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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

REPRODUCIBILITY OF 7T MRI MEASUREMENTS OF THE SUSCEPTIBILITY AND VOLUME OF HIPPOCAMPAL SUBFIELDS

PURPOSE: The UK7T travelling head dataset was used to characterise the reproducibility of 7T measurements of the susceptibility of the hippocampal subfields, focusing on the Cornu Ammonis (CA1, CA2 and CA3), dentate gyrus (DG), subiculum (SUB), tail of the hippocampus (TAIL) and entorhinal cortex (ERC). METHODS: Susceptibility maps were created from whole-brain 3D single-echo GRE data (TE=20 ms; 0.7 mm isotropic resolution) using Multi-Scale Dipole Inversion. Automatic Segmentation of Hippocampal Subfields (ASHS) was applied to high resolution T1- and T2-weighted images for segmentation. The mean magnetic susceptibility and volume of hippocampal subfields was evaluated in 50 data sets, comprising 5 repeat acquisitions on 10 healthy participants (age 32 + or -6 years; 3 female). RESULTS: Averaging over subjects, susceptibility values spanned an 18ppb range over the hippocampus (ranging from -13.3ppb in DG to 4.7ppb in ERC). Susceptibility values in the larger hippocampal subfields showed a consistent pattern of variation across subjects, being generally more positive in ERC and SUB than in CA1 and more positive in CA1 than in DG and TAIL. The standard deviation of subfield susceptibilities over subjects ranged from 8.2ppb in the TAIL to 1.7ppb in CA1, and the average standard deviation across repeated measurements, which ranges from 1.7 to 4 ppb, was less than half of the inter-participant standard deviation in all subfields. Susceptibility values in the smaller subfields (CA2 and CA3) were more variable, but ICC(2,k) values for all subfields were >0.82. CONCLUSION: The reported data characterises the variation and reproducibility of hippocampal subfield susceptibility measurements at 7T.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

SLUM-i: Semi-supervised Learning for Urban Mapping of Informal Settlements and Data Quality Benchmarking

Rapid urban expansion has fueled the growth of informal settlements in major cities of low- and middle-income countries, with Lahore and Karachi in Pakistan and Mumbai in India serving as prominent examples. However, large-scale mapping of these settlements is severely constrained not only by the scarcity of annotations but by inherent data quality challenges, specifically high spectral ambiguity between formal and informal structures and significant annotation noise. We address this by introducing a benchmark dataset for Lahore, constructed from scratch, along with companion datasets for Karachi and Mumbai, which were derived from verified administrative boundaries, totaling approximately 900 $km^2$ of urban area. This collection is supplemented by four cities from prior literature across Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, with comprehensive data quality assessments provided for each city. We also propose a semi-supervised segmentation framework designed to mitigate the class imbalance and distribution mismatch inherent in standard semi-supervised learning pipelines. Our method integrates a Class-Aware Adaptive Thresholding mechanism that dynamically adjusts confidence thresholds to prevent minority class suppression, and a DINOv2-based unlabeled pool filter that removes out-of-distribution tiles prior to training to reduce covariate shift. Extensive experiments across seven cities spanning three continents, repeated over five random seeds, demonstrate gains of up to +5.9 pp mIoU over state-of-the-art semi-supervised baselines, with both components being architecture-agnostic and adding no inference overhead.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

