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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-08

Daily briefing: Human embryo genomes precisely altered

Authors:

The use of ‘base editing’ to precisely tweak human embryos has divided researchers. Plus, the number of lives saved by less-polluting cars in China and how to tip the world towards a sustainable future. The use of ‘base editing’ to precisely tweak human embryos has divided researchers. Plus, the number of lives saved by less-polluting cars in China and how to tip the world towards a sustainable future.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

New Identity for Cayley's First Hyperdeterminant with Applications to Symmetric Tensors and Entanglement

Authors:

arXiv:2512.03093v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this article, a new formula for computing Cayley's first hyperdeterminant in terms of the Levi-Civita symbol is given. It is then shown that this formula can be used to compute the hyperdeterminant of symmetric tensors in polynomial time with respect to their order (assuming fixed side length). Applications to quantifying the entanglement of states of bosonic quantum systems are then discussed. Additionally, in order to obtain the fast calculation of the hyperdeterminant on symmetric tensors, generalized elimination and duplication matrices are defined and their explicit formulas are derived.

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

Comparing Linear Probes with Mahalanobis Cosine Similarity

arXiv:2606.19603v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Linear probes are widely used in interpretability research and often compared by cosine similarity. The Mahalanobis cosine similarity (MCS) between two directions, which reweights the inner product by test data covariance, is a natural task-aware refinement. Ying et al. (2026) report that a probe's MCS to a reference probe trained on the out-of-distribution (OOD) data near-perfectly linearly predicts the probe's OOD AUROC (R^2 = 0.98). Here, we extend this empirical finding across models, layers, and concept domains, and prove this general phenomenon in closed form: For balanced classes whose projections are Gaussian, OOD AUROC and MCS to the reference probe are linear because both are sigmoid-shaped functions of the probe's signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) on the test data. The theory also predicts when this linearity fails, which we verify empirically. MCS offers a theoretically grounded and empirically effective alternative to Euclidean cosine similarity for comparing linear probes.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Code-Switching Reveals Language Anchoring in Multilingual LLMs

Multilingual Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly expected to handle Code-Switched (CS) inputs, yet mixing languages frequently degrades performance relative to source- or target-language monolingual counterparts. To understand this degradation, we use grammar-forced CS as a controlled diagnostic setting for locating CS representations relative to their source and target counterparts. We introduce Anchor Bias, a geometric measure that quantifies language anchoring, whether a CS hidden state aligns closer to its source or target language counterpart. Across diverse MLLMs, Anchor Bias reveals a consistent grammar-frame effect: source-framed CS stays source-anchored, whereas target-framed CS shifts target-ward and shows larger Question Answering (QA) degradation. Motivated by this representational pattern, we propose CANVAS (Contextual Anchor-based Neural Vector Alignment Steering), an inference-time intervention that extracts a source-side canvas from the input and softly steers target-language hidden states toward the source anchor during prefill. CANVAS consistently recovers QA F1 across MLLMs and CS conditions, showing that internal anchoring signals provide an actionable target for mitigating CS inference failures.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

From Uniform to Learned Graph Priors: Diffusion for Structure Discovery

arXiv:2606.11831v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural relational inference (NRI) methods discover interaction graphs from trajectories through variational reasoning on discrete potential edges. However, these methods typically rely on oversimplified, factorized graph priors. Such priors, typically nearing uniform distributions, treat edges as independent entities. This systemic misalignment does not match the real-world systems and yields diffuse and indecisive edge posteriors limiting the reliability of structural discovery. To address this, we propose Diff-prior, a diffusion-parameterized adaptive prior used to calibrate latent graph distribution rather than generate graphs. Our core insight is to reframe prior integration as a learnable denoising-style calibration that organizes scattered, uncertain edge posteriors into a more reliable overall structure which can be trained by the diffusion model. Diff-prior learns an adaptive structure prior that performs structured calibration on the edge posteriors during inference, guiding it towards a distribution closer to the underlying structure. The diff-prior operates before structural sampling and acts as a denoising calibrator directly on the encoder edge distribution, which provides a generic training paradigm over structured variables. Experiments on standard benchmarks validated our framework, and the results indicate that Diff-prior improves the performance of structure inference and generates more decisive edge posteriors across multiple NRI-family architectures. The code is available on https://github.com/Hardy158118/Diffprior.

