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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Semantic Editing with Coupled Stochastic Differential Equations

Editing the content of an image with a pretrained text-to-image model remains challenging. Existing methods often distort fine details or introduce unintended artifacts. We propose using coupled stochastic differential equations (coupled SDEs) to guide the sampling process of any pre-trained generative model that can be sampled by solving an SDE, including diffusion and rectified flow models. By driving both the source image and the edited image with the same correlated noise, our approach steers new samples toward the desired semantics while preserving visual similarity to the source. The method works out-of-the-box, without retraining or auxiliary networks, and achieves high prompt fidelity along with near-pixel-level consistency. These results position coupled SDEs as a simple yet powerful tool for controlled generative AI. Project page: https://z-jianxin.github.io/syncSDE-release/. Code: https://github.com/Z-Jianxin/syncSDE-release.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Wellbeing After Stroke-2 (WAterS-2): a feasibility study with process evaluation exploring inclusive, accessible, online psychological support after stroke

Objectives: Explore feasibility and acceptability of upskilling a workforce to deliver a co-developed intervention, based on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), to support psychological adjustment post-stroke targeting underserved groups. Design: Multi-site, single-arm feasibility study with embedded mixed-methods process evaluation (ISRCTN17628580). Setting: Four NHS community stroke services across England. Participants: 1. Stroke survivors [≥]18 years of age, [≥]4 months post-stroke, reporting psychological difficulties adjusting to stroke, able to consent and access remote group sessions in English; 2. Group facilitators from NHS stroke services, not ACT specialists. Intervention: WAterS-2: an eight-session, remotely-delivered ACT-informed group intervention. Outcome measures: Recruitment, fidelity, safety, acceptability and perceived value were assessed using fidelity checklists, post-intervention surveys and semi-structured interviews with stroke survivors and facilitators. Clinical outcomes including mood (HADS), wellbeing (ONS4), psychological flexibility (AAQ-ABI), measured post-group and three-months later. Results: Nineteen stroke survivors recruited (mean 9.6 months post-stroke; n=5 (26%) minoritised ethnicities; n=10 (52%) with aphasia). Thirteen facilitators - including two peer support workers - delivered the intervention with fidelity following structured training across four services. Drop-out was low (2/19; 11%); with 15 (79%) attending [≥]5/8 sessions. Remote data collection was feasible (79% follow-up completion), with no adverse events recorded. Acceptability was high: survivors valued peer connection, grounding and mindfulness practices. ACT metaphors were helpful for some but challenging for others, including some with aphasia. Online delivery was suitable but limited informal connection. Facilitators reported increased capability, incorporating ACT skills into routine care. NHS workforce pressures and geographically-constrained referral pathways limited recruitment reach. Conclusions: WAterS-2 is feasible, safe, acceptable and inclusive. A mixed workforce, including NHS peer support workers, can be upskilled to deliver with fidelity. Inclusion of underserved groups is achievable but requires active strategies beyond standard NHS referral routes. Findings inform a provisional logic model and a future pragmatic trial.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Probe-and-Refine Tuning of Repository Guidance for Coding Agents

arXiv:2606.20512v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based coding agents need higher-level operational knowledge about a repository (which files house which subsystems, how to run the test suite, which workflows have historically led to wrong fixes) that does not exist in the code itself. Engineers typically maintain \texttt{AGENTS.md} files to supply this context as instructions for coding agents, but whether they help is contested: recent studies disagree on whether LLM-generated guidance improves or harms agent performance. In this paper we show that how the guidance is produced is the decisive variable, and introduce probe-and-refine tuning: a procedure that uses synthetic bug-fix probes to iteratively diagnose and patch a repository's guidance file through single-shot LLM calls, with no agent loop or tool use during tuning. On SWE-bench Verified across four independent trials with Qwen3.5-35B-A3B at 200 steps, probe-and-refine achieves 33.0\,\% mean resolve rate vs.\ 28.3\,\% for the static knowledge base used to initialize it and 25.5\,\% for an unguided baseline ($p < 0.001$ for both probe-and-refine contrasts). The improvement comes from coverage rather than precision: refined guidance produces evaluable patches for 14.5 percentage points (pp) more instances while per-patch precision remains statistically constant ($\sim$59\,\%, $p = 0.119$), showing that improved guidance helps agents reach the correct file rather than improving the quality of the changes they make. Further, a step-budget experiment shows that guidance is what lets the agent use a larger step budget productively, and a cross-model experiment with NVIDIA-Nemotron-3-Nano-30B-A3B finds that the tuning loop degrades when the model cannot generate sufficiently diagnostic output, though per-patch precision remains constant even then.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

