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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Improving Generalization and Data Efficiency with Diffusion in Offline Multi-agent RL

arXiv:2307.01472v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present a novel Diffusion Offline Multi-agent Model (DOM2) for offline Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL). Different from existing algorithms that rely mainly on conservatism in policy design, DOM2 enhances policy expressiveness and diversity based on diffusion model. Specifically, we incorporate a diffusion model into the policy network and propose a trajectory-based data-reweighting scheme in training. These key ingredients significantly improve algorithm robustness against environment changes and achieve significant improvements in performance, generalization and data-efficiency. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate that DOM2 outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in all multi-agent particle and multi-agent MuJoCo environments, and generalizes significantly better to shifted environments {(in $28$ out of $30$ settings evaluated)} thanks to its high expressiveness and diversity. Moreover, DOM2 is ultra data efficient and requires no more than $5\%$ data for achieving the same performance compared to existing algorithms (a $20\times$ improvement in data efficiency).

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

VeryTrace: Verifying Reasoning Traces through Compilable Formalism and Structured Verification

arXiv:2606.24124v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-step reasoning with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting remains fragile: logical errors or hallucinations in early steps silently propagate, producing confident but incorrect conclusions. This paper presents VeryTrace, a zero-shot verification-and-repair framework that formalizes natural-language reasoning traces into a structured, compilable representation. VeryTrace introduces a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) that (i) makes step dependencies explicit, (ii) mechanizes quantitative content as executable expressions, and (iii) structures semantic inferences via deduction schemas. Our hybrid verifier combines deterministic checks for computational correctness, dependency resolution, and constraint satisfaction with targeted LLM audits for non-mechanizable semantic judgments, enabling step-level error localization and repair. Across three diverse domains-competition mathematics (AIME 2025), robotics planning (LLM-BabyBench), and kinship reasoning (CLUTRR), VeryTrace improves accuracy over zero-shot baselines on state-of-the-art LLMs without requiring domain-specific training or in-context examples, demonstrating that formalized trace verification achieves both precision and generalization.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Nonlinear Two-Time-Scale Stochastic Approximation: A Sharp Phase Transition and How to Beat It

arXiv:2606.14488v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent finite-time analyses of nonlinear two-time-scale stochastic approximation show that under contractive assumptions the slow iterate $Y_k$ with stepsizes $\beta_k=\Theta(k^{-1})$ and $\alpha_k=\Theta(k^{-a})$, $a\in(1/2,1)$, generally satisfies a mean-square rate of order $k^{-a}$; decoupled $k^{-1}$ rates require strong local linearity. We identify a sharp regularity-dependent boundary. In a rate-determining normal form where the slow drift contains a locally linear leakage and a nonlinear remainder of order $1+\rho$ ($\rho\in[0,1]$), the uncorrected recursion satisfies \[ \mathbb{E}\|Y_k\|^2 \le C\bigl(k^{-1}+k^{-a(1+\rho)}\bigr), \] and a matching scalar Gaussian lower bound shows that the slower term is unavoidable without modifying the update. Thus the decoupled $k^{-1}$ rate is guaranteed for the uncorrected recursion exactly when $a(1+\rho)\ge 1$. This lower bound concerns only the naive update; it is not an information-theoretic obstruction. We demonstrate this by equipping the normal-form recursion with an auxiliary online bias estimator \[ M_{k+1}=M_k+\gamma_k(R(X_k)-M_k),\qquad \beta_k\ll\gamma_k\ll\alpha_k, \] and subtracting $M_k$ from the slow update. Under the same stability, moment, and remainder assumptions, the corrected recursion achieves $\mathbb{E}\|\widetilde Y_k\|^2=O(k^{-1})$ for every $\rho\in[0,1]$, including regimes where the uncorrected update provably suffers the slower rate. Finally, we prove localized transfer theorems that extend the phase-transition mechanism to general nonlinear TTSA in fast-manifold coordinates. The proofs are non-asymptotic and rely on two Abel-transform cancellations: one for the locally linear fast-error leakage, and one for the tracked nonlinear bias.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Pre-Deployment Robustness Stress Testing for CT Segmentation Systems Using Clinically Motivated Multi-Corruption Augmentation

