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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

BindEdit: Taming Attention Leakage for Precise Multi-Object Image Editing

Real image editing enables precise manipulation of visual content, yet existing methods often fail in complex multi-object scenarios, causing semantic blending, object duplication, or incomplete edits. We attribute these failures to attention leakage, where signals across spatial regions and text tokens become entangled during the denoising process. Specifically, we identify two distinct forms of leakage: Edit-Token Leakage, where ambiguous token-region alignment leads to object blending, and Source Dominance Leakage, where tokens of unchanged source objects overwhelm the attention intended for target entities. To resolve these leakages, we propose BindEdit, which enforces attention-level constraints within a single diffusion trajectory. To suppress Edit-Token Leakage, BindEdit jointly regularizes cross- and self-attention so that each target token group is bound to its corresponding spatial region while maintaining instance-level separation. To suppress Source Dominance Leakage, a cross-attention re-balancing mechanism amplifies target token influence and attenuates residual source semantics within editable regions. Moreover, a region fidelity term ensures that each target concept is expressed coherently across the entire editing mask. Additionally, we propose a comprehensive multi-object benchmark encompassing diverse object counts and categories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BindEdit consistently outperforms existing methods within a single diffusion trajectory, maintaining robust performance across both single- and multi-object editing scenarios.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

A Gauge-Covariant Geometric Framework for Non-Hermitian Quantum Systems

arXiv:2606.15922v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop a comprehensive, gauge-covariant geometric framework for non-Hermitian quantum systems in the quasi-Hermitian regime, that is, the region of parameter space where the non-Hermitian Hamiltonian admits a real spectrum and a positive-definite metric operator. We build this framework by elevating the Dyson map to a central geometric object. This map is the transformation that converts a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian into an equivalent Hermitian one. From it we construct the Dyson connection and decompose it into Hermitian and anti-Hermitian parts, identified respectively as {\it stretching } and {\it rotation } components. This decomposition cleanly separates the genuine physical metric deformations from the unitary gauge redundancies. Working with manifestly gauge-covariant states, we then derive the complex non-Hermitian Berry phase and the quantum geometric tensor (QGT), and show that the non-Hermitian geometric curvature originates from the non-commutativity of the stretching components at the operator level. We further analyse the geometric singularities near an exceptional point (EP) and uncover a distinct hierarchy of divergences. For a general two-level non-Hermitian model, the quantum metric tensor (QMT) exhibits a leading-order divergence $\sim |\epsilon_\mu|^{-2}$, while the Berry curvature shows a weaker, subleading divergence $\sim |\epsilon_\mu|^{-3/2}$, with $\epsilon_\mu$ denoting the parameter displacement from the EP along an individual parameter axis $\mu$. Finally, we examine physical realizations of this model, including the non-Hermitian Su–Schrieffer–Heeger (SSH) and Hatano–Nelson (HN) models, where exact analytical results confirm the predicted critical scaling laws and illustrate the metric-deformation-driven non-Hermitian geometries.

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

LibriConvo: Simulating Conversations from Read Literature for ASR and Diarization

We introduce LibriConvo, a synthetic conversational speech corpus for speaker diarization and automatic speech recognition (ASR), built by instantiating the previously proposed Speaker-Aware Simulated Conversation (SASC) framework in a dataset and benchmarking setting. The main contribution of this paper is a corpus construction pipeline and benchmark derived from that framework. To make the data more suitable for downstream ASR and diarization, conversational timing statistics are estimated from English CallHome using external voice activity detection, long pauses are compressed, LibriTTS utterances are grouped by book to improve local semantic continuity, and room impulse responses are selected with a spatial-plausibility heuristic. The resulting corpus contains 240.1 hours of audio across 1,496 dialogues involving 830 speakers, partitioned into speaker-disjoint train, validation, and test splits. We report baseline results for both diarization and ASR. On the test split, Sortformer outperforms the pyannote pipeline in diarization (11.1\% vs.~24.4\% DER). For ASR, a Fast Conformer-CTC XLarge model fine-tuned with Serialized Output Training achieves 7.29\% WER and 6.97\% cpWER, outperforming zero-shot Whisper-large-v3. These results position LibriConvo as a practical benchmark for studying synthetic conversational speech and for evaluating multi-speaker speech processing systems.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Multi-LCB: Extending LiveCodeBench to Multiple Programming Languages

