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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

On the localization transition from MAA to AA models

arXiv:2606.24720v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite their potential similarity between the mosaic Aubry-André (MAA) and AA models, the MAA model allows mobility edges (MEs), whereas the AA model does not. Here we develop a new double quasiperiodic MAA (DMAA) model consisting of one primitive MAA with nonzero even-site potentials and the other modified one with both nonzero odd-site potentials and a tunable amplitude factor, to reveal how localization transitions evolve from MAA to AA models. Interplays and competitions among the extended, critical and localized states arising from superpositions of double quasi-periodic MAA potentials enable new twice and multiple localization-delocalization transitions besides the original single localization transition. Our numerical calculations on inverse participation ratio, normalized participation ratio, fractal dimension and real-space wavefunction distribution confirm such localization features. The continuum model simulations on the experimental polariton modes also yield consistent results and hence validate their experimental feasibility. The constructed DMAA model provides a new framework for studying the localization transition processes between two analogous quasiperiodic models and broadens the understanding of Anderson localization.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

The Effectiveness of aromatherapy and its supportive Interventions on anxiety and pain among breast cancer patients: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Introduction: Breast cancer treatments are often associated with pain and anxiety, which can hinder physical functioning and overall quality of life, even after treatment. Complementary therapies, such as aromatherapy, can be used to alleviate pain and reduce anxiety in breast cancer patients. This project aimed to synthesize current global evidence on the effectiveness of aromatherapy. Method: This systematic review followed the PRISMA 2020 guidelines, with a comprehensive, systematic search conducted in PubMed, CINAHL, Cochrane Library, and SCOPUS for randomized controlled trials (RCTS) published from 2015 to 2025. Eligible studies included adult women breast cancer surgery patients who received aromatherapy during various periods of breast cancer. Where possible, data from the included studies were pooled using meta-analysis. GRADE approach was used to assess certainty of findings. Results: The search yielded 84 studies. Out of these, six were included in this review. On average, aromatherapy reduces pain and anxiety scores by 0.79 (standard mean difference (SMD)=-0.79, 95% CI -1.42, -0.16) and 0.53 (SMD=-0.53, 95 CI=-0.90, -0.16) units, respectively, compared to control condition [Low-quality of evidence]. The combination of aromatherapy with music reduces pain and anxiety by 1.26 (SMD= -1.26, 95 CI=-1.65, -0.87) and 1.08 (SMD = -1.08, 95 % CI: -1.45, -0.70) units respectively compared to standard care [Low-quality of evidence]. Conclusion: There is a potential role for the use of aromatherapy and music therapy, to alleviate anxiety and pain, especially for non-preoperative anxiety and pain. Further research is needed to inform the integration of aromatherapy into the management of anxiety and pain.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Renewable Lasso without Batch-Number Constraints: A Gradient-Enhanced Approach

arXiv:2606.11738v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study online estimation for high-dimensional generalized linear models with streaming data. First, for the non-distributed setting, we propose a gradient-enhanced surrogate loss that approximates the cumulative loss using only historical summaries, which modifies and improves upon the existing renewable estimation approach for the same model in the high-dimensional setting, and removes the batch-number constraint in previous studies. We then extend the method to distributed streaming data under the master-client architecture, where batches are partitioned across sites and only summaries (gradient vectors) are exchanged. Instead of directing applying the popular method of Jordan et al. (2019) to the surrogate quadratic loss, our adjusted approach does not require the clients to compute the full surrogate loss. We derive non-asymptotic error bounds under the high-dimensional scaling, without the stringent constraint on the number of batches in the previous studies. Simulation results under linear and logistic models, together with a real-data application, show improved accuracy over existing renewable estimators.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Adapt Only When It Pays: Budgeted Decision-Loss Priority for Delayed Online Time-Series Adaptation

