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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Contactless 3D Human Body Measurement Using Depth Cameras for Smart Health Monitoring

Contactless body measurement technologies are becoming increasingly significant for smart health monitoring, digital health applications, and remote patient assessment. Traditional anthropometric measurements typically necessitate physical contact and trained personnel, which may constrain scalability in remote healthcare settings. In this study, we introduce a depth camera-based framework for estimating human body measurements utilizing 3D point cloud data. An Orbbec Astra 2 depth camera was employed to capture RGB images, depth maps, and 3D point clouds of participants. The captured point cloud was processed using Python-based tools, including Open3D, NumPy, and OpenCV, to segment the human body from the background. Key anthropometric measurements, such as height and arm span, were computed. The measurements were obtained through a combination of spatial filtering and landmark selection on the 3D point cloud, followed by the projection of the computed measurements onto the corresponding RGB image using camera intrinsic parameters. In addition to linear measurements, the approximate body volume and visible surface area were estimated using voxel-based occupancy analysis and mesh-based surface reconstruction methods. The experimental results from a single depth capture demonstrated that accurate body measurements and geometric estimates could be obtained from depth camera data without physical contact. This study provides a foundation for future real-time systems that integrate depth sensing with intelligent health monitoring and generative AI models for smart healthcare applications.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Data-driven Lake Water Quality Forecasting for Time Series with Missing Data using Machine Learning

arXiv:2601.15503v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Volunteer-led lake monitoring yields irregular, seasonal time series with many gaps arising from ice cover, weather-related access constraints, and occasional human errors, complicating forecasting and early warning of harmful algal blooms. We study Secchi Disk Depth (SDD) forecasting on a 30-lake, data-rich subset drawn from three decades of in-situ records collected across Maine lakes. Missingness is handled via Multiple Imputation by Chained Equations (MICE), and we evaluate performance with a normalized Mean Absolute Error (nMAE) metric for cross-lake comparability. Among six candidates, ridge regression provides the best mean test performance. Using ridge regression, we then quantify the minimal sample size, showing that under a backward, recent-history protocol, the model reaches within 5% of full-history accuracy with approximately 176 training samples per lake on average. We also identify a minimal feature set, where a compact four-feature subset matches the thirteen-feature baseline within the same 5% tolerance. Bringing these results together, we introduce a joint feasibility function that identifies the minimal training history and fewest predictors sufficient to achieve the target of staying within 5% of the complete-history, full-feature baseline. In our study, meeting the 5% accuracy target required about 64 recent samples and just one predictor per lake, highlighting the practicality of targeted monitoring. Hence, our joint feasibility strategy unifies recent-history length and feature choice under a fixed accuracy target, yielding a simple, efficient rule for setting sampling effort and measurement priorities for lake researchers.

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

BusterX++: Towards Unified Cross-Modal AI-Generated Content Detection and Explanation with MLLM

The rapid advancement of generative AI has substantially improved image and video synthesis, amplifying the risk of multimodal visual misinformation. Recent MLLMs have shown promise for transparent AI-generated content detection through reasoning and explanation, yet existing approaches largely treat image and video forensics as isolated tasks, leaving cross-modal synergies underexplored. To address this, we present BusterX++, a unified MLLM for joint image and video detection with interpretable reasoning. We also introduce GenBuster-Bench++, a meticulously curated, difficulty-aligned benchmark containing balanced image and video samples spanning recent generation models and diverse real-world scenarios. Using this controlled setting, we revisit the widely adopted $SFT \rightarrow RL$ post-training paradigm. Notably, our findings demonstrate that a single-stage, pure RL strategy driven strictly by sparse outcome rewards consistently matches or surpasses a strong SFT+RL baseline across both unified and single-modality settings. Our key insight reveals that SFT imposes lower policy entropy, which restricts the policy search space and dampens exploratory freedom. In contrast, single-stage pure RL maintains higher policy entropy throughout training, effectively unlocking the spontaneous emergence of cross-modal capability transfer between image and video forensics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BusterX++ achieves state-of-the-art performance, highlighting the powerful potential of RL for unified cross-modal visual reasoning.

