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

It's About Time: Temporal References in Emergent Communication

Emergent communication enables agents to develop bespoke languages that improve communication efficiency. Despite the known importance of temporal structure in natural language, there is no existing evidence of temporal references in emergent communication. This paper addresses this gap, by exploring how agents communicate about temporal relationships. We analyse three potential factors for the emergence of temporal references: environmental, external, and architectural. Our experiments demonstrate that altering the loss function is insufficient for temporal references to emerge; rather, architectural changes are necessary. A minimal change in agent architecture, using a different batching method, allows the emergence of temporal references. This modified design is compared with the standard architecture in a temporal referential games environment, which emphasises temporal relationships. The analysis shows that over 95% of the agents with the modified batching method develop temporal references, without changes to their loss function. We consider temporal referencing necessary for future improvements to the agents' communication efficiency, enabling future agents to use a closer to optimal coding as compared to purely compositional languages. These insights provide the basis for incorporation of temporal references into other emergent communication settings, and investigation of other aspects of language.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Proximal Policy Optimization for Amortized Discrete Sampling

arXiv:2606.15793v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper explores policy gradient algorithms for training stochastic policies to sample from structured discrete probability distributions under the Generative Flow Network (GFlowNet) framework. Building on extensive theoretical connections between GFlowNets and entropy-regularized reinforcement learning, we derive equivalents of standard policy gradient algorithms for training GFlowNets, as well as experimentally explore their various methodological aspects, including baseline training and advantage estimation. Most importantly, our work is the first to derive and successfully apply proximal policy optimization to GFlowNets, showing its improved convergence speed and data efficiency compared to standard GFlowNet training objectives on benchmarks ranging from synthetic energies to molecular graph generation.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Handbook of Error-Correcting Codes

arXiv:2606.11484v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Barcode scans, clear phone calls, reliable data storage, satellite communication, and large-scale quantum computation are all made possible by error correction. We present a handbook version of The Error Correction Zoo, a curated reference of methods for protecting classical or quantum information from errors during storage and transmission. The handbook includes descriptions of these error-correcting codes and a classification according to the symbols they use. It also catalogues relations among codes and related objects such as sphere packings, lattices, designs, groups, and classical and quantum phases of matter. The collection is intended both as a rigorous reference and as a practical aid for tracing the web of code relationships and uncovering new connections.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Non-Parametric Machine Text Detection via Multi-View Gaussian Processes

Adversarial conditions such as paraphrasing and targeted style transfer sharply degrade the accuracy of machine text detectors. A document, however, carries multiple complementary signals (e.g., stylistic features, likelihood and rank-order features, and structural features), and an attack that suppresses one may leave others intact. While a parametric classifier can learn to combine these features given sufficient supervision, classifiers are prone to making confidently incorrect predictions when the distribution shifts (e.g., novel attacks or unseen language models). To address this, we propose a multi-view, non-parametric detection framework that extracts complementary feature views from the same document and aggregates per-view evidence through a Gaussian process ensemble. By aggregating evidence across views, an adversary must simultaneously defeat multiple independent axes of detection, substantially raising the cost of evasion. The Gaussian process formulation additionally provides calibrated probabilities and principled abstention on out-of-distribution inputs, supporting reliable deployment in high-stakes settings. We evaluate on three benchmarks spanning diverse generators and attacks: the DetectRL and RAID benchmarks, and the PAN2025 shared task and demonstrate that our multi-view detector maintains strong performance under the considered attacks, outperforming existing approaches against held out attacks.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

SceneCompleter: Dense 3D Scene Completion for Generative Novel View Synthesis

Generative models have shown great promise for novel view synthesis (NVS) by leveraging strong image generation priors. However, existing approaches typically follow a 2D inpainting paradigm, first completing missing image regions and then performing 3D reconstruction. This strategy often causes geometry distortion and appearance drift, as 2D inpainting models cannot reliably infer the underlying 3D structure required for cross-view consistent generation. In this paper, we propose SceneCompleter, a geometry-aware framework that reformulates generative NVS as dense 3D scene completion. Instead of hallucinating isolated 2D views, SceneCompleter jointly completes geometry and appearance through a geometry-appearance dual-stream diffusion model in a spatially aligned RGBD latent space. To provide holistic scene context, we further introduce a Scene Embedder that conditions generation on global semantic and stylistic information from reference images. The completed RGBD predictions are then aligned and integrated into an expandable 3D scene representation, enabling iterative and coherent scene completion. Extensive experiments on in-domain and out-of-distribution datasets demonstrate that SceneCompleter produces visually plausible and geometrically consistent novel views across diverse scenarios. Project Page: https://chen-wl20.github.io/SceneCompleter