Authors:

arXiv:2606.25068v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Online time-series forecasters receive labels only after horizon-dependent delays, while every adaptation step spends limited compute. We study when an online learner should update, not how to adapt at every opportunity, and introduce ADOWIP: a residual-adapter framework with sealed delay queues, exact budget accounting, and auditable update telemetry. Its main scheduler is an observed decision-loss priority gate that updates only after feedback is revealed, when downstream loss, optionally penalized by prediction MSE, exceeds a calibrated empirical quantile and budget remains. We prove hard-budget feasibility, projected-OGD regret for a convex linear accepted-update subproblem, and stability plus conditional finite-sample gate-selection statements. On public ETT capacity-planning tasks, a frozen calibration/evaluation split selects a gate that lowers held-out decision loss against always, fixed-period, and drift-triggered exact-update baselines under matched compute. Secondary threshold/load-index ETT suites are mixed: 33 of 41 selected contrasts clear the stricter cross-artifact Holm family, and the 8 nonpassing rows are explicitly excluded from primary claims. The same protocol improves an external UCI Bike capacity proxy with 20/0 held-out wins, and a fixed gate passes three full-year Capital Bikeshare station-rebalancing contrasts. Probe-based and finance experiments remain negative, delimiting the current scope of decision-prioritized adaptation.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

CP4SBI: Local Conformal Calibration of Credible Sets in Simulation-Based Inference

arXiv:2508.17077v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Current experimental scientists have been increasingly relying on simulation-based inference (SBI) to invert complex non-linear models with intractable likelihoods. However, posterior approximations obtained with SBI are often miscalibrated, causing credible regions to undercover true parameters. We develop $\texttt{CP4SBI}$, a model-agnostic conformal calibration framework that constructs credible sets with local Bayesian coverage. Our two proposed variants, namely local calibration via regression trees and CDF-based calibration, enable finite-sample local coverage guarantees for any scoring function, including HPD, symmetric, and quantile-based regions. Experiments on widely used SBI benchmarks demonstrate that our approach improves the quality of uncertainty quantification for neural posterior estimators using both normalizing flows and score-diffusion modeling.

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

DLWM: Diverse Latent World Models for Efficient Multimodal Reasoning

Reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have improved considerably in recent years. Existing approaches typically rely on explicit chain-of-thought or continuous latent-space trajectories to enhance multi-step reasoning. However, these methods generally assume that an input admits a single latent interpretation and unfold reasoning along a fixed path or under a uniform computation budget. In real-world multimodal settings, visual observations are often subject to occlusion, blur, viewpoint variation, or semantic ambiguity, giving rise to multiple plausible interpretations. A uniform reasoning strategy not only limits the model's ability to explore multiple hypotheses but also incurs high memory usage and rollout cost. We present DLWM (Diverse Latent World Models), a multimodal reasoning framework that combines latent-space reasoning with reinforcement learning. First, we construct a set of diverse latent world hypotheses in continuous latent space, each capturing a different plausible interpretation of the visual input, and unfold latent reasoning independently on each hypothesis. An orthogonality-based diversity regularizer explicitly prevents hypothesis collapse. Second, we formulate the latent reasoning process as a resource-constrained sequential decision problem and introduce a resource-aware reinforcement learning policy that adaptively allocates computation across hypotheses, dynamically deciding whether to expand, terminate, or merge reasoning paths, thereby substantially reducing memory footprint and improving rollout efficiency. Experiments on multiple multimodal reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that DLWM outperforms existing methods by 2-5 points in accuracy while reducing memory usage by 24%.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Energy-Efficient CNN Acceleration with MSDF Digit-Serial Arithmetic on FPGA

