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02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

NVMOS: Non-Verbal Vocalization Quality Assessment in Speech

arXiv:2606.15888v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Non-verbal vocalizations (NVs), such as laughter, sighs, and coughs, are important acoustic cues for emotion and intent. Existing speech quality assessment methods typically focus on overall naturalness, while non-verbal TTS evaluations mainly examine whether a target NV appears with the correct type and position. However, the perceptual quality of NV events themselves remains underexplored. To address this gap, we construct an NV-MOS dataset containing outputs from multiple NV-TTS systems and naturally occurring NV samples, with ratings collected from three acoustic experts on a perceptual quality scale. We further analyze audio-capable multimodal large language models such as Gemini and find clear inconsistencies between their scores and expert ratings. These results suggest that general-purpose multimodal models cannot reliably replace human judgments for NV quality assessment. We then propose NVMOS, to our knowledge the first model that can reliably predict the perceptual quality of NV events in speech. Experimental results show that, with a local NV-event focusing module, NVMOS reaches expert-level or stronger agreement with human MOS.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

$\mu$VLA: On Recurrent Memory for Partially Observable Manipulation in VLA Models

arXiv:2606.12497v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models predict chunks of future actions from the current observation, an assumption that fails under partial observability, where decisions depend on information no longer visible. Existing memory-augmented VLAs simultaneously introduce recurrence, retrieval, compression modules, auxiliary objectives, hierarchical memory, or task-specific architectural changes, so the contribution of recurrence itself remains entangled with surrounding machinery. We present a controlled isolation study of recurrence in a strong pretrained VLA backbone. Our formulation augments the transformer with a small set of learnable memory tokens carried across timesteps and updated through self-attention, trained end to end with truncated backpropagation through time, with no auxiliary losses and no architectural changes. We instantiate this as $\mu$VLA, a family of OpenVLA-OFT variants parameterized by memory width m, TBPTT length K, and the memory update rule (cross-step gradients or a detached EMA), so that recurrence is the only varying factor. On MIKASA-Robo, $\mu$VLA improves average success rate on five training tasks from 0.42 to 0.84 at the strongest setting and reaches 0.23 on held-out tasks with the same memory structure versus 0.07 for the memoryless baseline. On tasks requiring different memory structure, performance remains near baseline. On LIBERO, the strongest recurrent variant achieves 96.2% average success, indicating no regression under full observability. We interpret these results as a calibration of the capability envelope of minimal in-backbone recurrence, identifying the regime in which it is sufficient and the regime where additional memory structure is required. Demos and videos can be found in https://avanturist322.github.io/mu-vla/.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Regional Service-System Conditions Associated with Facility-Linked Home-Based Specialist Care in Japan: A Claims-Based Ecological Study of Home Dialysis

Authors:

Background Complex chronic care is increasingly delivered in patients' homes while remaining linked to specialist facilities for training, monitoring, and backup care. Home dialysis provides a useful case because peritoneal dialysis (PD) and home hemodialysis (HHD) share a home-facility delivery structure but differ in technical and operational requirements. This study examined regional service-system conditions associated with the presence and scale of PD and HHD in Japan. Methods This ecological study used publicly available claims, administrative, census, and geospatial data harmonized to 334 Secondary Medical Areas. Regional indicators were organized into four domains: dialysis service delivery, implementation support for home-based care, hospital backup capacity, and living and sociodemographic context. Diffusion was examined using claims-based indicators of regional presence and post-presence scale, analyzed separately for PD and HHD with Firth penalized logistic regression and zero-truncated negative binomial regression, respectively. Results PD was observed in 271 regions and HHD in 109. Patterns of associated regional conditions differed by modality and stage. PD was associated mainly with existing dialysis-service organization, whereas HHD was associated with broader regional supports, including home-care delivery, living infrastructure, transition support, and hospital-system indicators. Conditions associated with presence differed from those associated with scale. Cross-modality associations suggested that shared regional factors may shape the distribution of both modalities. Conclusions Regional conditions for home dialysis diffusion in Japan differed by modality and stage. PD was linked mainly to existing dialysis-service organization, whereas HHD was linked to multi-domain regional support for technically demanding home treatment. Under standardized reimbursement, local service-system capacity may remain important for modality- and stage-specific diffusion of home dialysis.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Spectral Query-Key Product Weight Steering for Training-Free VLM Hallucination Mitigation

