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01.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Physics-Driven Zero-Shot Reconstruction of Isotropic 3D Fluorescence Microscopy under Undersampled Acquisition

Three-dimensional (3D) imaging represents the development of next generation of fluorescence microscopy. However, routine axial down-sampling makes isotropic resolution unrealistic. Here, we propose DeepUI, a physical zero-shot framework designed to achieve isotropic 3D fluorescence images from a low axial sampling rate. DeepUI fully leverages the intrinsic characteristics of 3D images through physics-guided degradation, which incorporates spatial-frequency joint learning to generate a scaled optical transfer function, combined with noise degradation and an up-sampling branch. Typically requiring just 5 minutes for training and 0.5 minutes for high-throughput and fast prediction, we demonstrate the superior performance of DeepUI to get isotropic results, and the exclusivity to axial down-sampling conditions, even in more challenging conditions, including defocused background, noise, and resolution blur.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

SoftMatcha 2: A Fast and Soft Pattern Matcher for Trillion-Scale Corpora

We present SoftMatcha 2, an ultra-fast and flexible search algorithm that enables search over trillion-scale natural language corpora in under 0.3 seconds while allowing semantic variations in the form of substitution, insertion, and deletion. Our approach employs string matching based on suffix arrays that scales well with corpus size, and represents words as vectors, which underpin its semantic flexibility. To mitigate the combinatorial explosion induced by the semantic relaxation of queries, our method is built on two key algorithmic ideas: dynamic corpus-aware pruning and fast exact lookup enabled by a disk-aware design. We theoretically analyze the efficiency of the proposed method, indicating that it can mitigate exponential growth in the search space. Empirically, on FineWeb-Edu (Lozhkov et al., 2024) (1.4T tokens), it attains substantially lower search latency than existing methods: infini-gram (Liu et al., 2024), infini-gram mini (Xu et al., 2025), and SoftMatcha (Deguchi et al., 2025). As a practical application, our method uncovers benchmark contamination in training corpora that existing approaches miss, and it also benefits information retrieval and paraphrase detection. We also provide an online demo of fast, soft search across corpora in seven languages.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Advances in 4D Representation: Geometry, Motion, and Interaction

We present a survey on 4D generation and reconstruction, a fast-evolving subfield of computer graphics whose developments have been propelled by recent advances in neural fields, geometric and motion deep learning, as well as 3D generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). While our survey is not the first of its kind, we build our coverage of the domain from a unique and distinctive perspective of 4D representations, to model 3D geometry evolving over time while exhibiting motion and interaction. Specifically, instead of offering an exhaustive enumeration of many works, we take a more selective approach by focusing on representative works to highlight both the desirable properties and ensuing challenges of each representation under different computation, application, and data scenarios. The main take-away message we aim to convey to the readers is on how to select and then customize the appropriate 4D representations for their tasks. Organizationally, we separate the 4D representations based on three key pillars: geometry, motion, and interaction. Our discourse will not only encompass the most popular representations of today, such as neural radiance fields (NeRFs) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), but also bring attention to relatively under-explored representations in the 4D context, such as structured models and long-range motions. Throughout our survey, we will reprise the role of large language models (LLMs) and video foundational models (VFMs) in a variety of 4D applications, while steering our discussion towards their current limitations and how they can be addressed. We also provide a dedicated coverage on what 4D datasets are currently available, as well as what is lacking, in driving the subfield forward. Project page:https://mingrui-zhao.github.io/4DRep-GMI/

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Physics-Driven Zero-Shot MRI Reconstruction with Non-local Image Priors

Zero-Shot Self-Supervised Learning (ZS-SSL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for accelerated Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) reconstruction, eliminating the reliance on fully-sampled external datasets. However, learning solely from a single under-sampled scan suffers from supervision scarcity and optimization instability, often leading to overfitting or artifacts. To address these challenges, we propose a robust physics-driven ZS-SSL framework that synergizes physical consistency with image-domain non-local priors. Our method introduces three core innovations: (1) a Coil Sensitivity Map (CSM)-Guided Dynamic Repository, which stabilizes the training trajectory by filtering physically inconsistent artifacts based on coil sensitivity constraints; (2) a SPIRiT-based regularization, which enforces k-space self-consistency via a learned correlation kernel and stochastic masking; (3) a Non-Local Self-Similarity (NSS) Pixel Bank, which leverages the high-fidelity reference established by the former modules to explicitly mine non-local anatomical similarities, thereby augmenting supervision in the image domain. Extensive experiments on the FastMRI dataset demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, particularly under high acceleration factors, effectively bridging the gap between zero-shot learning and supervised methods. The code is available at https://github.com/Zolento/NS-SSL.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Modelling the decadal expansion of West Nile virus in Italy: the role of climatic, anthropogenic, and macroecological drivers