Deep learning-based CT segmentation systems often achieve high accuracy on clean benchmark images, but their performance may degrade under heterogeneous clinical imaging conditions such as noise, resolution loss, contrast variation, intensity shift, and artifacts. This instability can limit reliable deployment in real-world medical imaging workflows. We propose Robustness via Augmented Multi-corruption Pipeline (RAMP), a robustness-oriented augmentation framework for CT segmentation. RAMP combines anatomically constrained spatial perturbations, CT intensity transformations, and stochastic multi-corruption composition to expose models to clinically plausible image degradation during training. Across two CT segmentation evaluation settings, RAMP achieved the strongest corrupted-image performance and the smallest clean-to-corrupted robustness gap. In the five-organ noisy evaluation benchmark, RAMP improved mean corrupted Dice from 0.610 to 0.753 and reduced the robustness gap from 0.264 to 0.064 compared with the nnU-Net baseline. In Abdomen1K, RAMP improved mean corrupted Dice from 0.633 to 0.789 and reduced the robustness gap from 0.290 to 0.070. Although RAMP did not achieve the highest clean-image Dice, it substantially mitigated worst-case segmentation collapse under severe image degradation. These results suggest that multi-corruption augmentation can serve as a practical pre-deployment strategy for improving the reliability of CT segmentation systems in heterogeneous clinical environments.

05.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-24

RNabel-A Standalone Software Tool for Annotating Tandem Mass Spectra of Modified Ribonucleic Acids

Ribonucleic acid (RNA) modifications, with over 170 identified types, play diverse roles in cellular processes. The past decade has witnessed surging demand for accurate identification and localization of RNA modifications in both endogenous and synthetic therapeutic RNAs. With accurate spectral annotation for RNA, tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) can meet this demand. Here we present RNabel, a user-friendly software tool for in-depth annotation of MS/MS spectra of RNA oligonucleotides. RNabel considers a full set of backbone-cleavage ions (a, b, c, d, a-B, w, x, y, z) in which the ribonucleotide unit could be A, U, C, G, Y (pseudouridine), or I (Inosine). Additionally, RNabel considers 196 modifications on the base, the phosphoribose linkage, the 5' or the 3' terminus, or detachment of a sub-nucleotide fragment as a neutral or charged group. Users can create new components if needed, including ribonucleotides, modifications, neutral or charged groups that could detach from a ribonucleotide. RNabel efficiently processes large datasets in four acceptable formats including .mgf, .raw, .txt from msConvert, and RNabel batch files. Multiple statistical metrics are provided for quality assessment of spectral annotation. To accelerate RNA modification analysis, RNabel is made freely available for Mac and Windows users at https://github.com/songge1111/RNabel/releases.

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

Deep Learning and Elicitability for McKean-Vlasov FBSDEs With Common Noise

arXiv:2512.14967v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present a novel numerical method for solving McKean–Vlasov forward–backward stochastic differential equations (MV–FBSDEs) with common noise, combining Picard iterations, elicitability and deep learning. The key innovation involves elicitability to derive a pathwise loss function, enabling efficient training of neural networks to approximate both the backward process and the conditional expectations arising from common noise, without requiring computationally expensive nested Monte Carlo simulations. The mean-field interaction term is parameterized via a recurrent neural network trained to minimize an elicitable score, while the backward process is approximated through a hybrid feedforward and recurrent network representing the decoupling field. We validate the algorithm on a systemic-risk inter-bank borrowing and lending model, where analytical solutions exist, demonstrating accurate recovery of the true solution. We further extend the model to quantile-mediated interactions, showcasing the flexibility of the elicitability framework beyond conditional means or moments. Finally, we apply the method to a non-stationary Aiyagari–Bewley–Huggett economic growth model with endogenous interest rates, illustrating its applicability to complex mean-field games without closed-form solutions.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

