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02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Scalable Deep Unfolding of Conic Optimizers

arXiv:2606.13825v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep unfolding (DU) accelerates iterative optimizers by introducing learnable components and training them through unrolled iterations, but extending DU to the large-scale semidefinite programs (SDPs) common in robotics has remained limited. Unrolling a full-update conic solver such as COSMO exposes two obstacles that prior work on learned conic solvers has not: backpropagating through the per-iteration linear-system solve incurs memory quadratic in the problem size once the coefficient matrix is formed explicitly, and backpropagating through the positive semidefinite (PSD) cone projection becomes numerically unstable when eigenvalues coincide. We address the first obstacle with a matrix-free implicit differentiation rule that operates entirely through matrix-vector products, reducing memory from $O(n^2)$ to $O(n)$ and enabling backpropagation at scales where direct factorization runs out of memory. We address the second with a backward rule based on the Dalečkii–Krein representation of the Fréchet derivative, which remains well-defined under repeated eigenvalues. Together these make it possible to learn lightweight hyperparameter policies and warm-starts for a full-update conic solver. We evaluate on nonlinear covariance steering problems solved via sequential convex programming (SCP), as well as standalone SDPs and second-order cone programs ranging from max-cut and Lovász $\vartheta$ SDPs to robust estimation and control problems. The learned policies outperform state-of-the-art solvers across all problems, and can provide up to a 50$\times$ speedup depending on the class. When used as a subroutine in SCP, the learned approach delivers over a 30$\times$ speedup compared to COSMO.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Exploring Exotic Spin-Dependent Interactions Beyond the Standard Model: Theoretical Foundations and Experimental Investigations

arXiv:2606.13318v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: New interactions mediated by novel particles propose solutions to several important questions in modern physics. Axions serve as examples of such particles; they are lightweight and interact weakly with ordinary matter. This category of particles, including those similar to axions-termed Axion-Like Particles (ALPs)-arises from diverse theoretical frameworks, such as the Peccei-Quinn mechanism addressing the strong CP problem, string theory, and spontaneous supersymmetry breaking. Given their light mass and weak coupling, ALPs are also possible candidates for cold dark matter. Introducing these new interactions mediated by novel particles not only tackles several challenges in modern physics but also raises a crucial question: Are there undiscovered interactions beyond the Standard Model? Many of the interactions predicted by these theories are spin-dependent, which is the primary focus of this review. In this review, we first outline the theoretical foundations for investigating exotic spin-dependent interactions, highlighting their importance in various models beyond the Standard Model. We examine the potential roles of new lightweight particles in mediating these interactions, which may enhance our understanding of dark matter. Relevant formulas derived from theoretical models are included to support experimental investigations. Following this theoretical framework, we conduct a detailed review of recent experimental efforts to detect these exotic interactions. A systematic review of current constraints on these interactions is presented, along with an assessment of various detection approaches.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Fusing Transferred Priors and Physics-based Decomposition for Underwater Image Enhancement

The underwater images are captured within diverse water-medium conditions, leading to complex degradation, including color bias, low contrast, and blur effect. Recently, learning-based methods have demonstrated their potential for underwater image enhancement (UIE). However, most of the previous work focus on the training strategy or network design to make the enhanced result aligned well with the labels in datasets, ignoring that the labels are selected from the enhanced results of previous UIE methods and these pseudo-labels are noisy. Consequently, the performance of their models is not satisfactory to a certain extent. However, collecting the true labels of the underwater images is challenging. In this work, we propose a transfer learning-based UIE that does not require underwater images to have paired noisy or true labels for learning. Instead, the UIE task is first divided into global color correction, haze removal, and background noise suppression following the underwater physics. Then multiple types of prior from other vision tasks are leveraged as cross-domain supervision in each step. In this way, a novel UIE is available via transfer learning, and the physics-aligned UIE decomposition provides theoretical soundness. Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our proposal based on physics and priors fusion achieves SOTA performance in the UIE task and effectively boosts downstream vision tasks, significantly outperforming benchmark methods. Project repo: https://github.com/Haru2022/P2-UIE.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