Vision-language models (VLMs) often generate fluent but visually unsupported descriptions, especially by mentioning objects absent from the image. We propose QK Product Steering, a data-free, training-free, and zero-inference-cost weight edit for reducing object hallucination. The method directly edits the per-head query-key product, the operator that produces pre-softmax attention logits, by suppressing a small number of dominant singular modes in selected middle layers. The edited product is then mapped back to the query weights through a closed-form query-only update while keeping shared key weights fixed, making the edit compatible with grouped-query attention. We further decompose the QK product into symmetric and antisymmetric components to distinguish mutual content-similarity patterns from directional attention patterns. Across three GQA-based VLMs, QK Product Steering achieves an average relative CHAIR$_s$ reduction of $4.0\%$, while matched random-mode controls show negligible change. Interpretability ablations show that the hallucination signal is specific to dominant QK modes and is primarily localized to the symmetric mutual-attention channel. Overall, QK Product Steering offers a simple alternative to decoding-time mitigation, requiring no additional data, fine-tuning, or inference-time overhead while largely preserving general multimodal capability.

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

Localized Kernel Projection Outlyingness: A Two-Stage Approach for Multi-Modal Outlier Detection

arXiv:2510.24043v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper presents Two-Stage LKPLO, a novel multi-stage outlier detection framework that overcomes the coexisting limitations of conventional projection-based methods: their reliance on a fixed statistical metric and their assumption of a single data structure. Our framework uniquely synthesizes three key concepts: (1) a generalized loss-based outlyingness measure (PLO) that replaces the fixed metric with flexible, adaptive loss functions like our proposed SVM-like loss; (2) a global kernel PCA stage to linearize non-linear data structures; and (3) a subsequent local clustering stage to handle multi-modal distributions. Comprehensive 5-fold cross-validation experiments on 10 benchmark datasets, with automated hyperparameter optimization, demonstrate that Two-Stage LKPLO achieves state-of-the-art performance. It significantly outperforms strong baselines on datasets with challenging structures where existing methods fail, most notably on multi-cluster data (Optdigits) and complex, high-dimensional data (Arrhythmia). Furthermore, an ablation study empirically confirms that the synergistic combination of both the kernelization and localization stages is indispensable for its superior performance. This work contributes a powerful new tool for a significant class of outlier detection problems and underscores the importance of hybrid, multi-stage architectures.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Artificial Intelligence-Based Detection of Airway Mucus Plugs on CT and Associations With Clinical Outcomes in COPDGene

RATIONALE: Airway mucus plugging is a clinically relevant manifestation of airway pathology in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and is associated with increased mortality even in early disease; however, visual computed tomography (CT) assessment is subjective and labor intensive. OBJECTIVES: To develop an AI-based quantitative CT method for automated detection of airway mucus plugging and evaluate associations with physiologic impairment and clinical outcomes. METHODS: Inspiratory CT scans from 8,971 COPDGene Phase 1 (GOLD 0-4 and PRISm) participants were analyzed. An AI-based framework combining 3D airway segmentation discontinuities and convolutional neural network classification identified mucus plug obstructions, yielding mucus plug burden (total plug count). Associations with outcomes were evaluated using covariate-adjusted models. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS : Higher mucus plug burden was associated with lower post-bronchodilator FEV % predicted ({rho} = -0.41; P < 0.001), greater air trapping (LAA < -856 HU; {rho} = 0.33; P < 0.001), worse health status (SGRQ; {rho} = 0.31; P < 0.001), and shorter 6-minute walk distance ({rho} = -0.26; P < 0.001). Among GOLD 1-4 participants, mucus plug presence was independently associated with increased all-cause mortality (adjusted hazard ratio, 1.28; P < 0.005) and exacerbation frequency (adjusted incidence rate ratio, 1.32; P < 0.005). Plug presence was also associated with increased respiratory mortality across GOLD categories and cardiovascular mortality in GOLD 1-2. CONCLUSIONS: AI-based quantitative CT assessment of airway mucus plugging provides a scalable, reproducible measure associated with physiologic impairment and adverse outcomes in COPD, supporting its role in risk stratification and future therapeutic studies.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Mitigating Content Shift and Hallucination in GenAI Image Editing via Structural Refinement

