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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

SPICE-Q and Large-Scale Quantum Chip Production

arXiv:2606.17907v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose SPICE-Q, a SPICE-inspired design-technology co-optimization framework for superconducting quantum processors. Rather than replacing tools such as HFSS, Qiskit Metal, pyEPR, SQcircuit, SQuADDS, scqubits, or QuTiP, SPICE-Q aims to connect them through a unified, traceable data chain spanning process rules, layout, electromagnetic simulation, energy-participation-ratio and circuit quantization, Hamiltonian extraction, noise analysis, cryogenic test, and manufacturing feedback. The central mapping is from process and PDK constraints to layout geometry, electromagnetic modes, equivalent circuit parameters, effective Hamiltonians, and finally metrics such as frequency, coupling, anharmonicity, decoherence, readout performance, and yield. This flow must capture Josephson-junction variability, transmon frequency allocation, resonator and Purcell constraints, coupler crosstalk, microwave routing, 3D interconnects, material/interface loss, package modes, and wafer-scale process statistics. By introducing standardized model interfaces, statistical parameter models, model cards, version governance, and closed-loop calibration from cryogenic and fabrication data, SPICE-Q frames superconducting quantum-chip design as an engineering workflow rather than a collection of isolated simulations. We argue that scalable and fault-tolerant quantum processors will require such a continuous model chain from device physics and electromagnetic fields to quantum dynamics, noise, manufacturability, and system-level yield.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Multimodal Speaker Identification in Classroom Environments

Automated analysis of K-12 classroom dynamics faces challenges due to background noise and variable child speech, often confounding acoustic-only models. This study evaluates a multimodal speaker identification framework anchoring acoustic embeddings with LLM-derived semantic context. Using a subset of the EDSI dataset (8 math classrooms, N = 2,801 utterances), we found an acoustic baseline (ECAPA-TDNN) achieved only 39.0% accuracy. By integrating transcript-based "contextual anchoring" into a gradient boosting classifier, our multimodal approach raised student identification to 50.3%. Performance also improved for utterances over 5 seconds, reaching 76.9% accuracy (vs. 64.9% baseline) with a 90.9% Top-3 accuracy. Additionally, the model distinguished teacher vs. student roles with 99.3% accuracy. This approach advances the feasibility of automated feedback systems capable of considering individual student participation, a crucial step for supporting equitable instruction at scale.

03.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-23

Automated Segmentation of Prostatic Gold Fiducial Markers for MR-Only Radiotherapy Planning Using Multi-Modal Consensus Deep Learning

Purpose: To develop and evaluate a multi-model consensus deep learning approach for automated gold fiducial marker (FM) segmentation in T1-weighted prostate MRI. Materials and Methods: In this retrospective study, T1-weighted MRI and CT-derived reference standard segmentations were collected from 127 prostate cancer patients (all male; mean age, 70 years +/- 7 [standard deviation]; age range, 50-88 years; collected between October 2020 and January 2026) who each had three implanted gold FMs. A 3D U-Net was trained on 93 subjects using four random seeds to produce an ensemble. At inference, marker-class probability maps were averaged across models and the top three connected components selected. Performance was evaluated on 34 temporally held-out subjects (9 tuning, 25 test) using marker-level sensitivity and precision with exact (Clopper-Pearson) 95% confidence intervals (CIs). A model count ablation study was performed. The pipeline was deployed for on-scanner processing on Siemens MRI systems via the OpenRecon framework and as a browser-based application using WebAssembly, executing entirely client-side. Results: The four-model consensus achieved 96% (70 of 73) sensitivity and 95% (70 of 74) precision on 25 test subjects, with 29 of 34 (85%) subjects achieving perfect marker detection. Single models had a mean sensitivity of 84% (SD, 9%), improving to 96% with four-model consensus (SD,

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Co-occurring associated retained concepts in Diffusion Unlearning

