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01.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-18

Ten simple rules for turning your qualifying exam into an NIH-style fellowship proposal: A guide for graduate students

by Courtney Peña-Lima, Cameron S. Bader, Brendan K. Ball, Troy C. Dildine, Mekhala V. Dissanayake, Iris van ‘t Erve, Albina Ibrayeva, Amy Nippert, M.K. Quinn, Chelse Spinner, Samuel Thompson, Antonio Tomasso, Crystal M. Botham Qualifying exams, often referred to as “quals” or candidacy exams, are an important milestone in doctoral programs. Although the style of quals varies greatly by program and institution, it is usually a proposal that requires students to develop research ideas as well as their scientific writing skills. Many quals are modeled after funding mechanisms that graduate students can apply to and on a topic that the student will pursue in their dissertation. This paper offers graduate students a step-by-step guide on how to turn their quals into a fellowship-style research proposal, using National Institutes of Health (NIH) mechanisms as a benchmark, as this is the norm within US research institutions. This paper will be most useful for students who have completed or are in the process of completing proposal-based qualifying exams, usually in the second year of a doctoral program.

02.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Light slows down carbon nanotubes in water

Water-suspended carbon nanotubes move more slowly in green light, suggesting that excited electrons in the tubes couple to the water through ‘quantum friction’. Water-suspended carbon nanotubes move more slowly in green light, suggesting that excited electrons in the tubes couple to the water through ‘quantum friction’.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Calibrated Sampling-Free Uncertainty Estimation in Bayesian Deep Learning

arXiv:2606.16214v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern deep learning models remain notoriously prone to overconfidence, limiting their reliability in high-stakes applications. Bayesian methods aim to counter this by learning a distribution over model parameters, and recent advances now make this feasible for large-scale architectures at costs comparable to AdamW. However, a challenge remains at test time: predictions must be averaged across many forward passes with weights sampled from the posterior, which is prohibitively expensive. Variance propagation offers an efficient alternative, computing layer-wise analytical approximations of uncertainty in a single forward pass. While such techniques are effective for MLPs, their extension to modern architectures remains challenging, due to increased depth and diversity of layer types. To fill this gap, we propose Calibrated Variance Propagation (CVP), which introduces a new propagation method for normalization layers, combines it with recent techniques for handling activation functions, and absorbs residual error through a light calibration step. CVP yields comparably accurate uncertainty estimates to MC sampling across transformers and CNNs, at a fraction of the cost. Against prior variance propagation work, CVP improves coverage at $0.5\%$ risk from $8.2\%$ to $14.6\%$ with BEiT-3 on Visual Reasoning (NLVR2) and from $2.6\%$ to $10.8\%$ with ViLT on VQAv2, with gains extending to convolutional architectures.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Brain-gut axis imaging, motion correction with 11C-carfentanil total-body PET

Background: Mu-opioid receptors (MORs) are expressed throughout the body including in the brain and gastrointestinal (GI) tract. Total-body PET imaging of the brain and GI tract offers a promising approach for cross-sectional in vivo evaluation of the MOR brain-GI axis. However, intestinal motility and bladder filling introduce motion throughout the GI tract over the scan window. Here we establish analysis methodology to account for motion for dynamic imaging of the brain-GI axis, to further characterize peripheral MORs throughout the body and provide a framework for semi-automatic total-body PET modeling. Methods: 4 subjects underwent 90-min dynamic [11C]-carfentanil (cfn) total-body PET acquisitions at baseline, after intravenous naloxone (central antagonist) administration, and after orally administered loperamide (peripheral agonist and P-glycoprotein substrate). Thalamic MOR availability was measured using the Logan reference tissue model. Using CT-based segmentation, the GI tract was subdivided into anatomical segments, in addition to other peripheral organs (e.g., liver, psoas muscle). Frame-by-frame semi-automatic motion correction was performed with three distinct reference frames (11-14 min post-injection, p.i., 35-40 min p.i., and 85-90 min p.i.). The performance of these three were compared to manual correction. Compartment modeling and Logan graphical analysis were performed to estimate relevant kinetic parameters (K1, VT, VTLogan). Results: Across the 4 subjects and regions, kinetic parameter estimates were highly correlated (r>0.7) for K1, VT and VT Logan when comparing semi-automatic (reference frame at 35-40 min p.i.) and manual correction. With semi-automatic motion correction, graphical-based estimation of VTLogan in the gastrointestinal tract was significantly decreased with loperamide relative to baseline (p