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

TAB-PO: Preference Optimization with a Token-Level Adaptive Barrier for Token-Critical Structured Generation

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is an effective and widely adopted approach for offline alignment but is poorly matched to ontology-driven structured prediction, where preferred and rejected JSON objects often differ in only a few schema-defining tokens. In this low-edit-distance regime, sequence-level DPO spreads gradient mass across non-critical serialization tokens (gradient dilution) and can reduce likelihood on rare, under-confident preferred schema tokens (token erosion). To address these limitations, we first develop a confusion-aware preference-construction strategy that augments expert-curated ambiguity patterns with empirical structured-error modes estimated from validation-set SFT predictions, synthesizing minimally perturbed, schema-valid negatives that focus preference learning on realistic ontology-level decision errors. We then introduce Token-Adaptive Barrier Preference Optimization (TAB-PO), a post-SFT objective for token-critical structured generation. TAB-PO adds a confidence-gated token-level barrier that applies supervised anchoring to under-confident schema tokens. On the public SciERC scientific information extraction task, evaluated with Llama/Qwen models from 1.5B to 70B, TAB-PO improves ontology-critical semantic-label and relational-linking metrics over SFT by 11.59% on average, wins 100% of comparisons against the strongest token-level and sequence-level DPO variants on these metrics, and surpasses leading frontier models by 14.71%, while delivering strong gains in textual grounding.

07.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Confined migration induces non-lethal DNA damage in developing neurons

Authors:

Migratory cells tend to have soft nuclei that deform and penetrate narrow spaces1,2. Extensive nuclear deformation during migration can cause nuclear-envelope rupture and DNA damage in cancer cells, which may contribute to malignant transformation during tumour progression3–6. However, the importance of DNA damage in physiological migration is less well understood. Here we demonstrate that the migration of neurons in developing cerebral and cerebellar cortices is accompanied by massive DNA double-stranded breaks (DSBs) due to mechanostress during passage through narrow interstitial spaces. In contrast to many other migratory cells, these DSBs occur without detectable nuclear envelope rupture. Confined migration increases topoisomerase-IIβ covalently bound DSBs, and these lesions are repaired through non-homologous end-joining during brain development without causing cell death. Genome sequencing revealed that DSBs tend to occur at transcriptionally inactive regions. The deletion of ligase IV at the onset of neuronal migration leads to persistent DSB accumulation in cerebellar neurons with moderate transcriptional changes in genes related to synaptic function, neuronal development and stress and immune responses. The mutant mouse develops mild motor deficits in later life, suggesting that the DNA damage generated during normal brain development poses a potential disease risk if left unrepaired. The migration of neurons in developing cerebral and cerebellar cortices is accompanied by massive DNA double-strand breaks due to mechanostress during passage through narrow interstitial spaces.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Language Models as Interfaces, Not Oracles: A Hybrid LLM-ML System for Pediatric Appendicitis

