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LM-SPT: LM-Aligned Semantic Distillation for Speech Tokenization
With the rapid progress of speech language models (SLMs), discrete speech tokens have emerged as a core interface between speech and text, enabling unified modeling across modalities. Recent speech tokenization approaches aim to isolate semantic information from low-level acoustics to better align with language models (LMs). In particular, previous methods use self-supervised learning (SSL) teachers such as HuBERT to extract semantic representations, which are then distilled into a semantic quantizer to suppress acoustic redundancy as well as capture content-related latent structures. However, these tokenizers often operate at relatively high frame rates, producing token sequences significantly longer than their textual counterparts and hindering seamless integration with pretrained LMs. Although recent methods attempt to reduce the token rate by applying uniform average pooling to SSL features, this can over-smooth content-bearing regions and dilute the structural information, thereby potentially limiting the LM alignment. To address this, we propose LM-SPT, an LM-aligned speech tokenization method based on semantic speech-resynthesis distillation. Instead of directly matching teacher and student features via pooling, LM-SPT resynthesizes speech from semantic tokens only and minimizes the discrepancy between representations extracted from the original and resynthesized waveforms using a frozen, LM-aligned speech encoder. This indirect supervision avoids rigid temporal alignment and encourages dedicated semantic units that are more semantically aligned with LMs under reduced frame rates. Experimental results show that the proposed LM-SPT consistently outperforms previous semantic-enhanced speech tokenizers when applied to SLMs for the tasks of automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech, even without compromising the speech reconstruction fidelity at the codec level.
P3D-Bench: Benchmarking MLLMs for Parametric 3D Generation and Structural Reasoning
Multimodal large language models can write code to produce complex programs as well as use programs to do 3D modeling, which opens up a new avenue for 3D generation powered by their priors, world knowledge and reasoning. Yet existing benchmarks rarely evaluate 3D modeling through code. Such modeling demands more than runnable code: from a text or visual specification, a model must generate a parametric 3D program that is geometrically precise, semantically aligned and assembly-consistent. We introduce P3D-Bench, a benchmark for parametric 3D generation. Unlike a 3D mesh, a parametric 3D program exposes explicit dimensions, construction operations and part relations, revealing whether a model recovers a design's structure, not just its appearance. Under a unified protocol, P3D-Bench covers three task families (Text-to-3D, Image-to-3D and Assembly-3D) and scores each output for executability, geometric fidelity, topology, text-grounded constraints, multiview semantic alignment and part-level structure. We evaluate frontier MLLMs and text-only LLMs on 400 text cases, 400 image cases and 203 annotated assemblies, with domain-specific models as reference points. Our extensive evaluation yields three findings. First, assemblies are the hardest setting, where models still fail to compose multiple parts into a coherent structure. Second, models can often recover the global shape and semantic identity of the target object, yet fail to reproduce the precise parametric geometry specified by the input. Third, part-level modeling remains weak on assemblies, where models recover neither the geometry of each part nor the right number of parts. These results position P3D-Bench as a benchmark for evaluating precise parametric geometry and part-level structure in parametric 3D generation.
Clipping Makes Distributed and Federated Asynchronous SGD Robust to Stragglers
arXiv:2606.13287v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In modern machine learning, parallelization of training is an important strategy for increasing scale. Asynchronous stochastic gradient descent (ASGD), which maximizes the utilization of available hardware by avoiding waiting for slow workers. However, with constant step sizes, the convergence of ASGD is nonetheless affected negatively by slow workers due to large delays in updates. At the same time, it has been empirically observed in asynchronous training of deep learning models that gradient clipping "stabilizes" training. In this work, we provide a theoretical justification for this behavior, as we show that clipping removes the dependence of the maximum delay in the oracle complexity. We employ a sub-Weibull model of gradient noise which generalizes sub-Gaussian and sub-exponential distributions to more heavy-tailed distributions, motivated by empirical observations in deep learning. We show convergence in expectation, and the first time in asynchronous optimization, convergence with high probability.
Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever virus transmission: exploring perceptions of human-animal-tick interactions across six districts in Uganda
Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever virus (CCHFV) causes a viral zoonotic disease transmitted through tick bites and direct contact with infected blood or tissue of infected animals. Socio-ecological and behavioural risk factors for CCHFV exposure in Uganda remain poorly understood, which can lead to the omission of key risk factors in quantitative survey design and limit our wider understanding. In this study, we explored human-animal-tick interaction transmission risks in Uganda. We conducted 24 focus group discussions (FGDs) and 31 key-informant interviews (KIIs) across six environmentally and socio-ecologically diverse districts, between October 2023 and March 2024. Study sites were selected using K-prototype analysis, which combined environmental and socio-ecological variables to identify distinct clusters within Uganda. FGDs were conducted separately with groups of community leaders, men, women and teenagers with stratified purposive sampling. Medical doctors, veterinarians, traditional healers, district surveillance officers, and herdsmen were individually interviewed as key informants and purposively sampled. Data were transcribed and translated into English, and analysed thematically using iterative categorisation in NVivo 14. Most participants reported tick bites, some as frequently as every day. Close contact with animals was common, including sleeping next to them in the same building, largely due to concerns about animal theft. Less frequent but notable practices included slaughtering animals for consumption or sacrifice and interactions with wild animals during hunting. Slaughtering and butchering an animal which was sick or had died was reportedly performed by participants in most districts. Plucking and roasting engorged ticks was a practice described in the Kaabong and Arua districts of Northern Uganda. These practices and behaviours highlight potential key risks of CCHFV transmission and underscore the need for future studies to address specific behaviours, to quantify if, and to what extent, they present an exposure risk. Further work should include underlying reasons for the behaviours, which would help ensure that culturally appropriate interventions are targeted.
Environmental “knees” and “wiggles” as strong stabilizers of species’ range limits set by interspecific competition
by Farshad Shirani, Benjamin G. Freeman Whether interspecific competition is a major contributing factor to setting species’ range limits has been debated for a long time. Theoretical studies have proposed that the interactions between interspecific competition and disruptive gene flow along an environmental gradient can halt range expansion of ecologically similar species where they meet. However, the stability of such range limits has not been well addressed. We use a deterministic mathematical model of adaptive range evolution over a continuous habitat to show that the range limits set by interspecific competition are unlikely to be evolutionarily stable if the environmental optima for fitness-related traits vary (almost) linearly in space. That is, in a linear environment without a dispersal barrier or a third (or more) species, the range borders formed between two competing species constantly move towards the weaker species. We demonstrate that environmental nonlinearities such as “knees” and “wiggles”—wherein an isolated sharp change or a step-like change occurs in the steepness of a trait optimum—can strongly stabilize competitively formed range limits. The stabilization mechanism relies on the contrast that such nonlinearities create in the level of disruptive gene flow to the peripheral population of each species, and succeeds when an additional process, such as Allee effects, prevents the establishment of an infinitesimal population in the presence of an abundant competitor. We show that the stability of the range limits at these nonlinearities is robust against moderate environmental disturbances. Whether strong disturbances such as rapid high-amplitude climate changes can destabilize such range limits depends on how the competitive dominance of the species changes across the nonlinearity. Therefore, our findings underscore the importance of assessing species’ competitive ability when predicting responses to climate change, and identify geographic regions where established range limits are likely to persist as well as regions where shifting limits may eventually stabilize.
Beyond IGO-Flow: Toward Convergence Analysis of IGO in Continuous Spaces
arXiv:2606.17523v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Information-Geometric Optimization (IGO) provides a unified framework for black-box optimization by interpreting the adaptation of a search distribution as a natural gradient update. Despite its conceptual importance, the convergence theory of IGO remains limited: most existing results concern continuous-time idealizations such as the IGO flow, rather than discrete-time updates with non-infinitesimal learning rates. In this paper, we study discrete-time IGO in continuous spaces, formulated as natural gradient updates in the expectation-parameter coordinates of an exponential family. In particular, we analyze IGO over the multivariate Gaussian family on strongly convex quadratic objective functions. Our analysis covers a setting that simultaneously incorporates full covariance adaptation, a fixed positive learning rate, and quantile-based weights. In this setting, we prove that the covariance matrix converges to the zero matrix. We further show that the mean vector converges to the global optimum, provided that the condition number of the appropriately scaled covariance matrix is bounded at sufficiently frequent iterations. These results advance the convergence theory of IGO and help bridge the gap between the mathematical theory of IGO and practical covariance-adaptive search methods such as CMA-ES.
