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

Advanced Machine Learning and Deep Learning Techniques for Enhanced Cattle Identification and Detection: A Comprehensive Review

arXiv:2606.15655v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The need for effective cattle identification technology is now more acutely felt than ever in maintaining biosecurity, food safety, and supply chain efficacy in livestock management. This paper presents a systematic review of recent research in cattle identification using machine learning and deep learning techniques. The present systematic review measures the effectiveness of traditional and modern cattle identification techniques using studies from major academic databases, where articles were subjected to full-text review. Among these techniques, classical Machine Learning Techniques such as K-Nearest Neighbors and Support Vector Machines have demonstrated good results in cattle identification; however, Deep Learning Techniques, such as Convolutional Neural Networks, Residual Networks, and You Only Look Once, are better in cognition, detection, and identification tasks. Feature extraction relies on common techniques like Local Binary Pattern (LBP), Speeded-Up Robust Features (SURF), and Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT), while key features commonly used in these studies include muzzle prints and coat patterns. The review highlights key hurdles involving cattle identification, such as the limited number of publicly accessible datasets, issues with data quality susceptible to environmental changes and animal mobility, and high demand for real-time processing ability. The paper aims to inform researchers, policymakers, and stakeholders about implementing scalable, humane, and effective cattle identification systems to achieve sustainable livestock management.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

A Robust Model-Based Approach for Continuous-Time Policy Evaluation with Unknown Lévy Process Dynamics

arXiv:2504.01482v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper develops a model-based framework for continuous-time policy evaluation (CTPE) in reinforcement learning, incorporating both Brownian and Lévy noise to model stochastic dynamics influenced by rare and extreme events. Our approach formulates the policy evaluation problem as solving a partial integro-differential equation (PIDE) for the value function with unknown coefficients. A key challenge in this setting is accurately recovering the unknown coefficients in the stochastic dynamics, particularly when driven by Lévy processes with heavy tail effects. To address this, we propose a robust numerical approach that effectively handles both unbiased and censored trajectory datasets. This method combines maximum likelihood estimation with an iterative tail correction mechanism, improving the stability and accuracy of coefficient recovery. Additionally, we establish a theoretical bound for the policy evaluation error based on coefficient recovery error. Through numerical experiments, including a real-data BTC price experiment, we demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our method in recovering heavy-tailed Lévy dynamics and verify the theoretical error analysis in policy evaluation.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Hierarchical Advantage Weighting for Online RL Fine-Tuning of VLAs from Sparse Episode Outcomes

arXiv:2606.17043v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When pretrained VLA policies are fine-tuned through online RL, each rollout episode produces only a single binary outcome (success or failure), yet the actor update requires per-transition supervision. Existing approaches commonly reduce this sparse outcome to a single scalar reward or advantage signal, which conflates distinct forms of transition-level feedback and provides limited guidance once basic task success becomes achievable. First, a single scalar signal conflates the two objectives of viability and efficiency; once basic success is achieved, the binary label provides no gradient to distinguish efficient completions from slow ones. Second, real-world rollouts mix autonomous and intervention segments; naively assigning episode outcomes across these boundaries introduces incorrect credit assignment. To address these issues, we propose Hierarchical Advantage-Weighted Behavior Cloning (HABC), which trains separate critic heads for these two objectives on different data subsets and combines their outputs with a state-adaptive balance. A state-adaptive gate $g_t$ merges their one-step advantages, prioritizing viability when success is uncertain and shifting to efficiency only when viability is high, and converts the result into per-transition weights on the actor loss. Intervention-aware credit assignment further restricts outcome labels to segments executed by the current policy, preventing supervision from leaking across intervention boundaries. In real-robot experiments on three contact-rich bimanual tasks, HABC raises success from supervised fine-tuning (SFT) baselines of 36%, 44%, and 12% to 92%, 88%, and 38%.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Privacy from Symmetry: Orthogonally Equivariant Transformers for LLM Inference