arXiv:2606.20517v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LiveCodeBench (LCB) has recently become a widely adopted benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs) on code-generation tasks. By curating competitive programming problems, constantly adding fresh problems to the set, and filtering them by release dates, LCB provides contamination-aware evaluation and offers a holistic view of coding capability. However, LCB remains restricted to Python, leaving open the question of whether LLMs can generalize across the diverse programming languages required in real-world software engineering. We introduce Multi-LCB, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs across twelve programming languages, including Python. Multi-LCB transforms Python tasks from the LCB dataset into equivalent tasks in other languages while preserving LCB's contamination controls and evaluation protocol. Because it is fully compatible with the original LCB format, Multi-LCB will automatically track future LCB updates, enabling systematic assessment of cross-language code generation competence and requiring models to sustain performance well beyond Python. We evaluated 24 LLMs for instruction and reasoning on Multi-LCB, uncovering evidence of Python overfitting, language-specific contamination, and substantial disparities in multilingual performance. Our results establish Multi-LCB as a rigorous new benchmark for multi-programming-language code evaluation, directly addressing LCB's primary limitation and exposing critical gaps in current LLM capabilities.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

JustDiag!: A Diagnostic Justification Engine for Accountable Root Cause Analysis

arXiv:2606.19407v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models can produce fluent root cause analyses, but fluent final answers alone are insufficient evidence for accountability in high-stakes operations. In real incident response, engineers need to know what evidence supported a diagnosis, which alternatives were considered, where contradictions remained, and whether the system resolved the case or preserved uncertainty. We address this gap with JustDiag, a diagnostic justification engine for RCA that maintains an explicit process state over evidence, findings, competing hypotheses, conflicts, and next checks. We evaluated the system on 66 real-world incidents using a two-layer protocol that separately scores final-answer quality and process quality. Relative to a matched control without diagnostic justification, JustDiag achieved stronger outcome and process scores, while accepting slightly lower terminal completion due to more calibrated non-closure. These results suggest that accountable RCA requires explicit diagnostic justification artifacts and process-aware evaluation, not only fluent final answers.

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

Token Factory: Efficiently Integrating Diverse Signals into Large Recommendation Models

arXiv:2606.19635v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Recommendation Models (LRMs) have demonstrated promising capabilities in industry-scale recommendation tasks. However, holistically integrating traditional signals into these transformer-based architectures effectively and efficiently remains a major challenge. Conventional approaches that "textualize" these signals directly or create discrete item representations often lead to excessively long prompts, substantial memory footprints, and high computational overhead. To overcome these limitations, we propose "Token Factory", a framework designed to transform traditional signals into "soft tokens" that can be directly processed by LRMs. This approach enables efficient integration and compression of heterogeneous input features, preventing prompt length explosion while enhancing model performance. We detail the architecture of Token Factory and present experimental results validating its effectiveness in a production-scale recommendation environment.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Vine Codes: Low-Overhead Quantum LDPC Codes on a Planar Square Grid

arXiv:2606.20263v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The surface code is a promising route towards large-scale quantum computing, requiring only nearest-neighbour gates amenable to superconducting hardware. However, surface codes incur large qubit overheads. Novel quantum low-density parity check (qLDPC) codes promise to reduce overheads but require long-range connections that are difficult to achieve on superconducting platforms. Here, we introduce "Vine Codes" - qLDPC codes that are implementable on a planar square grid through nearest-neighbour, two-qubit gates native to superconducting platforms (iSWAP and CZ). Our approach generalises "Directional Codes" recently introduced by Gehér et. al. (2025) which are constrained to a torus. In contrast, vine codes have open boundary conditions constructed with the aid of routing qubits. We perform extensive numeric searches and find promising candidate vine codes, e.g. [[121,4,6]], [[221,6,7]], and [[234,9,6]] codes. We verify the circuit distances and show that data and measure qubits required can be reduced by up to ~28% relative to the surface code at a circuit distance of 7. Even including routing qubits, vine codes require fewer total qubits than the surface code (e.g. ~18% reduction at circuit distance 10) and benefits are expected to increase at higher distances. We perform circuit-level noise simulations to demonstrate that under a realistic noise model and at a near-term noise rate of $10^{-3}$, vine codes can perform better than the surface code while using fewer qubits. We give an exhaustive list of all unique vine codes up to stabiliser-weight 9. We additionally introduce "Flip-Vine Codes" which possess single-qubit transversal Clifford gates useful for fault-tolerant logic and magic state cultivation. We furthermore construct examples of generalised open boundaries for vine codes that go beyond the familiar X/Z boundaries of the surface and tile codes.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