OpenMedQ: Broad Open Pretraining for Medical Vision-Language Models
We present OpenMedQ, a medical vision-language model pretrained on the broadest fully-open medical mix to date: 14 datasets totaling ~3.35M pretraining samples spanning pathology, radiology, microscopy, and text-only clinical QA. OpenMedQ reaches state-of-the-art BLEU-1 on PathVQA (75.9), beating Med-PaLM M variants up to 562B parameters (~80x larger), and matches the best reported VQA-MED BLEU-1 (64.5). Its vision encoder, transferred to 8 unseen medical classification benchmarks under an identical downstream recipe, obtains the highest average macro-F1 (0.757) among BiomedCLIP (0.745), PMC-CLIP (0.745), PubMedCLIP (0.746), and a from-scratch baseline (0.616). We release our code and an interactive demo is publicly available as a reproducible baseline for the community.
RankVR: Low-Rank Structure Perception and Value Recalibration for Robust Composed Image Retrieval
Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) constitutes a pivotal paradigm requiring models to perform joint reasoning on reference images and modification texts. However, the prevalence of Noisy Triplet Correspondence (NTC) in large-scale datasets severely constrains model performance. Existing denoising methods either target binary mismatches or rely on scalar-based point-wise estimation, neglecting rich global structural correlations among sample populations and dynamic value variations during training, thereby yielding suboptimal results. This paper identifies two critical unresolved challenges: Global Structural Inconsistency of Semantic Correlations and Hard Sample Discrimination Uncertainty. To address these, we propose RankVR, a framework designed to construct a robust CIR model via global structure consistency and dynamic value perception. Specifically, we introduce the Global Structure Consistency Perception (GSCP) module, which utilizes the Effective Rank of the Correlation Matrix to decouple clean samples from structural noise. By measuring rank difference, GSCP identifies samples disrupting macroscopic semantic symmetry. Furthermore, we develop the Adaptive Semantic Value Calibration (ASVC) module to distinguish high-value hard clean samples. By integrating training potential and reliability, it dynamically quantifies the semantic value of each triplet, ensuring effective utilization of hard samples while suppressing noise characterized by logical conflicts. Extensive experiments on the FashionIQ and CIRR benchmark datasets demonstrate that RankVR significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, validating its superior robustness in noisy environments.
Deciphering cell type-specific causal genetic effects on brain imaging-derived phenotypes and disorders with single-cell Mendelian randomization
by Anyi Yang, Xingzhong Zhao, Xing-Ming Zhao, Yucheng T. Yang Reconstructing causality routes from genetic effects to complex phenotypes in particular cell types is crucial for understanding biological mechanisms underlying the brain-associated phenotypes including imaging-derived phenotypes (IDPs), and brain disorders and behaviors (DBs). Here, we develop a single-cell Mendelian randomization framework to infer cell type-specific causal relationships between gene expression and diverse brain-associated complex phenotypes by integrating single-cell expression quantitative trait loci (cis-eQTLs) and genome-wide association study findings. We identifiy a set of 254 and 217 cis-eQTL target genes (eGenes) that may have causal effects on 112 IDPs and 26 DBs in eight cell types, respectively. These causal eGenes exhibit strong cell type specificity and varied pleiotropy among different types of brain-associated phenotypes. Further integrative analysis reveals putative causality routes among cell type-specific causal eGenes and brain-associated complex phenotypes. Finally, we characterize the spatiotemporal expression patterns of these causal eGenes, and highlight the coordinated associations of the brain-associated phenotypes based on the expression of their causal eGenes. Overall, our study presents a large-scale analysis of the genetic effects of brain structures, disorders and behaviors, providing a catalog of cell type-specific causal eGenes.