Unlearning has emerged as a key technique to mitigate harmful content generation in diffusion models. However, existing methods often remove not only the target concept, but also benign co-occurring concepts. As illustrated in Fig.1, unlearning nudity can unintentionally suppress the concept of person, preventing a model from generating images with person. We define these undesirably suppressed co-occurring concepts that must be preserved CARE (Co-occurring Associated REtained concepts). Then, we introduce the CARE score, a general metric that directly quantifies their preservation across unlearning tasks. With this foundation, we propose ReCARE (Robust erasure for CARE), a framework that explicitly safeguards CARE while erasing only the target concept. ReCARE automatically constructs the CARE-set, a curated vocabulary of benign co-occurring tokens extracted from target images, and leverages this vocabulary during training for stable unlearning. Extensive experiments across various target concepts (Nudity, Van Gogh style, and Tench object) demonstrate that ReCARE achieves overall state-of-the-art performance in balancing robust concept erasure, overall utility, and CARE preservation.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

A Brain-Aging Transcriptomic Signature Reclassifies WHO Glioma Grade and Predicts Survival Independently of IDH Status: A Multi-Cohort Study

Background Despite WHO grade and IDH status, significant survival differences remain in diffuse gliomas. We hypothesized that a brain-aging transcriptomic signature, reflecting neuroinflammation, myeloid infiltration, and synaptic loss, would independently predict survival and allow for molecular reclassification. Methods A neurodegeneration score was derived via PCA of brain MRI volumes from 1,057 OASIS-3 subjects and projected onto 888 TCGA-LGG/GBM (discovery) and 693 CGGA gliomas (validation). A 14-gene signature of glial/myeloid (GFAP, AQP4, TYROBP, TREM2, C1QA, CD68, ITGAM) and neuronal (SYP, DLG4, GRIN1, GRIA1, SNAP25, SYN1, RBFOX3) genes were computed. Elastic-net Cox regression identified a 3-gene panel (C1QA, CD68, GRIA1). Kaplan-Meier, multivariate Cox, decision curve, and single-cell RNA-seq analyses were performed. Results High brain-aging scores predicted poorer overall survival (p < 0.0001) and remained an independent prognostic factor after adjusting for WHO grade and IDH status (z = 4.72, p < 0.001); chronological age was non-significant (p = 0.231). In IDH-mutant gliomas, significance was confirmed in both cohorts (TCGA p = 0.027; CGGA p < 0.0001). Bidirectional reclassification showed high-risk Grade 2 tumors with Grade 3-like survival (p = 0.00089), and indolent Grade 3 tumors resembling Grade 2 by Ki-67. Single-cell RNA-seq confirmed macrophage localization of signature genes; DCA demonstrated net benefit over grade alone at 5-30% probability thresholds. Conclusions A brain-aging transcriptomic signature independently predicts glioma survival beyond WHO grade and IDH status, validated in an independent Chinese cohort, with clinical utility for identifying high-risk Grade 2 and sparing over-treatment of indolent Grade 3 tumors.

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

LLM Doesn't Know What It Doesn't Know: Detecting Epistemic Blind Spots via Cross-Model Attribution Divergence on Clinical Tabular Data

arXiv:2606.19509v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to structured clinical data, yet whether they can recognize the limits of their own knowledge on such tasks remains unexplored. We study this question through the lens of cross-model attribution divergence with the goal of reducing epistemic uncertainty for structured tasks, comparing Qwen 2.5 7B and XGBoost on a prediction task via attribution divergence analysis. We report four findings. First, LLM verbalized confidence is epistemically vacuous, it outputs a near-constant (0.856-0.937) regardless of whether accuracy is 49% or 75.3%, tracking prompt format rather than prediction quality. Second, the LLM exhibits an inverse difficulty effect: accuracy drops to 64.8% when XGBoost is 99% correct, but matches XGBoost (73.8% vs. 73.1%) when it is moderately uncertain. Third, few-shot examples and SHAP-derived feature evidence are orthogonal, super-additive interventions: they reduce the Attribution Disagreement Score (ADS) from 1.54 to 0.38 and improve accuracy from 49% to 75.3% without training. Fourth, a cross-model calibrator that determined LLM reliability using attribution divergence signals reduces expected calibration error from 0.254 to 0.080, replacing uninformative verbalized confidence with patient-specific reliability estimates, without accessing model internals or requiring repeated inference. We frame these findings as a cold start problem for LLMs on structured data and outline a path toward genuine epistemic self-awareness.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Making Foresight Actionable: Repurposing Representation Alignment in World Action Models

