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

Your Agent Has a Genome: Sequence-Level Behavioral Analysis and Runtime Governance of LLM-Powered Autonomous Agents

Authors:
Sidi Deng↗

arXiv:2606.15579v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose Base Sequence Analysis, a framework that encodes the runtime behavior of LLM-powered autonomous agents into compact symbolic sequences using a four-letter alphabet: X (Explore), E (Execute), P (Plan), and V (Verify). Drawing an analogy to genomic sequence analysis, we apply n-gram pattern mining, Markov transition matrices, and point-biserial correlation to 347 real-world execution traces collected from a production ReAct agent system over 8 days. Our analysis reveals that (1) the trigram P-X-P is the only statistically significant high-risk pattern, lowering success rate by 10.4%; (2) P-ratio is the strongest negative predictor of success (r=-0.256, pV transition probability is only 2.1%, indicating a systemic verification deficit. Based on these findings, we design Governor, a three-layer runtime intervention system comprising a rule engine, a statistical accumulator, and a chi-square-based threshold adaptor. In a natural before/after deployment evaluation (N=101 vs. N=246), Governor achieves a +6.2% absolute increase in task success rate while simultaneously reducing average token consumption by 44%. To validate cross-system generality, we apply the XEPV encoding to 2,000 public SWE-agent trajectories on SWE-bench, confirming that exploration spirals and the E->V verification deficit replicate in an independent system. We outline six research directions including base sequence language models, cross-agent behavioral fingerprinting, and reward shaping, and release an open-source toolkit for reproducibility.

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02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Active Quantum Reservoir Engineering: Using a Qubit to Manipulate its Environment

Authors:
Marcelo Janovitch↗Matteo Brunelli↗Patrick P. Potts↗

arXiv:2505.16898v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum reservoir engineering leverages dissipative processes to achieve desired behavior, with applications ranging from entanglement generation to quantum error correction. Therein, a structured environment acts as an entropy sink for the system and no time-dependent control over the system is required. We develop a theoretical framework for active reservoir engineering, where time-dependent control over a quantum system is used to manipulate its environment. In this case, the system may act as an entropy sink for the environment. Our framwork captures the dynamical interplay between system and environment, and provides an intuitive picture of how finite-size effects and system-environment correlations allow for manipulating the environment by repeated initialization of the quantum system. We illustrate our results with two examples: a superconducting qubit coupled to an environment of two-level systems and a semiconducting quantum dot coupled to nuclear spins. In both scenarios, we find qualitative agreement with previous experimental results, illustrating how active control can unlock new functionalities in open quantum systems.

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

Physics-Constrained Neural Networks for Improved Short-Term Weather Forecasting: A Case Study over the South Pacific

Authors:
Egor Bugaev↗Fedor Buzaev↗Dmitry Efremenko↗Denis Derkach↗Fedor Ratnikov↗

arXiv:2606.17659v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This study introduces enhancements to physics-constrained neural networks (PCNNs) that improve the accuracy and stability of hybrid short-term weather forecasting models. Building on the WeatherGFT architecture, three innovations are proposed. First, an upgraded numerical solver, combining a fifth-order weighted essentially non-oscillatory scheme (WENO-5), a beta-plane approximation, and subgrid-scale viscosity, permits a fourfold increase in the integration time step to 1200 s while reducing the daily mean squared error by up to 26%. Second, a unified autoregressive hybrid block replaces the original chain of 24 specialised modules, eliminating overfitting to specific lead times. Third, the physical core is integrated with two state-of-the-art neural backbones, resulting in PI-PredFormer and PI-IAM4VP. Evaluation on the WeatherBench South Pacific subset from 2000 to 2004 shows that these hybrids reduce root mean squared error at 1-12 h lead times by 8-22% compared to purely neural counterparts, while better preserving physical consistency. These results demonstrate that incremental refinement of hybrid components offers a practical route toward more accurate and efficient short-range weather forecasting.

