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

Acceleration of an algebraic multigrid pressure solver using graph neural networks

arXiv:2606.19251v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Solving the pressure-Poisson equation remains the primary computational bottleneck in incompressible unstructured flow solvers primarily due to the inherent sensitivity of traditional linear solvers to mesh irregularities. This work introduces a data-driven algebraic multigrid (AMG) smoother that uses a modified graph convolutional isomorphism network (GCIN). The graph neural network predicts optimal polynomial coefficients to construct a sparse pseudo-inverse operator across diverse grid topologies. The coefficients are optimized to reduce the residual after each V-cycle iteration. By directly capturing the algebraic structure of the system from the sparse coefficient matrix, the proposed method maintains the solver's linearity while adapting to local anisotropies in unstructured grids. Our framework demonstrates significant performance gains by reducing the number of V-cycles required for a given tolerance and delivering wall-clock speedups from 4% to 37% across diverse benchmarks. Notably, the model exhibits robust generalization by maintaining efficiency on meshes up to 128 times larger than those seen in training, and by accelerating the solver's convergence on unseen industry-relevant problems such as the AirfRANS dataset.

02.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

DivQuant: Estimation of Species Richness and Entropy from Small Samples

Estimating diversity properties of discrete distributions from a small observed sample is a fundamental problem in algorithmic statistics that has applications in many fields, in particular bioinformatics, but also in ecology or linguistics. The two most common diversity measures are the number of distinct elements in a multiset, also referred to as species richness in ecology or alpha diversity in microbial analysis, and the Shannon entropy, also referred to as evenness. Estimating these properties from a small sample is particularly challenging for distributions with many rare elements. Thus, many estimators have been proposed in the past that, in practice, work well for different types of distributions. We present DivQuant, an optimization-based, extrapolating richness and entropy estimator with three contributions. First, we formulate the upsampling problem as a convex quadratic program with a Neyman {chi}2 objective. Unlike the linear program of its predecessor RichnEst, DivQuant admits confidence intervals via {chi}2 test inversion that are empirically well-calibrated. Second, we replace RichnEst's fixed-threshold fingerprint truncation with the rare/abundant fingerprint split of Valiant and Valiant, which strongly reduces problem size and preserves enough degrees of freedom for the confidence-interval program to remain valid and feasible. Third, we plug the optimal population fingerprint returned by the program into Shannon's entropy formula to obtain an entropy estimate. DivQuant attains close-to-nominal 95% confidence intervals in essentially all tested regimes, including six simulated distribution families, Tara Oceans microbiome data, and 10X Genomics scRNA-seq data, while competing state-of-the-art methods (RichnEst, iNext, PreSeq) miss the true richness in up to 80% of instances, well above the nominal 5%. In addition, DivQuant outperforms classical asymptotic entropy estimators (Miller-Madow, CAE) and the extrapolating iNext estimator. Running times remain competitive, with DivQuant typically completing in seconds. DivQuant is available as a command-line tool at https://gitlab.com/rahmannlab/divquant.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Neuron-based Personality Trait Induction in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly proficient at simulating various personality traits, an important capability for supporting related applications (e.g., role-playing). To further improve this capacity, in this paper, we present a neuron-based approach for personality trait induction in LLMs, with three major technical contributions. First, we construct PersonalityBench, a large-scale dataset for identifying and evaluating personality traits in LLMs. This dataset is grounded in the Big Five personality traits from psychology and is designed to assess the generative capabilities of LLMs towards specific personality traits. Second, by leveraging PersonalityBench, we propose an efficient method for identifying personality-related neurons within LLMs by examining the opposite aspects of a given trait. Third, we develop a simple yet effective induction method that manipulates the values of these identified personality-related neurons. This method enables fine-grained control over the traits exhibited by LLMs without training and modifying model parameters. Extensive experiments validate the efficacy of our neuron identification and trait induction methods. Notably, our approach achieves comparable performance as fine-tuned models, offering a more efficient and flexible solution for personality trait induction in LLMs. We provide access to all the mentioned resources at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/NPTI.