05.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Tumour evolution as ground truth for cancer whole-genome sequencing

Cancer genomes are shaped by evolutionary processes that couple mutagenesis, clonal selection, chromosomal instability, spatial growth and treatment response into structured genomic patterns, yet current benchmarking strategies largely ignore this evolutionary dependency. Here, we present SCOUT, a large-scale synthetic whole-genome sequencing resource of over 200 samples, designed for systematic benchmarking of tumour genomic analysis and evolutionary inference under controlled evolutionary ground truth. Unlike conventional task-specific simulations, SCOUT models tumour evolution as a latent generative process that simultaneously shapes mutations, copy-number alterations, variant allele frequencies, mutational signatures and clonal architectures. SCOUT recapitulates key features of solid and haematological malignancies, including driver mutations, chromosomal instability, intratumour heterogeneity, spatial sampling and treatment-associated evolutionary dynamics in tumour and matched-normal longitudinal and multi-region sequencing designs. Using SCOUT, we benchmarked widely used methods for somatic variant detection, copy-number analysis, mutational signature inference and tumour evolutionary reconstruction. Across analytical tasks, performance deteriorated in low-purity, highly subclonal and structurally complex tumours, while spatial sampling bias and hypermutation generated spurious evolutionary signals that confounded tumour interpretation across multiple inference layers. Evolutionary simulations further distinguished lineage-restricted genetic bottlenecks from multi-lineage resistance dynamics associated with tumour plasticity. Tumour purity consistently exerted a stronger effect on inference accuracy than sequencing depth. Together, our results establish evolutionary ground truth as a prerequisite for reproducible benchmarking and biologically interpretable analysis of cancer whole-genome sequencing data.

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

MM++: Unsupervised Scale-Invariant Multilayer OOD Detection via Top-K Gated Feature Fusion

We introduce MM++ (Multilayer Mahalanobis++), a fully unsupervised, strictly post-hoc, and scale-invariant framework for Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection. To address the trade-off between scale invariance and hierarchical expressivity, MM++ constructs a principled joint feature space. It first identifies discriminative intermediate layers by measuring entropy density drops, which mark the boundaries of sharp semantic compression. By fusing these selected layers with the terminal representation, the framework captures latent cross-layer correlations while mitigating early-layer noise. Crucially, a Ledoit-Wolf regularized tied covariance matrix stabilizes this unified space, enabling reliable distance estimation. Requiring no auxiliary OOD data, classifier fine-tuning, or architectural modifications, MM++ delivers robust performance across distinct architectures for both near- and far-OOD detection.

07.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-23

Efficient generation of epitope-targeted antibodies with Germinal

Obtaining antibodies to specific protein targets is a widely important yet experimentally laborious process. Meanwhile, computational methods for antibody design have been limited by low success rates that require resource-intensive screening. Here we introduce Germinal, a broadly enabling generative pipeline that designs antibodies against specific epitopes with nanomolar binding affinities while requiring only low-n experimental testing. Our method co-optimizes antibody structure and sequence by integrating a structure predictor with an antibody-specific protein language model to perform de novo design of functional complementarity-determining regions onto a user-specified structural framework. When tested against four diverse protein targets, Germinal designed functional antibodies across all targets and binder formats, testing only 43–101 designs for each antigen. Validated designs also exhibited robust expression in mammalian cells and high sequence and structural novelty. We provide open-source code and full computational and experimental protocols to facilitate wide adoption. Germinal achieves epitope-targeted, de novo complementarity-determining region design with high experimental success rates.