Large language models (LLMs) can make clinical decision support more accessible by interpreting free-text documentation, but their direct use as diagnostic engines is limited by sensitivity to prompts, information order, and plausible but incorrect outputs. Structured machine-learning models offer more stable risk prediction, yet they require tabular inputs that are difficult to integrate with narrative clinical workflows. We present ClaMPAPP (Clinical Language-assisted Machine-learning Pipeline for Appendicitis), a hybrid system that uses an LLM as an interface rather than as the final decision-maker. ClaMPAPP extracts schema-constrained clinical features from note-like narratives, applies deterministic plausibility checks, and passes validated features to an XGBoost classifier trained on clinical, laboratory, and ultrasound variables. We evaluated ClaMPAPP on two independent pediatric appendicitis cohorts from German hospitals and compared it with end-to-end LLM baselines, including open-source and proprietary models. To preserve ground truth while testing free-text input, narratives were generated from structured electronic health records through template rendering and constrained LLM rewriting, with additional sentence-order permutation to assess positional robustness. ClaMPAPP achieved the strongest overall diagnostic performance in both internal and external validation while minimizing missed appendicitis cases, the key safety concern in acute triage. End-to-end LLMs showed unstable sensitivity-specificity trade-offs and greater degradation under narrative reordering. These results support an LLM-as-interface, ML-as-predictor design that separates natural-language usability from predictive inference and provides a more auditable pathway for clinical decision support.

09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Joint convergence in Wiener chaos via transport hierarchy and Malliavin covariances

arXiv:2606.14812v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the joint convergence in distribution of a sequence $X_N = I_p(f_N)$ of multiple Wiener–Itô integrals of order $p\geq 2$ that converges to a Gaussian limit $Z\sim N(0,\sigma^2)$, together with another sequence $Y_N = I_q(g_N)$ converging in law. The central finding is that the joint convergence of $(X_N, Y_N)$ is completely governed by the asymptotic behavior of the iterated Malliavin covariances $Y_{r+1,N} = \langle DX_N, DY_{r,N}\rangle_H$, $r\geq 0$: joint convergence holds as soon as these covariances converge jointly with $Y_N$, and the structure of the limiting distribution is then explicitly determined by their limits. Moreover, the convergence of the Malliavin covariances is necessary for joint convergence, as shown by a counterexample. When $q

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quasilinear Equivalence Checking for Detector Error Models

arXiv:2606.14677v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A Detector Error Model (DEM) is a structured representation of error mechanisms in quantum circuits, which has gained popularity in quantum compilation pipelines for its ability to capture fault-tolerance at a circuit level. It lists error mechanisms as instructions targeting detectors and observables, specifying for each physical fault channel the probability that the fault fires, the detectors it triggers, and the observables it flips. In this paper, we develop an equational theory for DEMs, with its associated categorical semantics. We present a sound, terminating, confluent rewriting system for DEM terms, formulating it as a symmetric monoidal theory (a PROP) over the Giry monad. We prove that every DEM term has a unique normal form, which can be computed efficiently in quasilinear time $O(k|E|\log|E|)$, where $|E|$ is the number of instructions and $k$ bounds the size of a target set. This provides a complete set of invariants (via Tanner graphs) for structural DEM equivalence. We provide the first static decision procedure for DEM equivalence, with rigorous correctness guarantees. It is complete (decides full decoder-equivalence exactly) for non-adaptive quantum error correction (QEC) pipelines, and scales to a sound and applicable decision procedure for partially-adaptive circuits (lattice surgery, distributed QEC, ...) without suffering exponential overhead. We discuss its application to the verification and optimisation of quantum compilers.

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

Seeing Before Colliding: Anticipatory Safe RL with Frozen Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2606.11266v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The cost signal that constrained-RL algorithms optimize against is almost always reactive: the simulator emits a non-zero cost only after a collision has begun, and the Lagrange multiplier of PPO-Lagrangian grows only after the episode budget has been exceeded. At race speeds, where collisions are instantaneous and irreversible, any safety mechanism that waits for cost to accumulate is structurally too late. We present VLM-Safe-RL, a framework that integrates a frozen vision-language model into the CMDP Lagrangian update as an anticipatory cost term. The framework comprises four contributions: (i) Decoupled Dual-Path CLIP, independent reward/cost paths that respect the CMDP's factorization; (ii) VLM-Lagrange, an augmented multiplier update that incorporates a per-step VLM cost as an anticipatory term; (iii) Confidence Gating, a Bayes-optimal weight derived from a logistic noise model on the CLIP margin; and (iv) VLMPPOLag, the composed algorithm. On Safety-Gymnasium FormulaOne L2, our principal evaluation ($n{=}5$ seeds, $10^{6}$ steps, budget $d_{lim}{=}25$) VLMPPOLag$+$Conf is the only configuration in our default budget comparison that simultaneously retains substantive return ($J_r{\approx}40$) and holds cost within budget on a majority of seeds; the five constraint-aware baselines (PPOLag, CPO, CPPOPID, CPO-CLG, PPOLag-RND) each fail at least one requirement. The mechanism generalizes to held-out MetaDrive Medium (catastrophe rate $41\%{\to}26\%$, 95\% bootstrap CI $[-26,-5]$\,pp) and shows directionally consistent transfer to Bullet Safety-Gym; we report honestly where it does not (MetaDrive Easy/Hard, Qwen2-VL backbone) and trace the Hard failure to a Lagrangian-regulation pathology rather than the VLM signal itself. To our knowledge, this is the first work to use frozen VLM signals as an anticipatory cost term inside the CMDP Lagrangian update.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Information Lattice Learning as Probabilistic Graphical Model Structure Learning

