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02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Small LLMs for Biomedical Claim Verification: Cost-Effective Fine-Tuning, Structural Dataset Shortcuts, and Cross-Domain Generalization

Authors:
Gaurav Kumar↗

Large Language Models such as GPT-4o and GPT-5 achieve strong zero-shot performance on biomedical claim verification, but cost and opacity limit scalable use. We fine-tune three small LLMs: Phi-3-mini (3.8B), Qwen2.5-3B, and Mistral-7B, via QLoRA on SciFact and HealthVer, providing the first study of QLoRA models against GPT-4o and fine-tuned BioLinkBERT encoders. Mistral-7B QLoRA surpasses both GPT-4o and GPT-5 (up to 12% F1 gain) at a fractional cost using just 1,008 training examples. We conduct extensive in-domain and cross-domain evaluation: models trained on SciFact tested on HealthVer and vice versa, at matched sizes to isolate dataset structure from data quantity. We identify a previously unreported structural artifact in SciFact that inflates in-domain scores, and show through bidirectional out-of-domain evaluation that training on structurally sound data enables robust cross-domain transfer. We plan to release all code and adapter checkpoints.

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

Design Criteria for SGD Preconditioners: Local Conditioning, Noise Floors, and Basin Stability

Authors:
Mitchell Scott↗Tianshi Xu↗Ziyuan Tang↗Alexandra Pichette-Emmons↗Qiang Ye↗Yousef Saad↗Yuanzhe Xi↗

arXiv:2511.19716v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) often slows in the late stage of training due to anisotropic curvature and gradient noise. We analyze preconditioned SGD in the geometry induced by a symmetric positive definite matrix $\mathbf{M}$, deriving bounds in which both the convergence rate and the stochastic noise floor are governed by $\mathbf{M}$-dependent quantities: the rate through an effective condition number in the $\mathbf{M}$-metric, and the floor through the product of that condition number and the preconditioned noise level. For nonconvex objectives, we establish a preconditioner-dependent basin-stability guarantee: when smoothness and basin size are measured in the $\mathbf{M}$-norm, the probability that the iterates remain in a well-behaved local region admits an explicit lower bound. This perspective is particularly relevant in Scientific Machine Learning (SciML), where achieving small training loss under stochastic updates is closely tied to physical fidelity, numerical stability, and constraint satisfaction. The framework applies to both diagonal/adaptive and curvature-aware preconditioners and yields a simple design principle: choose $\mathbf{M}$ to improve local conditioning while attenuating noise. Experiments on a quadratic diagnostic and three SciML benchmarks validate the predicted rate-floor behavior.

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04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Privacy-preserving federated tensor decomposition of single-cell immune data: recovering multicellular programs across institutions

Authors:
Axel Faes↗Stephanie M. van den Berg↗Maryam Amir Haeri↗

arXiv:2606.24938v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tensor decomposition of donor $\times$ cell-type $\times$ gene single-cell data recovers multicellular programs: coordinated axes of inter-individual transcriptional variation that span cell types and stratify disease. Yet immune single-cell atlases are increasingly multi-institution, multi-ancestry, and governed, so patient cells often cannot be pooled. We present a federated estimator: each site computes a local program subspace, and a coordinator merges these by stacked SVD under federated global-mean centering, provably equivalent (up to truncation) to the centralised decomposition. This centering makes the merge robust to site-label confounding (program AUC $0.957$ vs.\ $0.861$ for naive per-site centering). Only program subspaces leave a site, and aggregation is compatible with secure aggregation. On a 261-donor systemic lupus erythematosus atlas it recovers the canonical interferon program (ISG enrichment AUC $0.998$; case–control separation $0.958$; bootstrap $\DeltaAUC=-0.000$, 95\% CI $[-0.004,+0.012]$ vs.\ centralised), across institution-scale and multi-ancestry partitions, and across three real COVID-19 sites (subspace correlation $0.989$). It recovers the program when no site observes all cell types (correlation $1.000$, exact by construction), which fixed-feature federated PCA cannot. On an interstitial-lung-disease atlas the recovered program predicts disease better than the best single cell type (AUC $0.96$ vs.\ $0.91$; gap 95\% CI excludes zero) and the advantage survives federation; a liver cohort is consistent ($p=0.005$). Membership-inference shows secure aggregation cuts attack AUC from $0.91$ to $0.61$. The method enables cross-institution, cross-ancestry recovery of multicellular immune programs without sharing cells.

