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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Exactly Solvable Quantum Model with Spin-Dependent Coulomb Interaction

arXiv:2501.05103v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this work, we report an exactly solvable quantum model featuring a spin-dependent Coulomb interaction, described by the spin vector potential \(\vec{\mathcal{A}} = k (\vec{r} \times \vec{S}) / r^2\) together with a Coulomb-type scalar potential \(\varphi = \kappa / r\) . The model is governed by the Schrödinger-type Hamiltonian \(\mathcal{H}_S = \vec{\Pi}^2 / (2M) + q \varphi\) in nonrelativistic quantum mechanics and by the Dirac-type Hamiltonian \(\mathcal{H}_D = c \vec{\alpha} \cdot \vec{\Pi} + \beta M c^2 + q \varphi\) in relativistic quantum mechanics, where \(\vec{\Pi} = \vec{p} - (q/c)\vec{\mathcal{A}}\) is the canonical momentum. We demonstrate two main results: (i) Just as the Coulomb-type scalar potential \(\mathcal{S}_Maxwell = \{\vec{\mathcal{A}} = 0,\ \varphi = \kappa / r\}\) is a local exact solution of Maxwell's equations on $r\neq0$, the gauge potential \(\mathcal{S}_YM = \{\vec{\mathcal{A}} = k (\vec{r} \times \vec{S}) / r^2,\ \varphi = \kappa / r\}\) constitutes a local exact solution of the Yang–Mills equations on the punctured region $r\neq0$. (ii) Both Hamiltonians \(\mathcal{H}_S\) and \(\mathcal{H}_D\) can be solved exactly in the presence of this spin-dependent Coulomb interaction. The resulting energy spectra are derived, and they naturally reduce to those of the ordinary hydrogen atom when the spin-dependent terms are neglected. Finally, we clarify the quantization conditions and the fixed-background interpretation of the model.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Cost-Performance Evaluation of Large Language Models for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis of HCAHPS Patient Comments: A Validation Study

Background: Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) free-text comments contain actionable feedback, but timely, scalable, and affordable sentiment analysis remains challenging for health systems that rely on third-party vendors. Objectives: To evaluate cost-performance tradeoffs between a cost-optimized and a flagship large language model (LLM) for aspect-based sentiment analysis of HCAHPS comments, using human inter-rater agreement as a reproducibility benchmark. Methods: We analyzed 512 free-text HCAHPS comments collected from two community hospitals in calendar year 2023. Six trained reviewers (medical students, recent medical graduates, and practicing internists) independently assigned positive, negative, or neutral labels to each comment-aspect pair; the majority label among three reviewers formed the consensus reference standard. Two OpenAI models - GPT-5-nano (cost-optimized) and GPT-5 (flagship) - were prompted in a zero-shot setting via the OpenAI API. We calculated pairwise Cohen's {kappa} to establish a human inter-rater baseline, then compared each model's labels to the consensus using Cohen's {kappa}, accuracy, weighted F1, and per-call cost and latency. Results: Mean human inter-rater agreement was {kappa} = 0.79 (substantial). Both LLMs exceeded this baseline (cost-optimized {kappa} = 0.85; flagship {kappa} = 0.85) with nearly identical accuracy (0.92) and weighted F1 (0.93 vs. 0.93). Performance was strong on positive (F1 ~ 0.97) and negative (F1 ~ 0.90) classes but poor on the underrepresented neutral class (F1

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

Distilling Examples into Task Instructions: Enhanced In-Context Learning for Real-World B2B Conversations