arXiv:2606.19366v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Information lattice learning (ILL) learns interpretable rules of a signal by alternately projecting the signal onto a partition lattice that encodes a hierarchy of abstractions and lifting selected rules back to the signal domain. When the signal is a probability mass function, we show the probabilistic rules learned by ILL admit a natural probabilistic graphical model (PGM) interpretation and develop this interpretation in detail. A partition in ILL induces a deterministic quotient variable, and a rule is the marginal law of that quotient variable. A rule set is therefore a collection of marginal constraints over interpretable abstractions. General lifting is the feasible family of all joint distributions satisfying those constraints, while special lifting chooses a maximum-ignorance reconstruction, implemented in ILL by an L2 uniformity principle closely related to maximum entropy. Under a Shannon-entropy lifting, the same constraints yield a log-linear factor graph whose factors are indexed by learned abstractions. The information lattice itself, however, is not a Bayesian network: its edges encode refinement and coarsening of abstractions, not conditional dependence. Thus ILL is best viewed as structure learning for interpretable constraint-based factor graphs over quotient variables. This view clarifies how ILL relates to graphical models and maximum entropy models, while suggesting new directions for inference, identifiability, and hybrid symbolic-probabilistic learning.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Analyzing Initialization Strategies for the Local Unitary Cluster Jastrow Ansatz within the Quantum-Centric Supercomputing Framework

arXiv:2606.14933v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this study, we analyze the choice of local unitary cluster Jastrow (LUCJ) ansatz initialization and sensitivity of the sample-based quantum diagonalization (SQD) algorithm within the quantum-centric supercomputing (QCSC) framework. We examine six initialization strategies, including those based on coupled-cluster singles and doubles (CCSD), M{\o}ller-Plesset second-order perturbation theory (MP2), data-driven coupled-cluster (DDCC), and trivial (zeroes and random) initializations, across twelve molecular systems and three basis sets (STO-3G, cc-pVDZ, and aug-cc-pVDZ). We find that while the mean absolute percentage errors (MAPEs) between the alternative and CCSD-initialized t2-amplitudes span many orders of magnitude, the resulting SQD energies are largely insensitive to this variation. In particular, most initializations recover energies within chemical accuracy (+/-1.6 mEh) of the CCSD reference, with convergence improving as the basis set size increases. Notably, random initialization achieves performance competitive with CCSD across all basis sets, while zeroes initialization, despite having smaller deviations from CCSD, yields the worst energy agreement. Our results highlight that the proximity to the CCSD initialization is not a reliable predictor of the quality of electronic energies. These findings establish that configuration recovery within SQD, rather than circuit initialization, is the dominant factor governing energy accuracy, and suggest that computationally cheaper initialization strategies are viable alternatives to CCSD for QCSC workflows

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

QC-GAN: A Parameter-Efficient Quaternion Conformer GAN for High-Fidelity Speech Enhancement

arXiv:2606.18611v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a parameter-efficient speech enhancement framework, Quaternion Conformer GAN (QC-GAN), which combines a Quaternion Conformer generator with MetricGAN-based training. The Hamilton product encodes the magnitude and phase via structured weight sharing, reducing the number of layer parameters while preserving their interdependencies. A metric-learning discriminator was employed to maximize perceptual quality by optimizing the approximate perceptual evaluation scores. On the VoiceBank+DEMAND dataset, QC-GAN achieved a Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ) score of 3.48 with only 0.89M parameters, delivering a performance comparable to state-of-the-art models at less than half their size. A 35K-parameter variant achieved a PESQ score of 3.23, surpassing conventional methods with significantly fewer parameters. Evaluation on the DNS-Challenge 3 dataset further confirmed generalization to real-world conditions.