This paper presents an energy-efficient hardware acceleration of the convolutional layers in the U-Net architecture for image segmentation, implemented on FPGA. While digit-serial arithmetic, particularly most-significant-digit-first (MSDF) techniques, offers a compact hardware footprint, it suffers from initial latency before producing the first output digit. This delay accumulates in cascaded operations like multiplication followed by addition, where each unit introduces its own startup overhead. To overcome this, we propose a merged multiply-add (MMA) architecture that fuses these operations into a unified pipeline. Instead of incurring separate delays, the MMA introduces a single streamlined latency per iteration, shorter than the combined latency of conventional cascaded units, resulting in enhanced throughput and efficiency. The MMA units are designed to process spatial input depths in parallel, achieving significantly higher performance than both standalone MSDF-based and conventional designs. We evaluate the proposed design using U-Net as a target application. Despite operating at a lower frequency than a CPU, the FPGA-based accelerator achieves up to an order of magnitude higher energy efficiency, delivering up to $15.14$ GOPS/W compared to $1.93$ GOPS/W for CPU-based inference. The design also shows approximately $9\times$ reduction in energy consumption compared to MSDF-based FPGA implementations. These results highlight the efficacy of the merged arithmetic approach for resource-constrained, latency-sensitive edge applications in medical imaging and computer vision.

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

Efficient Zeroth-Order Federated Finetuning of Language Models on Resource-Constrained Devices

arXiv:2502.10239v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) is a promising paradigm for finetuning Large Language Models (LLMs) across distributed data sources while preserving data privacy. However, finetuning such large models is challenging on edge devices due to its high resource demand. Zeroth-order Optimization (ZO) estimates gradients through finite-difference approximations, which rely on function evaluations under random perturbations of the model parameters. Consequently, ZO with task alignment provides a potential solution, allowing finetuning using only forward passes with inference-level memory requirements and low communication overhead, but it suffers from slow convergence and higher computational demand. In this paper, we propose a new ZO-based method that applies a more efficient technique to reduce the computational demand associated with using a large number of perturbations while preserving their convergence benefits. This is achieved by splitting the model into consecutive blocks and allocating a higher number of perturbations to the second block, enabling efficient reuse of intermediate activations to update the full network with fewer forward evaluations. Our evaluation on RoBERTa-large, OPT1.3B, LLaMa-3-3.2B models shows up to $3\times$ reduction in computation compared to the other ZO-based techniques, while retaining the memory and communication benefits over first-order federated learning techniques.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Corticospinal tract risk modifies motor recovery after minimally invasive surgery for intracerebral hemorrhage: a secondary analysis of MISTIE-III

Objective: Outcome after surgical hematoma evacuation for intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) depends on hematoma location. As corticospinal tract (CST) integrity affects motor recovery after stroke, we hypothesized that CST integrity drives heterogeneity in surgical outcomes and investigated this in a secondary analysis of MISTIE-III participants. Methods: Risk of CST injury was categorized into four levels, based on the interaction between the CST, the hematoma, and perihematomal edema (PHE) on automatically segmented stability CT: no risk, PHE infiltration, hematoma infiltration, and complete interruption of the CST. Associations with outcome were tested using multivariable linear regression for motor National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) at day 180 and ordinal regression for modified Rankin Scale (mRS) at day 365, introducing an interaction term between CST risk and treatment group. Results: Day 180 motor NIHSS was significantly lower for 'no risk' ({beta}:-3.77, [95% confidence interval [CI]: -5.8 to -1.70], p=0.0003) and 'PHE infiltration' ({beta}:-2.3, [95%CI: -3.5 to -1.1]; p=0.0002) vs. 'complete interruption'. Surgery was associated with lower Day 180 motor NIHSS in participants with hematoma infiltration ({beta}:-2.07, [95%CI: -3.8 to -0.4], p=0.016). Compared to complete interruption, 'no risk' (adjusted odds ratio [aOR]:0.27, [95%CI: 0.10 to 0.74], p=0.01) and 'PHE infiltration' (aOR:0.41, [95%CI: 0.23 to 0.74]; p=0.003) were associated with lower odds of unfavorable day 365 mRS. Surgery was associated with lower mRS in participants with no risk (aOR:0.23, [95%CI: 0.05 to 0.97, p=0.045). Interpretation: Increasing CST risk is associated with worse motor recovery (day 180) and disability (day 365). CST risk modifies the effect of the MISTIE-III procedure on motor recovery and disability.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Topological Quantum Interferometry

