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

Non-frontal face recognition using GANs and memristor-based classifiers

Face recognition systems have advanced significantly through deep learning techniques, delivering high performance and robustness in complex scenarios. However, these approaches incur substantial computational overhead, limiting their in situ applicability in resource-constrained platforms such as drones, where they can address challenges including non-frontal facial imagery. Memristor-based neuromorphic systems have emerged as a compelling approach for edge AI applications, combining biologically inspired processing with efficient and scalable computation. In this work, we propose a facial recognition framework that addresses non-frontal pose variations by integrating lightweight generative adversarial network (GAN)-based pose frontalisation with memristor-based neuromorphic recognition. The experimental results on two datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of combining adversarial learning with memristive technology, achieving up to 96% identification accuracy. The proposed approach alleviates the computational bottlenecks of conventional AI and offers a scalable, efficient solution for face recognition in dynamic real-world environments.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Backbone-Conditional Behavior of Modality Gating in Multi-Modal Prostate MRI Segmentation: A 5-Fold Cross-Validation and Gate Mechanism Analysis

Robust segmentation of clinically significant prostate cancer (csPCa) on multi-parametric MRI must tolerate frequent degradation of its most informative diffusion sequences. Multi-modal fusion commonly employs learned modality gating under the assumption that gates implement per-sample modality quality routing – rarely tested directly. We ask how gating behaves across backbone architectures. We systematically analyze modality-isolated gated fusion (MIGF) for csPCa segmentation on two backbones (nnU-Net and Mamba) using PI-CAI (n=1500), with cross-cohort validation on Prostate158 (n=158): a factorial ablation over gating, modality dropout, and deep supervision under 5-fold cross-validation (180 trained models), plus a gate-weight and counterfactual analysis of 30 trained gating models. Modality gating is backbone-conditional. On nnU-Net, adding gating reduces the ranking score (marginal effect -0.037; gating configurations p

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Many-Body Second Order Green's Function Theory for Ab Initio Molecular Quantum Electrodynamics

arXiv:2606.26076v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, we develop two many-body quantum electrodynamic methods to calculate the ground-state energies of strongly coupled light-matter molecular systems. Specifically, we extend the second-order many-body Green's function theory (GF2) for electronic systems to incorporate electron-boson couplings. We employ two ansätze to treat the bosonic part of the system, namely the coherent-state (CS) and Lang-Firsov (LF) transformed vacuum state. These are combined with the GF2 method to construct two new approaches, which we refer to as CS-GF2 and LF-GF2. We benchmark CS- and LF-GF2 by studying various molecular systems inside an optical cavity. We investigate $\mathrm{H}_2$ and $\mathrm{LiH}$ potential energy surfaces, keto-eneol tautomerization energy barrier, van-der Waals interactions between two $\mathrm{H_2}$ molecules and the torsional potential energy surface of the ethylene molecule, $\mathrm{C_2H_4}$. Both methods provide highly accurate energies, with only modest additional improvement observed in LF-GF2.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Rotational Vacuum Friction of Nonabsorbing Particles

arXiv:2606.24723v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A nonabsorbing particle rotating in vacuum can lose angular momentum only by converting mechanical energy into electromagnetic radiation. Here, we develop a quantum theory of rotational vacuum friction for small lossless particles and show that axial symmetry qualitatively changes the leading dissipation channel. At zero temperature, the frictional torque scales as $M\propto\Omega^7$ with rotation frequency $\ Omega$ in anisotropic particles due to the emission of correlated photon pairs whose frequencies sum to $2\Omega$, while a contribution to the torque linear in $\ Omega$ is found at finite temperature. In contrast, axisymmetric particles are protected against photon-assisted friction regardless of temperature.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

High-Fidelity 3D Geometric Reconstruction of Pelvic Organs from MRI: A Hybrid Deep Learning and Iterative Optimization Approach