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

Text-Vision Co-Instructed Image Editing

Existing image editing methods can be generally categorized into textual instruction-based and visual prompt-based ones. Textual instructions are semantically expressive, but are limited by the coarse granularity of spatial control of the editing results. In contrast, visual prompts such as drag and point can provide precise spatial guidance, but are limited by the inherent ambiguity in semantic intent. To unify the strength of textual and visual prompts, we present Text-Vision Co-Instructed Image Editing, which jointly models textual instructions as semantic intent and sparse visual instructions as spatial guidance, aiming to achieve precise and intent-faithful image manipulation. To this end, we first construct a textual-visual instruction paired dataset with more than 23K samples derived from dynamic videos, enabling aligned supervision for cross-modal instruction. We then propose TV-Edit, a Textual-Visual instruction unified Editing framework to contextualize drag or point-based visual instructions with image-text semantics and lift them into semantic-aware control representations for pretrained editing backbones. By integrating semantic intent and spatial constraints, TV-Edit leads to more precise spatial control, less instruction ambiguity, and stronger structural consistency than text-only or drag-based alternatives. Finally, we establish TV-Edit-Bench, a deliberately designed benchmark to evaluate semantic faithfulness, spatial alignment, and visual consistency with ground-truth references and controlled textual-visual variations for reliable assessment. Our experiments across multiple editing backbones demonstrate that TV-Edit consistently yields more precise and intent-faithful edits, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art instruction-based and drag-based baselines.

16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

A scaling limit theorem for controlled branching processes with a size-divisible term

arXiv:2508.17116v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper establishes general sufficient conditions for a sequence of controlled branching processes to converge weakly on the Skorokhod space. We focus on a class of control mechanisms that extend previous results by decomposing those random variables into the sum of two independent components: an immigration term, which depends on the current population size, and a size-divisible term, which can be expressed as the sum of random contributions from each individual. This extension allows us to capture a broad range of control functions including Poisson, binomial, and negative binomial distributions, commonly used in the literature. The assumptions are formulated in terms of probability generating functions of the offspring and control laws, distinguishing in this latter between the immigration and the size-divisible parts. The limit process is shown to be a continuous-state branching process with dependent immigration. The proof essentially relies on tightness arguments and the identification of a martingale problem. We also identify the special case in which the limit reduces to a classical Feller branching diffusion with immigration.

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

AmchiBias: Measuring Stereotypical Bias in Goan Identity Groups with a Minimal Pair Dataset in English and Konkani

Socio-cultural stereotypical bias is an important consideration in the development and deployment of NLP systems. It is however often considered only at the national level, despite rich subnational socio-cultural structures. We present AmchiBias, the first benchmark for measuring socio-cultural stereotypical bias for the Indian state of Goa with its unique historically multicultural setting. It covers various Goan identity groups and comprises 313 minimal pairs across eight sociodemographic dimensions in both English and Devanagari Konkani. We then evaluate stereotypical bias in five multilingual encoder models on this benchmark. We find near-chance scores in Konkani, reflecting language incompetence for general multilingual models and a lack of Goan cultural competence for Indian language models. Queried in English, models with a stronger Indian language coverage show higher bias for pan-Indian groups than hyperlocal Goan groups. This suggests the English signal reflects pan-Indian pretraining associations rather than genuine Goan cultural knowledge. Our findings highlight a critical gap in low-resource multilingual NLP evaluation for hyperlocal community identities.