ToolGrad: Efficient Tool-use Dataset Generation with Textual "Gradients"

Prior work synthesizes tool-use LLM datasets by first generating a user query, followed by complex tool-use annotations like depth-first search (DFS). This leads to inevitable annotation failures and low efficiency in data generation. We introduce ToolGrad, an agentic framework that inverts this paradigm. ToolGrad first constructs valid tool-use chains through an iterative process guided by textual "gradients", and then synthesizes corresponding user queries. This "answer-first" approach led to ToolGrad-500, a dataset generated with more complex tool use, lower cost, and almost 100% pass rate. Experiments show that ToolGrad models outperform those trained on expensive baseline datasets and proprietary LLMs. The ToolGrad source code, dataset, and models are available at https://github.com/zhongyi-zhou/toolgrad.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Signals of Provenance: Practices & Challenges of Navigating Indicators in AI-Generated Media for Sighted and Blind Individuals

arXiv:2505.16057v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI-Generated (AIG) content has become increasingly widespread by recent advances in generative models and the easy-to-use tools that have significantly lowered the technical barriers for producing highly realistic audio, images, and videos through simple natural language prompts. In response, platforms are adopting provable provenance with platforms recommending AIG to be self-disclosed and signaled to users. However, these indicators may be often missed, especially when they rely solely on visual cues and make them ineffective to users with different sensory abilities. To address the gap, we conducted semi-structured interviews (N=28) with 15 sighted and 13 BLV participants to examine their interaction with AIG content through self-disclosed AI indicators. Our findings reveal diverse mental models and practices, highlighting different strengths and weaknesses of content-based (e.g., title, description) and menu-aided (e.g., AI labels) indicators. While sighted participants leveraged visual and audio cues, BLV participants primarily relied on audio and existing assistive tools, limiting their ability to identify AIG. Across both groups, they frequently overlooked menu-aided indicators deployed by platforms and rather interacted with content-based indicators such as title and comments. We uncovered usability challenges stemming from inconsistent indicator placement, unclear metadata, and cognitive overload. These issues were especially critical for BLV individuals due to the insufficient accessibility of interface elements. We provide practical recommendations and design implications for future AIG indicators across several dimensions.

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

HEad and neCK TumOR (HECKTOR) 2025: Benchmark of Segmentation, Diagnosis, and Prognosis in Multimodal PET/CT

Head and neck cancers (HNC) represent a significant global health burden, with accurate tumor delineation being essential for effective radiotherapy planning. The complexity of the oropharyngeal anatomy, combined with the heterogeneous appearance of tumors on imaging, makes manual segmentation time-intensive and subject to inter-observer variability. Beyond segmentation, predicting long-term clinical outcomes, such as recurrence-free survival (RFS), and determining human papillomavirus (HPV) status from noninvasive imaging, remain challenging yet clinically valuable goals. The HECKTOR 2025 challenge addresses these needs by establishing a comprehensive benchmark for automated HNC analysis using multimodal PET/CT imaging and electronic health records. Building on previous editions (2020-2022), this challenge features an expanded multi-institutional dataset comprising over 1,100 patients from 10 centers worldwide. Participants were tasked with three complementary objectives: (1) segmenting primary gross tumor volumes (GTVp) and metastatic lymph nodes (GTVn), (2) predicting recurrence-free survival, and (3) classifying HPV status. The challenge attracted 35 registered teams, with 15 final submissions evaluated on a held-out test set. Top-performing algorithms achieved a mean Dice similarity coefficient of 0.75 for segmentation, a concordance index of 0.66 for survival prediction, and a balanced accuracy of 0.56 for HPV classification. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the submitted methodologies, evaluates their performance across different lesion characteristics, and discusses their implications for clinical translation in automated oncology workflows and decision support systems.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

