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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

On Local Population-Risk Certificates

Authors:

arXiv:2606.19147v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper develops local certificates for population-risk increments around a current model. For a local candidate set \(\mathcal D\), the certificate is a two-sided confidence band for \(P({\ell_{\theta+v}-\ell_\theta})\) over \(v\in\mathcal D\). As an application, the upper endpoint of this band yields a risk-controlled update rule: an update is accepted only when its certified upper endpoint is nonpositive; otherwise the current model is retained.

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

Beyond Independent Genes: Learning Module-Inductive Representations for Single-Cell Gene Perturbation Prediction

arXiv:2602.04901v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Predicting transcriptional responses to genetic perturbations is a central problem in functional genomics. In practice, perturbation responses are rarely gene-independent but instead manifest as coordinated, program-level transcriptional changes among functionally related genes. However, most existing methods do not explicitly model such coordination, due to gene-wise modeling paradigms and reliance on static biological priors that cannot capture dynamic program reorganization. To address these limitations, we propose scBIG, a module-inductive perturbation prediction framework that explicitly models coordinated gene programs. scBIG induces coherent gene programs from data via Gene-Relation Clustering, captures inter-program interactions through a Gene-Cluster-Aware Encoder, and preserves modular coordination using structure-aware alignment objectives. These structured representations are then modeled using conditional flow matching to enable flexible and generalizable perturbation prediction. Extensive experiments on multiple single-cell perturbation benchmarks show that scBIG consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, particularly on unseen and combinatorial perturbation settings, achieving an average improvement of 6.7% over the strongest baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/ttruan2426-dot/scBIG.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Playful Agentic Robot Learning

arXiv:2606.19419v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current agentic robot systems can write executable Code-as-Policy programs, observe feedback, and revise behavior across multiple attempts, but they remain largely task-driven: reusable skills are acquired only after explicit instructions. We study Playful Agentic Robot Learning, where an embodied coding agent uses self-directed play as a continual skill-learning stage before downstream tasks arrive. We introduce RATs, Robotics Agent Teams designed for play-time skill acquisition. During play, RATs proposes novel yet learnable exploratory tasks, plans and executes robot-code policies, verifies intermediate progress, diagnoses failures, retries with dense, step-level feedback, and distills successful executions into a persistent code skill library. At test time, the agent reuses relevant skills from this frozen library to help solve new tasks. Experiments in LIBERO-PRO and MolmoSpaces show that play-learned skills improve held-out downstream tasks over no-play and random-play baselines, with 20.6 and 17.0 percentage-point gains over CaP-Agent0 on LIBERO-PRO and MolmoSpaces, respectively. Moreover, the learned skills can be plugged into other inference-time Code-as-Policy agents by simply retrieving them into the context, improving RoboSuite and real-world transfer by 8.9 and 8.8 points, respectively, without finetuning the underlying model.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

A Quantitative Analysis of Multimodal Biomarkers in Alzheimer's Disease

Despite increasing adoption of multimodal approaches in Alzheimer's Disease (AD) research – aimed at integrating molecular, structural, clinical, and genetic biomarkers to enhance disease characterization – the relationships among these modalities remain poorly understood. A systematic analysis of their dynamic interaction is essential for improving disease modeling, identifying redundant assessments, and reducing patient burden and acquisition costs. In this paper, we present a quantitative analysis of multimodal AD biomarkers by integrating tau-PET, structural MRI, cognitive scores (MMSE and CDR), and APOE4 data from 789 subjects drawn from the ADNI dataset. In our analyses, we (A) quantify cross-modal mutual information and explained variance to assess redundancy and predictive dependencies; (B) examine associations between tau topologies and structural atrophy across brain regions to select informative ROIs; (C) perform a statistical decomposition of the tau-cognition association into atrophy-related and atrophy-independent components; (D) and identify a dominant neurodegenerative trajectory that aligns with cognitive decline. This study provides a systematic characterization of cross-modal relationships, improving the interpretability and selection of biomarkers in AD. Code is publicly available at: https://github.com/antonioscardace/Multimodal-AD.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Comparative Analysis of Machine Learning Models vs. Traditional Clinical Calculators for Cardiovascular Risk Prediction