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

Multi-agent Framework for Time-Sensitive Complementary Collaboration in Minecraft

arXiv:2606.15684v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present TickingCollabBench, a Minecraft-based multi-agent benchmark for a novel class of time-sensitive complementary collaboration tasks. Our benchmark reflects four core characteristics of real-world collaboration: agent heterogeneity, mandatory collaboration, dynamic environments, and strict real-time constraints with failure risks. To enable this, we develop the TickingCollab framework, which supports the generation of diverse dynamic environments and abstracts Minecraft's primitive APIs to enable declarative YAML task specifications for composing these events. Building on this, we design a feasibility-aware automated benchmark generation pipeline, where an LLM drafts structurally diverse task configurations and feasibility verifier filters out invalid ones using approximate constraints. Evaluations demonstrate that lang latency and inherent difficulty of coordinating under partial observability and agent heterogeneity cause LLMs to frequently fail under dynamic environments and fall significantly short of a global-knowledge oracle.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Spatio-Temporal Audio Language Modeling for Dynamic Sound Sources

Sound events are entities with semantic identities, locations, and trajectories, but current audio-language models usually reason about clips as global event content. Conversely, sound event localization models track source directions over time but offer limited semantic coverage for language reasoning. To address this gap, we introduce ST-AudioQA, a spatio-temporal audio QA dataset and benchmark built from first-order ambisonic (FOA) renderings of static and moving sound sources. Each scene provides source identity, activity, direction, distance, and motion metadata, enabling dense trajectory supervision and questions about what is sounding, where it is, how it moves, and how sources relate. We further propose ST-Audio Encoder, a time-resolved FOA audio encoder that learns event semantics together with source trajectories, and ST-AudioLM, which connects the audio tokens from the encoder to an LLM for spatio-temporal audio QA. Experiments show that this representation improves the semantic-localization tradeoff and yields stronger reasoning performance than static spatial and localization-oriented baselines.

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

Protein Design with Agent Rosetta: A Case Study for Specialized Scientific Agents

arXiv:2603.15952v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are capable of emulating reasoning and using tools, creating opportunities for autonomous agents that execute complex scientific tasks. Protein design provides a natural testbed: although machine learning (ML) methods achieve strong results, these are largely restricted to canonical amino acids and narrow objectives, leaving unfilled need for a generalist tool for broad design pipelines. We introduce Agent Rosetta, an LLM agent paired with a structured environment for operating Rosetta, the leading physics-based heteropolymer design software, capable of modeling non-canonical building blocks and geometries. Agent Rosetta iteratively refines designs to achieve user-defined objectives, combining LLM reasoning with Rosetta's generality. We evaluate Agent Rosetta on design with canonical amino acids, matching specialized models and expert baselines, and with non-canonical residues – where ML approaches fail – achieving comparable performance. Critically, prompt engineering alone often fails to generate Rosetta actions, demonstrating that environment design is essential for integrating LLM agents with specialized software. Our results show that properly designed environments enable LLM agents to make scientific software accessible while matching specialized tools and human experts.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Phase controlled spectral topology, dynamic stability and sensitivity in Non-Hermitian Cavity Magnonics

arXiv:2606.16522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We theoretically investigate a non-Hermitian cavity-magnon platform in which coherent photonmagnon interactions and reservoir-mediated dissipative coupling interfere through a single externally tunable phase. We show that this interference phase provides a universal control parameter that continuously rotates the effective coupling between Hermitian and anti-Hermitian regimes, enabling dynamic transitions between level repulsion and level attraction without modifying intrinsic system parameters. The resulting phase-controlled non-Hermitian topology gives rise to exceptional points, linewidth engineering, and zero-damping conditions. Owing to the propagation-direction dependence of the dissipative interaction, the system further exhibits strong nonreciprocal transport and phase-tunable isolation arising from asymmetric hybridization of the cavity and magnon modes. Beyond its spectral and transport properties, we establish a direct connection between nonHermitian spectral topology and nonequilibrium population dynamics. The interference phase governs the stability of the hybrid modes, driving transitions between stable relaxation, critical slowing down near exceptional points, oscillatory energy exchange, and exponentially amplified dynamics. We further demonstrate that the same phase-controlled exceptional topology can be exploited for enhanced sensing, where the eigenvalue response exhibits the characteristic square-root scaling associated with exceptional-point physics. Our results provide a unified framework linking spectral topology, directional transport, dynamical stability, and sensing functionality through reservoirengineered interference in cavity magnonic systems.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

A Brain-Aging Transcriptomic Signature Reclassifies WHO Glioma Grade and Predicts Survival Independently of IDH Status: A Multi-Cohort Study