arXiv:2606.16461v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Running large language models locally is often impractical, pushing inference on sensitive text to third-party providers. Split inference partially mitigates this by keeping tokens on the client and sending only hidden representations, but these representations can still be recovered via nearest-neighbor search against the public embedding table. We propose an orthogonal obfuscation procedure in which the client multiplies embeddings by a secret orthogonal matrix before transmission. To enable correct inference under arbitrary rotations, we introduce ConjFormer, a transformer variant that is exactly $\mathrm{O}(d)$-equivariant via a lightweight normalization change (scalar RMSNorm) together with blockwise orthogonal conjugation of all linear weights. As a result, the server performs the full forward pass entirely in the rotated basis and never observes unrotated hidden states. Experiments on GPT-2 and Llama 3.2 1B models fine-tuned on PubMed show that orthogonal obfuscation eliminates direct cosine nearest-neighbor inversion and reduces token recovery from over 35% top-10 to at most 1.3%, while increasing perplexity by only 0.4% after fine-tuning. These results indicate that enforcing symmetry at the architectural level can provide a practical defense for privacy-preserving LLM inference without noise injection or heavy cryptographic machinery.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Inclusive Interactive Collisions for Multi-View Consistent Compositional 3D Generation

arXiv:2606.24206v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent breakthroughs in 3D generation have advanced notably with the development of text-to-image diffusion model. However, existing methods remain two practical challenges: (1) They primarily generate single 3D object, but struggle to generate multi-object compositional 3D assets due to the lack of the modeling for Gaussian primitives in reasonable interactions. (2) They often suffer from cross-view inconsistency during 3D optimization, as Score Distillation Sampling inherently performs on each single view, inevitably resulting in cross-view hallucinations. To solve above issues, we propose I2C-3D, a novel optimization-based method to generate multi-view consistent compositional 3D assets with reasonable interactions. Specifically, we propose an Inclusive Interactive Collisions strategy to guide Gaussian primitives appearing in reasonable interaction regions naturally, thereby ensuring objects in the compositional scene interact in a physically plausible and visually coherent way. Additionally, to enhance multi-view consistency, Multi-View Adaptive Score Distillation Sampling is devised to distill multi-view consistency prior and layout prior from pre-trained diffusion model by modulating attention map of instance token and spatial token across viewpoints. Benefiting from above elaborate designs, I2C-3D not only generates high-fidelity multi-view consistent compositional 3D assets but also supports 3D editing flexibly, facilitating complex scene generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate our I2C-3D outperforms existing methods in generation quality and multi-view consistency.

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

GRACE: Gated Refinement for Accurate Causal Edge Discovery in High-Dimensional Time Series

arXiv:2606.23880v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: From climate teleconnections to gene regulation, modern time-series datasets encompass tens or hundreds of interacting variables, making causal discovery increasingly challenging. Constraint-based methods offer statistical rigor but their nonlinear CI tests are infeasible at scale, while score-based alternatives avoid CI testing but require arbitrary thresholds to binarize continuous edge scores. We propose GRACE ($G$ated $R$efinement for $A$ccurate $C$ausal $E$dge discovery), which refines constraint-based discovery using Hard Concrete gates with $L_0$ regularization: each candidate edge has an independent gate whose values concentrate near 0 or 1, yielding a clean bimodal separation that makes the binary decision robust, unlike the narrow, overlapping score distributions produced by $L_1$ and attention-based methods. A fast linear CI skeleton provides high-recall candidates; a single gated model then prunes false positives by learning which edges genuinely improve prediction, with automatic regularization adapted to problem dimensions and skeleton density. Systematic experiments on synthetic benchmarks, spanning diverse graph topologies (scale-free, Erdős-R'enyi, small-world) and dimensionalities up to $d=100$, show that GRACE substantially improves F1 over its base CI method while maintaining high precision, and outperforms attention-based and score-based alternatives. GRACE matches or exceeds expensive nonlinear CI tests at a fraction of the cost ($75\times$ faster). On a real-world river flow dataset, where rainfall confounders, variable propagation lags, and distributional shifts violate standard assumptions, a temporal bootstrap variant of GRACE recovers 9 of 11 causal edges along the Elbe River with only 1 false positive ($F_1 = 0.86$, AUROC${} = 0.99$), reducing the skeleton's 106 false positives by 99%.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