arXiv:2606.19730v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Structured light provides high-dimensional Hilbert spaces holding tremendous potential for fundamental quantum optics and quantum technologies. However, existing characterization methods, like Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference, typically assume perfectly tuned conditions, overlooking the geometric physics governing spatial mode evolution. Here, we establish topological quantum interferometry driven by an interaction-based geometric phase, the exchange Berry phase (BPX). Our formalism generalizes $q$-plate state generation and characterization to arbitrary topological charges and (de)tuning conditions, demonstrating that BPX acts as a geometric marker governing spatial interference. We show BPX serves as a deterministic control parameter, decomposing two-photon spatial patterns into geometry-dictated fundamental modes. This mapping reveals topological invariants and phase singularities that function as a non-tomographic witness for state dimensionality estimation, circumventing full-state reconstruction. Being device-independent and highly scalable, this approach enables scalable high-dimensional characterization and topologically protected state selection, with direct applicability to quantum metrology and high-capacity quantum networks.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Optimal multi-spectral squeezing via deterministic 2D-phase optimization

arXiv:2606.20192v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Optimization routines are ubiquitous in quantum information technologies and essential to reach the resource levels required by quantum protocols. Specifically, multi-spectral squeezing for use in such protocols requires that losses be kept minimal at every stage, including coherent detection, which is performed by interfering the signal with a classical local-oscillator beam. This in turn requires control over all optical degrees of freedom of the beam in order to optimize the detection. The most general framework for this optimization relies on agnostic, off-the-shelf machine-learning techniques. Here we take the opposite approach: by focusing on a physical description of the specific optical process, we develop a deterministic sequential algorithm that provably reaches the global maximum of the visibility in a pixel basis and scales linearly with the number of pixels, thereby offering an efficient and theoretically grounded alternative to black-box optimization. In our waveguide-based setup, the optimized mask increases the visibility from 76% to 84%, corresponding to a 20% gain in mode-matching efficiency. Multi-spectral squeezing measurements confirm that this improvement translates directly into quantum readout: for the most squeezed spectral mode, the squeezing increases from $-2.08$ dB to $-2.64$ dB, consistent with the inferred efficiency gain. These results establish deterministic spatial phase shaping as an effective, interpretable route to enhanced multimode squeezing in waveguide platforms.

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

Expert-Driven Survival Machines: Improving Stratification and Interpretability in Multiple Clinical Cohorts

arXiv:2606.14608v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Survival prediction plays a central role for healthcare providers and clinical researchers. Accurate risk stratification enables early intervention and improved patient management. Most existing deep survival models learn one common feature representation for all patients, which may hide important differences between patient subgroups. In contrast, a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework allows different parts of the model to focus on different patient patterns, leading to more individualized representations. Therefore, in this work, we propose a mixture-of-experts enhanced adaptive deep clustering survival framework (AdaCSM) for modeling such heterogeneous survival patterns. We introduce a routing-based expert mechanism that enables conditional specialization within a parametric survival modeling framework. The proposed architecture allocates patients to specialized risk predictors dynamically while preserving the patient survival and subtype clustering objectives. We compare our method with state-of-the-art survival and deep clustering models on multiple real-world longitudinal clinical cohorts spanning diverse disease domains. The proposed method demonstrates improved predictive performance and leads to interpretable results in survival analysis.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

LAST: Bridging Vision-Language and Action Manifolds via Gromov-Wasserstein Alignment