Background Despite WHO grade and IDH status, significant survival differences remain in diffuse gliomas. We hypothesized that a brain-aging transcriptomic signature, reflecting neuroinflammation, myeloid infiltration, and synaptic loss, would independently predict survival and allow for molecular reclassification. Methods A neurodegeneration score was derived via PCA of brain MRI volumes from 1,057 OASIS-3 subjects and projected onto 888 TCGA-LGG/GBM (discovery) and 693 CGGA gliomas (validation). A 14-gene signature of glial/myeloid (GFAP, AQP4, TYROBP, TREM2, C1QA, CD68, ITGAM) and neuronal (SYP, DLG4, GRIN1, GRIA1, SNAP25, SYN1, RBFOX3) genes were computed. Elastic-net Cox regression identified a 3-gene panel (C1QA, CD68, GRIA1). Kaplan-Meier, multivariate Cox, decision curve, and single-cell RNA-seq analyses were performed. Results High brain-aging scores predicted poorer overall survival (p < 0.0001) and remained an independent prognostic factor after adjusting for WHO grade and IDH status (z = 4.72, p < 0.001); chronological age was non-significant (p = 0.231). In IDH-mutant gliomas, significance was confirmed in both cohorts (TCGA p = 0.027; CGGA p < 0.0001). Bidirectional reclassification showed high-risk Grade 2 tumors with Grade 3-like survival (p = 0.00089), and indolent Grade 3 tumors resembling Grade 2 by Ki-67. Single-cell RNA-seq confirmed macrophage localization of signature genes; DCA demonstrated net benefit over grade alone at 5-30% probability thresholds. Conclusions A brain-aging transcriptomic signature independently predicts glioma survival beyond WHO grade and IDH status, validated in an independent Chinese cohort, with clinical utility for identifying high-risk Grade 2 and sparing over-treatment of indolent Grade 3 tumors.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Multi-Modal Agents for Power Distribution Defect Detection: An Evaluation of Foundation Models

Authors:

arXiv:2606.12969v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The power distribution network is critical to reliable electricity delivery, yet traditional inspection methods face limitations in semantic understanding, generalization, and closed-loop automation. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a Multi-Modal Agent framework specifically for power distribution defect detection. Central to this study is the systematic evaluation of multimodal foundation models as unified cognitive engines. We rigorously assess their integrated performance across three critical capabilities: (1) Perception, where the model must accurately identify equipment and generate expert-level descriptions of defects; (2) Reasoning, where the model interprets visual findings to diagnose causes, assess severity, and plan maintenance strategies based on domain knowledge; and (3) Tool Usage, where the model acts as an autonomous operator to execute actions – such as querying knowledge bases or generating work orders – to achieve closed-loop maintenance. To support this evaluation, a domain-specific evaluation dataset and a comprehensive benchmark are developed. Experimental results demonstrate the strengths and limitations of current foundation models in these three dimensions, providing empirical evidence for deploying autonomous agents in high-stakes industrial environments.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

OneCanvas: 3D Scene Understanding via Panoramic Reprojection

Existing approaches to 3D scene understanding in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) either rely on complex, model-specific geometry encoders or large training budgets in pursuit of spatial reasoning. Instead, OneCanvas aggregates patch features from all views onto a single equirectangular panoramic canvas. Namely, each patch is unprojected to a 3D world coordinate using its depth and camera pose, then placed on the canvas at the continuous longitude and latitude of that point as seen from the canvas origin, with no rasterization or aggregation across overlapping views. A 3D position embedding of the patch's metric coordinates is added to its feature, restoring the depth lost when collapsing the world position to an angular canvas coordinate. Patches from all frames thus share one spatial coordinate system with no fusion or major architectural modifications of the backbone. The pretrained VLM consumes this representation as if it were an ordinary image. Because the canvas can be centered on any pose of interest, the same representation directly supports situated reasoning from a specific viewpoint, a common requirement in robotics and embodied AI. Thanks to this representation, we can also introduce a spatial pretraining curriculum: by procedurally placing patch features of objects, drawn from real images, at chosen 3D world positions on an otherwise empty canvas, we generate on-the-fly supervision spanning a broad range of spatial reasoning tasks, with answer distributions controlled to reduce spatial reasoning shortcuts. OneCanvas achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on SQA3D and VSI-Bench, and generalizes to out-of-distribution data on SPBench, using an order of magnitude less training compute than the strongest competing methods.