ExpRL: Exploratory RL for LLM Mid-Training

arXiv:2606.17024v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse reward reinforcement learning (RL) has become a standard tool for improving LLM reasoning, but its success depends critically on the coverage present in the base model. In practice, models are often primed for RL through mid-training on curated reasoning traces that teach useful primitive skills such as decomposition, verification, or self-correction. Although effective, this strategy requires manually specifying what the model should learn, and it remains unclear whether such primitive coverage is enough for much harder problems, which require combining these skills into broader solution strategies. We study a more automated approach: RL-based mid-training using large corpora of human-written question-answer data. Rather than treating reference solutions as targets to imitate, our method, ExpRL, uses them as reward scaffolds: references are hidden from the policy and used only to construct problem-specific grading rubrics for judging on-policy reasoning traces. The policy samples from the original problem prompt, while an LLM judge compares the sampled reasoning trace against the reference solution and assigns outcome-level or process-level dense rewards. This lets ExpRL reinforce partial progress, useful intermediate reductions, and productive reasoning behaviors that sparse final-answer rewards often fail to upweight. On challenging math reasoning tasks, ExpRL yields stronger RL priming than SFT, sparse-reward GRPO, and self-distillation, and provides a better initialization for subsequent sparse-reward RL. Additional mixed-domain experiments further suggest that ExpRL can extend beyond the original math-only setting.

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

The Distributed Detectability Band Against Marginal-Preserving Attacks

arXiv:2606.10456v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI-control monitors score individual agent actions to detect misbehavior, but real harm can be distributed across many benign-looking steps, each individually below any per-step alarm. We construct a marginal-preserving, correlation-encoded distributed-sabotage attack using a Gaussian-copula AR(1) construction: the per-step monitor-score marginal is held exactly equal to benign, so mean, max, top-k tail, and threshold monitors (Monitor A) are defeated by construction, while harm is encoded in the temporal correlation structure. We sequence the paper around three reviewer-mandated gates. (1) Realizability gate: the stealthy attack achieves KS-distance to benign of 0.013 (effectively zero) at all tested harm levels up to 3.0, confirming that harm is fully decoupled from the per-step marginal and realizability is not harm-limited. (2) Monitor-A-vs-B reconciliation: we show formally that the attack, built against Monitor A's score marginal, remains marginal-preserving under a different-score Monitor B (the correlation/sequence family: CUSUM, SPRT, HMM-LR, runs test, autocorrelation, windowed logistic), and scope worst-case claims to score functions that admit a temporal signature. (3) Non-empty detectability band: Monitor A achieves AUC 0.52 (chance); Monitor B spans AUC 0.79-0.97 at the same 1% FPR target, and as harm is amortized over more steps Monitor A collapses to chance while Monitor B holds at AUC ~0.95. These results demonstrate a non-empty detectability band and characterize the sub-threshold sabotage frontier: distribution-shape monitors fail by construction; temporal-correlation monitors can detect but are not trivially optimal.

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

OccAny: Generalized Unconstrained Urban 3D Occupancy

Relying on in-domain annotations and precise sensor-rig priors, existing 3D occupancy prediction methods are limited in both scalability and out-of-domain generalization. While recent visual geometry foundation models exhibit strong generalization capabilities, they were mainly designed for general purposes and lack one or more key ingredients required for urban occupancy prediction, namely metric prediction, geometry completion in cluttered scenes and adaptation to urban scenarios. We address this gap and present OccAny, the first unconstrained urban 3D occupancy model capable of operating on out-of-domain uncalibrated scenes to predict and complete metric occupancy coupled with segmentation features. OccAny is versatile and can predict occupancy from sequential, monocular, or surround-view images. Our contributions are three-fold: (i) we propose the first generalized 3D occupancy framework with (ii) Segmentation Forcing that improves occupancy quality while enabling mask-level prediction, and (iii) a Novel View Rendering pipeline that infers novel-view geometry to enable test-time view augmentation for geometry completion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OccAny outperforms all visual geometry baselines on 3D occupancy prediction task, while remaining competitive with in-domain self-supervised methods across three input settings on two established urban occupancy prediction datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/valeoai/OccAny .