Background: Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) remain the leading global cause of mortality, responsible for approximately 31% of all deaths worldwide in 2021. Traditional risk calculators, including Framingham, ASCVD, SCORE, and SCORE2, have long constituted the cornerstone of primary prevention strategies; however, they were derived predominantly from high-income European and North American populations, thereby limiting their predictive accuracy in diverse epidemiological contexts, particularly among Hispanic/Latino communities. Machine learning (ML) offers an alternative to capture the non-linear interactions inherent in biomedical data. Objective: The present study develops and validates ML-based models for cardiovascular mortality prediction using the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 1999-2018 dataset, and systematically compares their discriminative performance against eleven conventional clinical CVD risk calculators. Materials and Methods: A dedicated software platform, "CardioPrediQ," was designed to integrate multiple CVD calculators with ML-based risk assessment. A cohort of 12,847 participants with 16 predictor variables was derived from NHANES. Six algorithms (Logistic Regression, Cox Proportional Hazards, Gradient Boosting, AdaBoost, Random Forest, and Extra Trees) were trained in combination with six class-balancing strategies, yielding 36 model configurations. All models were trained on a stratified 70/30 split and calibrated using the Saerens prior probability adjustment method. Performance was evaluated using AUC-ROC, sensitivity, specificity, F1-score, and a weighted composite score. DeLong's test was employed to assess the statistical significance of AUC differences between the best-performing ML model and each conventional calculator. Results: Gradient Boosting with 2:1 oversampling and Saerens calibration achieved the best overall performance (AUC = 0.8934; composite score = 0.7904), outperforming all traditional calculators in composite ranking. The top six positions were occupied exclusively by ML and statistical models. The mean age of cardiovascular decedents was 67.43 years compared with 47.74 years among survivors. DeLong's test confirmed statistical superiority over six traditional CVD calculators (p < 0.05), whereas the difference against the top-performing calculators (ASCVD, HEARTS Caribbean, ASCVD Colombia, SCORE2, HEARTS North America) did not reach statistical significance. Age dominated feature importance at 41.2% relative weight, followed by systolic blood pressure (18.7%). Saerens calibration reduced the Brier score from 0.1286 to 0.1158, substantially improving probability calibration. Conclusions: ML models demonstrated superior composite performance over traditional calculators. The statistical equivalence with the highest-performing conventional calculators in the NHANES cohort is context-dependent and validates the methodological pipeline. The CardioPrediQ platform addresses the critical need for integrated, scalable CVD risk assessment tools, which is particularly relevant for Latin American populations where calculator validation remains limited. These findings support the integration of calibrated ML-based risk prediction into clinical practice while underscoring the importance of probability calibration for informed clinical decision-making.

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

Efficient Financial Language Understanding via Distillation with Synthetic Data

Large instruction-following models are powerful but costly to deploy, particularly in finance, where labelled data are limited by confidentiality and expert annotation cost. We present an efficient framework for financial sentiment analysis through distillation with synthetic data, transferring knowledge from a large instruction-tuned teacher to compact student models. The framework is designed for low-resource conditions, where a small set of real examples are collected and labelled by hand. The framework then clusters the examples and uses the clusters to select seeds for generating synthetic examples via structured few-shot prompting. Experiments show that clustering-based seed selection yields more representative synthetic data than random sampling, enabling compact models to achieve strong performance with minimal supervision. Notably, on a more complex and noisy text domain, the compact model trained on the complete synthetic-seed corpus even outperforms the teacher model, while remaining competitive on formal text. The framework provides a practical route toward resource-efficient domain adaptation in financial NLP with minimal human labelling effort.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

ReRAM-aware Model Finetuning addressing I-V Non-linearity and Retention Errors

arXiv:2606.17471v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Traditional CPU, GPU, and NPU architectures are increasingly limited by the von Neumann bottleneck. While In-Memory Computing (IMC) using ReRAM crossbar arrays offers a high-density, energy-efficient alternative, its practical deployment is constrained through their non-idealities. Existing hardware-aware training frameworks often require training from scratch, which is computationally prohibitive for modern large-scale models. In this work, we propose a finetuning-based hardware-aware training algorithm that enables robust DNN deployment on ReRAM with minimal training overhead. Our approach mitigates I-V non-linearity by applying a range-shrunk sinh transformation and incorporates retention errors directly into a regularization loss during the finetuning process. We evaluate our framework across models and tasks such as image classification and question-answering (QA). Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves similar accuracy on large-scale models like ResNet18 and DeiT-Tiny as the base model. In-case of ImageNet for MobileNetV3 families the technique has only less than 2% accuracy degradation. Further, applying the technique on the SQuAD v2 dataset results in only 1 point degradation of F-1 score.