A Stationary (and Therefore Compatible) Representation is All You Need

arXiv:2606.12488v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning compatible representations aims to learn feature representations that can be used interchangeably over time whenever a model undergoes updates. In this paper, we demonstrate that stationary representations learned by d-Simplex fixed classifiers imply compatibility as in its formal definition. This result establishes a foundation for future works and can be directly exploited in practical learning scenarios. We address the challenge of learning compatibility using $d$-Simplex fixed classifiers when the model is sequentially fine-tuned. Learning according to a d-Simplex fixed classifier with the cross-entropy loss aligns feature distributions at the first-order statistics. Consequently, it may not fully capture higher-order dependencies in the representation between model updates. To address this issue, we demonstrate that training the model using a $d$-Simplex fixed classifier through a convex combination of the cross-entropy loss and a contrastive loss not only captures higher-order dependencies, but is also equivalent to learning with the cross-entropy under the compatibility constraints. We confirm our findings with extensive experiments also considering a new scenario where a pre-trained model is sequentially fine-tuned and occasionally replaced with an improved model. We show that stationary representations enable uninterrupted retrieval services (without reprocessing gallery images) while improving performance during model updates and replacements, achieving state-of-the-art. Code at https://github.com/miccunifi/iamcl2r.

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

Rethinking the Role of Efficient Attention in Hybrid Architectures

Modern language models increasingly adopt hybrid architectures that combine full attention with efficient attention modules, such as sliding-window attention (SWA) and recurrent sequence mixers. However, how these efficient modules shape model capabilities remains poorly understood. To address this gap, we conduct a systematic analysis across hybrid architectures from three perspectives: scaling behavior, mechanism analysis, and architecture design. First, from a scaling perspective, we find that efficient-attention design primarily affects how fast long-context capability emerges, while different hybrids eventually converge to comparable long-context performance under sufficient training. Second, mechanistically, we show that long-range retrieval is mainly carried by full attention, whereas efficient attention shapes its optimization trajectory. This explains a counter-intuitive phenomenon we call Large-Window Laziness: larger SWA windows can delay the formation of retrieval heads in full-attention layers. Third, guided by this mechanism, we show that applying NoPE to only the full-attention layers of a small-window SWA hybrid substantially improves long-context performance with negligible impact on short-context performance.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Toward General Digraph Contrastive Learning: A Dual Spatial Perspective

arXiv:2510.16311v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) has emerged as a powerful tool for extracting consistent representations from graphs, independent of labeled information. However, existing methods predominantly focus on undirected graphs, disregarding the pivotal directional information that is fundamental and indispensable in real-world networks (e.g., social networks and recommendations).In this paper, we introduce S2-DiGCL, a novel framework that emphasizes spatial insights from complex and real domain perspectives for directed graph (digraph) contrastive learning. From the complex-domain perspective, S2-DiGCL introduces personalized perturbations into the magnetic Laplacian to adaptively modulate edge phases and directional semantics. From the real-domain perspective, it employs a path-based subgraph augmentation strategy to capture fine-grained local asymmetries and topological dependencies. By jointly leveraging these two complementary spatial views, S2-DiGCL constructs high-quality positive and negative samples, leading to more general and robust digraph contrastive learning. Extensive experiments on 7 real-world digraph datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach, achieving SOTA performance with 4.41% improvement in node classification and 4.34% in link prediction under both supervised and unsupervised settings.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Clinical Study Protocol of the 'Biomarkers of Severity of COVID-19 Patients' (BIOMARCOVID) Project