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Training LLMs with Reinforcement Learning over Digital Twin Representations for Reasoning-Intensive Surgical VideoQA

Surgical video question answering requires multi-step reasoning across semantic, spatial, and temporal dimensions. Existing methods architecturally compress videos into discrete token representations and couple visual perception with reasoning. This approach fragments continuous spatial-temporal relationships and has been shown to restrict multi-step reasoning capabilities. We introduce a reinforcement learning (RL) framework that trains large language models (LLMs) to decouple perception from reasoning by operating over digital twin representations constructed from surgical foundation models. Additionally, we introduce hierarchical representations across frame, temporal window, and procedure levels with probabilistic uncertainty estimates. Finally, we propose a novel reward that combines format validation with accuracy assessment through clinical plausibility evaluation and uncertainty-aware calibration for training. To demonstrate the capabilities of this approach, we introduce REAL-Colon-Reason, a colonoscopic benchmark with 2000 question-answer pairs across three complexity levels. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on REAL-Colon-Reason and two existing surgical VideoQA benchmarks REAL-Colon-VQA and EndoVis18-VQA.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

An Evaluation of Data Leakage Risks in Tool-Using LLM Agents in Realistic Scenarios

arXiv:2606.17114v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI agents are increasingly being adopted in enterprise and personal settings with access to emails, databases, documents, and other tools where they can read, update, and disseminate sensitive information. Much of prior research on data leakage risks in agents has focused on adversarial data exfiltration through prompt injections and jailbreaks. However, sensitive information may also be exposed during non-adversarial use, creating leakage risks even when users issue benign requests. We report a joint evaluation by the Singapore AI Safety Institute and the Korea AI Safety Institute examining agent data leakage in 12 realistic, non-adversarial tasks spanning customer support, DevOps, web automation, and enterprise and personal productivity. The evaluation covers five risk types: lack of data awareness, audience awareness, policy compliance, data minimization, and access-boundary awareness. Both institutes tested a common set of scenarios mirroring real-world deployments using independent testing environments and task-specific LLM-judge rubrics. Across the three tested agents, none achieved fully correct and fully safe execution across all scenarios. Successful task completion often coincided with data-handling failures such as accessing unnecessary information or disclosing information to inappropriate recipients, indicating that capability and data-handling safety should be evaluated separately. Qualitative review also revealed claim-action mismatches, simulation-aware behavior, user-simulator role reversal, and interpretation gaps in automated judging. Overall, the results indicate that operational data leakage is a first-order agent-safety concern distinct from adversarial exfiltration and provide a methodology for future evaluations of agent data-handling safety.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

FactoryLLM: A Safe and Open-Source AI Playground for Evaluating LLMs in Smart Factories

arXiv:2606.14119v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fault diagnostics and recovery in smart factories is challenging because critical information is dispersed across manuals of multiple machines which are interconnected through the manufacturing process. Large Language Models (LLMs) can provide a promising approach. In this paper, we propose FactoryLLM, a safe and open-source AI playground designed for evaluating different LLM-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) models by analysing documents from multiple machines across the manufacturing process. FactoryLLM enables the user to configure the LLM, and assess performance when reasoning over multiple documents, through a dual evaluation setup using both RAGAS and NVIDIA's LLM-as-a-Judge metrics. FactoryLLM is safe because it allows users to run local or open-source LLMs without sharing sensitive industrial data, providing a controlled environment for experimentation. We demonstrate the efficacy of FactoryLLM through a case study which involves an Autonomous Intelligent Vehicle and its Mobile Planner software, evaluating three LLMs across 30 maintenance queries derived from approximately 600 pages of cross-machine documentation. The results suggest that FactoryLLM is effective in cross-machine document reasoning: every model achieved a groundedness score above 0.88. The full code and documentation for community to test FactoryLLM with their manufacturing specific scenarios are publicly available.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Structural MRI Synthesis for Alzheimer's Disease via Conditional Diffusion on Anatomical Masks