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

A Controlled Benchmark of Quantum-Latent GAN Augmentation for Brain MRI

Medical image classification is often constrained by limited labeled data, motivating generative augmentation; recently, quantum generative models have been proposed for this purpose, frequently reporting accuracy gains. However, such claims are typically based on single training runs, do not match the parameter budgets of the quantum and classical generators, and do not characterize the data regime in which any benefit appears. We present a controlled benchmark that isolates the contribution of a quantum generator to brain-MRI augmentation. Images are encoded into a KL-regularized latent space in which a conditional Wasserstein GAN with gradient penalty is trained using either a variational quantum generator or a classical generator of near-identical parameter count (1648 vs. 1632). Synthetic samples are decoded and used to augment a pretrained classifier across labeled data fractions from 5% to 100%, evaluated over eight random seeds with paired significance testing (with multiple-comparison correction) and with intraset diversity and latent-distribution analyses. Across all fractions, no augmentation variant significantly outperforms real-data-only training, and the quantum and classical generators are statistically indistinguishable. Any low-data benefit behaves as regularization rather than faithful data expansion:synthetic samples are off distribution and severely mode collapsed precisely where data is scarce, and the quantum generator is no more diverse thanits classical counterpart. We release the protocol as a testbed for rigorous evaluation of quantum generative augmentation in medical imaging.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Propagating Structural Guidance: Synthesizing Fluorescein Angiography from Fundus Images and Sparse OCT Scans

Fundus fluorescein angiography (FFA) is critical for assessing retinal vascular abnormalities, but its acquisition is invasive and not always feasible. In contrast, color fundus photography (CFP) is non-invasive and widely accessible, which has motivated studies on CFP-to-FFA synthesis. However, prior works rely solely on CFP surface texture, fundamentally limiting the ability to reconstruct functional vascular information and subtle pathological changes. To address this, we propose a novel framework that synthesizes FFA from CFP with structural guidance provided by optical coherence tomography (OCT). We construct a multi-modal retinal imaging dataset with paired CFP, FFA, and OCT from 3,676 patient eyes–the first tri-modally aligned dataset in retinal imaging. To bridge the spatial gap between OCT and fundus modalities, we propose a Spatially Aligned Cross-Modal Fusion (SACMF) module that projects depth-resolved OCT features onto the fundus plane and injects them into the CFP encoder via adaptive layer normalization. Beyond feature fusion, we further introduce Token-wise Cross-Modality Alignment (TCMA), a token-level contrastive learning strategy that explicitly aligns CFP and FFA representations at corresponding spatial positions. Our method achieves superior synthesis performance compared to state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, extensive experiments demonstrate that the FFA images synthesized by our approach bring greater improvements in downstream disease diagnosis performance than existing methods, highlighting the clinical potential of our approach as a non-invasive decision-support tool in routine workflows. The code is available at https://github.com/while-plus/OCT-guide-FFA-Syn.

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

Tri-Info: Generalizable, Interpretable Failure Prediction for VLA Models via Information Theory

arXiv:2606.19998v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are increasingly deployed across diverse tasks, yet they remain black boxes whose physical interactions can cause irreversible harm, making generalizable and interpretable failure detection essential. We observe that successful and failed rollouts carry systematically different information-theoretic signatures. Building on this, we formalize VLA control as a closed-loop information pipeline and derive the Triple Information-theoretic (Tri-Info) signals that capture whether actions remain diverse, temporally consistent, and coupled to state transitions. Across six VLA models and three benchmark environments, Tri-Info matches the strongest baselines in-domain. Moreover, Tri-Info transfers across architectures, environments, and the sim-to-real gap without retraining, reaching 83\% accuracy on real-world tasks where prior detectors collapse to chance. This establishes Tri-Info as a simple yet powerful method that not only detects failures with strong cross-domain generalization, but also delivers interpretable diagnostics of the underlying failure modes.

12.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-06

Pathways of emergency care for severely ill children in Nigerian and Ugandan hospitals: A process mapping study

Authors:

by Rami Subhi, Abiodun Sogbesan, Dan Muramuzi, Mikael Burhin, Ayobami A. Bakare, Adegoke G. Falade, Freddy E. Kitutu, Freddie Ssengooba, Carina King, Sumit Kane, Belinda Dawson-McClaren, Hamish R. Graham, the MOXY-Implementation Research Collaboration Background Child mortality remains high in countries with weak emergency care systems. Facility organisation for paediatric emergency care is heterogeneous and under-described. We examined how hospitals in Uganda and Nigeria are organised to deliver emergency care for neonates and children. Methods and findings We conducted a qualitative, multi-method study in 26 purposively selected secondary and tertiary facilities in Uganda and Nigeria from October 2023 to December 2024. Embedded researchers documented patient pathways, resources for care, and care processes for severely ill children (