MemRefine: LLM-Guided Compression for Long-Term Agent Memory

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly expected to operate over long-term interactions, where information from past dialogues must be preserved and recalled to support future tasks. However, as interactions accumulate, the memory store grows without bound and fills with redundant entries that inflate storage cost and degrade retrieval by crowding out the most useful evidence. Furthermore, this is especially limiting on resource-constrained platforms with hard memory budgets, motivating us to formulate storage-budgeted memory management, the task of keeping an already constructed memory store within a fixed budget while preserving information useful for future interactions. To this end, we then propose MemRefine, an LLM-guided framework that, since surface similarity poorly reflects factual value, uses similarity only to propose candidate pairs and defers delete, merge, and preserve decisions to an LLM judge based on factual content, iterating until the budget is met. Across multiple memory frameworks and long-term conversation benchmarks, MemRefine consistently meets target budgets while preserving downstream performance and outperforming rule-based baselines under tight budgets.

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

Clinically Aligned Geometry Constraints for Robust IVUS Vessel Boundary Segmentation

Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) lumen and external elastic membrane (EEM) segmentation is important for quantitative coronary plaque burden assessment. Errors in lumen or EEM delineation directly propagate to plaque area, plaque burden and geometric measurements. However, standard methods prioritising overlap scores often suffer from boundary drift and topology errors, leading to inaccurate clinical measurements. We present GeoCat, a geometry-consistent network that processes 5-frame IVUS clips using dual Cartesian-polar encoders with cross-domain attention and temporal fusion. A differentiable geometry consistency loss directly supervises clinically relevant descriptors including diameters, orientations, and cross-sectional areas. The model is trained on 12,242 annotated frames from 146 patients acquired with two commercial IVUS systems. We evaluate performance using both segmentation accuracy and plaque-relevant clinical metrics, including Dice/IoU, boundary measures(95HD (mm), ASSD), topology violation rate, and clinical geometry errors (dmax/dmin, angles, and areas). On our dataset, GeoCat achieves a Dice of 0.93, reduces 95HD to 0.14 mm, and lowers topology violations to 1.0%. Importantly, it significantly improves geometric fidelity, yielding diameter errors of 0.13-0.16 mm and angular errors of ~8 degrees, supporting reliable plaque burden quantification.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

DART: A design-aware microfluidic chip paradigm for real-time live-cell image analysis

High-throughput microfluidic live-cell imaging generates rich single-cell data. Yet semi-automated procedures for locating regions of interest (RoIs), each containing one cell population, and removing surrounding microfluidic structures from recorded images, scale with the number of RoIs. This prevents real-time image analysis and delays time-to-insight by hours to days. We introduce the Design-Aware and Real-Time capable (DART) paradigm for microfluidic cultivation chips, which aligns the CAD blueprint with the physical chip and thereby enables throughput-independent localization of all RoIs and fully automated image processing across diverse RoI geometries and chip layouts. DART establishes this alignment through embedded fiducial markers and deep-learning-based marker detection. We validate DART using the Swiss Army Knife chip, which combines eight structurally distinct RoI designs across 1164 RoI locations. DART localizes all RoIs in five minutes, removes microfluidic structures from raw microscopy images in 40 ms, and performs fully automated image analysis, including cell segmentation, in under 1.1 s per image. Together, these capabilities establish DART as an end-to-end hardware-software paradigm with real-time-capable analysis that paves the way toward closed-loop and outcome-driven smart microscopy.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Jacobian Scopes: token-level causal attributions in LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) make next-token predictions based on clues present in their context, such as semantic descriptions and in-context examples. Yet, elucidating which prior tokens most strongly influence a given prediction remains challenging due to the proliferation of layers and attention heads in modern architectures. We propose Jacobian Scopes, a suite of gradient-based, token-level causal attribution methods for interpreting LLM predictions. Grounded in perturbation theory and information geometry, Jacobian Scopes quantify how input tokens influence various aspects of a model's prediction, such as specific logits, the full predictive distribution, and model uncertainty (effective temperature). Through case studies spanning instruction understanding, translation, and in-context learning (ICL), we demonstrate how Jacobian Scopes reveal implicit political biases, uncover word- and phrase-level translation strategies, and shed light on recently debated mechanisms underlying in-context time-series forecasting. To facilitate exploration of Jacobian Scopes on custom text, we open-source our implementations and provide a cloud-hosted interactive demo at https://huggingface.co/spaces/Typony/JacobianScopes.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Can Editing 1 Neuron Fix Repetition Loops in LLMs?

