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01.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

Cell-type resolved transcriptional network analysis of <i>in vivo</i> cellular senescence following injury

Authors:

by Alda Sabalic, Victoria Moiseeva, Andres Cisneros, Oleg Deryagin, Eusebio Perdiguero, Pura Muñoz-Cánoves, Jordi Garcia-Ojalvo Identifying the genetic correlates of complex phenotypes is a challenging task. Methods coming from the field of complex networks can help finding such molecular patterns, by revealing statistical associations among groups of genes that correlate with the phenotype. Here we study cellular senescence, a complex cell state whose molecular underpinnings are still under active investigation. We analyze cell type–resolved RNA sequencing data obtained from injured muscle tissue in mice, with a network-based approach that merges eigenvector centrality feature selection and community detection. Our analysis identifies genetic markers that had not been associated with senescence so far, which are validated with existing single-cell RNA sequencing data in a different type of tissue. The identified key genes belong to transcriptional pathways associated with established hallmarks of senescence, and thus can be interpreted as molecular correlates of such hallmarks. The method proposed here could be applied to any complex cellular phenotype even when only bulk RNA sequencing is available, provided the data is resolved by cell type.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Learning to Prompt: Improving Student Engagement with Adaptive LLM-based High-School Tutoring

LLMs can personalize education, although current static-prompt tutoring systems struggle to adapt to diverse academic disciplines. We develop and test a system with subject-aware prompting, based on 14 pedagogical features (e.g., tutor scaffolding, student understanding) extracted from raw transcripts. We first train a prompt routing model in a simulation environment, and then deploy it for online adaptation with actual high-school students. The simulation benchmark shows the router outperforming two static baselines ($0.694$ vs. $0.647$ and $0.64$, $p

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

PASQA: Pitch-Accent-Focused Speech Quality Assessment Model Trained on Synthetic Speech with Accent Errors

Existing mean opinion score (MOS) prediction models typically predict utterance-level naturalness MOS and can be insensitive to localized pitch-accent errors. We propose Pitch-Accent-focused Speech Quality Assessment (PASQA), which explicitly targets pitch-accent correctness. To train our model, we construct a controlled Japanese accent-error dataset by changing accent patterns using an accent-controllable text-to-speech system, and compute a pseudo accent-quality score from the accent-error rate. PASQA builds on self-supervised representations and employs mora-conditioned fusion, ranking loss, an auxiliary accent-error localization task, and speaker-invariant training. Experiments show that conventional models fail to preserve the ordering by accent-error severity, whereas PASQA achieves high ordering accuracy on both seen and unseen speakers. Further, PASQA shows stronger agreement with human accent-correctness judgments. The code is available at https://github.com/lycorp-jp/PASQA.

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

On Local Population-Risk Certificates

Authors:

arXiv:2606.19147v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper develops local certificates for population-risk increments around a current model. For a local candidate set \(\mathcal D\), the certificate is a two-sided confidence band for \(P({\ell_{\theta+v}-\ell_\theta})\) over \(v\in\mathcal D\). As an application, the upper endpoint of this band yields a risk-controlled update rule: an update is accepted only when its certified upper endpoint is nonpositive; otherwise the current model is retained.

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

What Makes Effective Supervision in Latent Chain-of-Thought: An Information-Theoretic Analysis

Latent Chain-of-Thought (CoT) internalizes reasoning within continuous hidden states, offering a promising alternative to verbose discrete reasoning traces. However, robust latent reasoning remains difficult because outcome supervision provides weak learning signals and leaves latent trajectories prone to semantic drift. In this work, we analyze Latent CoT from an information-theoretic perspective and identify this failure as a dual collapse: gradient attenuation along the optimization path and representational drift in the latent space. We further decompose process supervision into two complementary dimensions: Trajectory Supervision, which injects dense stepwise reasoning signals, and Space Supervision, which preserves the semantic structure of the latent manifold. Our analysis shows that rigid geometric compression can collapse the reasoning space, whereas generative reconstruction provides a more flexible semantic anchor that better preserves information capacity. To measure these effects, we introduce the Unified Latent Probe (ULP), which quantifies the mutual information between latent trajectories and explicit reasoning steps. Experiments reveal a clear Information-Performance Binding: reasoning accuracy depends on the information fidelity preserved in the latent chain. These findings provide a principled framework for latent reasoning supervision and suggest shifting from geometric imitation toward mutual information maximization. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/EIT-NLP/Supervision-in-Latent-CoT}{this repository}.

