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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Adaptive Weighted Averaging

Authors:
Aditya Bhaskara↗Ashok Cutkosky↗Ravi Kumar↗Manish Purohit↗

arXiv:2606.12763v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the problem of selecting the largest among $n$ unknown values $x_1,\dots,x_n$ given only a single unbiased estimate $y_i$ for each $x_i$. We design strategies that are simultaneously admissible (not uniformly dominated by any other strategy) and also never worse than a given baseline such as uniform random selection. We provide an application to stochastic optimization, where we obtain online-to-batch conversion bounds with a desirable "no-compromise" guarantee: they are never worse than standard random iterate selection, and yet can be significantly better in benign settings.

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02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Can Vision Foundation Models Navigate? Zero-Shot Real-World Evaluation and Lessons Learned

Authors:
Maeva Guerrier↗Karthik Soma↗Jana Pavlasek↗Giovanni Beltrame↗

arXiv:2603.25937v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Visual Navigation Models (VNMs) promise generalizable, robot navigation by learning from large-scale visual demonstrations. Despite growing real-world deployment, existing evaluations rely almost exclusively on success rate, whether the robot reaches its goal, which conceals trajectory quality, collision behavior, and robustness to environmental change. We present a real-world evaluation of five state-of-the-art VNMs (GNM, ViNT, NoMaD, NaviBridger, and CrossFormer) across two robot platforms and five environments spanning indoor and outdoor settings. Beyond success rate, we combine path-based metrics with vision-based goal-recognition scores and assess robustness through controlled image perturbations (motion blur, sunflare). Our analysis uncovers three systematic limitations: (a) even architecturally sophisticated diffusion and transformer-based models exhibit frequent collisions, indicating limited geometric understanding; (b) models fail to discriminate between different locations that are perceptually similar, however some semantics differences are present, causing goal prediction errors in repetitive environments; and (c) performance degrades under distribution shift. We will publicly release our evaluation codebase and dataset to facilitate reproducible benchmarking of VNMs.

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03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Accidental Symmetry in the Tavis-Cummings Model via the Schwinger Boson Representation

Authors:
Plato Deliyannis↗Iman Marvian↗

arXiv:2606.12813v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Jaynes-Cummings (JC) Hamiltonian is a paradigmatic model of light-matter interaction and, more generally, qubit-boson interactions, widely used across atomic, optical, and superconducting qubit platforms. In the multi-qubit setting, where n qubits are identically coupled to a single boson mode, this interaction is known as the Tavis-Cummings (TC) Hamiltonian. The structure of the TC model is usually understood in terms of two standard symmetries: permutation invariance of the qubits and a U(1) symmetry associated with conservation of the total excitation number. Here we identify an additional, independent "accidental" symmetry of the TC Hamiltonian and construct the corresponding conserved observable. We show that, for n>2 qubits, this symmetry imposes strong constraints on the realizable unitary transformations. These constraints persist in the presence of the global $J_z$ Hamiltonian, but are removed by adding $J_z^2$, even though $J_z^2$ preserves both permutation invariance and the U(1) symmetry. Finally, we explain the origin of this previously unnoticed symmetry using Schwinger's boson representation of angular momentum. These restrictions have important implications for controllability of the TC system and for its applications to quantum computing, which are investigated further in a companion paper.

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04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Two Blood-based Endotypes Reveal Divergent Clinical Outcomes of Fibrotic Hypersensitivity Pneumonitis