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04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

A Three-Layer Framework for AI in Scientific Discovery

Authors:
Guojun Liao↗

arXiv:2606.13566v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current discussions of AI in scientific discovery are often dominated by two visible capabilities: search over existing knowledge and execution through optimization, simulation, and automation. Both are important, but neither fully captures the central act of discovery: the formation and evolution of models. This paper proposes a three-layer view of AI in discovery. Layer 1 is search and retrieval by large language models. Layer 2, as the main innovation of this paper, is model formation through qualitative reasoning: the capacity to recognize when a current framework is structurally inadequate and to understand the problem within a broader representational space, not through trial and error, but through structural insight into what is missing and where it can be found. Layer 3 is execution, optimization, and refinement. The main claim is that Layer 2 is both the most important and the least developed. Search without model formation remains confined to inherited frameworks, while execution without conceptual revision only amplifies an existing formulation. We illustrate Layer 2 reasoning through three case studies: S. S. Chern's intrinsic proof of the Gauss-Bonnet theorem, the resolution of the Nesterov Accelerated Gradient convergence problem via Lyapunov functions, and the autonomous disproof of the Erdos unit distance conjecture by OpenAI in 2026. Each case exhibits the same structural signature: a framework that had become inadequate, a missing conceptual object, and a resolution found in an unexpected neighboring field.

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05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Quantum statistical functions

Authors:
Haruki Emori↗

arXiv:2602.05821v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Statistical functions such as the moment-generating, characteristic, cumulant-generating, and second characteristic functions are standard tools in classical statistics and probability theory. They provide a systematic means to analyze the statistical properties of a system and find applications in diverse fields. While these functions are ubiquitous in classical theory, a quantum counterpart has remained underdeveloped because of the noncommutativity of operators. The absence of such a framework has obscured the connections between statistical quantities and the nonclassical features of quantum mechanics. Here, we construct a framework for quantum statistical functions that addresses these limitations and unifies the languages of quantum statistics. We show that the functions reproduce standard statistical quantities such as expectation values, variance, and covariance upon differentiation. By extending the framework to include pre- and post-selection, we define conditional functions that generate conditional statistical quantities, including the weak value and the weak variance. We further show that multivariable functions, defined with specific operator orderings, correspond to the Kirkwood–Dirac, Margenau–Hill, and Wigner distributions. By generalizing Bochner's theorem within the theory of compactly supported distributions, we obtain a criterion that separates classical statistics from quantum statistics, linking the failure of positive definiteness of the multivariable function to the emergence of quasiprobability. As an application, we import the classical method of moments and generalized method of moments into quantum estimation, introducing quantum estimators that exploit the proposed functions. Our framework reproduces quantum statistical quantities and incorporates the nonclassical features of quasiprobability, providing a basis for further study of quantum statistics.

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

SleepMaMi: A Universal Sleep Foundation Model for Integrating Macro- and Micro-structures

Authors:
Keondo Park↗Younghoon Na↗Yourim Choi↗Hyunwoo Ryu↗Hyun-Woo Shin↗Hyung-Sin Kim↗

arXiv:2602.07628v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While the shift toward unified foundation models has revolutionized many deep learning domains, sleep medicine remains largely restricted to task-specific models that focus on localized micro-structure features. These approaches often neglect the rich, multi-modal context of Polysomnography (PSG) and fail to capture the global macro-structure of a full night's sleep. To address this, we introduce SleepMaMi , a Sleep Foundation Model engineered to master both hour-long sleep architectures and fine-grained signal morphologies. Our framework utilizes a hierarchical dual-encoder design: a Macro-Encoder to model full-night temporal dependencies and a Micro-Encoder to capture short-term characteristics from biosignals. Macro-Encoder is trained via Demographic-Guided Contrastive Learning, which aligns overnight sleep patterns with objective subject metadata, such as age, sex and BMI to refine global representations. Micro-Encoder is optimized via a hybrid Masked Autoencoder (MAE) and multi-modal contrastive objective. Pre-trained on a massive corpus of $>$20,000 PSG recordings (158K hours),SleepMaMi outperforms or matches state-of-the-art existing foundation models across a diverse suite of downstream tasks, demonstrating superior generalizability and label-efficient adaptation for clinical sleep analysis.

