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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Feature-preserving Latent-EnKF for Data Assimilation of Flows with Shocks

arXiv:2606.12559v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) is widely adopted for sequential data assimilation, but fails for solutions with discontinuities, such as shocks in compressible flows. Uncertainty in shock location induces multimodal ensemble statistics that violate the Gaussian assumptions underlying the EnKF, producing large-scale spurious oscillations in the analysis state. We introduce a feature-preserving latent-EnKF that performs the ensemble update in a learned low-dimensional latent space, where shock and flow features admit a smooth manifold representation, thereby preserving sharp features during EnKF analysis. The updated latent state is mapped back to physical state through a shared decoder for all ensemble members. The algorithm eliminates the member-specific ordered training and positivity flooring used in prior approaches. Numerical experiments on a Sod shock tube and Mach 2 shock interaction with a 2D cylinder, using sparse and noisy observations, show accurate feature recovery of shocks and contact discontinuities without spurious oscillations.

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

Attention, not scale, drives human-AI alignment in multimodal language prediction

Humans routinely draw on visual context to predict upcoming words. To what extent current vision-language models produce comparable behaviour is unclear. Here we placed five state-of-the-art pretrained systems side-by-side with 600 human participants in a web-based Visual-World Paradigm. On each of 100 six-second movie clips, models and participants received either text only or synchronised video and text and judged how likely a specified target word was to appear next; human eye movements were tracked throughout. Adding visual context increased model-human alignment in predictability ratings across all architectures (average Delta r = 0.18) with no impact of parameter size. When visual context was informative, transformer attention significantly increased alignment. Attention maps from two transformer models corresponded with human gaze, explaining up to 70% of the inter-participant variance when the scene contained informative cues. Notably, cross-modal attention reliably tracked anticipatory human fixations on semantic cues. These results suggest that current transformer-based vision-language models can approximate human behaviour exploiting visual context during language prediction - and that selective attention to informative cues, not sheer model scale, is the principal driver of this alignment.

03.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

DesignMaster: A Multi-Conditional Diffusion Framework for Rational PROTAC Design

Motivation: Proteolysis-targeting chimeras (PROTACs) enable targeted protein degradation through ternary complex formation with E3 ubiquitin ligase. However, the rational design of PROTACs remains highly challenging due to limited structure-activity relationship data and the vast conformational diversity of linkers. Existing computational approaches can be broadly divided into structure-based ternary modelling methods and fragment-based linker generation models. Although these approaches have advanced PROTAC design, they typically neglect key physicochemical constraints and linker-length control during the generation process, causing the generated PROTACs to lack balanced structural properties required for effective ternary complex formation with drug-like characteristics. Results: To address these limitations, we propose DesignMaster, a diffusion-based generative framework that explicitly incorporates linker length and physicochemical properties as controllable conditioning signals. DesignMaster employs an E(3)-equivariant graph Transformer with a gated multi-condition fusion module to inject linker length and physicochemical constraints throughout the diffusion process, enabling fine-grained and constraint-aware molecular generation. Experiments on PROTAC-DB 2.0 and 3.0 demonstrate that DesignMaster outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, with a 3.2% improvement in validity and a 34.4% improvement in recovery. The Case study shows DesignMaster achieves a 51.78% reduction in RMSD when predicting the linker of PROTAC BCPyr targeting 6W7O, highlighting its potential for practical structure-guided PROTAC design. Availability: The source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/ABILiLab/DesignMaster.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

From Self-Supervised Speech Models to Mixture-of-Experts for Robust Anti-Spoofing

arXiv:2606.14639v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in speech generation have significantly improved the naturalness of synthetic speech, making spoofing detection increasingly challenging. A key limitation of current anti-spoofing systems is their limited robustness to unseen synthesis methods. In this work, we transform a self-supervised speech representation model into a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture to improve generalization. Feed-forward blocks in selected encoder layers are replaced by multiple expert networks controlled by a layer-wise gating mechanism, allowing experts to capture complementary acoustic patterns while preserving the representations learned during self-supervised pretraining. We further analyze the architectural choices affecting the performance of this MoE conversion and investigate the activation behavior of the experts. The proposed approach is evaluated on 14 spoofing datasets and reduces the macro EER from 5.46% to 4.81%, corresponding to 11.9% relative improvement over the baseline.