Patient-specific 3D reconstruction of pelvic organ geometry from MRI is important for pelvic floor modeling and downstream patient-specific analysis. However, while previous studies have focused primarily on either image segmentation or downstream use of 3D models, the reconstruction of high-fidelity, high-quality geometries remains labor-intensive and poorly standardized. The study introduced a hybrid deformable shape modeling framework that integrates deep learning prediction with iterative optimization for the reconstruction of the bladder, uterus, and rectum. The framework consists of three core components: a geometry-aware multi-level deep learning architecture that preserves topological consistency of pelvic organs; a two-stage amortized optimization training strategy that balances global shape capture and local surface refinement; and a holistic synergy mechanism–where iterative optimization provides supervision for deep learning during the training phase, and during inference, deep learning rapidly predicts the global organ morphology, followed by iterative optimization to refine local surfaces and mesh quality. This framework demonstrated marked superiority in geometric fidelity than current mainstream deep learning-based organ reconstruction models. For individual anatomical structures, the reconstructed 3D geometries for the bladder, rectum, and uterus achieved significantly lower Chamfer Distance values and higher Dice Similarity Coefficient scores. In addition, while maintaining high computational efficiency, the proposed architecture yielded superior overall volumetric mesh quality. At the patient level, the framework achieved higher mean values for the 10 worst elements for both minSICN and minSIGE compared to traditional geometric post-processing algorithms.

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

HairLRM: Strand-based Hair Modeling via Large Reconstruction Models

The fundamental limitation of traditional strand-based modeling is not simply data scarcity, but the ill-posedness of inferring complex 3D fields from 2D imagery without structural constraints. This unconstrained regression leads to catastrophic failures in resolving both global occlusion (e.g., in ponytails) and local directionality (e.g., in curls), resulting in over-smoothed, plausible-but-incorrect geometries. To resolve this, we integrate the strong geometric priors of Large Reconstruction Models (LRMs) into the strand generation pipeline. Using the LRM mesh as a structural anchor, we employ a novel Dual Orientation AutoEncoder to lift coarse geometry into high-fidelity strands. By resolving vector field singularities through latent-space optimization and surface-guided refinement, our method effectively disentangles complex topological structures, setting a new benchmark for robustness and accuracy in hair reconstruction.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Autonomous End-to-End SOH Prediction Services for Battery Systems via Temporal-Contrastive Representation Learning

arXiv:2606.16434v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate state of health (SOH) estimation is a critical diagnostic service for lithium-ion battery management. However, reliance on labor-intensive manual feature engineering and opaque black-box models hinders scalable industrial deployment. To address this, we introduce TC-SOH: a modular, plug-and-play service architecture for autonomous, end-to-end SOH prediction. TC-SOH employs a temporal-contrastive mechanism and a cross-window prediction pretext task to extract degradation-relevant representations directly from raw operational data. To improve transparency, we connect model efficacy with representation diagnostics: visualization, sensitivity analysis, redundancy analysis, bidirectional probing, future-SOH probing, and temporal shuffling show that learned features overlap with selected expert descriptors while retaining additional SOH-relevant variation, and that ordered temporal context improves subsequent-SOH prediction. Across four public datasets, TC-SOH outperforms the considered physics-informed and data-driven baselines, reducing MAPE by 1.91 times and RMSE by 2.13 times.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

TSegAgent: Zero-Shot Tooth Segmentation via Geometry-Aware Vision-Language Agents

Automatic tooth segmentation and identification from intra-oral scanned 3D models are fundamental problems in digital dentistry, yet most existing approaches rely on task-specific 3D neural networks trained with densely annotated datasets, resulting in high annotation cost and limited generalization to scans from unseen sources. Thus, we propose TSegAgent, which addresses these challenges by reformulating dental analysis as a zero-shot geometric reasoning problem rather than a purely data-driven recognition task. The key idea is to combine the representational capacity of general-purpose foundation models with explicit geometric inductive biases derived from dental anatomy. Instead of learning dental-specific features, the proposed framework leverages multi-view visual abstraction and geometry-grounded reasoning to infer tooth instances and identities without task-specific training. By explicitly encoding structural constraints such as dental arch organization and volumetric relationships, the method reduces uncertainty in ambiguous cases and mitigates overfitting to particular shape distributions. Experimental results demonstrate that this reasoning-oriented formulation enables accurate and reliable tooth segmentation and identification with low computational and annotation cost, while exhibiting strong generalization across diverse and previously unseen dental scans.