Generative AI (GenAI) image editors, such as Nano Banana, produce visually compelling results for retouching tasks, enabling non-experts to edit images through text prompts alone. However, the generative nature of these models often introduces spatial misalignment, texture distortion, and content hallucination, all of which are detrimental to downstream workflows that require pixel-level fidelity. We identify a problem setting we call "structure-preserving GenAI fusion" for black-box GenAI image retouching: retain the perceptual enhancements of a GenAI output while enforcing structural faithfulness to the original input image. To address this problem, we propose a post-processing framework that fuses an input image with its GenAI-enhanced counterpart by first establishing coarse spatial and photometric correspondences, then performing a fusion stage that transfers desired enhancements while suppressing hallucinated content. In the absence of direct prior work in this setting, we evaluate our framework against representative methods from photorealistic style transfer and image fusion. Our experiments demonstrate that our method better preserves aesthetic quality while maintaining pixel-level structural consistency and the input resolution.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

HEPTv2: End-to-End Efficient Point Transformer for Charged Particle Reconstruction

arXiv:2606.20437v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Charged-particle tracking – reconstructing trajectories from sparse detector measurements – is a fundamental high-energy-physics inference problem and a canonical example of learning under extreme combinatorial ambiguity. At the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC), tracking must remain accurate and efficient despite unprecedented collision densities. Graph neural networks perform strongly, but incur substantial costs from graph construction and processing, while transformer-based approaches rely on auxiliary stages that prevent end-to-end optimization. To address this, we present HEPTv2, an end-to-end point-transformer architecture that reconstructs tracks from detector hits in one trainable pipeline. HEPTv2 combines a locality-aware point encoder with a track decoder that predicts complete trajectories without graph-building, clustering, or filtering. The encoder uses locality-sensitive hashing in detector coordinate space to preserve tracking-relevant geometry while enabling efficient local attention. The decoder resolves ambiguities through sectorized decoding and direct hit-to-track prediction under joint encoder-decoder supervision, allowing the full pipeline to be optimized end-to-end. On TrackML, HEPTv2 achieves 98.6% double-majority tracking efficiency at a 0.8% fake rate, while requiring only $\sim$15~ms inference time and 0.4~GB peak memory per event on a NVIDIA A100 GPU. Latency and memory scale approximately linearly for events with up to $5\times10^5$ hits. HEPTv2 establishes a new state of the art in the accuracy-latency trade-off, improving efficiency by 4.5% over the strongest prior transformer and by 1.1–2.2% over optimized graph-based pipelines, while reducing latency by factors of 7 and 38–52, respectively. These results show end-to-end transformers can deliver the accuracy and efficiency required for real-time particle reconstruction at the HL-LHC.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Visual enhancement and 3D representation for underwater scenes: a review

Underwater visual enhancement (UVE) and underwater 3D reconstruction pose significant challenges in computer vision and AI-based tasks due to complex imaging conditions in aquatic environments. Despite the development of numerous enhancement algorithms, a comprehensive and systematic review covering both UVE and underwater 3D reconstruction remains absent. To advance research in these areas, we present an in-depth review from multiple perspectives. First, we introduce the fundamental physical models, highlighting the peculiarities that challenge conventional techniques. We survey advanced methods for visual enhancement and 3D reconstruction specifically designed for underwater scenarios. The paper assesses various approaches from non-learning methods to advanced data-driven techniques, including Neural Radiance Fields and 3D Gaussian Splatting, discussing their effectiveness in handling underwater distortions. Finally, we conduct both quantitative and qualitative evaluations of state-of-the-art UVE and underwater 3D reconstruction algorithms across multiple benchmark datasets. Finally, we highlight key research directions for future advancements in underwater vision.

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

Can Post-Training Turn LLMs into Good Medical Coders? An Empirical Study of Generative ICD Coding