arXiv:2606.18354v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in generative machine learning models have significantly improved medical imaging, offering promising solutions for data augmentation, privacy preservation, and improved model generalization. However, synthesizing high-quality structural MRI data for Alzheimer's Disease (AD) remains challenging due to the subtle, region-specific, and progressive anatomical changes associated with neurodegeneration. In this paper, we extend the Med-DDPM conditional diffusion model – originally designed for brain tumor synthesis – to generate 3D structural MRIs specifically tailored to AD. We adopted Med-DDPM due to its established stability and structural fidelity compared to other generative models, which makes it particularly suitable for capturing the subtle anatomical changes characteristic of AD. Our approach conditions the diffusion process on anatomical segmentation masks derived from the ADNI dataset, incorporating key AD-relevant brain structures into the generation process. We systematically evaluate the quality and utility of the synthetic images by training segmentation models on real, synthetic, and hybrid (mixed) datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that segmentation models trained exclusively on synthetic data achieve comparable Dice scores (0.6532) to those trained on real data (0.6513), while exhibiting significantly enhanced recall. Notably, models trained on hybrid datasets (mixing real and synthetic images) outperform both real and synthetic-only baselines, achieving a Dice score of 0.7244. These findings underscore the successful use of conditional diffusion models for generating anatomically accurate, AD-specific synthetic MRIs, and highlight their potential for enhancing training data availability, improving diagnostic accuracy, and promoting research reproducibility in neuroimaging studies.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Matrix phase-space representations for gaussian boson sampling

arXiv:2503.12749v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce coherent matrix phase-space distributions. These use conservation laws and symmetries to improve the accuracy and speed of quantum phase-space representations. As an example, this is applied to validation of low-loss Gaussian boson sampling (GBS) quantum computational advantage experiments, where classical generation of the random photon-number counts is exponentially hard. Large improvements in sampling errors are demonstrated compared to previous methods. Matrix phase-space representations also provide a large numerical speed-up, due to their (at worst) quadratic scaling, compared to other methods for validating total count probabilities of large-scale, low-loss GBS networks.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Optimising Entanglement Distillation Policies

arXiv:2606.14908v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Entanglement distillation is a fundamental operation in quantum information processing used to obtain higher-fidelity entangled pairs from a supply of less entangled quantum states using local operations aided by classical communication (LOCC). In a physically relevant setting, where states with an initial fidelity of $f_0$, probabilistically generated over multiple, $m$, memory pairs distributed between two parties, Alice and Bob, are pairwise distilled, the optimal policy identifies the system-configuration dependent sequence of entanglement generation and distillation operations that need to be performed in order to minimize the expected time to reach some target fidelity $f_T>f_0$. Here, we formulate and systematically analyze this task as a Markov decision problem and using a value iteration algorithm, obtain optimal deterministic policies that minimize the expected waiting time required to reach a target fidelity. Our results show that the expected waiting time under the optimal policy decreases with increasing generation probability $p$ and number of quantum memories $m$ - as expected. In contrast, it exhibits non-monotonic behavior with respect to $f_0$ for a fixed fidelity gap, $(\Delta f = f_T-f_0)$. While the optimal policy consistently outperforms baseline policies such as the greedy, nested and entanglement pumping policies, its relative advantage is regime-dependent, being determined by the system parameters ($p,f_0,f_T,m$), and exhibits a nontrivial dependence on the fidelity gap $\Delta f$. Our results highlight the value of formulating entanglement distillation as a Markov decision problem, enabling the systematic design of policies that achieve target fidelity thresholds for quantum information tasks in realistic resource-constrained settings.

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

TWLA: Achieving Ternary Weights and Low-Bit Activations for LLMs via Post-Training Quantization