On the Benefits of Weight Normalization for Overparameterized Matrix Sensing

arXiv:2510.01175v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While normalization techniques are widely used in deep learning, their theoretical understanding remains relatively limited. In this work, we establish the benefits of (generalized) weight normalization (WN) applied to the overparameterized matrix sensing problem. We prove that WN with Riemannian optimization achieves linear convergence, yielding an exponential speedup over standard methods that do not use WN. Our analysis further demonstrates that both iteration and sample complexity improve polynomially as the level of overparameterization increases. To the best of our knowledge, this work provides the first characterization of how WN leverages overparameterization for faster convergence in matrix sensing.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Approximating Whittle-Matern Fields over Discretized Manifolds

arXiv:2606.13827v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Markovian Whittle-Matérn fields have been convergently approximated by discrete Gauss Markov Random Fields (GMRFs) with sparse precision matrices using a Finite Element approximation of the two-parameter family, \[ (\kappa^2 - \Delta)^{\alpha/2} u = \mathcal{W}, \;\; \kappa \in \mathbb{R}, \; \alpha \in \mathbb{N}. \] of SPDEs. Using recent developements in the analysis of Discrete Exterior Calculus (DEC), we present a different, yet closely related, convergent GMRF approximation to these Matérn fields over complete, boundaryless Riemannian manifolds discretized as well-centered simplicial complexes. This convergent method (i) is agnostic to $\alpha, \kappa$ and thus allows a universal approximation scheme for the precision and covariance matrices of the entire $(\alpha, \kappa)$-family of GMRFs, so they may be inferred rather than guessed. (ii) inherently models pointwise and piecewise-smoothed measurements of a random field and approximates both equally well (iii) is computationally independent of the interpolants used - it suffers no overhead if one convergent interpolant were replaced with another suitable interpolant over the same mesh. Furthermore, we show that, on discretizations that are well-connected in a precise sense, and volume-concentrated, the precision matrices are spectral functions of a graph-laplacian. We provide a low rank approximator to the family of such Matérn GMRFs and mention a use case: reducing the number of measurements needed to model the GMRF by compressed-sensing.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

CoRe-MoE: Contrastive Reweighted Mixture of Experts for Multi-Terrain Humanoid Locomotion with Gait Adaptation

arXiv:2606.04718v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Humans primarily rely on walking and running to traverse complex terrains. Similarly, humanoid robots should be able to smoothly transition between walking and running while maintaining natural and stable locomotion. However, unifying gait transition and multi-terrain adaptation within a single policy remains challenging due to gradient interference between tasks and the distribution shift caused by terrain variations. Although Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures can mitigate multi-skill interference, direct joint training often fails to achieve clear expert specialization. To address these challenges, we propose CoRe-MoE, a two-stage reinforcement learning framework that decouples gait generation from terrain adaptation. In the first stage, a stable locomotion policy is learned to produce natural walking and running behaviors with smooth transitions. In the second stage, a terrain-aware MoE branch is introduced, and the gating network is trained with a contrastive objective to learn structured terrain representations and promote expert specialization. The final action is obtained through weighted fusion of the base gait policy and the terrain-aware branch, enabling the policy to preserve stable locomotion while adapting to complex terrains. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms baseline approaches in terms of success rate, locomotion stability, and multi-terrain adaptability. Furthermore, zero-shot deployment on a Unitree G1 humanoid robot validates the effectiveness of our framework, achieving robust walking and running across stairs, slopes, steps, obstacles, and unstructured outdoor terrains while maintaining accurate foothold control and dynamic stability.

