mode-aware retrieval of a demonstration, a mode-aware transformation, a replan step that connects to the retrieval point while preserving mode constraints, and finally rolling out the transformed demonstration. These compose four key steps of the proposed RE4 framework, evaluated over state-based and image-based benchmarks in Push-T and Robomimic. An adversarial benchmark that evaluates sparse data regions of image-based Push-T showcases the robustness, further bolstered by indications from low-data regime experiments. The current work shows promise in using simple interpretable building blocks to learn manipulation skills.

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

A Survey on 3D Skeleton Based Person Re-Identification: Taxonomy, Advances, Challenges, and Interdisciplinary Prospects

Person re-identification via 3D skeletons is an important emerging research area that attracts increasing attention within the pattern recognition community. With distinctive advantages across various application scenarios, numerous 3D skeleton based person re-identification (SRID) methods with diverse skeleton modeling and learning paradigms have been proposed in recent years. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review and analysis of recent SRID advances. First of all, we define the SRID task and provide an overview of its origin and major advancements. Secondly, we formulate a systematic taxonomy that organizes existing methods into three categories centered on hand-crafted, sequence-based, and graph-based modeling. Then, we elaborate on the representative models along these three types with an illustration of foundational mechanisms. Meanwhile, we provide an overview of mainstream supervised, self-supervised, and unsupervised SRID learning paradigms and corresponding common methods. A thorough evaluation of state-of-the-art SRID methods is further conducted over various types of benchmarks and protocols to compare their effectiveness, efficiency, and key properties. Finally, we present the key challenges and prospects to advance future research, and highlight interdisciplinary applications of SRID with a case study.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

DrivingAgent: Design and Scheduling Agents for Autonomous Driving Systems

Many autonomous driving systems are increasingly incorporating foundation models to improve generalization and handle long-tail scenarios. However, this trend introduces two key challenges: (i) the manual and labor-intensive process of designing and integrating new models, and (ii) the lack of intelligent, dynamic scheduling mechanisms to meet strict real-time constraints. While Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents offer a promising avenue for automation, existing frameworks are ill-suited for autonomous driving. Specifically, they fail to distinguish between the fundamentally different requirements of system design and real-time scheduling, treat modules as opaque black boxes, and are not designed for continuous operation. To address these limitations, we propose DrivingAgent, a novel agent framework tailored to the dual challenges of autonomous driving system design and scheduling. In the design phase, DrivingAgent automates module development by interpreting system architecture, generating code, and validating modules via super-network training. In the scheduling phase, it employs a lightweight LLM trained with reinforcement learning to dynamically orchestrate system modules in real time, supported by a structured memory that integrates long-term storage with timestamped short-term context. Experimental results demonstrate that DrivingAgent achieves a superior speed–accuracy trade-off on both the nuScenes and Bench2Drive benchmarks.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Utility of genetic screening for the prediction of severe arrhythmic outcomes in mitral valve prolapse

Background: Cardiomyopathy and channelopathy (CC) gene variants have been linked to sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) or death (SCD) in small, selected pedigree or post-mortem studies of arrhythmic mitral valve prolapse (MVP). However, the utility of clinical whole exome sequencing (WES) panels as a risk stratification tool in unselected MVP samples is unknown. Objectives: The goal of the study was to test the utility of clinical WES panels with CC variant screening for arrhythmic risk stratification in MVP. Methods: We performed research based WES in 203 consecutive MVPs without other arrhythmic substrate. Variants were filtered for rare (

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Toward Entanglement Bootstrap for Conformal Field Theory in Any Dimension

arXiv:2606.12540v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Given a quantum critical wavefunction in any dimension, we propose a reconstructed Hamiltonian, analogous to the ones previously found for 1+1d CFT and for 2+1d bosonic liquid topologically-ordered states. We test numerically that, for known regularized approximate CFT groundstates (on the icosahedron and the fuzzy sphere), (1) they are close to the groundstate of their reconstructed Hamiltonian, and (2) the spectrum of their reconstructed Hamiltonian on the unit sphere has CFT properties (integer spacing of descendants) and matches known low-lying energies. We show that this provides an automated method to improve the finite-size effects in a fixed Hilbert space.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