QueryGaussian: Scalable and Training-Free Open-Vocabulary 3D Instance Retrieval

arXiv:2606.19733v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Efficiently retrieving specific 3D instances from large-scale scenes via natural language prompts remains a formidable challenge in multimedia analysis. Existing approaches predominantly follow a "scene-level embedding" paradigm, which requires distilling high-dimensional semantic features into every 3D primitive. This strategy suffers from a fundamental architectural bottleneck: memory and computational costs scale linearly with scene complexity, inevitably triggering out-of-memory (OOM) failures in city-scale environments. To address this barrier, we propose QueryGaussian, a training-free framework for expeditious and scalable open-vocabulary 3D instance retrieval. Unlike holistic semantic distillation, QueryGaussian employs an instance-level query mechanism that decouples semantic understanding from geometric representation. Specifically, we leverage pre-trained 2D vision models to interpret user prompts and lift segmentation masks into 3D via a concurrent maximum-weight association strategy, ensuring semantic-visual consistency. To mitigate projection ambiguity, we introduce a temporal fusion module with multi-stage adaptive density clustering. Experimental results demonstrate that QueryGaussian not only matches the accuracy of state-of-the-art methods but also delivers a decisive efficiency leap, reducing GPU memory usage by over 70% and accelerating inference by 180x. Crucially, QueryGaussian enables expeditious instance retrieval on city-scale scenes containing tens of millions of Gaussians using consumer-grade hardware.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Error-Aware TF-IDF Retrieval-Augmented Generation for ASR Error Correction

End-to-end automatic speech recognition systems frequently hallucinate rare entities and domain-specific terms, especially in low-resource languages. While retrieval-augmented generation frameworks can mitigate these errors using large language models, current architectures face significant challenges. They either rely on standard sparse retrieval that ignores phonetic misrecognitions or utilize heavyweight cross-modal embeddings that introduce high latency. This letter proposes a highly efficient, purely lexical error-aware framework designed to explicitly resolve phonetic and loop hallucinations. Our approach integrates a symmetric text normalization module with a novel error-aware term frequency-inverse document frequency algorithm. By constructing a sparse diagonal penalty matrix based on historical errors, the retriever mathematically prioritizes corrective documents containing specific high-risk misrecognitions. Evaluated on the Persian subset of the FLEURS dataset, our method increased the error-aware hit rate from 53.7% to 90.9%. In end-to-end evaluations, the integrated framework reduced the final word error rate from 23.06% to 18.83%, achieving significant accuracy gains with near-zero inference latency.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

EyeMVP: OCT-Informed Fundus Representation Learning via Paired CFP–OCT Pretraining

Color fundus photography (CFP) is the mainstay for large-scale retinal screening, yet its diagnostic capacity is constrained by the lack of depth-resolved structural information. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) provides cross-sectional retinal anatomy, but is less accessible in population-level screening. Here, we present EyeMVP, a cross-modal retinal foundation model that uses paired CFP–OCT pretraining to learn OCT-informed CFP representations. EyeMVP is pretrained on 674,893 strict same-eye same-day paired CFP–OCT image triples from 112,642 patients across eight hospitals in China. The model uses cross-modal masked reconstruction to enrich CFP representations with OCT-associated supervision, while requiring only CFP images at inference. To accommodate the non-aligned imaging geometry between en-face CFP and cross-sectional OCT, EyeMVP combines source-constrained cross-attention with CFP-derived structural masks. Across 16 downstream tasks, including classification, segmentation, few-shot adaptation, and cross-modal retrieval, EyeMVP outperforms representative retinal foundation models and shows consistent gains on tasks involving macular and optic nerve structure. For CFP-challenging macular diseases, EyeMVP achieves an AUROC of 0.948 for macular edema (vs.~0.852 for EyeCLIP) and 0.825 for myopic macular schisis. In an exploratory reader study, EyeMVP exceeds junior and intermediate ophthalmologist groups but does not reach senior ophthalmologist performance on macular edema, while showing numerically higher balanced accuracy than all reader groups on myopic macular schisis. These results suggest that pixel-level cross-modal reconstruction can enrich CFP representations with OCT-associated supervision, providing a practical route toward stronger CFP-based retinal analysis in screening settings.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Impact of Early Treatment on Symptom Improvement and Procedural Events among Men with BPH and Bothersome Lower Urinary Tract Symptoms: A Contemporary Analysis of the American Urological Association Quality (AQUA) Registry