Authors:
Huang↗Ma↗S.-F↗Kim↗J. S↗Strickland↗Receveur↗B. A↗Bonham↗C. S↗Paul↗T. K↗…

Rationale: Fibrotic hypersensitivity pneumonitis (fHP) is an antigen-driven, life-threatening interstitial lung disease characterized by heterogeneous radiologic features, clinical outcomes, and treatment responses. Objectives: To identify blood-based fHP endotypes that inform mechanism, prognosis and therapeutic response. Methods: We performed integrative analyses of multi-compartment transcriptomic data derived from whole blood, peripheral blood mononuclear cells, bronchoalveolar lavage, and surgical lung biopsies, alongside circulating plasma proteomics. Multiple clustering algorithms were cross-compared to ensure robustness and reproducibility of endotypes identification. Immune cell composition was inferred using bulk RNA-seq deconvolution and annotated with BAL single-cell RNA-seq. Pathway activities were characterized using Gene Set Enrichment Analysis. Transplant-free survival (TFS) was evaluated for endotype and corticosteroid exposure by Kaplan-Meier methods, with hazard ratios analyzed using multivariable Cox proportional hazards models. Results: Two molecular endotypes, lymphocytic-associated (L-fHP) and non-lymphocytic-associated (N-fHP), were identified and validated. L-fHP showed enrichment of adaptive immune signaling and lymphocyte predominance, whereas N-fHP demonstrated myeloid-cell activation with neutrophil and macrophage predominance. Corticosteroid exposure was associated with worse TFS in L-fHP but not in N-fHP after adjusting for age, sex, and baseline pulmonary function. Compared to L-fHP, N-fHP had poorer baseline pulmonary function, faster 12-month FVC decline, and shorter TFS. N-fHP also exhibited elevated neutrophil-associated markers, including matrix metalloproteinase-9, across paired transcriptomic and proteomic datasets, supporting a neutrophil-driven, cross-compartment disease process. Conclusion: Multi-omic, multi-compartment analysis identifies two reproducible fHP endotypes with distinct clinical outcomes and corticosteroid responses, supporting a precision medicine approach beyond current clinical and radiologic classification.

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05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Position: Generative Engine Optimization Creates Underexamined Risks, Governance Must Target Concentration, Disclosure, and Academic Blind Spots

Authors:
Yizhu Wen↗Nan Zhang↗Haohan Yuan↗Xun Chen↗Haopeng Zhang↗Hanqing Guo↗

arXiv:2606.12439v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) answer engines are increasingly used for information seeking, shifting visibility from ranked lists to synthesized answers. This enables Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), which targets LLM answer engines' evidence pool and generation. We analyze the search engine optimization (SEO) to GEO transition to identify two risks: (i) concentrated influence from low contestability and system sensitivity, and (ii) undisclosed commercial influence embedded in evidence and reasoning. We then formalize a general GEO pipeline to locate where optimization acts and compare academic and industry practices, revealing a third risk: (iii) academic-industry blind spots driven by visibility and evaluation asymmetries between offline setups and deployed systems. This position argues the need for answer-level governance and measurement: stronger contestability, high-precision disclosure, black-box auditing of material influence, and deployment-aligned metrics for exposure persistence.

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

SCOPE-FL: A Strategy-proof Chain-based Optimal pareto efficient Federated Learning System

Authors:
Seyed Salar Ghazi↗Kaiwen Zhang↗Mehdi feizi↗Hans-Arno Jacobsen↗

arXiv:2606.18384v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hierarchical Federated Learning (HFL) enables scalable collaborative model training across distributed devices while preserving data privacy. However, existing HFL client selection mechanisms suffer from a fundamental strategic inefficiency. By prioritizing stability over Pareto efficiency (PE), they produce suboptimal resource allocations, and without strategy proofness (SP), participants are incentivized to misrepresent their true preferences, both failures degrading system overall welfare in the Pareto sense in practice. To address it, we propose SCOPE-FL (Strategy-proof Chain-based Optimal pareto efficient Federated Learning), a synchronous HFL framework that formulates client selection as a two-sided school choice problem solved through the Top Trading Cycle (TTC) algorithm that simultaneously guarantees PE and SP. For reward distribution, SCOPE-FL employs a scalable Shapley value approximation based on One-Round Reconstruction (OR), ensuring compensation proportional to each client's contribution. The entire mechanism executes via blockchain smart contracts, providing the tamper-proof environment required for the SP guarantees to hold in practice. A comprehensive evaluation on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and CIFAR-10 demonstrates that SCOPE-FL outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, including DA, IAS, and other methods across model accuracy, convergence rate, and reward efficiency, while achieving communication latency comparable to DA and blockchain overhead significantly lower than DA at scale.