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

Tight Bounds for Logistic Regression with Large Stepsize Gradient Descent in Low Dimension

arXiv:2602.12471v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider the optimization problem of minimizing the logistic loss with gradient descent to train a linear model for binary classification with separable data. With a budget of $T$ iterations, it was recently shown that an accelerated $1/T^2$ rate is possible by choosing a large stepsize $\eta = \Theta(\gamma^2 T)$ (where $\gamma$ is the dataset's margin) despite the resulting non-monotonicity of the loss. In this paper, we provide a tighter analysis of gradient descent for this problem when the data is two-dimensional: we show that GD with a sufficiently large learning rate $\eta$ finds a point with loss smaller than $\mathcal{O}(1/(\eta \gamma^2 T))$, as long as $T \geq \Omega(n/\gamma + 1/\gamma^2)$, where $n$ is the dataset size. Our improved rate comes from a tighter bound on the time $\tau$ that it takes for GD to transition from unstable (non-monotonic loss) to stable (monotonic loss), via a fine-grained analysis of the oscillatory dynamics of GD in the subspace orthogonal to the max-margin classifier. We also provide a lower bound of $\tau$ matching our upper bound up to logarithmic factors, showing that our analysis is tight.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

DSAEval: Evaluating Data Science Agents on a Wide Range of Real-World Data Science Problems

Recent LLM-based data agents aim to automate data science tasks ranging from data analysis to deep learning. However, the open-ended nature of real-world data science problems, which often span multiple taxonomies and lack standard answers, poses a significant challenge for evaluation. To address this, we introduce DSAEval, a benchmark comprising 641 real-world data science problems grounded in 285 diverse datasets, covering both structured and unstructured data (e.g., image and text). DSAEval incorporates three distinctive features: (1) Multimodal Environment Perception, which enables agents to interpret observations from multiple modalities, including text and vision; (2) Multi-Query Interactions, which mirror the iterative and cumulative nature of real-world data science projects; and (3) Multi-Dimensional Evaluation, which provides a holistic assessment across reasoning, code, and results. We systematically evaluate 13 recent advanced agentic LLMs using DSAEval. Our results show that Claude-Sonnet-4.5 achieves the strongest overall performance, MiMo-V2-Pro and GPT-5.2 lead in duration and step efficiency, respectively, and MiMo-V2-Flash is the most cost-effective. We further demonstrate that multimodal perception consistently improves performance on vision-related tasks, with gains ranging from 2.04\% to 11.30\%. Overall, while current data science agents perform well on structured data and routine data analysis workflows, substantial challenges remain in unstructured domains. Finally, we offer critical insights and outline future research directions.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

A New Definition of Quantum Superposition

arXiv:2606.15607v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The usual description of the superposition of two (pure quantum) states is ambiguous, since the binary operation of summation in a Hilbert space does not pass down to the quotient projective space. Even though Dirac noted this as early as 1930, it is often asserted that the superposition is a binary operation acting on two states with a value that is a unique state. The goal for this note is to motivate a rigorous, geometrical definition of the superposition of states in the setting of complex projective space, which has been argued elsewhere to be the natural geometric phase space for quantum theory. The upshot is that the new definition of the superposition of two pure states, viewed as two distinct points in the projective space, is the unique (complex) line on which those two points lie. Finally, a comparison is given between superposition and expansion in an orthonormal basis.

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

BBP Phase Transition for a Doubly Sparse Deformed Model

arXiv:2603.04832v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We prove the equivalent of the Baik, Ben Arous, Péché (2004) phenomenon for a novel, doubly sparse model where both the Wigner noise matrix and signal vector(s) are sparse. Specifically, we consider a deformed sub-Gaussian sparse Wigner ensemble with a fixed number of sub-Gaussian spike vectors of the same-order sparsity added. We show that spike vectors with signals greater than one are correlated with the top eigenvectors of the deformed ensemble and that each spike vector of signal greater than one induces an outlier eigenvalue. Notably, our results hold in the supercritical sparsity regime for the Wigner matrix ($q \gg \frac{\log n}{n}$) and for any sparse spike vector with an unbounded number of entries ($np\to \infty$). No further relationship between the sparsities of the noise matrix ($q$) and spike vectors ($p$) is necessary. This generalizes the work of Benaych-Georges and Nadakuditi (2010) and Péché (2005).