05.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-21

GENATATORs: ab initio Gene Annotation With DNA Language Models

Inference of gene structure and location from genome sequences - known as de novo gene annotation - is a fundamental task in biological research. However, sequence grammar encoding gene structure is complex and poorly understood, often requiring costly transcriptomic data for accurate gene annotation. In this work, we benchmark current solutions and develop new methods of gene annotation. We show that pretrained DNA language model (DNA LM) embeddings do not capture the features necessary for precise gene segmentation, and that task-specific fine-tuning remains essential. We comprehensively evaluate the impact of model architecture, training strategy, receptive field size, dataset composition, and data augmentations on gene segmentation performance. We revisit standard evaluation protocols, showing that commonly used per-token and per-sequence metrics fail to capture the challenges of real-world gene annotation. We introduce and theoretically justify new biologically grounded metrics, along with benchmarking datasets that better capture annotation quality. We show that fine-tuned DNA LMs outperform existing annotation tools, generalizing across species separated by hundreds of millions of years from those seen during training, and providing segmentation of previously intractable non-coding transcripts and untranslated regions of protein-coding genes. Our results thus provide a foundation for new biological applications centered on accurate gene annotation.

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

Self-Questioning Vision-Language Models: Reinforcement Learning for Compositional Visual Reasoning

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are AI systems that process both images and text, yet they often struggle with compositional visual reasoning questions that require chaining multiple steps together, such as identifying objects, counting them, and comparing the results. Existing approaches improve this reasoning by training models on human-written step-by-step explanations, but creating these annotations is expensive and difficult to scale. We propose a self-questioning framework that trains a VLM to break visual questions into smaller sub-questions and answer each one before producing a final response, using a reinforcement learning algorithm called Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). The model is never shown examples of how to decompose questions, it discovers this behavior on its own, guided by a reward signal that scores whether the output contains sub-questions and whether the final answer is correct. We apply this framework to a 3-billion-parameter model, training on both synthetic scenes of geometric shapes (CLEVR) and real-world photographs (A-OKVQA). On A-OKVQA, both self-questioning and standard reinforcement learning substantially improve accuracy over the untrained model (52.2% and 51.6% vs. 46.8%). We introduce the first self-questioning VLM by rewarding not only the final answer like standard RL but additionally for generating intermediate sub-questions, enabling it to discover compositional decomposition strategies. These results suggest that teaching AI systems to ask themselves intermediate questions is a promising strategy for complex visual reasoning, particularly when the difficulty of a question warrants explicit step-by-step decomposition.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

PRISMR: Overcoming Parse Collapse in Multimodal Listwise Ranking via Parameterized Representation Internalization

arXiv:2606.12942v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative listwise ranking with Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) aims to capture global list context in a single forward pass, but its effectiveness degrades in long-context multimodal scenarios. We identify a recurring failure mode, parse collapse, where the autoregressive decoder produces fluent yet incomplete rankings by silently omitting candidates and terminating early. This failure stems from limited context utilization rather than simple formatting mistakes, making prompt engineering and constrained decoding insufficient. We propose PRISMR (Parameterized Representation Internalization for Semantic Multimodal Ranking), a framework that replaces transient in-context list processing with parametric structural conditioning. PRISMR uses a lightweight hypernetwork to encode multimodal candidates in parallel and generate item-specific LoRA weights, which are synthesized into an instance-specific adapter for a LMM. This paradigm enables more robust internalization of list structure while preserving the base model. We further introduce a large-scale multimodal review-ranking benchmark for evaluation. Experiments demonstrate that PRISMR substantially reduces parse collapse, improves listwise ranking performance, and transfers effectively across domains and instruction-tuned backbones.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

PolyAlign: Conditional Human-Distribution Alignment

Post-training methods such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and preference optimization typically align language models toward a single global assistant behavior. While effective for improving average helpfulness, this can suppress the natural variation of human responses across languages, tasks, and dialogue settings. We study this problem as conditional human-distribution alignment: models should match the human response distribution appropriate to the current interaction context, rather than a universal response style. We introduce PolyAlign, a distribution-aware alignment framework that organizes bilingual interaction data into bucket-specific human reference distributions defined by language, interaction track, response family, and length. PolyAlign combines Bucket-Aware SFT, which balances optimization across heterogeneous buckets, with Human-Distribution Preference Optimization (HDPO), which regularizes preference learning using critic-estimated distance to bucket-specific human support. Across a bilingual evaluation suite covering English and Chinese single- and multi-turn settings, PolyAlign improves conditional naturalness and distributional faithfulness while preserving competitive task utility. The results suggest that post-training should move beyond global alignment objectives toward interaction-aware alignment with human response distributions.