Augmenting Dysarthric Speech Severity Assessment with MOS Supervision
arXiv:2606.18645v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dysarthria is a speech disorder marked by reduced intelligibility and communicative effectiveness. Automatic utterance-level assessment of dysarthric speech can support scalable speech monitoring and therapy-related analysis. Yet training such systems is bottlenecked by the scarcity of clinically annotated dysarthric speech. This work proposes to augment dysarthric speech assessment using data from speech synthesis evaluations, specifically human-annotated utterances with Mean Opinion Score (MOS) labels from the QualiSpeech corpus. Experiments show that fine-tuning on speech synthesis assessment data consistently improves performance on both intelligibility and naturalness prediction, while joint training yields gains primarily on naturalness. These results suggest that synthesis artifacts and dysarthric speech share perceptual commonalities, and speech synthesis evaluation corpora offer a practical augmentation source that reduces reliance on scarce clinical annotations.
Branching Flows: Discrete, Continuous, and Manifold Flow Matching with Splits and Deletions
arXiv:2511.09465v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion and flow matching approaches to generative modeling have shown promise in domains where the state space is continuous, such as image generation or protein folding & design, and discrete, exemplified by diffusion large language models. They offer a natural fit when the number of elements in a state is fixed in advance (e.g. images), but require ad hoc solutions when, for example, the length of a response from a large language model, or the number of amino acids in a protein chain is not known a priori. Here we propose Branching Flows, a generative modeling framework that, like diffusion and flow matching approaches, transports a simple distribution to the data distribution. But in Branching Flows, the elements in the state evolve over a forest of binary trees, branching and dying stochastically with rates that are learned by the model. This allows the model to control, during generation, the number of elements in the sequence. We also show that Branching Flows can compose with any flow matching base process on discrete sets, continuous Euclidean spaces, smooth manifolds, and `multimodal' product spaces that mix these components. We demonstrate this in three domains: small molecule generation (multimodal), antibody sequence generation (discrete), and protein backbone generation (multimodal), and show that Branching Flows is a capable distribution learner with a stable learning objective, and that it enables new capabilities.
Model Risk in Credit Portfolio Models
arXiv:2111.14631v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Model risk in credit portfolio models is a serious issue for banks but has so far not been tackled comprehensively. We will demonstrate how to deal with uncertainty in all model parameters in an all-embracing, yet easy-to-implement way.
Verbatim Chunks Beat Extracted Artifacts: A Controlled Ablation of Memory Representations for Long LLM Conversations
A growing class of conversational-memory systems compresses dialogue history into structured artifacts – extracted facts, decisions, or events – on the premise that distilled structure retrieves better than raw text. We test this premise with a controlled ablation: within one fixed retrieval-rerank-reasoning pipeline, we swap only the stored representation – LLM-extracted typed artifacts versus verbatim conversation chunks – holding the model, retriever, reranker, and judge constant. Verbatim chunks win by 15.9 points on LoCoMo (43.9% vs. 28.0%) and 22.0 points on LongMemEval-S (67.4% vs. 45.4%); a 1-hop semantic graph does not recover the gap, and five confound controls reproduce the effect. The mechanism is lossy distillation: extraction discards verbatim detail that chunks retain for free, and the extracted-artifact pipeline never beats naive RAG in overall accuracy. Concurrent positive results with near-verbatim, provenance-preserving units fit the same account: retrieval accuracy tracks how far the representation departs from the source. For the extraction designs we test, structured memory should augment verbatim text rather than replace it: a chunks $\cup$ artifacts union store matches chunks on both benchmarks while artifacts alone forfeit the gap. Code and data: https://github.com/tao-hpu/cog-canvas
CAP: Towards PPG Universal Representation Learning with Patient-level Supervision
arXiv:2606.15284v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Photoplethysmography (PPG) plays a central role in wearable health monitoring and clinical decision support. Yet existing approaches to universal PPG representation learning largely focus on signal-level objectives and often overlook patient-level health context, which limits generalization to complex clinical tasks and heterogeneous cohorts. To address this gap, we construct a large-scale paired PPG-EHR multimodal dataset by distilling fragmented medical histories and clinical records into cohesive, patient-level electronic health records (EHR). Building on this resource, we propose Clinical Anchored Pretraining for PPG (CAP). During pretraining, CAP performs cross-modal contrastive alignment that anchors PPG representations to patient-level clinical semantics, guiding the encoder beyond waveform fitting toward modeling consistency in a patient's overall physiological state. During downstream adaptation, the pretrained PPG encoder provides clinically grounded representations that strengthen inductive bias and improve robustness and transferability. Experiments demonstrate that CAP consistently outperforms strong baselines on four diverse downstream tasks. CAP achieves a particularly large gain on respiratory rate prediction (up to +87.6% relative improvement over the state-of-the-art baseline) and delivers an average relative +26.7% across all tasks. We further enhance the interpretability of our approach through comprehensive analyses, including ablations and multiple complementary visualizations of the learned representations. The code for our experiments is available at: https://github.com/gody123gody/CAP .