FoMoE: Breaking the Full-Replica Barrier with a Federation of MoEs

arXiv:2606.19025v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pre-training Large Language Models (LLMs) typically demands large-scale infrastructure with tightly coupled hardware accelerators. While increasing model and dataset scale remains the dominant driver of performance, Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) architectures have recently achieved state-of-the-art results by decoupling parameter count from computational cost. This efficiency enables training massive models on constrained compute budgets, yet it typically requires the high-speed interconnects of a single datacenter. To overcome these physical limits, recent approaches such as DiLoCo and Photon use low-communication data-parallel methods to enable scaling across geographically distributed, weakly connected data centers. However, these methods suffer from a fundamental inefficiency: they require full model replicas at every site, which imposes prohibitive memory constraints and communication overheads. In this work, we introduce FoMoE, a system that breaks the full-replica paradigm by partitioning expert layers across workers. We demonstrate that FoMoE: (I) reduces communication costs by up to 1.42x over efficient baselines and 45.44x over DDP via partial expert replication in the studied regimes; (II) achieves empirical throughput speedups of up to 1.4x through a novel skip-token mechanism; and (III) shows stable routing in the trained proxy regimes and projects the communication/memory benefits to 100B-scale configurations through system modelling.

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

Damage Adaptation in Seconds for Architected Materials

arXiv:2606.17394v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Adaptation to damages and in-situ physical repairs is essential for long-term robot autonomy, yet challenging outside of narrowly defined and well-anticipated bounds. In this work we proprioceptively adapt to catastrophic damage in soft-actuated systems in under one minute. Architected materials are well equipped for adaptation: actuator failure occurs gradually rather than acutely, and damage can be described in a low-dimensional, discrete coordinate space. Surprisingly, latent damage representations plus a simple yet robust ensemble method is sufficient for adapting to unseen damage in real-time. Moreover, we identify conditions under which exponential sample complexity collapses to linear sample complexity for learned representations of architected materials, a concrete advantage over rigid components or continuum soft mechanisms. We demonstrate LEAP, our method for adaptive proprioception, via a tracing task for a 6DoF soft wrist based on Handed Shearing Auxetic (HSA) actuators. Our algorithm is able to adapt to cuts, burns, and actuator repairs, enabling simulation-free real-time adaptation that is critical for realizing the promise of soft robots outside the lab. Videos and more information are available at https://murpheylab.github.io/leap.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Output Vector Editing for Memorization Mitigation in Large Language Models

Large language models memorize and reproduce sequences from their training data, creating privacy, copyright, and security risks. Existing neuron-level mitigation methods equate editing with zeroing out neuron activations, but the activation only controls whether a neuron engages; the output vector is what writes to the residual stream and, through superposition, encodes multiple features. We propose output vector editing, a constrained-optimization weight edit that locates a small set of MLP neurons responsible for a memorized continuation and minimally modifies their output vectors to introduce a distractor in vocabulary space, redirecting their residual-stream contributions while leaving activations unchanged. Evaluating on four models from 360M to 7B parameters (SmolLM-360M, OLMo-1B, OLMo-7B, Llama2-7B), we center on OLMo-7B (whose open weights and pretraining corpus enable systematic mining) and mine 6831 memorized sequences, achieving up to 87.9% suppression. The 2.7$\times$ gap over zero ablation on the same located neurons shows the suppression comes from the output-vector edit, not localization alone. Four edit modes span a spectrum from aggressive suppression to minimal redirection; in ensemble they cover 96.5% of memorized sequences, while our recommended single-mode configuration reaches 81.5% with no catastrophic locality failures. We further identify a mechanistic boundary at ${\sim}14%$ of sequences unreachable by MLP-only editing; while these failures are not attention-driven overall, ablating the top contributing attention heads recovers 60–64% of them, with stronger recovery on continuations that copy tokens from the prefix, positioning attention as a complementary fallback rather than a primary mechanism. Edit mode ordering and the success-locality trade-off transfer across all four models, with success rates scaling with model size rather than family.