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

Creative Integration: A Decidable Criterion of Creativity

"Integrative" solutions are widely praised but rarely defined: we lack an operational way to tell a genuine integration – one that makes the world cheaper to describe – from a tidy re-description. Building on the lineage that treats creativity and intelligence as compression, we give such a criterion for creative integration (CI): the resolution of a real conflict between A and B is CI if and only if, under a fixed description language, the description length strictly shrinks (C = L_pre/L_post > 1), with the reduction located in the conflict itself. We make the judgment decidable through four binary, conjunctive gates, and we fix its extension through a taxonomy of pseudo-integration that names and rejects the look-alikes. We back the criterion with a curated, multi-domain corpus and – crucially – validate it not by human inter-rater agreement but by four falsifiable tests it could fail: an independent computational check, discrimination against hard negatives, out-of-sample prediction, and description-language robustness; all pass with margin. The contribution is not "creativity is compression" but its decidability, discrimination, and corpus: on this account, what makes a move genuinely creative – rather than merely novel – is that it compresses a conflict, with novelty and value as downstream symptoms; whether all creativity is so constituted we state as an explicit conjecture. We claim only the sign of C-1; we judge, not generate. The result is a citable primitive for a broader program.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

When Language Representations Interact: Separability and Cross-Lingual Effects in LLMs

arXiv:2606.14347v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models exhibit strong multilingual capabilities, however, their internal representations are difficult to interpret. Understanding these interactions is important for ensuring reliable behavior in multilingual systems. Recent work has shown that causal-geometric structure can explain how certain concepts are encoded as approximately linear and separable directions, but whether this framework extends to multilingual models, where language identity is correlated and hierarchical, is underexplored. We apply causal-geometric analysis to multilingual LLMs, studying 28 bilingual contrasts across three models, allowing us to analyze when languages behave as approximately independent factors and when structured dependencies persist. We find evidence that language concepts admit stable linear representations that are largely separable under a covariance-adjusted (causal) inner product, with structured deviations reflecting linguistic similarity. Moreover, languages within the same family (such as Germanic or Romance) exhibit a simplex-like geometric structure, suggesting hierarchical organization. These results extend causal-geometric interpretability to multilingual settings and provide insight into how separability and similarity may exist in multilingual LLM representations, motivating interpretability analyses that diagnose when and how structured dependencies between concepts can be anticipated. This has implications for trustworthy deployment, as residual structure between languages may lead to unintended cross-lingual effects when models are monitored or intervened upon.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Predicting Cognitive Load from Speech and Interaction Dynamics in Dyadic Conversations

arXiv:2606.12971v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Estimating cognitive load from speech has largely been studied in controlled laboratory settings, with limited understanding of its reliability in natural collaborative conversations. We investigate whether speech and interaction dynamics predict perceived cognitive load during dyadic conversations. We analyze audio from 53 dyads performing nine collaborative tasks and extract static acoustic, dynamic, and interaction features to train a two-head Gated Recurrent Unit encoder to predict cognitive load scores. Results show conversational interaction provides useful signals for predicting cognitive load related to time pressure, mental work, effort, and task performance. Temporal demand is associated with turn-taking dynamics such as overlap and speaker switch, while mental demand is linked to imbalanced participation between speakers. These findings highlight the importance of task structure and conversational interaction for modeling cognitive load in natural collaborative settings.