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Cost-effectiveness of measles rapid diagnostic tests for replacing or expanding laboratory testing in Ethiopia

Background: In low- and middle-income countries, laboratory testing to rapidly detect measles outbreaks is limited by infrastructure availability and high costs. This study estimates the potential impact and cost-effectiveness of measles rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) if implemented nationally in Ethiopia to either replace or expand current testing. Methods: An agent-based model to simulate measles outbreaks was calibrated to Ethiopian measles surveillance data. Modelled outbreak outcomes were aggregated over a 10-year period. Scenarios included using RDTs to (1) replace laboratory testing; (2) replace epidemiological linkage; and (3) increase case detection, in addition to replacing laboratory testing and epidemiological linkage. Testing and outbreak response costs (in 2025 US$) were obtained from Ethiopian Public Health Institute from a government perspective. Total costs and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) for each scenario were compared to baseline. Results: All scenarios were cost saving compared to baseline. Replacing laboratory testing with RDTs saved US$4.2M (3.2M-4.9M) over 10-years, but due to very low testing rates the benefits of eliminating laboratory testing delays were offset by missed cases from the lower RDT sensitivity, leading to similar outbreak detection times and DALYs. Replacing epidemiological linkage with RDTs had similar DALYs but increased the cost savings to US$9.7M. Using RDTs to double case detection reduced outbreak detection time from 113 to 80 days, averted 17,000 DALYs, and saved US$4.3M. Conclusions: In Ethiopia, use of measles RDTs could be cost saving, and if used to expand testing could prevent measles infections through faster outbreak detection and response.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Adaptive Hebbian Memory Routing in Vision Transformers for Few-Shot Learning

Few-shot image recognition requires models to adapt to new classes from a small labeled support set. Hebbian fast-weight memory can provide temporary associative information during an episode, but fixed memory behavior may not be appropriate for every few-shot task. In this work, we propose Adaptive Hebbian Routing for few-shot Vision Transformers. The method uses a lightweight MLP router to control the contribution of Hebbian memory, the strength of memory updates, and the retention of previous memory from support-set features. We study Adaptive Placement, Adaptive Plasticity, and Fully Adaptive Hebbian Routing. Experiments use ViT-Small, DeiT-Small, and Swin-Tiny under 5-way 1-shot evaluation on Omniglot, CIFAR-FS, and cross-domain transfer from CIFAR-FS to Omniglot. In the direct Swin comparison, fixed and adaptive Hebbian variants use the same memory location. Adaptive Plasticity improves the fixed Hebbian result from 96.74\% to 96.92\%, while Fully Adaptive Routing achieves the best result at 96.94\%. The fully adaptive Swin model also reduces inference time from 16.51 ms to 14.05 ms relative to fixed Hebbian Swin. On CIFAR-FS, adaptive variants improve performance across all three backbones, and the multi-shot evaluation shows that these gains remain useful as the number of support examples increases. These results show that adaptive plasticity and adaptive memory activation can improve few-shot Transformer representations beyond fixed Hebbian behavior.

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

When is Your LLM Steerable?

Activation steering offers a lightweight approach to control language models' behavior at inference time, but whether it succeeds or fails heavily depends on the prompt, concept, model, and steering configuration. Finding the regime and boundaries of successful steering typically requires expensive grid searches and post-hoc evaluation of full autoregressive rollouts. In this work, we investigate whether steerability can be predicted from the model's internal states at the beginning of the generation process, e.g., after generating the first few tokens, and how to leverage such a predictor to improve steering success rate. To this end, we first introduce ASTEER, a testbed including 1.4M steered generations, spanning 150 concepts with each steering success/failure labeled. Leveraging this testbed, we analyze the model's early decoding dynamics by extracting features that compare hidden states before and after steering across layers and initial decoding steps. These features help us understand how steering's effects propagate along layers and token positions, which provide key information for steerability prediction. We then train a Gradient Boosting Decision Trees (GBDT) classifier on these features to predict whether an intervention will under-steer, succeed, or over-steer without requiring full rollout. Our predictor achieves around 0.7 macro-F1 score on unseen concepts, demonstrating that early hidden states encode substantial, structured information about eventual steering efficacy. We further leverage this steerability predictor as guidance for steering strength searching, achieving near-optimal performance with a small fraction of decoding cost.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