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

Tensor-based second-order causal discovery

arXiv:2606.18074v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Causal discovery seeks to uncover the causal dependencies among variables. For this purpose, we propose an algorithm called Tensor-based Second-order Causal Discovery (TSCD). Its input is a tensor obtained from the covariance matrices of observational and interventional data. Assuming the causal dependencies follow a linear structural equation model on a directed acyclic graph (DAG), TSCD outputs the DAG and the functions on its edges, requiring only that the noise variables are uncorrelated. We also implement a version of the approach for nonlinear models. Our focus on second-order statistics (via the covariance matrices) is motivated by their statistical and computational efficiency relative to higher-order moments, their identifiability relative to first-order statistics, and that they work regardless of whether the variables are Gaussian. We show that TSCD has identifiable causal order and parameters from a number of interventions that is logarithmic in the number of variables. Experiments show that TSCD is robust to noise, competitive with existing methods, and scales to hundreds of variables.

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

Architectural Wisdom: A Framework for Governing Optimization in AI Systems

arXiv:2606.16319v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern AI systems exhibit structural failures that capability scaling alone does not reliably fix: they optimize under-specified objectives with no architectural mechanism to question whether the objective should be optimized at all. Engagement maximization can amplify harmful pathways; tool-using agents can commit irreversible actions; preference-trained language models can become sycophantic. We argue that this failure is a wisdom problem, not an intelligence problem. We use "wisdom" in a deliberately architectural sense, not as a claim about virtue, consciousness, or moral omniscience. Intelligence accepts a goal and optimizes within it; wisdom interrogates whether the goal should be optimized at all. The two are separable architectural properties. We propose architectural wisdom as a corrigible objective-governance layer above the optimization substrate. The layer makes three structural commitments explicit and nondegenerate before any action: temporal horizon, relational boundary, and irreversibility. It is realized by four components (Structural Utility Transform, Moral Admissibility Interface, Arbitration and Escalation Controller, Value Revision Channel) that compute a six-coordinate wisdom tuple over horizon, relational coverage, irreversibility, admissibility, value revision, and auditability. We motivate the architecture by eight cases drawn from contemporary AI failures, secular wisdom traditions, and hard ethical situations, and defend the distinction against the intelligence-completeness thesis using goal-questioning over goal-taking, Bostrom's orthogonality, structural separation in our exemplar cases, and persistent failure modes despite capability scaling. The framework is the conceptual contract for a larger architecture whose formal specifications and empirical validation are developed in subsequent work.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Development of an Open-Access Action Observation Video Library for Upper Limb Motor Rehabilitation

Background: Occupational therapists can improve stroke survivors hand and arm movement and participation in daily activities through action observation (AO). AO involves watching another persons hand or arm complete a movement or task. While research generally supports the use of AO with stroke survivors, there are limited AO videos are available to occupational therapists which makes applying AO challenging. Objective: The purpose of this work is to develop structured and widely accessible tool to support access to AO for stroke survivors, occupational therapists, and researchers. Methods: To develop an AO video library for stroke rehabilitation, functional and non-functional upper limb task deficits were first identified through clinical observations and clinician interviews to establish a prioritized list of daily activities. In collaboration with media production specialists, healthy adult volunteers were recruited and filmed performing these tasks from both first- and third-person perspectives. The recorded videos were then systematically edited, enhanced with instructional title slides, and distributed via a public YouTube channel for clinical application and a categorized digital repository for research purposes. Results: Initial assessments revealed a complete lack of familiarity, awareness, and utilization of AO resources among local occupational therapists, despite high perceived clinical utility. To address this gap, a final library of 150 tasks was established, resulting in the production of 419 finalized, standardized videos featuring six healthy volunteers. For clinical application, these videos were hosted on a free, public YouTube channel organized into 18 functional playlists, while a parallel set was structured into distinct movement categories for research repository storage. Conclusion: By providing a structured and highly accessible tool, this repository enables clinicians, researchers, and caregivers to readily implement evidence-based action observation interventions in both clinical and home settings.