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07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Assessment of occupational aerosol exposure for laboratory technicians: A quantitative study using {Phi}X174 phage as a substitute virus

Authors:
Liu↗Zhang↗

This study aimed to clarify aerosol exposure risks throughout the workflow of a Biosafety Level 2 (BSL-2) polymerase chain reaction (PCR) laboratory, validate the suitability of the {Phi}X174 bacteriophage as an indicator virus, and provide evidence for biosafety control measures. The {Phi}X174 bacteriophage was used to simulate viral samples, and a concentration-bacteriophage plaque standard curve was constructed (R2=0.998). Five operational steps in a simulated PCR laboratory were quantitatively monitored for aerosol concentration using double-layer agar plates, with blank controls used to eliminate interference. Statistical analysis was employed to identify risk differences. Sample homogenization ((5.67 {+/-} 1.23) x 104 plaque-forming units (PFU)/m3) and nucleic acid extraction ((3.45 {+/-} 0.89) x 104 PFU/m3) were identified as high-/very high-risk steps. The viral load in the samples was strongly positively correlated with the aerosol concentration (r = 0.926, P

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08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Optimal Deterministic Multicalibration and Omniprediction

Authors:
Georgy Noarov↗Aaron Roth↗

arXiv:2606.20557v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A model is multicalibrated on a collection of group weights $G$ if it is calibrated – i.e. unbiased even conditional on its prediction – not just overall, but also after reweighting contexts by each $g \in G$. It is a useful property for many downstream applications and is a basic desideratum of trustworthy machine learning. Before this work, all predictors known to attain the minimax-optimal $\widetilde O(\varepsilon^{-3})$ sample complexity rate for $\varepsilon$-multicalibration were randomized, while deterministic predictors were known only with substantially worse sample complexity. Whether randomization is necessary for optimal sample complexity in multicalibration was explicitly asked by [CLNR26] and implicitly in several prior works. We resolve this open problem by giving a minimax-optimal multicalibration algorithm that outputs a deterministic predictor. We then generalize the algorithm to produce optimal deterministic predictors that satisfy outcome indistinguishability (OI) with respect to finite or finitely covered collections of tests. As an application, this also gives deterministic omnipredictors and panpredictors with optimal sample complexity, resolving open problems posed by [OKK25] and [BHHLZ25].

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09.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-08

Statistics of cortical representational drift can enable robust readout

Authors:
Charles Micou↗

by Charles Micou, Timothy O’Leary Representational drift of fixed stimuli, learned tasks and familiar environments is observed in many brain areas, leading to reconfiguration of population codes over days to weeks. This raises the question of whether downstream brain regions employ mechanisms to track changes in population activity and thus preserve the fidelity of the information they extract. We show that the statistical properties of drift have a significant impact on such mechanisms. Over an extended period, a net change in population tuning due to drift can arise from an accumulation of small changes distributed across the population, or via abrupt jumps that affect smaller subsets of cells at each time point. We demonstrate that an adaptive readout can exploit the heavy-tailed statistics of abrupt jumps to maintain a more stable readout using a simple inference mechanism. Using experimental data, we investigate the extent to which heavy-tailed drift statistics are observed during representational drift in the posterior parietal cortex and visual cortex. We find that experimentally measured drift does not conform to a Gaussian random walk. Instead, we find sudden jumps in neural tuning that would be advantageous for a downstream observer adapting to changes in representation. These observations motivate future study to determine whether adaptive decoding mechanisms exist in the brain and to determine the physiological mechanisms that shape the statistics of representational drift.

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10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Machine-learned, finite temperature Fermi-operator expansions suitable for GPUs and AI-hardware