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07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Objective Quality Assessment of Point Clouds Using Multi-scale Implicit Structural Similarity

Authors:
Zhang Chen↗Shuai Wan↗Yuezhe Zhang↗Siyu Ren↗Fuzheng Yang↗Junhui Hou↗

The unstructured and irregular nature of points poses a significant challenge for accurate point cloud quality assessment (PCQA), particularly in establishing accurate perceptual feature correspondence. To tackle this, we propose the Multi-scale Implicit Structural Similarity Measurement (MS-ISSM). Unlike traditional point-to-point matching, MS-ISSM utilizes radial basis function (RBF) to represent local features continuously, transforming distortion measurement into a comparison of implicit function coefficients. This approach effectively circumvents matching errors inherent in irregular data. Additionally, we propose a ResGrouped-MLP quality assessment network, which robustly maps multi-scale feature differences to perceptual scores. The network architecture departs from traditional flat multi-layer perceptron (MLP) by adopting a grouped encoding strategy integrated with residual blocks and channel-wise attention mechanisms. This hierarchical design allows the model to preserve the distinct physical semantics of luma, chroma, and geometry while adaptively focusing on the most salient distortion features across High, Medium, and Low scales. Experimental results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that MS-ISSM outperforms state-of-the-art metrics in both reliability and generalization. The source code is available at: https://github.com/ZhangChen2022/MS-ISSM.

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

Agreement in Representation Space for Open-Ended Self-Consistency

Authors:
Paula Ontalvilla↗Gorka Azkune↗Aitor Ormazabal↗

Self-consistency improves LLM reasoning by sampling multiple outputs and selecting the most consistent answer, but existing formulations largely rely on exact matching and therefore remain limited to tasks with categorical outputs. In this work, we study self-consistency in open-ended generation tasks such as code synthesis and text summarization. We hypothesize that consistency can be understood as a geometric property of the generation space, where semantically compatible generations concentrate in similar regions of representation space. To study this hypothesis, we introduce Embedding-Based Agreement (EBA), a simple training-free operationalization that estimates agreement by clustering sampled generations in embedding space. Through experiments on mathematical reasoning, code generation, and summarization, we show that agreement in representation space provides a robust and scalable signal of self-consistency for open-ended tasks. In particular, EBA consistently outperforms random selection and exhibits more stable scaling behavior than recent selection approaches based on LLM evaluation or uncertainty estimation. We further show that these agreement signals remain stable across model families and embedding spaces, even with native hidden representations. Finally, our analysis shows that the geometric location occupied by sampled generations is strongly correlated with generation quality: generations concentrated near central regions of representation space tend to correspond to more reliable outputs, whereas peripheral generations are substantially less accurate. Overall, our findings support viewing self-consistency as a property of the geometric organization of sampled generations rather than exact symbolic overlap.

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09.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-24

Systematic benchmarking of multi-modal approaches for tumor-naive ctDNA detection and quantification

Authors:
Qi↗Odinokov↗Lakshmanan↗L. N↗Grachet↗N. G↗Lou↗Saelee↗Garcia-Montoya↗Mun↗W. P↗Rahman↗…

Longitudinal monitoring of circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) has emerged as a promising framework for characterizing treatment response dynamics in cancer. Scalable tumor-naive approaches for quantifying ctDNA often involve whole-genome sequencing (WGS) or DNA methylation profiling, but their comparative performance and capacity for complementary integration remain poorly understood. Here we systematically benchmarked tumor-naive WGS- and methylation-based ctDNA quantification methods using plasma from 150 patients with colorectal, lung and breast cancer. Using paired high-depth WGS and EM-seq data, we generated 40,000 in silico samples and evaluated detection accuracy, limits of detection (LoD) and quantification (LoQ) across cancer types and sequencing depths (0.1x-30x). We further assessed single- and multimodal method combinations, identifying conditions under which integrated approaches enhance analytical performance for detection and quantification relative to single modalities. This benchmark delineates key performance trade-offs and provides a practical framework to support method development and guide future research applications in ctDNA-based biomarker studies.