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

The Almost Intelligent Revolution: Options for Scaling Up Deliberation and Empowering People with AI

Authors:

The increasing prominence of Large Language Models (LLMs) in public discourse presents both opportunities and challenges for democratic deliberation. While red teaming strategies help mitigate specific risks, broader concerns persist regarding linguistic constraints, biases, and the sycophantic tendencies of LLMs. This chapter explores how LLMs can be used to significantly scale up and democratise deliberation, particularly in fostering inclusivity and empowering traditionally marginalised groups. Drawing on concepts from Systemic-Functional Linguistics, the chapter examines how variations across language users (for example, with respect to socio-demographic groups) and across language use (for example, with respect to communicative functions) shape participation in AI-supported deliberation. The chapter presents AI-driven deliberation studies and assesses their potential to scaffold argumentation, enhance access, and reduce the influence of exclusionary linguistic norms and biases which are embedded in prestigious registers. At the same time, the chapter cautions against both overclaiming, which leads to unrealistic expectations, and underclaiming, which risks missed opportunities for AI-assisted engagement. The chapter concludes by identifying future research directions to maximise the democratic potential of AI-assisted participation while embedding ethical safeguards to counteract the reproduction of linguistic inequalities.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Top-Theta Attention: Sparsifying Transformers by Compensated Thresholding

We present Top-Theta (Top-$\theta$) Attention, a training-free method for sparsifying transformer attention during inference. Our key insight is that static, per-head thresholds can be calibrated to retain the desired constant number of significant elements per attention row. This approach enables content-based sparsity without retraining, and it remains robust across data domains. We further introduce compensation techniques to preserve accuracy under aggressive sparsification, establishing attention thresholding as a practical and principled alternative to top-k attention. We provide extensive evaluation on natural language processing tasks, showing that Top-$\theta$ achieves 3-10x reduction in V-cache usage and up to 10x fewer attention elements during inference while degrading no more than 1% in accuracy.

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

MapAgent: An Industrial-Grade Agentic Framework for City-scale Lane-level Map Generation

arXiv:2606.04513v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Lane-level maps are critical infrastructure for autonomous driving and lane-level navigation, yet constructing and maintaining standardized lane networks for hundreds of cities remains highly labor-intensive. Recent end-to-end vectorized mapping methods can predict lane geometry and topology directly from sensor data, but they typically treat mapping specifications and traffic regulations as implicit, dataset-dependent supervision. Moreover, in complex scenes (e.g., worn or missing markings and occlusions), correct lane configurations are often under-determined by visual evidence alone, making specification violations a major source of human post-editing. We propose MapAgent, an industrial-grade agentic architecture that augments a vectorization backbone for specification-compliant lane-map production. Rather than merely adding an agent loop to map prediction, MapAgent couples backbone perception with explicit specification verification, constraint-aware reasoning, and deterministic map editing under a bounded, verification-driven Judge-Planner-Worker loop. A vision-language Judge diagnoses errors by jointly inspecting visual evidence and draft vectors, while a tool-calling Planner generates minimal corrective edits with post-edit re-validation. To remain scalable for city-scale production, MapAgent is selectively triggered only on tiles with low backbone confidence, adding modest overhead while preserving throughput. Experiments on real-world datasets show consistent gains over strong production baselines, especially in complex and long-tail scenarios. Additionally, MapAgent has been integrated into Baidu Maps, supporting lane-level map generation for over 360 cities nationwide and elevating the overall production automation to over 95%, demonstrating MapAgent's practicality and effectiveness for large-scale lane-level map generation.