arXiv:2606.13054v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit exceptional general language processing capabilities, but their memory and compute costs hinder deployment. Ternarization has emerged as a promising compression technique, offering significant reductions in model size and inference complexity. However, existing methods struggle with heavy-tailed activation distributions and therefore keep activations in high precision, fundamentally limiting end-to-end inference acceleration. To overcome this limitation, we propose TWLA, a post-training quantization (PTQ) framework that achieves 1.58-bit weight compression and 4-bit activation quantization while maintaining high accuracy. TWLA comprises three components: (1) Euclidean-to-Manifold Asymmetric Ternary Quantizer (E2M-ATQ) minimizes layer-output error under weight ternarization via a two-stage optimization from Euclidean initialization to manifold relocation; (2) Kronecker Orthogonal Tri-Modal Shaping (KOTMS) applies a Kronecker-structured orthogonal rotation to reshape weights into ternary-friendly tri-modal distributions, while the shared rotation statistically suppresses activation outliers; and (3) Inter-Layer Aware Activation Mixed Precision (ILA-AMP) explicitly introduces adjacent-layer second-order interaction costs in bit allocation and jointly optimizes for the layer-wise disparity of activation quantization gains induced by the shared orthogonal transform, preventing cascades triggered by a few weak layers. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TWLA maintains high accuracy under W1.58A4, while delivering significant inference acceleration. The code is available at .

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Quality Adaptive Angular Margin Learning for Respiratory Sound Classification

arXiv:2606.11915v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a quality-adaptive angular-margin learning framework that improves feature generalization by enforcing intra-class compactness and inter-class separability. Our framework, titled QLung, introduces a no-reference audio quality margin derived from spectral entropy and root-mean-square energy, which adaptively scales angular margins based on recording quality. To this end, we propose a log-scaled angular margin that stabilizes training under severe class imbalance. We also use an angular classifier that normalizes features and class weights, ensuring margin penalties are applied consistently on the unit hypersphere. Our approach improves in-distribution performance on the ICBHI dataset by 2.46\% over the cross-entropy baseline, and most significantly, achieves the strongest out-of-distribution performance on the SPRSound dataset compared to prior state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/RSC-Toolkit/QLung.

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

RECTOR: Masked Region-Channel-Temporal Modeling for Affective and Cognitive Representation Learning

arXiv:2606.15278v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Affective and cognitive disorders manifest as distributed, time-varying brain network dynamics across regions, channels, and time, challenging robust representation learning from EEG/sEEG for clinical diagnosis. We propose RECTOR (Masked Region-Channel-Temporal Modeling), an end-to-end self-supervised framework that unifies joint region-channel-temporal representation learning beyond fixed anatomical priors. At its core, RECTOR-SA is a hierarchical, block-sparse self-attention induced by Adaptive Functional Partitioning that evolves region structures from static anatomical definitions to adaptive functional regions. The self-supervision is driven by Masked Topology and Representation Learning, which jointly optimizes three complementary objectives: Masked Predictive Modeling, Topological Structure Modeling, and Cross-View Consistency. Across diverse benchmarks, RECTOR sets a new state-of-the-art in EEG emotion recognition and sEEG task-engagement classification. Crucially, its strong robustness to missing channels and cross-montage generalization underscores its potential for large-scale pre-training on heterogeneous EEG/sEEG, providing interpretable insights at both region and channel levels.

19.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

Complex-valued representations of time-series gene expression profiles for network analysis

Time-series RNA sequencing provides a powerful framework for studying dynamic gene regulation, yet conventional analyses usually represent gene expression profiles as real-valued vectors in Euclidean space and quantify similarity using correlation or distance. Inspired by quantum information theory, we present a framework for encoding time-series gene expression profiles as complex-valued vectors comprising amplitude and phase components in Hilbert space. We designed multiple encoding models to represent gene expression in the amplitude of complex-valued vectors, encode temporal differences in the phase, and extend the phase representation to incorporate the direction of local expression changes. Gene-gene similarity was then quantified using fidelity, which measures the overlap between two encoded vectors. Evaluation using time-series RNA-seq datasets across diverse species and biological contexts showed that different encoding models produced distinct fidelity distributions that were related to, but distinct from, conventional correlation measures. We then constructed gene-gene networks using pairwise fidelity values and detected communities containing genes with similar temporal profiles. Although fidelity distributions differed across encoding models, the resulting communities captured major temporal expression programs, and functional annotations based on gene ontology and Kyoto encyclopedia of genes and genomes pathway analyses provided exploratory biological context. The detected communities were comparable to those obtained using conventional methods, including weighted correlation network analysis and fuzzy c-means clustering. Furthermore, as a proof-of-concept, we performed SWAP-test circuit simulations to mimic fidelity computation on a quantum computer; under noise-aware conditions, these simulations produced less accurate fidelity estimates with higher computational cost than classical computation. As a proof-of-concept, this study provides a complementary view of temporal transcriptome organization, rather than a uniformly superior alternative to conventional methods.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Calibrated Sampling-Free Uncertainty Estimation in Bayesian Deep Learning