11.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-05

Structural motif search across the protein universe with Folddisco

Authors:

Detecting similar protein structural motifs in large structure collections is computationally expensive. We developed Folddisco, a fast structural motif search tool that uses an index of position-independent geometric features, including side-chain orientation, combined with a rarity-based scoring system. Folddisco is 20-fold faster in querying and fourfold more storage-efficient than existing methods while improving accuracy. Folddisco is freely available online ( https://folddisco.foldseek.com ), along with a webserver ( https://search.foldseek.com/folddisco ). Folddisco enables protein structural motif search in million scale databases.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Momentum LMS Theory beyond Stationarity: Stability, Tracking, and Regret

arXiv:2602.11995v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In large-scale data processing scenarios, data often arrive in sequential streams generated by complex systems that exhibit drifting distributions and time-varying system parameters. This nonstationarity challenges theoretical analysis, as it violates classical assumptions of i.i.d. (independent and identically distributed) samples, necessitating algorithms capable of real-time updates without expensive retraining. An effective approach should process each sample in a single pass, while maintaining computational and memory complexities independent of the data stream length. Motivated by these challenges, this paper investigates the Momentum Least Mean Squares (MLMS) algorithm as an adaptive identification tool, leveraging its computational simplicity and online processing capabilities. Theoretically, we derive tracking performance and regret bounds for the MLMS in time-varying stochastic linear systems under various practical conditions. Unlike classical LMS, whose stability can be characterized by first-order random vector difference equations, MLMS introduces an additional dynamical state due to momentum, leading to second-order time-varying random vector difference equations whose stability analysis hinges on more complicated products of random matrices, which poses a substantially challenging problem to resolve. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data streams demonstrate that MLMS achieves rapid adaptation and robust tracking, in agreement with our theoretical results especially in nonstationary settings, highlighting its promise for modern streaming and online learning applications.

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

UniIntervene: Agentic Intervention for Efficient Real-World Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.12372v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning (HiL-RL) has emerged as an effective paradigm for real-world robotic manipulation, enabling online policy improvement with human guidance. However, current HiL-RL frameworks remain intervention-intensive, relying on frequent human corrections to redirect the policy out of unproductive exploration, which incurs high labor cost and limits real-world scalability. To address this, we propose UniIntervene, an agentic intervention model that detects unproductive exploration and autonomously recovers the policy toward high-value states, taking over the bulk of interventions from human operators. Specifically, UniIntervene first performs future-conditioned action-value estimation, predicting the latent consequence of the current action and evaluating its induced value, which provides a more stable progress signal. Building on this, a temporal value-risk critic aggregates recent value dynamics and triggers intervention when the estimated value exhibits sustained stagnation or degradation. When intervention is required, UniIntervene retrieves a high-value recovery target from a memory of past intervention episodes and produces executable corrective actions through a goal-conditioned recovery policy. In this way, UniIntervene turns intervention from passive human correction into a value-aware recovery process for efficient real-world RL. Extensive experiments on diverse real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate that UniIntervene improves the average success rate by 8.6% while reducing human interventions by 57% relative to state-of-the-art HiL-RL baselines.

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

Biomazon: A Multimodal Dataset for 3D Forest Structure and Biomass Modeling in the Amazon Basin

Accurate, spatially explicit characterization of tropical forest structure is essential for carbon accounting and ecosystem monitoring, yet most ML pipelines predict canopy-top height proxies (e.g., RH95/RH98) or AGBD as separate scalar targets, rather than learning the forest vertical structure as an ordered profile. The community lacks a ML-ready multimodal benchmark for predicting the entire GEDI RH profile jointly with AGBD, or for evaluating methods that enforce physically consistent ordering across RH percentiles. We address this with Biomazon, a 20 m multimodal benchmark dataset over the Amazon Basin that pairs GEDI RH and AGBD targets with multi-sensor predictors (Sentinel-1/2, ALOS-2 PALSAR-2, Copernicus DEM, Dynamic World LULC, and AlphaEarth embeddings) under standardized spatial splits and evaluation protocols. Using a shared encoder-decoder with task-specific heads as a baseline framework, we conduct a comprehensive ablation study of (i) backbone/model scale, (ii) modality contributions, and (iii) the use of auxiliary embeddings under standalone and fusion settings, and we report both single-target and joint-target results to quantify tradeoffs under a unified training protocol. Finally, we contextualize baseline performance through regionally aligned comparisons against existing gridded products, including GEDI L4D RH10-RH98 and AGBD, at matching temporal scale. Biomazon, together with the accompanying protocols and baseline results, establishes a reference benchmark for future work on structurally consistent RH-profile prediction and structure-biomass modeling in tropical forests.