12.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-04

Comparative impacts and cost-effectiveness of tuberculosis systematic screening strategies in prisons in Brazil, Colombia, and Peru: A mathematical modeling study

Authors:

by Yiran E. Liu, José Victor Bortolotto Bampi, Ronan F. Arthur, Argita D. Salindri, Caroline Busatto, Pedro Avedillo Jiménez, Daniele Maria Pelissari, Fernanda Dockhorn Costa Johansen, Robert Arana-Narvaez, Alvaro Fernando Moreno Roca, Wilfredo Santos Solís Tupes, Esther Mori Jiu, Christian Alfredo Moreno Roca, Erika Albertina Abregú Contreras, Valentina Antonieta Alarcón Guizado, Julián Trujillo Trujillo, Belkys Marcelino, Mónica Alonso Gonzalez, Mayra Cecilia Córdova Ayllon, Ted Cohen, Moises A. Huaman, Jeremy D. Goldhaber-Fiebert, Julio Croda, Jason R. Andrews Background Incarceration is a leading driver of tuberculosis in Latin America. Systematic screening in prisons may reduce tuberculosis burden, but optimal strategies and cost-effectiveness remain uncertain. We examined the population-wide health impacts and cost-effectiveness of systematic screening in prisons in Brazil, Colombia, and Peru, comparing different timepoints, frequencies, and screening algorithms. Methods and findings Using dynamic transmission models calibrated to Brazil, Colombia, and Peru, we simulated annual or biannual (twice-yearly) prison-wide screening, alone or combined with entry and exit screening from 2026 to 2035. We evaluated four algorithms: (1) symptom screening, (2) chest X-ray with computer-aided detection (CXR-CAD), (3) symptoms and CXR-CAD (follow-up testing if either is positive), and (4) GeneXpert Ultra (Xpert) with pooled sputum. Individuals screening positive then received individual Xpert. We projected impacts on within-prison and population-level tuberculosis incidence in 2035, along with discounted costs (2023 US dollars) and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs). Model projections showed that combined entry, exit, and biannual screening with CXR-CAD was highly impactful and cost-effective across countries, reducing tuberculosis incidence by 61%–87% in prisons and 18%–28% population-wide. Compared to only biannual CXR-CAD (the next best strategy), the incremental cost per DALY averted of adding entry and exit screening was $2,984 (Brazil), $2,925 (Colombia), and $645 (Peru). Adding symptom screening to CXR-CAD marginally increased benefit and was only cost-effective in Peru’s higher-incidence prisons. Biannual screening alone remained cost-effective at prison incidence levels well below national averages, as well as at far lower willingness-to-pay thresholds. In settings without CXR-CAD, pooled Xpert was an impactful, cost-effective alternative. Key limitations include the model’s simplified representation of tuberculosis disease states and lack of stratification by age, gender/sex, HIV, or drug resistance. Conclusions These modeling results support immediate national-level adoption of prison-wide tuberculosis screening twice-yearly and at entry and exit, using CXR-CAD or pooled Xpert.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

GenTrack: A New Generation of Multi-Object Tracking

This paper introduces a novel multi-object tracking (MOT) method, dubbed GenTrack, whose main contributions include: first-a hybrid tracking approach employing both stochastic and deterministic manners to robustly handle unknown and time-varying numbers of targets, particularly in maintaining target identity (ID) consistency and managing nonlinear dynamics, second-leveraging particle swarm optimization (PSO) with some proposed fitness measures to guide stochastic particles toward their target distribution modes, enabling effective tracking even with weak and noisy object detectors, third-integration of social interactions among targets to enhance PSO-guided particles as well as improve continuous updates of both strong (matched) and weak (unmatched) tracks, thereby reducing ID switches and track loss, especially during occlusions, fourth-a GenTrack-based redefined visual MOT baseline incorporating a comprehensive state and observation model based on space consistency, appearance, detection confidence, track penalties, and social scores for systematic and efficient target updates, and five-the first ever publicly available source-code reference implementation with minimal dependencies, featuring three variants, including GenTrack Simple, Strengthen, and Super, facilitating flexible reimplementation. Experimental results have shown that GenTrack provides superior performance on standard benchmarks and real-world scenarios compared to state-of-the-art trackers, with integrated implementations of baselines for fair comparison. Potential directions for future work are also discussed. The source-code reference implementations of both the proposed method and compared-trackers are provided on GitHub: https://github.com/SDU-VelKoTek/GenTrack