In-context learning (ICL) is the standard method for low-resource classification, yet its efficacy in specialized domains remains largely unexplored. We address the challenge of classifying semantically complex, multi-party B2B conversations, where traditional ICL encounters significant limitations, especially as context length increases due to the concatenation of multiple few-shot examples. We introduce the \texttt{Call Playbook} dataset, featuring five classification tasks derived from real-world B2B conversations targeting core sales concepts. To bridge the gap between performance and practical utility, we propose novel knowledge extraction methods that distill verbose examples into compact, interpretable representations of structured classification criteria and precise task descriptions. Our approach achieves a 99\% reduction in token usage and improves macro-averaged AUC by up to 7\% over traditional ICL. Notably, it remains robust as context grows, unlike advanced token compression baselines which degrade by over 9 F1 points. Importantly, our framework enables direct refinement of classification logic, addressing critical needs for transparency, efficiency, and user interaction in real-world NLP applications.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Momentum LMS Theory beyond Stationarity: Stability, Tracking, and Regret

arXiv:2602.11995v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In large-scale data processing scenarios, data often arrive in sequential streams generated by complex systems that exhibit drifting distributions and time-varying system parameters. This nonstationarity challenges theoretical analysis, as it violates classical assumptions of i.i.d. (independent and identically distributed) samples, necessitating algorithms capable of real-time updates without expensive retraining. An effective approach should process each sample in a single pass, while maintaining computational and memory complexities independent of the data stream length. Motivated by these challenges, this paper investigates the Momentum Least Mean Squares (MLMS) algorithm as an adaptive identification tool, leveraging its computational simplicity and online processing capabilities. Theoretically, we derive tracking performance and regret bounds for the MLMS in time-varying stochastic linear systems under various practical conditions. Unlike classical LMS, whose stability can be characterized by first-order random vector difference equations, MLMS introduces an additional dynamical state due to momentum, leading to second-order time-varying random vector difference equations whose stability analysis hinges on more complicated products of random matrices, which poses a substantially challenging problem to resolve. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data streams demonstrate that MLMS achieves rapid adaptation and robust tracking, in agreement with our theoretical results especially in nonstationary settings, highlighting its promise for modern streaming and online learning applications.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

VigilFormer: Deformable Attention for Video Anomaly Detection with Causal Risk Inference

Authors:

Video anomaly detection in surveillance settings must balance detection accuracy against real-time throughput, a tension that existing methods address either through stronger feature extractors or more efficient architectures, but rarely both. We present VigilFormer, a unified framework that combines deformable spatio-temporal attention with causal temporal modeling to detect anomalies in untrimmed surveillance video. The proposed Deformable Spatio-Temporal Encoder (DSTE) attends to a sparse set of informative locations across frames, avoiding the quadratic cost of dense attention while retaining the ability to capture irregular motion patterns. A Causal Anomaly Classifier (CAC) applies dilated causal convolutions over snippet-level features and optimizes a contrastive multiple-instance learning objective that separates anomalous and normal representations without frame-level labels. To meet deployment constraints, an Adaptive Confidence Scheduler (ACS) dynamically skips low-information frames at inference time, reducing redundant computation in static scenes. Evaluated on UCF-Crime, ShanghaiTech, and CUHK Avenue, VigilFormer achieves AUC scores of 87.83%, 97.21%, and 89.74% respectively, at 41.5 FPS on a single GPU, outperforming recent weakly-supervised methods in both accuracy and speed.

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

NRITYAM: Language Models Meet Art and Heritage of Dance

Language models have become essential tools in shaping modern workflows. However, their global effectiveness hinges on a nuanced understanding of local socio-cultural contexts. To address this gap, we present NRITYAM, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating the cultural comprehension capabilities of language models in the context of global dance traditions. NRITYAM comprises 9,260 carefully curated question-answer pairs spanning 12 languages, making it the largest dataset dedicated to evaluating cultural knowledge in dance. The dataset has been developed from the ground up through close collaboration with native dance artists and native speakers of the languages, who authored and validated culturally relevant questions specific to their regions. We evaluate a broad set of models, including large language models, small language models, multimodal large language models, and small multimodal language models. As a multilingual and multicultural benchmark, NRITYAM sets a new standard for evaluating the ability of AI systems to understand and reason about traditional performing arts. Detailed dataset samples are available at~\url{https://github.com/niladrighosh03/NRITYAM}.