Introduction The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has challenged health care systems worldwide, in certain areas exceeding hospital capacities and human resources. This has underscored the importance of having better tools to predict the outcome of potentially severe respiratory infections such as SARS-CoV-2. Predicting COVID-19 severity may allow physicians to better manage ICU beds and increase the chances of patient survival through appropriate management. During the toughest months of the pandemic, most physicians tried to identify patients that might develop severe forms based primarily on clinical features on admission (e.g., BMI, age). In this context, significant research has focused on identifying comorbidities, clinical manifestations, and routine blood biomarkers to predict disease severity. However, despite the demonstrated value of untargeted metabolomics in assessing severity, limited data exist on its use for identifying novel metabolite biomarkers that could improve both the sensitivity and specificity of outcome prediction. Our goal is to identify metabolite biomarkers that could enhance the predictive accuracy of standard medical biology data and clinical parameters. Methods and analysis This is a retrospective, observational, monocentric cohort study conducted at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Grenoble Alpes (CHUGA). The maximum number of eligible patients admitted for PCR-confirmed COVID-19 between March and December 2020 will be included. Severity outcome is defined using the WHO 10-category ordinal scale (mild: categories 4-5; severe: >5). Blood samples were collected within 48 hours of admission and analyzed for 62 routine blood tests and untargeted multiplatform LC-MS/MS metabolomics across four national platforms. Statistical analysis will include logistic regression with variable selection for the primary aim, and multi-block chemometric integration of clinical, biological, and metabolomics data as a secondary aim. Ethics and dissemination A study steering committee has been formed to ensure the accuracy of the collected data by thoroughly reviewing it prior to the data lock. All aspects of the study comply with ethical standards, including approval by the CHUGA institutional review board and adherence to CNIL Reference Methodology MR004 for the protection of participants' rights, privacy, and confidentiality. This study is registered on the French Health Data Hub (number F20210218154851). Results will be disseminated through peer-reviewed publications, presentations at national and international scientific and clinical conferences, and reports shared with key healthcare system stakeholders.

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

Central Limit Theorems for Stochastic Gradient Descent Quantile Estimators

arXiv:2503.02178v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper develops asymptotic theory for quantile estimation via stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with a constant learning rate. The quantile loss function is neither smooth nor strongly convex. Beyond conventional perspectives and techniques, we view quantile SGD iteration as an irreducible, periodic, and positive recurrent Markov chain, which cyclically converges to its unique stationary distribution regardless of the arbitrarily fixed initialization. To derive the exact form of the stationary distribution, we analyze the structure of its characteristic function by exploiting the stationary equation. We also derive tight bounds for its moment generating function (MGF) and tail probabilities. Synthesizing the aforementioned approaches, we prove that the centered and standardized stationary distribution converges to a Gaussian distribution as the learning rate $\eta\rightarrow0$. This finding provides the first central limit theorem (CLT)-type theoretical guarantees for the quantile SGD estimator with constant learning rates. We further propose a recursive algorithm to construct confidence intervals of the estimators with statistical guarantees. Numerical studies demonstrate the effective finite-sample performance of the online estimator and inference procedure. The theoretical tools developed in this study are of independent interest for investigating general SGD algorithms formulated as Markov chains, particularly in non-strongly convex and non-smooth settings.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Lowest order Carleman linearization for low Reynolds long-term behaviour of fluid flow simulations

arXiv:2605.23380v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: It is shown that the lowest (second) order truncation of the Carleman linearization of the fluid equations (C2) recovers the late stage of the evolution, namely the steady-state solution, although to a decreasing degree of accuracy at increasing Reynolds number. This asymptotic property is first proved analytically for the decaying logistic with external forcing and then shown to hold to a significant degree of accuracy also for the more complex case of two-dimensional Kolmogorov-like fluid flow at low Reynolds numbers, below $Re \sim 10$. This time-asymptotic property may open interesting prospects for the quantum simulation of low-Reynolds steady-state fluid flows.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Expert in Ultrasound Skills: Feasibility of an IMU-video platform to describe technical profiles during focused cardiac ultrasound. Pilot study