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

An Empirical Analysis of Optimization Dynamics and Sparsity Boundaries in Large-Scale Pedestrian Attribute Recognition

Pedestrian Attribute Recognition (PAR) is critical for video surveillance, enabling forensic search and re-identification systems. Extreme class imbalance remains a fundamental obstacle when merging PETA and PA-100K into a 109,000-image composite corpus, where minority attributes have positive sample fractions below 1%. This causes standard BCE optimization to suppress rare traits, a phenomenon we term the majority negative class cheating trap. We present a systematic ablation of Multi-Label Focal Loss hyperparameters (alpha and gamma) on a ResNet-18 backbone. A calibrated configuration (alpha=0.50, gamma=2.0) achieves a Macro F1-score of 62.32%, matching BCE baseline while preserving superior hard-example mining and convergence dynamics. Our approach uses pure loss-function engineering with zero computational overhead for edge deployment. We identify the Sparsity Wall, a hard boundary where positive sample fractions below 0.1% make global loss reweighting ineffective, requiring instance-level intervention.

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

Agreement in Representation Space for Open-Ended Self-Consistency

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.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Recipe-Controlled Decoder Audit for Structural Knowledge-Graph Completion

arXiv:2606.14492v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a recipe-controlled decoder audit (RCDA) for structural transductive knowledge-graph completion (KGC). The audit asks a simple reporting question: before attributing gains to an encoder or training recipe, what changes when the decoder is swapped under the same recipe? Using ComplEx and DistMult as the primary controlled pair, with targeted RotatE/TransE spot-checks, we evaluate seven benchmarks. On five standard KGs, ComplEx-vs-DistMult differences are modest but consistent under our recipe (+0.005 to +0.012 MRR), whereas CompGCN-style encoder effects vary more by dataset. On small KGs, decoder effects become the main diagnostic: Kinship shows a stable ComplEx advantage of +0.143 MRR (6 seeds), while UMLS favours ComplEx by +0.022 MRR in a clean 6-seed server rerun but reverses in an earlier provenance variant. We therefore treat small-KG decoder choice as recipe- and provenance-sensitive rather than as a fixed dataset winner. We further show that decoder choice interacts with encoder depth on WN18RR, and that under our recipe L=0 ComplEx on YAGO3-10 reaches 0.6971 +/- 0.0048 MRR at d=128. The result is a compact audit protocol: report matched decoder rows, log small-KG provenance, and sweep decoder x depth before making encoder-level claims.

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

RLPR: Radar-to-LiDAR Place Recognition via Two-Stage Asymmetric Cross-Modal Alignment for Autonomous Driving

All-weather autonomy is critical for autonomous driving, which necessitates reliable localization across diverse scenarios. While LiDAR place recognition is widely deployed for this task, its performance degrades in adverse weather. Conversely, radar-based methods, though weather-resilient, are hindered by the general unavailability of radar maps. To bridge this gap, radar-to-LiDAR place recognition, which localizes radar scans within existing LiDAR maps, has garnered increasing interest. However, extracting discriminative and generalizable features shared between modalities remains challenging, compounded by the scarcity of large-scale paired training data and the signal heterogeneity across radar types. In this work, we propose RLPR, a robust radar-to-LiDAR place recognition framework compatible with single-chip, scanning, and 4D radars. We first design a dual-stream network to extract structural features that abstract away from sensor-specific signal properties (e.g., Doppler or RCS). Subsequently, motivated by our task-specific asymmetry observation between radar and LiDAR, we introduce a two-stage asymmetric cross-modal alignment (TACMA) strategy, which leverages the pre-trained radar branch as a discriminative anchor to guide the alignment process. Experiments on four datasets demonstrate that RLPR achieves state-of-the-art recognition accuracy with strong zero-shot generalization capabilities.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Exploratory Assessment of Pulsed-Wave Doppler Representations of Lung Sounds Using Deep Learning: An In-Vitro Phantom Study

The increasing availability of portable ultrasound systems motivates exploration of novel approaches to respiratory signal assessment. In this in-vitro study, we investigate whether pulsed-wave (PW) Doppler ultrasound can capture structured spectral patterns from replayed lung sound recordings. Digitized respiratory sounds were replayed through a tissue-mimicking ultrasound phantom, generating 1,478 PW Doppler spectral images from recordings associated with healthy subjects and several externally labeled disease categories. Exploratory classification experiments using a ResNet-18 architecture demonstrated that these Doppler representations contain learnable differences under controlled conditions. These findings motivate further investigation into PW Doppler as a potential representation of respiratory acoustics.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Decoupling Search from Reasoning: A Vendor-Agnostic Grounding Architecture for LLM Agents