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

Simulating Students' Java Programming Errors with Large Language Models

Understanding student errors in the programming is a cornerstone of programming education, yet obtaining a representative set of student errors for any newly designed task remains slow and costly, since authentic submissions only accumulate after extensive classroom deployment. This paper explores whether large language models (LLMs) can serve as scalable proxies for students by simulating realistic logical errors in code submissions. Using the CodeWorkout dataset of 74,000+ unique student Java submissions across 37 problems, we evaluate five LLMs under three mainstream prompting strategies: Input-Output (IO), Chain-of-Thought (CoT), and iterative Self-Refine. We assess performance along two key dimensions: diversity (the range of distinct error patterns) and alignment (alignment with authentic student mistakes), and examine how these vary by struggling level of programming tasks. Our quantitative findings reveal that while all models generate diverse errors, their alignment to human submissions diverges: Claude Sonnet 4 achieves the most balanced performance. In addition, we conducted a blinded expert annotation study (N = 401) comparing synthetic and authentic errors. This qualitative analysis confirms that the generated errors are functionally indistinguishable from authentic student errors. Moreover, higher-struggling-level problems elicit more diverse but less student-like errors. These results highlight trade-offs in using LLMs to simulate human learners and suggest design considerations for integrating synthetic errors into teachable agents, intelligent tutoring systems, and large-scale learning analytics.

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

DOG-DPO:Dynamic Optimization in Geometry for Safety Alignment

arXiv:2606.07678v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safety alignment for large language models relies on preference data, but current pipelines often train on large, redundant datasets. Existing data selection methods typically score each preference pair independently, collapsing directional preference information into scalar quality or diversity scores. This sample-centric view is especially limiting in multi-dataset settings, where shared safety directions coexist with dataset-specific residual risks. We propose DOG-DPO, a training-free data selection framework that treats preference pairs as structured geometric signals. DOG-DPO first represents each preference pair as a direction in model representation space. It then decomposes multi-dataset preference geometry into a global anchor subspace and dataset-specific residual subspaces. Finally, it selects subsets by maximizing diversity-based coverage, encouraging broad, non-redundant coverage of alignment directions before DPO training. Across six safety benchmarks and two model backbones, DOG-DPO achieves a strong utility-robustness trade-off using only 11% of the preference pairs. It recovers most of the safety gains of full-data training while remaining entirely teacher-free, training-free, and substantially faster than representative selection baselines.

17.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-17

Machine learning-driven identification of virulence determinants in <i>Borrelia burgdorferi</i> associated with human dissemination

by Hoa Thanh Nguyen, Catherine A. Brissette Lyme disease, the most common tick-borne infectious disease in the United States, presents with highly variable clinical outcomes, ranging from localized erythema migrans to severe disseminated complications affecting the heart, joints, and nervous system. The bacterial determinants underlying this phenotypic variation remain largely unknown, limiting our ability to predict disease progression and optimize treatment strategies. Here, we applied machine learning (ML) approaches to identify specific amino acid residues within surface-exposed virulence factors that predict human dissemination phenotypes. Utilizing the published whole genome sequences from 299 clinical Borrelia burgdorferi isolates collected from the United States and Slovenia over a 30-year period (1992–2021), we extracted and characterized translated amino acid sequences (variants) of seven known virulence factors (BB_0406, BBK32, DbpA, OspA, OspC, P66, and RevA). Protein variants were classified based on their association with disseminated versus localized infections using clinical metadata. Cramér’s V analysis revealed possible strong associations between dissemination phenotypes and five adhesins: BBK32, DbpA, OspC, P66, and RevA. We developed ML models using five algorithms with multiple feature selection strategies, achieving robust predictive performance for DbpA, OspC, and RevA variants (all performance metrics > 0.7). Feature importance analysis identified 57, 29, and 42 key predictive residues for DbpA, OspC, and RevA, respectively. Notably, B-cell epitope prediction revealed significant enrichment of ML-identified residues within predicted epitope regions for OspC (11 overlapping residues, OR = 3.57, p = 0.006) and RevA (12 overlapping residues, OR = 2.37, p = 0.048), suggesting these residues may influence immune recognition and bacterial persistence. This study establishes the first computational framework linking Borrelia protein sequence variants to clinical dissemination phenotypes, providing molecular insights into Lyme disease pathogenesis that may inform the development of improved diagnostics and therapeutic targets.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