arXiv:2606.13705v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Yes. Can it cure doom loops? Probably not. The Gemma 4 instruction-tuned models share a reproducible failure: on long factual enumeration prompts, such as listing every episode of a TV series, the 88 IAU constellations, or the 151 original Pokemon, they collapse into repetition, either a tight verbatim loop or a list whose entries decay onto a single answer. These loops occur at rates as high as 95% and survive prompt rewording, inference-engine changes, and most sampling adjustments. In this paper we explore whether this behavior is localized enough to remove by weight edits. To localize the cause, we use per-layer ablation and per-neuron attribution, then confirm the strongest candidates with full-generation sweeps. The loops trace to a small set of MLP neurons (or, in the 26B-A4B Mixture-of-Experts model, a few routed experts) which we suppress with static weight edits. These "surgeries" can be as small as a single sign-inverted neuron (in the E2B model). The size of the effective edits grows with model scale, but in all cases, the loop patterns can be addressed at normal generation budgets while preserving general-purpose benchmark scores. However, the edits do not solve everything: we also study longer thinking budgets, where the two larger models most visibly enter doom looping, i.e. a non-convergent regime in which the model self-corrects in circles over a fact it cannot recall, exhausting the budget without committing to a final answer. We show this residual failure is reduced but not eliminated by the same edits, and argue it is fundamentally a knowledge-precision problem rather than a removable circuit; weight surgery can delete a loop, but it cannot supply a missing fact. Our results are both a feasibility demonstration, that is, evidence that a concrete generation pathology can be localized to a few parameters and edited out, and a delineation of where that approach stops.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

ProMUSE: Progressive Multi-modal Uncertainty-guided Staged Evidential Alzheimer Disease Classification

arXiv:2606.19371v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a fatal disorder that destroys memory and cognitive skills in the elderly population. Most treatments for AD are effective in the early stage, leading to an increasing demand for early AD diagnosis. AD diagnosis increasingly relies on multimodal data such as clinical assessments, structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), and Positron Emission Tomography (PET) imaging. However, MRI and PET acquisition remain costly and not universally accessible, making full-modality inference impractical in real-world clinical workflows. We propose ProMUSE, a Progressive Multi-modal Uncertainty Guided Staged Evidential Network that adaptively determines when additional modalities are necessary, helping reduce the overall cost of data acquisition while maintaining accuracy. ProMUSE first performs evidential classification using low-cost clinical data and quantifies uncertainty via a Dirichlet-based subjective logic model. When uncertainty exceeds a learned threshold, ProMUSE progressively incorporates MRI or PET features, fusing modality-wise belief and uncertainty through Dempster-Shafer theory to obtain a calibrated multimodal prediction. This staged acquisition strategy enables accurate diagnosis while minimizing reliance on expensive imaging. Experiments on ADNI, AIBL, and OASIS across CN-AD, CN-MCI, and MCI-AD tasks demonstrate that ProMUSE achieves competitive or superior accuracy compared to full-modality baselines while reducing MRI/PET usage by 50-90%, yielding substantial cost savings. These results highlight ProMUSE as a practical, uncertainty-aware, and resource-efficient solution for real-world AD screening.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Beyond Layer Importance in Layer-wise Sparsity: An Inter-Layer Perturbation-Absorption Perspective

