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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Context-Aware Hierarchical Bayesian Modeling of IVF Laboratory Environmental Conditions

arXiv:2606.20459v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: IVF pregnancy rates are routinely modeled using patient-level variables, while high-resolution laboratory environmental data remain underutilized. We show that this is a missed opportunity. Rather than relying on raw sensor averages, we engineer 55 context-aware temporal features, including rolling thermal stability, simultaneous temperature-humidity adherence, peak stress duration, and post-stress recovery speed, that capture the dynamics of incubator microenvironments. On 61 weeks of data from an Asian IVF clinic, these features reduce cross-validated prediction error to 1.27%, compared to 3-5% for raw averages. We then train a hierarchical Bayesian Beta regression model that shares environmental effects across an Asian and a Northern European clinic via partial pooling, while preserving site-specific baselines. On held-out data from the Northern European clinic, the model achieves R2 = 0.86 and a 64% error reduction for the 35-39 age group over a naive baseline, demonstrating that structured environmental monitoring contains clinically meaningful, transferable signal.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Improving low-resource ASR using bilingual fine-tuning with language identification: a cross-linguistic evaluation

This study explores how bilingual fine-tuning affects automatic speech recognition (ASR) in low-resource languages. We evaluate this method across nine linguistically and geographically diverse language pairs, covering a range of language families and writing systems. To distinguish the two languages, during training, we pre-pend each input text with a language identification token. At inference, the model jointly predicts both the language and transcription from the speech input alone. As texts for which the language is incorrectly determined show low ASR performance, we also conduct a follow-up experiment in which the language identification token is provided both during training and inference. Our results show that bilingual fine-tuning can be beneficial when language identification accuracy is high, and that in cases where language identification performance is low, including the language identification token at inference helps to improve ASR performance.

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

JanusMesh: Fast and Zero-Shot 3D Visual Illusion Generation via Cross-Space Denoising

Creating 3D visual illusions, a single 3D mesh that reveals entirely different semantics from various viewing angles, is a fascinating but tough challenge. Existing optimization-based methods are slow and can produce oversaturated colors. In contrast, naive stitching approaches fail to produce geometrically coherent objects. This results in visible unnatural seams and semantic leaks. In this paper, we present a fast and training-free framework for generating text-driven 3D visual illusions. Our approach decouples the generation into two stages. First, we propose a cross-space dual-branch denoising process. This process dynamically decodes 3D latents into voxel space for CLIP-guided orientation alignment and Signed Distance Field (SDF) blending, which ensures seamless geometric fusion. Second, we introduce a view-conditioned texture synthesis module that projects and aggregates view-specific 2D diffusion priors onto the fused geometry. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method generates highly realistic, dual-semantic 3D illusions in just 3-5 minutes. It significantly outperforms existing methods in geometric integrity, semantic recognizability, and efficiency. Project page: https://siang1105.github.io/JanusMesh.github.io/

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

TivTok: Broadcasting Time-Invariant Tokens for Scalable Video Tokenization

Video tokenization is fundamental to scalable video generation, as the number of tokens directly determines the computational cost and the length of videos that can be modeled. Existing tokenizers mainly improve scalability by compressing videos into fewer tokens, but they often continue to represent persistent content, such as static backgrounds and consistent object appearances, repeatedly across frames and chunks. In this paper, we propose TivTok (Time-Invariant Tokenizer), a reuse-aware video tokenizer that makes persistent information reusable across time. TivTok represents a clip with Time-Invariant (TIV) tokens that encode information shared across frames and Time-Variant (TV) tokens that encode frame-specific residuals. To obtain this factorization, we introduce Scope-Induced Factorization (SIF), which assigns different attention scopes to the two token groups: TIV tokens attend to the full clip, whereas each TV token only accesses its corresponding frame together with the TIV tokens. In the decoder, Invariant Broadcasting (IB) reuses the same TIV tokens across frames and chunks for parallel reconstruction and long-video tokenization. Experiments show that TivTok achieves an rFVD of 12.65 on the standard $16{\times}256{\times}256$ benchmark and improves compression efficiency by 2.91$\times$ for 128-frame videos compared with the evaluated baselines, while using only 1.1\% of the tokens required by downsample-based tokenizers in our evaluation.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