World Action Models (WAMs) offer a promising route for robot manipulation by using video generation models to model future scene evolution before producing control actions. However, our empirical observations reveal a phenomenon: generating plausible visual futures does not always guarantee the extraction of accurate actions. To diagnose this failure, we conduct action-head attention analysis and causal interventions. We find that the action decoder fails to focus on task-relevant interaction regions and remains sensitive to perturbations in task-irrelevant areas. This reveals a representation mismatch: hidden states optimized for visual reconstruction are not inherently organized in a form useful for low-level action control. In this paper, we propose AGRA, an Action-Grounded Representation Alignment objective that regularizes the world-action interface by aligning intermediate video diffusion features with spatially coherent semantic representations from a foundation visual encoder. We evaluate AGRA on real-world manipulation tasks. Experiments show that AGRA makes world model representations more action-grounded: by focusing the action decoder on the correct interaction regions, it improves object localization accuracy and affordance understanding, and makes the policy more robust to perturbations in task-irrelevant regions. As a result, AGRA consistently improves both in-distribution performance and out-of-distribution generalization over the baseline world action model.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

When Does Language Matter? Multilingual Instructions Reveal Step-wise Language Sensitivity in Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong performance in language-conditioned robotic manipulation, yet their robustness to linguistic variation remains poorly understood. In this work, we present the first systematic multilingual evaluation of VLA models by translating the LIBERO benchmark into ten languages, revealing severe performance degradation under non-English instructions, with success rates dropping by 30-50%. Through fine-grained analysis of task executions, we find that language influence is highly non-uniform across steps: certain steps exhibit strong language dependence and dominate overall task failure, while others are largely language-agnostic. Based on this insight, we propose a step-wise inference-time intervention that aligns representations according to step language sensitivity, substantially improving performance under linguistic variation. Our results indicate that language robustness in VLA models is fundamentally a step-wise control problem, highlighting the importance of temporally structured analysis for reliable embodied agents.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Semantic Grading of Written Answers in Low-Resource Language Bangla Using a Fine-Tuned Lightweight Language Model

Bangla is among the world's most widely spoken languages, yet it remains underserved in educational NLP research. In many remote and rural regions, access to qualified subject teachers is limited, and written answers are consequently graded largely by hand, restricting timely and consistent feedback. Automatic assessment is challenging because semantically correct responses can vary substantially in surface form. We present a bilingual (Bangla-English) evaluation system designed for low-resource educational settings that prioritizes semantic correctness over lexical overlap. Our approach fine-tunes a lightweight language model to grade each response using the question, reference answer, and student answer, producing a numeric score and concise, context-grounded feedback suitable for classroom deployment. We also construct a synthetic bilingual dataset to enable controlled training and evaluation. Across proprietary and open-source LLMs evaluated under a unified protocol, our QLoRA-tuned Qwen3-8B confirms consistent improvement by producing the most leakage-resistant feedback (RoRa = 0.819) in synthetic evaluation and the strongest agreement with human scores (rho = 0.936, MAE = 0.725) in a dedicated human study.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

DeMix: Debugging Training Data with Mixed Data Error Types by Investigating Influence Vectors