PURPOSE: As the armamentarium of BPH therapies continues to expand, it remains imperative to maximize patient satisfaction and minimize decisional regret. We sought to determine the impact of time from BPH diagnosis to index treatment on symptom improvement and subsequent procedural events. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We queried the American Urological Association Quality Registry for men [&ge;] 40 years old with BPH, available IPSS data, and no receipt of prior BPH treatment. Index treatment included medication, surgery, or minimally invasive surgical therapy (MIST). Outcomes included IPSS over 3 years of follow-up, change in percentage of mild lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) by 3 months, and time to procedural event. Patients were stratified by time from index diagnosis to treatment by 3 years. Outcomes were compared across time-to-treatment cohorts with appropriate statistical tests with p < 0.05 as significant. RESULTS: 43,919 patients met criteria with 19,642 pursuing treatments. Patients pursued treatment at comparably lower baseline IPSS compared to prior prospective series. Patients undergoing surgery and MIST had significantly higher baseline IPSS, while medical comorbidities were significantly more common among men initiating pharmacotherapy. Early surgery and MIST were associated with significant improvement in IPSS within 6-12 months and an increase in mild LUTS by 3 months. All forms of early treatment were associated with delayed time to procedural events, including catheterization and fulguration. CONCLUSIONS: Early procedural intervention for BPH is associated with early symptom improvement and delayed time to procedural events among real-world, contemporary practice.

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

Mechanisms of Introspective Awareness

arXiv:2603.21396v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent work has shown that LLMs can sometimes detect when steering vectors are injected into their residual stream and identify the injected concept – a phenomenon termed "introspective awareness." We investigate the mechanisms underlying this capability in open-weights models. First, we find that it is behaviorally robust: models detect injected steering vectors at moderate rates with 0% false positives across diverse prompts and dialogue formats. Notably, this capability emerges specifically from post-training; we show that preference optimization algorithms like DPO can elicit it, but standard supervised finetuning does not. We provide evidence that detection cannot be explained by simple linear association between certain steering vectors and directions promoting affirmative responses. We trace the detection mechanism to a two-stage circuit in which "evidence carrier" features in early post-injection layers detect perturbations monotonically along diverse directions, suppressing downstream "gate" features that implement a default negative response. This circuit is absent in base models and robust to refusal ablation. Identification of injected concepts relies on largely distinct later-layer mechanisms that only weakly overlap with those involved in detection. Finally, we show that introspective capability is substantially underelicited: ablating refusal directions improves detection by +53%, and a trained bias vector improves it by +75% on held-out concepts, both without meaningfully increasing false positives. Our results suggest that this introspective awareness of injected concepts is robust and mechanistically nontrivial, and could be substantially amplified in future models. Code: https://github.com/safety-research/introspection-mechanisms.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Benchmarking LLMs' Mathematical Reasoning with Unseen Random Variables Questions

Recent studies have raised significant concerns regarding the reliability of current mathematics benchmarks, highlighting issues such as simplistic design and potential data contamination. Consequently, developing a reliable benchmark that effectively evaluates large language models' (LLMs) genuine capabilities in mathematical reasoning remains a critical challenge. To address these concerns, we propose RV-Bench, a novel evaluation methodology for Benchmarking LLMs with Random Variables in mathematical reasoning. Specifically, we build question-generating functions to produce random variable questions (RVQs), whose background content mirrors original benchmark problems, but with randomized variable combinations, rendering them "unseen" to LLMs. Models must completely understand the inherent question pattern to correctly answer RVQs with diverse variable combinations. Thus, an LLM's genuine reasoning capability is reflected through its accuracy and robustness on RV-Bench. We conducted extensive experiments on over 30 representative LLMs across more than 1,000 RVQs. Our findings propose that LLMs exhibit a proficiency imbalance between encountered and ``unseen'' data distributions. Furthermore, RV-Bench reveals that proficiency generalization across similar mathematical reasoning tasks is limited, but we verified it can still be effectively elicited through test-time scaling.