ASSCG: Just-Right Gating over Chattering for Fast-Slow LLM Planning in Autonomous Driving

Large language models (LLMs) can improve autonomous driving planning but are costly to query online, and existing fast-slow planners often rely on hand-designed triggering rules that either over-call the slow system or call it at the wrong times. We formulate slow-system invocation as a resource-aware sequential decision problem and propose the Adaptive Slow-System Control Gate (ASSCG), which makes frame-level Query/Cache/Drop decisions to refresh, reuse, or suppress slow guidance. ASSCG uses an RWKV backbone for efficient long-horizon gating and is trained with supervised fine-tuning followed by GRPO-style compute-aware reinforcement fine-tuning. We apply ASSCG to two different fast-slow architectures: (i) AsyncDriver on nuPlan Hard20 closed-loop evaluation, where ASSCG improves score to 67.28 (+2.28) while reducing average end-to-end inference latency by 60%; and (ii) a RecogDrive-based dual system that we build by replacing its original VLM-2B module with a lightweight ViT-based fast planner and adding an LLM slow planner, evaluated on NAVSIM, where ASSCG achieves 91.4 PDMS (+0.6) and increases average speed by 25%. The project page, including video visualizations and additional results, is available at https://williamxuanyu.github.io/asscg/.

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

Measuring Curriculum Alignment across Topical Coverage, Competency, and Cognitive Depth: A Longitudinal Framework Applied to CS2013 and CS2023

arXiv:2606.19469v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Undergraduate computer science is governed by international curricular guidelines revised about once a decade, yet programs lack a reliable, reproducible way to measure how completely they cover the current guidelines and how that coverage shifts when the guidelines are restructured. We address this with a human-in-the-loop pipeline that measures a program's coverage of an external body of knowledge, applied longitudinally to one accredited BSc in Computer Science against Computer Science Curricula 2013 (CS2013) and 2023 (CS2023). The pipeline represents the program and each guideline as structured corpora, generates candidate course-to-knowledge-unit matches by semantic retrieval, and confirms them through human judgment under an explicit coverage definition. Of seven benchmarked retrievers, a reciprocal-rank-fusion ensemble was strongest, and a reputed long-context model underperformed a small sentence model, so retriever choice must be measured. Both maps were validated by an independent second rater (Cohen's kappa 0.64 for CS2023, 0.69 for CS2013). The program covers 49.7% of CS2023 and 50.9% of CS2013 knowledge units, near-constant across a decade. Extending the same retrieve-then-confirm design to competency articulation and cognitive depth shows that the program articulates the competency for ~88% of covered units under each guideline, yet delivers it at the recommended depth for 76% of present units under CS2023 against 95% under CS2013, a gap reflecting the newer guideline's raised expectations, not the program. The longitudinal comparison separates persistent structural gaps (parallel and distributed computing, foundations of programming languages, systems fundamentals), uncovered against both guidelines and ABET, from differences that reflect the standard's evolution. The instrument is reusable and available from the authors on request.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Monotonic Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks: A Theoretical and Empirical Study of Monotonicity as an Inductive Bias

