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

Agentic MPC for Semantic Control System Resynthesis

While MPC effectively handles structured, diverse, and low-level specifications, it lacks the capability to dynamically incorporate high-level contextual information such as social norms, user intent, or natural language instructions. To address this limitation, this manuscript introduces an agentic MPC framework that enables context-aware, semantically adaptive control synthesis by integrating with large language model-based agents. The agent interprets heterogeneous inputs, including natural language messages, environmental observations, and external knowledge, to resynthesize the control specifications. The effectiveness of the framework is demonstrated in an autonomous driving scenario, where the system aligns with personal preferences or responds to social situations such as emergency vehicle yielding.

02.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Measurement of reactor neutrino oscillation with the first JUNO data

Neutrino oscillations (see refs. 1,2 and references therein), a quantum effect manifesting at macroscopic scales, are governed by lepton flavour mixing angles and neutrino mass-squared differences3 that are fundamental parameters of particle physics, representing phenomena beyond the Standard Model. Precision measurements of these parameters are essential for testing the completeness of the three-flavour framework, determining the mass ordering of neutrinos and probing possible new physics. The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO)4 is a 20-ktonne liquid-scintillator detector located 52.5 km from multiple reactor cores, designed to resolve the interference pattern of reactor neutrinos with sub-percent precision5,6. Here we report, using the first 59.1 days of data collected since detector completion in August 2025, the first simultaneous high-precision determination of two neutrino oscillation parameters, $${\sin }^{2}{\theta }_{12}=0.3092\,\pm \,0.0087$$ and $$\Delta {m}_{21}^{2}=(7.50\,\pm \,0.12)\times 1{0}^{-5}\,{\mathrm{eV}}^{2}$$ for the normal mass ordering scenario, improving the precision by a factor of 1.6 relative to the combination of all previous measurements. These results advance the basic understanding of neutrinos, validate the design of the detector and indicate the readiness of JUNO for resolving the neutrino mass ordering with a larger dataset. The rapid achievement with a short exposure highlights the potential of JUNO to push the frontiers of precision neutrino physics and paves the way for its broad scientific programme. The first data of the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory deliver high-precision neutrino oscillation parameters, improving measurements and demonstrating readiness to determine neutrino mass ordering.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

On Randomized Algorithms in Online Strategic Classification

arXiv:2602.06257v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Online strategic classification studies settings in which agents strategically modify their features to obtain favorable predictions. For example, given a classifier that determines loan approval based on credit scores, applicants may open or close credit cards and bank accounts to obtain a positive prediction. The learning goal is to achieve low mistake or regret bounds despite such behavior. While randomized algorithms have the potential to offer advantages to the learner in strategic settings, they have been largely underexplored. In the realizable setting, no lower bound is known for randomized algorithms, and existing lower bound constructions for deterministic learners can be circumvented by randomization. In the agnostic setting, the best known regret upper bound is $O(T^{3/4}\log^{1/4}T|\mathcal H|)$, which is far from the standard online learning rate of $O(\sqrt{T\log|\mathcal H|})$. In this work, we provide refined bounds for online strategic classification in both settings; our bounds depend on the Littlestone dimension $\mathrm{Ldim}(\mathcal H)$ of the hypothesis class $\mathcal H$ and the maximum degree $\Delta$ of the manipulation graph. In the realizable setting, we extend, for $T > \mathrm{Ldim}(\mathcal H) \Delta^2$, the existing lower bound $\Omega(\mathrm{Ldim}(\mathcal H) \Delta)$ for deterministic learners to all learners. This yields the first lower bound that applies to randomized learners. We then provide the first randomized learner that improves the known (deterministic) upper bound of $O(\mathrm{Ldim}(\mathcal H) \cdot \Delta \log \Delta)$. In the agnostic setting, we give an improper randomized learner that improves the regret upper bound to $O(\sqrt{T\log|\mathcal H|})$, matching the standard online learning rate. We also show a larger lower bound for all proper learning rules, demonstrating that improperness is necessary to achieve the optimal rate.