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

WHAR Arena: Benchmarking the State of the Art in Efficient Wearable Human Activity Recognition

arXiv:2606.13194v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep learning has become the dominant paradigm in Wearable Human Activity Recognition (WHAR), yet progress is obscured by a comparability crisis. Results are often reported using inconsistent datasets, custom data processing, and varying evaluation protocols, making state-of-the-art claims fragile. We address this with a large-scale, open-source benchmark that integrates 30 diverse datasets under standardized processing, unified model interfaces, and a shared cross-subject evaluation protocol. Evaluating 17 representative architectures across 4760 training runs, we jointly measure predictive performance alongside on-device latency, peak memory, and model size on an Android reference device. Our results reveal that the WHAR state of the art is distributed rather than dominated by a single architecture. While CNN-HAR achieves the highest mean macro-F1, top-performing models cluster tightly, indicating contemporary architectures have converged near a predictive performance ceiling. When accounting for deployment efficiency, compact neural models, such as TinierHAR, and classical Random Forests define the practically relevant Pareto frontier, whereas larger recurrent and hybrid models incur high hardware costs without corresponding performance gains. Consequently, while predictive performance has plateaued, substantial potential for future progress remains in optimizing deployment efficiency and improving adaptation to domain shifts. We release our full framework to support transparent reuse and extension.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

HeteRo-Select: Informativeness as the Participation Driver in Heterogeneous Federated Learning

arXiv:2508.06692v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated learning systems typically allocate gradient compression by link speed. This is sensible when bandwidth and data informativeness align. However, under non-IID data, these signals often decorrelate or invert. A bandwidth-driven allocator then risks compressing the most informative gradients hardest. We propose HeteRo-Select, a framework that replaces bandwidth with a per-client informativeness score as the primary driver of compression. The score jointly governs three decisions per round: client selection, compression ratio, and server aggregation weight, with bandwidth retained only as a hard ceiling. Score-proportional selection provably reduces the effective heterogeneity of the chosen subset; score-proportional compression provably lowers aggregate top-$k$ error at fixed traffic. Under the exact FedCG simulation protocol, HeteRo-Select delivers a $1.78\times$ speedup and an $18.2\%$ reduction in traffic on CIFAR-10. The same configuration, unchanged, scales from a $7{,}850$-parameter logistic regression to an $11.27$M-parameter ResNet-18, hitting the accuracy target on three of four benchmarks. When bandwidth and informativeness are deliberately anti-correlated, the method still achieves the target accuracy with less traffic than the normal-bandwidth run.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

FasterPy: An LLM-based Code Execution Efficiency Optimization Framework

arXiv:2512.22827v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Code often suffers from performance bugs. These bugs necessitate the research and practice of code optimization. Traditional rule-based methods rely on manually designing and maintaining rules for specific performance bugs (e.g., redundant loops, repeated computations), making them labor-intensive and limited in applicability. In recent years, machine learning and deep learning-based methods have emerged as promising alternatives by learning optimization heuristics from annotated code corpora and performance measurements. However, these approaches usually depend on specific program representations and meticulously crafted training datasets, making them costly to develop and difficult to scale. With the booming of Large Language Models (LLMs), their remarkable capabilities in code generation have opened new avenues for automated code optimization. In this work, we proposed FasterPy, a low-cost and efficient framework that adapts LLMs to optimize the execution efficiency of Python code. FasterPy combines Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), supported by a knowledge base constructed from existing performance-improving code pairs and corresponding performance measurements, with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to enhance code optimization performance. Our experimental results on the Performance Improving Code Edits (PIE) benchmark demonstrate that our method outperforms existing models on multiple metrics. The FasterPy tool and the experimental results are available at https://github.com/WuYue22/fasterpy.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Benchmark of quantum algorithms for ground state preparation in the presence of noise