arXiv:2606.17886v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Monotonicity has been a long-running architectural inductive bias for neural networks, motivated by tabular, scientific, and economic settings where outputs are known to respond monotonically to certain inputs. Existing approaches are MLP- or flow-based and lack per-edge functional transparency; the only Kolmogorov–Arnold Network (KAN) variant with monotonicity, MonoKAN, enforces the constraint only on a restricted parameter subset and requires a projection-style training procedure. We close this gap with MKAN, a KAN with hard monotonicity guaranteed for all parameter values via exponential reparameterization of B-spline coefficients, positive edge weights, and a monotone base activation. Training reduces to standard unconstrained gradient descent. Our headline theoretical contribution is a representation-cost theorem: any $C^K, K >0$ feature extractor inducing a ball-shaped semantic-neighborhood partition admits a monotone realization of the equivalent neighborhood structure at $N' = N^* + k \le 2N^*$, where $k$ is the number of non-monotone coordinates of the original. The bound is architecture-agnostic and gives a principled sizing rule for monotone encoders. Empirically, MKAN is competitive with state-of-the-art monotone NNs on the SMM/ICML-2024 benchmark while being the only method that combines hard unconstrained monotonicity with KAN's per-edge functional transparency; the $2N^*$ prediction is validated in a self-supervised feature-size sweep on four real datasets, and on a controlled monotone-generative dataset MKAN recovers ground-truth factors with substantially higher Spearman alignment than KAN, MLP, and linear baselines.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

SyncLoop: A Multimodal Dual-Loop Framework for Self-Improving Mathematical Reasoning

Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown impressive reasoning capabilities. However, further enhancing existing MLLMs necessitates high-quality vision-language datasets with carefully curated task complexities, which are both costly and challenging to scale. Although recent self-improving models that iteratively refine themselves offer a feasible solution, they still suffer from two core challenges: (i) most existing methods augment visual or textual data separately, resulting in discrepancies in data complexity (e.g., over-simplified diagrams paired with redundant textual descriptions); and (ii) the evolution of data and models is also separated, leading to scenarios where models are exposed to tasks with mismatched difficulty levels. To address these issues, we propose C2-Evo, an automatic, closed-loop self-improving framework that jointly evolves both training data and model capabilities. Specifically, given a base dataset and a base model, C2-Evo enhances them by a cross-modal data evolution loop and a data-model evolution loop. The former loop expands the base dataset by generating complex multimodal problems that combine structured textual sub-problems with iteratively specified geometric diagrams, while the latter loop adaptively selects the generated problems based on the performance of the base model, to conduct supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning alternately. Consequently, our method continuously refines its model and training data, and consistently obtains considerable performance gains across multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks. Our code, models, and datasets will be released.

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

OmniDirector: General Multi-Shot Camera Cloning without Cross-Paired Data

Cloning camera motion from reference videos is an important task in video generation, as videos provide intuitive and precise control. Existing methods either directly use parametric representations that fail to handle multi-shot generation or synthesize cross-paired data, which suffer from data scarcity, resulting in poor performance in complicated camera motion cloning. To address these issues, we introduce a general camera motion representation that encodes cameras as grid motion videos. This camera grid represents the camera parameters visually and supports the integration of diverse trajectories for multi-shot video generation. Building upon this, we propose OmniDirector, a unified framework trained on a million-scale camera grid-video pairs that coordinates characters, actions, and cameras to provide director-level control for multimodal diffusion transformers. Furthermore, we design a novel hierarchical prompt expansion agent that harmoniously integrates different control signals by systematically describing camera motion and visual content through understanding signal relationships. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance and outstanding controllability of our framework. Project page: https://ymlinfeng.github.io/OmniDirector.github.io/

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

A Plasmodium vivax controlled human infection and transmission model to evaluate interventions across the life cycle