We take a Gromov-Wasserstein perspective on Vision-Language-Action (VLA) learning, where the goal is to make the relational geometry of action representations compatible with the semantic geometry of VL embeddings. However, this alignment is non-trivial due to the mathematical heterogeneity between the domains: the semantic space of vision-language is topologically linear and isotropic, whereas the physical manifold of robotic action is non-Euclidean and anisotropic. Their disjoint metric structures render direct regression ill-posed. To resolve this incompatibility, we introduce LAST (Lie-algebraic Action Space Tokenizer), which reconstructs the action space to establish local metric compatibility with the VL modality via a two-stage transformation: (1) Global Topological Linearization: linearizing the action manifold via Lie-algebraic mapping, converting trajectories into a fixed-length, physically additive representation. (2) Local Metric Discretization: hierarchically discretizing the representation into schemas and whitened residuals, yielding approximately isotropic local charts that are statistically aligned with the semantic metric. By resolving the structural mismatch at both global and local levels, LAST enables VLA models with superior convergence and generalizability.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Trusted Multi-View Deep Learning Classification of Fetal Congenital Heart Disease with Feature-level and Decision-level Fusion

Congenital heart disease (CHD) refers to the abnormal anatomical structure caused by the abnormal development of the heart and great vessels during embryonic development. Traditional diagnostics often fail to achieve high accuracy and efficiency, especially given the complexity of cardiac anatomy. This study presents a specialized multi-view deep learning framework for CHD binary classification using echocardiographic images. A large-scale CHD dataset, including five views, was used to train the model, enabling it to integrate multi-angle image data. The framework utilizes advanced feature extraction and attention mechanisms to improve diagnostic precision and reliability. An uncertainty-based decision-making component is also integrated to handle low-quality images, enhancing diagnostic outcomes. Experimental results show that this method achieves top-tier performance on our dataset and provides a robust tool for early CHD detection, underscoring its potential for clinical use. The dataset and source code will be released upon paper acceptance.

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

Automatic ply-specific analyses of CFRP micrographs using shortest-path-based ply distinction

We present an automated approach to distinguish between ply instances in semantic segmentation masks of high-resolution carbon-fiber reinforced polymer micrographs. Interpreting the segmentation mask as a graph with pixels as vertices, enables us to use a shortest-path algorithm yielding the ply-separating paths. Thereby, we bridge the gap between semantic segmentation and ply instance segmentation using global information. We successfully apply our approach on high-resolution micrographs featuring a broad range of characteristics like artificially added gaps in single or multiple plies, different stacking sequences and ply traversing cracks. Assigning each fiber pixel to a ply based on the calculated paths, allows for a comprehensive, quantitative ply analysis with respect to its microstructural properties like the local fiber volume fraction as well as locally resolved ply and interleaf layer thickness. These insights help to reveal manufacturing-induced inhomogeneities, draw conclusions on manufacturing parameters and link mechanical properties to underlying microstructural imperfections.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Neural Events: Discrete Asynchronous Autoencoders for Event-Based Vision

Event cameras capture dynamic scenes with exceptional temporal fidelity by representing them as a continuous stream of microsecond resolution events. Each individual event, however, only carries minimal semantic value, merely signaling a localized brightness change. To derive meaningful signals, downstream algorithms need to quickly integrate cues from a potentially massive torrent of low-information events. Current architectures, however, are easily overwhelmed, struggling to balance capturing fine-grained temporal dynamics and maintaining a manageable data throughput. This paper proposes a framework to re-tokenize event streams into a small set of highly informative neural events, each representing a local spatio-temporal context window with a discrete learnable code. Every time this code flips, a neural event is triggered, yielding a highly compressed data stream. We demonstrate that, across object detection and classification, networks trained on neural events are on par or surpass the performance of state-of-the-art approaches while reducing the event rate by a factor of 2.0.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

BiPACE: Bisimulation-Guided Policy Optimization with Action Counterfactual Estimation for LLM Agents