arXiv:2606.20551v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We compare the performance of representative cooling, adiabatic, and optimization algorithms for ground-state preparation in the presence of noise. Using an exactly solvable family of quadratic fermionic Hamiltonians subject to depolarizing noise, we derive the scaling of the achievable relative energy as a function of the noise rate and support these results with numerical simulations. The Hamiltonian exhibits two phases, separated by a quantum phase transition. As expected, the performance of the different algorithms depends on the phase: adiabatic evolution is favorable in the trivial phase, while a multi-frequency cooling algorithm, as proposed in [1], becomes competitive or superior in the topological phase, where gap-closing limits adiabatic protocols. We further present numerical results for the quantum approximate optimization algorithm [2], showing that it performs competitively with cooling in the trivial phase but is typically outperformed in the topological regime. Finally, we show that for this model the cooling protocol exhibits enhanced robustness to parameter imperfections, highlighting its potential advantage for realistic implementations of noisy quantum state preparation. The analytical approach developed here, in conjunction with numerical validation, establishes an extendable approach to benchmarking ground-state preparation algorithms.

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

Graph Neural Networks for Semi-Supervised Image Classification with Multi-Feature Aggregation

Feature extraction involves the identification and extraction of salient characteristics or patterns, including edges, textures, shapes, and color attributes. Contemporary feature extractors predominantly leverage deep learning architectures, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (VITs). The availability of diverse feature extractors in the literature provides a wide range of feature representations. Features extracted from an image depend on the specific application, the chosen extractor, and its configuration. Therefore, integrating complementary information by combining distinct extractors offers a promising way to enhance performance. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), particularly Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs), have emerged as powerful and widely adopted approaches for semi-supervised image classification, as they effectively leverage both labeled and unlabeled data while exploiting the underlying graph structures that capture relationships among samples. This study proposes a novel approach for GNNs in scenarios where labeled data is scarce, by integrating diverse sets of feature and graph representations derived from various extractors in classification scenarios. Experimental investigations were conducted, encompassing combinations of distinct feature and graph extractors, as well as rank aggregation strategies. The primary contributions of this work are underscored by the experimental findings, which demonstrate that the strategic combination of feature and graph representations, coupled with the application of manifold learning for graph processing, leads to significant improvements in classification accuracy across the majority of experimental conditions. Furthermore, the utilization of rank aggregation techniques to integrate features from different extractors was shown to enhance classification accuracy.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Robust Detection of Planted Subgraphs in Semi-Random Models

arXiv:2508.02158v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Detection of planted subgraphs in Erdös-Rényi random graphs has been extensively studied, leading to a rich body of results characterizing both statistical and computational thresholds. However, most prior work assumes a purely random generative model, making the resulting algorithms potentially fragile in the face of real-world perturbations. In this work, we initiate the study of semi-random models for the planted subgraph detection problem, wherein an adversary is allowed to remove edges outside the planted subgraph before the graph is revealed to the statistician. Crucially, the statistician remains unaware of which edges have been removed, introducing fundamental challenges to the inference task. We establish fundamental statistical limits for detection under this semi-random model, revealing a sharp dichotomy. Specifically, for planted subgraphs with strongly sub-logarithmic maximum density detection becomes information-theoretically impossible in the presence of an adversary-despite being possible for some planted subgraphs in the classical random model. In stark contrast, for subgraphs with super-logarithmic density, the statistical limits remain essentially unchanged; we prove that the optimal (albeit computationally intractable) likelihood ratio test remains robust. Beyond these statistical boundaries, we design a new computationally efficient and robust detection algorithm, and provide rigorous statistical guarantees for its performance. Our results establish the first robust framework for planted subgraph detection and open new directions in the study of semi-random models, computational-statistical trade-offs, and robustness in graph inference problems.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Combining Retrieval-Augmented Text Generation with LLMs for Reading Content Recommendations