The Illusion of Improvement: Reject Inference Strategies in Credit Scoring
arXiv:2606.18479v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reject inference methods are widely used to mitigate survival bias in credit scoring, yet their effectiveness remains poorly understood. We systematically evaluate several such methods and uncover a structural failure mode: in a natural retraining cycle, models whose accuracy improves while recall collapses create an illusion of improvement that leads practitioners to believe the system is getting better when, in fact, its rejection quality – the ability to correctly screen out defaulters – is deteriorating. We then propose a controlled exploration strategy that breaks the feedback loop without statistical assumptions: the lender deliberately approves a fraction of rejected applicants and observes their true outcomes. We show that accuracy and rejection quality give opposite recommendations on whether to explore: accuracy favors no exploration, while rejection quality improves with it, confirming that standard evaluation metrics are misleading under selection bias. Even minimal exploration rates (2–5\%) prove sufficient in our experiments to diagnose the severity of the feedback loop at near-zero cost. Our findings are consistent across two machine learning methods and three real-world datasets, and suggest that standard evaluation protocols are inadequate for assessing models trained under survival bias.
Stabilizing Bandits using Regularization: Precise Regret and A Quantitative Central Limit Theorem
arXiv:2603.10184v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Statistical inference with bandit data presents fundamental challenges owing to adaptive sampling, which violates the independence assumptions underlying classical asymptotic theory. Recent work has identified stability~\citep{laiwei82} as a sufficient condition for valid inference under adaptivity. This paper first provides a refined stability condition, stated in terms of the iterates of an online algorithm, and shows that a large class of regularized stochastic-mirror-descent-style algorithms satisfy it. This refined condition allows us to strengthen the asymptotic results of~\citet{laiwei82} in several ways. First, we derive a non-asymptotic Berry–Esseen bound for the empirical reward estimates under adaptive sampling. Second, we derive matching non-asymptotic upper and lower bounds on the regret of the proposed algorithm, yielding a precise characterization of its regret. Third, we show that these regularized algorithms preserve asymptotic normality and valid inference under a prescribed level of adversarial corruption. Finally, we show that regularization is necessary rather than incidental: Lai–Wei stability is incompatible with the optimal $O(\sqrt{T})$ regret rate – the rate attained by unregularized algorithms such as EXP3 – so that a controlled, polylogarithmic inflation in regret is the price of valid inference.