On the Wasserstein distance between a hyperuniform point process and its mean

arXiv:2404.09549v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the existence of bounds on the expected $p$-Wasserstein distance between a random measure and its mean under the assumption that the $p$-th centered moments of the counting statistics are controlled uniformly in space. The average Wasserstein transport cost is shown to be bounded from above and from below by some multiples of the number of points. $D$-dimensional versions of those results are also obtained. As a corollary, we prove that for any value of $p\geq 1$ the Ginibre point process can be seen as a perturbed lattice with identically distributed perturbations with a finite $p$-th moment.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Web-based education on Metabolism and Obesity is associated with improved lifestyle and health behaviours among Brazilian school teachers

Background: Obesity is a major global public health challenge, and teachers play a critical role in school-based health promotion. This study examined the perceived impact of a web-based educational program on metabolism and obesity delivered to Brazilian school teachers. Methods: This analytical cross-sectional study included 217 teachers who responded to the evaluation questionnaire after attending the course between 2017 and 2022. Statistical analyses included logistic regression and chi-square tests. Findings: Course completion rate was 81.98%, substantially exceeding the 5-15% typical of global MOOCs. However, ethnic disparities were observed: White respondents were 4.95 times more likely to complete the course than Black respondents (p=0.00097) and Brown respondents were 3.05 times more likely (p=0.0268) than Black respondents. Among non-completers, lack of time (64.7%) was the primary barrier. Participation was concentrated in Sao Paulo (77%), with no respondents from three northern states. Perceived difficulty showed a non-significant trend (p=0.0893) where by Black respondents had the lowest predicted difficulty; the most challenging course material was Scientific Content/Reading papers (50%). Completion was strongly associated with applying learned activities in teaching (p

20.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

PhenoBIC: operator-free single-cell spatial phenotyping in multiplex imaging data using deep learning of cell staining patterns

Multiplex imaging is a valuable tool for spatially examining tissue microenvironments at the single-cell level to uncover biological and clinical insights. However, most multiplex image analysis workflows currently require manual intervention for cell phenotyping, which slows progress, demands human effort, and yields operator-dependent outputs. Here, we developed PhenoBIC, a pre-trained deep learning model for image classification of the multiplexed biomarker signals in a cell (Biomarker Imprint of a Cell) to classify cell phenotypes. We show that PhenoBIC (F1-score ~0.88) outperforms manual gating (widely used) and other machine learning-based computational approaches for cell marker expression classification. We validated this across multiple biomarkers, tissue sampling strategies (whole biopsies and tissue microarrays), multiplex panels, imaging platforms, and tissue types. We have released our in-house training and validation datasets of ~1.4 million manually curated cell expression ground truth labels. We have also open-sourced PhenoBIC and enabled its community-wide deployment via the QuPath interface.

21.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

SteerAF: Distogram-based Steering of AlphaFold2 toward Alternative Conformations

End-to-end structure predictors, such as AlphaFold2, typically output only the dominant conformational state of a given protein, which is biased by the training data set. Existing strategies for recovering alternative conformations are often computationally expensive and offer limited biological interpretability. Here, we present SteerAF, an inference-time optimization framework based on AlphaFold2 that leverages information encoded in the distogram derived from deep multiple sequence alignments (MSAs) to predict alternative protein conformations. Across four benchmark datasets, SteerAF matches or surpasses existing methods in predicting alternative conformations for the majority of systems. Sparse MSA-feature modifications generated via block gradient ascent exhibit a strong correlation with experimentally characterized functional residues, recovering them with approximately 50% precision in the tested proteins. Furthermore, SteerAF enables effective decoy selection in the absence of experimental structures, and its predictions can serve as seed structures for molecular dynamics simulations to map conformational landscapes. Thus, SteerAF provides an efficient and interpretable approach for predicting alternative conformations, offering a framework that can be extended to other similar predictors and problems.