Background Plasmodium vivax is an underappreciated cause of malaria disease burden. No reproducible and standardized full life-cycle controlled human malaria infection (CHMI) model to accelerate development of novel interventions is available. Methods This transmission-CHMI trial was conducted in Nijmegen, Netherlands. Healthy, malaria-naive adults were sequentially enrolled into three cohorts of four and inoculated with the asexual blood-stage isolate PvW1. Primary endpoint was proportion of oocyst-positive laboratory-reared Anopheles stephensi mosquitoes. The sequential design allowed for adaptations between cohorts. At parasitemia >10 parasites/microL or symptom onset, participants received oral gametocyte-sparing treatment (GST): mepacrine (Cohort 1 and 3; 100 mg at 0, 8 16 hours, then once daily for 3 days) or piperaquine (Cohort 3; 480 mg single-dose). Transmission was assessed by direct skin feeding (DSF) and membrane feeding assay (DMFA) with and without enrichment of gametocytes. End-of-study treatment was atovaquone-proguanil (1000/400 mg once daily for 3 days). The trial was registered: NL-OMON57011. Findings Participants were enrolled between September 17, 2024 and March 25, 2025, all (12/12) developed parasitemia and transmitted PvW1 to mosquitoes. No serious adverse events occurred. Most adverse reactions were related to malaria. Mepacrine and piperaquine reduced asexual parasitemia while preserving gametocytemia and transmission. Peak transmission occurred within 3 days after GST and depended on the parasite developmental cycle, with highest gametocyte-infectivity ~48 h post ring-stage. In Cohort 3, mosquito infection reached 100% in all transmission assays. Median peak oocyst counts were 24 (IQR: 14-31) for DSF, 17 (12-19) for DMFA, and 150 (116-199) for enriched DMFA. A two-fold increase in pre-GST maximal parasitemia was associated with 20 additional oocysts (95% CI 8,6-32) in enriched DMFA. Sporozoites were viable in primary human hepatocytes. Interpretation A PvW1 transmission-CHMI is reproducible and safe, enabling P. vivax sporozoite production, relapse models and evaluation of transmission-blocking interventions.

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

Towards Deep Learning Surrogate for the Forward Problem in Electrocardiology: A Scalable Alternative to Physics-Based Models

arXiv:2512.13765v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The forward problem in electrocardiology, computing body surface potentials from cardiac electrical activity, is traditionally solved using physics-based models such as the bidomain or monodomain equations. While accurate, these approaches are computationally expensive, limiting their use in real-time and large-scale clinical applications. We propose a proof-of-concept deep learning (DL) framework as an efficient surrogate for forward solvers. The model adopts a time-dependent, attention-based sequence-to-sequence architecture to predict electrocardiogram (ECG) signals from cardiac voltage propagation maps. A hybrid loss combining Huber loss with a spectral entropy term was introduced to preserve both temporal and frequency-domain fidelity. Using 2D tissue simulations incorporating healthy, fibrotic, and gap junction-remodelled conditions, the model achieved high accuracy (mean $R^2 = 0.99 \pm 0.01$). Ablation studies confirmed the contributions of convolutional encoders, time-aware attention, and spectral entropy loss. These findings highlight DL as a scalable, cost-effective alternative to physics-based solvers, with potential for clinical and digital twin applications.

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

Symmetry and Topology of Monitored Quantum Dynamics

arXiv:2412.06133v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The interplay between unitary dynamics and quantum measurements induces diverse phenomena in open quantum systems with no counterparts in closed quantum systems at equilibrium. Here, we generally classify Kraus operators and their effective non-Hermitian dynamical generators, thereby establishing the tenfold classification for symmetry and topology of monitored free fermions. Our classification elucidates the role of topology in measurement-induced phase transitions and identifies potential topological terms in the corresponding nonlinear sigma models. Furthermore, we establish the bulk-boundary correspondence in monitored quantum dynamics: nontrivial topology in spacetime manifests itself as topologically nontrivial steady states and gapless boundary states in Lyapunov spectra, such as Lyapunov zero modes and chiral edge modes, leading to the topologically protected slowdown of dynamical purification.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Scaling limit of additive functionals for reversible non-gradient exclusion process: critical cases