arXiv:2606.11616v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-quality training data is essential for the success of machine learning models. However, real-world datasets often contain mixed types of errors arising from systematic flaws in data preparation pipelines, including label errors, feature errors, and spurious correlations. Effective debugging of training data requires both detecting erroneous samples and identifying their specific error types to enable targeted repair, yet existing data cleaning and attribution methods fail to adequately address this dual requirement. In this paper, we propose DeMix, a novel framework that simultaneously diagnoses erroneous samples and their error types. Our key insight is that different error types produce distinct patterns on model behavior. DeMix captures such error-specific patterns by influence vectors that characterize how each training sample affects model predictions across all validation samples. We formulate training data debugging as a multi-label classification problem where a classifier is developed to predict error types directly from influence vectors. We further introduce an intervention-based learning strategy that guides the classifier to capture invariant rationales specific to each error type, ensuring the learned classifier generalizes effectively. Empirical evaluations on 11 tasks across tabular data prediction, recommendation systems, and LLM alignment demonstrate that DeMix significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving a 22.61% improvement in data debugging F1-score and a 9.32% gain in task model performance after data repair. Code is available at: https://github.com/SJTU-DMTai/DeMix.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Optimism Stabilizes Thompson Sampling for Adaptive Inference

arXiv:2602.06014v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Thompson sampling (TS) is widely used for stochastic multi-armed bandits, yet its inferential properties under adaptive data collection are subtle. Classical asymptotic theory for sample means can fail because arm-specific sample sizes are random and coupled with the rewards through the action-selection rule. We study adaptive inference for Thompson sampling with Gaussian randomized indices in $K$-armed stochastic bandits with independent sub-Gaussian reward noises, and identify optimism as a key mechanism for restoring stability, meaning that each arm's pull count concentrates around a deterministic scale. This stability yields asymptotically valid Wald inference despite adaptive sampling. First, we prove that variance-inflated TS is stable for any $K \ge 2$, including the challenging regime where multiple arms are optimal, with asymptotically uniform allocation over optimal arms and sharp logarithmic pull-count asymptotics for suboptimal arms. This resolves the $K$-armed extension question raised by \citet{halder2025stable}, using new winner-map and Lyapunov-drift techniques to control allocation among multiple optimal arms. Second, we analyze an alternative optimistic modification that keeps the Gaussian index variance unchanged but adds an explicit mean bonus to the index center, and establish a similar stability conclusion. In summary, suitably implemented optimism stabilizes Thompson sampling and enables asymptotically valid Wald inference in multi-armed bandits, while incurring only a mild additional regret cost.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

D2H-AD: A Hybrid Model Utilizing Hyperdimensional Computing for Advanced Anomaly Detection

arXiv:2606.13754v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Anomaly detection is a fundamental component of intelligent systems with applications in healthcare, cybersecurity, smart grids, and IoT environments. Although conventional machine learning and deep learning methods have demonstrated effectiveness in identifying anomalies, they often rely on large labeled datasets, incur high computational costs, and face scalability challenges in edge and high-dimensional settings. This paper presents D2H-AD, a novel anomaly detection framework based on Hyperdimensional Computing (HDC), a brain-inspired paradigm that represents information using high-dimensional distributed vectors. Unlike existing HDC-based methods, D2H-AD integrates distance-based similarity and density-aware encoding within a unified framework, improving anomaly representation and detection performance. Ablation studies show that hyperdimensional encoding alone yields up to 5.4% higher ROC-AUC than applying the same density-distance scoring directly in the original feature space. Furthermore, D2H-AD consistently outperforms five established baselines, namely HDAD, ODHD, One-Class SVM, Isolation Forest, and Autoencoders, across all evaluated datasets. The framework is lightweight, interpretable, and computationally efficient, making it suitable for resource-constrained and real-time applications. We validate D2H-AD on five benchmark datasets and demonstrate superior F1-score and ROC-AUC performance, together with robustness to class imbalance, noise, and data complexity. In addition to improved accuracy, D2H-AD offers scalability, a small memory footprint, and low-latency operation enabled by binary computations and a compact design. These properties make it particularly attractive for TinyML and edge AI deployments. The proposed framework highlights the potential of HDC for accurate, interpretable, and energy-efficient anomaly detection in dynamic environments.