Antimicrobial-resistant E. coli in human, animal and environmental reservoirs in rural Bangladeshi households with young children
In low-income countries, ESBL-producing Escherichia coli (ESBL-EC) is frequently detected in humans, animals and household environments, indicating widespread exposure to antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Established risk factors such as antibiotic use do not explain the high community carriage of AMR in all settings; identifying the dominant exposure pathways can inform interventions against AMR. We aimed to investigate (i) animal-human-environment sharing of AMR by assessing associations between the abundance of ESBL-EC in the household environment, domestic animal feces and young children's stool and (ii) household factors associated with ESBL-EC abundance in these reservoirs. We enrolled 112 households from the CRADLE trial in rural Bangladesh. We enumerated ESBL-EC in drinking water, food, child hand rinses, outdoor soil, indoor floor swabs, chicken and cow feces, and stool from children aged 6 months. We recorded indicators of sanitation, animal ownership/management, human and animal antibiotic use, and child exposure behaviors using structured questionnaires and spot checks. The highest prevalence of ESBL-EC was in child stool (95.6%) and animal feces (82.3-96.9%), followed by soil (48.2%) and floors (36.6%); < 10% of food, child hands and drinking water harbored ESBL-EC. The abundance of ESBL-EC in child stool was not associated with its abundance in any sampled matrix; the abundance in chicken but not cow feces showed positive correlations with soil, floors, child hands, and drinking water (correlation coefficients: 0.19-0.39, p-values < 0.05). Higher-quality latrines (improved, pour-flush, with slab) were associated with lower ESBL-EC abundance across matrices; unsafe animal management (animals roaming or spending the night inside the home) was associated with higher abundance. Child antibiotic use and exposure behaviors (soil ingestion, time spent on floor) were not associated with ESBL-EC abundance in child stool. We observed high AMR colonization among young children and domestic animals in rural Bangladesh not explained by traditional fecal-oral exposure pathways. Future studies should explore additional pathways and assess whether sanitation and animal management improvements can reduce AMR.
Rethinking Text-to-Image as Semantic-Aware Data Augmentation for Indoor Scene Recognition
In the realm of computer vision, indoor image recognition presents challenges due to the intricate interplay of lighting conditions, occlusions, and diverse object arrangements within confined spaces. To address the lacks of training indoor images, we introduce a novel approach leveraging Stable Diffusion (SD) for the generation of synthetic images, which serve as a powerful data augmentation tool. The utilization of SD offers a principled framework for synthesizing diverse and realistic indoor scenes, thereby enriching the training data pool for robust indoor image recognition models. Experimental findings on the MIT Indoor Scene dataset reveal the potential of our proposed approach in enhancing the training of deep models when authentic data is limited. Furthermore, to prevent the misuse of SD synthetic images, we introduce a counter measure based on DIffusion Reconstruction Error (DIRE). The powerful DIRE presentation enables training robust classifiers only using lightweight deep models. Experiments show that our approach can perfectly recognize SD generated images with the accuracy of 100% using MobilenetV3.
4DP-QA: Scalable QA for 4D Perception in Vision Language Models
Despite recent advances, Vision Language Models (VLMs) still struggle to grasp the dynamics of the world. We note that the ability to reason about a 4D scene, challenging in itself, is further complicated by two factors. First, VLMs observe motion indirectly via its projection onto 2D images. Second, existing datasets fail to disentangle object and camera motion. To address these challenges, we present a QA generation pipeline that focuses on motion-related scene understanding. We take particular care of the entanglement of camera and object motion by casting tracking in both the traditional way and in a novel, fixed reference system, dubbed True-Motion Tracking, which provides an intuitive description of motion. From this pipeline, we generate a large-scale training dataset of 400K samples, 4DP-QA (4D Perception QA), and a 2.2K-sample benchmark, 4DP-QA-Bench. Training existing models on our dataset yields performance improvements on an external benchmark, validating the effectiveness of our method.
Why we seek to fly: Books in brief
Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks. Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.
Beyond Scalar Scores: Exploring LLM-based Metrics for Clinical Significance Evaluation in Radiology Reports
Reliable evaluation of generated radiology reports requires strict clinical accuracy, as omitted critical findings or mischaracterized radiographic observations can directly affect patient care. Existing metrics obscure this requirement by reducing report quality to a medically ungrounded scalar. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) possess rich medical knowledge, they likewise struggle to draw a reliable boundary between clinically significant errors and harmless variation. We study this boundary using ReEvalMed benchmark as testbed and evaluate metric-level clinical significance from detecting true clinical errors ("Discrimination") and tolerating insignificant variations ("Robustness"). Across 8 LLM evaluators under one-pass and two-pass settings, we identify a widespread discrimination bias: models effectively detect errors but also over-penalize harmless rephrasings. To mitigate this, we synthesize 4k report pairs and train lightweight interpretable metrics on Qwen3-8B and MedGemma-4B. Our trained metric sharpens the clinical significance boundary, surpassing 32B-scale medical LLMs and remaining competitive with proprietary models. Crucially, the more costly two-pass setting fails to consistently improve overall performance and mainly trades discrimination for robustness. These findings suggest one-pass trained metrics as the practical choice for cost-sensitive deployment, with two-pass inference reserved for settings where D-R balance is critical. We will release the dataset and metric.