arXiv:2606.13442v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For the reversible speed-change exclusion process $(\eta_t)_{t \geq 0}$ in $\mathbb{Z}^d$, we study the scaling limit of additive functionals ${\Gamma_t(f) = \int_0^t f(\eta_s)\, \mathrm{d} s}$. Concerning the local centered function $f$, the previous work [Commun. Math. Phys. 104, 1-19, 1986] by Kipnis and Varadhan and [Comm. Pure Appl. Math., 66: 649-677, 2013] by Gon{ç}alves and Jara respectively covered the cases $d \geq 3$ and $d=1$. The present paper completes the missing part $d=2$, and also develops the theory for functions with higher degree. The novelty is a quantitative homogenization of the resolvent, which allows to overcome the obstacle of correlation function in non-gradient models.

14.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Benchmarking attention-based methods for vision transformers' interpretability in retinal fundus imaging

Deep learning models based on Vision Transformers (ViTs) have shown strong performance in retinal fundus imaging, but their interpretability remains poorly understood. In particular, attention-based attribution methods are widely used to explain ViT predictions, despite limited evaluation of their faithfulness and biological relevance in medical imaging. Here, we systematically benchmark four attention-based interpretability methods for RETFound, a retinal ViT-based foundation model, that we previously fine-tuned to predict 17 retinal vascular phenotypes from UK Biobank fundus images1. We compare raw attention, attention rollout, gradient-weighted attention rollout, and Chefer's hybrid relevance-based method using both qualitative visualisation and quantitative evaluation frameworks. To assess attribution faithfulness, we perform perturbation-based deletion and insertion experiments, quantifying changes in model predictions as highly attended image regions are progressively removed or restored. To evaluate biological specificity, we run structure-aware analyses combining attribution maps with vessel segmentation and artery-vein labels through the Relative ratio of Attention Intensity (RAI) metric. Across models, attribution maps differed substantially depending on the selected interpretability method, highlighting the need for rigorous quantitative evaluation. Among the evaluated approaches, gradient-weighted attention rollout consistently achieved the strongest perturbation performance and produced attribution maps most closely aligned with the anatomical definition of the predicted retinal traits. Furthermore, vessel-type specific models systematically concentrate attention on the corresponding vascular structures despite being trained using only a single scalar value per image as supervision. These findings demonstrate that attention-based attribution methods capture biologically meaningful vascular representations, while also revealing method-dependent variability in attribution behaviour. This work provides a quantitative framework for evaluating interpretability methods in medical imaging with annotated segmentation and contributes toward more transparent and biologically grounded medical AI systems.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

RoTRAG: Rule of Thumb Reasoning for Conversation Harm Detection with Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Detecting harmful content in multi turn dialogue requires reasoning over the full conversational context rather than isolated utterances. However, most existing methods rely mainly on models internal parametric knowledge, without explicit grounding in external normative principles. This often leads to inconsistent judgments in socially nuanced contexts, limited interpretability, and redundant reasoning across turns. To address this, we propose RoTRAG, a retrieval augmented framework that incorporates concise human written moral norms, called Rules of Thumb (RoTs), into LLM based harm assessment. For each turn, RoTRAG retrieves relevant RoTs from an external corpus and uses them as explicit normative evidence for turn level reasoning and final severity classification. To improve efficiency, we further introduce a lightweight binary routing classifier that decides whether a new turn requires retrieval grounded reasoning or can reuse existing context. Experiments on ProsocialDialog and Safety Reasoning Multi Turn Dialogue show that RoTRAG consistently improves both harm classification and severity estimation over competitive baselines, with an average relative gain of around 40% in F1 across benchmark datasets and an average relative reduction of 8.4% in distributional error, while reducing redundant computation without sacrificing performance.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Cost-Optimal Decision Diagrams for Stochastic Boolean Function Evaluation

arXiv:2606.24672v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In many decision-making scenarios, acquiring information incurs different costs. We consider the problem of constructing a deterministic evaluation strategy that minimizes the expected cost of evaluating a propositional formula under variable costs and a probability distribution over truth assignments. We present a branch-and-bound algorithm with variable-selection heuristics, pruning, and caching. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first practical exact algorithm for this level of generality. Experiments on random instances demonstrate scalability and quantify the efficiency-quality trade-off of a greedy beam-search variant. We additionally evaluate a structured heart-disease diagnosis instance. Finally, we prove that the problem is $\#P$-hard and contained in $\mathrm{PSPACE}$.