14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

An Analytical Methodology for Quantifying Airspace Conflict Rate and Complexity

arXiv:2606.14897v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Air traffic growth, advanced air mobility, and increasingly autonomous operations are driving the need for scalable and adaptive airspace design methodologies. Central to this challenge is quantifying how traffic flow structure and demand, governed in part by airspace geometry, influence conflict generation and operational complexity. This paper presents an analytical framework for computing conflict rate and conflict probability in structured airspace using stochastic flow models. Traffic streams are modeled as renewal processes with prescribed inter-arrival time distributions, while interactions between flows are captured through geometry-dependent minimum spacing constraints at merges and crossings. Within this formulation, closed-form upper bounds on the expected conflict rate and conflict probability per aircraft are derived as functions of flow configuration and demand. These metrics are interpreted as complementary measures of airspace complexity, reflecting controller workload and per-aircraft operational risk. The methodology is applied to representative hexagonal cell geometries with varying routing structures and flow distributions. Results reveal non-monotonic tradeoffs between routing flexibility, capacity, and conflict generation, with intermediate flow configurations outperforming both highly constrained and highly distributed cases. The proposed framework provides a tractable tool for evaluating airspace design alternatives and complexity-informed traffic management strategies.

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

How to sketch a learning algorithm

Authors:

arXiv:2604.07328v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: How does the choice of training data influence an AI model? This broad question is of central importance to interpretability, privacy, and basic science. At its technical core is the data deletion problem: after a reasonable amount of precomputation, quickly predict how the model would behave in a given situation if a given subset of training data had been excluded from the learning algorithm. We present a data deletion scheme capable of predicting model outputs with vanishing error $\varepsilon$ and failure probability $\delta$ in the deep learning setting. Our precomputation and prediction algorithms are only $\tilde{O}(\log(1/\delta)/\varepsilon^2)$ factors slower than regular training and inference, respectively. The storage requirements are those of $\tilde{O}(\log(1/\delta)/\varepsilon^2)$ models. Our proof is based on an assumption that we call stability. In contrast to the assumptions made by prior work, stability appears to be fully compatible with learning powerful AI models. In support of this, we show that stability is satisfied in a minimal set of experiments with microgpt. Our code is available at https://github.com/SamSpo1/microgpt-sketch. At a technical level, our work is based on a new method for locally sketching an arithmetic circuit by computing higher-order derivatives in random complex directions. Forward-mode automatic differentiation allows cheap computation of these derivatives.

16.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-22

C-glycoside synthesis via radical cross-coupling of glycohydrazides

Authors:

Carbohydrates are among the most abundant and structurally diverse biomolecules in nature, playing central roles in energy storage, molecular recognition, and cell signaling. Within this domain, C-glycosides1-3, in which the oxygen atom of the glycosidic bond in O-glycosides is replaced by carbon, have emerged as valuable motifs in medicinal chemistry due to their resistance to enzymatic hydrolysis2,4. Of particular importance are C-aryl glycosides, exemplified by the SGLT2 inhibitors dapagliflozin, canagliflozin, and empagliflozin, which are frontline therapies for type 2 diabetes5-7. However, scalable syntheses of C-aryl glycosides have traditionally relied on protected sugar derivatives, lengthy sequences, or conventional cross-couplings that often suffer from poor selectivity, limited scope, and extensive protecting-group manipulation6. Herein, we report a practical approach to C-aryl glycosides using glycosyl sulfonyl hydrazides as redox-neutral radical precursors for cross-coupling. Prepared directly from unprotected native sugars, these reagents generate glycosyl radicals under mild conditions and enable efficient access to diverse C-aryl glycosides, including all approved SGLT2 inhibitors, natural products such as salmochelins and neopetrosins, and medicinally relevant probes. Beyond anomeric functionalization, this platform enables C–C bond formation at multiple positions on carbohydrate scaffolds and supports stereoretentive radical coupling that can override inherent stereochemical biases, expanding practical access to carbohydrate-derived therapeutics and chemical tools.

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

A Comparative Study of Graph Neural Network Layer Selection for Interaction Modelling in Driving Trajectory Prediction

arXiv:2606.14956v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous driving systems rely on precise trajectory prediction to plan safe and efficient movement. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become a promising approach for modelling spatiotemporal interactions among road agents. However, designing GNN architectures for trajectory prediction remains non-standardized, with little guidance on which graph layers effectively capture spatial interactions and temporal dynamics. This paper offers a detailed comparative study of 19 graph layer types, focusing on their spatial and temporal processing capabilities to discover the most effective architectures for trajectory prediction. Within the explored hyperparameter setting, we highlight five standout layer combinations, with ARMA, Chebyshev, and topology-aware layers consistently performing better than others. Beyond performance metrics, our findings yield practical design principles: sum-based aggregation is more effective than mean-based methods, multi-head attention mechanisms enable richer interactions, and assigning different weights to different hop distances significantly improves prediction accuracy. These findings offer useful guidance for designing more interpretable and effective trajectory prediction models.