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

Intelligent Skin Cancer Detection Using a Multispectral Metasurface and a Hybrid

Skin cancer is among the most prevalent malignancies worldwiAdbe satnradcitts early detection is essential for improving patient survival and reducing treatment costs Conventional dermoscopic and visual imaging techniques are primarily limited to the visible spectrum and often fail to capture subtle spectral signatures associated with early stage malignancies This study proposes an innovative framework that integrates a multispectral metasurface for imaging with a hybrid deep learning architecture based on Convolutional Neural Networks and Vision Transformers The designed metasurface enables noninvasive acquisition of rich spectral information highly sensitive to tissue alterations while the hybrid CNN ViT model simultaneously extracts local and global features to robustly classify skin lesions Simulation-based evaluations demonstrate that the proposed method achieves approximately 98 accuracy 95 percentages sensitivity and 99 perentage specificity surpassing conventional RGB-based and single-architecture approaches Qualitative analyses using attention maps reveal that the model focuses on clinically relevant lesion regions improving interpretability Overall the results indicate that combining metasurface based multispectral imaging with hybrid deep learning can introduce a new generation of diagnostic tools in dermatology and pave the way for portable fast and highly accurate clinical systems

12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Power-law hypothesis and (un)fairness of PageRank on undirected multi-type PAMs

arXiv:2606.19583v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The preferential attachment model (PAM) describes the sequential growth of a network based on the "rich-get-richer" principle. Several versions of it have become established for modeling, e.g., citation networks, capturing a power-law degree distribution. Directed versions of the preferential attachment model where the edges are directed from the new to the old vertices have been the subject of extensive research. They have been shown to exhibit remarkable properties such as heavier tails for the limiting graph-normalized PageRank than for the in-degrees. By contrast, for the undirected version, we recently showed that PageRank has similar tails as the degree. In the present paper, we discuss the PageRank asymptotics for a multi-type version of the undirected PAM (here vertices have different colors), complementing previous results of Antunes, Bhamidi, Banerjee and Pipiras on the asymptotics of PageRank on similar directed multi-type or colored PAMs. Our studies are motivated by the aim to go beyond the rigid rule of edge orientation in directed preferential attachment models. As the main result, for the case of a finite set of colors, we show that the power-law hypothesis for PageRank is fulfilled also for the colored undirected PAM, where, by contrast to the directed case, the power-law exponent is color-dependent for some choices of the initial color distribution and the attractiveness function. For the specific case of a two-type model, we discuss implications of our results on fairness in sampling underrepresented nodes from the network.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

NarrativeWorldBench: A Frontier-Saturated Benchmark and a Latent World Model for Long-Horizon Co-Creative Audio Drama

Long-form serialized audio drama, with arcs that run for 200 to 800 episodes, is a major creative medium and a setting where frontier large language models (LLMs) fail. We benchmark 21 models, spanning classical, fine-tuned, open-frontier, closed-frontier, and reasoning tiers, on a uniform set of structural narrative metrics. All closed-frontier systems saturate at a plot-beat F1 in the band [0.78, 0.81] and collapse by about -0.20 F1 at horizon h=200. We introduce NarrativeWorldBench, an open benchmark of nine narrative-structure metrics evaluated across horizons h in {10, 20, 50, 100, 200}, with cross-lingual evaluation across four Indic languages (Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi). We introduce N-VSSM, a Narrative Variational State-Space Model that maintains a structured 256-dimensional latent world state over more than 200 episodes via a Mamba-2 backbone with an event-conditioned posterior and an 8B decoder. N-VSSM holds plot-beat F1 >= 0.84 across all horizons at 4x lower compute than the closed-frontier band. A learned Cultural Transfer Function lifts cross-language fidelity by +0.20 to +0.23 Likert points. In a within-subjects writer study (n = 12 professional authors, 240 trials), N-VSSM is preferred over Claude Opus 4.5 on long-arc consistency 71% of the time and rated +1.3 Likert points higher on controllability.

14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Matrix Discrepancy for Representations of Finite Groups

arXiv:2606.12181v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Given a finite group $G$, we prove that there exist signs $\varepsilon\in\{\pm1\}^G$ such that $$\left\| \sum_{g\in G} \varepsilon_g\rho(g) \right\|\leq C\, \sqrt{|G|},$$ where $\rho$ is the left regular representation of $G$, and $C$ is a universal constant. This special case of the Matrix Spencer conjecture was posed in [BKMZ24], where it was established for simple groups.