The considerable layer-wise redundancy in large language models (LLMs) has established non-uniform sparsity allocation across layers as the standard pruning approach for efficient compression. Existing layer-wise allocation methods that estimate allocation strategy from local signals such as activation outliers or weight spectra mainly derive from local layer importance, whereas the final post-pruning performance is also influenced by the network's subsequent compensatory capacity. In this paper, we directly characterize this property through controlled perturbation experiments. We make the following empirical findings. First, layers exhibit highly heterogeneous responses to pruning-scale perturbations. In most cases, early layers amplify perturbations, while middle and late layers actively absorb them, with relative L2 drift decreasing monotonically across depth and direction realigning toward the unperturbed hidden-state trajectory. Second, absorption is a large-perturbation phenomenon. Under small perturbations the network exhibits amplification across all layers, and the transition to absorption occurs smoothly as perturbation magnitude grows to pruning scale. This enriches the linearized accumulation theory underlying related works. Building on these findings, we define an absorption coefficient per layer and propose absorption-aware correction, an orthogonal augmentation that improves OWL and AlphaPruning by reducing perplexity by 7.13% and boosting zero-shot accuracy by 1.02% across multiple model families at 70% sparsity.

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

Balalaika: Data-Centric, Prosody-Aware Annotation Pipeline for Russian Speech

We introduce Balalaika, an open-source, data-centric pipeline for processing audio and producing prosody-aware annotations. It combines semantic VAD for context-preserving segmentation, multi-ASR ensembling with ROVER consensus decoding, while retaining optional word-level timestamps, followed by automatic quality and speaker-purity filtering. The text is further enriched with punctuation restoration, lexical stress and "\textipa{e}/\textipa{\H{e}}" normalization, and IPA phonemes. Using Balalaika, we build a 5.1k-hour multi-source Russian corpus with rich annotations, and show consistent gains under equalized training budgets for both speech denoising and TTS; ablations confirm complementary benefits of stress and punctuation and improved synthesis with stricter MOS filtering. The datasets are publicly available at \href{https://huggingface.co/collections/lab260/balalaika-dataset}{\underline{HuggingFace}}

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Conditioning of incoherent sub-dictionaries sampled from a coherent dictionary

Authors:

arXiv:2606.24323v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Motivated by the desire to find a realistic and stable random model for $d$-dimensional signals, that are sparse in a transform-based and thus often coherent frame, such as a wavelet or a Gabor frame, we study the conditioning of incoherent sub-dictionaries sampled from a coherent dictionary, such as a unit norm frame. In particular, we show that if the sub-dictionary is selected via a coherence rejective Poisson sampling model, it is well-conditioned with high probability, as long as its expected size scales as $d/\log (K)$, where $K$ is the number of dictionary elements. The result is proved for the more general case of sampling quadratic sub-matrices from a real but not necessarily symmetric $K\times K$ matrix with zero diagonal, where coherence rejective sampling is defined via a symmetric mask, that acts as coherence substitute.

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

The Initial Exploration Problem in Knowledge Graph Exploration

arXiv:2602.21066v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Knowledge Graphs (KGs) enable the integration and representation of complex information across domains, but their semantic richness and structural complexity create substantial barriers for lay users without expertise in semantic web technologies. When encountering an unfamiliar KG, such users face a distinct orientation challenge: they do not know what questions are possible, how the knowledge is structured, or how to begin exploration. This paper identifies and theorises this phenomenon as the Initial Exploration Problem (IEP). Drawing on theories from information behaviour and human-computer interaction, including ASK, exploratory search, information foraging, and cognitive load theory, we develop a conceptual framing of the IEP characterised by three interdependent barriers: scope uncertainty, ontology opacity, and query incapacity. We argue that these barriers converge at the moment of first contact, distinguishing the IEP from related concepts that presuppose an existing starting point or information goal. Analysing KG exploration interfaces at the level of interaction primitives, we suggest that many systems rely on epistemic assumptions that do not hold at first contact. This reveals a structural gap in the design space: the absence of interaction primitives for scope revelation, mechanisms that communicate what a KG contains without requiring users to formulate queries or interpret ontological structures. In articulating the IEP, this paper provides a theoretical lens for evaluating KG interfaces and for designing entry-point scaffolding that supports initial exploration.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Vortex: Multi-Modal Fusion System for Intelligent Video Retrieval