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

Edu-Theater: A Data-Efficient Agent Framework for Scalable Learner Behavior Simulation through Staging Roll-Call

arXiv:2606.15225v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large-scale learner-task interaction data are crucial for intelligent educational systems but are costly to collect and constrained by privacy and learner engagement. Learner simulators play a critical role in simulating scalable learner behavior without the need for continuous involvement of real learners. However, existing methods are predominantly individual-centric, pairing a simulator with each learner to iteratively infer latent knowledge states from dense interaction histories, which is both data- and computation-intensive, and fragile in cold-start scenarios. We propose a cohort-aware roll-call simulation paradigm that first constructs cohort-level proficiency priors and refines individual learner states through a small number of targeted diagnostic queries. Based on this paradigm, we introduce Edu-Theater, an LLM-powered agent system that performs cohort-aware learner simulation via a teacher agent and retrospective roll-call probing over learner logs. Edu-Theater enables scalable future behavior simulation without the need for dense per-learner histories. Experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that Edu-Theater achieves higher simulation accuracy with significantly fewer LLM calls, producing synthetic data that enhances downstream applications such as adaptive testing.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

A Fully First-Order Layer for Differentiable Optimization

arXiv:2512.02494v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Differentiable optimization layers enable learning systems to make decisions by solving embedded optimization problems. However, computing gradients via implicit differentiation requires solving a linear system with Hessian terms, which is both compute- and memory-intensive. To address this challenge, we propose a novel algorithm that computes the gradient using only first-order information. The key insight is to rewrite the differentiable optimization as a bilevel optimization problem and leverage recent advances in bilevel methods. Specifically, we introduce an active-set Lagrangian hypergradient oracle that avoids Hessian evaluations and provides finite-time, non-asymptotic approximation guarantees. We show that an approximate hypergradient can be computed using only first-order information in $\tilde{O}(1)$ time, leading to an overall complexity of $\tilde{O}(\delta^{-1}\epsilon^{-3})$ for constrained bilevel optimization, which matches the best known rate for non-smooth non-convex optimization. Furthermore, we release an open-source Python library that can be easily adapted from existing solvers. The source code is available at https://github.com/guaguakai/FFOLayer.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Scaling Laws of Global Weather Models

arXiv:2602.22962v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Data-driven models are revolutionizing weather forecasting. To optimize training efficiency and model performance, this paper analyzes empirical scaling laws within this domain. We investigate the relationship between model performance (validation loss) and three key factors: model size ($N$), dataset size ($D$), and compute budget ($C$). Across a range of models, we find that Aurora exhibits the strongest data-scaling behavior: increasing the training dataset by 10x reduces validation loss by up to 3.2x. GraphCast demonstrates the highest parameter efficiency, yet suffers from limited hardware utilization. Our compute-optimal analysis indicates that, under fixed compute budgets, allocating resources to more total training data yields greater performance gains than increasing model size. Furthermore, we analyze model shape and uncover scaling behaviors that differ fundamentally from those observed in language models: weather forecasting models consistently favor increased width over depth. These findings suggest that future weather models should prioritize wider architectures and larger effective training datasets to maximize predictive performance.

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

Sharp analysis of linear ensemble sampling

arXiv:2602.08026v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We analyse linear ensemble sampling (ES) with standard Gaussian perturbations in stochastic linear bandits. We show that for ensemble size $m=\Theta(d\log n)$, ES attains $\tilde O(d^{3/2}\sqrt n)$ high-probability regret, closing the gap to the Thompson sampling benchmark while keeping computation comparable. The proof brings a new perspective on randomized exploration in linear bandits by reducing the analysis to a time-uniform exceedance problem for $m$ independent Brownian motions. This continuous-time lens appears particularly natural here: it yields an exact representation of the relevant discrete-time processes, and we do not know another route to a sharp ES bound.

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

Phantoms and Disclosures: a Causal Framework for Auditing Synthetic Data

arXiv:2606.16952v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid adoption of generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) has spurred interest in synthetic data as a privacy-preserving alternative to sensitive real-world datasets. However, generating high-utility synthetic data often carries the risk of memorizing and regurgitating private information from the training corpus. In this work, we present a customizable empirical auditing framework designed to detect and explain such data disclosures. Our framework introduces a mechanism to distinguish between "true disclosures"-where the system directly reproduces a user's information-and "phantom disclosures''-where the system incidentally generates a user's data. By partitioning input data into training and holdout sets and applying rigorous statistical hypothesis testing, we determine if observed disclosures are consistent with strict privacy baselines, such as zero-learning or specific Differential Privacy (DP) bounds. Crucially, this approach requires no model access, no canary insertion, and no reference model training -only the synthetic output and a held-out control set. We demonstrate that this framework effectively functions as a membership inference attack, providing empirical lower bounds on privacy leakage that are tighter than prior data-based auditing methods. Our approach is model-agnostic, applies to any synthetic data generation mechanism, and requires orders of magnitude fewer computational resources than shadow-model or canary-based alternatives.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