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

PhysVLA: Towards Physically-Grounded VLA for Embodied Robotic Manipulation

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models excel at mapping visual inputs and natural language instructions directly to robotic control policies. However, because they are trained primarily to fit behavioural demonstration data, they do not explicitly enforce fundamental physical principles such as rigid-body dynamics or contact constraints. This exposes a critical physics gap: standard temporal smoothing applied on top of single-step or chunked VLAs trades trajectory quality for added failures that short-term memory cannot resolve. To bridge this gap, we introduce PhysVLA (Physics-VLA), a plug-and-play, inference-time framework designed to wrap any frozen VLA backbone without retraining, fine-tuning, or weight access, with less than 1 ms of overhead per control step. PhysVLA intercepts the predicted control action, captures only the simulator or system state, and applies a dual-layered correction: (i) a phase-aware finite-state machine that structures discrete task segments (approach, grasp, transport, and place), and (ii) a selective Euler-Lagrange gate that activates only when a dynamics oracle detects kinodynamic inconsistency. Evaluated across OpenVLA, OpenVLA-OFT, Force-VLA, and Generalist-VLA on LIBERO-Spatial with a 7-DoF Franka Panda, the framework delivers absolute success rate increases of up to 17% and stability increases of up to 19% with no per-task regressions, improves trajectory efficiency by up to 15% across all four backbones, and shows up to a 10x improvement in trajectory jerk robustness on a Robosuite Lift cross-simulator sweep. We further validate the framework on a real Agilex Piper arm with a pick-and-place task, confirming that PhysVLA transfers to physical hardware without retraining, with success-rate improvements of up to 50%, establishing physical awareness as a composable, backbone-agnostic runtime module.

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

EfficientRollout: System-Aware Self-Speculative Decoding for RL Rollouts

arXiv:2606.18967v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a representative post-training paradigm for LLMs, enabling strong reasoning and agentic capabilities. However, rollout generation remains a dominant latency bottleneck because autoregressive sampling decodes responses sequentially and a small number of long-tailed generations often determine completion time. Speculative decoding (SD) offers a natural way to address this bottleneck, as it is a well-established technique for serving fixed LLMs that reduces latency by rapidly drafting tokens and accepting them through parallel verification while preserving the target-model distribution. However, its practical speedups do not directly carry over to RL rollouts: (i) the evolving target policy makes any fixed drafter increasingly mismatched with the policy's output distribution; and (ii) active batch sizes shrink throughout rollout decoding, shifting decoding from compute-bound to memory-bound regimes where parallel verification can exploit underutilized compute. Therefore, accelerating RL rollouts requires both a drafter that remains effective under long, high-temperature generations from an evolving policy and system-aware use of SD that avoids compute-bound regimes. We present EfficientRollout, a system-aware self-SD framework designed to address this gap for RL rollouts. EfficientRollout induces a quantized drafter from the target model (i.e. self-speculative decoding), keeping it coupled to the evolving policy without separate drafter pretraining or online adaptation. It further coordinates a system-aware SD toggle policy with acceptance-aware draft-length adaptation, enabling speculation only in beneficial regimes while matching the drafting budget to evolving drafter quality. EfficientRollout reduces rollout and end-to-end latency by up to 19.6% and 12.7%, respectively, over an accelerated AR rollout baseline, while preserving final model quality.