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

SkMTEB: Slovak Massive Text Embedding Benchmark and Model Adaptation

We introduce SkMTEB, the first comprehensive MTEB-style text embedding benchmark for Slovak, a low-resource West Slavic language, comprising 31 datasets across 7 task types – nearly 4$\times$ the depth of existing multilingual benchmark coverage for Slovak. Our evaluation of 31 embedding models reveals that large instruction-tuned multilingual models achieve the strongest performance, while existing Slovak-specific models trained for NLU tasks transfer poorly to embedding tasks. To address the need for efficient, locally-deployable Slovak embeddings, we develop \texttt{e5-sk-small} (45M parameters) and \texttt{e5-sk-large} (365M) by applying vocabulary trimming and fine-tuning to Multilingual E5 models. Despite size reductions of up to 62\%, our open-source models achieve competitive performance with proprietary APIs while remaining locally deployable for semantic search and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). We release the benchmark, models, datasets, and code openly, hoping our approach offers a replicable path for other under-resourced languages.

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

TENSO: Software Package for Numerically Exact Open Quantum Dynamics Based on Efficient Tree Tensor Network Decomposition of the Hierarchical Equations of Motion

arXiv:2603.17711v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: TENSO is a versatile and powerful open-source software package for numerically exact simulations of the dynamics of quantum systems immersed in structured thermal environments. It is based on a tree tensor network decomposition of the hierarchical equations of motion (HEOM) that efficiently curbs its curse of dimensionality with bath complexity. As such, TENSO enables exact non-Markovian open quantum dynamics simulations even with complex environments typical of chemistry and quantum information science. TENSO allows for time-dependent drive in the system, and for non-commuting fluctuations. More generally, TENSO efficiently propagates the dynamics for any method with a generator of the dynamics that can be expressed in a sum-of-products form, including the HEOM and multi-layer multiconfigurational time-dependent Hartree methods. TENSO enables simulations using tensor trees and trains of arbitrary order, and implements three propagation strategies for the coupled master equations; two fixed-rank methods that require a constant memory footprint during the dynamics and one adaptive rank method with a variable memory footprint controlled by the target level of computational error. In contrast to the accompanying theory and algorithmic paper [J. Chem. Phys. 163, 104109 (2025)] the focus here is on the practical usage and applications of TENSO with underlying theoretical concepts introduced only as needed.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Deep Dense Exploration for LLM Reinforcement Learning via Pivot-Driven Resampling

Effective exploration is a key challenge in reinforcement learning for large language models: discovering high-quality trajectories within a limited sampling budget from the vast natural language sequence space. Existing methods face notable limitations: GRPO samples exclusively from the root, saturating high-probability trajectories while leaving deep, error-prone states under-explored. Tree-based methods blindly disperse budgets across trivial or unrecoverable states, causing sampling dilution that fails to uncover rare correct suffixes and destabilizes local baselines. To address this, we propose Deep Dense Exploration (DDE), a strategy that focuses exploration on $pivots$-deep, recoverable states within unsuccessful trajectories. We instantiate DDE with DEEP-GRPO, which introduces three key innovations: (1) a lightweight data-driven utility function that automatically balances recoverability and depth bias to identify pivot states; (2) local dense resampling at each pivot to increase the probability of discovering correct subsequent trajectories; and (3) a dual-stream optimization objective that decouples global policy learning from local corrective updates. Experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms GRPO, tree-based methods, and other strong baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/AgentCombo/DEEP-GRPO

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

A Low-Rank Subspace Analysis of LLM Interventions

arXiv:2606.14388v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Interventions designed to modify a particular behavior in LLMs, such as refusal or sycophancy, often produce unintended changes in other behaviors. This lack of targeted control makes it difficult to design and implement reliable safety controls. To understand these side-effects, we introduce a diagnostic framework for analyzing interacting behaviors in LLMs. We model behaviors as low-rank subspaces in activation space, and study how interventions influence across behaviors. Across multiple instruction-tuned models (7B-70B) and across refusal, jailbreak, and sycophancy settings, we find that different behaviors share internal representations, and intervening on one behavior alters others in asymmetric ways. Some behaviors act as upstream control points whose interventions propagate broadly across other behaviors, while others remain more isolated. We relate these effects to two geometric quantities: (i) the overlap between behavior subspaces, measured as the average squared cosine of principal angles, and (ii) the angle between each behavior subspace and the decision subspace (capturing the model's final decision e.g., refuse vs. comply). Empirically, intervention effects on other behaviors tend to be larger for behavior pairs with higher subspace overlap, and for source behaviors whose subspaces lie closer (smaller angle) to the decision subspace. These findings highlight a challenge for targeted behavior control: behaviors are difficult to modify independently, as interventions can propagate through shared representations and asymmetric interactions.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Gaussian Spatial Priors for Anatomy-Aware Object Detection in Surgical Videos