This paper presents Vortex, the multimodal video retrieval system developed by our team, FocusOnFun, for the Ho Chi Minh City AI Challenge 2025, designed to advance intelligent multimedia search and temporal reasoning. The system integrates adaptive keyframe extraction, multimodal metadata generation from vision-language and speech models, and a hybrid retrieval strategy that fuses CLIP and SigLIP2 embeddings through Reciprocal Rank Fusion to balance global and fine-grained semantics. To enhance interactivity, Vortex incorporates Rocchio-based relevance feedback and a multi-stage temporal search mechanism for sequential event alignment. Built on Milvus and Elasticsearch, the architecture enables scalable indexing and efficient retrieval. Evaluated in the official competition, our FocusOnFun team's system achieved a score of 79.6/88 (90.5\%) in the Preliminary Round and was further evaluated in the Final Round, achieving an `Excellent' overall performance with `Outstanding' results in the question-answering (QA) task. This demonstrating the complementary strengths of CLIP and SigLIP2 and confirming the effectiveness of the hybrid retrieval approach. The system establishes a robust foundation for future research in intelligent, context-aware, and interactive video retrieval.

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

MLLP-VRAIN UPV system for the IWSLT 2026 Simultaneous Speech Translation task

This work describes the participation of the MLLP-VRAIN research group in the shared task of the IWSLT 2026 Simultaneous Speech Translation track. Our submission utilizes the recently released Parakeet and Qwen 3.5 models to create a robust, cascaded solution for long-form SimulST through the use of adaptive "black-box" policies. We explore relaxations of these policies to achieve better quality-latency trade-offs. Compared to last year, we participate on all language directions. In addition to this, for the En$\rightarrow${De, It, Zh} directions we also participate in this year's new context track employing a combination of ASR word-boosting and a RAG mechanism of offline pre-translated exemplars to guide generation and enrich our system with domain-specific context. Finally, we provide a detailed latency analysis of our system. Compared to last year, results on the MCIF En$\rightarrow$De test set shows a substantial quality improvement of +5.82 XCOMET-XL. Our context track processing further improves performance by +1.03.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

BrainPro: Towards Large-scale Brain State-aware EEG Representation Learning

arXiv:2509.22050v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Electroencephalography (EEG) reflects underlying brain states, whose activities are distributed across brain regions and manifest as spatial patterns on the scalp. Learning these spatially structured, state-related patterns requires consistent spatial representations across datasets. However, existing EEG foundation models are typically based on self-attention, which does not preserve location-specific information and struggles to align signals recorded with different channel configurations. Moreover, brain states contain both shared and state-specific regional activity, suggesting that learning neurophysiologically plausible, state-aware representations can complement the shared representations targeted by current models and improve downstream decoding. To address these limitations, we propose BrainPro, a large EEG model that combines a retrieval-based spatial learning mechanism for cross-layout spatial alignment with a brain state-decoupling module that learns both shared and state-specific representations through parallel encoders and region-aware reconstruction. Pre-trained on a large EEG corpus, BrainPro achieves state-of-the-art performance across nine public BCI datasets spanning emotion, motor, speech, stress, mental disease, and attention tasks. Analyses of spatial filters, channel-drop robustness, and encoder contributions further validate the effectiveness of its spatial alignment and state-aware pathways. These results show that BrainPro achieves improved interpretability of learned spatial patterns and produces representations that benefit diverse EEG decoding tasks.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Robust Neural Tucker Factorization with Bias Correction and Adaptive Initialization