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

Reasoning in Computer Vision: Taxonomy, Models, Tasks, and Methodologies

Visual reasoning matters for many computer vision tasks that go beyond surface-level object detection and classification. Despite progress in relational, symbolic, temporal, causal, and commonsense reasoning, existing surveys typically cover only one part of the problem, such as visual question answering, scene-graph generation, neuro-symbolic AI, or multimodal chain-of-thought, and rarely analyze reasoning types, methodologies, and evaluation protocols together. This survey addresses that gap. Following a structured literature review, we group visual reasoning into five major types (relational, symbolic, temporal, causal, and commonsense) and examine how each is implemented across methods that range from graph-based models, memory networks, attention mechanisms, and neuro-symbolic systems to reasoning with vision-language models (VLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs), including visual chain-of-thought, visual programming, and tool-augmented and test-time reasoning. We then review evaluation protocols for functional correctness, structural consistency, and causal validity, and we analyze their limits in generalizability, reproducibility, faithfulness, and explanatory power. We also identify open challenges: scaling to complex scenes, integrating symbolic and neural paradigms more deeply, the shortage of comprehensive benchmarks, language-prior shortcuts and hallucination in foundation models, and reasoning under weak supervision. Finally, we set out a research agenda for vision systems and argue that connecting perception and reasoning is necessary for transparent, trustworthy, and cross-domain models, especially in high-stakes settings such as autonomous driving and medical diagnostics.

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

On the Residual Scaling of Looped Transformers: Stability and Transferability

arXiv:2606.18524v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Looped (weight-tied) Transformers apply a shared residual block $N$ times ($h \leftarrow h + \varepsilon\,f(h)$, same $f$ at each step), increasing effective depth without adding parameters. Prior depth-scaling analyses prescribe $\varepsilon = 1/\!\sqrt{L}$ for depth-$L$ residual networks. We show that this is insufficient for looped architectures: weight sharing makes residual updates correlated across iterations, requiring the stronger scaling $\varepsilon = 1/N$. For multi-layer blocks ($L$ unique layers looped $N$ times), we derive a factored parameterization $\varepsilon = \lambda/(N\!\sqrt{L})$ that separates the two sources of growth: $1/N$ controls the within-layer loop correlation, and $1/\!\sqrt{L}$ controls the across-layer variance. A key consequence is that the optimal learning rate depends only on the number of unique layers $L$, not on the loop count $N$, enabling direct hyperparameter transfer from small to large $N$ without retuning. Experiments on looped Transformers confirm that $1/N$ scaling improves trainability and yields better loss than $1/\!\sqrt{N}$ scaling across loop counts.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

A Survey on Federated Causal Discovery and Inference

arXiv:2606.23741v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Causal reasoning, which encompasses the discovery of causal structures and the inference of causal effects, is fundamental to data-driven decision making. In practice, data for reliable causal analysis are often distributed across institutions and cannot be centralized due to privacy regulations or communication constraints. Federated learning (FL) addresses this by enabling collaborative analysis without raw data sharing, giving rise to the rapidly growing field of federated causal discovery (FCD) and inference (FCI). However, the interdisciplinary nature of this field and the absence of a comprehensive survey present barriers to entry for researchers. This paper bridges that gap by providing a systematic review through multi-dimensional taxonomies. Grounded in the three core design decisions underlying any FCD solution, namely how structures are learned, how data are partitioned, and what structural knowledge each party obtains, we organize FCD along three axes: methodological paradigm, federation topology, and structural scope. We further examine key practical dimensions, including temporal dynamics, data heterogeneity, missing data, and non-identical variable sets. For FCI, we categorize methods by target estimand (average versus individualized/conditional treatment effects) and by estimation strategy, from classical weighting methods to modern deep generative architectures. Unlike prior works that treat FCD and FCI separately, we formalize their connection as complementary stages of a unified federated causal reasoning pipeline, where FCD supplies the structural knowledge required for valid effect estimation in FCI. Finally, we highlight their shared concerns regarding privacy, communication efficiency, theoretical guarantees, and application domains, and conclude by identifying open challenges for future research.