Automated International Classification of Diseases (ICD) coding is a core medical-coding task for billing, epidemiology, and clinical decision support. Generative large language models (LLMs) are often reported as weak medical coders, but this finding mainly comes from inference-time settings such as prompting, retrieval, reranking, or tool use, leaving the role of task-specific post-training underexplored. We present a controlled empirical study of post-training for generative ICD coding, comparing discriminative baselines with LLM coders across prompting, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning under a common protocol and metric set. To our knowledge, this is the first study to evaluate RL-based post-training for generative LLM coders in ICD coding. We further introduce PHI, a diagnostic curriculum that extends GRPO to refine missed-code cases. Our results show that prompting-only evaluation substantially underestimates the potential of LLMs for ICD coding. SFT provides the main capability jump, GRPO further improves code-set prediction beyond SFT, and PHI provides targeted gains on macro-level performance. These findings suggest that the main bottleneck is not the generative formulation alone, but how the model is adapted and optimized for full-taxonomy recall. We release our code, data splits, and checkpoints at https://github.com/AlexandreWANG915/LLM4ICD.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Which Directions Matter? Sparse Design for Affine Robust Optimization

arXiv:2606.14648v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robust machine learning and optimization rely on the uncertainty model choice. We investigate which uncertainty directions a model must cover when defined by a finite dictionary and a budget constraint. Selecting a subset forms an atomic uncertainty set with a closed form support function, yielding tractable robust programs for affine objectives. We propose a data driven selection rule based on a coverage objective over evaluation directions, including gradients, adversarial perturbations, or shifts observed on held out data. We prove this objective is monotone and submodular, supporting a greedy method with a $(1-1/e)$ approximation guarantee and a matching hardness barrier. We also provide a certificate bounding the loss from the selected subset and a radius calibration rule with out of sample control.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Scaling Limits of Bivariate Nearly-Unstable Hawkes Processes and Applications to Rough Volatility

arXiv:2605.03703v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study a pair of nearly-unstable Hawkes processes coupled through a one-directional, or triangular, cross-excitation: the first component evolves autonomously and excites the second, but not conversely. Each component is self-exciting through a heavy-tailed memory kernel, and the two kernels are allowed to have different tail indices, so that the limiting components exhibit genuinely different degrees of roughness. As the system approaches criticality, we prove that the suitably rescaled intensity vector converges weakly to the unique solution of a coupled system of stochastic Volterra equations of rough-volatility type. The first limiting component is autonomous, while the second is driven both by its own noise and by an inherited noise transmitted from the first component through an effective cross-kernel. This cross-kernel is the convolution of the two limiting Mittag-Leffler kernels and therefore combines the two memory structures. As a consequence, we obtain a short-time cross-decorrelation law: although the two components are coupled, their functional correlation vanishes at small time scales at an explicit polynomial rate. This time-dependent correlation distinguishes the limit from independent rough processes and from classical bivariate rough models with constant Brownian correlation.

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

The Circumplex Degeneracy Behind the Rare-Class Limit in Affect Recognition

In-the-wild expression recognition persistently fails on a few rare emotions, and the standard explanation is class imbalance. Through a controlled multi-task study on two benchmarks, we show the failure is instead a property of affect geometry: the rare classes are degenerate on Russell's circumplex, and that degeneracy bounds what any loss or cost can achieve. Our instrument is a circumplex-cost optimal-transport term that prices expression confusions by their valence-arousal distance. The term improves the official score and expression macro-F1, but a control most studies omit shows the gain is not geometric: a uniform cost, equivalent to a generic confidence penalty, matches it on Aff-Wild2 (p=0.625) and significantly exceeds it on AffectNet (+0.057 over base, larger than the circumplex). What the geometry reshapes is the structure of the errors, making them affectively nearer the truth on Aff-Wild2 (p=0.031 against the uniform control), an effect that does not survive on AffectNet, where a visual confound at the far corner of the circumplex overwhelms it. The rare-class failure, by contrast, is stable across both datasets we examine: the degenerate pairs (anger-fear on Aff-Wild2, anger-contempt on AffectNet) resist frequency-based interventions, the transport term, and an action-unit-augmented cost built specifically to separate them. We conclude that progress on rare expressions requires representations that distinguish the classes, not supervision that reprices their confusions, and we provide the controls and metrics needed to tell the two apart.