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

PolyFlow: Safe and Efficient Polytope-Constrained Flow Matching with Constraint Embedding and Projection-free Update

arXiv:2606.13400v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While flow-based generative models have demonstrated strong performance across a wide range of domains, deploying them in safety-critical physical systems remains challenging due to strict constraint requirements. Existing approaches typically enforce safety through post-hoc corrections, which incur substantial computational overhead and may distort the learned distribution. We propose PolyFlow, a polytope-constrained flow matching framework that embeds constraints directly into the model and flow dynamics. PolyFlow introduces a discrete-time flow formulation and a projection-free architecture, which eliminate the discretization error and guarantee strict satisfaction of arbitrary polyhedral constraints, without the need for expensive iterative solvers. Experimental results show that PolyFlow achieves zero constraint violation while maintaining high distributional fidelity across a range of planning and control tasks. Compared to state-of-the-art constrained generation baselines, PolyFlow significantly reduces inference latency and demonstrates a favorable trade-off between safety, efficiency, and generative quality. Code is available on https://github.com/MJianM/PolyFlow.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

SierpinskiCam: Camera-Controlled Video Retaking with Sierpinski Triangle Pattern Cues

Generating novel renderings of a scene along user-defined camera trajectories from a single monocular video, dubbed video retaking, is a compelling but difficult problem in content creation and visual effects. Existing geometry-guided approaches reconstruct a 4D representation from the source video and render it along the target trajectory to condition video diffusion models. However, this guidance degrades as the target camera departs from the source trajectory, leaving newly revealed regions sparse or entirely missing. We propose SierpinskiCam, which addresses this limitation by augmenting geometry-based guidance with Sierpinski dome texture cues that contains rich trackable features even under large viewpoint changes. We further introduce a reference video conditioning mechanism that appends source-video tokens to the target-token sequence and separates the two streams with negative RoPE indices, enabling appearance grounding without architectural modification or per-video adaptation. Extensive experiments show that SierpinskiCam achieves significant gains in camera controllability, geometric consistency, and video quality across diverse and challenging retaking scenarios. Project page: https://hyelinnam.github.io/SierpinskiCam/.

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

BALTO: Balanced Token-Level Policy Optimization for Hallucination Mitigation

Hallucinations remain a major obstacle to deploying large language models (LLMs) in knowledge-intensive settings, where generated responses must be faithfully grounded in provided evidence. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising direction for hallucination mitigation, but response-level faithfulness rewards suffer from a granularity mismatch: localized hallucinations can cause supported content to receive spurious penalties. Although recent work introduces fine-grained feedback such as claim-level verification and token-level rewards, unbalanced credit assignment can still induce length, verbosity, or optimization-noise biases. We propose BALTO, a Balanced Token-level Policy Optimization framework for hallucination mitigation. BALTO extracts checkable factual claims, verifies them against the reference context, and projects claim-level judgments to token-level labels. A balanced token-level credit assignment mechanism is introduced into the framework. This design redistributes probability mass from unsupported content toward faithful content, rather than suppressing the entire response. We systematically analyze the limitations of response-level rewards from a theoretical standpoint, and prove BALTO's advantages in training stability and optimization efficiency for hallucination mitigation. Experiments on ConFiQA, RAGTruth, and FinLLM-Eval show that BALTO achieves the highest faithfulness across all six model–benchmark settings and consistently outperforms existing post-training baselines in Q-Score, demonstrating a stronger faithfulness–informativeness trade-off.