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

DF-ExpEnse: Diffusion Filtered Exploration for Sample Efficient Finetuning

arXiv:2606.19656v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A natural recipe for intelligent robotic decision-making is initializing from pretrained generative control policies, which have summarized offline experience, and adapting them to self-collected online experience. We present DF-ExpEnse, an exploration technique that improves the quality of online experience collection, thus increasing finetuning sample-efficiency. DF-ExpEnse leverages the multimodal modeling capabilities of the generative control policy to create an expressive and tractably evaluatable candidate set. It then utilizes an ensemble of critics to identify the action that best balances quality with high exploration interest. In fleet settings, DF-ExpEnse further enables cross-agent communication to facilitate collaborative exploration as a group. DF-ExpEnse can be seamlessly integrated with existing strategies that finetune pretrained generative control policies via reinforcement learning. We experimentally validate consistent sample-efficiency benefits through DF-ExpEnse across a variety of manipulation and locomotion tasks, compared to default finetuning and alternative action selection schemes. Project can be found at https://df-expense.github.io.

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

A Penalty Approach for Differentiation Through Black-Box Quadratic Programming Solvers

arXiv:2602.14154v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Differentiating through the solution of a quadratic program (QP) is a central problem in differentiable optimization. Most existing approaches differentiate through the Karush–Kuhn–Tucker (KKT) system, but their computational cost and numerical robustness can degrade at scale. To address these limitations, we propose dXPP, a penalty-based differentiation framework that decouples QP solving from differentiation. In the solving step (forward pass), dXPP is solver-agnostic and can leverage any black-box QP solver. In the differentiation step (backward pass), we map the solution to a smooth approximate penalty problem and implicitly differentiate through it, requiring only the solution of a much smaller linear system in the primal variables. This approach bypasses the difficulties inherent in explicit KKT differentiation and significantly improves computational efficiency and robustness. We evaluate dXPP on various tasks, including randomly generated QPs, large-scale sparse projection problems, and a real-world multi-period portfolio optimization task. Empirical results demonstrate that dXPP is competitive with KKT-based differentiation methods and achieves substantial speedups on large-scale problems. Our implementation is open source and available at https://github.com/mmmmmmlinghu/dXPP.

19.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-23

Multi-Scale Machine Learning for Antibody-Antigen Binding Affinity Prediction Using Deep Mutational Scanning and Structural Features

Authors:

Predicting how mutations alter antibody-antigen binding affinity is essential for antibody engineering and vaccine design, yet current methods generalize poorly to unseen complexes. We present a multi-scale machine learning framework integrating 93 descriptors across four modalities: physicochemical, structural, ESM-2 protein language model, and solvent-accessible surface area (SASA)/{Delta}{Delta}G_fold features. Under leave-one-complex-out deep mutational scanning (LOCO-DMS) cross-validation on AbAgym (36,541 mutations, 68 experiments, 13 pathogens), gradient boosting achieved MCC = 0.206; a confidence-stratified ensemble reached MCC = 0.374 (83.5% accuracy, 25.5% coverage). No single modality exceeds the majority baseline alone; only multi-scale fusion succeeds. Boltzmann ceiling analysis shows 45.9% of mutations are near-neutral (|{Delta}{Delta}G| < k_BT), bounding theoretical maximum MCC at 0.473; our method achieves 79.1% of this limit. Five deep learning architectures benchmarked under LOCO-DMS showed self-attention matching gradient boosting (MCC = 0.200). Cross-pathogen transfer failed systematically (mean 46.7%), confirming universal binding predictors remain an open challenge.