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05.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

SPARK: A Systems-level Computational Framework for Reconstructing Transcriptomic State Organisation in Lung Adenocarcinoma

Authors:
Kulkarni↗Sengupta↗Kumar↗

Lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) exhibits substantial molecular heterogeneity, which complicates tumour stratification and limits the ability of mutation-centric models to capture tumour behaviour and predict patient outcomes. This study investigates whether coordinated transcriptomic programs can provide a systems-level representation of tumour states. Bulk RNA-sequencing data from the TCGA-LUAD cohort were analysed to reconstruct pathway-level transcriptomic organisation using a stability-optimised network framework (SPARK). This analysis identified eight transcriptomic modules representing coordinated biological processes active across tumours. Module activity scores were subsequently used to derive a composite Transcriptomic Risk Score through elastic-net Cox proportional hazards modelling. The resulting risk score showed a significant association with overall survival in the discovery cohort and improved prognostic discrimination beyond clinical variables. An independent evaluation in the CPTAC-LUAD cohort confirmed the prognostic signal and preserved risk stratification across patient groups. Unsupervised clustering of module activity further revealed three transcriptomic patient groups characterised by distinct biological programs, genomic alteration patterns, and survival outcomes. Single-cell analysis also demonstrated that the identified transcriptomic modules reflect coordinated organisation of the tumour-immune-stromal ecosystem across cellular compartments. Together, these findings suggest that LUAD heterogeneity can be organised into coordinated transcriptomic programs with measurable clinical relevance, providing a systems-level framework for representing tumour molecular states.

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

Evaluating Local Explainability Metrics for Machine Learning Models on Tabular Data

Authors:
Tom\'as Pereira↗Jo\~ao Vitorino↗Eva Maia↗Isabel Pra\c{c}a↗

arXiv:2605.27618v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Despite the wide use of explainability techniques to attempt to understand the behavior of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the generated explanations may not always be reliable. An explanation can appear plausible to humans but fail to capture the internal reasoning of a model, particularly when dealing with complex tabular data. This paper studies the trustworthiness of local explainability techniques when applied to complex tabular classification tasks, considering evaluated metrics for three main properties: faithfulness to the model's predictions, robustness to input data variations, and complexity of the explanation itself. A benchmark was performed for Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME), Kernel SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), and Feature Ablation techniques, across 32 datasets and different types of machine learning models. Model performance ranges were analyzed to identify two groups: consensus-correct, which are samples that all models predicted correctly, and consensus-wrong, samples that all models predicted incorrectly. The obtained results demonstrate that that the explanations are not always correlated with a model's predictive performance. Instead, dataset complexity and feature distributions seem to be the main factors affecting explanation quality and reliability.

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07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Engineering Reliable Autonomous Systems: Challenges and Solutions

Authors:
Marie Farrell↗Matt Luckcuck↗Angelo Ferrando↗Rafael C. Cardoso↗Natasha Alechina↗Marco Autili↗Diana Benjumea Hernandez↗Luciana Brasil Rebelo dos Santos↗Daniela Briola↗Ana Cavalcanti↗Christian Colombo↗Louise A. Dennis↗…

arXiv:2606.23760v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Engineering reliable autonomous systems is an important and growing topic in computer science. As autonomous systems become more prevalent, easy-to-use techniques for building them reliably are increasingly important. This workshop report captures and expands on the discussions at the Lorentz Center Workshop "Engineering Reliable Autonomous Systems" (ERAS), held from 10 to 14 June 2024. The workshop was co-organised by the organisers of the Workshop on Formal Methods for Autonomous Systems (FMAS) and the Workshop on Agents and Robots for reliable Engineered Autonomy (AREA). It brought together members of the FMAS and AREA communities, industry practitioners, and representatives from sectors where autonomous systems pose distinctive engineering challenges. The workshop focused on three main research topics: techniques for verification and validation of autonomous systems; engineering real-world autonomous systems; and software architectures for safe autonomous systems. Its main outcome is a catalogue of challenges in these areas and, most importantly, a pathway to solutions. Some challenges can already be tackled by techniques that are well known in academia but have not yet become regularly used in practice. Other challenges remain unresolved and require further research. This roadmap is intended to support future research and industrial collaboration.