Background: Focused cardiac ultrasound (FoCUS) is operator dependent and requires coordinated probe manipulation, image interpretation and iterative visual feedback. Existing assessment approaches often emphasize final image quality or expert rating. We developed Expert in Ultrasound Skills (EXUS) , a platform that synchronizes transducer-mounted inertial measurement unit (IMU) data with ultrasound video, and evaluated its technical feasibility during FoCUS acquisition. Methods: This observational pilot study included 6 operators performing two repetitions of a four-view FoCUS protocol, yielding 12 analytical sessions and 48 planned acquisitions. Feasibility was defined by acquisition completion, video availability, start/stop events, fused IMU-video windows, temporal coverage, complete human label entries and IMU integrity. A 100-image Likert rating task was used to summarize pairwise inter-rater agreement for still-frame image quality assessment. Results: All 48 planned acquisitions were completed with video, start/stop events, fused windows and complete human label entries. Temporal coverage was at least 90% in 47/48 acquisitions. IMU integrity endpoints exceeded the 80% threshold: 43/48 acquisitions had no extreme IMU-derived artifact, 43/48 had no active-segment IMU restart and 44/48 had no complete motion flatline. Mean pairwise exact agreement for the Likert task was 38.9%, with mean quadratic-weighted Cohen's kappa of 0.564. Post hoc profiles varied across duration, visual quality, mechanical load and motor efficiency. Conclusions: EXUS was technically feasible for synchronized IMU-video capture during FoCUS. The pilot supports multimodal acquisition data as a way to describe technical profiles and generate formative feedback hypotheses, but the post hoc indices are not validated competency measures. Keywords: focused cardiac ultrasound; point-of-care ultrasound; inertial measurement unit; medical education; deliberate practice

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

Beyond Algorithms: Conceptual Innovation in Medical Imaging AI

arXiv:2606.19270v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Artificial intelligence has driven rapid progress in medical imaging research, producing increasingly sophisticated algorithms and steady improvements on benchmark tasks. However, this algorithm-centric trajectory has also revealed a growing imbalance: while computational methods advance rapidly, the conceptual foundations that define imaging tasks, evaluation metrics, and clinical meaning sometimes remain underexamined. In this Perspective, we distinguish algorithmic innovation, which focuses on improving computational implementations and performance within a fixed problem definition, from conceptual innovation, which reframes what problems are posed, how success is measured, and why an approach is clinically relevant. We argue that prevailing incentive structures, training pathways, and publication norms disproportionately reward algorithmic novelty, particularly for early-career researchers, while at times undervaluing conceptual contributions that are essential for scientific maturation and clinical translation. Through representative examples from medical imaging AI, we show how insufficient conceptual grounding can lead to misaligned objectives, fragile generalization, and limited real-world impact. We conclude with actionable recommendations for researchers, mentors, reviewers, and journals to better recognize, support, and integrate conceptual innovation alongside algorithmic advances.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Holographic Complexity, Extremality, and Cosmic Censorship

arXiv:2604.20170v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a holographic complexity origin for the third law of black-hole mechanics and weak cosmic censorship. In both complexity equals action and complexity equals volume prescriptions, the relative complexity between subextremal and extremal AdS black holes diverges logarithmically. For overcharged RN-AdS, explicit calculations in both prescriptions show that the near-singularity action terms are power-law divergent or finite, while the maximal-volume contribution is finite. Thus, the extremal-to-naked relative complexity also diverges, obstructing finite-time transitions.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Unified MRI Brain Image Translation via Hierarchical Tumor Structure Comparison

Multi-modal MRI brain image translation via available modalities holds significant practical importance in modern medicine, providing robust support for early diagnosis, treatment planning, and outcome assessment of diseases. For this purpose, it is important to ensure the fidelity of the tumor regions after translation. However, existing brain image translation methods ignore the structure information of different tumor regions, which could assist translation models in enhancing the quality and clinical applicability of the translated images. In this work, we propose a novel translation model called HTSCGAN, which is a unified multi-modal brain image translation generative adversarial model integrating the structural information within tumor regions with the aim of improving the quality of brain image translation. Specifically, the generator employs three Patch Contrast Module (PCM) with different patch sizes to capture the hierarchical structural information of the tumor regions. In addition, a pretrained Patch Classifier (PC) and a pretrained Structure-Aware Encoder (SAE) are employed to derive the generated image containing the same tumor region structure as the ground truth image via patch classification loss and tumor perceptual loss, respectively. The experiments on BraTS2020 and BraTS2021 demonstrate strong performance of our model in both translation tasks and down stream segmentation tasks, highlighting its effectiveness in enhancing the quality and clinical relevance of the translated brain images. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/HTSCGAN.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