arXiv:2606.16214v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern deep learning models remain notoriously prone to overconfidence, limiting their reliability in high-stakes applications. Bayesian methods aim to counter this by learning a distribution over model parameters, and recent advances now make this feasible for large-scale architectures at costs comparable to AdamW. However, a challenge remains at test time: predictions must be averaged across many forward passes with weights sampled from the posterior, which is prohibitively expensive. Variance propagation offers an efficient alternative, computing layer-wise analytical approximations of uncertainty in a single forward pass. While such techniques are effective for MLPs, their extension to modern architectures remains challenging, due to increased depth and diversity of layer types. To fill this gap, we propose Calibrated Variance Propagation (CVP), which introduces a new propagation method for normalization layers, combines it with recent techniques for handling activation functions, and absorbs residual error through a light calibration step. CVP yields comparably accurate uncertainty estimates to MC sampling across transformers and CNNs, at a fraction of the cost. Against prior variance propagation work, CVP improves coverage at $0.5\%$ risk from $8.2\%$ to $14.6\%$ with BEiT-3 on Visual Reasoning (NLVR2) and from $2.6\%$ to $10.8\%$ with ViLT on VQAv2, with gains extending to convolutional architectures.

21.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-23

Early Tracheal and Salivary miRNAs in Extremely Preterm Infants Predict BPD-related Pulmonary Hypertension

Pulmonary hypertension (BPD-PH) associated with bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD) in preterm infants associates with high morbidity and mortality within the first two years of life. In a previous unbiased study, we identified a panel miRNAs in tracheal aspirates (TA) that were differentially expressed in extremely low gestational age newborns (ELGANs) with BPD-PH compared to those with BPD but no PH. To explore the predictive potential of these miRNAs, we studied TA exosomes from 7 days old ELGANs and analysed a curated panel of 16 miRNAs through logistic regression and calculated the predictive AUROC to diagnose BPD-PH at 36 weeks PMA. AUROC of TA miRNAs was 0.76 with sensitivity and specificity of 53% and 93%, respectively. Adding sex and gestational age to the variables improved the AUROC to 0.78 with sensitivity and specificity of 61 and 87% respectively. Due to challenges of obtaining TA in non-invasively ventilated infants, we collected saliva samples from ELGANs at 7 days of age and compared the log expression of these 16 miRNAs in both biofluids and found significant correlation in their expression (pearson r=0.92, p

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

iTRIALSPACE: Programmable Virtual Lesion Trials for Controlled Evaluation of Lung CT Models

We introduce iTRIALSPACE, a programmable evaluation framework for controlled assessment of lung CT models. Standard benchmarks are static retrospective collections that entangle lesion size, lobe prevalence, anatomy, and acquisition context, making it difficult to determine what structurally drives model accuracy. iTRIALSPACE addresses this limitation by composing real clinical CTs and lesion profiles into controlled virtual lesion trials through a four-stage pipeline: multidataset nodule profiling, explicit trial specification, anatomy-aware mask insertion, and ControlNet-conditioned CT synthesis. The framework is built on a unified 54-attribute nodule-profile dataset spanning 13,140 annotated nodules from seven public CT sources and instantiated as 13 trial modes. We evaluate iTRIALSPACE in a 55,469-sample Virtual Lesion Study spanning three medical VLMs, four spatialguidance conditions, and three clinical tasks. Across all 13 modes, the synthetic substrate remains within the real-to-real FID baseline, and synthetic performance rankings transfer strongly to real clinical data ($\rho$ = 0.93, p < 10$^{-15}$). Controlled trial modes expose findings unavailable to fixed-distribution benchmarks, including shortcut-driven size prediction collapse under lobe-equalized sampling and hostto-donor variance ratios of 8.9x and 3.3x in twin-cross analysis. These results position iTRIALSPACE as an auditable evaluation infrastructure for controlled, falsifiable testing beyond static retrospective benchmarks.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Power Battery Detection