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10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Rethinking Text-to-Image as Semantic-Aware Data Augmentation for Indoor Scene Recognition

Authors:
Trong-Vu Hoang↗Quang-Binh Nguyen↗Dinh-Khoi Vo↗Hoai-Danh Vo↗Minh-Triet Tran↗Trung-Nghia Le↗

In the realm of computer vision, indoor image recognition presents challenges due to the intricate interplay of lighting conditions, occlusions, and diverse object arrangements within confined spaces. To address the lacks of training indoor images, we introduce a novel approach leveraging Stable Diffusion (SD) for the generation of synthetic images, which serve as a powerful data augmentation tool. The utilization of SD offers a principled framework for synthesizing diverse and realistic indoor scenes, thereby enriching the training data pool for robust indoor image recognition models. Experimental findings on the MIT Indoor Scene dataset reveal the potential of our proposed approach in enhancing the training of deep models when authentic data is limited. Furthermore, to prevent the misuse of SD synthetic images, we introduce a counter measure based on DIffusion Reconstruction Error (DIRE). The powerful DIRE presentation enables training robust classifiers only using lightweight deep models. Experiments show that our approach can perfectly recognize SD generated images with the accuracy of 100% using MobilenetV3.

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11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

SENTRY: SAM2-Enhanced Neighbor-Aware and Temporally Reasoned Memory for Visual Tracking

Authors:
Mohamad Alansari↗Yonathan Michael↗Hasan AlMarzouqi↗Muzammal Naseer↗Naoufel Werghi↗Sajid Javed↗

We revisit the memory update mechanism in SAM2-based visual object tracking and identify confidence-only mask selection as the dominant cause of drift under occlusion, rapid motion, and distractors. We introduce SENTRY, a training-free, plug-and-play, refine-before-write module that validates each memory update for short-horizon temporal consistency before committing it. SENTRY aggregates diverse segmentation hypotheses per frame, backtracks them into short tracklets, and uses neighbor-aware cycle-consistent matching against recent trajectories to favor temporally and geometrically consistent masks. It leaves the base architecture untouched, replacing confidence-driven writes with consistency-validated ones. For fair evaluation, we re-evaluate major open-source SAM2-based trackers across all available scales and datasets, filling gaps in prior reports. Integrated into five strong baselines, SENTRY delivers consistent gains across nine benchmarks, achieving new zero-shot SOTA on LaSOT, LaSOT_ext, GOT-10k, VOT20, VOT22, and DiDi. Despite these checks, the SAM2-L version runs at 32.8 FPS on an A100, and across compatible hosts adds only about 0.4–0.6 GB VRAM. Our results provide the first unified all-scale evaluation of SAM2-based trackers and show that enforcing temporal validity at write time stabilizes memory-augmented tracking without retraining.

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

Robust Mixed-State Cluster States and Spurious Topological Entanglement Negativity

Authors:
Seunghun Lee↗Eun-Gook Moon↗

arXiv:2504.16165v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate 1D and 2D cluster states under local decoherence to assess the robustness of their mixed-state subsystem symmetry-protected topological (SSPT) order. By exactly computing fidelity correlators via dimensional reduction of effective statistical mechanics models, we pinpoint the critical error rate for strong-to-weak spontaneous breaking of strong subsystem symmetry. Without resorting to the replica trick, we demonstrate that mixed-state SSPT order remains remarkably robust up to the maximal decoherence rate when noise respects strong subsystem symmetry. Furthermore, we propose that the mixed-state SSPT order can be detected by a constant correction to the area-law scaling of entanglement negativity, termed spurious topological entanglement negativity. This also highlights that topological entanglement negativity, a widely used diagnostic for mixed-state topological order, is generally not invariant under finite-depth quantum channels.