Detecting anatomical structures in surgical video is essential for intraoperative safety frameworks such as the Critical View of Myopectineal Orifice (CVMPO) in inguinal hernia repair. While prominent structures like the Cooper's Ligament and Triangle of Doom are reliably detected by standard methods, smaller structures such as the epigastric vessels remain challenging due to their visual ambiguity and intermittent visibility. We observe that the spatial relationship between structures is anatomically constrained, and propose a Gaussian Spatial Prior (GSP) module that encodes this relationship as a compact, parametric bias injected into the self-attention of a DAB-DETR decoder. The prior is computed offline from training annotations as a small set of frozen Gaussian parameters and recomputed at each decoder layer using the iteratively refined reference points. On a dataset of inguinal hernia repair videos with 5-fold cross-validation, GSP improves dependent class detection by $+33.5\%$ ($AP_{50}$) over DAB-DETR and $+53.9\%$ over YOLOv26, while also improving anchor detection by $+6.0\%$. These gains are statistically significant across all folds ($p=0.012$, paired $t-$test).

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

Mana: Dexterous Manipulation of Articulated Tools

Articulated tool manipulation remains a major challenge in dexterous robotics due to the need to coordinate internal degrees of freedom and contact-rich interactions. While prior work has largely focused on rigid objects, articulated tool use remains underexplored because of its physical complexity and the difficulty of learning functional grasping and manipulation policies. We present Mana (Manipulation Animator), a general sim-to-real framework that reinterprets dexterous manipulation as an animation problem. Inspired by computer animation, Mana employs a coarse-to-fine pipeline that transforms procedurally-generated grasp keyframes into manipulation trajectories through motion planning and reinforcement learning. The data generation process is largely automatic, requiring only a few mouse clicks to specify functional affordances (

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

D3Seg: Dependency-Aware Diffusion for Brain Tumor Segmentation with Missing Modalities

Accurate brain tumor segmentation using multi-parametric MRI is critical for effective treatment planning. However, in clinical settings, complete acquisition of all MRI sequences is not always possible. The absence of certain MRI modalities results in substantial performance degradation in existing segmentation methods, which typically rely on naive feature concatenation or direct fusion strategies. To address this limitation, we propose a novel segmentation model D3Seg which is designed to maintain stable performance under missing-modality settings. D3Seg introduces Multi-hop Modality Graph Fusion (MMGF) to model higher-order inter-modality dependencies, a lightweight diffusion-based imputation mechanism to compensate for missing T1ce and FLAIR feature representations in latent space, and probability-space decision refinement to mitigate dominant-class overconfidence and improve delineation of underrepresented tumor subregions. We evaluate the proposed D3Seg model on BraTS 2023 Glioma as the primary benchmark and further test it on a subset of the external BraTS 2023 Meningioma cohort to assess generalization across tumor pathologies. The results are compared with the state-of-the-art models under different missing-modality conditions. The proposed model achieves approximately 1.5-2.0% Dice improvement on enhancing tumor (ET) and around 1.0% on tumor core (TC) across multiple missing-modality configurations compared to the current state-of-the-art model on BraTS Glioma dataset. Cross-cohort evaluation on BraTS Meningioma dataset demonstrates the generalizability of the proposed model, showing consistent improvements in the challenging TC and ET regions, with approximately 1.5-3.0% and 1.5-6.5% gains respectively across several missing-modality configurations.