arXiv:2606.14817v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of a system for generating personalized reading content using Large Language Models (LLMs) combined with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). The proposed architecture consists of four modules: Input, RAG, Generation, and Judging and enables users to specify both a question and a target reading content complexity. RAG is employed to retrieve relevant information from the Internet, enriching and grounding the content produced by three modern LLMs: Meta LLaMA 4 Scout, LLaMA 3.1 8B Instant, and Google Gemma2 9B. Reading materials are generated using three prompting strategies (Chain-of-Thought, zero-shot, and few-shot), and the LLM-as-a-Judge module automatically evaluates answer quality and alignment with the desired readability level. Experimental results show that RAG consistently improves system performance across all models and prompting techniques, increasing relevance and particularly groundedness by up to 26-35 percentage points. Overall, the findings demonstrate that the RAG-augmented architecture effectively produces reading content tailored to user queries and desired textual complexity.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Decomposing Prediction Mechanisms for In-Context Recall

arXiv:2507.01414v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a new family of toy problems that combine features of linear-regression-style continuous in-context learning (ICL) with discrete associative recall. We pretrain transformer models on sample traces from this toy, specifically symbolically-labeled interleaved state observations from randomly drawn linear deterministic dynamical systems. We study if the transformer models can recall the state of a sequence previously seen in its context when prompted to do so with the corresponding in-context label. Taking a closer look at this task, it becomes clear that the model must perform two functions: (1) identify which system's state should be recalled and apply that system to its last seen state, and (2) continuing to apply the correct system to predict the subsequent states. Training dynamics reveal that the first capability emerges well into a model's training. Surprisingly, the second capability, of continuing the prediction of a resumed sequence, develops much earlier. Via out-of-distribution experiments, and a mechanistic analysis on model weights via edge pruning, we find that next-token prediction for this toy problem involves at least two separate mechanisms. One mechanism uses the discrete symbolic labels to do the associative recall required to predict the start of a resumption of a previously seen sequence. The second mechanism, which is largely agnostic to the discrete symbolic labels, performs a "Bayesian-style" prediction based on the previous token and the context. These two mechanisms have different learning dynamics. To confirm that this multi-mechanism (manifesting as separate phase transitions) phenomenon is not just an artifact of our toy setting, we used OLMo training checkpoints on an ICL translation task to see a similar phenomenon: a decisive gap in the emergence of first-task-token performance vs second-task-token performance.

15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-20

Systematic Evaluation of Feature Representations for Cancer-Associated sORF Prediction in Non-coding RNA

Short open reading frames (sORFs) within non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) have arisen as a hidden layer of gene regulation, encoding small peptides that represent a new class of cancer regulators with diagnostic and therapeutic potential. However, inferring associations between sORFs to specific cancer types remains challenging and requires computational approaches for accurate prediction. Recently, the CoraL framework introduced the first computational approach for predicting cancer-associated peptides, focusing primarily on model architecture while overlooking how feature extraction strategies influence predictive accuracy. We present a systematic evaluation of machine learning models and feature extraction approaches to predict cancer-associated sORFs across 15 cancer types. We benchmarked seven traditional machine learning algorithms combined with three feature extraction methods: k-mer frequency, Word2Vec embeddings, and genomic language model (gLM)-based embeddings. To our knowledge, this is the first study applying gLM-derived embeddings to the prediction of cancer-associated sORFs in ncRNA. Our results show that traditional machine learning models with appropriate feature extraction outperform the CoraL baseline across all cancer types, achieving up to 10% higher accuracy in some of the 15 evaluated datasets. Interestingly, k-mer features consistently outperformed gLM embeddings without fine-tuning, suggesting that local sequence composition may provide more discriminative information for this task and that pre-trained genomic representations may require task-specific adaptation to fully capture these patterns. Additionally, we observed that the way sequences are tokenized, such as the k-mer length, can affect performance: longer fragments (e.g., k=7) sometimes reduced accuracy for Random Forest but had a smaller effect on MLP. Our findings suggest that appropriate feature engineering can provide greater improvements than increasing model complexity.

16.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-23

Learning interpretable structural similarity from tandem mass spectra for small molecule analog discovery

Analog discovery remains a central bottleneck in mass spectrometry-based untargeted metabolomics, as conventional spectral similarity scores poorly reflect molecular structure. We introduce SIMBA, a transformer-based model that infers two interpretable graph-based distances, maximum common edge subgraph and substructure edit distance, directly from tandem mass spectra. SIMBA consistently retrieves structurally closer analogs than existing methods, enabling structure-aware small molecule identification beyond exact spectral matching.