06.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-19

Optimized R2 retroelement complexes for DNA insertion into plant genomes

Traditional approaches for DNA insertion into plant genomes using Agrobacterium tumefaciens result in random integration. Newer genetic engineering methods based on nucleases, prime editors, transposases and recombinases extend capabilities but remain constrained with low efficiencies, off-target integration or limited payload size. Here we adapt the avian Taeniopygia guttata R2 protein (R2Tg) for targeted DNA insertion into plant genomes by engineering R2Tg expression cassettes and RNA payloads carrying intron-disrupted reporters, with optimized ribosomal DNA homology arms and untranslated regions. In Arabidopsis thaliana protoplasts, Nicotiana benthamiana leaves and Solanum lycopersicum seedlings, our R2Tg editor system achieves targeted insertion of full-length payloads ranging from 2.2 kb to 5 kb. In Nicotiana benthamiana leaves, integration occurs, on average, at 1 copy per genome, which is 30 times more efficient than that achieved by Cas9 homology-directed repair. This work establishes an R2Tg ribonucleoprotein platform for targeted DNA insertion into plant genomes, using a multicopy genomic safe-harbor site to enable efficient addition of multikilobase genes. R2 retrotransposons are used to integrate DNA into plant and crop 25S ribosomal DNA sites.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Influcoder: Distilling Decoders' Gradient Influence Rankings into an Encoder for Data Attribution

With the growth of LLMs' (Large Language Models) capabilities, there has been an increasing push to curate high quality datasets by filtering samples in the training data. In general, Data Attribution (DA) methods aim to estimate how individual samples in a training dataset can precondition a model to generate certain outputs. As an example, one might be interested in which samples in the data could be the source of toxic behavior after training the LLM. Many methods quantify this conditioning through the paradigm of influence functions. While methods of this family are effective in its function, they lack the necessary processing speed and storage compactness to be practically implemented on large datasets. We propose a method, Influcoder, as a quick and cost-effective approach to influence-based Data Attribution at scale.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Detecting High-Potential SMEs with Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks

arXiv:2602.19591v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) constitute 99.9% of U.S. businesses and generate 44% of economic activity, yet systematically identifying high-potential SMEs remains an open challenge. We introduce SME-HGT, a Heterogeneous Graph Transformer framework that predicts which SBIR Phase I awardees will advance to Phase II funding using exclusively public data. We construct a heterogeneous graph with 32,268 company nodes, 124 research topic nodes, and 13 government agency nodes connected by approximately 99,000 edges across three semantic relation types. SME-HGT achieves an AUPRC of 0.621 0.003 on a temporally-split test set, outperforming an MLP baseline (0.590 0.002) and R-GCN (0.608 0.013) across five random seeds. At a screening depth of 100 companies, SME-HGT attains 89.6% precision with a 2.14 lift over random selection. Our temporal evaluation protocol prevents information leakage, and our reliance on public data ensures reproducibility. These results demonstrate that relational structure among firms, research topics, and funding agencies provides meaningful signal for SME potential assessment, with implications for policymakers and early-stage investors.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Trimodal Glioma Representation Alignment via Volumetric Contrastive Learning

Glioma grading and survival prediction require the integration of heterogeneous information collected at different spatial and biological scales. Histopathology describes tissue morphology, mRNA expression captures molecular activity, and magnetic resonance imaging provides a non-invasive view of tumor extent and radiological heterogeneity. Existing glioma prognosis models often combine only two of these sources, while their alignment objectives remain mostly pairwise. This paper introduces GLORIA, a novel trimodal framework for GLioma Omics - Radiology - hIstopathology Alignment. GLORIA processes whole-slide image regions, gene-expression profiles, and 3D MRI volumes through modality-specific encoders, projects them into a shared latent space, and aligns them with a Gramian contrastive loss that measures the volume spanned by the three modality embeddings. The aligned representations are fused through a cross-modal gating module and optimized jointly for three-class glioma grading and overall survival prediction. We evaluate GLORIA on a matched TCGA-GBM/LGG and BraTS21 cohort, comprising 132 patients with all three modalities. On the shared trimodal test set, GLORIA improves over the bimodal WSI-mRNA baseline in all the metrics considered.