Stepwise group-based RL is an attractive way to train long-horizon LLM agents without a learned critic: it reuses multiple sampled rollouts to estimate local advantages. Its weakness is less visible but more fundamental: every group-relative estimator assumes that the steps it compares are equivalent for credit assignment. We show that current agentic variants violate this assumption through a state-action credit mismatch. The observation-hash partition is overly fine on the state side, creating singleton groups with zero step-level signal, while a single within-group mean is too coarse on the action side, mixing state-value estimation with action-specific credit. We introduce BiPACE (Bisimulation-Guided Policy Optimization with Action Counterfactual Estimation), a drop-in advantage estimator that fixes both sides without adding a critic, auxiliary loss, or extra rollouts. BiGPO clusters steps by cosine distance in the actor's own hidden-state geometry, an empirical policy-induced proxy for bisimulation that substantially lowers the singleton rate left by observation hashing. PACE then recenters returns within each behavioral cluster using action-conditioned peer baselines; its Q-style instance estimates a local Q(s,a)-V(s) nonparametrically. On ALFWorld/Qwen2.5-7B, BiPACE_Q raises overall validation success from GiGPO's 90.8 to $97.1\pm0.9$ over three seeds, and crosses the 95% threshold on every seed, which GiGPO never does within the same budget. On Qwen2.5-1.5B it reaches $93.5\pm1.2$ versus GiGPO's 86.7, and on WebShop and TextCraft it improves over GRPO and GiGPO at both model scales. The measured BiPACE-specific overhead is 11.3% of a single training-step wall time. Yet it changes the estimator's comparison unit from surface identity to approximate behavioral equivalence plus action-side counterfactuals. The code is available at https://github.com/TianxiangZhao/BiPACE.

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

RoPE-Aware Bit Allocation for KV-Cache Quantization

Existing low-bit KV-cache quantizers often treat each cached key as a flat vector. Under RoPE, however, a key's contribution to a future attention logit decomposes into a position-dependent sum over two-dimensional frequency blocks. This makes key-cache quantization a block-wise bit-allocation problem: high-energy RoPE blocks are more sensitive to quantization error and should receive more bits. We introduce Block-GTQ, a RoPE-aware bit allocator for key-cache quantization built on TurboQuant-MSE(TQ-MSE). For each layer and KV head, Block-GTQ computes a label-free energy score for each RoPE block and greedily allocates integer bit widths by marginal gain. Under matched K/V bit budgets, Block-GTQ better preserves RoPE query-key logits on a ten-model diagnostic panel, cutting per-layer MAE by 32-80% at 2 and 3 b/dim K-only quantization and winning all 367/367 layer comparisons against uniform TQ-MSE. These fidelity gains translate to stronger downstream long-context retrieval, understanding, and reasoning. At K2V2 on Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, Block-GTQ raises the six-task NIAH average from 70.6 to 97.4, and the LongBench-EN average from 36.87 to 53.31. On AIME 2024/2025 with DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B, without an fp16 recent-key buffer, Block-GTQ at K3V2 scores 51.7/37.5, close to fp16's 54.2/37.9, whereas uniform TQ-MSE collapses to 0.0/0.0. We further implement a packed-cache serving path. On a single H800 GPU with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct, packed K3V3 achieves 3.24x KV-cache compression with fp16-comparable quality, runs 1.34x faster than fp16 FlashAttention2 at 128K context, reduces peak memory from 56.31 GB to 19.85 GB, and remains feasible at 256K and 512K where fp16 OOMs. Code is available at https://github.com/JIA-Lab-research/blockgtq.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

GauS: Differentiable Scheduling Optimization via Gaussian Reparameterization

arXiv:2602.20427v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Efficient operator scheduling is a fundamental challenge in software compilation and hardware synthesis. While recent differentiable approaches have sought to replace traditional ones like exact solvers or heuristics with gradient-based search, they typically rely on categorical distributions that fail to capture the ordinal nature of time and suffer from a parameter space that scales poorly. In this paper, we propose a novel differentiable framework, GauS, that models operator scheduling as a stochastic relaxation using Gaussian distributions, which fully utilize modern parallel computing devices like GPUs. By representing schedules as continuous Gaussian variables, we successfully capture the ordinal nature of time and reduce the optimization space by orders of magnitude. Our method is highly flexible to represent various objectives and constraints, which provides the first differentiable formulation for the complex pipelined scheduling problem. We evaluate our method on a range of benchmarks, demonstrating that Gaus achieves Pareto-optimal results.