Power batteries are essential components in electric vehicles, where internal structural defects can pose serious safety risks. We conduct a comprehensive study on a new task, power battery detection (PBD), which aims to localize the dense endpoints of cathode and anode plates from industrial X-ray images for quality inspection. Manual inspection is inefficient and error-prone, while traditional vision algorithms struggle with densely packed plates, low contrast, scale variation, and imaging artifacts. To address this issue and drive more attention into this meaningful task, we present PBD5K, the first large-scale benchmark for this task, consisting of 5,000 X-ray images from nine battery types with fine-grained annotations and eight types of real-world visual interference. To support scalable and consistent labeling, we develop an intelligent annotation pipeline that combines image filtering, model-assisted pre-labeling, cross-verification, and layered quality evaluation. We formulate PBD as a point-level segmentation problem and propose MDCNeXt, a model designed to extract and integrate multi-dimensional structure clues including point, line, and count information from the plate itself. To improve discrimination between plates and suppress visual interference, MDCNeXt incorporates two state space modules. The first is a prompt-filtered module that learns contrastive relationships guided by task-specific prompts. The second is a density-aware reordering module that refines segmentation in regions with high plate density. In addition, we propose a distance-adaptive mask generation strategy to provide robust supervision under varying spatial distributions of anode and cathode positions. The source code and datasets will be publicly available at \href{https://github.com/Xiaoqi-Zhao-DLUT/X-ray-PBD}{PBD5K}.

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

Transformer-Based Language Models Across Domain Verticals: Architectures, Applications and Critical Assessment

Transformer-based language models have become the default substrate for natural language processing and the pace of new releases has made it hard for practitioners to separate durable ideas from the noise of incremental announcements. This review works at two levels. At the level of mechanism, we organise the main transformer families into a working taxonomy, covering encoder-only, decoder-only, encoder-decoder, long-context, permutation-based, and generator-discriminator variants. We then extend the discussion to post-2023 developments that changed the picture in practice: instruction tuning, reinforcement learning from human feedback, direct preference optimisation, mixture-of-experts scaling, retrieval augmentation and the current flagship model families from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Mistral and DeepSeek. At the level of use, we survey deployments across healthcare, finance, legal, education, customer service, creative writing and scientific work. Based on this we link each to the specific capabilities that make a transformer the appropriate tool. The contribution of this paper is a critical assessment that is based on the survey. We compare architectures on four axes that matter to deployment decisions, we quantify the trade-off between parameter count and energy cost. We also discuss how alignment methods, data provenance and benchmark saturation change what it means to call a model "state of the art". The final section lists the research questions that we think deserve more attention.

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

DP-Hype: Federated Differentially Private Hyperparameter Search

arXiv:2510.04902v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Tuning hyperparameters in federated machine learning can substantially impact model performance. When hyperparameters are tuned on sensitive data, privacy becomes an important challenge and to this end, differential privacy has emerged as the de facto standard for provable privacy. A standard setting in federated learning is that clients agree on a shared setup, i.e., find a compromise from a set of hyperparameters, like a model's learning rate. Yet, prior work on privacy-preserving hyperparameter tuning is tailored to specific learning tasks, does not account for the privacy leakage of aggregated results, or offers a sub-optimal privacy-utility trade-off. In this work, we present our algorithm DP-Hype, which performs a federated and privacy-preserving hyperparameter search by conducting a federated voting based on local hyperparameter evaluations of clients. In this way, DP-Hype selects hyperparameters that lead to a compromise supported by a majority of clients, while maintaining scalability and independence from specific learning tasks. We prove that DP-Hype preserves the strong notion of differential privacy called client-level differential privacy and, importantly, show that its privacy guarantees do not depend on the number of hyperparameters. We also provide bounds on its utility guarantees, that is, the probability of finding good hyperparameters, and implement DP-Hype as a submodule in the popular Flower framework for federated machine learning. In addition, we evaluate performance on multiple benchmark data sets in iid as well as multiple non-iid settings and demonstrate high utility of DP-Hype even under small privacy budgets.