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

ShapeBench: A Scalable Benchmark and Diagnostic Suite for Standardized Evaluation in Aerodynamic Shape Optimization

arXiv:2605.20763v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Rapid progress in aerodynamic shape optimization (ASO) has outpaced currently-available standardized evaluation frameworks. Fair comparison requires a unified benchmark spanning diverse shape classes, objective formulations, and matched-budget state-of-the-art baselines. We introduce ShapeBench, an open-source ASO benchmark with a unified API spanning 103 tasks across eight shape categories and multiple optimization regimes. Each ShapeBench task includes a validated surrogate for fast search; when feasible, a high-fidelity Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) pipeline for final verification is available, enabling systematic fidelity-gap analysis. ShapeBench provides a reproducible protocol with well-configured baselines to compare fairly using a consistent budget metric, allowing for comparison among both classical and LLM-driven methods, including general-purpose optimizers and a new domain-specialized evolutionary LLM baseline, ShapeEvolve. Results on ShapeBench demonstrate substantial variance in optimizer rankings across shape categories and problem formulations, with mean pairwise Spearman $\rho = 0.013$, so single-task conclusions do not reliably generalize across problem classes. The benchmark is also far from saturation; classical methods are rarely applicable across all shape categories and tasks, further highlighting the need for more general-purpose approaches.

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

Venice-H1: Failure-Aware Query Re-Ranking with Multi-Scale Grid Signatures for Referring Image Segmentation

Modern Referring Image Segmentation (RIS) systems generate multiple candidate masks per expression but rely on a simple heuristic–typically the argmax detection score–to select the final output. We identify query selection as a failure-case bottleneck: although heuristic selection succeeds on 82-93% of samples, the residual 7-18% of failures dominate the error budget, leaving a best-query selection gap of 3-11% mIoU. We introduce Venice-H1, a lightweight, backbone-decoupled post-hoc re-ranking module that encodes each candidate through multi-scale grid signatures–compact spatial descriptors pooled onto 4x4, 8x8, and 16x16 grids–and feeds them to a Transformer-based re-ranker with a Failure Gate (ROCAUC 0.78-0.82) that intervenes only when the default choice is likely suboptimal. Instantiated on DeRIS-L and DeRIS-B, Venice-H1 achieves delta_fail of +1.40 and +0.89 mIoU with strictly positive 95% CIs on all 16/16 (split, backbone) pairs and harmful-switch rates below 0.53%. Zero-shot transfer to medical referring segmentation (MS-CXR, M3D-RefSeg-2D) yields +1.16 and +0.51 mIoU without RIS-backbone fine-tuning. The module adds approximately 11.3M parameters and under 1 ms latency.

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

Scale-Invariant Neural Network Optimization: Norm Geometry and Heavy-Tailed Noise

arXiv:2605.18528v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A growing lesson from neural network optimization is that optimizer design should respect how the model is parametrized. The layerwise input-output structure of neural networks motivates scale-invariant optimizers, such as Muon and Scion, whose updates also support hyperparameter transfer. At the same time, stochastic gradient noise in deep learning is often far from sub-Gaussian and may exhibit heavy tails. These observations have shaped recent algorithmic principles for training neural networks, yet their joint theoretical consequences are underexplored. In particular, it remains unclear what dimension dependence is unavoidable for gradient-based methods given the problem class is defined by input-output norm and under heavy-tailed noise, and whether higher-order smoothness can accelerate training. We study these questions through nonconvex smooth stochastic optimization over $\mathbb R^{m\times n}$ equipped with general norms and under $p^\mathrm{th}$-moment heavy-tailed noise, where the goal is to achieve an $\epsilon$-stationary point in the dual norm. Our first contribution is a dimension-dependent lower bound: when $\frac{\max\{m,n\}}{(\min\{m,n\})^2}$ is large enough, any gradient-based method requires $\Omega(\min\{m, n\}\epsilon^{-\frac{3p-2}{p-1}})$ oracles for the problem class defined by the spectral norm, which is a common input-output norm. We prove that a scale-invariant Scion method with the spectral norm can achieve the matching upper bound of $O(\min\{m, n\}\epsilon^{-\frac{3p-2}{p-1}})$. To exploit higher-order smoothness, we propose a transported Scion method and improve the bound to $O(\min\{m, n\}\epsilon^{-\frac{5p-3}{2p-2}})$ when the Hessian is Lipschitz. Finally, we incorporate heuristics into our transported method and evaluate it across multiple architectures and model sizes, demonstrating its flexibility and compatibility with neural network training.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