LUCID: Learning Embodiment-Agnostic Intent Models from Unstructured Human Videos for Scalable Dexterous Robot Skill Acquisition

arXiv:2606.11628v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The most widely-adopted robot learning pipelines today learn skills from robot demonstrations or structured human data, which are expensive to collect and tied to specific embodiments. In contrast, unstructured human videos provide a scalable alternative. They contain diverse manipulation demonstrations across objects, scenes, and strategies, but are not directly connected to robot action. We propose LUCID, a two-stage framework that learns task intent from unstructured human videos drawn from internet-scale datasets and learns robot control in massively-parallel simulation. The intent model predicts short-horizon intent (what should happen next in the scene) from the current observation in closed loop. An embodiment-specific sensorimotor policy converts this intent into robot actions. The intent interface is shared across controllers, so the same intent model can be applied to different embodiments, from our primary dexterous hand to a parallel-jaw gripper. We evaluate LUCID on five real-world manipulation tasks: stirring, wiping, and binning supervised by only internet video, with zero-shot transfer to novel scenes and object instances; and push-T and cable routing supervised by 1 hr each of self-collected smartphone video. Project page: https://lucid-robot.github.io/.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

FBSDiff++: Improved Frequency Band Substitution of Diffusion Features for Efficient and Highly Controllable Text-Driven Image-to-Image Translation

With large-scale text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models achieving significant advancements in open-domain image creation, increasing attention has been focused on their natural extension to the realm of text-driven image-to-image (I2I) translation, where a source image acts as visual guidance to the generated image in addition to the textual guidance provided by the text prompt. We propose FBSDiff, a novel framework adapting off-the-shelf T2I diffusion model into the I2I paradigm from a fresh frequency-domain perspective. Through dynamic frequency band substitution of diffusion features, FBSDiff realizes versatile and highly controllable text-driven I2I in a plug-and-play manner (without need for model training, fine-tuning, or online optimization), allowing appearance-guided, layout-guided, and contour-guided I2I translation by progressively substituting low-frequency band, mid-frequency band, and high-frequency band of latent diffusion features, respectively. In addition, FBSDiff flexibly enables continuous control over I2I correlation intensity simply by tuning the bandwidth of the substituted frequency band. To further promote image translation efficiency, flexibility, and functionality, we propose FBSDiff++ which improves upon FBSDiff mainly in three aspects: (1) accelerate inference speed by a large margin (8.9$\times$ speedup in inference) with refined model architecture; (2) improve the Frequency Band Substitution module to allow for input source images of arbitrary resolution and aspect ratio; (3) extend model functionality to enable localized image manipulation and style-specific content creation with only subtle adjustments to the core method. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments verify superiority of FBSDiff++ in I2I translation visual quality, efficiency, versatility, and controllability compared to related advanced approaches.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Predictive variational inference: Learn the predictively optimal posterior distribution

arXiv:2410.14843v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vanilla variational inference finds an optimal approximation to the Bayesian posterior distribution, but even the exact Bayesian posterior is often not meaningful under model misspecification. We propose predictive variational inference (PVI): a general inference framework that seeks and samples from an optimal posterior density such that the resulting posterior predictive distribution is as close to the true data generating process as possible, while this closeness is measured by multiple scoring rules. By optimizing the objective, the predictive variational inference is generally not the same as, or even attempting to approximate, the Bayesian posterior, even asymptotically. Rather, we interpret it as implicit hierarchical expansion. Further, the learned posterior uncertainty detects heterogeneity of parameters among the population, enabling automatic model diagnosis. This framework applies to both likelihood-exact and likelihood-free models. We demonstrate its application in real data examples.