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

Post-Launch Capability Expansion of Vision-Language Models via Prompting for On-Orbit Spacecraft Inspection

Authors:
Nicholas A. Welsh↗Lennon J. Shikhman↗Monty Nehru Attazs↗Seemanthini K. Putane↗Van Minh Nguyen↗Ryan T. White↗

Spaceborne inspection systems often deploy perception models prior to launch, after which updating model weights or expanding fixed label sets becomes operationally impractical. While supervised models can be integrated pre-flight, adding new semantic capabilities in orbit requires retraining and re-uploading parameters. We investigate whether prompt-driven vision–language models can enable post-launch semantic expansion, allowing new spacecraft components to be specified via natural-language prompts without modifying onboard weights. We evaluate zero-shot instance segmentation of spacecraft components under a strictly frozen, single-pass inference protocol on a test set of $129$ images of previously unseen satellites. Under fixed global thresholds and no post-processing, SAM3 achieves $0.385$ mAP@$0.5$ and $0.267$ mAP@$0.5{:}0.95$. Performance is strongly scale-dependent: large structural elements like spacecraft bodies ($0.639$ AP@$0.50$) and solar arrays ($0.598$ AP@$0.5$) localize reliably, while relatively small appendages like antennas ($0.221$ AP@$0.5$) and thrusters ($0.081$ AP@$0.5$) remain difficult. Prompt formulation influences performance, with structured prompts incorporating spatial and geometric descriptors yielding up to $82%$ improvement over short category-name prompts. The model operates within the memory and compute envelope of contemporary embedded GPUs, suggesting prompt-driven grounding can provide a practical mechanism for post-launch semantic extension of dominant spacecraft structures while highlighting limitations of zero-shot localization for fine-scale components under orbital domain shift.

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14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

GDGU: A Gradient Difference-based Graph Unlearning Method for Cyberattack Localization in Electric Vehicle Charging Networks

Authors:
Nanhong Liu↗Mucun Sun↗Jie Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.19566v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Electric vehicle charging stations (EVCSs) can expose distribution feeders to cyberattacks. While machine learning methods, including graph neural networks, can localize which bus is compromised, significant challenges remain in data sharing and model training. For example, privacy regulations grant EVCS owners the right to delete their training data from a deployed model, yet retraining from scratch on every request is computationally prohibitive. To address this, we study graph unlearning (GU) for EVCS cyberattack localization, formulated as a feature-level unlearning problem on a graph-level multi-label classification task. Specifically, we propose gradient difference-based graph unlearning (GDGU), which removes the influence of the requested deletion data through a first-order parameter correction. The correction is computed from the gradient difference between the original training data and a modified dataset in which only the charging power features at the requested EVCS buses are unlearned. Then, a batch-normalization recalibration and a brief recovery fine-tuning step are applied to restore localization utility. We benchmark GDGU against two second-order GU baselines on the IEEE 34-bus, 123-bus, and 8500-node distribution networks across three graph neural network backbones and cumulative unlearning scenarios. GDGU matches the strongest baseline on localization utility and reaches forgetting fidelity close to full-retraining, while unlearning 10 to 12 times faster than retraining from scratch and using far less memory than the second-order GU baselines.

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15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

GRACE-DS: a Guarded Reward-guided Agent Correction Environment in Data Science

Authors:
Aleksandr Tsymbalov↗Danis Zaripov↗Artem Epifanov↗Anastasya Palienko↗

We introduce GRACE-DS, a Guarded Reward-guided Agent Correction Environment in Data Science for pre-deployment evaluation of LLM-powered AutoML agents. GRACE-DS is a set of evaluation metrics in an isolated environment that can be applied to tabular ML tasks specific to a particular organization. It exposes agents to realistic workflow stages, from planning and data inspection through feature engineering, model development, validation, and code repair to final submission, while hidden executable validators measure not only final predictive performance but also leakage avoidance, reproducibility, protocol validity, correction behavior, and reward alignment. The strongest structured regime, flexible iterative interaction (our approach), achieves higher end-to-end normalized hidden-test quality than single-shot generation, unstructured interaction, and restart-based baselines, while also improving protocol-valid completion. Validated across more than 7,000 episodes, these results establish GRACE-DS as a robust platform for assessing the capacity of LLM-based AutoML agents to execute machine learning workflows under production-like conditions and in accordance with organization-specific requirements.