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

DF-ExpEnse: Diffusion Filtered Exploration for Sample Efficient Finetuning

arXiv:2606.19656v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A natural recipe for intelligent robotic decision-making is initializing from pretrained generative control policies, which have summarized offline experience, and adapting them to self-collected online experience. We present DF-ExpEnse, an exploration technique that improves the quality of online experience collection, thus increasing finetuning sample-efficiency. DF-ExpEnse leverages the multimodal modeling capabilities of the generative control policy to create an expressive and tractably evaluatable candidate set. It then utilizes an ensemble of critics to identify the action that best balances quality with high exploration interest. In fleet settings, DF-ExpEnse further enables cross-agent communication to facilitate collaborative exploration as a group. DF-ExpEnse can be seamlessly integrated with existing strategies that finetune pretrained generative control policies via reinforcement learning. We experimentally validate consistent sample-efficiency benefits through DF-ExpEnse across a variety of manipulation and locomotion tasks, compared to default finetuning and alternative action selection schemes. Project can be found at https://df-expense.github.io.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Mapping molecular polariton transport via pump-probe microscopy

arXiv:2504.15501v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We demonstrate how the transport properties of molecular polaritons in optical cavities can be extracted from a microscopic modeling of pump-probe spectroscopy. Our approach combines a mean-field treatment of the light-matter Hamiltonian with a perturbative expansion of both light and matter components, along with spatial coarse-graining. This approach extends semiclassical cavity spectroscopy to multimode light-matter interactions, providing full access to spatially resolved transient spectra. By simulating a microscopy experiment with counter-propagating pump and probe pulses, we compute the differential transmission and show how molecular dephasing and persistent dark exciton populations drive sub-group-velocity transport of the root-mean-square displacement. We analyze transport across the polariton dispersion, showing how velocity renormalization correlates with excitonic weight, consistent with experimental observations, and further its dependence on the rate of molecular dephasing. Our results highlight the need to consider measured spectroscopic observables when characterizing transport in polaritonic systems.

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

Hybrid Iterative Neural Low-Regularity Integrator for Nonlinear Dispersive Equations

arXiv:2605.04853v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose HIN-LRI, a hybrid framework that augments a classical numerical solver with a neural operator trained to correct the solver's structured truncation error. A base low-regularity integrator provides a consistent first-order approximation to nonlinear dispersive PDEs, while a lightweight neural network, operating on a low-dimensional latent manifold, learns the residual defect that analytical methods cannot close. An explicit time-step scaling on the neural correction ensures that its Lipschitz contribution remains $\mathcal{O}(\tau)$, yielding a Gronwall stability factor bounded uniformly in the step size and independent of the spatial resolution. The network is trained end-to-end through a solver-in-the-loop objective that unrolls the full iteration and penalises trajectory error in a Bourgain-type norm, aligning learning with multi-step solver dynamics rather than isolated one-step targets. Under stated assumptions, the global error satisfies $C(\varepsilon_{net}+\delta)\,\tau^\gamma\ln(1/\tau)$, where $\varepsilon_{net}$ measures the network approximation quality and $\delta$ the training shortfall. Experiments on three dispersive benchmarks with rough data show that HIN-LRI improves accuracy over analytical integrators, splitting methods, and neural PDE surrogates, with stable spatial refinement, effective out-of-distribution transfer, and modest online overhead.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Quantum correlations in QBism's reconstruction program

arXiv:2606.07485v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: QBism recasts quantum theory as a normative framework for an agent's probability assignments, with the Born rule taking the form of a consistency condition known as the Urgleichung. Motivated by this perspective, qplex theories provide a broader class of probabilistic models in which the sets of valid states and measurements are constrained by QBist-inspired geometric conditions. While qplexes have been extensively studied for single systems, their implications for bipartite correlations remain largely unexplored. In this work, we investigate bipartite correlations in qplex theories by expressing joint expectation values as inner products between suitably defined $C$-vectors. This geometric formulation allows Bell-type inequalities to be studied as optimization problems over qplex-compatible probability assignments. We first analyze the CHSH scenario and show that the shared inner-product structure of the $C$-vectors restricts the maximal value to the Tsirelson bound $2\sqrt{2}$. We then turn to the three-outcome CGLMP inequality $I_{2233}$ and find that the same qplex-derived norm and inner-product constraints allow a violation of up to $\leq 2+2\sqrt(3)/3 \approx 3.1547$ versus the quantum maximum of $\approx 2.8729$, thereby exhibiting super-quantum correlations. These results show that qplex geometry captures enough structure to reproduce an important quantum bound in the two-outcome case, but not enough to recover the full set of quantum correlation constraints. The analysis therefore suggests that additional principles are needed to complete the QBist reconstruction of quantum theory.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

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

Authors:

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

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Diffusive Dynamics of Nonstabilizerness

arXiv:2606.13606v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Symmetries shape the quantum-information dynamics of many-body systems, but their effect on nonstabilizerness, the resource complementary to entanglement, is less understood. We compute the stabilizer Rényi entropy, a measure of nonstabilizerness, in $\mathrm{U}(1)$-symmetric one-dimensional random circuits. The disorder-averaged dynamics is captured by a four-replica tensor network, which we evaluate by $S_4$-adapted infinite time-evolving block decimation (iTEBD) directly in the thermodynamic limit. Together with a hydrodynamic argument, our results identify a diffusive universality class for the late-time approach of nonstabilizerness to its random-state value, with the stabilizer Rényi entropy gap closing as $1/t$. The same scaling is verified in an energy-conserving nonintegrable Ising chain. More broadly, our framework provides a hydrodynamic perspective on nonstabilizerness generation and offers insight into the design of approximate Haar-random states in Hamiltonian dynamics.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

A Data-Centric Framework for Detecting and Correcting Corrupted Labels

arXiv:2606.11699v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The performance of machine learning and deep learning models largely depends on the quality of the training data. However, the quality of the real-world datasets is often compromised by noisy labels, which can substantially degrade model accuracy and reliability. To address this challenge, we propose Relabeler, an end-to-end data-centric framework for detecting and correcting corrupted labels. For corrupted label detection, Relabeler jointly leverages both local and global relationships among data instances to identify potentially noisy samples. After detecting suspicious instances, Relabeler further performs label correction by estimating the most probable clean label for each instance based on both its input features and observed noisy label. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets, noise types, and noise rates demonstrate that Relabeler consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving up to 58% improvement in label correction precision and 6% improvement in downstream task performance.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Graph2Idea:Retrieval-Augmented Scientific Idea Generation with Graph-Structured Contexts

arXiv:2606.09105v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Generating novel, feasible, and high-quality research ideas is an important yet challenging task in scientific discovery. Recent Large Language Model (LLM)-based methods often ground idea generation with retrieved literature, but the retrieved evidence is usually provided as flat text, such as titles, abstracts, or summaries. Such flat contexts may contain redundant or weakly relevant information, while making cross-paper relations among problems, methods, mechanisms, and findings difficult to identify and trace. To address this challenge, we propose Graph2Idea, a knowledge graph-guided framework for retrieval-augmented scientific idea generation.Graph2Idea first retrieves papers according to the input topic, transforms them into structured knowledge triples, and dynamically constructs a target-centered knowledge graph to make literature relations explicit. It then extracts compact graph-derived contexts that retain target-relevant relational evidence while reducing noisy textual input. Based on these contexts, a two-stage generation process first identifies promising research directions and then guides the LLM to synthesize candidate ideas from graph-grounded evidence. Experiments on a scientific idea generation benchmark show that Graph2Idea outperforms representative baselines under the automatic evaluation protocol. Compared with the strongest baseline scores, it improves Novelty from 0.45 to 0.52, Quality from 0.24 to 0.29, and Feasibility from 0.22 to 0.28. These results suggest that graph-structured evidence helps LLMs generate research ideas through more explicit, compact, and traceable recombination of prior scientific knowledge.

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

Scalable and Interpretable Representation Alignment with Ordinal Similarity

arXiv:2606.16379v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating representation similarity is fundamental to representation learning. However, existing metrics suffer from significant limitations: they lack interpretability due to shifting baselines, lack robustness to outliers, and are computationally intractable for large datasets, forcing reliance on heuristic approximations. To address this, we develop an ordinal-similarity framework, instantiated by the Triplet (TSI) and Quadruplet (QSI) Similarity Indices, which measure alignment by quantifying the consistency of ordinal relationships. We theoretically demonstrate this formulation is inherently interpretable, robust to outliers, and computationally efficient. Finally, we establish a formal equivalence between TSI and local neighborhood alignment, measured by Mutual Nearest Neighbors. Empirically, we validate these properties and show that ordinal similarity offers a scalable approach to measuring alignment, enabling practitioners to better understand and design representations.