MolGraphBench: A Benchmark of GNN Architectures for Molecular Regression Tasks

arXiv:2602.20573v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Molecules are often represented as SMILES strings, which can be readily converted to hand-crafted descriptors or fingerprints (FP) for molecular property prediction. Research has demonstrated that SMILES can be converted to molecular graphs $G = (V, E)$, with atoms as nodes $(V)$ and bonds as edges $(E)$. These molecular graphs can subsequently be used to train graph neural networks (GNN) models. Despite the recent surge in application of GNN (existing and novel architectures) for molecular property prediction, a rigorous benchmark is still lacking. We propose MolGraphBench, a comprehensive benchmark of four commonly used GNN models for molecular property prediction. Benchmarking results demonstrate graph convolutional network (GCN) and graph isomorphism networks (GIN) as the optimal GNN architectures for molecular graph regression tasks, based on absolute performance, training efficiency, transfer learning and prediction quality. The study also indicates the non-complementary nature of molecular fingerprints in the fusion (GNN-FP) framework. Furthermore, our GNN models achieved performance superior or comparable performance to current state-of-the-art GNN baselines across three datasets (GCN with RMSE of $0.518$ on B3DB, GIN-FP with RMSE of $1.022$ on FreeSolv and GIN with MAE of $63.783$ on RT datasets). Findings from this study indicate that type of GNN-layer, should be treated as a tunable hyperparameter rather than a fixed design choice to achieve superior performance.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Beyond the Apnea-Hypopnea Index: Physiological and Demographic Predictors of Excessive Daytime Sleepiness in Obstructive Sleep Apnea

Excessive daytime sleepiness (EDS) is a common but inconsistently predicted symptom of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). OSA is typically diagnosed with polysomnography (PSG), and the current standard for severity assessment is the apnea-hypopnea index (AHI). AHI has many limitations, including its inability to explain physiological mechanisms or reflect variability in patient symptoms, such as EDS. This retrospective study aims to find physiological and demographic parameters that better predict EDS in patients with OSA and to evaluate whether these parameters outperform AHI using PSG data from the Mount Sinai Integrative Sleep Center. Clinical variables used to predict EDS included arousal index (AI), average oxygen desaturation during sleep, average heart rate during sleep, and AHI, along with demographic variables including age, sex, and BMI. Hypothesis tests, logistic regression models, and decision tree classifier models were performed on the data to discriminate sleepy from nonsleepy patients as determined by an Epworth Sleepiness Scale (ESS) score [&ge;] 10. AI and oxygen desaturation were found to be the most predictive physiological variables, and sex and BMI were found to be the most predictive demographic variables. The final decision tree model with these four variables outperformed the AHI in predicting EDS. These findings suggest that daytime sleepiness in OSA can be better explained by measures of apnea burden, oxygenation impairment, and patient demographics than by AHI alone, although these remain only modestly predictive. Future studies should focus on investigating more comprehensive physiological markers, multi-night sleep data, and more objective assessments of sleepiness.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Two-Stage Fine-Tuning of ResNet50 for High-Sensitivity Melanoma Detection on Dermoscopic Images

Authors:

Melanoma is the most dangerous form of skin cancer with five-year survival rates exceeding 99% when detected early but falling sharply once the disease spreads. This paper proposes and evaluates a two-stage fine-tuning approach for ResNet50 applied to binary melanoma classification on dermoscopic images. The core challenges addressed are class imbalance and suboptimal transfer learning from single-stage fine-tuning. After stratified train/validation/test splitting, random oversampling was applied exclusively to the training set to achieve a 1:1 class balance. Stage 1 trained only the classification head with the ResNet50 base frozen, while Stage 2 fine-tuned all layers jointly at a low learning rate of 1e-5 to prevent catastrophic forgetting of learned visual features. On an independent test set of 3,826 images, the model achieved an AUC-ROC of 0.9559, accuracy of 88.34%, sensitivity of 87.56%, specificity of 89.13%, and F1-score of 88.29%. An ablation study confirms the two-stage protocol significantly outperforms single-stage fine-tuning, with sensitivity gains of over 4%. Grad-CAM visualizations demonstrate correct lesion localization. A fully deployable Streamlit detection application is provided alongside all training code.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