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08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

LaTtE-Flow: Layerwise Timestep-Expert Flow-based Transformer

Authors:
Ying Shen↗Zhiyang Xu↗Jiuhai Chen↗Shizhe Diao↗Jiaxin Zhang↗Yuguang Yao↗Joy Rimchala↗Ismini Lourentzou↗Lifu Huang↗

Recent advances in multimodal foundation models unifying image understanding and generation have opened exciting avenues for tackling a wide range of vision-language tasks within a single framework. Despite progress, existing unified models typically require extensive pretraining and struggle to achieve the same level of performance compared to models dedicated to each task. Additionally, many of these models suffer from slow image generation speeds, limiting their practical deployment in real-time or resource-constrained settings. In this work, we propose Layerwise Timestep-Expert Flow-based Transformer (LaTtE-Flow), a novel and efficient architecture that unifies image understanding and generation within a single multimodal model. LaTtE-Flow builds upon powerful pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to inherit strong multimodal understanding capabilities, and extends them with a novel Layerwise Timestep Experts flow-based architecture for efficient image generation. LaTtE-Flow distributes the flow-matching process across specialized groups of Transformer layers, each responsible for a distinct subset of timesteps. This design significantly improves sampling efficiency by activating only a small subset of layers at each sampling timestep. To further enhance performance, we propose a Timestep-Conditioned Residual Attention mechanism for efficient information reuse across layers. Experiments demonstrate that LaTtE-Flow achieves strong performance on multimodal understanding tasks, while achieving competitive image generation quality with around 6x faster inference speed compared to recent unified multimodal models.

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

Tight Bounds for Logistic Regression with Large Stepsize Gradient Descent in Low Dimension

Authors:
Michael Crawshaw↗Mingrui Liu↗

arXiv:2602.12471v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider the optimization problem of minimizing the logistic loss with gradient descent to train a linear model for binary classification with separable data. With a budget of $T$ iterations, it was recently shown that an accelerated $1/T^2$ rate is possible by choosing a large stepsize $\eta = \Theta(\gamma^2 T)$ (where $\gamma$ is the dataset's margin) despite the resulting non-monotonicity of the loss. In this paper, we provide a tighter analysis of gradient descent for this problem when the data is two-dimensional: we show that GD with a sufficiently large learning rate $\eta$ finds a point with loss smaller than $\mathcal{O}(1/(\eta \gamma^2 T))$, as long as $T \geq \Omega(n/\gamma + 1/\gamma^2)$, where $n$ is the dataset size. Our improved rate comes from a tighter bound on the time $\tau$ that it takes for GD to transition from unstable (non-monotonic loss) to stable (monotonic loss), via a fine-grained analysis of the oscillatory dynamics of GD in the subspace orthogonal to the max-margin classifier. We also provide a lower bound of $\tau$ matching our upper bound up to logarithmic factors, showing that our analysis is tight.

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10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Contextualizing Biological Language Models across Modalities via Logit-Space Contrastive Alignment

Authors:
Yanjun Shao↗Yundi Chen↗Yashvi Patel↗Aurelien Pelissier↗Mar\'ia Rodr\'iguez Mart\'inez↗