21.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

Transposable elements as evolutionary substrates of proteindisorder in the human proteome

Intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs) are central contributors to protein function, evolution and human disease, yet the evolutionary routes that seed new disordered segments within pre-existing proteins are still poorly understood. Sequence insertions provide a powerful mechanism for disorder expansion, but the genomic donors of inserted IDR and its long-term conformational fate remain largely unknown. Transposable elements (TEs), abundant mobile genetic elements with distinctive compositional biases, represent compelling candidates for generating disorder within proteins. Here, we systematically mapped TE-derived segments across human proteins and isoforms, and we found that these insertions are strongly enriched in intrinsic disorder. The structural consequences of their insertion are shaped by TE class and family, reflecting the sequence biases of the elements from which they originate. Recent, Primate specific insertions preferentially generate disordered segments, whereas older insertions more frequently occupy ordered structural contexts, revealing an age-dependent transition in the conformational state of TE-derived sequences. TE-containing isoforms are expressed at lower levels than TE-free isoforms, particularly when insertions are young and disorder-rich, suggesting that intrinsic disorder may constrain the cellular tolerance of newly exonized sequences. These findings identify TEs as a major evolutionary mechanism linking genome mobility to the emergence of new disordered conformational ensembles in the human proteome.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

DRAG-Compatible Leakage Suppression in Landau–Zener Control via Isoprobability Twins

arXiv:2506.19572v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Analytically solvable models – particularly the Landau-Majorana-Stückelberg-Zener (LMSZ) and Allen-Eberly-Hioe (AEH) models – underpin many quantum-gate implementations and population-transfer protocols. However, their canonical pulse shapes are incompatible with modern leakage-suppression techniques and some systems. Most notably, the constant Rabi envelope of the LMSZ pulse prevents many leakage-suppression approaches, which require smoothness. We address both limitations by developing the concept of isoprobability twin models: distinct pairs of Rabi frequency $\Omega(t)$ and detuning $\Delta(t)$ that yield identical post-pulse transition probabilities based on the Delos-Thorson transformation. In this work, we formalise the method by experimentally demonstrating the equivalence of multiple LMSZ and AEH twin models on IBM's ibm_kyiv processor. Finally, we show a staggering leakage reduction by more than 3 orders of magnitude using a custom DRAG implementation of a cosine LMSZ isoprobability model.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Benchmarking AI Agents for Addressing Scientific Challenges Across Scales

arXiv:2606.12736v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents are increasingly being developed to accelerate scientific discovery, yet their practical capabilities in real research settings remain poorly understood. Existing benchmarks for AI agents rarely capture the complexity, heterogeneity, and extended reasoning required by scientific work, whereas benchmarks for scientific tasks often reduce research to static, direct problems and provide limited support for interactive evaluation. Here, we introduce SciAgentArena, a systematic benchmark for evaluating AI agents in real-world scientific research scenarios drawn from emerging needs across multiple domains. SciAgentArena comprises approximately 200 tasks with stepwise verification and an interactive, agent-agnostic environment for assessing diverse AI agents. Using this benchmark, we find that current agents can contribute effectively to well-specified data-analysis workflows, particularly when the task structure and evaluation criteria are clear. However, their performance remains uneven across scientific contexts: agents struggle to generate genuinely novel insights, sustain self-directed exploration, and formulate robust solutions for open-ended research questions. We further characterize common failure modes across agents and identify opportunities for improving their reliability, autonomy, and scientific reasoning. Together, SciAgentArena provides a practical framework for measuring progress in AI agents for science and for guiding the design of future agents capable of addressing complex scientific challenges. Full codes, tasks, and datasets can be accessed via this link: https://sciagentarena.github.io/.

24.
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.

25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Eyring-Kramers asymptotics for infinite-dimensional stochastic gradient systems

arXiv:2606.16083v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study small-noise asymptotics for a class of reversible stochastic evolution equations in infinite dimensions. The dynamics are of the form \[ dX_t=-A\nabla F(X_t)\,dt+\sqrt{2\beta^{-1}A}\,dW_t, \] where $F$ is a regular multi-well potential, $A$ is a selfadjoint mobility operator, $W$ is a cylindrical Brownian motion and $\beta\gg 1$ is the inverse noise strength. The invariant measure is a Gibbs perturbation of a Gaussian reference measure, and the resulting framework covers, in particular, the stochastic Allen-Cahn and stochastic Cahn-Hilliard equations on bounded intervals. In the double-well case, we derive a sharp asymptotic formula for the first nonzero eigenvalue of the generator. This gives an infinite-dimensional Eyring-Kramers law for the spectral gap, with exponential rate determined by the communication height and leading prefactor determined by the local quadratic behavior at the relevant minima and saddle points. Our approach provides a general strategy for lifting finite-dimensional Eyring-Kramers analysis to infinite-dimensional stochastic gradient systems.