Stochastic Schrödinger Diffusion Models for Pure-State Ensemble Generation
arXiv:2605.03573v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Quantum machine learning increasingly relies on pure-state representations, motivating generative models that sample directly in quantum representation space rather than perturbing classical inputs and re-encoding. We introduce Stochastic Schrödinger Diffusion Models (SSDMs), a score-based generative framework that defines diffusion, scores, and reverse-time sampling intrinsically on the complex projective manifold $\mathbb{CP}^{d-1}$ under the Fubini–Study metric. SSDMs combine a Riemannian Ornstein–Uhlenbeck forward diffusion with a stochastic Schrödinger realization, and learn reverse-time dynamics driven by the Riemannian score. Our central technical contribution is a local-time learning objective that exploits the local Euclidean OU limit of intrinsic manifold diffusions in Fubini-Study normal coordinates to obtain an analytic teacher score, bypassing the intractable transition densities that limit existing Riemannian score-based models. Across synthetic, physics-inspired (TFIM, XXZ), and quantum feature-state benchmarks up to $14$ qubits, SSDMs match target pure-state ensembles by orders of magnitude on MMD and observable statistics over both ambient Euclidean and matched Riemannian score-based baselines, and improve representation-level diagnostics for downstream quantum kernel methods.
Unifying Post-hoc Explanations of Knowledge Graph Completions
arXiv:2507.22951v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Knowledge Graphs organize information as entity-relation-entity triples, enabling machine learning models to predict plausible missing triples in a task known as Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC). Post-hoc explainability for KGC addresses the problem of identifying which triples most influence the predictions of machine learning models. Currently, the field lacks formalization and consistent evaluations, hindering reproducibility and cross-study comparisons. This paper argues for a unified taxonomy for post-hoc explainability in KGC. First, we propose a characterization of post-hoc explanations via multi-objective optimization that unifies existing post-hoc explainability algorithms in KGC and the explanations they produce, balancing explanation effectiveness and conciseness. Next, we examine improved evaluation protocols based on popular metrics, such as Mean Reciprocal Rank and Hits@k, through illustrative experiments. Finally, we stress the importance of interpretability as the ability of explanations to address queries meaningful to end users. By unifying methods and discussing evaluation standards, this work puts forward a case for more reproducible and impactful research in KGC explainability.
Dual-Uncertainty Guided Policy Learning for Multimodal Reasoning
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has advanced reasoning capabilities in multimodal large language models. However, existing methods typically treat visual inputs as deterministic, overlooking the perceptual ambiguity inherent to the visual modality. Consequently, they fail to distinguish whether a model's uncertainty stems from complex reasoning or ambiguous perception, preventing the targeted allocation of exploration or learning signals. To address this gap, we introduce DUPL, a dual-uncertainty guided policy learning approach for multimodal RLVR that quantifies and leverages both perceptual uncertainty (via symmetric KL divergence) and output uncertainty (via policy entropy) to guide policy updates. By establishing an uncertainty-driven feedback loop and employing a dynamic branch prioritization mechanism, DUPL recalibrates the policy advantage to focus learning on states with high perceptual or decisional ambiguity, enabling effective targeted exploration beyond passive data augmentation. Evaluated on diverse multimodal reasoning benchmarks spanning mathematical and general domains, DUPL achieves solid gains. It improves Qwen2.5-VL accuracy by up to $12.3%$ (3B) and $7.9%$ (7B), and Qwen3-VL-Instruct by up to $10.7%$ (4B) and $12.4%$ (8B), consistently outperforming GRPO, while seamlessly generalizing to alternative algorithms (DAPO, $+6.5%$ avg) and architectures (LLaVA-OneVision-1.5, $+4.7%$ avg). These results demonstrate that DUPL is an effective and generalizable approach for multimodal RLVR.