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

CoIRL-AD: Collaborative-Competitive Imitation-Reinforcement Learning in Latent World Models for Autonomous Driving

End-to-end autonomous driving models trained with imitation learning (IL) often generalize poorly, particularly in long-tail scenarios where expert demonstrations are sparse. Reinforcement learning (RL) can provide complementary task-level supervision, but applying RL to real-world autonomous driving is challenging in offline settings without interactive simulators, where datasets are dominated by expert actions and provide limited behavioral diversity. We propose CoIRL-AD, a competitive dual-policy framework that integrates IL and RL under a unified offline training regime. CoIRL-AD decouples imitation and reward optimization into separate actors to alleviate objective conflicts, uses imagined future rollouts for long-horizon reward estimation, and introduces a competition mechanism that selectively transfers beneficial behaviors while keeping RL anchored to expert-like driving. Experiments on the nuScenes benchmark show that CoIRL-AD consistently improves robustness over strong IL-based baselines, with especially large gains in cross-city generalization and long-tail scenarios. Code is available at: https://github.com/SEU-zxj/CoIRL-AD.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Low-Density Lipoprotein Cholesterol and Dementia Risk: Integrating Mendelian Randomization and Target Trial Emulation Within the Heart-Brain Axis

Background: The heart-brain axis links cardiovascular and neurodegenerative disease through shared vascular and inflammatory mechanisms. Although low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) is an established causal factor in atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD), its relationship with dementia remains uncertain, with midlife elevations associated with increased risk but late-life associations often appearing null or inverse. To address this cholesterol paradox, we integrated mendelian randomization (MR) with an active-comparator new-user target trial emulation. Methods: We applied a triangulated causal inference framework integrating two-sample MR with observational target trial emulation. Genetic variants associated with LDL-C were used as instrumental variables to evaluate Alzheimer disease (AD), dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), frontotemporal dementia (FTD), and any dementia (AnyDem), with causal estimates derived using inverse-variance weighted models and sensitivity analyses for heterogeneity and pleiotropy. In parallel, an active-comparator new-user design compared statin versus ezetimibe initiation among adults aged 60 years or older using propensity score (PS) overlap weighting and Cox proportional hazards models to evaluate cardiovascular and dementia outcomes. Results: Genetically predicted LDL-C was associated with increased risk of DLB (OR 1.65, 95% CI 1.30-2.10; p

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

Small LLMs for Biomedical Claim Verification: Cost-Effective Fine-Tuning, Structural Dataset Shortcuts, and Cross-Domain Generalization

Authors:

Large Language Models such as GPT-4o and GPT-5 achieve strong zero-shot performance on biomedical claim verification, but cost and opacity limit scalable use. We fine-tune three small LLMs: Phi-3-mini (3.8B), Qwen2.5-3B, and Mistral-7B, via QLoRA on SciFact and HealthVer, providing the first study of QLoRA models against GPT-4o and fine-tuned BioLinkBERT encoders. Mistral-7B QLoRA surpasses both GPT-4o and GPT-5 (up to 12% F1 gain) at a fractional cost using just 1,008 training examples. We conduct extensive in-domain and cross-domain evaluation: models trained on SciFact tested on HealthVer and vice versa, at matched sizes to isolate dataset structure from data quantity. We identify a previously unreported structural artifact in SciFact that inflates in-domain scores, and show through bidirectional out-of-domain evaluation that training on structurally sound data enables robust cross-domain transfer. We plan to release all code and adapter checkpoints.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Approximately Decoding the Colour Code