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

RepNet: Tackling spectral bias in deep neural networks via parameter reparameterization

arXiv:2606.16575v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved remarkable success in scientific computing, yet they often suffer from spectral bias in capturing oscillatory and multiscale behaviors. In this study, we investigate this limitation by examining the failure of shallow ReLU neural networks in fitting high-frequency functions. This observation identifies two important factors in resolving rapid oscillations: the initial slope scale and the distribution of partition points induced by the networks. Motivated by this analysis, we propose RepNet, a reparameterized DNN model for ReLU and tanh networks designed for high-frequency and multiscale problems. The key idea is to reparameterize the weights and biases in the first hidden layer, which enables effective control of the initial slope scale and provides an appropriate distribution of the initial partition points. Furthermore, treating the reparameterized weights and biases as trainable parameters allows the DNN to achieve adaptive frequency scaling during training. In addition, we derive quantitative estimates for the output and slope magnitudes of the reparameterized DNN to guide the initialization of the proposed method. Numerical experiments, including multiscale one- and four-dimensional function approximation, forward and inverse PDE problems in combination with physics-informed neural networks (PINNs), and operator learning, demonstrate that RepNet improves the predicted accuracy of vanilla DNNs in capturing highly oscillatory features with slightly additional computational cost. These results indicate that RepNet provides an effective and flexible approach for overcoming spectral bias and applying DNNs to multiscale problems.

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

Latent-Conditioned Parameterized Quantum Circuits as Universal Approximators for Distributions over Quantum States

arXiv:2605.28690v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Many applications in quantum simulation, quantum chemistry, and quantum machine learning require not a single quantum state but an ensemble of states characterizing the heterogeneity of a target system. Preparing such ensembles state-by-state is prohibitive in both variational and fault-tolerant settings, thereby motivating a generative modeling approach. We introduce latent-conditioned parameterized quantum circuits (LPQCs), a hybrid quantum-classical framework in which classical neural networks map a latent variable sampled from a prior distribution to the parameters of a parameterized quantum circuit. We prove that LPQCs are universal approximators for probability measures over density operators in the 1-Wasserstein distance, extending classical universal approximation theorems to the quantum-distribution setting. We additionally introduce a multimodal latent prior and a mixture-of-experts circuit architecture, and show empirically that the latent-conditioned parameterization alleviates the barren plateau problem during optimization, a behavior for which we provide rigorous partial guarantees. Numerical experiments validate the framework on a synthetic multi-cluster ensemble of mixed quantum states and on a QM9-derived ensemble of 3-D molecular structures. In these tasks, LPQC outperforms recent quantum generative baselines and matches the generation quality of a classical neural-network baseline, while requiring an output dimension that grows only linearly with the number of qubits rather than exponentially. By leveraging classical expressivity in the latent space, LPQCs offer a tractable route to quantum generative modeling.

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

Probing Semantic Alignment, Lexical Invariance, and Syntactic Influence in LLM Metaphor Processing

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on metaphor detection and interpretation tasks, yet it remains unclear what such behavioral success reveals about metaphor processing. We present a diagnostic analysis that examines the limits of behavioral evidence by probing three complementary dimensions: semantic attribute alignment, lexical invariance, and syntactic sensitivity. Using geometric probing, we assess whether model-generated interpretations align with reference semantic attributes; through context-varying substitution, we analyze the stability of lexical associations between metaphorical and literal expressions; and via controlled syntactic perturbations, we examine sensitivity in metaphor detection. Our analysis reveals that LLM-generated interpretations can exhibit semantic drift relative to reference attributes; stable lexical anchors persist across contextual conditions, potentially supporting conventional metaphors while biasing novel metaphors requiring contextual integration; and detection performance is sensitive to syntactic irregularities. These findings suggest that strong behavioral performance may reflect heterogeneous underlying signals, highlighting the need for caution when interpreting metaphor benchmarks as evidence of robust, integrated semantic understanding.