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

Multi-Modal Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Network with Mixture of Experts for Soil Organic Carbon Prediction

Top-soil organic carbon (SOC) prediction is fundamental to agricultural sustainability, land use policy and fertilization planning. Existing approaches face two limitations: they pair hand-crafted covariates with classical ML or single-modal deep models that miss rich spectral and temporal information, and grid-based architectures ignore the irregular spatial structure of field measurements. We introduce SpTGNN, a multi-modal spatio-temporal graph neural network addressing both. SpTGNN represents soil measurements as nodes in a heterogeneous graph with three edge types (spatial proximity, spectral similarity, elevation), and applies relational graph attention to learn separate patterns per relation. A fine-tuned TerraMind encoder extracts node features from Sentinel-2, Sentinel-1 and DEM signals, combined with per-sample environmental covariates and learned positional and temporal embeddings. A sparse Mixture-of-Experts module fuses the four streams via top-$k$ routing. Uncertainty is captured by pairing heteroscedastic regression (aleatoric) with deep ensembles (epistemic), and a Moran's $I$ penalty regularizes spatial autocorrelation. We evaluate on a global SOC corpus split into three regional instances ($\sim$49k samples globally, Africa $\sim$26k, Europe $\sim$14k). Our 5-member deep ensemble reports $R^2=0.762$, RMSE $=3.51\pm0.48$ g/kg and MAPE $=22.9\%$ on the Africa test split, improving over a tabular XGBoost baseline; the best single checkpoint reaches validation $R^2=0.864$. Ablations confirm the heterogeneous graph, MoE fusion and fine-tuned backbone each contribute substantively, and the ensemble UQ stack achieves post-calibration ECE of $0.031$ (hybrid) and $0.026$ ($\beta$-NLL). To our knowledge, this is the first framework to unify foundation-model feature extraction, heterogeneous graph attention and decomposed uncertainty quantification for SOC estimation.

17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Hua-Chen New Theory of Economic Optimization

arXiv:2504.19134v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Between 1957-1985, Chinese mathematician Loo-Keng Hua pioneered economic optimization theory through three key contributions: establishing economic stability's fundamental theorem, proving the uniqueness of equilibrium solutions in economic systems, and developing a consumption-integrated model 50 days before his death. Since 1988, Mu-Fa Chen has been working on Hua's theory. He introduced stochastics, namely Markov chains, to economic optimization theory. He updated and developed Hua's model and came up with a new model (Chen's model) which has become the starting point of a new economic optimization theory. Chen's theory can be applied to economic stability test, bankruptcy prediction, product ranking and classification, economic prediction and adjustment, economic structure optimization. Chen's theory can also provide efficient algorithms that are programmable and intelligent. {Stochastics} is the cornerstone of Chen's theory. There is no overlap between Chen's theory, and the existing mathematical economy theory and the economics developments that were awarded Nobel Prizes in Economics between 1969 and 2024. The distinguished features of Chen's theory from the existing theories are quantitative, calculable, predictable, optimizable, programmable and can be intelligent. This survey provides a theoretical overview of the newly published monograph [5rw24]. Specifically, the invariant of the economic structure matrix, also known as the Chen's invariant, was first published in this survey.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Bidirectional associations between cannabis use, oddball performance, and P3 event-related potential

Importance: Cannabis use remains prevalent in youth despite concerns regarding its potential impact on cognitive function. Unraveling whether the association between cannabis use and cognition is partially due to preexisting differences or primarily related to use is vital to understanding underlying mechanisms. Objective: To estimate the longitudinal association between cannabis initiation and cognitive trajectories, indexed by task performance and P3 event-related potential (ERP), and to estimate whether baseline cognition is associated with cannabis initiation. Design: Data were analyzed from the ongoing longitudinal Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism (COGA) cohort, which was followed up approximately every 2-5 years from 2004 to 2025. Setting: 6 sites across the United States. Participants: Adolescent and young adult offspring of past COGA participants and control families who reported on their cannabis use and who had Visual Oddball (VOP) performance and P3 ERP data (N=4814; 52.4% female, 68.4% white) were grouped based on the timing of cognitive data collection relative to cannabis initiation into Pre-onset (n=2,449; [&ge;]1 assessment) and Post-onset (n=998; [&ge;]3 assessments) subsamples. Main Outcomes and Measures: VOP measures include performance accuracy (%), reaction times (ms), and P3 amplitude (V) and latency (ms) during target trials. Cannabis measures included lifetime use of cannabis (i.e., ever used) and age at first use. Results: High P3 amplitude, and prolonged P3 latency and reaction time were associated with a reduced hazard of cannabis initiation (All Hazards Ratio, [H.R.s]< 0.91, p's