13.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Global high-resolution mapping of seagrass to support conservation

Authors:

Seagrass ecosystems underpin coastal biodiversity1 and provide vital ecosystem services, including shoreline protection2, food security3 and climate mitigation4. Despite growing recognition as a nature-based climate solution, seagrasses are among the least mapped and most poorly understood vegetated coastal ecosystems5. Here we present, to our knowledge, the first global 10-m spatial resolution maps and change analysis of seagrass extent in clear, shallow coastal waters, derived from 4.75 million Sentinel-2 MSI satellite images for two periods (2019–2020 and 2023–2024). Using a deep-learning classifier trained on curated reference data, we identified 148,506 km2 of seagrass globally, including 5,961 km2 of intertidal and 142,545 km2 of subtidal areas. Sixty-nine per cent of global seagrass extent is concentrated in The Bahamas, Cuba, the USA, Australia and Indonesia, yet only 21% of seagrass areas are located within marine-protected areas. Over the 4 years of the study, 5,969 km2 (4%) of seagrass was lost, and an additional 6,221 km2 (4.2%) was degraded from dense to sparse cover in tropical regions. Our findings identify seagrass meadow hotspots and vulnerable regions to inform conservation and climate policy. Global high-resolution mapping shows widespread seagrass loss and degradation since 2019, with most meadows outside protected areas, highlighting urgent conservation and climate-policy needs.

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

Multi-Label Test-Time Adaptation with Bayesian Conditional Priors

Multi-label recognition with frozen Vision-Language Models (VLMs) is brittle under distribution shift: standard zero-shot inference scores labels independently, ignoring co-occurrence structure and producing incoherent label sets where dominant concepts suppress weaker but compatible labels. We introduce Bayesian Conditional Priors (BCP) Estimation, a gradient-free test-time adaptation method that injects label dependency without tuning the backbone. BCP views zero-shot logits as a proxy for marginal posteriors under a fixed image-text likelihood and attributes shift-induced errors mainly to a mismatched label prior. For each test image, it selects a high-confidence anchor label and applies an anchor-conditioned Bayesian refinement. This update is closed-form in logit space and admits a pointwise mutual information (PMI) interpretation, explicitly promoting compatible labels and suppressing incompatible ones. BCP operates without target annotations by estimating anchor-conditioned priors online from the unlabeled test stream via lightweight second-order co-occurrence statistics, adding negligible overhead beyond a single forward pass. Across standard multi-label benchmarks and multiple CLIP backbones, BCP consistently outperforms strong TTA baselines, e.g., improving RN50 average mAP from 57.31 to 69.22 and ViT-B/16 from 62.61 to 71.79.

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

Neural FOXP2 – Language Specific Neuron Steering for Targeted Language Improvement in LLMs

LLMs are multilingual by training, yet their lingua franca is often English, reflecting English language dominance in pretraining. Other languages remain in parametric memory but are systematically suppressed. We argue that language defaultness is governed by a sparse, low-rank control circuit, language neurons, that can be mechanistically isolated and safely steered. We introduce Neural FOXP2, that makes a chosen language (Hindi or Spanish) primary in a model by steering language-specific neurons. Neural FOXP2 proceeds in three stages: (i) Localize: We train per-layer SAEs so each activation decomposes into a small set of active feature components. For every feature, we quantify English vs. Hindi/Spanish selectivity overall logit-mass lift toward the target-language token set. Tracing the top-ranked features back to their strongest contributing units yields a compact language-neuron set. (ii) Steering directions: We localize controllable language-shift geometry via a spectral low-rank analysis. For each layer, we build English to target activation-difference matrices and perform layerwise SVD to extract the dominant singular directions governing language change. The eigengap and effective-rank spectra identify a compact steering subspace and an empirically chosen intervention window (where these directions are strongest and most stable). (iii) Steer: We apply a signed, sparse activation shift targeted to the language neurons. Concretely, within low to mid layers we add a positive steering along the target-language dominant directions and a compensating negative shift toward the null space for the English neurons, yielding controllable target-language defaultness.