DenseControl: Instance-Level Controllable Synthesis of Dense Crowd Image

In this paper, we introduce DenseControl, a novel pipeline for generating dense crowd images. Specifically, DenseControl meticulously positions and sizes each generated instance to align precisely with the predefined coordinates and scales. Based on this, we further allow for control over the background, style, and attributes of instances. The motivation behind DenseControl stems from the observation of two main challenges in synthesizing crowd images: controlling signal embedding and maintaining topological integrity when imparting instance scale guidance. To address these, we first introduce the Isolated Object Embedding (IOE) map, a novel representation that facilitates spatial location control while mitigating the difficulties associated with learning projections for model. Secondly, we propose an Implicit Scale Embedding (ISE) strategy that seamlessly integrates with the IOE map to encode precise scale information. To further enhance the efficacy of combining ISE with the IOE map, we incorporate a Position Shortcut mechanism that enhances cross-attention to alleviate projection challenges. We evaluate DenseControl through two lenses: synthesis quality and applicability in latent applications. Experiments across different control conditions demonstrate DenseControl achieves state-of-the-art results in dense crowd image synthesis. Furthermore, we showcase applications in augmenting crowd analysis under data scarcity, transfer learning, and weather generalization scenes, to highlight the practical utility of DenseControl. The codebase will be released.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

GENERIC-FNO: Embedding Energy Conservation and Entropy Production into Fourier Neural Operators

arXiv:2606.08343v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce GENERIC-FNO, the first neural operator to embed the full GENERIC (metriplectic) structure of nonequilibrium thermodynamics – reversible, energy-conserving dynamics and irreversible, entropy-producing dynamics coupled through the degeneracy conditions – directly in function space. Existing structure-preserving neural operators enforce at most a single conservation law or reversible (Hamiltonian) structure, while thermodynamically consistent learning has been confined to finite-dimensional, graph, or particle systems. GENERIC-FNO closes this gap: it learns the energy and entropy functionals as neural operators and parameterizes the Poisson and friction operators as diagonal Fourier multipliers sandwiched between rank-one projections that enforce the degeneracy conditions exactly, by construction, with no penalty term, update projection, or residual. The degeneracy identities hold to machine precision (residuals ~10^-13) for any initialization, dimension, or resolution, so the continuous-time dynamics conserve the learned energy and produce entropy exactly; the explicit time stepping adds only a small O(dt^2) drift (per-step residual ~10^-6). We further note that the (E,S,L,M) decomposition of a given flow is not unique, and introduce a gauge-invariant dissipation diagnostic separating reversible from dissipative dynamics independently of the learned functionals. Across three operator backbones (1D/2D FNOs and DeepONet) and four PDEs spanning reversible, dissipative, and mixed regimes, GENERIC-FNO preserves its exact structural guarantees zero-shot across a 4x super-resolution range (64 to 256), recovers the ground-truth ordering of physical dissipation, and is competitive with strong unconstrained and energy-penalized baselines, outperforming them on several dissipative and mixed problems at comparable or fewer parameters.