07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Decay of correlations and zeros for the hard-core model

arXiv:2603.17858v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In a recent paper the last author proved that absence of complex zeros of the partition function of the hard-core model near a parameter $\lambda>0$ implies a form of correlation decay called strong spacial mixing. In this paper we investigate the reverse implication. We introduce a strengthening of strong spatial mixing that we call very strong spatial mixing (VSSM). Our main result is that if VSSM holds at a parameter $\lambda>0$ for a family of graphs, this implies that the partition function has no zeros near that parameter for each graph in the family. We also demonstrate that a closely related variant of very strong spatial mixing does not imply zero-freeness. As a consequence of our main result, we moreover obtain that VSSM implies spectral independence. Our proof relies on transforming the problem to the analysis of an induced non-autonomous dynamical system given by Möbius transformations.

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

Characterizing Narrative Content in Web-scale LLM Pretraining Data

The narrative composition of web-scale LLM pretraining corpora remains largely unexplored even though narrative is a fundamental mode of human communication. We present the first fine-grained study of narrative features in Dolma, a 3-trillion-token open pretraining corpus. Drawing on narrative theory, we design a framework spanning three core narrative elements (agency, setting, and events) operationalized as 11 interpretable dimensions. After sampling and annotating a diverse set of 400 passages, we finetune and validate NarraBERT, a RoBERTa-based model for fine-grained narrative prediction. We apply NarraBERT to 3M passages, resulting in a new dataset, NarraDolma. We find (i) narrative structure is measurable at scale across extremely heterogeneous data, (ii) we uncover a continuous, multidimensional narrative structure underlying web text, and (iii) narrative qualities are unequally distributed across pretraining sources and topics in ways that current curation practices neither measure nor account for. Our framework, dataset, and analyses provide a foundation for understanding how narrative qualities are distributed in LLM pretraining data and for studying how data composition affects narrative reasoning tasks. We publicly release NarraDolma and NarraBERT.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Towards an Inferentialist Account of Information Through Proof-theoretic Semantics

arXiv:2605.05368v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Information is one of the most widely-discussed concepts of the current era. However, a great deal of insightful work notwithstanding, it is yet to be given wholly convincing logical or mathematical foundations. Without them, we lack adequate reasoning tools for understanding the complex ecosystems of systems upon which the society depends. We seek to rectify this by taking a first step towards developing an inferentialist semantic theory of information. There are three key interacting components. First, conceptual analysis: the metaphysics of information. Dretske expressed the key concepts of information in terms of intentionality, truth, and transmissibility. We replace truth with inferability, and trace the consequences of this replacement. Second, logic: proof-theoretic semantics (P-tS) provides a mathematical-logical realization of inferentialist reasoning. Using P-tS, we develop the first steps towards a mathematical-logical theory of an inferentialist primitive unit of information, the 'inferon'. This proof-theoretic approach counterpoints the model-theoretic view of information articulated in situation theory. Furthermore, we argue that it facilitates addressing all three components of van Benthem and Martinez's categorization of the understandings of information, as range, as correlation, and as code. Our focus is on information-as-correlation. Third, systems: the P-tS tools we develop provide the basis for a mathematical account of distributed systems modelling – a key tool from informatics for understanding the organization of information processing systems. This yields a reasoning-based theory of information flow in models of distributed systems. Overall, we seek to give a conceptually rigorous mathematical-logical account of information and its role within informatics, grounded in inference and reasoning.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

CHILLGuard: Towards Fine-Grained Chinese LLM Safety Guardrail with Scalable Data Construction and Model-aware Preference Alignment