Abstract BACKGROUND West Nile virus (WNV) is a growing health burden in Italy. Anticipating human infection risk is hampered by the pathogen's complex ecology, highlighting the need for comprehensive early-warning tools. AIM We aimed to model municipal-level WNV risk in Italy and characterize its decadal expansion in Italy, providing a comprehensive ecological understanding of viral emergence. METHODS We applied a machine learning framework to annual human WNV case data from 2014 to 2024. The model integrated a suite of environmental, socio-economic, and macroecological predictors to generate risk projections. We evaluated the model's performance through multiple validation settings. We also performed an anticipation test for the 2025 epidemic season, using 2024 environmental data to assess the model's predictive accuracy against observed 2025 human cases. RESULTS Our model achieved robust performance (True Skill Statistic > 0.4) and captured WNV progressive expansion from 184 predicted positive municipalities in 2014 to 2,012 in 2024 (an 11-fold increase in 11 years). Seasonal minimum temperature was the primary risk driver, followed by monitoring year and population density, indicating active spatial spread. Environmental suitability consistently preceded clinical detection. Municipalities with cases in 2023-2024 exhibited significantly higher predicted suitability during 2018-2022 than those without cases (average risk 0.58 vs 0.20). Our model successfully identified emerging risk hotspots along the Adriatic coast and southern Italy before the official human spillover of 2025. CONCLUSION Embedding macroecological drivers into WNV risk modelling provides an improved understanding of drivers of rapid WNV expansion. Our model enables proactive risk mapping, surveillance efforts, and targeted public health measures.

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

Quantum Batteries as Work Sources for Phase-Locked Parametric Amplification

Authors:

arXiv:2606.20306v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum batteries have been proposed as locally precharged work sources for superconducting quantum technologies, suggesting a route to reduce continuously supplied microwave drives. Here we ask whether the pump tone of a quantum-limited parametric amplifier can be replaced, or strongly duty-cycled, by a finite bosonic quantum battery. Quantizing the pump of a nondegenerate parametric amplifier exposes a resource distinction hidden in the classical description: stored pump energy can generate signal-idler photons, but pump phase coherence is required to generate a phase-locked amplifier field. In a closed trilinear model, coherent and phase-randomized coherent pumps with the same photon-number distribution produce comparable pair numbers, yet only the coherent pump produces anomalous two-mode coherence and an EPR-squeezed interference dip. Including leakage, we collect the emitted fields into cascaded temporal modes. At matched collector bandwidth, the coherent pump gives \(I_{\min}^{(f)}=0.553\), whereas the phase-randomized pump gives \(I_{\min}^{(f)}=1.94\) at nearly identical collected energy. Weak amplitude squeezing slightly improves the dip by reducing finite-pump number fluctuations while preserving the coherent displacement. Thus battery-powered parametric amplification requires phase-coherent stored energy, possibly assisted by number-noise reduction, rather than stored energy alone.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

TruncProof: A Guardrail for LLM-based JSON Generation under Token-Length Constraints

The LLM-based generation of machine-readable outputs such as JSON has attracted significant attention for integration with external systems. However, existing approaches cannot strictly enforce the maximum number of tokens to be generated, leading to infinite generation or truncated outputs that cause a system malfunction. To address this limitation, we propose TruncProof, a novel grammar-constrained generation method that enables LLMs to produce grammatically valid JSONs while adhering to a predefined token limit. By leveraging the properties of LL(1) parsers, TruncProof efficiently approximates the minimum number of tokens required to complete a grammatically valid output at each decoding step. Experiments on the Text-to-JSON instruction tasks demonstrate that TruncProof successfully generates syntactically correct outputs even under strict token constraints. Furthermore, we show that TruncProof can be effectively combined with advanced decoding strategies, resulting in outputs that are not only grammatically valid but also semantically accurate.