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

Activation- and Influence-Aware Ranks (AIR): Function-Preserving SVD Compression for LLMs

arXiv:2606.19993v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present Activation- and Influence-Aware Ranks (AIR), an SVD-based LLM compression framework that guides each weight matrix's low-rank approximation with a backward-signal influence metric. Starting from the activation-aware optimum of SVD-LLM(W), AIR runs a single closed-form alternating least squares (ALS) sweep that integrates influence element-wise under a monotone-descent guarantee. AIR is layer-local and composes orthogonally with end-to-end methods: alone it exceeds ACIP, and AIR+LoRA outperforms it further. AIR improves perplexity over SVD-LLM(W) by >18% at

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

World Models in Pieces: Structural Certification for General Agents

arXiv:2606.24842v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In the big-world regime, agents cannot be universally capable and their ability is inevitably specialized across a world model in pieces. Consequently, standard uniform guarantees fail to distinguish between the understanding of critical bottlenecks and irrelevant failures. We first formalize this limitation by proving that general agents are not universal, rendering standard worst-case analysis uninformative. To overcome this, we introduce structural certification, a transition-local framework that maps bounded goal-conditioned performance to entry-wise guarantees on the agent's internal world model. Our main contribution is constructive. We provide algorithms that filter specific transitions using deep compositional goals and prove that a general agent on these goals has a structural world model with a $\mathcal{O}(1/n) + \mathcal{O}(\delta)$ error bound. Conversely, this bound is tight in the small-$\delta$ regime, whose existence is explicitly guaranteed by our certification. These results enable the certifiable deployment of general agents by localizing the specific transitions where long-horizon planning is reliable.

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

VISTA: Scale-Aware Visual Navigation via Action History Conditioning

arXiv:2606.17294v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision Navigation Foundation Models (VNMs) promise end-to-end learned navigation policies capable of zero-shot deployment across diverse embodiments and environments. To maintain generality, many vision-based navigation models predict normalized actions. However, this normalization introduces a critical deployment vulnerability: applying different scaling factors to the same normalized trajectory alters its physical geometry, which degrades navigation performance and increases collision risks. We address this vulnerability by conditioning the model on normalized action histories alongside image observations, providing explicit context on the relationship between the model's predictions and the robot's actual physical displacement. Furthermore, current VNMs often struggle in visually repetitive environments that lack distinct features. To resolve this issue, we integrate a DINOv3 encoder, whose richer representations enable our model to capture both spatial and geometric dimensions between observations. VISTA generalizes robustly to out-of-distribution environments, achieving 100% goal prediction accuracy in zero-shot, real-world deployment in Outdoor, Forest and Office settings, and an average of 95% checkpoints crossed, demonstrating consistent path following in unseen environments.

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

LLM-Evolved Domain-Independent Heuristics for Symbolic AI Planning

arXiv:2605.29649v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Heuristic search is the dominant paradigm in symbolic AI planning, and the strongest heuristics are the result of decades of work by planning researchers. Recent work has shown that large language models (LLMs) can design heuristics for individual planning domains, but no LLM-generated heuristic has so far worked on arbitrary planning tasks. In this paper, we use evolutionary search to produce the first LLM-generated domain-independent heuristics that exceed the hand-engineered state of the art. We let an LLM mutate parent heuristics written in C++, store candidates in a MAP-Elites archive keyed on informedness and speed and calculate fitness scores by blending coverage with solving time. To place the evolved programs in context, we additionally benchmark a broad set of hand-engineered heuristics on their informedness-speed tradeoff, which to our knowledge has not been done before. On unseen testing domains, our best evolved heuristic solves more tasks than even the strongest baseline, with our full heuristic suite spanning the Pareto frontier of said tradeoff. We also find that seeding evolution from the trivial blind heuristic outperforms seeding from the strong FF heuristic, even when the resulting program is itself an FF variant, and that LLM reasoning effort affects how often candidates compile much more than the quality of those that do. Because the evolved programs are plain C++, they slot into existing planners as drop-in replacements and inherit the soundness and completeness guarantees of the underlying search.