arXiv:2606.16388v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-dimensional incomplete (HDI) tensors are widely used in traffic and climate applications, but sparse observations make accurate completion difficult. The intrinsic non-linear dynamics and non-stationary variations across distinct multi-modal fields severely hinder the efficacy of conventional linear reconstruction frameworks. Neural Tucker factorization provides an effective framework for modeling high-order interactions among tensor modes. By parameterizing underlying structural characteristics into continuous latent spaces, neural representations circumvent the rigid low-rank constraints of classical algebra. However, its performance can still be affected by implementation-level choices, especially parameter initialization and the bias configuration of the final output mapping. Suboptimal initializations frequently lead to variance explosion across the cubically expanded interaction spaces, driving the subsequent non-linear activation boundaries into severe gradient saturation zones, while the omission of a dedicated translation parameter forces interaction weights to implicitly absorb global statistical deviations. This paper proposes a simple yet effective neural Tucker factorization model with Kaiming initialization and bias correction (KaBiN) for HDI tensor completion. The proposed model utilizes Kaiming uniform initialization for the embedding and Tucker linear parameters, and adopts a simple bias correction in output mapping. By elegantly decoupling global mean shifts from local structural representations, the framework provides a highly stable and well-conditioned optimization landscape. Experiments on three real-world HDI tensor datasets show that KaBiN achieves better performance than the original NeuTucF, while introducing minimal computational overhead.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Asymptotic Signal Subspace Recovery in Softmax Attention Models

Authors:

arXiv:2606.22406v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Attention mechanisms have demonstrated remarkable empirical success in identifying relevant information from large collections of tokens, yet the theoretical principles underlying this behavior remain poorly understood. We study a stylized softmax-attention model in which a query vector is learned by stochastic gradient ascent from a collection of informative and nuisance tokens. Exploiting the symmetry of the model, we derive a population objective and characterize the limiting ordinary differential equation governing the learning dynamics. Using tools from stochastic approximation and dynamical systems theory, we establish a rigorous connection between the stochastic learning algorithm and its deterministic limit. Our main result shows that, under suitable high-dimensional scaling assumptions and standard step-size conditions, the learned query converges almost surely to the one-dimensional signal subspace spanned by the latent informative direction. Equivalently, the query asymptotically recovers the latent signal up to the intrinsic sign ambiguity. These results provide a rigorous theoretical foundation for understanding attention mechanisms as signal extraction procedures in high-dimensional noisy environments and offer a dynamical-systems perspective on how attention discovers relevant information in the presence of substantial noise.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Evaluating Bias in Phoneme-Based Automatic Speech Recognition Systems: An Analysis of IPA Transcription Models

The popularization of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems has increased exploration of the demographic biases related to race, age, gender, and accent, often formed from imbalanced training data. Most of these studies focused on standard grapheme-based ASR systems with comparatively little emphasis on phoneme-based systems, such as models that produce International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) representations. As ASR systems shift toward multilingual support and low-resource language modeling, IPA-based layers serve as a critical, language-agnostic foundation. In this study, we evaluate the performance of two state-of-the-art open-source ASR systems, WhisperIPA and ZIPA, that generate IPA transcriptions across diverse accents and language sources. Our evaluation includes existing multilingual speech corpora and demographically annotated English-language corpora. We measure model performance by comparing model-generated IPA transcriptions against grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) systems using both standard phoneme error rate (PER) and a proposed Soft PER metric that tolerates linguistically similar phoneme substitutions. Our analysis examines how performance varies across languages and demographic groups such as gender, accent, ethnicity, and age, revealing persistent disparities even after accounting for acceptable phonemic variation. These findings provide insight into potential sources of bias and inform the development of more inclusive and linguistically robust phoneme-based ASR systems. Our code and data will be made publicly available to the community.