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

Decoherence as Defence and the Magnitude of Noise Regularisation: A Rigorous N -Qubit Theory of Stochastic Quantum Neural Networks for Adversarially Robust Network Intrusion Detection

Stochastic quantum neural networks (SQNNs) encode neuronal activations as qubits, synaptic topology as entanglement, and neural noise through a Lindblad master equation. A recent conference study applied a ring-entangled SQNN to collaborative intrusion detection and reached three conclusions: ring entanglement is essential for non-local anomaly detection; an adversarial-resilience bound holds but is conservative; and the depolarising channel fails to act as a dropout-style regulariser, behaving instead as output noise. It left open whether a per-gate stochastic deactivation (``true quantum dropout'') could regularise where the depolarising channel could not, and whether the loose robustness bound could be replaced by a predictive theory. This paper resolves both and extends the framework to real data and to neutral-atom hardware. We give an $N$-qubit formulation through the stochastic master equation and its vectorised Liouvillian, and prove a decoherence-contraction theorem: a depolarising channel of strength $\gamma$ over $L$ entangling layers contracts every weight-$w$ Pauli read-out by a factor $(1-4\gamma/3)^{wL}$ (for the weight-$1$ read-out used here, $(1-4\gamma/3)^{L}$); building on the general noise-as-defence result of Du et al., we make this quantitative and operational for intrusion detection. On the real NSL-KDD dataset under white-box FGSM and PGD attacks, a depolarising SQNN trained with the channel is, over seven seeds under strong $\ell_\infty$/$\ell_2$ attacks, significantly more robust than the noiseless circuit ($\ell_\infty$ PGD-$20$, $p=0.04$, large effect) and, critically, never suffers the catastrophic robustness collapse that the noiseless model and gradient-trained classical detectors (which fall from $95\%$ to $47\%$) do, cutting robustness variance roughly twofold; we show this robustness arises from a noise-reshaped training boundary rather than from attack-time gradient contraction. For generalisation, we derive an adaptive-penalty formula showing that per-gate dropout implements a curvature-weighted $L_2$ penalty $\tfrac{p(1-p)}{2}\sum\theta^2\partial^2_\theta L$ in weight space, maximised at $p=1/2$, whereas depolarising noise implements an output-space penalty. A $30$-seed study confirms the formula's quantitative prediction: both mechanisms reduce the train-test gap by a small but statistically significant margin ($\approx\!0.01$; $p

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

DYNA-PRUNER: Input-Adaptive Data-Model Co-Pruning for Efficient and Scalable Spatio-Temporal Media Prediction

Spatio-temporal prediction supports radar/satellite nowcasting and city-scale traffic monitoring, but modern models are often too expensive for real-time deployment. This stems from a mismatch between dense computation and strong input-dependent redundancy (e.g., calm seas or clear skies). To enable automated, resource-aware architecture optimization in scalable media analysis, we propose Dyna-Pruner, an end-to-end framework for input-dependent co-pruning of data and model structure. A shared-importance synchronization mechanism generates coupled masks that prune redundant regions and their corresponding computational units (e.g., convolutional filters), yielding per-sample sparse sub-networks at inference time. Experiments on WeatherBench, SEVIR, and TaxiBJ show seamless integration with CNN, RNN, and Transformer backbones, reducing FLOPs by up to $70\%$ and achieving a $2.5\times$ speedup on NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin with negligible accuracy loss ($

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

P$^2$CE: Model-Agnostic Plausible Pareto-Optimal Counterfactual Explanations

arXiv:2606.18418v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The increasing use of machine learning algorithms in social applications has raised concerns about fairness and transparency, leading to the development of counterfactual explanations. These explanations supports individuals to understand and potentially alter unfavorable decisions in areas such as loan applications, job selections, and more, by providing actionable changes to input features that would lead to a desired outcome. Existing methods often struggle to balance feasibility, plausibility, and computational efficiency. To address this, we introduce P$^2$CE, an algorithm for generating plausible Pareto-optimal counterfactual explanations, offering users a diverse set of optimal trade-offs between different notions of feasibility. P$^2$CE employs an auxiliary isolation forest outlier detector to ensure that explanations are in accordance with the data distribution and leverages SHAP values to obtain optimal results with short computing times, regardless of the underlying model. Our algorithm was empirically evaluated on three datasets, demonstrating superior performance in terms of both solution quality and computational efficiency compared to related techniques.