arXiv:2606.18703v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pretrained biological language models expose per-token probability distributions through masked-token prediction, providing the likelihood interface central to sequence design, variant scoring, and mechanistic interpretation. Yet these distributions are learned from broad unlabeled corpora and are not naturally conditioned on task-specific biological contexts such as interaction partners, cellular environments, or therapeutic interventions. Existing contextual matching methods often distort this interface through pooled embeddings, contrastive latent spaces, or task-specific prediction heads. We introduce LOGICA (Logit-space Contrastive Alignment), a framework for context-conditioned prediction that performs contrastive learning directly in output-logit space. Using gated cross-modal adapters compatible with each model's native token head, LOGICA preserves the pretrained likelihood interface and converts contextualized token log-likelihoods into matching scores. Alignment is defined through context-sensitive token probabilities rather than proximity in a shared embedding space, enabling learning from sparse paired data across models with distinct vocabularies, without a shared tokenizer or decoder. LOGICA is particularly effective for mutation-local variant ranking, where comparisons reduce to context-conditioned likelihoods of mutant tokens at perturbed sites. Across protein–ligand binding, TCR–peptide activity, and drug-conditioned resistance prediction, LOGICA improves over prior state-of-the-art methods, including matched latent-contrastive and conditional MLM baselines, while retaining a token-level interface for interpretation and generation. On held-out-gene single-mutation drug-resistance prediction, LOGICA improves AUC from near-random latent-space baselines of $\sim$0.55 to $\sim$0.65.

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11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Beyond Shapley: Efficient Computation of Asymmetric Shapley Values

Authors:
Ezequiel Companeetz↗Santiago Cifuentes↗Sergio Abriola↗

arXiv:2606.25103v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We address the problem of explainability in machine learning models through feature attribution methods. In particular, we consider a variant of Shapley values known as Asymmetric Shapley Values (ASV), which enables the incorporation of causal knowledge into model-agnostic explanations through the use of a causal graph. We show that in certain contexts in which the computation of SHAP is $\#P$-hard, the exact computation of ASV can be done in polynomial time. To extend this algorithmic result, we introduce a notion of equivalence classes over the topological orderings of the underlying causal graph, which is useful to reduce the time to compute ASV. In particular, we present a polynomial-time algorithm (in the number of equivalence classes) to compute it whenever the causal graph is a rooted directed tree. Finally, we develop an algorithm for approximating ASV in arbitrary causal DAGs which relies on a procedure to sample topological orderings uniformly at random. To implement this sampling mechanism we leverage known algorithms as well as simpler alternatives. Our experimental results demonstrate the practical viability of the proposed approach in realistic causal structures.

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12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Bayesian Optimization for Learning Nonlinear MPC in Autonomous Agent Navigation

Authors:
Lorenzo Ortolani↗Gabriel Voss↗Gabriele Beltrami↗Francesco Dorati↗Tommaso Felice Banfi↗

arXiv:2606.14763v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-time autonomous navigation in dynamic, unknown environments remains a fundamental challenge for mobile robotics. We propose a map-free framework that tightly integrates reactive rolling-horizon planning with nonlinear Model Predictive Control (MPC). At each control cycle, a LiDAR-based Gaussian occupancy representation is constructed and used to generate collision-free trajectories via A* search, which are then tracked by a CasADi/IPOPT MPC formulation incorporating a smooth sigmoid obstacle barrier. To improve robustness to parameter sensitivity, we adopt an offline Bayesian optimization scheme based on Tree-structured Parzen Estimators (TPE), which identifies near-optimal controller parameters with respect to a composite navigation objective. In addition, a Gaussian Process surrogate is used to analyze parameter sensitivity and provide insight into the optimization landscape. The proposed framework is robot-agnostic and is evaluated on the Unitree Go2 quadruped in simulation using Gazebo, followed by deployment on the physical robot. Experimental results show that parameters tuned in simulation transfer effectively to hardware, maintaining comparable performance without additional tuning. The full system achieves up to a 90.0\% navigation success rate when deployed, along with a 38.9\% average improvement in the evaluation metrics across simulated environments.