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

The Hidden Environmental Cost of Poor Coding Practices in TensorFlow and Keras Applications: A Study on Resource Leaks and Carbon Emissions

arXiv:2606.19799v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Efficiency and sustainability are critical considerations in the development and deployment of machine learning (ML) applications. Among the factors influencing sustainability, resource leaks in ML code can introduce hidden inefficiencies that elevate energy consumption and CO2 emissions. Despite this, empirical evidence quantifying their environmental impact remains limited. This emerging results paper presents an initial empirical investigation of two common resource-leak smells, namely Improper Model Reuse (IMR) and Unreleased Tensor References (UTR), and their impact on energy consumption and CO2 emissions in TensorFlow and Keras workloads. Controlled experiments were conducted for each smell by executing identical training tasks while comparing against a smell-free baseline. Our preliminary results show that both smells consistently increase estimated electricity usage and carbon emissions. IMR and UTR increased electricity consumption by approximately 32% and 46%, respectively, with proportional increases in CO2 emissions. Paired statistical tests indicate that these differences are systematic and statistically significant, providing initial empirical evidence that resource-leak smells may degrade ML energy efficiency and environmental sustainability. These findings suggest that resource-leak smells pose measurable risks to both software quality and sustainability, emphasizing the importance of integrating resource-lifecycle management and energy-efficiency considerations into ML development.

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

Cross-lingual Embedding Clustering for Hierarchical Softmax in Low-Resource Multilingual Speech Recognition

We present a novel approach centered on the decoding stage of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) that enhances multilingual performance, especially for low-resource languages. It utilizes a cross-lingual embedding clustering method to construct a hierarchical Softmax (H-Softmax) decoder, which enables similar tokens across different languages to share similar decoder representations. It addresses the limitations of the previous Huffman-based H-Softmax method, which relied on shallow features in token similarity assessments. Through experiments on a downsampled dataset of 15 languages, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in improving low-resource multilingual ASR accuracy.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-20

EpiLink: a simulation-based compatibility model for genomic transmission clustering in infectious disease surveillance

Identifying recently linked infections from pathogen genome sequences is central to infectious disease surveillance, yet many clustering approaches rely on fixed genetic distance thresholds whose relationship to transmission is often unclear. This limitation is especially important in rapidly growing outbreaks and superspreading events, where many cases may be sampled close together in time and share little genetic variation, making true transmission links difficult to distinguish from other closely related infections. Supervised models can improve discrimination, but they require labelled transmission data that are rarely available during outbreak response. We developed EpiLink, a threshold-free method that estimates whether two cases are compatible with recent transmission. Here, compatibility means how well the observed genetic distance and sampling-time difference between two cases fit what would be expected if they were linked by defined recent transmission scenarios. EpiLink simulates plausible recent transmission histories while accounting for uncertainty in infection timing, testing delay, and mutation accumulation, then assigns higher scores to pairs whose observed differences are typical of those simulations. EpiLink was evaluated using both synthetic and empirical SARS-CoV-2 outbreak data from the 2020 Boston epidemic. Two EpiLink variants were compared to a logistic regression model trained on labelled transmission data. One EpiLink variant assumed deterministic mutation accumulation, with genetic differences proportional to elapsed evolutionary time; the other accounted for stochasticity by sampling mutation counts from a Poisson distribution. The logistic regression model performed better at distinguishing linked from unlinked pairs, but EpiLink achieved comparable clustering accuracy. In the Boston data, EpiLink recovered clusters enriched for documented conference and skilled nursing facility outbreaks. EpiLink thus provides an interpretable, simulation-based approach for identifying recent transmission clusters when fixed thresholds are difficult to justify and labelled transmission data are unavailable.

18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-13

ADMETron: An AI-driven SaaS platform for comprehensive ADMET prediction and compound prioritisation

ONTOSIGHT(R) ADMETron is an AI-driven platform designed for rapid prediction and visualization of Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism, Excretion, and Toxicity (ADMET) properties to support modern drug discovery. The platform integrates an interactive web interface with a scalable predictive engine, enabling high-throughput virtual screening and batch analysis of chemical compounds. Its core architecture combines recurrent neural network (RNN)-derived molecular embeddings from SMILES representations with physicochemical descriptors, which are subsequently modeled using gradient boosting machines (GBMs). This framework provides predictions across 34 ADMET endpoints, including physicochemical properties, absorption, CYP450 interactions, hERG liability, and mutagenicity. The predictive performance of ADMETron was evaluated using benchmark datasets from the Therapeutics Data Commons (TDC), demonstrating strong performance and generalizability across both classification and regression tasks. Beyond predictive modeling, the platform introduces an interactive radar graph-based structure-activity relationship (SAR) visualization framework that enables real-time comparison of multiple compounds and reference drugs across selected ADMET parameters. This feature facilitates intuitive interpretation of multidimensional molecular profiles and supports lead optimization and compound prioritization. Comparative assessment against widely used online ADMET tools further demonstrated broad endpoint coverage spanning pharmacokinetic, physicochemical, toxicity, and medicinal chemistry properties within a unified environment. Together, these capabilities establish ADMETron as a comprehensive platform for ADMET assessment and data-driven decision-making in drug discovery. (https://admetron.partex.ai/).