20.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Structure Bioinformatics of Eight Human ATP Synthase Fo Subunits and Their AlphaFold3-Predicted Water-Soluble QTY Analogs

Human mitochondrial ATP synthase is an essential rotary motor enzyme that produces most of the cellular ATP through oxidative phosphorylation. Its membrane-embedded Fo sector contains highly hydrophobic transmembrane subunits that are challenging to study in aqueous environments without detergents. This study explores whether applying the QTY code can reduce the hydrophobicity of selected ATP synthase Fo subunits while preserving their overall molecular structures. We applied the QTY code to eight human ATP synthase Fo subunits: ATP6, ATP8, ATPK, ATP68, ATPMK, AT5G1, AT5G2, and AT5G3. Hydrophobic amino acids leucine (L), isoleucine (I), valine (V), and phenylalanine (F) in transmembrane regions were systematically replaced with hydrophilic glutamine (Q), threonine (T), and tyrosine (Y). Four native subunits with available CryoEM structures from human ATP synthase (PDB: 8H9S) were superposed with their AlphaFold3-predicted QTY analogs. The native ATP synthase Fo subunits superposed well with their respective QTY analogs. For the CryoEM-native comparisons, RMSD values ranged from 0.565[A] to 2.546[A]. For the AlphaFold3-native comparisons of subunits without CryoEM structures, RMSD values ranged from 0.204[A] to 0.297[A]. Despite substantial QTY substitutions in the transmembrane regions, ranging from 38.89% to 50.79%, the QTY analogs retained similar overall folds, molecular weights, and isoelectric points. Hydrophobic surface analysis showed that the QTY analogs had reduced hydrophobic patches compared with their native counterparts, with average hydrophobicity decreasing from 0.2959 in native proteins to -1.1023 in QTY analogs. These structural bioinformatics studies suggest that the QTY code can be applied to ATP synthase Fo subunits to generate more hydrophilic, potentially water-soluble analogs while preserving overall structural similarity. These results extend the application of the QTY code to the membrane-embedded Fo sector of ATP synthase and provide a foundation for future experimental studies testing whether these QTY analogs can be expressed, purified, and evaluated for assembly or proton-transfer-related functions.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

ScalingAR: Scaling Confidence for Autoregressive Image Generation

Test-time strategies have shown remarkable success in improving large language models, but their application to next-token prediction (NTP) autoregressive (AR) image generation remains largely underexplored. Existing test-time scaling (TTS) methods for visual autoregressive models (VAR) rely on frequent partial decoding and external reward models, which are inefficient and often ineffective for NTP-based image generation due to the inherent instability of intermediate decoding results. To address these limitations, we propose ScalingAR, a novel test-time scaling framework tailored for NTP-based AR image generation. ScalingAR introduces token entropy as a confidence signal and operates at two complementary levels: (i) Profile Level, integrates intrinsic uncertainty and conditional utilization into a unified confidence state, and (ii) Policy Level, leverages this state for adaptive trajectory pruning and dynamic guidance scheduling. Without requiring early decoding or auxiliary rewards, ScalingAR achieves significant improvements across diverse benchmarks. Experiments show that ScalingAR (I) improves base models by $12.5\%$ on GenEval and $15.2\%$ on TIIF-Bench, (II) reduces visual token consumption by $62.0\%$ while outperforming baselines, and (III) enhances robustness, mitigating performance degradation by $26.0\%$ in challenging scenarios. These results establish ScalingAR as a robust and efficient test-time scaling solution for autoregressive image generation.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Clipping Makes Distributed and Federated Asynchronous SGD Robust to Stragglers