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16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

UPLOTS: A Unified Pretrained Language Model for Constrained Time-series Generation

Authors:
Du Yin↗Hao Xue↗Jinliang Deng↗Yang Yang↗Shuang Ao↗Arian Prabowo↗Flora Salim↗

arXiv:2606.10466v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In time-series generation, existing approaches typically handcraft ortrain a separate model for each dataset, which hinders their scalability and fails to leverage shared temporal structures across domains. To address this fragmentation, we propose UPLOTS, a Unified, Prompt-guided Language model framework fOr constrained Time-Series Generation across diverse domains. Instead of building task-specific models, UPLOTS leverages a single pre-trained transformer backbone guided by learned constraint prompts, enabling on-demand generation with precise pattern control. One key innovation is our dynamic multi-dataset loss re-weighting and prompt-to-pattern mapping, which allows UPLOTS to internalize diverse temporal structures during training and conditionally generate them at inference. We evaluate UPLOTS on four real-world benchmarks and multiple constraint settings, including peak-period, calendar, load-level, and volatility patterns. Additional held-out constraint-combination and downstream forecasting experiments further demonstrate that UPLOTS generalizes beyond the original peak-pattern setting and improves data augmentation under scarce real-data regimes. Our code and baselines are available at anonymous github repo: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/UPLOTS-6C36.

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

Fuzzy-Geometric Branch-Point Modeling for Structure-Aware Augmentation of Handwritten Chinese Characters

Authors:
Dongbin Jiao↗Yibo Lyu↗Qiulu Wei↗Fuxiang Lu↗Shengcai Liu↗Shi Yan↗

Data scarcity and structural distortion significantly limit handwriting recognition in high-security authentication. Existing augmentation methods often cause topological and morphological damage, particularly when processing complex Chinese characters where stroke intersections, ligatures, and sharp turns render traditional branch-point detection unreliable. To address this, this paper proposes a fuzzy geometry-driven structure-aware (FGSA) augmentation framework. We model branch points as fuzzy sets within the skeleton space, constructing a continuous branch-point membership field by integrating topological neighborhood evidence with direction field divergence. This membership field is adaptively optimized via an unsupervised surrogate objective, enabling robust stroke decoupling without manual annotation. Finally, kinematically-aligned samples are synthesized through parameterized cubic Bézier reconstruction and multi-strategy perturbations, ensuring a balance between structural fidelity and sample diversity. Moreover, we establish LZUSig, a large-scale, highly challenging dataset specifically dedicated to fine-grained structural degradation in Chinese handwritten signatures. Extensive experiments on CASIA-HWDB1.1, ChiSig, and LZUSig demonstrate that FGSA significantly reduces the word-level error rate ($\Delta$WER), achieving optimal recognition gains over the compared baselines. More importantly, it strikes a robust trade-off among task gain, structural fidelity, and discriminative feature preservation, offering a highly controllable solution for handwriting augmentation.

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19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Agon: An Autonomous Large-Scale Omnidisciplinary Research System Built on Prompt Economy

Authors:
Youran Sun↗Xingyu Ren↗Chugang Yi↗Jiaxuan Guo↗Kejia Zhang↗Jianda Du↗Haizhao Yang↗

Large language models are making research production scalable, shifting the bottleneck from producing artifacts to judging claims. We present \textsc{Agon}, a research orchestrator that validates what can be checked inside the workflow and leaves the remaining judgments to human scientists. \textsc{Agon} is built on six design principles: Prompt Economy, Future-Facing, Minimal Prompts, OmniDisciplinary, Massive Parallelism, and Zero-Code. We ran \textsc{Agon} across domains for 444 iterations of Prompt Economy loops, using only small starting topics and no human-written experimental code. These deployments demonstrate scalability while exposing new classes of failure. We organize these failures into a taxonomy along severity, fixability, visibility, and capability locus. The taxonomy separates failures the loops can see and fix from those that require human judgment. Together, these results show that \textsc{Agon} is pushing research toward a new paradigm: machine scales, human steers.