An Automated, Pathologist-free Gleason Grade Stratifies Disease-free Interval Comparably to Expert Grading from a Single Out-of-distribution Slide

Automated Gleason grading now matches expert pathologists on the cohorts where systems are developed and tuned, but deployment-relevant gaps remain: whether an automated grade, applied without site-specific tuning or pathologist oversight, stratifies outcome comparably to expert grading on slides from unseen institutions and in cross-specimen applications. We tested this for disease-free interval (DFI), a curated recurrence endpoint. A production gland-level prostate diagnostic (PathTools Prostate v11.0) was applied frozen and uncalibrated to 298 diagnostic whole-slide images from 274 TCGA-PRAD radical-prostatectomy patients, a cohort outside its development distribution and needle-core-biopsy training data, contributed by 25 source sites under heterogeneous digitization; tissue was detected automatically with no expert region annotation. From the output we derived an ISUP grade group and continuous high-grade content, and evaluated each grade as a standalone predictor of DFI (24 events) by Harrell's c-index with 95% bootstrap confidence intervals, a paired between-method bootstrap, and Kaplan-Meier curves with the log-rank test. The automated grade reproduced the clinical grade group at quadratic-weighted kappa = 0.62 (95% CI 0.53-0.70; 48% exact, 86% within one group), within the expert inter-observer range. As the sole predictor it stratified recurrence (log-rank p = 0.022; c-index 0.69, 95% CI 0.58-0.79), and the continuous high-grade fraction was robustly prognostic (hazard ratio 1.37 per SD, p = 0.029; c-index 0.71, 0.61-0.81). Standalone discrimination was not statistically separable from the clinical grade (c-index 0.78, 0.69-0.86; paired {triangleup} c-index spanning zero), and in a joint model the automated grade added nothing beyond it, consistent with both measuring a shared morphological axis. From a single out-of-distribution slide with no pathologist oversight, the automated grade provides standalone recurrence stratification not statistically separable from whole-gland expert grading, demonstrating robust generalizability beyond training data; reported as a continuous high-grade fraction, it offers reproducible, expert-free, grade-equivalent risk stratification for harmonizing large archival or genomically-profiled cohorts.

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

AFFORDANCE20Q: Evaluating Affordance Reasoning from Physical Properties

arXiv:2606.14240v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Affordance reasoning, the inference of an object's action possibilities from its physical properties (e.g., shape and material), is fundamental to human physical understanding and increasingly critical for Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing affordance benchmarks largely expose explicit object identities in the evaluation setup, allowing models to rely on memorized object-affordance mappings rather than reasoning over physical properties. To address this gap, we introduce Affordance20Q, a novel affordance reasoning benchmark formulated as a 20-Questions game without exposing the object's identity. In each game, the model identifies a hidden object's affordance from a candidate set by asking yes/no questions about its physical properties. Affordance20Q comprises 1,009 games over 454 objects and 59 affordances, all manually filtered, refined, and annotated. We conduct comprehensive experiments with 15 state-of-the-art LLMs and find a substantial gap (~20 points) compared to human performance. A KL-based information-gain (IG) analysis further shows that models fail to ask discriminating questions as the game progresses. To close the gap, we develop KB-Anchored Rule Induction (KARI), a pipeline based on LLMs that generates affordance rules grounded in evidence from knowledge bases (KBs). KARI improves open-source LLMs by up to 15.2 points, while the limited coverage of KBs hinders further gains. We release all our code and data at https://github.com/1171-jpg/Affordance20Q.git