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

From Tokens to Regions: CUDA-Sensitive Instruction Tuning for GPU Kernel Generation

arXiv:2606.16231v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: High-performance CUDA kernels are essential for scalable AI systems, while Large Language Models (LLMs) still struggle to generate correct kernels due to strict and implicit execution constraints. Existing LLM-based approaches either rely on costly agentic or reinforcement-learning (RL) pipelines, or adopt supervised fine-tuning (SFT) objectives that fail to explicitly model CUDA sensitivity, namely code tokens or regions tightly coupled with execution constraints. In this work, we investigate CUDA sensitivity from the perspective of token confidence patterns, showing that CUDA sensitivity appears at both token and region levels, where most CUDA-sensitive tokens are predicted with high confidence, while a smaller low-confidence subset forms regions corresponding to execution-critical structures. These findings suggest that effective CUDA kernel generation should both leverage high-confidence CUDA-sensitive tokens and preserve low-confidence CUDA-sensitive regions. Building on these insights, we propose \underline{CUDA-\underline{Se}nsitive Instruction \underline{T}uning (CuSeT)}, a low-cost post-training method within a simple SFT framework. CuSeT follows the principle of ``from tokens to regions'' by combining adaptive token-level masking with region-aware sample reweighting. Experiments show that CuSeT consistently improves functional correctness across multiple model families and scales, outperforming standard SFT and advanced SFT variants, while achieving competitive performance against frontier CUDA kernel generation models with substantially lower inference cost.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Dimension-Free Approximate Tensorization of Quantum Hypercontractivity for Qudit Depolarizing Semigroups

arXiv:2606.17729v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove almost tensorization for hypercontractivity and logarithmic-Sobolev constants for a class of reversible quantum Markov semigroups satisfying the positive off-diagonal scaling (PODS) property. This class includes qubit examples and generalized depolarizing semigroups with respect to full-rank states in arbitrary finite dimensions. For any such semigroup $(\Phi_t)_{t\ge 0}$ and every tensor power $n$, we show that the log-Sobolev constant of the product semigroup $\Phi_t^{\otimes n}$ is at least $2/(3\ln 2)$, approximately 0.96, times the log-Sobolev constant of the single-site semigroup $\Phi_t$, independently of $n$ and the local dimension $d$. The proof first establishes exact tensorization of the $(q,2)$-hypercontractive inequality for integer $q$, in particular $q=3$, and then extends the estimate to all real $q>2$ by complex interpolation; the standard implication from hypercontractivity to logarithmic-Sobolev inequalities yields the stated almost tensorization result. As an application of the same method, we also obtain sharp $(q,2)$-hypercontractivity estimates for qubit depolarizing channels.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

TreeGRNG: Binary Tree Gaussian Random Number Generator for Efficient Probabilistic AI Hardware

arXiv:2606.16599v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) offer opportunities for greatly enhancing the trustworthiness of conventional neural networks by monitoring the uncertainties in decision-making. A significant drawback for BNN inference at the extreme edge, however, is the imperative need to incorporate Gaussian Random Number Generators (GRNG) within each neuron. State-of-the-art GRNG algorithms heavily depend on multiple arithmetic operations and the use of extensive look-up tables, posing significant implementation challenges for ultra-low power hardware implementations. To overcome this, this paper presents an innovative binary tree random number generator (TreeGRNG) allowing the use of ultra-low-cost constant comparators instead of arithmetic units. We further enhance the TreeGRNG proposal with a set of hardware-aware optimizations exploiting the Gaussian properties. The optimized TreeGRNG surpasses the State-of-the-Art (SoTA) in terms of distribution accuracy while achieving a 3.7$\times$ reduction in energy per sample and boosting the throughput per unit area by 5.8$\times$. Moreover, our TreeGRNG proposal possesses a distinct advantage over the current SoTA in terms of flexibility, as it easily enables designers to adjust the shape of the sampled probability distribution, extending beyond the capabilities of traditional GRNGs, opening the horizon towards future probabilistic AI designs. The TreeGRNG design is available open-source in the link