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

Filtered Conformal Ellipsoids for Graph-Native Time Series

arXiv:2606.17014v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Joint prediction sets for multivariate time series should control a single event while adapting to cross-coordinate dependence. We study filtered conformal ellipsoids: a frozen state-space filter emits a one-step predictive mean and covariance, and split-conformal calibration is applied to the resulting Mahalanobis scores. The filter is used to choose the ellipsoid shape; conformal calibration chooses the scalar radius, so the construction benefits from a learned predictive covariance without relying on Gaussian tail probabilities for coverage. The main difficulty is that filtered scores are dependent and learned recurrent filters need not contract in their raw hidden state; we therefore analyse contraction in an observable predictive-law quotient that identifies hidden states producing the same future sequence of emitted Gaussian laws. Under a stable Bayes Gaussian-projection filter, covariance bounds, and a finite-horizon observability Fisher condition, small excess Gaussian negative log-likelihood implies contraction of the learned emitted laws. Combined with a threshold-autocovariance envelope this yields a Chebyshev-type approximate coverage bound for filtered split-conformal prediction under dependence; a sharper Bernstein-type bound requires an additional geometric-mixing concentration assumption. Under Gaussian oracle realisability we also obtain a near-oracle log-volume comparison within the class of conditionally valid Gaussian ellipsoid rules. We instantiate the framework with a GCN-GRU filter with diagonal-plus-low-rank covariance. On moderate-size graph-native traffic benchmarks (METRLA-$20$ and PEMSBAY-$50$), the learned filter gives sharper at-target ellipsoids than static-covariance and non-filter baselines; at full-graph scale and on non-graph-native datasets, factor and copula baselines can be stronger.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

On the stability of rarefaction for stochastic viscous conservation law

arXiv:2606.24167v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the asymptotic stability of rarefaction waves for one-dimensional stochastic viscous conservation laws driven by nonlinear conservative noise. In a critical scaling where stochastic energy injection and viscous dissipation compete at comparable magnitudes, standard kinetic and viscosity frameworks encounter obstructions due to regularity gaps and non-integrable profiles. To address this, we introduce a stochastic area inequality controlling accumulated energy fluctuations, a local $L^1$ contraction principle via stochastic Kru\v{z}kov doubling-of-variables that yields pathwise uniqueness without global integrability, and a modified Galerkin scheme preserving the $H^2$ energy structure. Assuming local $H^2$ regularity, we prove almost sure algebraic convergence to the rarefaction wave. For sufficiently small initial perturbations, we establish global well-posedness and sharp decay estimates in expectation. The smallness condition identifies a regime where viscous dissipation dominates stochastic injection, reflecting a structural stability threshold rather than a technical artifact. Our approach extends the analytical framework for conservative SPDEs with rough fluxes.

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

MAWARITH: A Dataset and Benchmark for Legal Inheritance Reasoning with LLMs

Islamic inheritance law is challenging for large language models because solving inheritance cases requires complex, structured, multi-step reasoning and the correct application of juristic rules to compute heirs' shares. We introduce MAWARITH, a large-scale annotated dataset of 12,500 Arabic inheritance cases for training and evaluating models on the full reasoning chain: (i) identifying eligible heirs, (ii) applying blocking (\d{hajb}) and allocation rules, and (iii) computing exact inheritance shares. To the best of our knowledge, MAWARITH is the first Arabic corpus and benchmark designed for end-to-end Islamic inheritance reasoning. Unlike prior datasets that restrict inheritance case solving to multiple-choice questions, MAWARITH supports the full reasoning chain and provides step-by-step solutions with justifications grounded in classical juristic sources and established inheritance rules, as well as exact share calculations. This enables models to learn how to generate detailed, step-by-step responses to user queries that reflect real-world Islamic inheritance cases. To evaluate models beyond final-answer accuracy, we propose MIR-E (Mawarith Inheritance Reasoning Evaluation), a weighted multi-stage metric that scores key reasoning stages and captures error propagation across the pipeline. We evaluate six large language models in a zero-shot setting. A commercial model achieves about 90\%, whereas all evaluated open-source models remain below 50\%. Our error analysis identifies recurring failure patterns, including scenario misinterpretation, errors in heir identification, errors in share allocation, and missing or incorrect application of key inheritance rules such as \textquotesingle awl and radd. The MAWARITH dataset is publicly available at https://gitlab.com/nlpresearcher/mawarith.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Diffusion Offline Reinforcement Learning for Fair and Energy-Efficient UAV-Assisted Wireless Networks