Authors:

arXiv:2606.18035v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recently we showed that minimum weight decoding in the (6.6.6 planar) colour code is NP-hard. However, it remained an open question as to whether it was possible to approximate the minimum weight decoding arbitrarily closely in polynomial time. In this paper we prove that it is possible: for any $\varepsilon>0$ there is an polynomial time algorithm that, given a syndrome, can find an error-set generating that syndrome whose weight is at most $1+\varepsilon$ times the weight of the minimum weight decoding. As a consequence we see that, for any $\varepsilon>0$, there is a polynomial time algorithm that can correct all errors of weight up to $(1-\varepsilon)d/2$ in the distance $d$ colour code (so almost up to the theoretical $d/2$ limit). The polynomial we give is impractically large, but it does open the door for sensible polynomial time algorithms that approximate minimum weight decoding and, in particular, shows that approximate decoding is not NP-hard.

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

CRAX: Fast Safe Reinforcement Learning Benchmarking

arXiv:2606.20376v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safety is a core concern for deploying reinforcement learning (RL) agents in real-world domains such as robotics and autonomous driving. While benchmarks have been central to progress in RL, existing safety benchmarks with high-fidelity 3D physics remain computationally slow, limiting large-scale experimentation and rapid prototyping. To address this gap, we propose CRAX (Constrained RL Accelerated with JAX). Built on top of the MuJoCo XLA (MJX) physics engine with realistic 3D dynamics, CRAX leverages vectorized operations and hardware acceleration, yielding up to ~100x speedups over comparable CPU-based safety benchmarks. The benchmark features six environment suites and three agent-specific tasks, each spanning three difficulty levels. Evaluating six popular safe RL methods shows that no single approach dominates across all tasks, and reveals the trade-offs between performance and safety. We find that curriculum learning across difficulty levels and safety transfer can improve performance over direct training in harder settings.

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

Scalable Production Scheduling: Linear Complexity via Unified Homogeneous Graphs

arXiv:2604.23841v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Efficiently solving the Job Shop Scheduling Problem in real-world industrial applications requires policies that are both computationally lean and topologically robust. While Reinforcement Learning has shown potential in automating dispatching rules, existing models often struggle with a scalability bottleneck caused by quadratic graph complexity or the architectural overhead of heterogeneous layers. We introduce a unified graph framework that employs feature-based homogenization to project distinct node roles into a shared latent space. This allows a standard homogeneous Graph Isomorphism Network to capture complex resource contention with linear complexity, ensuring low-latency inference for large-scale industrial applications. Our empirical results demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance while exhibiting consistent zero-shot generalization. We identify the job-to-machine ratio as the primary driver of policy effectiveness, rather than absolute problem size. Based on this, we propose a hypothesis of structural saturation, demonstrating that policies trained on critically congested instances ($\mathcal{J} \approx \mathcal{M}$) learn scale-invariant resolution strategies. Agents trained at this saturation point internalize invariant conflict-resolution logic, allowing them to treat massive rectangular instances as a sequential concatenation of saturated sub-problems. This approach eliminates the need for expensive scale-specific retraining and prevents overfitting to statistical shortcuts, providing a robust and efficient pathway for deploying RL solutions in dynamic production environments.

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

BALTO: Balanced Token-Level Policy Optimization for Hallucination Mitigation

Hallucinations remain a major obstacle to deploying large language models (LLMs) in knowledge-intensive settings, where generated responses must be faithfully grounded in provided evidence. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising direction for hallucination mitigation, but response-level faithfulness rewards suffer from a granularity mismatch: localized hallucinations can cause supported content to receive spurious penalties. Although recent work introduces fine-grained feedback such as claim-level verification and token-level rewards, unbalanced credit assignment can still induce length, verbosity, or optimization-noise biases. We propose BALTO, a Balanced Token-level Policy Optimization framework for hallucination mitigation. BALTO extracts checkable factual claims, verifies them against the reference context, and projects claim-level judgments to token-level labels. A balanced token-level credit assignment mechanism is introduced into the framework. This design redistributes probability mass from unsupported content toward faithful content, rather than suppressing the entire response. We systematically analyze the limitations of response-level rewards from a theoretical standpoint, and prove BALTO's advantages in training stability and optimization efficiency for hallucination mitigation. Experiments on ConFiQA, RAGTruth, and FinLLM-Eval show that BALTO achieves the highest faithfulness across all six model–benchmark settings and consistently outperforms existing post-training baselines in Q-Score, demonstrating a stronger faithfulness–informativeness trade-off.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Private Prediction via PAC Privacy