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

Traditional machine learning vs. deep learning from dynamic graph representations of proteins' 3D folds in the task of protein structure classification

arXiv:2605.29228v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Protein structure classification (PSC) uses supervised learning to predict a protein's CATH/SCOP(e) class from the protein's sequence or 3D structural feature(s). We already modeled 3D structures as (static) protein structure networks (PSNs), demonstrating the competitiveness of PSN-based features to sequence or direct (i.e. non-network) 3D structural features in the PSC task. More recently, we demonstrated the power of features extracted from dynamic PSNs over features extracted from static PSNs (and thus by transitivity over sequence and direct 3D structural features) in the same task. That dynamic PSN approach used traditional machine learning (ML), combining manual (pre-engineered) features with an off-the-shelf classifier. Here, we evaluate whether automatic deep learning (DL) from the dynamic PSNs yields improvements. Our evaluation on 72 datasets spanning ~44,000 CATH- or SCOPe-labeled dynamic PSNs reveals that in terms of PSC accuracy, traditional ML and DL are (close to) tied for a large majority of the datasets, while DL is on average 10+ times slower. We are the first to evaluate traditional ML vs. DL in the dynamic PSN-based PSC task.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

HCP-MAD:Heterogeneous Consensus-Progressive Reasoning for Efficient Multi-Agent Debate

arXiv:2604.09679v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) is a collaborative framework in which multiple agents iteratively refine solutions through the generation of reasoning and alternating critique cycles. Current work primarily optimizes intra-round topologies and inter-round interactions separately, limiting the adaptation of token costs to task complexity. This work introduces Heterogeneous Consensus-Progressive Reasoning for Efficient Multi-Agent Debate (HCP-MAD), leveraging consensus as a dynamic signal to facilitate progressive reasoning. The core motivation is that a majority of straightforward tasks can be effectively resolved via lightweight pair-agent debates, while complex tasks require expanded collaboration. Firstly, Heterogeneous Consensus Verification conducts rapid consensus verification using a pair of heterogeneous agents for early stopping. Next, Heterogeneous Pair-Agent Debate applies an adaptive stopping criterion to terminate mutual critique of reasoning traces. Finally, the unresolved tasks are addressed through Escalated Collective Voting by aggregating diverse perspectives from additional agents. Experiments across six benchmarks show that HCP-MAD enhances accuracy while substantially reducing token costs. Code is https://github.com/fuyu66/HCP-MAD.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Causal Object-Centric Models for Planning with Monte Carlo Tree Search

arXiv:2606.14418v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce COMET (Causal Object-centric Model for Efficient Tree search), a model-based reinforcement learning algorithm that performs Monte Carlo Tree Search in a slot-structured latent space. COMET pairs a frozen unsupervised object-centric encoder with a transformer-based world model, in which actions are bound to objects through a novel action-slot fusion mechanism that is used in slot transition prediction. Policy and value heads use object-causal attention, modulating token interactions by learned per-slot relevance scores so that decision-making concentrates on task-relevant entities. COMET adds an explicit object-level inductive bias to MuZero-style latent planning. Across eight visually and dynamically diverse tasks from the Object-Centric Visual RL benchmark, ManiSkill, Robosuite, and VizDoom, COMET achieves a higher mean normalized score during the early stages of training compared to object-centric and monolithic baselines.

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

Simplifying the Modeling of Arbitrary Conditionals in Natural Language

Causal Transformers model sequences through an autoregressive factorization of the joint distribution, which enables efficient left-to-right decoding and conditional likelihood computation. However, they cannot tractably sample from or evaluate arbitrary conditionals – e.g., a block of text conditioned on past and future tokens. Recent work aims to solve this problem through novel architectures, but they often lead to sub-optimal modeling of such conditionals and degraded generations. We propose Arbitrary Conditionals GPT (AC-GPT) which introduces a simple modification to standard causal Transformers to enable evaluating and sampling from arbitrary conditionals – including past, future, and mixed contexts – within a single forward pass. Unlike prior approaches, our method preserves the standard left-to-right ordering and next-token prediction objective essential for both strong performance and efficient training on natural language. Crucially, this compatibility allows existing LLMs to be fine-tuned for arbitrary conditioning. Our empirical results indicate that our method outperforms baselines on modeling arbitrary conditionals, without degrading standard left-to-right performance.