Authors:
Stanislaw Kowalski↗Christian F. A. Negre↗Anders M. N. Niklasson↗Kipton Barros↗Joshua Finkelstein↗

arXiv:2605.08523v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present several finite-temperature recursive Fermi-operator expansion schemes based on the second-order spectral projection (SP2) method. Our approach builds on a previous observation that the electronic structure problem, as formulated through a recursive SP2 expansion, can be mapped onto the architecture of a deep neural network. Using this perspective, we generalize SP2 to finite electronic temperatures by constructing machine learning models that determine optimized recursive expansion coefficients. The same approach is also applied to the prediction of the electronic entropy for fractional occupation numbers. The coefficients are trained for a specified chemical potential and electronic temperature and are not available in closed analytical form. However, by employing an appropriate affine rescaling strategy to the Hamiltonian matrix, we eliminate the need to retrain the model for different temperatures and chemical potentials. Our approach avoids explicit diagonalization and relies solely on highly optimized matrix-matrix multiplication kernels. Compared to state-of-the-art diagonalization, we achieve an order-of-magnitude speedup in the single-particle finite-temperature density matrix calculation for small and moderately sized matrices on modern GPUs and dense matrix multiply units.

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

Contour-Constrained Deformable Registration with Parameter Characterization for Head and Neck Surgical Guidance

Authors:
Qingyun Yang↗Jon S. Heiselman↗Ayberk Acar↗Morgan J. Ringel↗Michael I. Miga↗Matthieu Chabanas↗Michael C. Topf↗Jie Ying Wu↗

With 890,000 annual new cases globally, head and neck squamous cell carcinoma has one of the highest recurrence rates among solid malignancies. Although frozen section analysis is the standard of care for intraoperative margin assessment, accurately relocating detected positive margins on the resection bed remains challenging due to imprecise alignment between resected specimens and their resection bed, compounded by post-resection mucosal tissue shrinkage. We present a biomechanics-driven deformable registration framework that corrects post-resection tissue deformation to provide intraoperative guidance. Our approach registers 3D specimen meshes to intraoperative resection bed point clouds using a deformable registration approach based on regularized Kelvinlet basis functions. The registration matches surface point clouds, fiducial landmarks, and boundary contour constraints that directly penalize perpendicular distance-to-agreement between specimen and resection bed boundaries. Across nine specimens from skin, buccal mucosa, and tongue sites, the overall mean target registration error was $11.11 \pm 4.07$ mm using rigid registration, which decreased to $8.20 \pm 2.68$ mm (26.19\% reduction) using deformable registration without contour constraint. The proposed contour-constrained deformable registration further reduced the error to $5.62 \pm 2.28$ mm, a 49.41\% reduction relative to rigid registration. We observed the largest reduction in the most clinically challenging tongue specimens. We also performed a systematic two-stage parameter search to characterize the relative importance of surface alignment, fiducial correspondences, contour constraint, and strain energy regularization. This search revealed that contour weighting dominates registration accuracy for tissue types with large lateral deformation, while the algorithm operates over a broad range of parameter combinations.

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13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Entanglement Detection by Approximate Entanglement Witnesses

Authors:
Samuel Dai↗Ning Bao↗

arXiv:2402.14755v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The problem of determining whether a given quantum state is separable is known to be computationally difficult. We develop an approach to this problem based on approximations of convex polytopes in high dimensions. By showing that a convex polytope constructed from a finite number of hyperplanes approximates the Euclidean ball arbitrarily well in high dimensions, we find evidence that a finite set of approximate entanglement witnesses is potentially sufficient to determine the entanglement of a state with high probability.

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

Measurement Plasticity: Sensor-Level Adaptation for Vision-Language Models

Authors:
Boyeong Im↗Wooseok Lee↗Yoojin Kwon↗Hyung-Sin Kim↗

We propose Multi-View Physical-prompt (MVP) for Test-Time Adaptation (TTA), a forward-only framework that moves TTA from tokens to photons by treating the camera exposure triangle (i.e., ISO, shutter speed, and aperture) as physical prompts. At inference, MVP acquires selected multiple physical views using a source-affinity score, evaluates digitally augmented variants of each retained view and filters the lowest-entropy predictions, and aggregates predictions with hard voting. This selection-then-vote design is simple, calibration-friendly, and requires no gradients or model modifications. On ImageNet-ES and ImageNet-ES-Diverse, MVP outperforms digital-only TTA on both Auto-Exposure and a combination with conventional sensor control. MVP remains effective under reduced parameter candidates that lower capture latency, demonstrating its practicality.