arXiv:2601.14033v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Machine learning models are increasingly served behind APIs. This renders private prediction, i.e., privatizing a model's outputs rather than its parameters, a natural privacy target: model outputs are lower-dimensional and far more stable to training-data changes than weights. While differential privacy (DP) cannot effectively exploit this as it calibrates noise to worst-case sensitivity that is intractable to bound for non-convex models, we argue that PAC privacy is a natural fit for private prediction. It is instance-based, and calibrates noise to a black-box function's empirical stability to control mutual-information (MI) leakage. The missing ingredient is efficient, adaptive composition. Serving predictions means answering a long stream of adaptively chosen queries from untrusted users; existing composition either fails under adaptivity, grows quadratically, or reverts to input-independent, DP-like noise. We close this gap with a new adversarial composition result via adaptive noise calibration and prove that MI accumulates only linearly under adaptive and adversarial querying. Experiments across modalities show that prediction stability enables high utility even at a tiny per-query budget: on CIFAR-10, we achieve 87.79% accuracy with a per-query MI budget of $2^{-32}$. This enables serving one million queries while provably bounding membership-inference success to 51.08% – the same guarantee as $(0.04, 10^{-5})$-DP. Further, in the presence of auxiliary public data, the large volume of PAC-private predictions enables us to distill a publishable model that can be queried without limit. Concretely, 210,000 private labels on an ImageNet subset distill into a student reaching 91.86% accuracy on CIFAR-10 with membership inference success bounded by 50.49%, comparable to $(0.02, 10^{-5})$-DP.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Theory of uncertain probability: can we derive the probability density function of uncertain random experiments with continuously changing conditions?

Authors:

arXiv:2606.20169v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper aims to explore the formation mechanism of probability distribution in situations where the differences among random experiments are distinguishable, and these differences continue to evolve along with the dynamic changes in conditions and their mechanisms of action. To this end, we are motivated to devise a new theoretical system – theory of uncertain probability (TUP) with Kolmogorov's system and nonlinear theories as special cases. TUP develops a novel model that integrates probability and uncertainty as well as the known and unknown to more accurately depict numerous typical random phenomena under more realistic assumptions, and thus provides appropriate tools for greater variety of real needs. It also allows for pioneering interpretation of the causal mechanisms underlying many important distributional characteristics and incorporation of pathwise property to distribution model.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

VOID: Defeating Unauthorized Mimicry in Latent Diffusion Models

While Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) have revolutionized visual synthesis, they are increasingly exploited for unauthorized mimicry of individuals. Existing defenses inject deceptive perturbations to steer the generated images toward irrelevant targets. However, this approach hinges on an ungrounded assumption: subtle perturbations can maintain their deceptive efficacy throughout an LDM's extensive generation process. In reality, the model's innate restoration mechanism will remove such perturbations and cause individual identities to re-emerge in the images generated. We propose VOID, a defense framework that overcomes this conundrum by manipulating an LDM's intrinsic stochasticity. VOID perturbs the diffusion pipeline in two novel ways: 1) amplifying the latent encoding errors to shatter an image's semantic structure, and 2) counteracting the target guidance signals to suppress the model's restoration capabilities. This results in a semantic corruption that thwarts any unauthorized mimicry. Notably, the security gain does not come at the price of visual utility, as VOID simultaneously manages to confine perturbations to human-imperceptible regions of protected images. Our comprehensive evaluation of 24 state-of-the-art defenses against 10 mimicry attacks on 5 datasets demonstrates VOID's unprecedented protection power: it increases the average Frechet Inception Distance (FID) from 113 to 365, a 223% improvement over the strongest defense to date.