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

MARD: Mirror-Augmented Reasoning Distillation for Mechanism-Level Drug-Drug Interaction Prediction

Mechanism-level drug-drug interaction (DDI) prediction requires identifying which enzyme or pharmacodynamic axis is implicated, in which direction, and with which evidence – not merely whether two drugs interact. We introduce a reproducible mechanism-level DDI labelling and evaluation protocol with a structured 7-family/147-subtype taxonomy, leakage-safe cold-split protocols, and auditable reasoning metrics for evaluating pharmacological prediction beyond flat interaction classification. We propose a pipeline that produces a 7B reasoning MARD (Mirror-Augmented Reasoning Distillation), combining three training innovations: a single-token KL divergence on direction tag that ties the model's prediction, per-loss PRM-weighted DPO with programmatic hard negatives, and a leakage-safe mechanism-aware retrieval channel. Process-reward step labels are automatically verifiable against DrugBank-structured fields, requiring no human or LLM judges. On the April-2026 DrugBank release, our MARD-7B is the only system in a 32-system comparison whose accuracy survives drug-pair novelty, beating the best baseline by +13.9 pp and GPT-4o by +6.7 pp at ~1% of frontier API cost. Further analysis reveals an anti-memorisation signature where accuracy improves on rarely seen drugs, suggesting that gain comes from structured pharmacological reasoning rather than drug-frequency memorisation. We release corpus, DDI-PRM, retrieval index, and training code.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

FedUP: One-Shot Federated Unlearning via Centroid-Guided Plug-in Filters

arXiv:2606.24113v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated unlearning (FU) is critical for complying with legal mandates like the right to be forgotten in decentralized systems, yet current methods face a persistent dilemma between non-target knowledge loss and high request latency. To resolve these issues, we propose FedUP, a one-shot federated unlearning framework utilizing lightweight pluggable filters that act as a "knowledge funnel" to screen out target data while preserving original model performance. By freezing original model parameters and training filters at the server side using differentially private (DP)-protected class centroid samples, FedUP bypasses the need for multi-round client-server communication and complex retraining, reducing unlearning latency from minutes to mere seconds. Additionally, the framework's pluggable architecture ensures inherent reversibility, enabling the seamless restoration of forgotten knowledge by simply removing the filters. Extensive experiments on diverse image and text tasks demonstrate that FedUP effectively reduces non-target knowledge loss and achieves superior unlearning precision and efficiency across various scenarios. Code is available at: https://github.com/suows/FedUP-code.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

A Generalizable Light Transport 3D Embedding for Global Illumination

Global illumination (GI) is essential for realistic rendering but remains computationally expensive due to the complexity of simulating indirect light transport. Recent neural methods have mainly relied on per-scene optimization, sometimes extended to handle changes in camera or geometry. Efforts toward cross-scene generalization have largely stayed in 2D screen space, such as neural denoising or G-buffer based GI prediction, which often suffer from view inconsistency and limited spatial understanding. We propose a generalizable 3D light transport embedding that approximates global illumination directly from 3D scene configurations, without using rasterized or path-traced cues. Each scene is represented as a point cloud with geometric and material features. A scalable transformer models global point-to-point interactions to encode these features into neural primitives. At render time, each query point retrieves nearby primitives via nearest-neighbor search and aggregates their latent features through cross-attention to predict the desired rendering quantity. We demonstrate results on diffuse global illumination prediction across diverse indoor scenes with varying layouts, geometry, and materials. The embedding trained for irradiance estimation can be quickly adapted to new rendering tasks with limited fine-tuning. We also present preliminary results for spatial-directional radiance field estimation for glossy materials and show how the normalized field can accelerate unbiased path guiding. This approach highlights a path toward integrating learned priors into rendering pipelines without explicit ray-traced illumination cues.