16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

SAGE: Answer-Conditioned Uncertainty Targets for Verbal Uncertainty Alignment

Large language models increasingly express uncertainty through natural-language statements, yet these expressions often fail to reflect the model's sampled behavior. We study verbal uncertainty alignment as a distributional calibration problem: the appropriate uncertainty target for a prompt should be estimated from repeated model outputs rather than from an isolated response. However, group rollouts alone are insufficient, since the resulting target must provide a useful training signal. Existing targets only partially satisfy this requirement. We propose SAGE, Semantic-Answer Guided Entropy, a group-level uncertainty target that constructs an answer-conditioned uncertainty geometry over sampled responses. SAGE preserves categorical, numeric, and symbolic answer distinctions while maintaining a smooth and scale-preserving calibration signal. We further apply this target through Group-Uncertainty Preference Optimization, or GUPO, an uncertainty-channel training framework that supervises verbal uncertainty expressions rather than the full response. Experiments across factual, mathematical, and multiple-choice reasoning tasks show improved uncertainty ranking, lower calibration error, and reduced overconfidence.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

The $\mathbf{P}$-Completeness of Inverted Index Traversal: On the Complexity of Evaluating Boolean Query DAGs

Authors:

Modern AI agents increasingly rely on search infrastructure to execute complex, neuro-symbolic reasoning workflows. These workflows often compile into deeply nested, non-monotonic Boolean queries over text fields. However, standard query evaluation strategies over inverted indices face severe theoretical limits when handling these structures. Stateful iterator models (Document-at-a-Time) are structurally bounded by $NC^1$ formula evaluation, suffering a worst-case $O(2^{|Q|})$ exponential blowup in query complexity when unrolling re-convergent logic. Conversely, recursive materialization models (Term-at-a-Time) incur an $\Omega(|U|)$ space complexity penalty (the Universal Scan) when evaluating logical negation over the document universe. In this paper, we establish the theoretical boundaries of executing complex logic natively over an inverted index. We formalize a retrieval language ($\mathcal{L}_R$) based on Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) and prove that its evaluation problem is strictly $\mathbf{P$-Complete}. To make evaluation tractable, we introduce \texttt{ComputePN}, a deterministic, sparsity-aware evaluation algorithm. By decoupling logical negation from universe-scale materialization via a novel Positive-Negative dual representation, and utilizing native DAG memoization, \texttt{ComputePN} strictly bounds evaluation time to $O(|Q| \cdot |U_{\mathit{active}}|)$. This approach successfully evaluates $\mathbf{P}$-Complete queries natively over the index, avoiding both the combinatorial tree-expansion bottleneck and the universal scan penalty, laying the formal foundation for computational retrieval.

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

Large-scale semantic mapping of learner agency and autonomy reveals what measurement and generative AI research overlook

arXiv:2606.10881v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learner agency and autonomy are foundational to personal development, yet a pervasive "jingle-jangle" fallacy (i.e. identical terms denoting different constructs, distinct terms denoting identical ones) has substantially hindered cumulative knowledge. Treating meaning as a phenomenon constituted through use in linguistic practice, we extracted 8,954 definitions and 2,700 scale items from over 14,000 publications, to investigate how researchers actually used learner agency and autonomy with a semantic analysis pipeline. The definitional landscape of two constructs resolves into three dimensions: regulation and control of learning (task), intrinsic motivation and internal decision-making (person), and social-relational action (sociocultural), thereby empirically quantifying the jingle-jangle fallacy. Existing scales, however, systematically underrepresent the sociocultural dimension. Critically, current generative AI research in education concentrates on learning regulation and control, narrowing the behavioral repertoire that AI-mediated learning environments are designed to cultivate. Beyond conceptual clarification, this work carries direct implications for conceptualization, measurement, and practice towards supporting the multidimensional learner agency and autonomy.

19.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

DNA-binding specificity recognition from predicted homologous protein-DNA structures