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

From Observation to Intervention: A Causal Audit of Expert Importance in Mixture-of-Experts Models

Interpretability methods routinely use population-level summary statistics over observed model behaviour to license claims about the effects of targeted interventions on specific computations; in Pearl's terms, they treat rung-1 associational evidence as if it supported rung-2 interventional conclusions, a move whose validity is rarely tested. We examine one concrete instance: the use of routing statistics in Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) pruning, where utilization rates, activation norms, and routing weight distributions are treated as predictors of which experts can be removed without functional cost. A token-level interventional audit across three high-redundancy MoE architectures (OLMoE-1B-7B-0924, Qwen1.5-MoE-A2.7B, DeepSeek-V2-Lite) finds no observational metric predicts causal expert importance in any model: across all 60 metric-layer combinations effect sizes stay below Cohen's $d = 0.23$, and no metric is reliably positive under our corrected, dual-test criterion. A per-token routing weight control, run with identical $n$, rules out insufficient power, recovering a signal whose CI excludes zero at OLMoE's final MoE layer ($d = +0.231$, 95\% CI $[+0.09, +0.37]$, $p = 0.0013$). Existing pruning methods succeed in this regime not by identifying dispensable experts but because early-layer redundancy renders most selection criteria interchangeable. Our results provide an explicit counterexample to the common inferential step from population-level observational summaries to token-level interventional claims about expert importance, and illustrate how interventional audits can calibrate the evidential standards for interpretability claims.

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

Doeblin Curves

arXiv:2606.19859v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent research on Doeblin coefficients has shed light on their usefulness as a multi-way generalization of the Dobrushin contraction coefficient for TV distance, in a separate vein from their classic role in the theory of Markov chain ergodicity. However, strong conditions, such as being bounded away from 0, are typically necessary for Doeblin coefficients to establish the existence of information contraction. Building on recently formulated concepts of nonlinear information contraction, we aim to propose a finer-grained Doeblin-based characterization of multi-way contraction behavior which yields non-vacuous contraction guarantees even for channels whose Doeblin coefficient is 0. To this end, we introduce the notion of a Doeblin curve – a nonlinear function which quantifies the contraction behavior of a Markov kernel on collections of input distributions at specific levels of divergence and power. Through the course of our analysis, we develop a new variational characterization of Doeblin coefficients, present several properties of Doeblin curves, define several versions of power-constrained Doeblin curves, and derive upper and lower bounds using our aforementioned variational characterization. We then utilize these results in diverse areas, including generalization bounds for noisy iterative optimization, error bounds for reliable computation with noisy circuits, and differential privacy guarantees for online iterative algorithms. In particular, we extend results in these areas to broader domains or group settings, leveraging Doeblin curves to reveal finer-grained contraction phenomena than Doeblin coefficients.

19.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

DyMoTree decodes early cell state transitions and drivers from single-cell transcriptomes using a tree-structured neural network

Inferring early cell fate from single-cell RNA-sequencing data is essential for identifying cellular origins and fate plasticity in development and disease. However, existing methods often fail to exploit tree-structured lineage trajectories, limiting the accuracy and interpretability of fate mapping. Here we present DyMoTree, a computational framework that models cell fate decisions as nonlinear mappings between progenitor and terminal cell states under explicit lineage constraints. By integrating lineage graphs with a tree-structured neural architecture, DyMoTree learns lineage-resolved cell-state transition maps from single-cell transcriptomes, enabling robust inference of early fate bias and identification of fate-specific progenitor substates and driver genes. Across simulations, lineage-tracing experiments, and in vivo systems, DyMoTree outperformed existing methods in resolving early fate biases. Applications to mouse embryogenesis, lung adenocarcinoma progression, and CAR-T immunotherapy revealed regulatory programs underlying developmental and disease-associated transitions. DyMoTree provides a general framework for modeling lineage-resolved cell-state dynamics underlying development and disease progression.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Towards Provably Fair Machine Learning: Bayesian Approaches For Consistent and Transparent Predictions