Production LLM agents increasingly depend on real-time search, yet native search grounding bundles retrieval policy, provider choice, evidence injection, cost, latency, and generation behavior behind a single model-provider boundary. This coupling makes grounding hard to inspect, tune, reuse, or port, and can trigger Search-Induced Verbosity that breaks strict output contracts. We present Decoupled Search Grounding (DSG), a vendor-agnostic boundary that moves grounding outside the reasoning model through an MCP-compatible gateway, exposing provider routing, source-aware context rendering, configured fallback, retrieval-depth control, and exact plus semantic caching as first-class controls. Across five frontier models on SimpleQA, FreshQA, and HotpotQA, native search leads on recency-sensitive FreshQA, but DSG exposes a stronger frontier when control matters: on SimpleQA it nearly matches native accuracy (86.1% vs. 87.7%) at 91% lower search cost, preserves concise answer contracts, and reaches a 99.4% warm-cache hit rate with 68% lower latency. Deployed as a shared production grounding layer for large-scale agentic workloads with interchangeable models, DSG matches or slightly exceeds native-search accuracy on an e-commerce query-understanding (QIU) workload while cutting search cost by over 98%. Real-time grounding is best treated as an optimizable interface boundary, not a fixed model feature.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Do Time Series Foundation Model Benchmarks Hide Regime-Dependent Failures? Evidence from Traffic Speed Forecasting

arXiv:2606.18367v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Standard benchmarks evaluate time series foundation models (TSFMs) using aggregate metrics, but these can mask severe failures in critical operating regimes. We introduce regime-stratified evaluation and apply it to three TSFMs on two standard traffic speed benchmarks. Traffic exhibits abrupt regime switching between free-flow and congested states, producing bimodal speed distributions during transitions. When we stratify by traffic regime, both accuracy and prediction-interval coverage degrade sharply during transitions: transition-regime MAE reaches 11 mph (versus 3 mph overall), and empirical coverage of 90% prediction intervals drops as low as 55%. These failures are invisible in aggregate metrics because free-flow observations dominate the sample. A simple historical conditional baseline (sampling from per-sensor training distributions) achieves better transition coverage than any TSFM, but has far worse overall accuracy. We propose bimodal mixture augmentation (BMA), a post-hoc method that combines TSFM forecasts with historical distributional knowledge, approaching the historical baseline's transition coverage while preserving the TSFM's accuracy. Our results suggest that TSFM benchmarks should incorporate regime-aware evaluation to surface failures that aggregate metrics hide.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

GCH1 p.Ser80Asn Confers Risk for Parkinson's Disease in East Asian Populations

Introduction: GCH1 has been implicated in Parkinson's disease (PD), but its risks variants and associations are not well defined. Objectives: To investigate the clinical relevance and PD risk associated with the GCH1 p.Ser80Asn variant. Methods: We first identified a segregating GCH1 p.Ser80Asn variant in a Malaysian Chinese PD family via whole genome sequencing (WGS). We assessed its risk association using multi-ancestry WGS data from the Global Parkinson's Genetics Program (GP2) (n=22,372PD vs n=8,826Controls) and meta-analysis of East Asian (EAS) cohorts (n=4,712PD vs 38,733Controls). Clinico-demographic details of affected variant carriers were collated. Results: The GCH1 p.Ser80Asn variant was enriched in GP2 EAS PD populations (n=9/2,757; 0.33%) but not detected in other ancestries. Meta-analysis revealed increased PD risk in EAS populations (odds ratio:5.1; 95%CI:2.3-10.7; p=2.89x10-5). Affected carriers (mean age at onset:56.3+-12.5 years) had additional occurrence of dystonia, while dementia was rare. Conclusions: The GCH1 p.Ser80Asn variant is a rare, EAS-enriched risk variant for PD.