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20.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-20

Seed variation impacts clustering stability in Single-Cell RNA-Seq and can be mitigated by StAbility-BasEd-Reassignment (SABER)

Authors:
Zagaria↗Tini↗Bonetti↗Mazzarella↗

Single-cell RNA-seq clustering is commonly treated as reproducible once a random seed is fixed, yet the choice of seed itself may alter cell assignments and downstream interpretation. We systematically quantified seed-induced clustering variability by running Louvain and Leiden clustering across 100 seeds in Seurat and Scanpy on 28 single-cell RNA-seq datasets from the Human Cell Atlas and IMMUcan. Using Element-Centric Consistency, we found that seed choice affected a substantial fraction of cells, with Scanpy showing more unstable assignments than Seurat on average, 40.46% versus 26.78% unstable cells, respectively. This increased stability came at a marked computational cost: Seurat required approximately 19-fold higher median memory than Scanpy. Seed-dependent clustering variability also propagated to cell-type annotation, particularly among transcriptionally related populations including macrophage/monocyte, endothelial/epithelial and T/NK cell states. To mitigate this instability, we developed StAbility-BasEd Reassignment (SABER), a Scanpy-based framework that identifies seed-sensitive cells across repeated clusterings and reassigns them to stable cluster cores using cosine similarity. SABER improved clustering quality while preserving annotation concordance and reduced median memory usage 3.5-fold compared with Seurat-Louvain. Our results identify seed choice as an underappreciated source of variability in single-cell analysis and provide a scalable strategy to improve clustering robustness.

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21.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-25

Information from coincidences

Authors:
Akshay Balsubramani↗

arXiv:2606.25042v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We prove a single algebraic mixed coincidence identity that unifies a broad swath of information-theoretic variational results. For any family of priors $\{\pi_i\}$ and real exponents $\{ \alpha_i \}$, the log of the mixed count $E_{x\sim\nu}\!\left[\prod_{i=1}^W \pi_i^{\alpha_i}(x)\right]$ is simultaneously a Boltzmann coincidence weight, an exponential-family normalizer, a maximum-entropy value, and a KL-barycenter optimum. The identity yields a unified derivation of classical cornerstones of information theory: concentration of empirical distributions (Sanov-type decompositions and Gibbs conditioning), hypothesis-testing error exponents (Chernoff information and its multi-way analogue), change-of-measure inequalities (Donsker-Varadhan and PAC-Bayes), and laws governing rare-pattern coincidences (Erdos-Renyi run-length, iterative guesswork, rate-distortion, and birthday thresholds). Each is recovered as a specialization of the same algebraic equality. It strictly generalizes the classical Renyi entropy and divergence variational formulas (one and two priors respectively) to a $W$-prior simplex, and holds for unnormalized and continuum-indexed priors. Among its consequences are an exact multi-prior PAC-Bayes penalty that subtracts an explicit "coincidence bonus" from the usual single-prior posterior penalty, and the asymptotic MAP error exponent for $W$-ary hypothesis testing as an edge-restricted simplex optimum. We demonstrate the calculus at scale on two large alphabets encoding richly modeled sequential languages: on language-model next-token predictives where we recover contrastive decoding, and on human genomic regulatory sequence where it separates correlated from diverse prior families along a sliding-window trace.

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22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

The Linguistics Olympiads: Towards a New Corpus for Linguistics Research?