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

Darshana Graph: A Parallel Commentary Corpus for Comparative Indian Philosophy, with Stylometric and Exploratory Graph Analyses

Authors:

We introduce Darshana Graph, a corpus of over 125,000 text records spanning classical Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain philosophical traditions, drawn from public-domain and openly licensed translations of sources including the Bhagavad Gita, Brahma Sutras, principal Upanishads, the Pali Canon, and core Jain texts. Its distinctive contribution lies in a structurally unique subset of roughly 8,500 Hindu and Jain records in which the same root verse or sutra is aligned across eighteen historical commentators representing five schools of Vedanta and other darshanas, enabling direct comparison of how independent interpretive traditions read identical source material. To our knowledge, no publicly available resource provides comparable cross-commentator alignment at this scale. We present two analyses built on this corpus. First, a transparent stylometric comparison requiring no machine learning measures argumentative style through scriptural citation density, explicit refutation rate, and sentence complexity. It finds a moderate negative correlation between citation density and refutation rate, a marked increase in refutation rate across three commentators in a related doctrinal lineage, and measurable genre-level differences within the Pali Canon itself. Second, we describe a constrained large language model pipeline that extracts typed philosophical relationships between concepts using a predefined relation vocabulary and deterministic post-hoc validation. The resulting graph surfaces cross-school disagreement patterns while also revealing important extraction limitations, including cases where an independent embedding-based analysis disagrees with the graph-derived findings. We release the full corpus, extracted relationship graph, and all source code.

19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Typical geometry of self-repelling polymers in a constant force field

arXiv:2606.24352v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study a general class of self-repelling polymers on $\mathbb Z^2$, including the simple random walk, the self-avoiding walk and the repulsive Domb-Joyce model, in the presence of a constant force field acting on each monomer. Conditioning the polymer to have fixed length and fixed endpoints, we identify the limiting free energy and prove that typical trajectories concentrate exponentially near a deterministic macroscopic shape. This shape is characterized as the unique minimizer of a variational problem and can be interpreted as a geodesic of a height-dependent Finsler metric. We also analyze two limiting regimes with universal features: for small field strength, in the symmetric case, the geodesic is close to a classical catenary, while for large field strength it converges to a universal polygonal shape governed by the nearest-neighbor lattice constraint.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Quantum Dynamics from Lax Pair Theory: A Reconstruction from Spectrum Preservation

arXiv:2606.19664v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We reconstruct unitary quantum dynamics from a minimal axiomatic foundation built on Hilbert-space observables and isospectral evolution. The only dynamical assumption is that physical time evolution is a continuous one-parameter flow of Hermitian observables that preserves their spectra, i.e. the possible outcomes of measurement. We show that this assumption is already sufficient to force the Lax form of quantum dynamics. The Heisenberg equation, the time-dependent and time-independent Schrödinger equations, conservation laws, and good quantum numbers then follow as theorems rather than postulates. In this formulation, Lax pair theory supplies the missing dynamical bridge between the measurement structure of a Hilbert space and standard quantum evolution: the Hamiltonian is not assumed, but emerges as the generator required for an isospectral observable flow.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Notes2Skills: From Lab Notebooks to Certainty-Aware Scientific Agent Skills

Scientific discovery workflows usually contain and rely heavily on lab notes, where researchers record observations, interpret uncertain results, and plan follow-up experiments. Such informative lab notes preserve evolving scientific reasoning and author uncertainty, rather than polished final results exhibited in publications, providing a valuable opportunity for AI to engage in scientific exploration at a more comprehensive and deeper level. However, most prior work on scientific text focuses on papers, protocols, or structured databases, leaving informal laboratory notes underexplored as inputs to AI agents for science. This gap matters because lab notes often intermingle validated observations, tentative judgments, and possible experimental next steps within the same passage. If these signals are conflated, an AI agent may mistake uncertain scientific judgments for confirmed conclusions or executable actions. To this end, we present Notes2Skills, a two-stage framework for turning lab notebooks into verifiable skills for scientific AI agents while preserving the author's certainty. Across seven conditions and three wet-lab sessions, Notes2Skills is the only configuration that neither mistakes uncertain notes for firm instructions nor discards firm ones. We show that certainty preservation is the missing piece between lab notebooks and reliable agent skills, opening a path toward safer AI co-scientist systems.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Architectural Bias in Face Presentation Attack Detection: A Comparative Study of Vision Transformers and Convolutional Neural Networks