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

Rational Sparse Autoencoder

arXiv:2606.14990v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are standard tools for mechanistic interpretability, but current SAE families are constrained by fixed encoder nonlinearities such as ReLU, JumpReLU, and TopK. This hard-codes a particular sparsity mechanism into the model and can distort the reconstruction-versus-sparsity trade-off. We introduce the Rational Sparse Autoencoder (RSAE), which replaces the fixed encoder activation with a trainable rational function. Rational activations are flexible enough to uniformly approximate the activation primitives used by existing SAE families on compact domains (for TopK, the thresholded gate obtained after a separating top-k threshold is supplied), while also providing a richer function class for adapting to the observed pre-activation geometry. We realise this idea through a two-stage pipeline: an initialisation procedure that copies the pre-trained baseline SAE weights, plugs in rational coefficients obtained by the relaxed Remez exchange on synthetic data, and calibrates the scale parameters along with the rational coefficients; followed by a fine-tuning step under the standard sparsity-regularised reconstruction objective. Empirically, on residual-stream activations of three open-weight language models and across all three baseline activation families, the RSAE strictly improves on it after the fine-tuning step, both on reconstruction-side metrics and on downstream-behaviour metrics, without sacrificing feature-level interpretability under sparse probing. These gains are consistent across host language models, across baseline activation families, and across the full range of baseline sparsity we tested, while the upgrade itself adds only a handful of scalar parameters per autoencoder and runs in minutes on a single consumer GPU.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Method comparisons for differentiation of Schizophrenia and Bipolar based on rs-fMRI Intrinsic and Functional Networks

Psychosis as a symptom manifests in schizophenia and bipolar disorder, two highly heterogeneous psychiatric illnesses with overlapping clinical manifestations. Resting-state functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (rsfMRI), represents a promising tool for identifying objective biomarkers of functional brain alterations to aid differential diagnosis. In this work, we comparatively evaluate multiple rs-fMRI representations for differentiating schizophrenia and bipolar disorder using intrinsic connectivity network (ICN) temporal profiles and several functional network connectivity (FNC) approaches, including static, dynamic, and high-order connectivity analyses. The study was conducted on a cohort of 371 subjects with psychosis, while evaluation was performed using a separate held-out cohort of 315 subjects. We investigated convolutional neural network architectures applied to ICN temporal profiles, spectrograms, and scalograms, alongside classical machine learning models trained on connectivity-derived features. Across the evaluated approaches, ICN temporal profiles provided the most consistent discriminative performance, with a 1D convolutional neural network achieving the strongest overall results under the benchmark protocol. Among connectivity-based methods, static functional connectivity generally outperformed dynamic and high-order representations, suggesting that increased representational complexity did not necessarily translate into improved generalization. Although the obtained classification performance remained modest, the results highlight the challenges of robust psychosis differentiation using rs-fMRI while emphasizing the relative stability of low-order connectivity representations and temporal ICN features. These findings contribute to ongoing efforts toward reproducible and interpretable neuroimaging biomarkers for psychiatric disorders.

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

VinQA: Visual Elements Interleaved Long-form Answer Generation for Real-World Multimodal Document QA

Real-world documents combine text with tables, charts, photographs, and diagrams arranged in diverse layouts, yet existing research on multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for document QA predominantly produces text-only responses, underutilizing these visual elements. We introduce VinQA, a dataset for long-form answer generation where cited visual elements are explicitly interleaved with their supporting text and grounded in relevant document pages. To support this task, we study two encoding methods for feeding raw document page images into an MLLM, along with their visual-element citation mechanisms: (1) Page Encoding, which directly encodes full-page images with bounding boxes of visual elements and treats these boxed regions as citable units; and (2) Modality Encoding, which parses each page to extract text and crop visual elements, encodes them separately, and uses these cropped elements as citable units. In our experiments, we propose M-GroSE, a multimodal evaluation framework extending GroUSE to assess answers along four dimensions: completeness, answer relevancy, faithfulness, and unanswerability. We additionally report Visual Source F1 to directly measure visual citation accuracy. Although proprietary frontier models still achieve the best overall scores on the VinQA test split, fine-tuning open Qwen2.5-VL models on the training split substantially improves their performance and narrows this gap. Modality Encoding is initially more robust for complex documents with long text, many visual elements, and diverse citation requirements. After training on VinQA, however, Page Encoding reaches a comparable level, competing effectively even without the explicit parsing used in Modality Encoding. Finally, Visual G-Eval, an MLLM-based judge, confirms that fine-tuned models insert visual elements at semantically appropriate positions with faithful supporting text.