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

On The Effectiveness-Fluency Trade-Off In LLM Conditioning: A Systematic Study

Controlling the output of Large Language Models (LLMs) is a central challenge for their reliable deployment, yet a clear understanding of the involved trade-offs remains elusive. Current approaches to conditioning are often evaluated with a narrow focus on their effectiveness at injecting or removing a target concept, neglecting generation quality. We systematically investigate a range of conditioning methods in both injection and removal scenarios. We find that efficient steering methods frequently achieve conditioning at a steep cost to fluency. Furthermore, we identify a critical yet previously overlooked interaction with the training paradigm: activation steering methods are far less effective on instruction-tuned models than on their base counterparts. Simple prompting and full-fledged supervised fine-tuning, on the other hand, are viable options for concept injection, but are not as good at concept removal. Finally, cheaply computed textual metrics highly correlate to costly LLM-as-judge scores, and provide insights on the behavior of conditioning methods.

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

An Empirical Analysis of Optimization Dynamics and Sparsity Boundaries in Large-Scale Pedestrian Attribute Recognition

Pedestrian Attribute Recognition (PAR) is critical for video surveillance, enabling forensic search and re-identification systems. Extreme class imbalance remains a fundamental obstacle when merging PETA and PA-100K into a 109,000-image composite corpus, where minority attributes have positive sample fractions below 1%. This causes standard BCE optimization to suppress rare traits, a phenomenon we term the majority negative class cheating trap. We present a systematic ablation of Multi-Label Focal Loss hyperparameters (alpha and gamma) on a ResNet-18 backbone. A calibrated configuration (alpha=0.50, gamma=2.0) achieves a Macro F1-score of 62.32%, matching BCE baseline while preserving superior hard-example mining and convergence dynamics. Our approach uses pure loss-function engineering with zero computational overhead for edge deployment. We identify the Sparsity Wall, a hard boundary where positive sample fractions below 0.1% make global loss reweighting ineffective, requiring instance-level intervention.

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

Mahalanobis-Guided Latent OOD Detection for Hybrid ES-DRL Control in Time-Varying Systems

arXiv:2606.11474v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we study Mahalanobis-guided latent out-of-distribution (OOD) detection for test-time RL controller switching in nonlinear time-varying systems. RL controllers can quickly control high-dimensional systems within the training distribution, but their performance can degrade when time-varying dynamics produce unseen observations. We consider a combined ES–DRL controller, where RL provides fast in-distribution actions and bounded extremum seeking (ES) provides robust model-independent control under OOD operation. The key challenge is deciding when to switch. We train a variational autoencoder (VAE) on in-distribution beam-profile observations and use Mahalanobis distance in the VAE latent space to detect OOD beam profiles at test time. This OOD decision sets a binary switch that selects either the RL controller or the ES controller. We evaluate the approach in safety-critical particle accelerator control. In this setting, spatial magnet motion creates OOD beam profiles that were not seen during RL training. Visualization of the VAE latent space shows that the proposed method identifies this OOD scenario and provides an interpretable signal for switching between RL and ES in the combined controller.