Malicious content generated from large language models (LLMs) could pose severe safety risks and ethical concerns. While existing LLM safety guardrails excel in English or multilingual settings, they lack adaptation to Chinese-specific regulatory policies, cultural context and linguistic nuances, failing to support fine-grained risk classification for diverse deployment needs. In this paper, we introduce a 5-macro, 31-micro category fine-grained risk taxonomy for Chinese scenarios, and build CHILLGuard: a dedicated Chinese LLM content safety guardrail. To address the critical scarcity of high-quality annotated Chinese safety data, we propose a scalable multi-stage data construction pipeline: we expand multi-source corpus via retrieval-augmented generation, generate implicit harmful samples through prompt engineering rewriting, and refine high-quality data via multi-model voting-based label calibration. Based on this, we build CHILLGuardTrain, a large-scale training set with 405,007 samples, and CHILLGuardTest, a rigorously curated annotated test set with 51,745 samples. We then train CHILLGuard on CHILLGuardTrain under a generator-classifier collaborative framework via Model-aware Direct Preference Optimization. Extensive experiments under multiple settings demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of CHILLGuard, e.g., a 15.92% improvement of F1 score over Qwen3Guard-8B-Strict on our benchmark. We will release our resources at https://github.com/cswbyu/CHILLGuard.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Mechanism-Guided Selective Unlearning for RLVR-Induced Reasoning

arXiv:2606.19222v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose MAST (Mechanism-Aligned Selective Targeting), a mechanism-guided method for unlearning RLVR-induced reasoning with substantially lower collateral damage than standard full-parameter updates. In matched SFT/RLVR checkpoints on Qwen2.5-Math-1.5B and Qwen3-1.7B-Base, the SFT-to-RLVR increment differs sharply from the SFT update in token-level delta-log-probability, and full-parameter gradient ascent forgets only by damaging retain MATH and GSM8K. MAST ranks attention-projection tensors by off-principal energy, update magnitude, and forget-gradient coupling magnitude, then updates only the top-ranked subset. On the primary model, MAST induces statistically significant target forgetting (MATH forget 45/150 to 37/150; McNemar p=0.0078) while preserving GSM8K (+0.8 pp) and MATH retain (-0.5 pp). The advantage reproduces across seeds, NPO/SimNPO objectives, and Qwen3, where MAST preserves GSM8K while full-parameter unlearning collapses it.

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

Probabilistic Signature Inversion: Learning Conditional Distributions from Truncated Signatures

arXiv:2606.15332v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The signature transform is a principled feature map for continuous-time paths, valued for its uniqueness and universality. Recovering a path from its truncated signature is, however, structurally ill-posed because the truncated signature map is not injective. We therefore reframe truncated signature inversion as a probabilistic problem – learning the conditional distribution of a path given its truncated signature – and adopt a signature-conditioned flow matching model as a practical estimator. This probabilistic formulation elucidates the fundamental difficulty of inversion: Bayes reconstruction error quantifies the irreducible uncertainty remaining after conditioning on a statistic. We derive the Bayes-optimal error under linear statistics, obtaining a closed form for log-GBM and numerically tractable formulas for log-fBM and OU, yielding a concrete theoretical baseline for model validation. This baseline upper-bounds the Bayes error under truncated-signature conditioning, since truncated signatures provide richer information than linear statistics. Experiments show that empirical reconstruction errors under linear-statistics conditioning faithfully align with the theory-derived baseline, while errors decrease when the statistic is replaced with truncated signatures. Moreover, generated paths faithfully recover the conditioning signature while preserving key distributional and temporal structures, indicating that the estimator is well-calibrated to the target conditional distribution. Together, these results establish a well-posed probabilistic framework for truncated-signature inversion, with applicability demonstrated on real financial data beyond the parametric process families covered by theory.