ThinkDeception: A Progressive Reinforcement Learning Framework for Interpretable Multimodal Deception Detection

arXiv:2606.18988v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal deception detection is critical for identifying fraudulent intentions, yet existing approaches predominantly rely on end to end black–box paradigms. These methods suffer from a severe lack of interpretability failing to provide transparent reasoning trajectories and struggling to explicitly capture the subtle, cross modal inconsistencies inherent in deceptive behaviors. To transcend these limitations, we propose ThinkDeception, a novel and interpretable multimodal deception detection framework. As a pioneering effort, it introduces Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) into this domain, transforming deception detection from a traditional binary classification task into an explicit cognitive reasoning process. Facilitated by the first meticulously annotated step–by–step multimodal Chain of Thought (CoT) dataset, we develop a foundational model, ThinkDeception Base, empirically validating the critical role of modal inconsistency in decoding deception. Building upon this foundation, our core innovation lies in proposing Visual-Audio Consistency Group Relative Policy Optimization(VAC–GRPO) equipped with a progressive training strategy. Distinct from standard GRPO, we stratify the training data into four progressive difficulty tiers, guiding the model through a psychologically grounded easy–to–hard cognitive transition. By innovatively coupling this dynamic curriculum scheduler with a multi dimensional, process aware reward mechanism and a reflective learning paradigm, we significantly elevate the model's overall reasoning quality. Extensive experiments on mainstream benchmarks demonstrate that ThinkDeception establishes a new SOTA, significantly outperforming existing methods in both detection accuracy and rationale quality. Ultimately, this work successfully drives the field of deception detection toward interpretable, multimodal cognitive reasoning.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Reward Hacking in Language Model Agents: Revisiting AI Safety Gridworlds

arXiv:2606.15385v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reward hacking, where AI systems exploit misspecified objectives to achieve high reward without satisfying intended goals, remains a central challenge in AI safety. Yet most known instances have been discovered post hoc in frontier systems where controlled study is impractical. We adapt the AI Safety Gridworlds framework into a text-based evaluation suite that reformulates classic reinforcement learning safety tasks for language-based agents. Across frontier and mid-scale models, we find that specification gaming emerges zero-shot: models systematically achieve high observed reward while underperforming on hidden safety objectives, and even apparently safe behaviors can reflect misunderstanding rather than principled safety. Reinforcement learning does not correct these failures: direct reward optimization widens the gap between observed and hidden reward, as the model's initial competence causes it to lock into locally rewarding strategies before discovering safer alternatives. This pattern persists across model scales (1.5B–14B) and is not resolved by finer credit assignment, exploration prompts, or entropy regularization. Our results show that reward hacking arises naturally when optimizing proxy objectives with capable language model agents and resists standard mitigations, suggesting that proxy-reward failures in agentic settings may require approaches beyond standard exploration and credit-assignment fixes. To facilitate reproducibility, the code for this work is available at \href{https://github.com/asparius/verl-agent-safety}{our public repository}.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

ParkingTransformer: LLM-Enhanced End-to-End Trajectory Planning for Autonomous Parking

arXiv:2606.17082v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: End-to-end autonomous parking has emerged as a critical task within the realm of autonomous driving. However, existing methods suffer from black-box characteristics, lacking high-level semantic understanding and interpretability, which impedes the realization of seamless long-distance autonomous parking from the road to the target spot. To address these limitations, we propose ParkingTransformer, a novel framework that leverages multi-view perception and the scene understanding capability of Large Language Models (LLMs). By combining trajectory queries with LLMs implicit state features, our method interacts directly with historical information and raw sensor data to output planning trajectories, eliminating the need for dense Bird's-View (BEV) representations. To compensate for the inadequate spatial reasoning ability of LLMs, we introduce 3D positional encoding to explicitly inject spatial geometric awareness. Furthermore, a fixed-window streaming mechanism is designed for historical information processing, significantly improving long-term temporal processing efficiency and inference speed. Additionally, a coarse-to-fine decoding strategy is employed to progressively enhance trajectory precision. Extensive closed-loop experiments are conducted on the CARLA simulator and real-world vehicle platforms. The results demonstrate that our method achieves a driving score of 61.32 in CARLA simulator and an average success rate of 88.70% in real-world experiments, validating the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.