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Focus When Necessary: Adaptive Routing and Collaborative Grounding for Training-Free Visual Grounding

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel in cross-modal reasoning, they often struggle to perceive fine-grained details in complex high-resolution images. Recent training-free methods address this through image scaling and localized cropping. However, applying these manipulations indiscriminately introduces computational redundancy for simple queries and can degrade accuracy by truncating essential global context or introducing irrelevant background noise. To this end, we propose LazyMCoT, a dynamic and training-free framework that adaptively allocates visual grounding efforts based on sample difficulty. The framework features an Adaptive Routing mechanism that evaluates predictive uncertainty using first-token statistics from a single forward pass. This efficiently bypasses confident cases while ensuring the recall of difficult samples via conformal calibration. For these challenging cases, a Collaborative Grounding module integrates the inherent cross-modal attention of the model with an external visual expert through a two-stage refinement process. This refinement process generates a precise localized display to recover small or occluded targets. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that LazyMCoT rivals training-based approaches by simultaneously improving reasoning accuracy and reducing average inference latency. Our code is availble at https://github.com/TencentBAC/LazyMCoT.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

uva-irlab-conv at SemEval-2026 Task 8: Multi-Turn RAG with Learned Sparse Retrieval and Listwise Reranking

This report describes our participation in SemEval-2026 Task 8 on multi-turn retrieval and question answering. The task evaluates conversational systems across four domains (finance, cloud documentation, government, Wikipedia), and includes unanswerable queries where the available collection does not contain sufficient evidence to produce a complete response. We propose a multi-turn retrieval-augmented generation pipeline that combines learned sparse retrieval with LLM-based reranking and generation. Using sparse retrieval as the primary retrieval method, we leverage its strong generalization across domains. In addition, we make use of the long-context capabilities of LLMs for conversational query rewriting, pointwise and listwise reranking, and generating the final response, each conditioned on the full conversational history. This multi-step design enables effective integration of conversational context throughout retrieval and generation, improving robustness across domains.

24.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-22

Cancer cells adopt unprecedented strategies to produce a molecule that protects them from iron-dependent death

The finding that spermine molecules in cells bind to iron to prevent it unleashing ferroptosis, a type of cell death, opens up strategies for treating tissue damage and cancer. The finding that spermine molecules in cells bind to iron to prevent it unleashing ferroptosis, a type of cell death, opens up strategies for treating tissue damage and cancer.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Fusion of Pervasive RF Data with Spatial Images via Vision Transformers for Enhanced Mapping in Smart Cities

In this paper, we present a deep learning-based approach that integrates the DINOv2 architecture to improve building mapping by combining (possibly erroneous) maps from open-source platforms with pervasive radio frequency (RF) data collected from multiple wireless user equipments and base stations. Unlike prior methods, our approach leverages a vision transformer-based architecture to jointly process both RF and map modalities within a unified framework, effectively capturing spatial dependencies and structural priors for enhanced mapping accuracy. For the evaluation purposes, we employ a synthetic dataset co-produced by Huawei. To address the challenges associated with real-world data imperfections, we introduce controlled noise to its RF data so as to simulate real-world conditions. Additionally, we develop and train a model that leverages only aggregated path loss information to tackle the mapping problem. We measure the results according to three performance metrics: the Jaccard index (intersection over union, IoU), the Hausdorff distance, and the Chamfer distance. Our design achieves a macro IoU of 65.3%, significantly surpassing (i) the erroneous maps baseline, which yields 40.1%, (ii) an RF-only method from the literature, which yields 37.3%, and (iii) a non-AI fusion baseline that we designed which yields 42.2%. The comparative evaluation highlights the limitations of relying solely on RF data or on spatial data, as well as the effectiveness that AI can have on fusing data towards enhancing smart city mapping accuracy. We further validate our method on real-world data from the Oslo region, complementing the synthetic evaluation with a real deployment setting, where our best fusion model reaches 64.9% macro IoU. We additionally outline a strategy for deploying the model over larger areas by tiling the region with overlapping windows.