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

Generalized two-qubit Hamiltonian for Projective Quantum Feature Maps

arXiv:2606.13641v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Projected quantum feature maps provide a strategy for using quantum processors as feature generators for classical machine-learning models. Building on counterdiabatic Ising-glass and one-dimensional Heisenberg PQFMs, we introduce a generalized two-qubit Hamiltonian-based PQFM that provides a unified way to encode classical features through local Pauli fields and pairwise two-qubit Pauli interactions. This construction allows distinct classical variables to be embedded along different Pauli axes of the same qubit, increasing the information density of shallow circuits while remaining compatible with hardware constraints. We develop and implement these methods in pqfmlib, a publicly available Python library for constructing, executing, and benchmarking Hamiltonian-based PQFMs.We then benchmark the generalized Hamiltonian PQFMs against reference PQFMs on four biomedical classification datasets under a nested cross-validation protocol with paired statistical tests. Quantum features are generated using both IBM quantum processors with up to 156 qubits and statevector simulations. Our results show that the generalized two-qubit Hamiltonian family provides the most consistent pattern of statistically supported gains over matched classical baselines, although the performance of all methods depends on the dataset, encoding strategy, measured observables, and hardware conditions. These findings support generalized Hamiltonian PQFMs as a promising route toward near-term quantum utility.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

A Geometric Family of Correlations Containing the Quantum Singlet

arXiv:2606.12045v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a geometrically constrained hidden-variable framework that generates a family of correlations parametrized by a boundary function, within which the quantum singlet correlation appears as a particular member. Exact expressions for the correlation function are derived. Several structural results are established, including admissibility conditions, symmetry properties, a universal stationary point of the associated CHSH function, and an exact relation between the CHSH value at $\nu=\pi/4$ and a geometric contrast measure defined on the underlying hidden-variable distributions. Rather than treating the quantum singlet correlation as an isolated target to be reproduced, the present framework places it within a broader geometric structure of correlations. These results suggest the existence of a nontrivial geometric structure underlying the family of correlations and motivate the search for a principle capable of selecting the quantum singlet solution from within that family.

14.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Population-associated molecular variation in histologically normal breast tissue is context-dependent and associated with distinct transcriptional states

Population-associated molecular variation in breast tissue may contribute to differences in tissue biology and disease susceptibility, yet the extent to which such variation is shaped by underlying tissue states remains unclear. Here, we performed RNA-seq and lipidomic profiling of histologically normal breast tissue samples from African American (AA) and Caucasian White (CW) individuals, followed by conceptual integration of the resulting transcriptomic and lipidomic patterns. Unsupervised analysis revealed two distinct baseline transcriptional states (G1 and G2) that defined the primary axis of molecular variation across the cohort and corresponded to epithelial-enriched (G1) and vascular-enriched (G2) tissue contexts as determined by cell-type deconvolution. Global comparisons between AA and CW samples showed minimal transcriptomic differences, with only a single gene reaching significance after multiple testing correction. However, when stratified by baseline tissue state, 191 genes were differentially expressed within G1, with coordinated upregulation of extracellular matrix organization and proliferative/cytoskeletal processes in AA samples. These patterns were consistently supported across multiple enrichment approaches. No comparable population-associated differences were observed within G2. Lipidomic analyses showed partial but non-significant trends consistent with transcriptomic structure, suggesting that lipid variation provides complementary but limited support for baseline molecular differences, likely reflecting constraints of bulk tissue composition. Together, these findings suggest that population-associated molecular differences in normal breast tissue are context-dependent and emerge within specific baseline transcriptional states, where distinct biological programs can coexist and be differentially modulated. These findings highlight the importance of tissue heterogeneity in shaping molecular variation and its potential relevance to disease-associated tissue states.