arXiv:2606.12615v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: ML classifiers deployed in high-stakes domains produce predictions whose quality varies systematically across subgroups. For granular subgroups defined by intersections of multiple features, predictions are often inconsistent with the observed data: the model's outputs contradict the evidence available for that subgroup. This problem is exacerbated by regularisation, which improves aggregate performance by collapsing small subgroups into larger groups, disproportionately affecting demographic minorities. We define two requirements for consistent prediction: determinism (identical individuals receive identical predictions) and statistical consistency (we cannot reject, at significance level alpha, the hypothesis that the predictions for a subgroup were drawn from the Bayesian optimal target distribution inferred for that subgroup). From these requirements we derive the Fair Bayesian classifier, which enforces both across every group and subgroup simultaneously and abstains whenever no consistent deterministic prediction is possible. On three benchmark datasets (Adult, COMPAS, and Bank Marketing), standard classifiers produce statistically inconsistent predictions for a substantial proportion of subgroups. Our classifier achieves zero consistency error by construction while exceeding baseline accuracy and multicalibration on every dataset tested. Statistical consistency provides a principled foundation for prediction quality with direct implications for algorithmic fairness. Minority demographics are disproportionately concentrated in small subgroups, precisely where frequentist inference is least reliable; addressing this inference problem is therefore a necessary step toward fair ML. By enforcing Bayesian consistency at the finest resolution the data supports, the our classifier demonstrates that exhaustive subgroup fairness with principled abstention is achievable in practice.

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

Mask-Proof: An LLM-based Automated Data Curation Pipeline on Mathematical Proofs

arXiv:2606.15258v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly capable of mathematical problem solving and can even assist with research-level proofs, yet we still lack a scalable and reproducible way to measure step-level reasoning in long proofs across diverse sources. This evaluation gap limits trustworthy AI assistance in proof-certified scientific progress. Existing evaluations often emphasize final answers or rely on costly expert grading, while end-to-end proof generation remains open-ended and hard to verify automatically. We introduce Mask-Proof, a pipeline that turns real proofs into automatically checkable masked-step tasks. It masks key formula steps, provides the necessary surrounding context, and evaluates model reconstructions with an LLM-based equivalence judge using repeated votes for stability. The resulting Mask-ProofBench contains 292 curated problems across diverse research areas. Experiments with 17 models show that reasoning-enhanced models outperform standard models by 12% to 27%. Our evaluator achieves 96.8% agreement with expert annotators, enabling faithful, reproducible, and comparable measurement of step-level mathematical reasoning. Benchmark, annotations, and code are available at https://github.com/weating/Mask-Proof.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Linear-Time Encodable and Decodable Quantum Error-Correcting Codes

arXiv:2603.04543v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent years have seen rapid development in the subject of quantum coding theory, with breakthroughs on many exciting classes of codes, including quantum LDPC codes, quantum locally testable codes, and quantum codes with interesting transversal gates. However, a natural class of quantum codes, which has been well-studied classically, has not yet been treated: those which can be quickly encoded and decoded. This problem concerns the channel capacity setting, where a noise channel sits between perfect encoding and unencoding/decoding operations; this is the setting that is relevant for communication between fault-tolerant quantum computers. In this work, we construct asymptotically good quantum codes that can be encoded and unencoded by quantum circuits of logarithmic depth and consisting of a linear total number of gates. The classical decoding algorithms also run in logarithmic depth and use $\mathcal{O}(n \log n)$ gates, or alternatively a linear number of gates but with higher depth. We further construct explicit and asymptotically good quantum codes whose encoding, unencoding and decoding all use a linear number of gates, and additionally whose encoding and unencoding may be run in logarithmic depth.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

VL-DINO: Leveraging CLIP Vision-Language Knowledge for Open-Vocabulary Object Detectio