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13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Implicit Variational Rejection Sampling

Authors:
Jian Xu↗Shigui Li↗Wei Chen↗Jiacheng Li↗Zhiqi Lin↗Delu Zeng↗Xinghao Ding↗John Paisley↗Qibin Zhao↗

arXiv:2606.14235v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Variational Inference (VI) is a fundamental inference technique in Bayesian machine learning for approximating complex posterior distributions. Traditional VI often relies on the mean-field factorization, which can inadequately capture true posterior complexity. Recent advancements have leveraged neural networks to model implicit distributions, offering increased flexibility. However, the practical constraints of neural network architectures still produces inaccuracies. In this paper, we propose a method called Implicit Variational Rejection Sampling (IVRS), which integrates implicit distributions with rejection sampling to improve the posterior approximation. Our method uses neural networks to construct implicit proposal distributions, and rejection sampling with a discriminator network that estimates the density ratio between the implicit proposal and the true posterior for refining the approximation. Towards this end, we introduce the Implicit Resampling Evidence Lower Bound (IR-ELBO) as a metric to characterize the resampled distribution's quality and derive a tighter variational lower bound. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms traditional variational inference techniques.

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

Are LLMs Ready to Assist Physicians? PhysAssistBench for Interactive Doctor-Patient-EHR Assistance

Authors:
Tianming Du↗Peijie Yu↗Sihan Shang↗Danli Shi↗My Linh Nguyen↗Shengbo Gao↗Guangyuan Li↗Yinghong Yu↗Yan Jiang↗Qianlong Zhao↗Behzad Bozorgtabar↗Shaoxiong Ji↗…

The most plausible near-term role of medical LLMs is to assist rather than replace physicians, yet current evaluations often test isolated capabilities: clinical knowledge, EHR system interaction, or patient communication. Physician assistance instead requires coordinating these capabilities within the same interaction, where physicians issue underspecified requests, patients describe symptoms ambiguously, and EHR systems demand precise tool use. We introduce PhysAssistBench, a benchmark for interactive doctor-patient-EHR assistance. Built from real MIMIC-IV cases, PhysAssistBench uses a scalable pipeline to construct agentic patients: interactive, record-grounded agents that turn static EHR records into multi-turn clinical scenarios while preserving clinical factuality. PhysAssistBench provides a curated bilingual evaluation set of 1,296 manually reviewed and physician-validated turns. Experiments with leading LLMs show that current models remain unreliable in this setting, which exposes a key bottleneck for clinical LLMs: reliable assistance requires coordination across knowledge, communication, and systems, not isolated gains in any of them.

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15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Patients With Personality: Realistic Patient Simulation through Controlled Diversity and Selective Disclosure

Authors:
Moritz Schlager↗Friederike Jungmann↗Samuel Schmidgall↗Philipp Raffler↗Franziska Hartl↗Eva Wende↗Paula Ro{\ss}m\"uller↗Conrad Ketzer↗Avinatan Hassidim↗Dale R. Webster↗Yossi Matias↗Yun Liu↗…

arXiv:2606.17441v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Simulating realistic patient interactions is a key requirement to testing clinical applications of LLMs at scale without time-consuming and expensive user studies. However, existing approaches often lack realism and controllability, often oversharing information unprompted, and failing to capture the wide variability of patient behavior. Here, we introduce PatientsWithPersonality (PWP), a patient simulation framework that generates realistic yet diverse virtual patient responses through explicit personality parametrization over a latent patient state. Grounded in HEXACO, a six-dimensional personality space used to quantify and parameterize human behavioral traits, our approach enables fine-grained control over conversational style, cooperativeness, and information disclosure within a unified framework. In a clinician evaluation, PWP is judged nearly as realistic as recorded human actors and clearly ahead of prior simulators, while being flagged as "too informative" far less often. Conditioning on HEXACO axes yields personas whose configured traits are recoverable by both clinicians and an autorater, span a substantially wider behavioral footprint than the closest baseline, and prevent oversharing. Altogether, our framework paves the way for more accurate and informative LLM benchmarking through our realistic and steerable patient simulator.