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

A Multi-Center Benchmark for Abdominal Disease Diagnosis and Report Generation from Non-Contrast CT

Multiphasic contrast-enhanced CT (CECT) is widely used for abdominal lesion characterization, yet it carries inherent risks of contrast-induced nephropathy, escalates acquisition burden, and heavily contributes to radiologist workload. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel multi-center benchmark for multi-organ abdominal disease diagnosis and automated radiology report generation, which learns to synthesize contrast-enhanced findings from single-phase non-contrast CT (NCCT). To support this, we curated a large-scale dataset of paired NCCT-CECT studies and their corresponding contrast-enhanced radiology reports from two centers, partitioned into internal sets and an external validation cohort. Under a unified evaluation protocol, we benchmarked five contemporary deep learning architectures encompassing chest-specific, abdomen-specific, and general-purpose multimodal domains. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NCCT retains diagnostic signals, achieving an average multi-organ AUC of 69.1% on the internal cohort and 63.1% on the external cohort, respectively. By releasing this dataset and standardized benchmark publicly, this study aims to catalyze future research into safer, resource-efficient, and globally accessible contrast-free abdominal imaging workflows. Code is available at: https://github.com/xmed-lab/TriALS-Report.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Spatially Grounded Concept Bottleneck Models via Part-Factorized Attention

Concept bottleneck models (CBMs) predict a layer of human-named attributes before predicting a class, which makes their decisions auditable. On fine-grained recognition tasks the concept heads are usually free to attend anywhere in the image, so a head named for one body region can be satisfied by evidence on another. This work studies a part-factorized CBM that removes that freedom by construction. The method has three components built on a frozen DINOv3 vision transformer. A learned foreground gate, trained on DINOv3 patch features, suppresses background patches inside the part attention. A set of part queries cross-attends to patch features and each of the 312 CUB attributes is routed, through a fixed concept-to-part map, to read only from the part token its name implies. A learnable two-dimensional Gaussian prior, injected additively in log space into the attention logits, breaks the permutation symmetry among part queries; its means are initialized from the dataset-average keypoint location of each part, which requires no per-image keypoint supervision at training or test time. On CUB-200-2011 the spatial-prior model matches a fully supervised baseline (88.85% versus 88.95% top-1) while raising pointing accuracy by 16 points (52.6% versus 36.4%). Replacing bounding-box supervision with a PCA foreground target and combining it with the Gaussian prior removes all per-image supervision and reaches 88.6% top-1 at about 70% pointing accuracy. A keypoint-fraction sweep shows that 0.5% of the training set (about 27 images) suffices to initialize the prior with no measurable loss. Removing part identity entirely is the harder case: without any spatial prior, pointing accuracy collapses to $2.9\%$.

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

Interpreting Bohm-like quantum potentials in "Computing quantum waves exactly from classical action"

arXiv:2605.20443v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The recent posting arXiv:2605.02621 [14], commenting on the article rspa.2025.0413 [7], argues that the proof of Lemma 3.1 in [7] is missing the spatial derivative of the density, which would lead to a Bohm-like quantum potential. This technical note shows why the propagated density is independent of space in the Feynman propagator construction of Lemma 3.1. This is done by extending the proof of Lemma 3.1 explicitly with Bohm-like quantum potential terms along the stationary action paths, and then showing that these terms are exactly zero. In [7], this property can also be verified directly on most examples (double slit, Aharonov-Bohm, potential well, harmonic oscillator, tunneling, EPR, QED), as well as in the derivations of the Pauli, Dirac, and Maxwell equations. For more general nonlinear actions, a time rescaling may be required to guarantee this space independence along stationary paths. In the hydrogen atom example, this time rescaling can be computed in closed form. In contrast to the general wave of the Madelung solution [9] Lemma 3.1 of [7] is defined first for a propagator, and a general wave is then constructed in a second step. Recall that a propagator is a specific quantum wave, which is initialized at $t=0$ with a Dirac impulse at a given initial position or momentum. In turn, a general wave is constructed in a second step by superposing a distribution of initial conditions using the propagator. This key difference is why the Bohm-like quantum potential terms disappear in the construction [7] (specifically, in the first step) while the Bohm potential in the Madelung analysis does not. This fundamental difference is also consistent with the fact that the wave construction in [7] extends naturally to relativistic contexts, while Bohmian non-locality notoriously prevents such extensions. Keywords - Response to arXiv:2605.02621, in relation to rspa.2025.0413