CADET: Physics-Grounded Causal Auditing and Training-Free Deconfounding of End-to-End Driving Planners

Authors:

arXiv:2606.14438v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: End-to-end (E2E) autonomous-driving planners trained by imitation are prone to statistical shortcuts: they associate scene elements that merely co-occur with expert actions (a roadside object, a building facade) with driving decisions, rather than the variables that causally determine them. Such causal confusion silently compromises reliability in long-tail scenarios, and it is difficult to detect, because prevailing open-loop metrics (L2 displacement and collision rate) are dominated by ego status and do not indicate whether a planner depends on spurious cues. Existing remedies based on causal-intervention training require retraining large models and cannot audit a planner that is already deployed. We present CADET, a training-free framework that audits, benchmarks, and repairs spurious reliance in pretrained E2E planners without any parameter update.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Time-Conditioned and Multi-Time Survival Prediction from 2D PET/CT Projections in Lung Cancer

Accurate prediction of overall survival (OS) from positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) can support personalized treatment and follow-up strategies in oncology. However, the impact of temporal modeling on imaging-based survival prediction remains insufficiently explored. We investigate how different temporal formulations influence survival prediction by developing two complementary approaches: Attention-guided Time-Conditioned Survival (ATCS) and Multi-Time Survival (MTS). We retrospectively analyzed pre-treatment PET/CT images from 848 patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), including 556 for model development and 292 for held-out testing. A previously proposed Time-Conditioned Survival (TCS) model was used as a baseline. Models were trained using 5-fold cross-validation and evaluated on the test set using time-dependent area under the curve (AUC) at 6-month intervals from 0.5 to 5 years. Both ATCS and MTS outperformed the baseline TCS model, achieving mean AUCs of 0.794 and 0.793, respectively, compared to 0.767. ATCS performed better at earlier time points (0.5-3 years), whereas MTS performed better at later intervals (3.5-5 years). Combining tumor-specific and tissue-wise PET/CT features improved performance over either input alone. Finer temporal discretization improved short-term prediction, while coarser intervals provided more stable long-term estimates. These findings demonstrate that temporal modeling and input design influence PET/CT-based survival prediction. The proposed approaches enable time-specific survival estimation from pre-treatment imaging and may support improved risk stratification and clinical decision-making.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

MirrorCheck: Efficient Adversarial Defense for Vision-Language Models

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly susceptible to sophisticated adversarial attacks, including adaptive strategies specifically designed to bypass existing defenses. To address this vulnerability, we propose MirrorCheck, a robust and model-agnostic detection framework that operates effectively in both unimodal and multimodal settings. MirrorCheck leverages Text-to-Image (T2I) models to regenerate visual content from captions produced by the target model and assesses semantic consistency by comparing feature-space embeddings between the original and synthesized images. To enhance robustness against adaptive attacks, MirrorCheck introduces a stochastic defense strategy that randomly selects T2I generators and image encoders from a diverse model zoo. Additionally, we incorporate a novel One-Time-Use (OTU) perturbation applied to the selected encoder embeddings, regulated by a scaling factor, which decreases the effectiveness of adaptive attacks. Extensive experiments across multiple threat scenarios demonstrate that MirrorCheck consistently outperforms baseline methods, and maintains its utility even under strong adaptive adversarial conditions.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Evolutionary Bilevel Reward Shaping for Generalization in Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.16236v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) often suffers from performance degradation when deployed in environments that differ from those encountered during training. Existing techniques such as domain randomization (DR) mitigate this, but require access to diverse training environments and full trajectory observability, assumptions that fail in privacy-preserving or restricted scenarios where only scalar performance metrics are available. We propose Generalization via Evolutionary Reward Shaping (GERS), a bilevel optimization approach to improve generalization on unseen test environments using only scalar feedback from validation environments. At the lower level, an RL agent guided via a reward function shaped by the upper level learns a policy on a limited set of training environments with accessible trajectory data; at the upper level, CMA-ES optimizes the reward shaping parameters to maximize the cumulative unshaped reward on separate validation environments for which trajectory access is unavailable. Results on continuous control tasks indicate that GERS outperforms the standard RL baseline on unseen test environments. GERS performance is comparable to DR, despite DR treating the combined set of training and validation environments of GERS as a single training set that requires trajectory access, whereas GERS cannot access validation trajectories. These results confirm that GERS effectively enhances generalization under restricted data access constraints.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quasilinear Equivalence Checking for Detector Error Models

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