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16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Rescaling MLM-Head for Neural Sparse Retrieval

Authors:
Youngjoon Jang↗Seongtae Hong↗Jonah Turner↗Heuiseok Lim↗

arXiv:2606.18811v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learned sparse retrieval (LSR) models such as SPLADE have traditionally used BERT-style masked language models as backbone encoders. A natural expectation is that replacing BERT with stronger pretrained encoders should improve retrieval effectiveness. However, we find that under standard SPLADE training recipes, backbones with large MLM-head L2 norms can suffer performance degradation and even training collapse under standard SPLADE training recipes. We identify this failure as a scale mismatch in the MLM head: SPLADE directly uses MLM-head outputs to construct sparse lexical representations, and query-document relevance is computed by an unnormalized dot product over these representations. As a result, an inflated MLM-head scale can amplify sparse activations, distort matching scores, and destabilize contrastive training under common training settings. To address this issue, we introduce a simple initialization-time correction that rescales the MLM-head projection by a constant factor before SPLADE training. This zero-cost adjustment improves training stability without modifying the model architecture or training objective. Across both in-domain and out-of-domain retrieval benchmarks, this simple correction substantially improves large-norm backbones such as ModernBERT and Ettin, turning unstable training runs into competitive sparse retrievers. In several settings, the corrected models further match or surpass the classic BERT-SPLADE baseline. These findings suggest that the bottleneck in adapting pretrained encoders to LSR is not encoder capacity alone, but the calibration of the MLM-head scale used to construct sparse lexical representations.

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17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

P-K-GCN: Physics-augmented Koopman-enhanced Graph Convolutional Network for Deep Spatiotemporal Super-resolution

Authors:
Xizhuo↗Zhang↗Zekai Wang↗Fei Liu↗Bing Yao↗

arXiv:2606.19303v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-fidelity simulation of spatiotemporal dynamics is computationally prohibitive, necessitating efficient super-resolution techniques to reconstruct high-resolution data from coarse-grained inputs. Traditional data-driven methods often lack physical constraints, and simple physics-informed learning struggles with irregular spatial geometries and intricately evolving temporal dynamics. To tackle these challenges, we propose a Physics-augmented Koopman-enhanced Graph Convolutional Network (P-K-GCN) for spatiotemporal super-resolution on irregular geometries. Specifically, a continuous spline-based GCN is first designed to extract spatial dependencies directly from coarse graph, and Koopman operator theory is incorporated to project the nonlinear dynamics into a compact latent space where temporal progression is linearized. Second, we augment the optimization objective with a physics-based loss to force the data-driven reconstructions to adhere to physical laws for improving predictive fidelity and robustness. Finally, we provide a rigorous theoretical analysis, establishing that the physics augmentation and Koopman regularization mathematically guarantees a reduction in super-resolution error by diminishing Rademacher complexity and tightening generalization bounds. We evaluate our framework on reconstructing spatially high-resolution cardiac electrodynamics across a 3D heart geometry from sparse low-resolution measurements. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior accuracy compared to baseline models.

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18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Leaking Circuit Secrets: Gradient Leakage Attacks on Graph Neural Networks

Authors:
Rupesh Raj Karn↗Johann Knechtel↗Ozgur Sinanoglu↗

arXiv:2606.25589v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As graph neural networks (GNNs) become standard tools for critical tasks in circuit design and analysis, their security and privacy risks require careful attention. Here, we present the first comprehensive evaluation of gradient leakage attacks (GLAs) on GNNs in circuit-design and hardware-security tasks, a practical threat that has been largely overlooked. We assess state-of-the-art (SOTA) GNNs, including GraphSAGE, GCN, GIN, and GAT, trained on standard netlist benchmarks (ISCAS'85, EPFL, and TrustHub), for their fundamental vulnerability to GLAs. We find that GLAs can expose sensitive information, such as gate types and distinctive properties of hardware Trojans, which may assist adversaries in analyzing logic locking schemes or evading Trojan detection mechanisms. Our analysis shows that these risks are influenced by architectural features, with attention mechanisms (GAT) exacerbating leakage, while injective aggregation (GIN) provides comparatively stronger resilience. We further evaluate several SOTA defense techniques, including differential privacy, gradient clipping, secure aggregation, model compression with quantization, and adversarial training. We find that these techniques improve resilience only in specific settings and can also compromise model performance. Overall, our work provides key insights toward privacy-preserving GNNs and highlights the need for more robust and efficient defenses. We release our full methodology and artifacts.