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

Rethinking Air-Ground Collaboration: A Progressive Cross-Task Benchmark and Socialized Learning Framework

Authors:
Zhoupeng Guo↗Yunqi Zhu↗Zhihe Fan↗Xinjie Yao↗Ruipu Zhao↗Boan Tao↗Yiming Sun↗Zhen Wang↗Pengfei Zhu↗

Air-ground collaborative perception is crucial for robust visual understanding in real-world dynamic environments. However, existing studies typically formulate collaboration as single-task cross-view fusion, overlooking the functional dependencies among localization, target association, and fine-grained parsing. In addition, the heterogeneous nature of aerial and ground views introduces substantial geometric, scale, and occlusion discrepancies, making uniform feature sharing vulnerable to negative transfer. To tackle these issues, we model air-ground perception as a progressive cross-task collaboration task and construct the Air-Ground Progressive Collaboration (AGPC) benchmark, a spatio-temporally aligned benchmark comprising more than 745K raw video frames. Built upon this benchmark, we propose Socialized Co-Perception (SCP), a coarse-to-fine framework that organizes collaboration progressively from aerial global localization to ground target association and identity-aware parsing. Its core module, the Dual-Layer Router (DLR), decouples input-side multi-scale expert selection from output-side task-conditioned modulation, enabling selective cross-view and cross-task interaction while suppressing harmful interference. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SCP. It achieves a 3.73\% coevolutionary gain and a 7.86\% improvement in average downstream performance. These results show that task-conditioned collaboration is more effective than uniform fusion for heterogeneous air-ground perception. The code is available at https://github.com/g1136639260-spec/AGSCP.

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16.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-13

ProtAff: Protein Binding Affinity Prediction via LoRA-Finetuned ESM-2

Authors:
Chu↗L.-S↗Vogt↗Chungyoun↗Gray↗J. J↗

Predicting the binding affinity of protein–protein interactions remains a central challenge in computational biology. Structure prediction models such as AlphaFold3 (AF3) and Boltz-2 can produce high-quality docking poses, and their confidence scores indicate structure quality, but these same scores fail to rank binding affinity among confirmed binders. Here we present ProtAff, a sequence-only affinity prediction model built on ESM-2 (650M parameters) with low-rank adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning and a cross-attention module. ProtAff is trained using a margin ranking loss on 362,567 affinity measurements spanning 20 heterogeneous data sources, and we removed all training samples whose target sequence exceeds 50% similarity to the test target EGFR. On the AdaptyvBio EGFR benchmark (N = 55), ProtAff achieves a Spearman correlation coefficient {rho} = 0.413, outperforming the best AF3 metric ({rho} = 0.054), the best Boltz-2 metric ({rho} = -0.046), and ML-based predictors MINT ({rho} = 0.242) and CrossAffinity ({rho} = 0.216). Applied to the AdaptyvBio Nipah virus binder design competition, a pipeline incorporating ProtAff for affinity ranking produced a design with KD = 0.132 nM (2 of 5 designs confirmed binding), a 2.8-fold improvement over the competition winner. On a cross-target discrimination benchmark of 91 VHH-antigen crystal structures, ProtAff underperforms structural methods for distinguishing cognate from non-cognate pairings, indicating that sequence-based affinity models are effective for within-target ranking but not for cross-target specificity.

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17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

MolmoMotion: Forecasting Point Trajectories in 3D with Language Instruction

Authors:
Jianing Zhang↗Chenhao Zheng↗Yajun Yang↗Max Argus↗Rustin Soraki↗Winson Han↗Taira Anderson↗Chun-Liang Li↗Shuo Liu↗Jiafei Duan↗Zhongzheng Ren↗Jieyu Zhang↗…