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

Small edits, large models: How Wikipedia advocacy shapes LLM values

Can a small group of volunteers shape how AI systems discuss animal welfare, just by editing Wikipedia? We show that they can. Wikipedia appears in nearly every major language model training dataset and is weighted more heavily than web-crawled text. The Pro-Animal Wikipedians (PAW), a group of advocates who add sourced animal welfare content to relevant articles, have made 125 edits across 115 pages. Using gradient-based data attribution (Bergson; MAGIC), we traced how these edits influence language model behavior. TrackStar retrieval attribution on Llama 3.1 8B found that PAW-edited sections made up 68 percent of the highest-attributed documents for animal welfare queries (p < 0.0001) but only 52 percent for unrelated queries about the same companies (p = 0.53): the model links PAW content specifically to animal welfare topics, not to the entities in general. MAGIC counterfactual influence estimation on Llama-3.2-1B, run across five random training-order seeds, gave the same picture even more sharply: in every seed, the top-10 most influential documents on animal welfare queries were all PAW edits (10 of 10, 5 of 5 seeds), while on general queries the same top-10 sat at chance (4 to 6 of 10). Mean PAW influence exceeded mean control influence on animal welfare queries with p < 0.0001 in every seed, an effect 6 to 30 times larger than on general queries. Leave-subset-out validation gave Spearman rho = 1.00 for all 10 runs. When we fine-tuned separate models on PAW content versus control content, each model performed better specifically on the type of text it was trained on: the PAW-trained model cut perplexity on animal welfare text from 12.4 to 8.4, while the control-trained model cut perplexity on control text from 16.1 to 11.4. A small, coordinated Wikipedia editing campaign therefore measurably shapes how language models handle the topics those edits address.

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

Generative Modeling of Bach-Style Symbolic Music: A Comparative Study of Autoregressive, Latent-Variable, and Adversarial Approaches

arXiv:2606.13626v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study generative modeling of Bach-style symbolic piano music using a shared MIDI corpus and three model families: autoregressive LSTMs with attention, latent-variable models including recurrent VAEs and vector-quantized VAEs, and generative adversarial networks. We compare their ability to model polyphonic note sequences, learn useful latent representations, and generate stylistically coherent compositions. Our experiments show that the autoregressive LSTM with attention produces the most musically coherent samples, while vector quantization helps mitigate posterior collapse and yields more structured outputs than conventional recurrent VAEs. The adversarial approach captures local pitch patterns but remains difficult to train and generalizes less reliably to Bach's style. These results highlight the relative strengths and failure modes of autoregressive, latent-variable, and adversarial approaches for symbolic music generation.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Interplay of insurance and financial risks in a non Levy-Renewal environment

arXiv:2606.15596v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper we consider a multivariate risk model, with common counting process and common process of logarithmic returns for the investment portfolio. We assume that the claim-vectors, the counting process and the logarithmic returns of the investment portfolio satisfy a weak dependence structure. Further, we consider that the counting process represents an inhomogeneous renewal process, and the logarithmic returns represent a cadlag process with independent but not necessarily stationary increments. Under these conditions we provide an asymptotic expression for the infinite-time entrance probability of the discounted aggregate claims into some rare set xA, where A denotes a set from a general set family, crucial for the actuarial practice, when the common distribution of the claim vectors belong to a multivariate heavy-tailed distribution class. This result, is derived under a moment condition for the financial risks, and underlines the multivariate linear single big jump principle. When we restrict the distribution class of the claim-vectors to multivariate regular variation, we find more explicit asymptotic expressions, weakening the moment conditions on the financial risks. The asymptotic formulas, derived through double dependence solution, become more direct and practical in applications. With respect to the technical part, due to non Levy-Renewal framework, the classical Kesten-Goldie theorems are not applicable, nor their extensions. The way we make the discretization of the process of the discounted aggregate claims permits to derive uniform asymptotics with respect to the number of summands, that facilitate the approximation of the infinite sums of the main results.