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

TAHOE: Text-to-SQL with Automated Hint Optimization from Experience

arXiv:2606.12387v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have democratized database access through Text-to-SQL, but moving from prototypes to production remains difficult. Real deployments must handle strict SQL dialects, massive schemas, and evolving user preferences, while supervised fine-tuning is costly and rigid and agentic test-time scaling is expensive. We present Tahoe, a system that treats prompt optimization as a dynamic data management problem. Tahoe uses an error-driven hint learning pipeline across Development and Deployment to consolidate debugging traces into a structured Hint Bank. Compiler feedback is distilled into reusable Syntax Hints for dialect-specific rules, while execution and user feedback are converted into Semantic Hints for schema- and user-specific logic. Tahoe further introduces a Strategy Layer that models conflicting user intents as competing strategies under shared natural-language triggers, with recency signals and post-learning attribution statistics that summarize empirical success, harm, inertness, and support. At inference time, Tahoe retrieves relevant hints and guides the LLM through Logic Planning followed by SQL Synthesis. We implement and evaluate the development-phase workflow, leaving deployment-time human-feedback updates for future work. On Spider 2.0-Snow, Tahoe substantially improves Text-to-SQL without updating model parameters. On 113 supervised Spider 2.0-Snow-0212 examples using GPT-5.5, Tahoe raises pass rate from 61.95 percent to 79.42 percent and pass-at-4 from 72.57 percent to 87.61 percent, achieves 100 percent Snowflake syntax pass rate, and reduces average compiler-feedback critic rounds from 2.79 to 0.12 per sampled candidate. The same Hint Bank also transfers to weaker backbones, including a 19.7 percentage-point pass-rate gain on Doubao-2.0-lite.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Green AI Carbon Optimizer: Carbon-Efficient Training Location Recommendation and Global AI Energy Demand Forecasting

arXiv:2606.14707v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI training and deployment consume substantial electricity, but carbon outcomes remain weakly integrated into routine model development decisions. This paper presents Green AI Carbon Optimizer with two primary contributions: (i) a carbon aware cloud region recommendation method for training workloads, and (ii) a power law forecasting pipeline for global AI energy demand. For location recommendation, we combine regional grid carbon intensity, renewable share, and data center Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) into a unified scoring model across 100+ regions from major cloud providers. For a reference workload (8*A100, 100h), estimated emissions in our sampled regions range from 7.74kg to 272.00kg CO2. Selecting the best region instead of the worst corresponds to a 97.2% reduction relative to the worst case. Ablation shows that ranking by renewable share alone can select regions with higher CO2 emissions than rankings that include grid carbon intensity. For forecasting, we fit a power law relation between parameter count and training energy using 26 anchor models. We combine this fit with scenario assumptions on model growth, hardware efficiency, and training frequency, and evaluate sensitivity to inference ratio and ecosystem scaling. Across scenarios, projected 2030 demand ranges from 7TWh to 1,436TWh under the stated assumptions, highlighting the importance of deployment choices, model scaling discipline, and transparent energy reporting.

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

ToaSt: Token Channel Selection and Structured Pruning for Efficient ViT

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved remarkable success across various vision tasks, yet their deployment is often hindered by prohibitive computational costs. While structured weight pruning and token compression have emerged as promising solutions, they suffer from prolonged retraining and inter-layer dependencies that complicate optimization, respectively. We propose ToaSt, a decoupled framework applying specialized strategies to distinct ViT components. We apply coupled head-wise structured pruning to Multi-Head Self-Attention modules, leveraging attention operation characteristics to enhance robustness. For Feed-Forward Networks (over 60% of FLOPs), we introduce Token Channel Selection (TCS), a training-free method that filters redundant noise channels at inference time. Extensive evaluations across nine diverse models, including DeiT, ViT-MAE, and Swin Transformer, demonstrate that ToaSt achieves superior trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency, consistently outperforming existing baselines. On ViT-MAE-Huge, ToaSt achieves 88.52% accuracy (+1.64%p) with 39.4% FLOPs reduction. ToaSt also transfers effectively to diverse downstream tasks (COCO detection, ADE20K segmentation, CIFAR-100 classification), achieving 52.2 versus 51.9 mAP on COCO. Code: github.com/SHANNonLab-HUFS/ToaSt

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Conversational Speech for Respiratory Triage in Primary Care: A Pilot Study

Authors:

Background. Respiratory complaints account for a substantial share of adult ambulatory care visits, and triaging them accurately has direct consequences for antibiotic stewardship and pathogen-specific therapy. Prior work has investigated voice as a triage signal, but that literature is dominated by single-condition detection from scripted speech in crowdsourced or controlled clinical settings and has not been evaluated at primary care scale on conversational ambient audio. Methods. A dataset of 514,377 ambient-recorded primary care visits from 379,225 adult patients at a US clinic network was used, with per-visit clinically assigned ICD-10 diagnosis codes and de-identified demographic and geographic metadata. Patient audio was extracted from each doctor-patient conversation, and spectral, voice quality, and prosodic features were computed. Eleven binary classification tasks were defined, aligned with a respiratory triage cascade (e.g., acute respiratory versus acute non-respiratory illness, and lower versus upper respiratory tract infection). An acoustic model (feed-forward network) was trained independently for each task using patient-stratified five-fold cross-validation and evaluated on a held-out test set. Each task's model was also compared against six non-acoustic baselines using a single demographic, geographic, or temporal variable. The 11 trained classifiers were composed into a hierarchical cascade and illustrated as case studies on selected patients. Results. Test-set AUC across the 11 tasks ranged from 0.602 (95% CI: 0.588-0.614) to 0.745 (95% CI: 0.742-0.748), with a mean expected calibration error of 0.018. Six of eleven binaries outperformed all confounder baselines. Four binaries showed median within-stratum AUC of 0.62-0.70 when the confounder was held fixed, indicating acoustic discrimination beyond what the confounder alone explains. The exception was the pneumonia versus non-pneumonia lower respiratory tract infection binary, which failed against the patient-city confounder baseline, plausibly reflecting a clinic-level difference in ICD-10 coding. Conclusion. Conversational primary care audio carries acoustic signal that discriminates clinically meaningful respiratory contrasts. Absolute performance is moderate, but the conditions are stricter than prior work: conversational speech and differential-diagnosis contrasts among sick patients. This pilot study is a baseline for voice-based clinical AI moving beyond sick-versus-healthy detection toward differential-diagnosis panels and a proof-of-concept for hierarchical reasoning.

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

Deployment-Centered Evaluation: Predicting Query-Level Rejection Risk in a Clinical LLM System

arXiv:2606.12702v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into clinical systems, making it essential to evaluate the real-world utility of these systems. However, static benchmarks tend to measure correctness rather than user acceptance, aggregate performance across queries, and require densely annotated datasets – leading to major blind spots for evaluating clinical systems. In this work, we perform a deployment-centered evaluation of an LLM system embedded within electronic health records at an academic medical center, where user feedback is sparse but closely reflects the deployment conditions. Specifically, we train a pre-response classifier that estimates the risk that a future interaction will result in the user rejecting the LLM response, based on query content and deployment-specific context available before generation. We conduct a prospective analysis of our model over 4.5 months of user feedback, finding that our prediction model achieves an AUROC of 0.719. Further, we estimate the benefit of such predictions in two downstream use cases (guardrail triggering and abstention). Our key conceptual insight is that making use of deployment-specific context (i.e., the provider type, department name, language model used for response), as opposed to only query content, improves the ability to predict whether the user will reject the system output. Altogether, our empirical case study demonstrates the feasibility of predicting user rejection using deployment-specific context, opening the door to targeted guardrails.

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

VGPT-RSI for RH-Adjacent Formal Progress: Boundary Certificates, Verified Finite Lagarias Inequalities, and Explicit Failure Localization

arXiv:2606.15096v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Riemann Hypothesis remains one of the central unsolved problems in mathematics. Rather than claiming proof, we investigate whether a verifiable AI-assisted reasoning system can produce reliable, formally checked partial progress while explicitly identifying the remaining mathematical obstructions. We apply the Verifiable Growing Physical Transformer with Recursive Self-Improvement (VGPT-RSI) to two RH-adjacent certification tasks. First, we construct and verify a finite RH-boundary certificate for inequality on a parameterized safe lower curve over a region. The numerical boundary curve is converted into a certificate-backed lower curve, audited using outward-rounded interval arithmetic and Arb/FLINT ball arithmetic, and then checked in Rocq/CoqInterval for the parameterized theorem. Second, we initiate a formal Lagarias-route certificate. Lagarias criterion states that RH is equivalent to the global inequality. We formalize the finite quantity and produce a Coq-checked finite certificate. The final system identifies the exact unresolved mathematical bottlenecks: formalizing the Lagarias equivalence, proving the global tail theorem beyond any finite cutoff, and potentially reducing counterexamples to colossally abundant or related extremal integers. These results demonstrate that VGPT-RSI can produce certified RH-adjacent formal progress, organize proof dependencies, and avoid overclaiming when the remaining obstruction is genuinely mathematical.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