arXiv:2606.13287v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In modern machine learning, parallelization of training is an important strategy for increasing scale. Asynchronous stochastic gradient descent (ASGD), which maximizes the utilization of available hardware by avoiding waiting for slow workers. However, with constant step sizes, the convergence of ASGD is nonetheless affected negatively by slow workers due to large delays in updates. At the same time, it has been empirically observed in asynchronous training of deep learning models that gradient clipping "stabilizes" training. In this work, we provide a theoretical justification for this behavior, as we show that clipping removes the dependence of the maximum delay in the oracle complexity. We employ a sub-Weibull model of gradient noise which generalizes sub-Gaussian and sub-exponential distributions to more heavy-tailed distributions, motivated by empirical observations in deep learning. We show convergence in expectation, and the first time in asynchronous optimization, convergence with high probability.

23.
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.

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

NeST: Neuron Selective Tuning for LLM Safety

arXiv:2602.16835v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safety alignment is essential for the responsible deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet, existing approaches often rely on heavyweight fine-tuning that is costly to update, audit, and maintain across model families. Full fine-tuning incurs substantial computational and storage overhead, while parameter-efficient methods, e.g., Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), trade efficiency for inconsistent safety gains and sensitivity to design choices. Safety intervention mechanisms reduce unsafe outputs without modifying model weights, but do not directly shape or preserve the internal representations that govern safety behavior. We present NeST, a Neuron-Selective Tuning framework for efficient post-hoc safety alignment. NeST identifies safety-relevant feed-forward neurons via activation probing on vanilla harmful and benign prompts, clusters neurons with similar activation profiles, and trains shared cluster-level updates while freezing the rest of the model. Importantly, NeST is trained only on vanilla malicious prompts, without using jailbreak-specific attack data, yet generalizes robustly to diverse jailbreaks. The learned updates are then folded into the original weights, incurring no inference-time overhead. Evaluated on 14 open-weight language and multimodal models, NeST outperforms lightweight baselines and approaches full fine-tuning robustness with significantly fewer trainable parameters. On text-only models, NeST reduces average jailbreak attack success rate from 44.5% to 1.1% while training only 0.4M parameters on average. Across multimodal settings, it reduces ASR from 55.3% to 1.1%, and for downstream fine-tuned variants, it restores safety by reducing ASR from 53.8% to 0.8%. These results show that robust, maintainable safety alignment can be achieved by concentrating adaptation on localized, functionally coherent safety structures.

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

K-Prism: A Knowledge-Guided and Prompt Integrated Universal Medical Image Segmentation Model

Medical image segmentation is fundamental to clinical decision-making, yet existing models remain fragmented. They are usually trained on single knowledge sources and specific to individual tasks, modalities, or organs. This fragmentation contrasts sharply with clinical practice, where experts seamlessly integrate diverse knowledge: anatomical priors from training, exemplar-based reasoning from reference cases, and iterative refinement through real-time interaction. We present $K-Prism$, a unified segmentation framework that mirrors this clinical flexibility by systematically integrating three knowledge paradigms: (i) $semantic priors$ learned from annotated datasets, (ii) $in-context knowledge$ from few-shot reference examples, and (iii) $interactive feedback$ from user inputs like clicks or scribbles. Our key insight is that these heterogeneous knowledge sources can be encoded into a dual-prompt representation: 1-D sparse prompts defining $what$ to segment and 2-D dense prompts indicating $where$ to attend, which are then dynamically routed through a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) decoder. This design enables flexible switching between paradigms and joint training across diverse tasks without architectural modifications. Comprehensive experiments on 18 public datasets spanning diverse modalities (CT, MRI, X-ray, pathology, ultrasound, etc.) demonstrate that K-Prism achieves state-of-the-art performance across semantic, in-context, and interactive segmentation settings.