Vision-language models like CLIP can provide rich semantic priors for open-vocabulary object detection. However, jointly integrating both textual and visual knowledge into detection architectures remains challenging. In this paper, we propose VL-DINO, an open-vocabulary detector that enhances DINO through more effective exploitation of CLIP's vision-language knowledge. Specifically, a Query-guided Positive Sample Construction (QPSC) module is first developed to construct additional high-quality positive samples, enabling the vanilla DINO framework to better accommodate mixed training across heterogeneous data sources while providing more vision-language alignment signals, thereby incorporating richer textual knowledge during training. A Visual Semantic Encoder (VSE) module is then introduced to distill CLIP visual knowledge into backbone-extracted features, producing fused features for subsequent encoder refinement. Based on the fused features, an Object-Region Semantic Alignment (ORSA) module extracts object-centric region features and aligns them with the corresponding textual embeddings, further incorporating textual cues. In the zero-shot setting, VL-DINO-T and VL-DINO-L achieve 36.3 and 38.1 AP on the LVIS benchmark, respectively, consistently outperforming prior advanced approaches. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and competitive performance of the proposed design.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

The relationship between serotonin transporter occupancy and extracellular serotonin concentration is hyperbolic, not linear: implications for safely tapering antidepressants

Background: Hyperbolic tapering is an increasingly recognized approach for discontinuing serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SRI) antidepressants that involves non-linear dose reductions with equal stepwise reductions in serotonin transporter (SERT) occupancy to mitigate withdrawal symptoms. Its theoretical basis is the hyperbolic relationship between SRI dose and SERT occupancy reported in radioligand imaging studies. Hyperbolic tapering implicitly assumes that changes in SERT occupancy approximate changes in biologic effect and withdrawal risk. Because SERT occupancy plateaus across the therapeutic dose range of SRIs, this framework predicts relatively small biologic effects and withdrawal risk within this range. However, SERT occupancy influences serotonergic activity only indirectly via its effects on extracellular serotonin concentrations, and the relationship between these two variables is poorly characterized. Methods: We developed a two-pathway clearance model derived from mass-action kinetics to evaluate the steady-state relationship between SERT occupancy and extracellular serotonin concentrations under chronic SRI treatment. Results: Our analysis indicates that serotonin concentrations increase hyperbolically as transporter occupancy increases, suggesting that biologically meaningful differences in serotonergic signaling persist across the therapeutic dose range of SRIs despite plateauing occupancy. Conclusions: Our model predicts a hyperbolic relationship between SERT occupancy and extracellular serotonin concentrations, suggesting that changes in occupancy may not map proportionally onto serotonergic effect. These findings provide a potential mechanistic explanation for dose-dependent clinical effects of SRIs despite plateauing transporter occupancy and generate testable hypotheses regarding antidepressant tapering strategies. Empirical validation is warranted.

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

Vernier: Probing Representational Misalignment Behind Lexical Gaps in Causal Reasoning

Authors:

Instruction-tuned language models can answer the same causal-reasoning question differently after its English variable names are replaced by type-preserving placeholders, although the structural causal model and the gold answer are unchanged. We ask whether this lexical gap reflects information loss in the placeholder view or a misaligned read-out from a representation that still carries answer-relevant content. Vernier uses a paired-view weight update as an instrument and then inspects the mechanism left after the gap closes. In the working regimes, the evidence favours representational misalignment. A variable-name probe becomes more accurate on the placeholder view, and activation patching on Qwen-7B, Qwen-14B, and Llama-3.1-8B shows that the decision-token representation can transfer answer identity between views. The update that realigns the views is counterfactual augmentation over original and placeholder prompts, while the answer-subspace KL mainly sharpens intermediate answer-belief agreement. Success is bounded by model family, scale, and task. CRASS transfer is reliable across Qwen scales and Llama, e-CARE remains weak, and preliminary non-causal rename tasks show a similar qualitative pattern.