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

DPRM: A Plug-in Doob h transform-induced Token-Ordering Module for Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2604.24357v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion language models generate without a fixed left-to-right order, leaving token ordering as a central algorithmic choice. Existing systems mainly use random masking or confidence-driven ordering, which respectively suffer from train–test mismatch and myopic exploration. We introduce DPRM (Doob -transform Process Reward Model), a plug-in token-ordering module that keeps the host architecture, denoising objective and supervision unchanged, and modifies only the ordering policy. DPRM starts from confidence-driven ordering and gradually shifts to process-reward-guided ordering through online estimates. We characterize the exact DPRM policy as a reward-tilted Gibbs reveal law, prove convergence of its stagewise Soft-BoN approximation, show that the online bucketized controller tracks the exact DPRM score at empirical-Bernstein rates, and establish a sample-complexity advantage under tractable optimization assumptions. Across nine hosts covering language reasoning, test-time scaling, protein, single-cell, molecular, DNA, text-to-image generation, and VQA, DPRM order variants improve several language, DNA, and multimodal settings while also identifying boundary cases where confidence-only ordering or task-specific utilities are preferable. Code is available at: https://github.com/DakeBU/DPRM-DLLM

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Enhancing Underwater Light Field Images via Global Geometry-aware Diffusion Process

This work studies the challenging problem of acquiring high-quality underwater images via 4-D light field (LF) imaging. To this end, we propose GeoDiff-LF, a novel diffusion-based framework built upon SD-Turbo to enhance underwater 4-D LF imaging by leveraging its spatial-angular structure. GeoDiff-LF consists of three key adaptations: (1) a modified U-Net architecture with convolutional and attention adapters to model geometric cues, (2) a geometry-guided loss function using tensor decomposition and progressive weighting to regularize global structure, and (3) an optimized sampling strategy with noise prediction to improve efficiency. By integrating diffusion priors and LF geometry, GeoDiff-LF effectively mitigates color distortion in underwater scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework outperforms existing methods across both visual fidelity and quantitative performance, advancing the state-of-the-art in enhancing underwater imaging. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/linlos1234/GeoDiff-LF.

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

From Passive Generation to Investigation: A Proactive Scientific Peer Review Agent

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in automating scientific peer review. However, existing approaches often struggle to generate in-depth reviews supported by concrete evidence. We argue that a key limitation is the lack of flexibility to proactively investigate suspicious parts of a paper based on accumulated evidence, as human reviewers do. In this paper, we explore how to enable an LLM-based review agent to perform such proactive investigation. We find that this can be naturally formulated as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), and propose ProReviewer, a scientific peer review agent that proactively reviews a paper guided by a maintained, structured review log. The structured review log serves as a workspace for the agent to track evidence and intermediate findings collected during review. Experiments show that ProReviewer with an 8B backbone, trained by supervised fine-tuning and optimized by reinforcement learning, achieves the highest average score across five quality dimensions, outperforming prompt-based methods with much larger frontier LLMs by up to 39% and the strongest fine-tuned baseline by 16% relatively. It also attains the highest win rates against baselines in human evaluation.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Beyond Weights and Gradients: A Taxonomy of Federated Learning Messages

arXiv:2606.16891v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated Learning is rapidly evolving beyond the exchange of traditional model weights and gradients, yet existing definitions fail to capture the full scope of modern payloads like synthetic data and federated analytics. This paper addresses the gap by proposing a formal mathematical definition of a federated message that accounts for both utility and privacy. We introduce a taxonomy that organizes these exchanges into three categories: model structures, statistical summaries, and data-conditioned representations. By evaluating these groups based on computational demands, communication costs, and privacy risks, we provide a clearer understanding of the trade-offs involved in decentralized training. Our review of 202 recent publications highlights a significant shift since 2021 toward diverse messaging paradigms, signaling a move away from standard deep learning updates toward more specialized information sharing. This framework provides a structured path for future research to optimize federated systems for varying hardware and security requirements.