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

Dual-Uncertainty Guided Policy Learning for Multimodal Reasoning

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has advanced reasoning capabilities in multimodal large language models. However, existing methods typically treat visual inputs as deterministic, overlooking the perceptual ambiguity inherent to the visual modality. Consequently, they fail to distinguish whether a model's uncertainty stems from complex reasoning or ambiguous perception, preventing the targeted allocation of exploration or learning signals. To address this gap, we introduce DUPL, a dual-uncertainty guided policy learning approach for multimodal RLVR that quantifies and leverages both perceptual uncertainty (via symmetric KL divergence) and output uncertainty (via policy entropy) to guide policy updates. By establishing an uncertainty-driven feedback loop and employing a dynamic branch prioritization mechanism, DUPL recalibrates the policy advantage to focus learning on states with high perceptual or decisional ambiguity, enabling effective targeted exploration beyond passive data augmentation. Evaluated on diverse multimodal reasoning benchmarks spanning mathematical and general domains, DUPL achieves solid gains. It improves Qwen2.5-VL accuracy by up to $12.3%$ (3B) and $7.9%$ (7B), and Qwen3-VL-Instruct by up to $10.7%$ (4B) and $12.4%$ (8B), consistently outperforming GRPO, while seamlessly generalizing to alternative algorithms (DAPO, $+6.5%$ avg) and architectures (LLaVA-OneVision-1.5, $+4.7%$ avg). These results demonstrate that DUPL is an effective and generalizable approach for multimodal RLVR.

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

Scalable and Interpretable Representation Alignment with Ordinal Similarity

arXiv:2606.16379v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating representation similarity is fundamental to representation learning. However, existing metrics suffer from significant limitations: they lack interpretability due to shifting baselines, lack robustness to outliers, and are computationally intractable for large datasets, forcing reliance on heuristic approximations. To address this, we develop an ordinal-similarity framework, instantiated by the Triplet (TSI) and Quadruplet (QSI) Similarity Indices, which measure alignment by quantifying the consistency of ordinal relationships. We theoretically demonstrate this formulation is inherently interpretable, robust to outliers, and computationally efficient. Finally, we establish a formal equivalence between TSI and local neighborhood alignment, measured by Mutual Nearest Neighbors. Empirically, we validate these properties and show that ordinal similarity offers a scalable approach to measuring alignment, enabling practitioners to better understand and design representations.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Unveiling the Awareness of Private Health Insurance Coverage among Healthcare Professionals in Freetown, Sierra Leone: Insights Extracted from Their Perspectives.

Our study is an assessment of the knowledge, personal coverage, and related determinants of private health insurance as revealed by healthcare professionals in Freetown, the urban capital of Sierra Leone. This study stands as a precursor for Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs), like Sierra Leone, seeking to establish Universal Health Coverage (UHC) to provide healthcare access and coverage through publicly arranged risk pooling, designed to help protect against unmanageable medical costs. In parallel, such countries face significant challenges with achieving sustainable universal coverage due to limited public resources, inefficient allocation systems, uneasy reliance on out-of-pocket payments, and large struggling populations. Our research sheds particular light on how healthcare professionals view their own participation with private healthcare options. A cross-sectional, analytical study was conducted, openly recruiting individuals from various facilities in Freetown. Using the Yamane Formula, a sample size of 109 participants was calculated. STATA 14.0 was used for data analysis. Our findings revealed that 96 (88.9%) participants did not have private health insurance, while 12 (11.1%) did have private coverage. However, 105 (97.2%) reported other modes of health insurance, with only 3 (2.8%) uninsured. Notably, 97.2% expressed willingness to join a private health insurance scheme. Our study found no statistically significant associations between selected indicators (demographic or socioeconomic fac tors) and current insurance coverage among study participants. These results highlight a low prevalence and understanding of private health insurance among healthcare professionals in a representative urban center in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), while acknowledging high willingness to enroll. The lack of any significant determinants suggests other unexamined factors, such as cost, accessibility, or awareness, capable of influencing the adoption and implementation of a universal health program.