Motion forecasting is central to visual intelligence: agents must anticipate how objects will move in order to plan actions, reason about physical interactions, and synthesize realistic futures. We argue that 3D points in world coordinates provide a general representation that is class-agnostic, view-stable, compact, and directly useful for downstream tasks. We formalize the task of goal-conditioned 3D point motion forecasting: given a short visual history, a set of 3D query points on an object of interest, and a language description of the intended goal, the model predicts the future 3D trajectory of each point. We introduce a full stack to study this task at scale: (1) MolmoMotion-1M is a large corpus of action-described, object-grounded 3D point trajectories annotated from 1.16M unconstrained videos; (2) PointMotionBench is a human-verified benchmark spanning 111 object categories and 61 motion types; and (3) MolmoMotion is a general motion forecasting model that supports both autoregressive coordinate prediction and flow-matching-based trajectory generation. MolmoMotion accurately predicts diverse motion patterns with different language instructions, and significantly outperforms existing motion prediction baselines on PointMotionBench. Finally, we show that the learned 3D motion prior transfers well to downstream applications: it improves training efficiency and generalization for robot manipulation, and its predicted trajectories provide effective motion guidance for generative models to synthesize videos with more realistic object motion.

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18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

DiffCoord: Differentiable Coordination for Distributed Multi-Agent Trajectory Optimization

Authors:
Bingheng Wang↗Yichao Gao↗Tianchen Sun↗Shanker Ajay↗Lin Zhao↗

arXiv:2509.01630v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Integrating the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) with Differential Dynamic Programming (DDP) provides a scalable framework for distributed multi-agent trajectory optimization. In practice, ADMM is typically truncated for computational efficiency, tightly coupling parameters that would otherwise separately govern coordination quality and task performance. In this paper, we propose Differentiable Coordination (DiffCoord), a unified framework that jointly meta-learns these coupled parameters for the truncated ADMM-DDP pipeline. These parameters are generated by agent-wise neural networks for task adaptation, and the same networks are shared among isomorphic agents to enable scalability to varying agent counts. We achieve efficient meta-learning by differentiating the ADMM-DDP pipeline end-to-end. Notably, this yields an auxiliary ADMM-LQR distributed gradient solver that computes and coordinates meta-gradients with respect to these parameters. This solver inherits the computational structure of the pipeline, enabling reuse of key computation results and efficient parallelization over agents and along trajectory horizons. We validate DiffCoord through numerical and physical experiments on a cooperative aerial transport system, where it reconfigures quadrotor formations for safe 6-DoF load manipulation in tight spaces. It adapts robustly to varying team sizes and load dynamics, while reducing per-agent gradient computation time by up to 70% compared with state-of-the-art trajectory-gradient methods.

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

CellNet – Localizing Cells using Sparse and Noisy Point Annotations

Authors:
Benjamin Eckhardt↗Dmytro Fishman↗Stuart Fawke↗Andrew Curtis↗Bo Fussing↗Constantin Pape↗

Counting living cells is an important step in many biological research workflows. Our collaborators at the Wellcome Sanger Institute study vital genes in humans via large scale saturation genome editing screening, which requires repeatedly counting cells a great number of times. Computer Vision based automation is crucial for high throughput and resource efficiency. In this work, we develop a regression-based deep learning computer vision algorithm to detect and count cells in phase-contrast microscopy images. To reduce annotation effort, which in practice often becomes a bottleneck, we focus on counting cells only using sparse point annotations, which are fast and easy to acquire. By comparison to state-of-the-art 0-shot methods, we show that regression-based counting is a promising alternative in low data regimes. Through developing methods to automatically count living cells in microscopy images, we contribute to valuable research on the human genome. The code is available at https://github.com/beijn/cellnet.

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20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Validating an Early Pregnancy HbA1c as the Screening Test for Gestational Diabetes Mellitus: Findings from PRISMA Pakistan Cohort

Authors:
Naz↗Yazdani↗Hoodbhoy↗Ghebremihael-Weldeselassie↗Mazhar↗Hotwani↗Jehan↗Nisar↗M. I↗Iqbal↗