20.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Calculation of sequence space coverage in a mutagenesis library

Directed evolution requires screening of large mutagenesis libraries, but accurate calculation of library sizes needed to discover functional variants remains challenging. Existing models provide baseline estimates, yet current computational approaches for finding the best variants scale poorly with library complexity. Here, we introduce a scalable algorithmic framework to compute exact discovery probabilities in saturation mutagenesis libraries with no requirement for explicit sequence enumeration. By aggregating variants into a composition log–sum distribution and applying log-space convolution across randomisation blocks, it is possible to extend this to massive sequence spaces and mixed codon schemes. By inverting these calculations, absolute mathematical ceilings for experimental design are established. Ultimately, this framework provides a rapid, quantitative tool to balance the statistical coverage-diversity trade-off within the limitations of laboratory screening. Finally, this is implemented as an open-source web application (SSCC) that allows researchers to construct heterogeneous library designs and compute required sampling depths, coverage probabilities, and absolute randomisation limits.

21.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-09

Prediction of hospitalisation in young children with pneumonia in Malawi: A machine learning-based approach

by Patrick Staunton, Mohammad Adib Makrooni, Master Chisale, Billy Nyambolo, Joseph Wu, Damien McCarthy, Mark Ledwidge, Yasir Bin Nisar, Chris Watson, Balwani Mbakaya, Cathal Seoighe, Joe Gallagher Background Globally, pneumonia remains the single biggest cause of mortality in children under 5 years of age. This study sought to train and test a prediction model for hospitalisation within 7 days after initial presentation in 2- to 59-month-old Malawian children with WHO-defined pneumonia in primary care and compare its performance to existing risk prediction models. Methods and findings BIOTOPE is a cohort study of children with pneumonia in a primary healthcare setting in Malawi. The training cohort involved nine primary care centres and the testing cohort involved two primary care centres in Northern Malawi. The training cohort was recruited between December 2022 and April 2023 while the testing cohort was recruited in 2016. Participants were consecutive children aged 2–59 months presenting with cough and/or difficulty breathing and who were diagnosed as WHO-defined pneumonia in primary care of any severity. The training cohort was used to train and validate a machine learning model with a prespecified primary outcome defined as hospitalisation and/or death within 7 days as the outcome. This model was then further evaluated in the testing cohort.Median age was 15 months (interquartile range 8−27) in the training and 17 months (interquartile range 9−29) in the external testing cohort (52.1% and 54.4% male, respectively). Hospitalisation occurred in 14.3% (294) of the training cohort and 12.1% (55) of the testing cohort. There was one death in the training cohort only. WHO danger signs were present in 17.6% (360) and 15.9% (70) of children in the training and testing cohorts, respectively. The optimal machine learning model achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic and precision recall curves of 0.87 and 0.57, respectively, in the testing cohort outperforming existing risk prediction models; furthermore, this model produced an expected calibration error of 0.16 (a logistic regression model using severity status as the response variable and the log odds of the machine learning model’s calibrated probabilities produced an intercept estimate of −0.32 and a slope estimate of 1.13). Key limitations include the use of hospitalisation and/or death as a severity outcome, which may reflect health system factors rather than true disease severity, that mortality-based comparisons were not possible due to low mortality in these primary care cohorts, and that comparator tools were developed for hospital populations rather than primary care populations. Conclusion This machine learning score outperformed traditional pneumonia risk scores in predicting hospitalisation within 7 days in Malawian children presenting to primary care. Traditional pneumonia risk scores diminish in performance when externally applied to new datasets suggesting they may not generalise well beyond their original derivation settings. Mortality-related findings are not applicable as there was only one death in this cohort. Overall these findings support the potential of machine learning to meaningfully improve early identification of children at risk of severe pneumonia in low-resource primary care settings. Further external validation and clinical impact studies are needed to confirm these results.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Distributional Loss for Robust Classification