arXiv:2606.16331v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The integration of generative artificial intelligence with wireless communication and signal processing systems has opened new avenues for intelligent, data-driven decision-making in future 6G networks. This work proposes a diffusion soft actor-critic (Diffusion-SAC) approach that leverages offline reinforcement learning (RL) enhanced by denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) to optimize trajectory and scheduling control in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks. While offline RL methods, such as conservative Q-learning (CQL), can learn from static datasets, they often struggle to generalize in low-data or dynamic conditions. To address this, we combine the robustness of CQL with the generative power of diffusion models, enabling expressive and signal-aware policy learning that generalizes beyond behavior policies. Applied to a UAV-assisted wireless network, the proposed framework minimizes transmission energy and improves fairness among devices. Simulations show that Diffusion-SAC outperforms standard offline RL baselines, achieving more stable convergence and higher rewards even with limited datasets. The method enhances data efficiency, reduces energy consumption, and increases throughput by more than 35 % compared to existing algorithms, demonstrating its potential for robust policy learning in next-generation wireless control systems.

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

CAOA – Completion-Assisted Object-CAD Alignment

Accurately aligning CAD models to their corresponding objects in indoor RGB-D scans is a central challenge in 3D semantic reconstruction. The task requires estimating a 9-Degree-of-Freedom (DoF) pose-position, rotation, and scale along three axes-but is hindered by noisy and incomplete scans, as well as segmentation errors that cause geometric distortions. We present Completion-Assisted Object-CAD Alignment (CAOA), a method that integrates a semantically and contextually aware point cloud completion module with a symmetry-aware relative pose estimation algorithm, enabling precise alignment of CAD models to scanned objects. Existing completion methods are typically trained and evaluated on synthetic datasets, which often fail to generalize to real-world scans. To bridge this gap, we introduce a synthetic data generation strategy tailored to indoor scenes, significantly reducing the synthetic-to-real domain gap-validated through quantitative comparisons with widely used completion datasets. In addition, we release S2C-Completion, an expert-annotated dataset of over 8,500 object-CAD pairs from Scan2CAD, created for real-world indoor single-object completion and intended as a new benchmark for this task. For object-CAD alignment, we incorporate symmetry information via a symmetry-aware loss, improving robustness to symmetric ambiguities. On the Scan2CAD benchmark, CAOA achieves a 17% accuracy improvement over state-of-the-art methods.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

The Professor: Multi-Teacher Unsupervised Prompt Distillation for Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2606.23897v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Prompt distillation compresses large vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP into lightweight student models by matching teacher predictions on unlabeled domain images. PromptKD (CVPR 2024) established this paradigm with a single PromptSRC-finetuned ViT-L/14 teacher and a ViT-B/16 student. We propose TheProfessor, a multi-teacher extension that distills from a fixed two-teacher ensemble: a domain-finetuned PromptSRC ViT-L/14 teacher and a zero-shot EVA-CLIP-L/14 teacher whose logits are pre-computed per dataset. We evaluate single-teacher PromptKD, equal-probability ensembling, and confidence-weighted ensembling on four base-to-novel datasets: Caltech-101, DTD, UCF101, and EuroSAT. In a 12-run single-seed sweep, confidence-weighted ensembling improves average HM from 87.52 to 89.28 (+1.77 points), while equal averaging improves average HM to 88.88 (+1.37 points). Gains are dataset dependent: they are negligible on Caltech-101 (+0.16 HM for confidence weighting), modest on UCF101 (+0.62), and largest on domain-shifted EuroSAT (+5.78). These results update our earlier Caltech-only analysis and show that multi-teacher prompt distillation is most useful when the second teacher contributes complementary supervision under domain shift.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Noise-Driven Escape from Metastable Phases explains Grokking in Deep Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.17120v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) exhibit first order phase transitions under variations of the L2 regularization strength, with each transition marking the onset of a new learnable feature. Below a critical regularization strength, all features are in principle learnable, but coexisting metastable states, separated by energy barriers, can trap the network and impede convergence. A strength of DNNs is their ability to generalize. But many open questions remain, among them the origin of so called grokking: the abrupt, delayed onset of generalization after prolonged apparent overfitting. We show for linear DNNs that grokking is consistent with hysteresis in first-order L2 phase transitions: using L2 regularization to engineer deliberate trapping, we demonstrate that a model in a low-accuracy metastable state escapes only when SGD noise drives it across an energy barrier, with escape times following Arrhenius scaling. We reproduce grokking-like delayed convergence across two orders of magnitude in escape time by deliberately trapping models in metastable phases. Using sparse sub-sampling we also reproduce the canonical grokking curve where test error eventually approaches the final training error. Our work suggests that the number of metastable states equals the number of learnable features – one per singular value of the data covariance – the potential for hysteresis grows naturally with task complexity. We provide evidence that the same mechanism likely operates in general nonlinear DNNs. Our results provide routes toward more efficient learning schemes.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Scalable estimation of temporal clustering in accelerometry: a kernel-independent dispersion index grounded in the Hawkes process