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

The Market in the Model: Latent Diffusion as Neural Economy

Valuable critique of generative image models within visual culture and the humanities has emphasized the role of datasets in shaping the images they produce. Yet, close studies of the ideological positions embedded into the mechanism of the models have been neglected, leaving them imagined as "black boxes." In a bid to expand, rather than replace, dataset critique, this paper examines the mechanisms of the latent diffusion model in terms of the problems they were brought in to solve on behalf of computer vision engineers, and the decisions each component was tasked with automating. I interpret that ensemble through the histories of its parts and the theory of vision the system inscribes into every generated image. Drawing on Impett and Offert's notion of neural exchange value, I offer this analysis to argue that the model operates as a neural economy: a contained symbolic system that abstracts social communication into commensurable vectors as it transfers the social sphere into parcels for sale. Tracing the training and generation pipelines component by component reveals what each operation displaces, and how it further entrenches the logics of platform and attention economies over social communication. The paper warns that any critique fixated exclusively on copyright and commodity defenses risks reaffirming the very fetishism the model produces, and argues instead for centering social exchange.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Digital self-efficacy as a potential intermediary between vision impairment and daily internet use among older adults: A cross-sectional analysis of HINTS 2024

Background: Older adults with vision impairment often experience barriers to using digital technology. The indirect associations between vision impairment and digital access and skills via digital self-efficacy and frustration among older adults remain largely unknown. Objective: This study aimed to 1) explore factors associated with digital access, skills, self-efficacy, and frustration among older adults with vision impairment; 2) examine associations between vision impairment and digital access, skills, self-efficacy, and frustration among older adults; and 3) examine whether digital self-efficacy and frustration may help explain associations between vision impairment and digital access and skills among older adults. Methods: This was a cross-sectional study using nationally representative data from the Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS) 2024. Respondents aged 60 and older were included. Vision impairment was assessed using a self-reported item. Outcomes included self-reported digital access, skills, self-efficacy, and frustration. Survey-weighted multivariable logistic regression and generalized structural equation modeling were conducted, adjusting for age, sex, race/ethnicity, education, and the number of comorbidities. Results: Among 3,149 older adults (mean [SD] age, 70.7 [10.0] years; 45.6% female), 7.1% (n=223) reported vision impairment. Among older adults with vision impairment, 65.6% (95% CI, 53.5% to 75.9%) used the internet daily, and 79.5% (95% CI, 66.8% to 88.2%) used a smartphone in the past 12 months. In multivariable logistic regression analyses among older adults with vision impairment, older age was associated with lower odds of daily internet use (OR, 0.84; 95% CI, 0.79 to 0.90), smartphone use (OR, 0.85; 95% CI, 0.75 to 0.97), wearable device use (OR, 0.88; 95% CI, 0.79 to 0.97), and using the internet to send a message to a healthcare provider (OR, 0.87; 95% CI, 0.80 to 0.93). Older adults who self-identified as racial and ethnic minority groups (e.g., Black/African American, Hispanic) had lower odds of daily internet use (OR, 0.15; 95% CI, 0.05 to 0.50) and using the internet to send a message to a healthcare provider (OR, 0.17; 95% CI, 0.04 to 0.73) compared with Non-Hispanic White older adults. Vision impairment was associated with lower odds of daily internet use (OR, 0.60; 95% CI, 0.37 to 0.99) and digital self-efficacy (OR, 0.53; 95% CI, 0.32 to 0.86). Digital self-efficacy was associated with higher odds of daily internet use (OR, 2.95; 95% CI, 2.04 to 4.26). Generalized structural equation modeling identified an indirect association between vision impairment and daily internet use via digital self-efficacy (coefficient, -0.68; 95% CI, -1.24 to -0.12). Conclusions: Findings suggest that reduced digital self-efficacy may help explain the observed association between vision impairment and daily internet use among older adults. Interventions targeting digital self-efficacy, including accessible interface designs, personalized coaching, and peer support, may help bridge the digital divide among older adults with vision impairment.