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

Applicability Condition Extraction for Therapeutic Drug-Disease Relations

arXiv:2606.14031v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Identifying conditions that a certain drug takes therapeutic effect on a target disease is crucial for clinical decision-making support. However, most existing biomedical information extraction methods have focused on identifying only relations between drugs and diseases, while largely overlooking the context-specific conditions where such relations can apply. To address this problem, we introduce the task of applicability condition extraction for therapeutic drug–disease relations from biomedical research literature. We create the first dataset that has manually annotated triples of drugs, diseases, and applicability conditions on biomedical paper abstracts with 1,119 drug-disease pairs. Using this dataset, we systematically evaluate the performance of a range of existing methods. In addition, we propose a new method that enhances LoRA to consider relations between drugs and diseases. Our method consistently outperforms strong baselines across different evaluation settings. The source code and dataset of this paper can be obtained from: https://github.com/guantingluo98/Drug-ACE

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Evidence-Gated LLM Priors for Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization

arXiv:2606.01730v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as heuristic advisors for black-box optimization, yet their suggestions and self-reported confidence are not necessarily calibrated to downstream objective values. This issue becomes more pronounced in multi-objective Bayesian optimization, where different objectives may require different expert knowledge and where an LLM expert can be useful for one objective but misleading for another. We study how to use LLM-generated expert priors in discrete multi-objective Bayesian optimization without blindly trusting them. We propose an objective-wise reputation-market mechanism that treats each expert-objective pair as a falsifiable prior source. Expert weights are updated online from observed objective feedback, discounted over time, and gated by market-level trust. We then introduce a decoupled counterfactual gate that can use the LLM prior without confidence, use it with confidence, or abstain from the LLM prior entirely. Across controlled synthetic stress tests and three molecule optimization benchmarks with \qwenflash{}-generated expert priors, we find that dynamic objective-wise calibration improves robustness over fixed LLM priors. However, raw LLM confidence is not reliably beneficial: on ESOL, confidence is positively correlated with prediction error; on FreeSolv, confidence can help; and on Lipophilicity, ignoring confidence remains strongest. Our fixed three-arm counterfactual gate improves over the first counterfactual variant on ESOL and FreeSolv, while an attempted margin portfolio exposes a useful negative result: margin selection should be acquisition-aware rather than based only on one-step prior error.

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

ASTEROID: A Spatiotemporal Information Transformer for Forecasting Multi-Step Time Series of Molecular Dynamics

arXiv:2606.17668v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Molecular dynamics (MD) simulation is computationally demanding, particularly for large-scale systems requiring long-term analysis. Accurate forecast of the outcomes of a MD simulation is not only an attractive scientific challenge but also has substantial practical value. In this work, we developed a data-driven framework, termed ASTEROID (Advanced Spatiotemporal TransformER fOr Inferring Dynamics), that can directly predict multi-step atomic coordinates, avoiding conventional iterative integration. For this purpose, our ASTEROID reformulates MD trajectories as high-dimensional spatiotemporal sequences and integrates the Spatiotemporal Information (STI) Transformation equation into a Transformer architecture. The core innovation of ASTEROID lies in its ability to model multiscale spatiotemporal dependencies. In particular, for spatial dependencies, a local-global self-attention mechanism captures both short- and long-range interactions. For temporal dependencies, an encoder-decoder structure integrates global context with autoregressive forecasting. ASTEROID was evaluated on several quantum-mechanics derived molecular datasets. Our results indicate that ASTEROID achieved not only a higher level of accuracy in multi-step prediction than existing methods on various benchmarks, but also significantly reduced computational cost of conventional MD simulation. Moreover, the model supports iterative multi-step forecasting over an extended time scale. This work establishes a robust and generalizable data-driven paradigm for accelerating MD simulations.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Voronoi Percolation: Topological Stability and Giant Cycles

arXiv:2601.00793v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the topological stability of Voronoi percolation in higher dimensions. We show that slightly increasing p allows a discretization that preserves increasing topological properties with high probability. This strengthens a theorem of Bollobás and Riordan and generalizes it to higher dimensions. As a consequence, we prove a sharp phase transition for the emergence of i-dimensional giant cycles in Voronoi percolation on the 2i-dimensional torus.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