Predicting protein DNA-binding specificity is essential for understanding gene regulation and disease mechanisms. Existing deep learning methods typically infer specificity from a single protein-DNA complex structure, which limits their ability to capture the diverse geometric patterns underlying protein-DNA recognition. Homologous protein-DNA interfaces provide complementary structural evidence and richer geometric features related to interatomic interactions. To address the limited diversity and coverage of experimentally determined complexes, we constructed a large-scale library of predicted homologous protein-DNA complex structures. Building on this resource, we propose HomoDSP, a template-retrieval-based framework for accurate DNA-binding specificity prediction. Benchmark evaluations and validation on newly released JASPAR 2026 samples indicate that HomoDSP outperforms existing methods in both accuracy and generalization, with particularly substantial gains on high-error samples. Moreover, this performance is largely retained when AlphaFold3-predicted complex structures are used as input. Template- and residue-level interpretability analyses suggest that HomoDSP improves prediction by focusing on DNA-affinity residues across multiple homologous templates. Finally, universal Protein Binding Microarrays evaluations on AI-designed DNA-binding proteins show that HomoDSP rescues a baseline failure mode in which the baseline method produces incorrect predictions because of training-set bias. Together, these results support the use of homologous template interfaces as informative structural priors for decoding protein DNA-binding specificity.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

LLM Compression by Block Removal with Constrained Binary Optimization

In this paper, we formulate the compression of large language models (LLMs) by optimally deleting transformer blocks (``block removal'') as a constrained binary optimization (CBO) problem that can be mapped to a physical system (Ising glass), whose energies are a strong proxy for downstream model performance. This formulation enables an efficient ranking of a large number of candidate block-removal configurations yielding many high-quality, non-trivial solutions beyond those only removing consecutive regions. Our method performs strongly in the deep compression regime, such as for 50% compression of Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct, where we achieve an almost 23 percentage point increase on the MMLU benchmark compared to other state-of-the-art (SOTA) block-removal methods. For lighter compression, it performs on par with those methods across several benchmarks for Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, Qwen3-14B (both before and after retraining), as well as Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct. The approach is computationally efficient and requires only forward and backward passes on a calibration dataset for a few active parameters. Additionally, we demonstrate that using good heuristic solvers for the CBO problem provides solutions that perform well on downstream tasks in negligible runtime when it is unfeasible to solve the problem exactly. The method can be readily applied to any architecture. We illustrate this generality on the recent NVIDIA-Nemotron-3-Nano-30B-A3B-FP8 model, which exhibits a highly inhomogeneous and challenging block structure, and where we outperform SOTA for AIME25 and GPQA when removing either 2 attention layers or 3 mixture-of-experts layers.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Learning QoE from Packet-Level Measurements in Encrypted Video Conferencing Traffic

The quality of the user experience has become one of the most important aspects in todays world, as it directly influences individuals willingness to continue using or abandon a product or service. In this context, video conferencing applications (VCAs), which experienced widespread adoption following the COVID-19 pandemic, must deliver excellent performance to remain competitive in an increasingly crowded market. Although content providers (CPs) such as Zoom, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Google Meet can assess conversation quality by comparing transmitted and received data. The widespread use of end-to-end encryption in VCAs makes quality-of-experience (QoE) evaluation by internet service providers (ISPs) far more challenging. Since ISPs do not have access to the encrypted content, they must rely on passive measurements of unencrypted traffic characteristics on the data path. In this work, we present a simple yet effective QoE prediction framework based on an almost stock convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture that uses only the packet sizes extracted from the communication between two participants in a video conferencing (VC) call to predict two QoE metrics: BRISQUE and MOS. The proposed framework is simple, easy to implement, and does not require high-end computational resources, yet it provides superior prediction performance, as shown in our experiments on two custom datasets collected from WhatsApp and Zoom, which achieve substantial improvements over previous models for the QoE prediction task.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Utilising Artificial Intelligence to Identify Ventricular Tachycardia Ablation Targets in Sinus Rhythm