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

Hard or Just Unreached? Diagnosing the Sampling Blind Spot in Math-Reasoning Difficulty Estimation

arXiv:2606.19636v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Math and science reasoning benchmarks rely on pass@k, the fraction of sampled chains that reach gold, as the canonical per-example difficulty signal. The same signal drives RL with verifiable rewards, math data curation, synthetic curricula, and verifier training. We show this proxy has a persistent blind spot on its hardest stratum: on the eight free-form math cells we test (GSM8K and MATH across four open-weight models), 10.3-22.9% of the examples that no sampling seed solves in six tries are instead solved at matched compute by a six-chain deterministic regime. These are greedy decoding plus five cheap residual-stream perturbations applied via activation grafting, while greedy alone solves at most 6% on these math cells. Recovery scales with the additional budget, across perturbations whose mechanistic distinctness we verify across all twelve cells (cross-kind fix-set Jaccard

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Temporal Preference Optimization for Unsupervised Retrieval

arXiv:2606.17664v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unsupervised dense retrievers offer scalability by learning semantic similarity from unlabeled documents via contrastive learning, but they struggle to capture the temporal relevance, retrieving semantically related but temporally misaligned documents-an important aspect when a document collection spans multiple time periods (e.g., retrieving documents from 2018-2025 for "Who is the president in 2019?" introduces temporal ambiguity). Existing methods rely on supervised training with explicit timestamps, which are not always feasible. We propose TPOUR (Temporal Preference Optimization for Unsupervised Retriever), which uses our novel training method Temporal Retrieval Preference Optimization (TRPO). TRPO reinterprets preference learning in the temporal dimension, guiding the retriever to favor temporally aligned documents. TPOUR further generalizes to unseen time periods via interpolation in a learned time embedding, enabling continuous temporal alignment. Experiments on temporal information retrieval (T-IR), TPOUR outperforms both unsupervised and supervised baselines. Compared to Qwen-Embedding-8B, despite being about 72.7x smaller, TPOUR Contriever improves average nDCG@5 by +4.04 (+12.15%) on explicit and +4.98 (+15.21%) on implicit queries. We provide our code at https://github.com/agwaBom/TPOUR.

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

Exact Posterior Score Estimation for Solving Linear Inverse Problems

Diffusion and flow-based models learn powerful data priors by training a denoiser to reverse Gaussian corruption. To use this prior to solve a linear inverse problem, one needs to sample from the posterior, but the score that the prior provides is the unconditional score, not the posterior score. Existing methods either steer a fixed pretrained denoiser with approximate measurement-matching corrections, or train a conditional restoration model that abandons the denoising structure of the prior. We derive the exact posterior score in closed form for linear Gaussian inverse problems under general Gaussian interpolants, and show that posterior sampling reduces to a denoising problem at an operator-dependent shifted pivot under an anisotropic noise covariance. We turn this identity into Exact Posterior Score (EPS), a denoising training objective that preserves the input/output structure of standard pretraining and can therefore be trained from scratch or fine-tuned from a pretrained denoiser. At inference, EPS uses the same sampler as the underlying backbone, with no likelihood gradients or projections. We evaluate EPS on five linear inverse problems across FFHQ and ImageNet, where it outperforms training-free and training-based baselines on fidelity, perceptual, and distributional metrics, while using roughly an order of magnitude fewer denoiser evaluations than gradient-based posterior samplers.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

PRInTS: Reward Modeling for Long-Horizon Information Seeking

Information-seeking is a core capability for AI agents, requiring them to gather and reason over tool-generated information across long trajectories. However, such multi-step information-seeking tasks remain challenging for agents backed by language models. While process reward models (PRMs) can guide agents by ranking candidate steps at test-time, existing PRMs - designed for short reasoning with binary judgment - cannot capture richer dimensions of information-seeking steps, such as tool interactions and reasoning over tool outputs, nor handle the rapidly growing context in long-horizon tasks. To address these limitations, we introduce PRInTS, a generative PRM trained with dual capabilities: (1) dense scoring based on the PRM's reasoning across multiple dimensions of step quality (e.g., interpretation of tool outputs, tool call informativeness) and (2) trajectory summarization that compresses the growing context while preserving essential information for step evaluation. Extensive evaluations across FRAMES, GAIA (levels 1-3), and WebWalkerQA (easy-hard) benchmarks on multiple models reveal that best-of-n sampling with PRInTS enhances information-seeking in open-source models as well as specialized agents, matching or surpassing frontier models with a much smaller backbone agent and outperforming other strong reward modeling baselines.