High-harmonic generation driven by temporal-mode quantum states of light

arXiv:2512.06602v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We develop a theoretical framework for high-harmonic generation (HHG) driven by quantum states of light based on a temporal-mode expansion of the electromagnetic field. This approach extends previous single plane-wave mode treatments to realistic pulse configurations and arbitrary multi-mode states of light, resolving conceptual inconsistencies arising from non-normalizable infinite plane waves and establishing consistency between analytical and numerical methods. We derive a correction factor that quantifies deviations from the diagonal approximation (in which the yield becomes a statistical average over classical-field simulations) both for the response of a single atom and in the many-atom regime. Our results confirms that the HHG spectrum for atoms driven by any quantum state of light in free space is accurately described by averaging semi-classical calculations over the Husimi distribution, with no observable genuine quantum effects in the spectrum. We also demonstrate that in the many-atom regime, the mean-field coherent-state approximation underlying this treatment does not preserve probabilities, although unitarity is restored by in the diagonal approximation. The absence of genuine quantum effects in the HHG yield is attributed to the large photon numbers ($\sim 10^{11}$) required to reach HHG intensities in free space, which render quantum fluctuations negligible. We discuss nanophotonic environments with ultrasmall mode volumes as potential platforms where few-photon strong-field processes could exhibit genuine quantum signatures.

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

Security and Privacy Prompts in the Wild: What Users Ask LLMs and How LLMs Respond

Large language models (LLMs) are widely used to fulfill users' information needs; users ask LLMs about the weather, pose educational questions, and consult them for legal assistance. One particularly understudied area is digital security and privacy (S&P), where users may seek LLMs' help on how to secure their online accounts or protect their computers from cyber attacks. To the best of our knowledge, no prior study has collected or analyzed the S&P questions users ask LLMs; prior research on LLM response quality relied on expert-authored S&P misconceptions or FAQs rather than user queries. Drawing from WildChat, a dataset of 3.2M user-LLM conversations collected in the wild, our study identifies 14,727 S&P prompts and categorizes them into nine categories covering a wide range of S&P topics. From the S&P prompts, we sampled 450 and performed a thematic analysis to characterize the S&P questions users ask LLMs. Separate from the thematic analysis, we curated 270 advice-seeking S&P prompts, where users ask for recommendations, guidance, or specific S&P information. We measured LLM response quality and consistency when posing the prompt to LLMs 10 times. We found that commercial LLMs outperform open-weight models (GPT 5.5 provided "good enough" responses on 98% of prompts; Llama 4 on 47%). However, among prompts that received high-quality responses on average, commercial models sometimes produce contradictory responses across runs, risking confusing or misleading users.

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

Probing Low Frame Rate Degradation in Neural Audio Codecs

arXiv:2606.16969v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low frame rates in neural audio codecs are attractive for autoregressive speech synthesis, where the generation cost scales linearly with the sequence length. Recent work has demonstrated that codecs can operate at 12.5 Hz and below, but the mechanisms underlying low frame rate degradation remain insufficiently understood. We investigate these mechanisms through a controlled frame rate ablation. We reproduce a quality cliff at 6.25 Hz reported in previous works and evaluate candidate explanations: phonemic collisions and codebook saturation, neither of which shows evidence of a fundamental barrier. The cliff is instead caused by suboptimal training configuration: fixed clip duration during training yields too few tokens at low frame rates, starving the decoder of inter-token context. Once corrected, WER degrades smoothly with phonemic load down to 3.1 Hz and 1.6 Hz, suggesting the inference-time efficiency gains of low frame rate codecs are more accessible than previously assumed.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

RaLMPH: Reliability-aware Learning for Multi-Pathologist Harmonization in Whole-Slide Image Classification

Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) is a standard paradigm for Whole-Slide Image (WSI) analysis and has achieved strong results in computational pathology. However, most MIL pipelines assume a single "gold" label per slide, which conflicts with clinical practice where substantial inter-pathologist variability is common. Existing multi-annotator learning and label-refinement methods typically estimate global annotator reliability or rely on single-instance assumptions, making them poorly suited to MIL and to localized diagnostic contexts where experts disagree. We propose RaLMPH (Reliability-aware Learning for Multi-Pathologist Harmonization), a MIL-based label reconciliation framework for WSIs annotated by multiple pathologists. RaLMPH introduces a reliability field that jointly models (i) local neighborhood structure in WSI feature space and (ii) expert uncertainty (entropy), enabling per-sample identification of trustworthy reference neighborhoods. Leveraging this field, RaLMPH performs sample-wise local annotator ranking to select reliable opinions per slide and applies an adaptive gating mechanism to fuse labels conditioned on local reliability. Experiments on a clinical WSI dataset with labels from six pathologists, as well as controlled simulated benchmarks, show that RaLMPH consistently outperforms existing approaches. Further analyses clarify how our reliability-aware mechanism improves label reconciliation and downstream MIL performance.