Background and Aims: Machine learning has shown potential in predicting ablation targets for ventricular tachycardia (VT) in an animal model. This study progresses to externally validating deep learning approaches for human data. Methods: The development and external validation dataset included 21 and 13 patients, respectively, with structural VT undergoing catheter ablation. In the development datasets, electrophysiological studies were conducted using the AdvisorTM HD grid (EnsiteTM X), while both CARTO and Ensite Precision were used in the validation dataset. In each patient, VT ablation targets were defined as mapping points within 8 mm of VT isthmuses. Three advanced machine learning models were trained using cardiac mapping data acquired in both omnipolar and unipolar configurations during sinus rhythm and ventricular pacing. Discrimination was evaluated using nested leave-one-out cross-validation at patient level. Results: Overall, graph convolutional networks (GCNs), which integrate intracardiac signal waveforms with three-dimensional electroanatomical geometries, achieved the highest performance, with optimal results obtained from unipolar electrograms acquired in sinus rhythm (median AUC 0.793, sensitivity 83.6%, specificity 69.0%). This may be partly explained by the inclusion of repolarization dynamics in unipolar electrograms and the higher point density of sinus rhythm maps. Comparable performance was observed in the external dataset. Conclusion: This study demonstrates that graph convolutional networks applied to sinus rhythm EGM waveforms collected during substrate mapping can localise critical components of VT re-entry circuits. This approach has potential to provide fast and accurate ablation guidance without the need to induce and map VT, improving safety and efficacy of VT catheter ablation.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

TACOMORE: Exploring a replicable prompting protocol for LLM-assisted corpus analysis

As corpus linguistics continues to scale, researchers are facing a growing methodological bottleneck: while computational tools can easily count billions of words, the qualitative interpretation of these data remains a slow and labor-intensive human task. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising way to automate this process, yet their integration into the field is often hindered by concerns over black-box unpredictability and a lack of replicability. This study introduces TACOMORE, a structured prompting framework designed to transform ad-hoc AI interactions into a standardized linguistic protocol. Built upon four foundational principles (Task, Context, Model, and Replicability), the framework guides LLMs to move beyond generic probability prediction to anchoring their reasoning in the specific co-occurrence patterns of a target corpus. We applied this framework to three core corpus tasks, i.e., the analysis of keywords, collocates, and concordances, using an open corpus of COVID-19 research abstracts. After testing three LLMs, we found that while structured prompting improves accuracy and replicability, inherent limitations regarding hallucination persist. This research offers a critical lens into the role of LLMs in corpus linguistics, highlighting their potential as complementary tools while emphasizing the irreplaceable role of human validation.

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

FOCUS on Contamination: Hydrology-Informed Noise-Aware Learning for Geospatial PFAS Mapping

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are persistent environmental contaminants with significant public health impacts, yet large-scale monitoring remains severely limited due to the high cost and logistical challenges of field sampling. The lack of samples leads to difficulty simulating their spread with physical models and limited scientific understanding of PFAS transport in surface waters. Yet, rich geospatial and satellite-derived data describing land cover, hydrology, and industrial activity are widely available. We introduce FOCUS, a geospatial deep learning framework for PFAS contamination mapping that integrates sparse PFAS observations with large-scale environmental context, including priors derived from hydrological connectivity, land cover, source proximity, and sampling distance. These priors are integrated into a principled, noise-aware loss, yielding a robust training objective under sparse labels. Across extensive ablations, robustness analyses, and real-world validation, FOCUS consistently outperforms baselines including sparse segmentation, Kriging, and pollutant transport simulations, while preserving spatial coherence and scalability over large regions. Our results demonstrate how AI can support environmental science by providing screening-level risk maps that prioritize follow-up sampling and help connect potential sources to surface-water contamination patterns in the absence of complete physical models.

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

MedSynth: Realistic, Synthetic Medical Dialogue-Note Pairs

Physicians spend significant time documenting clinical encounters, a burden that contributes to professional burnout. To address this, robust automation tools for medical documentation are crucial. We introduce MedSynth – a novel dataset of synthetic medical dialogues and notes designed to advance the Dialogue-to-Note (Dial-2-Note) and Note-to-Dialogue (Note-2-Dial) tasks. Informed by an extensive analysis of disease distributions, this dataset includes over 10,000 dialogue-note pairs covering over 2000 ICD-10 codes. We demonstrate that our dataset markedly enhances the performance of models in generating medical notes from dialogues, and dialogues from medical notes. The dataset provides a valuable resource in a field where open-access, privacy-compliant, and diverse training data are scarce. Code is available at https://github.com/ahmadrezarm/MedSynth/tree/main and the dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Ahmad0067/MedSynth.