23.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

A thalamus–brainstem attractor network drives history-biased decisions

Authors:

Natural environments often change gradually, making it adaptive to bias decisions on the basis of the recent past — a phenomenon known as serial dependence1–3. Large-scale recordings during behaviour have identified that serial dependence is a common motif for decision-making, with neural representations of past experiences found throughout the brain4–11. However, it remains unclear whether this bias arises from dedicated neural circuits with history-specific computations. Using whole-brain, cellular-resolution imaging in zebrafish performing memory-guided evasive manoeuvres12–14, we identified a hierarchical circuit that maintains past information and biases future choices. Discrete attractors in the dorsal thalamus encoded the position of the most recent obstacle, maintaining a categorical memory via persistent activity lasting 10–20 s. Optogenetic manipulation of the dorsal thalamus abolished or imposed serial bias. A downstream hindbrain integrator received input from the thalamus and combined it with current sensory cues to produce graded responses reflecting multi-trial history. Leveraging a comprehensive brain atlas in zebrafish15, we constructed a whole-brain computational model that recapitulated behaviour and also predicted a key role for heterogeneous inhibitory subtypes in enabling flexible state transitions. This attractor–integrator architecture reveals a hierarchical and modular computation that unifies robust memory retention with flexible sensory integration, providing a general principle for history-biased decisions. Whole-brain, cellular-resolution imaging reveals a hierarchical thalamus–brainstem attractor network that encodes recent history and shapes behavioural bias in zebrafish.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Information Is Not Physical: Possibility Spaces, Erasure, and the Structure of Unrealized Alternatives

arXiv:2606.15120v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The slogan ``information is physical,'' introduced by Rolf Landauer and developed through quantum information theory and black-hole thermodynamics, has achieved near-axiomatic status in modern physics. Yet the ontological status of information remains surprisingly underexamined: most discussions either reduce information to a form of energy or treat it as a purely mathematical object. This paper proposes a third position. I argue that information is neither a physical substance nor a free-floating abstraction, but rather the structure of physically realizable alternatives – a counterfactual structure that a physical system instantiates in virtue of the possibility space available to it. Building on Shannon's combinatorial definition, the Landauer principle, the no-cloning theorem, and the black-hole information paradox, I show that the informational content of any physical event is constituted by the set of outcomes that could have occurred but did not. This counterfactual reading dissolves several persistent confusions: it explains why erasing information dissipates heat without making information ``material,'' why quantum superposition is informationally richer than any classical mixture, and why information loss in black holes is physically significant beyond mere bookkeeping. The proposal sits within a structural-realist framework but departs from standard structural realism by locating the relevant structure in modal, not merely actual, relations. I conclude by sketching implications for the foundations of quantum mechanics, quantum gravity, and scientific ontology more broadly.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

S$^2$COPE: Self-Supervised Concept Discovery via Preference Learning

Current representation learning paradigms force a fundamental compromise: self-supervised methods scale to massive datasets but yield opaque features, whereas interpretable models remain bottlenecked by the need for dense human annotation. We introduce Self-Supervised Concept discOvery via Preference lEarning (\model), a label-free framework that resolves this dilemma. Instead of treating Vision-Large-Language Models (VLLMs) as static feature extractors, \model leverages them as active participants in a self-supervised preference optimization loop. By autonomously hypothesizing, validating, and reinforcing candidate visual attributes directly from raw imagery, our framework discovers novel, structured concepts without a single label. Extensive experiments across natural, medical, and physics domains demonstrate that \model successfully extracts domain-specific concepts where standard VLLMs often fail to generate. By amortizing concept discovery directly into the VLLM backbone through our self-supervised preference objective – rather than relying on static generation and disjoint filtering – we achieve up to a 24-point absolute improvement in downstream top-1 classification accuracy on unseen data. Our work suggest that interpretability can emerge through a model's autonomous interaction with incidental visual structures, without any human supervision.