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

Semantic Flip: Synthetic OOD Generation for Robust Refusal in Embodied Question Answering and Spatial Localization

Detecting unanswerable user queries remains essential for the reliable deployment of real-world embodied agents. However, modern vision-language models (VLMs) often generate overly confident answers even when the available visual memory cannot support the query. Such overconfidence poses various task-dependent risks. The agent may provide misleading information to the user in Embodied Question Answering and select an arbitrary coordinate and physically guide the user there in spatial reasoning for navigation. Despite these high stakes, only a few prior studies directly address when and how an embodied VLM should respond with "I do not know." This work proposes Semantic Flip, a simple yet effective framework that synthesizes auxiliary out-of-distribution (OOD) samples for embodied refusal without requiring external OOD annotations. The key idea is to independently transform the query and video memory to construct auxiliary OOD pairs that lack sufficient visual grounding. These synthesized pairs enable training a lightweight rejection module on top of a frozen pretrained VLM. The module attaches to any existing VLM-based pipeline without retraining the underlying model. Across two complementary benchmarks, Semantic Flip consistently outperforms strong prompting baselines. This work also introduces SpaceReject, a new refusal benchmark for spatial localization with deliberately unanswerable queries over long video memory, where Semantic Flip achieves an $F_1$ score of 0.9559. The source codes and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/ndb796/SemanticFlip.

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

Hubs or Fringes: Pretraining Data Selection via Web Graph Centrality

The performance of modern language models depends critically on pretraining data composition. Yet existing data selection methods rely on auxiliary classifiers for document scoring or mixture optimization, adding computational overhead and dependence on labeled data. We propose WebGraphMix, a lightweight data selection framework that computes structural centrality scores over the Common Crawl host-level web graph and uses them to vary the proportion of central versus peripheral documents in the pretraining mixture. We hypothesize that central hosts expose models to reusable abstractions, while peripheral hosts encode specialized, long-tail knowledge. WebGraphMix computes centrality scores efficiently at web scale, requiring no model training, labeled data, or downstream supervision. We integrate WebGraphMix into the DataComp-LM pipeline and train models at 400M and 1B parameter scales with 8B and 28B tokens respectively, evaluating on 23 tasks ranging from factual knowledge to symbolic reasoning. Our experiments show that central and peripheral web regions encode complementary capabilities. Mixture combining both at a ratio of 1:1 achieves 41.4% on average, compared to 39.8% for uniform sampling. Combining structural scores with document-level quality classifier scores further improves performance to 43.8%. These findings demonstrate that web graph topology is a meaningful axis for pretraining data curation, capturing information that is largely orthogonal to existing content-based approaches.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Resolving the Edge of a Quantum Pyramid

arXiv:2606.14698v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Standing on the shoulders of giants, we resolve the quantum pyramids conjecture, confirming the globally information-optimal measurement for an ensemble of equiangular equiprobable pure states, as conjectured by Englert and \v{R}eháček (arXiv:0905.0510). We do so by proving the remaining entropy inequalities of Holevo and Utkin (arXiv:2506.06700), which certify optimality for obtuse and flat pyramids. For obtuse pyramids, our key contribution is a rigorous proof that local minimizers of the corresponding entropy inequality cannot have three distinct coordinate values. We show that eliminating this family can be reduced to a neat algebraic reciprocal inequality relating branches of the Lambert $W$ function, which may be of independent interest. For flat pyramids, we prove a tight $\ell^p$ inequality for zero-sum vectors that was recently conjectured, proved analytically in dimension $d=3$, and computationally verified for $d\leq 200$ by Holevo and Utkin (arXiv:2603.24017). We prove this bound for all $d\geq 2$ via a technique in symmetric inequalities known as the equal variables method.