19.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Reimagining machine vision with optical computing

Authors: Unknown Author

A general-purpose artificial-intelligence vision system for use in image-sensing devices has been developed by embedding fundamentals of core computer-vision operations into a light-manipulating planar material called an optical metasurface. A prototype enables accurate, real-time perception and processing across diverse tasks, suggesting that this could be a solution for rapid, low-energy, on-device vision intelligence. A specialized ‘metasurface’ can preprocess incoming scene information on image-generating devices.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Bound State Solutions of the Relativistic Finite-difference Equation for the Ring-shaped Quesne Oscillator Potential

arXiv:2606.12082v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We solve exactly the relativistic finite-difference equation for the quantum three-dimensional ring-shaped Quesne oscillator potential. Our investigation is based on a finite-difference version of relativistic quantum mechanics. So-called relativistic configurational r-space is a key concept here. We show that the radial wavefunctions and angular wavefunctions are expressed through the continuous dual Hahn polynomials and Jacobi polynomials, respectively. A discrete energy spectrum has been found. The radial wave functions and energy spectrum have the correct nonrelativistic limit. We also build a dynamical symmetry group SU (1, 1) for the radial part of the equation of motion, which allows us to find the energy spectrum purely algebraically.

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

Automatic identification of diagnosis from hospital discharge letters via weakly supervised Natural Language Processing

Identifying patient diagnoses from hospital discharge letters is essential for large-scale cohort selection and epidemiological research, but traditional supervised approaches require extensive manual annotation, which is often impractical for large textual datasets. We present a weakly supervised Natural Language Processing (NLP) pipeline for classifying Italian discharge letters without document-level manual annotation. The method extracts diagnosis-related sentences, generates semantic embeddings using a transformer model further pre-trained on Italian medical documents, and applies a two-level clustering procedure to derive weak labels that are then used to train a document-level classifier. The approach was evaluated in a case study on bronchiolitis using 33,176 discharge letters of children admitted to 44 emergency rooms or hospitals in the Veneto Region, Italy, between 2017 and 2020. The best weakly supervised model achieved an AUROC of 77.68% ($\pm4.30\%$), an AUPRC of 73.13% ($\pm4.93\%$), and an F1-score of 78.14% ($\pm4.89\%$) against manually annotated data. Performance surpassed unsupervised baselines and approached fully supervised models, while reducing the need for manual annotation by more than 1,500 hours for a dataset of this size. Similar model rankings were observed in a secondary validation on a smaller bronchitis dataset (3,188 discharge letters, 2020-2025), where the best weakly supervised model achieved an AUPRC of 76.72% ($\pm 5.02\%$). These results suggest the potential of weakly supervised NLP methods for scalable disease identification from clinical discharge letters.

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

Want Better Synthetic Data? Steer It: Activation Steering for Low-Resource Language Generation

Large language models (LLMs) have become an effective tool for synthetic data generation, including for low-resource languages, where generated data can improve downstream task performance. Current best-performing approaches typically rely on few-shot prompting with target-language examples, which increases inference costs and may reduce diversity through lexical anchoring. In this work, we investigate activation steering as an alternative for low-resource synthetic data generation. We study two steering strategies: Language Steering, which targets the linguistic identity of a language, and Quality Steering, which captures well-formedness by contrasting human-written and backtranslated text representations. We evaluate these methods across four open-source LLMs, multiple layers, and 11 typologically diverse languages by generating sentiment and topic classification data and finetuning smaller classifiers. Steering is applied in both zero-shot and few-shot prompting settings and compared against non-steered counterparts. Our results show that steering on early layers consistently improves the diversity of generated data while often yielding stronger downstream model performance, particularly for low-resource languages.