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19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Ingredient-Level Food Image Segmentation for Nutrition Awareness

Authors:
Jonesh Shrestha↗

Food images often contain several visible ingredients, so assigning one dish label to an entire image hides important visual structure. This work studies ingredient-level semantic segmentation on FoodSeg103, where the model predicts an ingredient class for each pixel. Two SegFormer variants were fine-tuned and evaluated under a controlled setup: SegFormer-B0 as the smaller baseline model and SegFormer-B1 as the larger final model. Both models use ImageNet-pretrained MiT backbones with newly initialized 104-class output layers. On the held-out FoodSeg103 test split of 2,135 images, B0 achieved 0.7709 pixel accuracy and 0.2521 mean IoU, while B1 achieved 0.7929 pixel accuracy and 0.3204 mean IoU. B1 improved every saved test metric, including a +0.0683 absolute gain in mean IoU. The system also converts predicted masks into visible ingredient-area percentages, giving a simple visual composition summary of the predicted meal. This summary can serve as a first-pass nutrition-awareness cue by providing a visual alternative to detailed food tracking similar to plate-based meal guidance, but it is not a direct estimate of calories, macronutrients, food mass, volume, density, or true portion size.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

InTrain: Intrinsic Trainability for Zero-Cost Neural Architecture Search

Authors:
Qinqin Zhou↗Fuhai Chen↗Jipeng Wu↗Zhiwei Chen↗Zhikai Hu↗Weiwei Cai↗

Training-free neural architecture search promises efficient discovery of high-performance networks without costly training. However, existing zero-cost proxies rely on fragmented heuristics that fail to capture the fundamental question: what makes an architecture trainable? This paper introduces Intrinsic Trainability (InTrain), a unified theoretical proxy that formalizes trainability as an architectural invariant emerging from two synergistic components: geometric capacity and optimization resilience. We operationalize intrinsic trainability through analysis of neural information processing. Geometric capacity is quantified via the participation ratio of activation covariance eigenspectrum, capturing the effective dimensionality of representation manifolds. Optimization resilience is measured through cumulative gradient health, assessing the robustness of backpropagation across network depth. InTrain synthesizes these dimensions through a scale-invariant multiplicative coupling, which we hypothesize is essential for capturing their synergistic, non-additive relationship. Extensive experiments on standard NAS benchmarks and search spaces demonstrate that InTrain achieves ranking correlations on par with state-of-the-art ensemble-based proxies and outperforms other single-metric methods.

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21.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

Is level-1 blob reconstruction under the network multispecies coalescent easy?

Authors:
Dai↗Molloy↗

Hybridization is an important evolutionary process, commonly modeled by the network multispecies coalescent. Reconstructing evolutionary histories under this model is notoriously costly, even for level-1 networks where hybridization events are isolated from each other. The widely used methods that combine speed with statistical guarantees rely on quartet concordance factors computed for all subsets of four species, resulting in an o(n^4k) bottleneck that severely limits scalability to large numbers of species (n) and genes (k). Among quartet-based methods, NANUQ+ is notable because it decomposes the problem into two steps: first reconstructing a tree of blobs, which compresses each non-treelike part of the network, called a blob, into a single vertex, and second reconstructing the internal structure of each level-1 blob, specifically its circular order and hybrid vertex. Here, we investigate whether level-1 blob reconstruction is difficult once the tree of blobs is known. We present a fast and statistically consistent algorithm, called NetCS, based on two simple primitives: majority voting and merge sort, circumventing the bottleneck of computing all quartet concordance factors. In simulations, NetCS achieved comparable accuracy to NANUQ+ and was dramatically faster, enabling analyses of 200 taxa and 1000 genes in only a few minutes. Both methods attained near-perfect accuracy when given the true tree of blobs; however, their performance degraded in end-to-end pipelines due to errors in tree of blobs reconstruction. Strikingly, even methods that reconstruct level-1 networks directly struggled to accurately predict hybrid ancestry. Our results suggest that reconstructing level-1 blobs is unexpectedly easy once the tree of blobs is known, and that a major challenge for phylogenetic network inference lies in accurate tree of blobs reconstruction.