Background. Self-exciting (Hawkes) point processes are a natural model for the temporal clustering of human physical activity (PA) recorded by accelerometers, yet they have seldom been used in this setting—in part because the usual maximum-likelihood fitting is challenging due to potential estimation bias and convergence failures on these data. A moment-based alternative—estimating the Hawkes branching ratio from the dispersion index, the variance-to-mean ratio of event counts—is kernel-independent and computationally trivial, but it has not been evaluated for accelerometry or adapted to the intensity-marked recordings accelerometers provide. Methods. Treating each minute above a sedentary threshold as an event, we estimated the Hawkes branching ratio $n$ by maximum likelihood and, as a kernel-independent and far cheaper alternative, from the dispersion index. We compared four dispersion-based estimators—event-count-based, intensity-mark-weighted using the mark-moment ratio, and time-of-day (TOD) adjusted variants of each—against the marked and unmarked maximum-likelihood estimates. Estimators were evaluated for mutual agreement, goodness of fit, and finite-window results in two National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) accelerometry cohorts (hip-worn, $n=2{,}560$; wrist-worn, $n=3{,}132$). We related the resulting temporal clustering measures to all-cause mortality using survey-weighted Cox models, adjusting for PA frequency, Peak30 (the average of the 30 highest PA values), and demographic covariates. Results. Event-count-based dispersion estimates agreed strongly with maximum-likelihood branching ratios ($rapprox0.74$ in both cohorts); the intensity-marked variant incorporating PA intensity variability agreed less well. Marked and unmarked Hawkes models yielded similar excitation and decay parameters, suggesting PA intensity added little clustering information beyond event timing. In the survival analysis, temporal clustering was associated with all-cause mortality independently of PA frequency and Peak30; the direction of association differed between the hip- and wrist-worn cohorts. Conclusions. A scalable dispersion-index estimator recovers the Hawkes branching ratio and matches maximum-likelihood estimates without requiring kernel specification or iterative optimization. It offers a practical tool for quantifying temporal clustering in accelerometry, enabling decomposition of temporal PA patterns into its exogenous initiation and endogenous persistence. Such temporal patterns carry health-relevant information beyond PA intensity and volume. Keywords: dispersion index; Hawkes process; branching ratio; temporal clustering; point process estimation; accelerometry; mortality

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

Multiple Descents in Deep Learning as a Sequence of Order-Chaos Transitions in LSTM Networks

arXiv:2505.20030v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We observe a novel `multiple-descent' phenomenon during the learning process of a recurrent neural network called long-short-term memory (LSTM) networks during its training on real-world task, in which the performance goes through long cycles of up and down trends multiple times after the model is overtrained. By carrying out asymptotic stability analysis of the models, we found that the cycles in performance – indicated by loss function in test data – are closely associated with the phase transition process between order and chaos of the model, and the local optimal training step are consistently at the critical transition point between the two phases. More importantly, the most optimal point of the model usually occurs at the first transition from order to chaos, where the `width' of the `edge of chaos' is often the widest, allowing the best exploration of weight configurations for learning.