This paper proposes a novel loss concept for supervised classification tasks. Rather than enforcing a direct mapping from each input sample to a single assigned label, we define an optimization objective over all classifier outputs as a bimodal Gaussian distribution. This softer target formulation implicitly captures class ambiguity, mitigates overfitting, and encourages the learning of more robust decision boundaries, all without requiring additional label information. Experimental results demonstrate consistent improvements in robustness, with particularly pronounced gains in low-data regimes, while requiring only minimal modifications to standard training pipelines.

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

Examining Human-Like Behaviors in LLMs: A Multi-Dimensional Analysis of Model Behaviors, User Factors, and System Prompts

arXiv:2606.18258v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit a wide range of human-like behaviors, from expressing thoughts and emotions, to engaging in relationship-building with users, to refusing requests and maintaining boundaries. Despite their prevalence, researchers and practitioners lack methods and empirical insights to make informed decisions about when and what types of human-like behaviors LLMs should exhibit. To fill this gap, we present a multi-dimensional analysis of the prevalence, potential effects, and controllability of these behaviors using LLM-as-a-judge and human evaluation. Across 21,000 multi-turn conversations from four widely used models (gpt-4o, gpt-4.1-mini, claude-sonnet-4.6, gemini-2.5-flash), we find that human-like behaviors are pervasive but vary across models and user factors (conversation goals and user profiles). In terms of perceived appropriateness, human evaluators judged self-referential and relationship-building behaviors as less appropriate from LLMs than from humans, but boundary-maintaining behaviors more appropriate from LLMs than from humans. Finally, we show that system prompting can control these behaviors, though it requires careful evaluation to avoid unintended effects. We discuss the implications of our findings and provide recommendations for responsible LLM design and evaluation.

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

Odds Law: The Decomposition Algebra On How Intelligence Organizes Itself to Solve Difficult Problems Reliably

Authors:

arXiv:2606.15712v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We ask a structural question: given unreliable elementary problem-solvers, what organizations of them solve hard problems reliably, and what are the limits? We develop a $decomposition~algebra$: elementary solvers are morphisms in a stochastic category, and four combinators (sequential composition, parallel ensembling, verification gating, and recursive reduction) generate the space of compound solvers. We equip this algebra with two homomorphisms, a $reliability$ valuation into the ordered monoid $([0,1],\le)$ and a $cost$ valuation into a commutative semiring, and we derive the composition laws that govern how reliability flows through structure. Our central results are (i) a $verification~odds~law$ (the result that names this report), showing that a verification gate multiplies the odds of correctness by the verifier's likelihood ratio $\Lambda$, so that $k$ conditionally independent gates yield geometric amplification; (ii) a $reliability~amplification~theorem$, giving target reliability $1-\delta$ at $O(\log 1/\delta)$ verification depth whenever $\Lambda>1$; and (iii) a $threshold~dichotomy$: above the critical parameters reliability can be driven arbitrarily close to one at logarithmic cost, while at or below them no amplification is possible. We then show that $self-organization$ is the least fixed point of a monotone improvement operator on the complete lattice of strategies, and that this fixed point equalizes marginal log-odds gain per unit cost. Finally, we prove matching limits: an information ceiling bounds per-gate amplification by a divergence quantity; shared error causes create a strictly positive voting floor, so diversity is $necessary$ for unbounded amplification. Reliability, in short, is neither free nor magical: it is bought with independent information, arranged by composition, and bounded by the verifier.