RASC+: Retrieval-Constrained LLM Adjudication for Clinical Value Set Authoring

Clinical value sets define the standardized terminology codes used in quality measurement, phenotyping, cohort construction, and clinical decision support. The recently introduced Retrieval-Augmented Set Completion (RASC) benchmark showed that direct zero-shot large language model (LLM) generation is poorly suited to this task: clinical code systems are large, version-controlled, and not reliably memorized by language models. We study a stage-wise alternative in which candidate-pool construction is optimized for recall and a constrained LLM adjudicator is optimized for candidate selection. On the full 3,744-value-set RASC test split, Qwen3-based retrieval with vocabulary-aware expansion and code-display rescue retrieval increases candidate-pool recall from the original RASC retrieval baseline of 0.553 to 0.730; on the held-out-publisher stratum, pool recall is 0.655. The higher-recall pool alone is not sufficient: applying the original SAPBert cross-encoder to this expanded pool gives full-test macro F1 of 0.287 and held-out-publisher macro F1 of 0.233. Replacing the stage-2 selector with blinded GPT-5 adjudication over the same pool increases full-test macro F1 to 0.549 and held-out-publisher macro F1 to 0.533. These results show that retrieval-constrained LLM adjudication can substantially improve value set completion while preserving the safety constraint that all returned codes must come from an auditable candidate pool.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Learning to Refine Hidden States for Reliable LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2606.17524v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models show strong reasoning ability, but their internal reasoning process can remain unstable in complex multi-step settings, where early hidden-state errors may propagate to incorrect predictions. We propose ReLAR, a reinforcement-guided latent refinement framework that iteratively updates hidden representations before decoding. ReLAR maintains a compact latent reasoning state and uses learned depth and action controllers to adaptively determine both the number and direction of refinement steps. The controllers are trained with a policy gradient objective based on step-wise likelihood improvement, enabling efficient input-dependent reasoning without explicit chain-of-thought generation. Experiments on medical, mathematical, multi-hop reasoning, and open-ended generation benchmarks show that ReLAR improves accuracy, generation quality, and reasoning stability with substantially lower inference overhead than explicit reasoning baselines.

16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Optimal Couplings of Levy Processes in the Class of Immersion Couplings

arXiv:2606.24290v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the optimal coupling problem for Levy processes on R^d with respect to the quadratic cost. For any two such processes with finite second moments, we prove that the optimal Levy coupling constructed in Kang and Lim (2025), which was previously shown to be optimal among Feller couplings, is in fact optimal among the larger class of immersion couplings. The proof makes use of a characterization of immersion couplings, which is equivalent to the classical martingale preservation definition but more convenient for our purposes. The construction is based on two fundamental ingredients: the existence of an optimal coupling within the class of Levy couplings, and a dual formulation of the associated optimization problem. While both results were previously established in Kang and Lim (2025), we provide here simpler and more transparent proofs relying only on optimal transport between infinitely divisible measures and a generalized minimax principle. These arguments are self-contained and may be of independent interest.

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

Risk Under Pressure: Compute-Aware Evaluation of Adversarial Robustness in Language Models

arXiv:2606.11409v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Adversarial robustness evaluations of large language models (LLMs) typically report attack success rate (ASR) under fixed query budgets, implicitly treating all attacks as equally costly. In practice, the computational expense of different attack strategies can vary by orders of magnitude. Consequently, ASR at a fixed budget can obscure the true effort required to jailbreak a model, thereby making it hard to determine whether an attack's cost justifies its payoff to the attacker. We propose a compute-aware evaluation framework based on computational pressure, measured in cumulative floating-point operations (FLOPs), as a proxy for adversarial effort. We introduce risk-compute curves, which map compute budgets to attack risk, and derive two metrics that summarize the average pressure required for a given attack to succeed. Across ten models spanning three families and four different stages in language model training and alignment, evaluated with three attack strategies (gradient-based, iterative refinement, and template-based) on two jailbreak robustness benchmarks, we find: (1) alignment training has non-monotonic effects on compute-space robustness; (2) scaling model size reduces gradient-based attack effectiveness but has limited impact on cheaper template-based attacks; (3) gradient-based attacks optimized on a surrogate model can transfer to a separate target model, providing a way to reduce attacker costs; (4) compute cost varies by up to ${\approx}5{\times}$ across harm categories within a single model; and (5) safety-aligned RL increases aggregate cost while leaving some categories disproportionately accessible. We release our framework to enable compute-aware risk assessment and evaluation.