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

Running the Gauntlet: Re-evaluating the Capabilities of Agents Beyond Familiar Environments

arXiv:2606.14397v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As agentic systems continue to evolve and are widely deployed in real-world scenarios, there is a growing demand to faithfully evaluate their capabilities. However, current benchmarks are typically built on popular applications with relatively simple tasks and focus on a narrow set of capabilities while overlooking broader dimensions, resulting in saturated performance on modern agents and failing to probe their limitations. To this end, we introduce GauntletBench, a web-based benchmark for evaluating agent generalisation in challenging scenarios, focusing on three underexplored capabilities (temporal perception, graphical understanding, and 3D reasoning), across five less-covered professional applications (Video Editor, Workflow Builder, 3D Modeller, Flight Analyser, and Circuit Designer), each with 20 vision-intensive tasks (100 in total). Our benchmark provides a modular pipeline that comprises an environment compatible with both open- and closed-source agent frameworks, a controlled web-based application, a well-structured task suite, and an automated evaluation engine with diverse metrics. Contrary to widespread expectations, our empirical results reveal that frontier agentic systems remain far from achieving human-level performance. Even the state-of-the-art agent achieves only a 19.1% success rate on our GauntletBench, highlighting the limitations in these overlooked capabilities and generalisation. By comparison, non-expert human annotators achieve over 80% success on our challenging yet feasible tasks, revealing the substantial gap between current agent capabilities and those required for complex real-world scenarios.

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

Rational Sparse Autoencoder

arXiv:2606.14990v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are standard tools for mechanistic interpretability, but current SAE families are constrained by fixed encoder nonlinearities such as ReLU, JumpReLU, and TopK. This hard-codes a particular sparsity mechanism into the model and can distort the reconstruction-versus-sparsity trade-off. We introduce the Rational Sparse Autoencoder (RSAE), which replaces the fixed encoder activation with a trainable rational function. Rational activations are flexible enough to uniformly approximate the activation primitives used by existing SAE families on compact domains (for TopK, the thresholded gate obtained after a separating top-k threshold is supplied), while also providing a richer function class for adapting to the observed pre-activation geometry. We realise this idea through a two-stage pipeline: an initialisation procedure that copies the pre-trained baseline SAE weights, plugs in rational coefficients obtained by the relaxed Remez exchange on synthetic data, and calibrates the scale parameters along with the rational coefficients; followed by a fine-tuning step under the standard sparsity-regularised reconstruction objective. Empirically, on residual-stream activations of three open-weight language models and across all three baseline activation families, the RSAE strictly improves on it after the fine-tuning step, both on reconstruction-side metrics and on downstream-behaviour metrics, without sacrificing feature-level interpretability under sparse probing. These gains are consistent across host language models, across baseline activation families, and across the full range of baseline sparsity we tested, while the upgrade itself adds only a handful of scalar parameters per autoencoder and runs in minutes on a single consumer GPU.

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

Model Graph Inductive Learning for Knowledge Graph Completion

arXiv:2606.16509v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Link prediction in knowledge graphs fundamentally depends on the quality of learned embeddings for entities and relations. However, most existing methods derive these embeddings by aggregating only the local neighborhood of each entity, neglecting the global structure of the knowledge graph. This limited view prevents models from capturing higher-level structural patterns that are essential for accurate and generalizable link prediction. To address these limitations, we introduce Model Graph Inductive Learning (MGIL), a framework that constructs a model graph by clustering entities based on the similarity of their incoming and outgoing relational structures or their entity types. A GNN is then applied to this model graph to produce embeddings that capture the global view of the knowledge graph. These embeddings subsequently serve as high-quality initial features %embeddings for the original knowledge graph, replacing random initialization and leading to more stable and expressive representations. Extensive experiments on standard and recently proposed inductive benchmarks demonstrate that MGIL achieves state-of-the-art or highly competitive performance in inductive link prediction, highlighting its effectiveness across diverse graph settings.