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Black Hole–Entropy Container or Creator

arXiv:2603.18374v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Do black holes possess entropy or do they create it? The dominant assumption is that they possess entropy, and a they evaporate that entropy is emitted and decreases. In this paper I use a model of a linear amplifier, in which I argue that the amplifier has not entropy and yet it emits entropy in the process of it operation. This model is closely related to behaviour of black holes, resulting in answer the question of that title that black holes do not have entropy, but nevertheless them create and emit entropy with the total entropy emitted being the same as the usual expression proportional to the square of the mass of the black hole.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Prediction-Powered Causal Inference by Automatic Debiased Machine Learning and Semi-Supervised Riesz Regression

Authors:

arXiv:2606.12892v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This study investigates semiparametric efficient estimation of causal and structural parameters in a semi-supervised setting. In our setting, unlabeled auxiliary regressors are available in addition to labeled observations consisting of outcomes and regressors. Our goal is to construct estimators of causal and structural parameters whose asymptotic variances are smaller than those of estimators constructed using only labeled data. We refer to this framework as prediction-powered causal inference (PPCI). We first derive the efficient influence function and the efficiency bound, which imply that the use of auxiliary regressors can attain a smaller asymptotic variance than the efficiency bound attainable from labeled observations alone. Then, by combining the efficient influence function with the debiased machine learning (DML) framework, we propose methods that we call DML-PPCI. If we construct an estimating-equation estimator, we refer to the method as EE-DML-PPCI; if we construct a targeted-learning estimator, we refer to the method as TMLE-DML-PPCI. The asymptotic variances of both estimators match our derived efficiency bound. In the construction of the estimators, estimation of the efficient influence function plays an important role. In our study, the efficient influence function is also a Neyman orthogonal score, which depends on the Riesz representer and the regression function. For Riesz representer estimation, we develop semi-supervised generalized Riesz regression with convergence rate guarantees.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Closing the Loop: PID Feedback Control for Interpretable Activation Steering in Symbolic Music Generation

arXiv:2606.18790v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transformer-based architectures have significantly advanced the generation of complex symbolic sequences, yet a significant gap remains in achieving fine-grained, interpretable control over discrete signal attributes. This paper investigates the mechanistic interpretability of the Multitrack Music Transformer (MMT) and proposes a framework for deterministic attribute modulation without retraining to bridge this gap via inference-time activation steering. Utilizing the Difference-in-Means (DiffMean) methodology, we isolate latent directions for signal attributes, specifically Pitch and Duration, within the residual stream. We validate the Linear Representation Hypothesis in this domain, achieving high correlation between steering magnitude and attribute shift. To address the inherent feature entanglement in multi-attribute steering, we introduce a Dual Steering framework utilizing Gram-Schmidt Orthogonalization. Experimental results demonstrate that this geometric decoupling reduces conceptual interference and signal degradation compared to naive vector addition, enabling independent deterministic control even against strong autoregressive conditioning.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Spatial Localization of Relativistic Quantum Systems: The Commutativity Requirement and the Locality Principle. Part II: A Model from Local QFT

arXiv:2604.04173v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper is the second and final part of a two-part study. We construct positive-energy relativistic spatial localization observables in Minkowski spacetime within standard quantum field theory, using the stress–energy–momentum tensor smeared with suitable test functions. For each fixed timelike direction, the construction gives positive operator-valued measures (POVMs) on spacelike hypersurfaces, well defined on every $n$-particle sector and satisfying a relativistic causality condition excluding superluminal propagation of detection probabilities. The observables are built from local or quasi-local field-theoretic quantities, thus providing a rigorous version of earlier heuristic proposals. In the one-particle sector, the construction reduces to the observable previously introduced by the author, and its first moment gives the Newton–Wigner position operator under appropriate normalization and centering assumptions. Because the Reeh–Schlieder theorem prevents the normally ordered stress–energy–momentum tensor from being positive on the full Fock space, we use quantum energy inequalities to obtain lower bounds controlling deviations from positivity. This leads to regularized operator families, bounded from below, which approximate the localization effects. Finally, we define conditional localization observables for finite laboratories through modified local energy operators. By Haag duality, the corresponding conditional POVMs belong to local von Neumann algebras and commute for causally separated regions, in accordance with the Araki–Haag–Kastler framework. The results show how commutativity of localization observables is recovered for conditional measurements in finite spacetime regions.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Long-term exposure to PM2.5 components and lipid profiles in WTC Health Program general responders