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

What sentiment analysis can't see: Measuring whether customers were helped, and what went wrong, across 70,000 support conversations

Most companies read their customer support data at scale using sentiment analysis, which measures how customers sound rather than whether they were satisfied with the result. We tested a richer alternative on 70,450 support conversations from a leading online fundraising platform: alongside tone, we used GPT-5.4 to estimate each customer's satisfaction and to flag whether they reported a concrete problem, then validated all three readings against the 1-to-5 ratings customers left on the conversations they rated. The satisfaction estimate tracked those ratings far better than sentiment did, correlating at 0.47 against 0.36 and flagging unhappy customers with far fewer false alarms. The structured read also sees what sentiment cannot: tone and satisfaction disagree in 44% of conversations, a single "Neutral" label hides everything from quietly satisfied customers to ones who quietly gave up, and the largest group of all is "tolerated friction," customers who are satisfied but still reporting a fixable problem, a standing issue that no sentiment-based dashboard can surface. The broader finding is that LLM-based annotation can capture far more than the tonality of a customer's language, offering strong potential for new business metrics grounded instead in the customer's state (whether they were satisfied) and the cause of their problem extracted directly from the raw textual data of interactions and feedback.

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

CaReTS: A Multi-Task Framework Unifying Classification and Regression for Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2511.09789v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent advances in deep forecasting models have achieved remarkable performance, yet most approaches still struggle to provide both accurate predictions and interpretable insights into temporal dynamics. This paper proposes CaReTS, a novel multi-task learning framework that combines classification and regression tasks for multi-step time series forecasting problems. The framework adopts a dual-stream architecture, where a classification branch learns the stepwise trend into the future, while a regression branch estimates the corresponding deviations from the latest observation of the target variable. The dual-stream design provides more interpretable predictions by disentangling macro-level trends from micro-level deviations in the target variable. To enable effective learning in output prediction, deviation estimation, and trend classification, we design a multi-task loss with uncertainty-aware weighting to adaptively balance the contribution of each task. Furthermore, four variants (CaReTS1–4) are instantiated under this framework to incorporate mainstream temporal modelling encoders, including convolutional neural networks (CNNs), long short-term memory networks (LSTMs), and Transformers. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that CaReTS outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) algorithms in forecasting accuracy, while achieving higher trend classification performance.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

MERGE: Minimal Expression-Replacement GEneralization Test for Natural Language Inference

As many benchmarks have become saturated, it has become increasingly important to create new datasets that evaluate the generalization capacity of current state-of-the-art models in reasoning. However, designing high-quality reasoning datasets is challenging, as their manual construction is costly, and their automatic generation is unreliable, often leading to synthetic data with limited scope. In this paper, we propose the Minimal Expression-Replacement GEneralization (MERGE) test that evaluates the robustness of reasoning models against non-adversarial variants of existing evaluation datasets. We automatically obtain high-quality variants from the original instances with Minimal Expression REplacement (MERE) generation, which uses Masked Language Models (MLMs) and safeguarding filters. We apply the MERGE test to Natural Language Inference (NLI), a popular task of reasoning. We generate new NLI datasets from two widely used existing ones with the MERE generation and use them to evaluate multiple strong NLI models. The results indicate that both LLMs and fine-tuned NLI models generalize poorly: they struggle to consistently and correctly classify variants minimally different in form and reasoning from the original ones. Further, we also analyze how certain aspects in variant generation, such as the word class and the source MLMs, affect model performance.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Panel-level multilocus methylation quantification in native cell-free DNA by PCR-compatible sequential enzymatic processing

DNA methylation is informative for liquid biopsy, but low template abundance, distributed methylation signals and workflow complexity limit implementation. Here we present Delta-HLD, a PCR-compatible methylation assay platform that quantifies methylation directly in native DNA through sequential hybridization, ligation and methylation-sensitive digestion. The assay co-reports methylation-dependent signals from multiple loci through a shared amplification architecture, generating a single panel-level PCR readout. We established the chemistry, optimized panel size and composition through model-guided experiments, and implemented the assay as a triplex qPCR workflow with per-sample internal process controls. Plasma proof-of-concept analyses showed discriminatory signal in CRC and proof-of-concept transferability to hepatocellular carcinoma. Additional platelet-retaining experiments identified a strategy to increase recovery of analyzable circulating templates while reducing genomic DNA recognition. Delta-HLD provides a compact PCR-compatible framework for low-input methylation analysis without base conversion.