Authors:
Vlad A. Neacsu↗

Linguistics olympiad problems (LOPs) are a category of self-sufficient puzzles consisting of a scaled-down corpus representative of certain linguistic phenomena, from which the solver must deduce a primitive set of rules of the language and then translate a new set of elements. The linguistics olympiads (LOs) have become a worldwide phenomenon with 43 different territories taking part in the International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL) 2025. While the typology and solving strategies of LOPs have been analysed, their scientific facet and connections to academic linguistics have yet to be explored. LOPs are directly connected to many linguistic fields, e.g., linguistic typology, linguistic relativity, and linguistics fieldwork. Recently, LOPs have become a research focus as benchmarks for large language models, thus highlighting their usefulness in computational linguistics. Nevertheless, they have not yet been integrated into mainstream linguistics research. This paper attempts to open new directions of including this particular type of puzzle in academic research by offering a structured evaluation of LOPs as linguistic data sources and proposes criteria for their responsible use in academic research. Starting from a set of over 1800 LOPs, this study critically examines the potential of LOPs as a novel corpus for linguistics research by discussing their strengths and limitations as tools, as well as the areas of linguistics into which these problems could fit. This work forms the foundation for a broader initiative aimed at bridging the gap between LOs and academic linguistics, by establishing a robust theoretical framework for LOPs.

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23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Taxonomy of integrable and ground-state solvable models: Jastrow wave functions on graphs and parent Hamiltonians

Authors:
Nilanjan Sasmal↗Adolfo del Campo↗

arXiv:2602.22315v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a family of many-body systems of distinguishable continuous-variable particles in which interparticle interactions are set by the adjacency matrix of a graph. The ground-state wave function of such systems is of a generalized Jastrow form involving the product of pair-correlation functions over the edge set of the graph. These systems describe quantum fluids when the graph is complete, and the pair function has a well-defined permutation symmetry. In general, they provide the continuous-variable generalization of spin systems on graphs, with broken permutation symmetry. The corresponding parent Hamiltonian is shown to include (a) two-body interactions determined by the graph adjacency matrix and (b) three-body interactions over all possible 2-paths on the graph. Employing elements of graph theory, we chart the landscape of models, recovering known instances in the literature and providing numerous new examples of ground-state solvable models for which the system Hamiltonian, ground-state wave function, and corresponding energy eigenvalue are specified.

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24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

A Study of Belief Revision Postulates in Multi-Agent Systems (Extended Version)

Authors:
Michael Thielscher↗Tran Cao Son↗

arXiv:2605.02249v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate the belief revision problem in epistemic planning, i.e., what will be the beliefs of all agents in a multi-agent system after an agent gains the belief in some state property. Based on the standard representation in epistemic planning of agents' beliefs via a single multi-agent Kripke model, we generalize the classical AGM belief revision postulates to the multi-agent setting, with the aim to provide a formal framework for evaluating dynamic epistemic reasoning frameworks in which the beliefs of all agents as the result of actions are computed. As an example of a simple operator that satisfies all of the generalized AGM postulates, we present generalized full-meet multi-agent belief revision. We moreover define a generalization of the standard postulates for iterated revision, present a more sophisticated, event model based revision operator, and discuss the potential issues in defining an epistemic operator on Kripke models that can satisfy all of the generalized postulates for iterated multi-agent belief revision.

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

Rethinking the Trust Region in LLM Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Penghui Qi↗Xiangxin Zhou↗Zichen Liu↗Tianyu Pang↗Chao Du↗Min Lin↗Wee Sun Lee↗

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) serving as the de facto standard algorithm. Despite its ubiquity, we argue that the core ratio clipping mechanism in PPO is structurally ill-suited for the large vocabularies inherent to LLMs. PPO constrains policy updates based on the probability ratio of sampled tokens, which serves as a noisy single-sample Monte Carlo estimate of the true policy divergence. This creates a sub-optimal learning dynamic: updates to low-probability tokens are aggressively over-penalized, while potentially catastrophic shifts in high-probability tokens are under-constrained, leading to training inefficiency and instability. To address this, we propose Divergence Proximal Policy Optimization (DPPO), which substitutes heuristic clipping with a more principled constraint based on a direct estimate of policy divergence (e.g., Total Variation or KL). To avoid huge memory footprint, we introduce the efficient Binary and Top-K approximations to capture the essential divergence with negligible overhead. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that DPPO achieves superior training stability and efficiency compared to existing methods, offering a more robust foundation for RL-based LLM fine-tuning. Our code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/Stable-RL.

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