Face Presentation Attack Detection (PAD) systems constitute a critical security layer in biometric authentication; however, existing approaches exhibit systematic performance disparities across demographic groups, disproportionately affecting individuals with darker skin tones. This paper presents a comparative empirical investigation of whether Vision Transformer architectures reduce demographic bias in face PAD systems relative to convolutional baselines. Experiments are conducted on the CASIA-SURF Cross-Ethnicity Face Anti-Spoofing (CeFA) dataset. Three architectures are evaluated: a Multimodal ViT-Tiny trained from scratch, a ResNet18 CNN baseline, and a pretrained DeiT-S fine-tuned on CeFA across African, East Asian, and zero-shot Central Asian demographic groups. DeiT-S achieves the highest overall accuracy of 97.27% and the lowest EER of 0.86%, outperforming ResNet18 at 90.15% accuracy. In terms of fairness, DeiT-S reduces the inter-ethnic ACER gap between African and East Asian subjects to 0.13%, compared to 0.75% reported in an LBP-based work [6], representing an 83% reduction. Most notably, while ResNet18 records a BPCER of 10.44% on zero-shot Central Asian subjects, DeiT-S maintains 2.89% on the same unseen group, demonstrating a 3.6x generalization advantage. These results suggest that pretrained Vision Transformers achieve superior PAD accuracy, produce smaller demographic performance gaps, and generalize more equitably across unseen demographic groups, indicating that cross-demographic fairness in PAD may partly be influenced by architectural design.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Dissipation-induced superradiance in matter coupled to a self-interacting cavity

arXiv:2606.14526v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Light-matter interactions are often modeled via the Dicke model, namely, by two-level systems coupled to a cavity mode. Alas, the threshold for superradiance is often experimentally inaccessible or hindered by light's diamagnetic term. Here, within the Dicke setting, we consider self-interacting light in a cavity, modeled by a photonic Kerr nonlinearity. We show that negative Kerr nonlinearity gives rise to a low-threshold superradiant phase with spin inversion. While unstable in a closed system, cavity dissipation stabilizes this lit phase, opening avenues for lasing and bath-engineered phases.

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

Clinically Aligned Geometry Constraints for Robust IVUS Vessel Boundary Segmentation

Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) lumen and external elastic membrane (EEM) segmentation is important for quantitative coronary plaque burden assessment. Errors in lumen or EEM delineation directly propagate to plaque area, plaque burden and geometric measurements. However, standard methods prioritising overlap scores often suffer from boundary drift and topology errors, leading to inaccurate clinical measurements. We present GeoCat, a geometry-consistent network that processes 5-frame IVUS clips using dual Cartesian-polar encoders with cross-domain attention and temporal fusion. A differentiable geometry consistency loss directly supervises clinically relevant descriptors including diameters, orientations, and cross-sectional areas. The model is trained on 12,242 annotated frames from 146 patients acquired with two commercial IVUS systems. We evaluate performance using both segmentation accuracy and plaque-relevant clinical metrics, including Dice/IoU, boundary measures(95HD (mm), ASSD), topology violation rate, and clinical geometry errors (dmax/dmin, angles, and areas). On our dataset, GeoCat achieves a Dice of 0.93, reduces 95HD to 0.14 mm, and lowers topology violations to 1.0%. Importantly, it significantly improves geometric fidelity, yielding diameter errors of 0.13-0.16 mm and angular errors of ~8 degrees, supporting reliable plaque burden quantification.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Mind the Heads: Topological Representation Alignment for Multimodal LLMs

Representation alignment has emerged as an effective approach to improve Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) by regularizing their internal representations toward those of an external vision encoder. However, existing methods typically align a fixed layer of the language backbone, overlooking the fine-grained structure of Transformer models. In this work, we propose Head-Wise Representation Alignment (HeRA), a method that enforces cross-modal alignment at the level of individual attention heads. Our approach is grounded in the Platonic Representation Hypothesis, focusing on preserving the topological structure of representations (i.e., their local neighborhood relationships) across modalities. Following the Mutual K-Nearest Neighbor (MKNN) alignment metric, we introduce a contrastive objective that acts as a differentiable proxy for matching local structures. HeRA applies this objective during multimodal training to specific attention heads in the LLM, selected by their alignment score according to the MKNN metric. Counterintuitively, we find that aligning the least aligned heads yields the largest gains. Extensive evaluations across multiple MLLMs and 18 benchmarks demonstrate that HeRA consistently improves performance on challenging vision-centric tasks and serves as an effective regularizer against visual hallucinations by naturally curbing the over-reliance on linguistic priors. Our code is publicly released.