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

SmartFont: Dynamic Condition Allocation for Few-Shot Font Generation

Few-shot font generation simultaneously requires global structural completeness and fine-grained local style fidelity. Existing methods usually either rely on global content-style modeling, which is robust but imperfectly disentangled, or emphasize component/local modeling, which captures fine details but relies heavily on local priors and reference coverage. We argue that the key challenge is not merely to learn purer conditions, but to organize complementary yet biased global and local conditions through multi-level allocation during generation. To this end, we propose SmartFont, a diffusion-based few-shot font generation framework that combines global content-style generation with weakly supervised local corrective experts. The local branch performs semantic-spatial allocation by learning expert-wise local concepts and semantically meaningful spatial maps under weak component supervision, enabling fine-grained correction without requiring explicit component-conditioned inference. On top of this, a denoising-state condition allocation module adaptively weights global content, global style, and local corrective feature across timesteps and injection blocks. Extensive experiments show that SmartFont achieves better global-local balance, improves glyph quality and local detail fidelity.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Localizing Credit at the Divergence: Path-Conditioned Self-Distillation for LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2606.15576v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards assigns a single scalar to each rollout, leaving token-level credit assignment underspecified in long reasoning traces. On-policy self-distillation addresses this by letting the same model act as a teacher conditioned on privileged information, producing a dense per-token signal. But the common choice of a ground-truth answer is only an endpoint cue: on terse-answer tasks, the teacher falls silent at the intermediate positions where path-level guidance matters most. We propose Hindsight Self-Distillation (HSD), which conditions the teacher on a successful peer rollout drawn from the current training group. Such a peer is an exact sample from the success-conditioned policy, requiring no additional sampled rollouts. By providing a full successful continuation rather than only the final answer, the resulting credit signal concentrates at the divergence position between a failed rollout and a successful peer. Across Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-32B on math and code benchmarks, HSD obtains the best result against GRPO variants and on-policy distillation baselines, with the largest gains on terse-answer tasks such as AIME.

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

Unlocking Diffusion Hierarchies: Adaptive Timestep Selection for Zero-Shot Segmentation

Zero-shot segmentation has recently shown notable improvement by leveraging the rich visual priors in large-scale text-to-image diffusion models, such as Stable Diffusion. However, current diffusion-based methods often face limitations due to the trade-off between spatial resolution and contextual information, as well as their reliance on a single static timestep for feature extraction. To overcome these challenges, our work introduces two key advancements. First, our Contextual Similarity Maps fuse high-resolution attention maps with rich U-Net encoder features, providing both fine-grained and robust per-pixel representations. Second, we identify an emergent hierarchical semantic progression within the denoising process of various diffusion models: representations transition from part-level abstractions at earlier timesteps to object-level abstractions at later stages. Leveraging this insight, we introduce a mechanism to adaptively select the optimal timestep for each pixel. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing zero-shot segmentation baselines, validating the efficacy of combining contextual features with dynamic, hierarchical timestep selection.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Certification of the genuine resolution of photon number resolving detectors

arXiv:2606.14365v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Photon-number-resolving (PNR) detectors are essential components of photonic quantum technologies, yet thus far, no practical metric exists to certify how many photons they can genuinely resolve in a single measurement. Here we introduce an operational framework for quantifying the capability of a PNR detector to distinguish between different numbers of photons, i.e. its genuine resolution. In turn, we develop a practical and scalable protocol for certifying the genuine resolution of a detector, which is based on coherent state probes. We apply the method to a 28-pixel photon-number-resolving superconducting nanowire single-photon detector (PNR-SNSPD) and certify genuine four-outcome resolution. Our work highlights the critical requirements in terms of detector efficiency towards achieving high genuine resolution. This approach provides an operational benchmark for PNR detectors and fills a crucial gap in the characterization of photonic quantum devices.