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

Weighted Bayesian Conformal Prediction

arXiv:2604.06464v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Conformal prediction provides distribution-free prediction intervals with finite-sample coverage guarantees, and recent work by Snell \& Griffiths reframes it as Bayesian Quadrature (BQ-CP), yielding powerful data-conditional guarantees via Dirichlet posteriors over thresholds. However, BQ-CP fundamentally requires the i.i.d. assumption. Meanwhile, weighted conformal prediction handles distribution shift via importance weights but remains frequentist, producing only point-estimate thresholds. We propose Weighted Bayesian Conformal Prediction (WBCP), which generalizes BQ-CP to arbitrary importance-weighted settings by replacing the uniform Dirichlet $\Dir(1,\ldots,1)$ with a weighted Dirichlet $\Dir(\neff \cdot \tilde{w}_1, \ldots, \neff \cdot \tilde{w}_n)$, where $\neff$ is Kish's effective sample size. We prove four theoretical results: (1)~$\neff$ is the unique concentration parameter matching frequentist and Bayesian variances; (2)~posterior standard deviation decays as $O(1/\sqrt{\neff})$; (3)~BQ-CP's stochastic dominance guarantee extends to per-weight-profile data-conditional guarantees; (4)~the HPD threshold provides $O(1/\sqrt{\neff})$ improvement in conditional coverage. We instantiate WBCP for spatial prediction as Geographical BQ-CP, where kernel-based spatial weights yield per-location posteriors with interpretable diagnostics. Experiments on synthetic and real-world spatial datasets demonstrate that WBCP maintains coverage guarantees while providing substantially richer uncertainty information.

20.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Towards Conversational AI for Disease Management

While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in diagnostic dialogue1, their capabilities for effective management reasoning—including disease progression, therapeutic response, and safe medication prescription—remain under-explored. We advance the previously demonstrated diagnostic capabilities of the Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer (AMIE)1−3 through a new LLM-based agentic system optimized for multi-visit clinical management and dialogue. To ground its reasoning in authoritative clinical knowledge, AMIE leverages Gemini’s long-context capabilities4, combining in-context retrieval with structured reasoning to align its output with up-to-date clinical practice guidelines and drug formularies. In a randomized, blinded virtual Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) study, AMIE was compared to 21 primary care physicians (PCPs) across 100 multi-visit case scenarios designed to reflect UK NICE Guidance and BMJ Best Practice guidelines. AMIE was non-inferior to PCPs in management reasoning as assessed by specialists and scored better in both preciseness of treatments and investigations, and in its alignment with and grounding in clinical guidelines. To benchmark medication reasoning, we developed RxQA, a multiple-choice question benchmark derived from two national drug formularies (US, UK) and validated by board-certified pharmacists. Though AMIE and PCPs both benefited from the ability to access external drug information, AMIE outperformed PCPs on higher difficulty questions. While further research would be needed before real-world translation, AMIE’s strong performance across evaluations marks a significant step towards conversational AI as a tool in disease management.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Topological Flow Matching

arXiv:2606.15897v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Flow matching is a powerful generative modeling framework, valued for its simplicity and strong empirical performance. However, its standard formulation treats signals on structured spaces, such as fMRI data on brain graphs, as points in Euclidean space, overlooking the rich topological features of their domains. To address this, we introduce topological flow matching, a topology-aware generalization of flow matching. We interpret flow matching as a framework for solving a degenerate Schrödinger bridge problem and inject topological information by augmenting the reference process with a Laplacian-derived drift. This principled modification captures the structure of the underlying domain while preserving the desirable properties of flow matching: a stable, simulation-free objective and deterministic sample paths. As a result, our framework serves as a drop-in replacement for standard flow matching. We demonstrate its effectiveness on diverse structured datasets, including brain fMRIs, ocean currents, seismic events, and traffic flows.

22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Extremal representations of functions of matrices and applications to multivariate prediction

arXiv:2606.19359v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Motivated by two seminal results of multivariate prediction theory by Helson and Lowdenslager and by Wiener and Masani we prove extremal representations of functions of matrices and derive their prediction-theoretic consequences. We also sketch a way to obtain matricial inequalities from our results. The main goal of the paper is the computation of the infimum of a set of values of the form $tr(A \Delta A^*)$, where $\Delta$ is a given non-negative Hermitian $n \times n$ matrix and the choices for $A$ exhauste a certain set of $n \times n$ matrices. In particular, we focus on norm-bounded unit spheres with certain types of properties of unitary invariance, what allows an application of the theory of majorization.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