Fine particulate matter (PM2.5) was found to be associated with elevated blood lipids, but fewer studies have examined the associations with specific constituents of PM2.5. We studied the associations between exposure to annual PM2.5 and its 14 constituents, and repeated blood lipid measurements among general responders enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Program between 2003 and 2019 (n = 44,876). We used generalized additive mixed effect models to investigate the single-pollutant associations with repeated measures of blood total cholesterol (TC), high and low-density lipoprotein (HDL-C and LDL-C) levels. We then used linear generalized weighted quantile sum regression with a random intercept for participant ID to account for the clustering of repeated measures and evaluate the combined associations with the component mixture. A decile increase in the mixture of 14 PM2.5 chemical components was associated with 0.375 mg/dL increase in TC levels (95% confidence Interval (CI): 0.174-0.577) and 0.302 mg/dL increase in LDL-C (95% CI: 0.063, 0.540). Lead, organic carbon, and iron were major drivers of both associations. Component-specific models also show higher TC and LDL levels associated with interquartile range increases in organic carbon (0.472, 95% CI [0.027, 0.918] and 0.648 95% CI [0.136, 1.160]) and iron exposure (1.081, 95% CI [0.630, 1.532] and 0.748, 95% CI [0.318, 1.178]). In conclusion, we found PM2.5 exposure to be associated with elevated lipid levels. The associations differed by PM2.5 composition, highlighting organic carbon, lead, and iron and major drivers. These findings are highly significant for a population exposed to extreme air pollution event and susceptible to lipid alterations that might trigger cardiovascular events.

24.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

Promera: a unified model for biomolecular structure prediction, filtering, and design

Generative models have become staple tools for modeling and designing biomolecular structures. However, although these tools have improved in structural prediction accuracy, their ability to filter designed binders—an essential use case—remains insufficient; whereas design methods have focused more on unconstrained binder generation rather than capabilities enabled by controllable design. We introduce Promera, a unified generative model that combines all-atom structure prediction with improved filtering and controllable design. We find that Promera's confidence metrics are more accurate for filtering binders from non-binders for both miniproteins and nanobodies, while its co-folding performance surpasses popular open-source models (OpenFold3-p2, Boltz-2) on therapeutically relevant categories. As a design model, Promera generates binders by predicting masked protein sequences with optional epitope, paratope, and template constraints. Remarkably, our nanobody designs match the in silico success rates from backprop-based techniques (mBER) when evaluated under co-folding confidence filters. We further provide two in silico demonstrations of the the versatile capabilities of our design method: epitope targeting of the Andes hantavirus glycoprotein with VHHs and active state stabilization of the beta-2 andrenergic GPCR. We conclude by proposing a scaling law for co-folding models, suggesting a path for further performance improvement.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Learning Arbitrary Lindbladians with Quantum Error Correction

arXiv:2606.18188v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study ansatz-free Lindbladian learning, the problem of reconstructing the generator of an open quantum system without prior knowledge of its Hamiltonian or dissipator structures. This problem exhibits two distinct information-theoretic precision limits: Hamiltonian components unmasked by dissipation are Heisenberg-limited, while the remaining Lindbladian components are subject to the quadratically worse standard quantum limit. Existing approaches that attain these optimal scalings strongly rely on pre-specified structure of interaction and noise, leaving the ansatz-free setting an open problem. In this work, we present the first standard-quantum-limited algorithm for learning arbitrary sparse Lindbladians. Under an additional physically motivated regularity condition, our framework also learns the Hamiltonian component disjoint from the dissipator at the Heisenberg limit, without prior knowledge of either the Hamiltonian or dissipator supports. Our main technical ingredient is a recursive random stabilizer-code construction that suppresses the strongest Lindbladian terms while preserving sensitivity to weaker unknown ones. These results establish a scalable framework for characterizing unknown open quantum systems, with quantum error correction serving as a key learning primitive.