23.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-24

BATTLE-AMP: Benchmarking Antimicrobial Peptide Predictors

As antimicrobial resistance outpaces antibiotic development, antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) have emerged as a promising class of alternative antibacterials, and computational predictors are increasingly used to prioritize AMP candidates. Such predictors are typically evaluated on binary AMP/non-AMP classification, which does not test whether they can identify peptides with clinically relevant potency against specific pathogens. We present BATTLE-AMP, a benchmarking framework that evaluates AMP predictors against experimentally measured minimum inhibitory concentrations (MICs) across clinically relevant bacterial species and strains. We surveyed 48 published methods, finding fewer than 25% reproducible, and benchmarked 10 model families (21 variants) using experimental MIC data, synthetic sequence perturbations, activity cliff analyses, and all-atom molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. Four findings emerge: (i) models trained on MIC data outperform binary classifiers regardless of architecture; (ii) the best model depends on the target pathogen, so model selection must be guided by the biological question; (iii) most models cannot distinguish active peptides from inactive sequences with identical amino acid composition; and (iv) activity cliffs remain unresolved by both machine learning and MD, marking a limit of current computational methods. BATTLE-AMP is released as an open Snakemake framework at https://github.com/szczurek-lab/battleamp-snakemake for benchmarking new models and scoring novel candidate libraries.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Reinforcement Learning Disrupts Gradient-Based Adversarial Optimization

arXiv:2606.12251v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Gradient-based adversarial attacks remain a dominant threat to deep neural networks (DNNs), as they exploit gradient information to efficiently optimize adversarial perturbations. To address this, we investigate whether reinforcement learning (RL) training can disrupt the gradient structure used by attackers by training image classifiers with policy-gradient objectives and epsilon-greedy exploration. Through systematic experiments across CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet-100 with multiple architectures, we find that RL-trained classifiers significantly disrupt gradient-based adversarial optimization. To explain this, we conduct a comprehensive mechanism analysis using loss landscape visualization, static and dynamic gradient indicators, and predictive entropy. Our analysis reveals that RL acts as an implicit regularizer, producing models with highly unstable gradient directions and smaller gradient magnitudes. This combination makes each PGD step both unreliable in direction and limited in magnitude, causing gradient-based attacks to fail within practical iteration budgets. We further show that combining RL with adversarial training (RL-adv) provides a dual-layer defense operating at two complementary levels: RL degrades gradient information available to attackers (gradient-level defense), while adversarial training strengthens decision boundaries (boundary-level defense). RL-adv achieves the highest robustness across all major attack types evaluated, including gradient-based (PGD, AutoAttack), transfer-based, and query-based attacks, outperforming SL-adv by a significant margin. These findings identify RL-induced gradient disruption as a complementary robustness mechanism and motivate future research on hybrid SL-RL training schedules that combine SL's efficiency with RL's gradient-regularization properties.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Repurposing a Speech Classifier for Guided Diffusion-Based Speech Generation

arXiv:2606.20457v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Classifier guidance is a way to control diffusion generation by using a noise-conditioned classifier to steer the sampling process toward a target class. One drawback of classifier guidance is that it requires two separately trained models: a classifier and a diffusion model. We therefore study a more compact alternative in which a conventionally trained speech classifier is repurposed as the backbone for diffusion generation. Starting from a frozen noise-conditioned classifier in log-Mel space, we attach a lightweight subnetwork that reuses intermediate classifier representations and train only this subnetwork under a Denoising Score Matching objective. Our work shows that a pretrained classifier can be repurposed for conditional generation, providing an appealing bridge between discriminative modeling and conditional speech synthesis resulting in high speech quality within a single-backbone model, with reduced memory footprint and computational cost.