UltraEP: Unleash MoE Training and Inference on Rack-Scale Nodes with Near-Optimal Load Balancing

arXiv:2606.04101v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large-scale expert parallelism (EP) is becoming pivotal for training and serving frontier MoE models, but it also amplifies device-level expert load imbalance into compute stragglers, token all-to-all bottlenecks, and activation-memory spikes. Existing balancers redistribute experts periodically based on historical load, which becomes unreliable for production deployments with non-stationary load patterns. We present UltraEP, the first exact-load, real-time balancer for large-EP MoE training and serving prefill on rack-scale nodes (RSNs). Leveraging the extended scale-up connectivity among dozens of GPUs within RSNs, UltraEP rebalances every microbatch and layer on critical paths, which requires nontrivial co-design of plan solving and expert replication communication to minimize exposed overhead. To this end, UltraEP eagerly reacts to post-gating load with an efficient quota-driven planner, and executes the resulting irregular expert-state transfers with RSN-native persistent tile streaming and relay-based fan-out mitigation. We evaluate UltraEP in a multi-RSN deployment of up to 256 GPUs, using cutting-edge MoE models from 106B to 671B parameters. Averaged across training and serving, UltraEP achieves 94.3% of the force-balanced ideal throughput, delivering 1.49$\times$ improvement over no-balancing, while reducing the final inter-rank imbalance from 1.30$-$4.01 to 1.01$-$1.04.

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

CyberEvolver: Structured Self-Evolution for Cybersecurity Agents On the Fly

arXiv:2605.26195v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM-based agents are increasingly used for cybersecurity tasks, but most existing systems rely on fixed, human-designed scaffolds that struggle to adapt across diverse targets and failure modes. We introduce \textsc{CyberEvolver}, a self-evolving cybersecurity agent framework that iteratively revises its own scaffold based on experience from failed execution attempts. Self-evolution in cybersecurity is challenging because the space of possible scaffold changes is largely unstructured, execution feedback is sparse and often obscured by the environment, and low-diversity updates can cause errors to compound over repeated iterations. \textsc{CyberEvolver} addresses these challenges with a four-layer evolvable agent architecture that decomposes scaffold optimization into structured components, a trace-to-diagnosis mechanism that converts noisy execution logs into actionable revision signals, and a population-based beam search strategy that preserves diverse agent variants during evolution. We evaluate \textsc{CyberEvolver} on CTF challenges, vulnerability exploitation, and penetration-testing tasks using four open-source LLMs. Across these settings, \textsc{CyberEvolver} improves the seed agent's success rate by $13.6$\,\% on average, and outperforms six human-designed cybersecurity agents as well as two self-improvement methods adapted from other domains. These results suggest that scaffold self-evolution is a promising direction for building adaptive LLM agents for security testing.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Composed Object Retrieval: Object-level Retrieval via Composed Expressions

Retrieving fine-grained visual content based on user intent remains a challenge in multimodal systems. Although current Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) methods combine reference images with retrieval texts, they are constrained to image-level matching and cannot localize specific objects. To this end, we propose Composed Object Retrieval (COR), a new object-level retrieval task that retrieves target object(s) from candidate objects in a target image and grounds the retrieved result with pixel-level masks. Given a reference object, its mask, a target image, and a retrieval text describing the desired modification, COR requires models to perform composed visual-textual reasoning rather than relying on explicit category names. This setting introduces several challenges, including fine-grained compositional matching, negative-object filtering under visually similar distractors, and flexible single- or multi-object retrieval. We construct COR125K, the first large-scale COR benchmark, containing 125,541 retrieval triplets across 408 categories with base/novel splits for evaluating category-level generalization. We also present CORE, a unified end-to-end model that integrates reference region encoding, adaptive vision-text interaction, and region-level contrastive learning to align composed representations with target objects while suppressing background and distractors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CORE significantly outperforms existing CIR-based pipelines and strong baselines in both base and novel categories, establishing a simple and effective foundation for fine-grained object-level multimodal retrieval. Code will be released publicly at https://github.com/wangtong627/COR.