Background: Early identification of gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) is critical to improving maternal and neonatal outcomes, particularly in resource-constrained settings where universal oral glucose tolerance testing (OGTT) is burdensome. We assessed whether early-pregnancy HbA1c alone or combined with common risk factors can predict GDM and reduce the burden of OGTT requirements in a peri-urban cohort in Karachi, Pakistan. Methods: We conducted a secondary analysis of the Pregnancy Risk Infant Surveillance and Measurement Alliance (PRISMA) Pakistan cohort. Women enrolled before 20 weeks' gestation with available early-pregnancy HbA1c and a 2-hour 75g OGTT at 24 to 28 weeks were included. We externally validated GDM prediction models originally developed in the STRiDE-India cohort. Model performance was evaluated using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and area under the curve (AUC). We assessed four models: HbA1c alone (Model 1a); age, BMI, and family history of diabetes mellitus (FH DM) (Model 1b); HbA1c combined with age, BMI, and FH DM (Model 2); and an extended model, i.e., Model 2 combined with socioeconomic status, gestational age, parity, systolic and diastolic blood pressure (Model 3). A dual-threshold approach was applied to assess rule-in and rule-out performance. Results: Among 2,489 women, GDM incidence was 7.5% (n=186). Models with a broader set of predictors demonstrated higher AUC values, with Model 2 achieving an AUC of 0.61 (95% CI: 0.57, 0.66). Including additional factors (Model 3) did not further improve predictive ability (AUC: 0.62; 95% CI: 0.58, 0.66). In addition, at predefined thresholds, Model 2 achieved sensitivity of 73.7% (rule-out) and specificity of 83.5% (rule-in), with the potential to reduce OGTT requirements (58.5%). Conclusions: Early-pregnancy risk stratification using HbA1c combined with simple clinical predictors offers a pragmatic approach to streamline GDM screening among high-risk pregnant women. A dual-threshold strategy using Model 2 could reduce reliance on universal OGTT while prioritizing high-risk women for confirmatory testing.

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21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Masked and Predictive Self-Supervised Foundation Models for 3D Brain MRI

Authors:
Esra Erg\"un↗Hersh Chandarana↗Dan Sodickson↗G\"ozde \"Unal↗

Self-supervised foundation models have shown strong promise in medical imaging. However, existing MRI foundation-model studies have primarily emphasized segmentation and dense prediction tasks, while systematic investigation of self-supervised foundation models for MRI-based disease detection remains limited. In this work, we investigate two major self-supervised pretraining paradigms for MRI-based disease detection: reconstruction-based learning via Masked Autoencoders (MAE) and predictive representation learning via Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPA). We study the role of auxiliary objectives by introducing a novel spectral-domain reconstruction loss for MAE to enhance sensitivity to fine-grained anatomical structure, and by integrating variance–covariance regularization (VCR) within our JEPA framework to encourage decorrelated latent representations. Our models are pretrained on heterogeneous single-contrast MRI volumes in a contrast-agnostic setting, without modality concatenation. Across five downstream disease detection tasks, our results highlight the importance of self-supervised objective design for medical foundation model pretraining, demonstrating that the downstream benefit of each objective is determined by its relevance to the task's structure. Specifically, spectral regularization yields the largest improvements when the downstream discriminative signal is characterized by strong high-frequency anatomical structures, while covariance regularization is most beneficial when discriminative information spans multiple decorrelated feature dimensions. MAE with spectral-domain supervision consistently achieves superior downstream performance for MRI-based disease detection. These findings suggest that self-supervised objectives in medical imaging encode specific biases, and their downstream benefit is fundamentally conditioned on the task's structure.

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22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Impact of Connectivity on Laplacian Representations in Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Tommaso Giorgi↗Pierriccardo Olivieri↗Keyue Jiang↗Laura Toni↗Matteo Papini↗

arXiv:2603.08558v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning compact state representations in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) has proven crucial for addressing the curse of dimensionality in large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) problems. Existing principled approaches leverage structural priors on the MDP by constructing state representations as linear combinations of the state-graph Laplacian eigenvectors. When the transition graph is unknown or the state space is prohibitively large, the graph spectral features can be estimated directly via sample trajectories. In this work, we prove an upper bound on the approximation error of linear value function approximation under the learned spectral features. We show how this error scales with the algebraic connectivity of the state-graph, grounding the approximation quality in the topological structure of the MDP. We further bound the error introduced by the eigenvector estimation itself, leading to an end-to-end error decomposition across the representation learning pipeline. Additionally, our expression of the Laplacian operator for the RL setting, although equivalent to existing ones, prevents some common misunderstandings, of which we show some examples from the literature. Our results hold for general (non-uniform) policies without any assumptions on the symmetry of the induced transition kernel. We validate our theoretical findings with numerical simulations on gridworld environments.