19.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Viability of engineered AAVs via protein language models

Capsid engineering has greatly improved the performance of recombinant AAV vectors used for gene therapy. One commonly used strategy is the insertion of a short, 7-mer, peptide into surface-exposed loops to modify receptor interactions and enhance cell entry. While effective in receptor retargeting and improved transduction, these insertions might destabilize the capsid protein, hinder assembly, and thus limit production. While previous attempts have used deep mutational scanning and AI to predict which insertions are viable, there is lack in understanding the structural consequences of these peptide insertions at the amino-acid level. Here we combined experiments, deep sequencing and large protein language models to gain insight on the impact of 7-mer insertions on the VR-VIII region. We first characterize the biochemical properties of viable insertions, thus identifying which residues are well tolerated, and which should instead be avoided. We then focus on the nearby context of those insertions, by studying the effect of the linkers, either for highly diverse libraries or for individual variants known for their efficiency. Next, we study the broader context, by extending our analysis to the whole capsid sequence, and identifying regions that can tolerate insertions without long-ranged structural deformations that could affect capsid functionality. We conclude with a cross-serotype comparison and a viability analysis of tens of previously engineered variants. Our work showcases how AI can uncover structure-function rules governing the success of engineered AAV capsids.

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

FEMOT: Multi-Object Tracking using Frame and Event Cameras

Conventional RGB cameras have been widely used in multi-object tracking due to their ability to capture rich appearance and semantic information. However, their performance is often degraded under complex real-world challenges, such as motion blur, low illumination, and overexposure. Bio-inspired event cameras offer high temporal resolution and high dynamic range, providing complementary cues under extreme scenarios. Nevertheless, RGB-event multi-object tracking remains underexplored due to the lack of large-scale and well-annotated datasets. To address this issue, we propose FEMOT, a large-scale RGB-event multi-object tracking dataset that covers diverse real-world scenarios and 14 challenging attributes. With both RGB and event data as well as high-quality annotations, FEMOT provides a reliable platform for systematically evaluating RGB-event multi-object tracking methods. Based on FEMOT, we retrain and evaluate over ten strong trackers, thereby establishing a comprehensive benchmark for future research. Furthermore, we propose FEMOTR, a multimodal tracking framework that decouples RGB and event features and fuses them in the frequency domain, thereby effectively exploiting their complementary characteristics for robust object localization and identity association. Extensive experiments on FEMOT and DSEC-MOT datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The source code and benchmark dataset have been released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/FEMOT.

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

MARD: Mirror-Augmented Reasoning Distillation for Mechanism-Level Drug-Drug Interaction Prediction

Mechanism-level drug-drug interaction (DDI) prediction requires identifying which enzyme or pharmacodynamic axis is implicated, in which direction, and with which evidence – not merely whether two drugs interact. We introduce a reproducible mechanism-level DDI labelling and evaluation protocol with a structured 7-family/147-subtype taxonomy, leakage-safe cold-split protocols, and auditable reasoning metrics for evaluating pharmacological prediction beyond flat interaction classification. We propose a pipeline that produces a 7B reasoning MARD (Mirror-Augmented Reasoning Distillation), combining three training innovations: a single-token KL divergence on direction tag that ties the model's prediction, per-loss PRM-weighted DPO with programmatic hard negatives, and a leakage-safe mechanism-aware retrieval channel. Process-reward step labels are automatically verifiable against DrugBank-structured fields, requiring no human or LLM judges. On the April-2026 DrugBank release, our MARD-7B is the only system in a 32-system comparison whose accuracy survives drug-pair novelty, beating the best baseline by +13.9 pp and GPT-4o by +6.7 pp at ~1% of frontier API cost. Further analysis reveals an anti-memorisation signature where accuracy improves on rarely seen drugs, suggesting that gain comes from structured pharmacological reasoning rather than drug-frequency memorisation. We release corpus, DDI-PRM, retrieval index, and training code.