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

EvalStop: Using World Feedback to Detect and Correct Reward Overoptimization in Multi-Tenant RLHF Platforms

arXiv:2606.04145v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Cloud LLM fine-tuning platforms increasingly serve RLHF workloads, where a learned reward model is optimized as a proxy for human quality. As Gao et al. (2023) showed, this proxy diverges from world feedback (downstream eval metrics) under sustained optimization pressure, a phenomenon known as reward overoptimization. Existing platform schedulers ignore this divergence: non-clairvoyant schedulers optimize JCT without any quality signal, SLAQ-style quality-aware schedulers use training loss (a weaker proxy that drops monotonically through hacking), and classical per-job early stopping requires human monitoring and does not free shared GPUs. We propose EvalStop, a composable scheduling primitive that terminates jobs on k consecutive eval-score declines, releases GPUs, preserves the best checkpoint, and delegates to any base scheduler. We frame scheduler-level early stopping as a detection problem and evaluate it in a discrete-event simulator whose RLHF workload mixes reward-hacking and structurally healthy runs, with ground-truth labels hidden from schedulers. On RLHF-heavy workloads (80% RLHF, 64 GPUs), EvalStop achieves precision 98% / recall 99% / FPR 1.5% while improving JCT by 9% and cutting wasted compute by 22% over SRTF-Est (p

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

Pepti-Agent: An AI Agent for Peptide Design and Optimization

Therapeutic peptides occupy a valuable design space between small molecules and biologics, but their development requires satisfying several competing constraints at once: solubility, hemolytic activity, and nonspecific surface fouling are governed by overlapping sequence features, so improving one property often degrades another. Computational design addresses this by pairing generative models with sequence-based property predictors, iteratively proposing and refining candidates. However, these components are typically wired together as monolithic scripts that are difficult to inspect, extend, or reuse, and they often refine sequences by natural-language reasoning rather than by tracking the evolving multi-property state of each candidate. We present Pepti-Agent, a closed-loop, peptide-specific framework that exposes generation, property prediction, and single-residue mutation as independently inspectable Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools. A large language model controller invokes these tools and consults live predictor output between calls, so refinement is guided by each sequence's current property profile rather than by language reasoning alone. Task-specific PeptideGPT models generate candidates, ProtBERT-based classifiers score solubility, hemolysis, and non-fouling, and two interchangeable mutation operators propose sequence edits. By recording a per-step trace of controller decisions, predictor outputs, and accepted mutations, Pepti-Agent offers a reproducible substrate for benchmarking multi-objective design strategies and for prioritizing candidates for experimental validation.

25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Multi-floor generalization of TASEP

arXiv:2603.13610v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider an interacting particle system, which generalizes the classical totally asymmetric simple exclusion process (TASEP), in that each site can contain up to a fixed finite number of particles, and the particle movement is governed by a back-pressure (BP) algorithm (also often called MaxWeight). There are $N$ sites (with $N$ finite or infinite), each may contain at most $c$ particles, $1 \le c < \infty$. New particles enter the system at the left-most site $1$ as a Poisson process of rate $\alpha\le 1$, unless site $1$ has $c$ particles. Particles (if any) are removed from the right-most site $N$ as a Poisson process of rate $\beta \le 1$. The left-to-right movement of particles between neighboring sites is governed by the BP rule: one particle moves from site $n$ to $n+1$ at epochs of a rate $1$ Poisson process, as long as the former site has strictly more particles than the latter. When $c=1$, this is the standard TASEP. Our main results address the asymptotics of the stationary distribution of a finite system, and especially the limit of the flux (current) as $N\to\infty$. In particular, we prove that interesting non-trivial phase transitions take place in a system with $c>1$. For example, if $c>1$ and $1/2 \le \beta \le 1$, the maximum limiting flux $1/4$ is achieved as long as $\alpha \ge \alpha_c^*$, where $\alpha_c^* < 1/2$ is some non-trivial threshold. (For the standard TASEP the threshold is $1/2$.) We also put forward a general conjecture about the stationary distribution asymptotics under an arbitrary parameter setting. We illustrate our formal results and the conjecture by simulations, and identify interesting directions for further research.