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

Persistent Homology as a Theory of Emergent Structure

Authors:
Xin Li↗

arXiv:2507.03065v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Why do some macroscopic structures remain identifiable even though their microscopic constituents continually change? Vortices persist while fluid parcels turn over, neural memories persist while spikes and synapses fluctuate, and institutions persist while individuals enter and leave. We propose a scale-relative answer: an emergent property is a persistent nontrivial homology class $[z]\in H_p=\ker\partial_p/\im\partial_{p+1}$, a macro-feature that is closed but not exact across a filtration of descriptions. This identification turns emergence into a measurement problem. Persistent bars detect stable macro-features, and we introduce a contractive-similarity (CS) graph operator to supply scaffold spectral gaps that predict robustness. Hodge decomposition separates harmonic macro-scaffold from exact and co-exact micro-flow; and functorial condensation explains when one level's emergent class becomes a unit for the next. The resulting scaffold-flow framework expresses six familiar signatures of emergence (i.e., inevitability, coherence, irreducibility, complementarity, robustness, and hierarchy) within one mathematical language. It also yields falsifiable predictions across atmospheric, neural, and social systems: genuine emergent structures should persist across filtrations, remain spectrally stable, respond disproportionately to harmonic interventions, and require timescale separation for hierarchical autonomy.

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

Enhancing Visual Feature Attribution via Weighted Integrated Gradients

Authors:
Kien Tran Duc Tuan↗Tam Nguyen Trong↗Son Nguyen Hoang↗Khoat Than↗Anh Nguyen Duc↗

arXiv:2505.03201v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Integrated Gradients (IG) is a widely used attribution method in explainable AI, particularly in computer vision applications where reliable feature attribution is essential. A key limitation of IG is its sensitivity to the choice of baseline (reference) images. Multi-baseline extensions such as Expected Gradients (EG) assume uniform weighting over baselines, implicitly treating all baseline images as equally informative. In high-dimensional vision models, this assumption often leads to noisy or unstable explanations. This paper proposes Weighted Integrated Gradients (WG), a principled approach that evaluates and weights baselines to enhance attribution reliability. WG introduces an unsupervised criterion for baseline suitability, enabling adaptive selection and weighting of baselines on a per-input basis. The method preserves the core axiomatic properties of IG in a generalized weighted-baseline form. Under an expected, proxy-based fitness–relevance monotonicity assumption, WG provides a probabilistic justification for assigning larger weights to more informative baselines. Experiments on commonly used image datasets and models show that WG improves over EG under our protocol, with up to 36% gains across evaluated convolutional and Transformer architectures. These gains come with additional fitness-evaluation cost, so WG should be viewed as an attribution-fidelity trade-off rather than a faster alternative to EG. By moving beyond the assumption that all baselines contribute equally, Weighted Integrated Gradients offers a clearer and more reliable approach to explaining computer-vision models, improving both understanding and practical usability in explainable AI.

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25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Cross-Dataset Bloom Question Classification: Supervised Models and Prompted LLMs

Authors:
Abdolali Faraji↗Mohammadreza Molavi↗Zohreh Rasoulkhani↗Mohammadreza Tavakoli↗G\'abor Kismih\'ok↗

Automatic Bloom's taxonomy classification of assessment questions can substantially reduce instructor workload, but labeling is subjective and teacher-dependent. Prior machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) approaches reported strong within-dataset results, yet were rarely evaluated in cross-dataset settings, leaving real-world generalizability unclear; meanwhile, LLM effectiveness for Bloom question classification has not been systematically studied. We evaluated the cross-dataset generalization of existing ML/DL methods and assessed LLMs with multiple prompting strategies on five datasets; the best prompting strategy combined in-context examples with course-specific action verbs. Supervised ML/DL models degraded substantially on unseen datasets, whereas LLMs were more stable, suggesting a robust alternative across diverse educational contexts. Based on the best prompting strategy, we also presented a lightweight UI that supports instructors in automatically classifying large question banks; a usability study indicated low workload and high usability.

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