23.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Light-induced quantum friction of carbon nanotubes in water

Friction slows down moving objects at both macroscopic and microscopic scales1. At the electronic level, quantum friction describes direct transfer of momentum between a liquid and the electrons of a solid2. Owing to its microscopic nature, this phenomenon remains experimentally challenging to capture3. Here we show that near-infrared fluorescent single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) exhibit light-induced quantum friction in water. It is measured by observing an excitation-power-dependent linear decrease of around 50% in the diffusion constants of functionalized SWCNTs in aqueous solution. This effect disappears when excitons are localized, as in the case of SWCNTs with quantum defects. We further show that the chemical manipulation of exciton concentration by molecules that increase or decrease SWCNT fluorescence also modulates the diffusion constant by up to a factor of 2. Optical pump terahertz (THz) probe spectroscopy shows an instantaneous response (around 30 cm−1) that we assign to direct exciton–water coupling in the range of water Debye modes. It is followed by an increasing (>100 ps) response in the range of intermolecular translational modes of the hydrogen bond network of water (>100 cm−1), resembling heating. Classical molecular dynamics simulations further support a mechanism in which the fluctuating dipole moments of excitons create frictional forces. These findings establish light-induced quantum friction between excitons in SWCNTs and water and show that electronic excitations can be used to control nanoscale motion and fluid properties. Near-infrared fluorescent carbon nanotubes exhibit light-induced quantum friction in water, in which exciton interactions slow nanoscale motion and enable optical control of diffusion and fluid dynamics.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

MAD: Manifold Attracted Diffusion

arXiv:2509.24710v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Score-based diffusion models are a highly effective method for generating samples from a distribution of images. We consider scenarios where the training data comes from a noisy version of the target distribution, and present an efficiently implementable modification of the inference procedure to generate noiseless samples. Our approach is motivated by the manifold hypothesis, according to which meaningful data is concentrated around some low-dimensional manifold of a high-dimensional ambient space. The central idea is that noise manifests as low magnitude variation in off-manifold directions in contrast to the relevant variation of the desired distribution which is mostly confined to on-manifold directions. We introduce the notion of an extended score and show that, in a simplified setting, it can be used to reduce small variations to zero, while leaving large variations mostly unchanged. We describe how its approximation can be computed efficiently from an approximation to the standard score and demonstrate its efficacy on toy problems, synthetic data, and real data.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

APCyc: Property-Informed Design of Cyclic Peptides via Automated Cyclization

arXiv:2606.12991v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cyclic peptides represent a promising class of therapeutic compounds in modern drug discovery, often offering improved stability and binding affinity. However, the de novo design of cyclic peptides remains challenging because methods must identify pocket-adaptive cyclization patterns and linkage sites while simultaneously controlling drug-relevant properties. This challenge is particularly pronounced for recent generative models trained predominantly on linear peptide data, which may fail to capture cyclization-specific constraints. To address the limitation, we introduce APCyc, a target-aware de novo cyclic peptide generation framework that explicitly models cyclization and jointly optimizes multiple essential physicochemical properties. By using an expanded residue vocabulary and explicitly encoding cyclization-site and linkage-type information, APCyc learns cyclization-aware representations and leverages Bayesian posterior guidance to steer sampling toward cyclic peptides satisfying multiple property objectives. Experimental results demonstrate that our model learns target-dependent cyclization preferences, and enables effective and controllable multi-property optimization for cyclic peptide design. The source code of this paper is available at https://github.com/HKUSTGZ-ML4Health-Lab/APCyc.