22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Laws of Large Numbers for Non-Independent Random Variables on Hyperspaces with respect to the Hausdorff Metric

arXiv:2011.07199v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper investigates the limit behavior of the Minkowski sums for sequences of set-valued random variables. When the underlying space is finite dimensional, by using the support function, we establish the weak and strong laws of large numbers for non-independent random variables in the hyperspace with respect to the Hausdorff metric $d_H$.

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

Fantastic Pretraining Optimizers and Where to Find Them II: Hyperball Optimization

arXiv:2606.16899v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Matrix based optimizers such as Muon can substantially speed up language model pretraining, but their gains over AdamW are observed to shrink as model size and data scale grow when using standard constant decoupled weight decay. We propose Hyperball, a simple optimizer wrapper that addresses this issue. Given a base optimizer such as Adam or Muon, Hyperball sets the Frobenius norms of weight matrices and their corresponding optimizer updates to fixed constants. On Qwen3 style models up to 1.2B parameters, Muon Hyperball achieves 20–30% token equivalent speedup over weight decay baselines. Hyperball also improves learning rate transfer across widths and depths compared to decoupled weight decay. This method is motivated by prior theory showing that training with weight decay leads to an equilibrium weight norm that only depends on the training hyperparameters. Through this mechanism, the weight decay then decides the angular learning rate, i.e. how fast the direction of the weight matrix changes.

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

InfantFace: Detecting infant faces in neonatal clinical environments

Reliable localisation of the neonatal face is the first step for several video-camera based non-contact assessments such as pain and distress related facial expression analysis, pain scoring, cardiorespiratory signal extraction and cessation of breathing alerts. However, major challenges persist in neonatal clinical environments. Cluttered backgrounds, illumination changes and poor lighting conditions can reduce the accuracy of face detection models. Clinical interventions, monitoring equipment and, in some cases, medical devices can obstruct the face, making visual assessment difficult. We propose a one-stage YOLOv11m-based model tailored for face detection of infants in neonatal clinical environments. We combined multiple publicly available datasets (VGGFace2, CelebA, FDDB, WIDER FACE) to train and evaluate our proposed model. We then fine-tuned our model on a neonatal research dataset involving 228 videos from 114 recording sessions of 113 independent infants. Before fine-tuning, our model achieved an AP50 of 0.87, surpassing the performance of three state-of-the-art general face detectors. Performance improved further to an AP50 of 0.96 after clinical-domain adaptation. Evaluating face detection performance across different datasets remains a challenge due to the lack of publicly available neonatal datasets. Prioritising the creation of such datasets, while upholding appropriate privacy safeguards and ethical standards in their creation and use, would greatly support further progress in this field.

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

Generalized Discrete Diffusion with Self-Correction

arXiv:2603.02230v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Self-correction is an effective technique for maintaining parallel sampling in discrete diffusion models with minimal performance degradation. Prior work has explored self-correction at inference time or during post-training; however, such approaches often suffer from limited generalization and may impair reasoning performance. GIDD pioneers pretraining-based self-correction via a multi-step BERT-style uniform-absorbing objective. However, GIDD relies on a continuous interpolation-based pipeline with opaque interactions between uniform transitions and absorbing masks, which complicates hyperparameter tuning and hinders practical performance. In this work, we propose a Self-Correcting Discrete Diffusion (SCDD) model to reformulate pretrained self-correction with explicit state transitions and learn directly in discrete time. Our framework also simplifies the training noise schedule, eliminates a redundant remasking step, and relies exclusively on uniform transitions to learn self-correction. Experiments at the GPT-2 scale demonstrate that our method enables more efficient parallel decoding while preserving generation quality.