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

Conformal Bayes under Label Shift: Post-Hoc Calibration vs. In-Training Adaptation

Authors:
Seungjin Choi↗

arXiv:2606.11865v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conformal Bayes combines Bayesian posterior predictives with conformal calibration to produce prediction sets that are both statistically valid and geometrically efficient. We study conformal Bayes under label shift from a unified perspective, identifying two complementary approaches that restore nominal target-domain coverage through importance-weighted conformal calibration but operate through independent mechanisms. Post-hoc calibration tilts the posterior predictive toward the target domain and corrects the conformal threshold via an importance-weighted quantile, leaving the parameter posterior unchanged. In-training adaptation tilts the parameter posterior itself to the target domain, producing a corrected predictive whose highest predictive density region serves as the highest predictive density (HPD) based prediction set under the fitted target predictive; efficiency is model-dependent and does not imply finite-sample conditional optimality. Two controlled experiments show that in an unbiased training regime both strategies achieve valid coverage equally, while in a lead-optimization regime in-training adaptation acts as a debiasing operator, reducing interval width at unchanged coverage.

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

LADBench: A Benchmark for Logical Fault Detection in Images

Authors:
Sahasra Kondapalli↗Lara Radovanovic↗Aadi Palnitkar↗Mingyang Mao↗Xiaomin Lin↗

Large Vision Language Models (VLMs) excel at visual question answering and semantic grounding, but their capacity for autonomous logical reasoning remains underexplored. Existing anomaly benchmarks emphasize visual errors or direct prompting rather than the physical and social common sense needed for open-world deployment. To address this, we introduce LAD-bench, a benchmark of more than 1,000 curated synthetic images with logical anomalies across four domains: Residential, Urban, Collaborative, and Nature. We further propose a Tiered Prompting Protocol based on progressive disclosure, which measures how much explicit assistance a model needs to localize and reason about a logical fault. Evaluating leading foundation models reveals substantial weaknesses: even the best achieves only 70.11% overall accuracy, showing that implicit logical fault detection remains unsolved. Crucially, models often fail to identify anomalies even after receiving explicit hints in deeper tiers. By surfacing these limitations in sequential multimodal reasoning, LAD-Bench offers a rigorous framework for advancing the safety, reliability, and cognitive alignment of autonomous visual systems. Dataset and Code: https://huggingface.co/datasets/SahasraK/LADBench

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

Quantum mechanics over real numbers fully reproduces standard quantum theory

Authors:
Alan C. Maioli↗Evaldo M. F. Curado↗Jean-Pierre Gazeau↗

arXiv:2604.19482v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Standard quantum mechanics employs complex Hilbert spaces, but whether complex numbers are fundamental or merely convenient has long been debated. For decades, real-valued equivalents were considered mathematically possible but cumbersome. However, a highly cited 2021 result claimed that any quantum theory based on real numbers is experimentally falsifiable via network Bell experiments. Yet, it remains an open question whether this falsification applies to all real-valued theories. Here we show that this conclusion rests on an incomplete real formulation, and we present a rigorous real-valued framework that perfectly reproduces all predictions of standard quantum mechanics. We demonstrate that the standard real tensor product ($\otimes_{\mathbb{R}}$) used in previous no-go theorems is algebraically incompatible with the rich structure of conventional quantum mechanics. We present a real framework based on K\"{a}hler space and prove that it is exactly isomorphic to established quantum mechanics via an explicit bijection $\gamma$. The isomorphism extends to composite systems through a symplectic composition rule $\otimes^{\ks}$ that replaces the Kronecker product. Consequently, our formulation achieves the maximal $\mathrm{CHSH}_{3}$ violation of $6\sqrt{2}$ using purely real variables, demonstrating that the no-go theorem is specific to a particular real representation of states and operators and to the composition rule $\otimes_\mathbb{R}$ built upon it, neither of which extends to the present K\"{a}hler framework. These results demonstrate that complex numbers are not fundamentally required by nature; rather, they encode a deeper real geometric structure that governs quantum interference and entanglement, settling this long debate.

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25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

From Concept-Aligned Tokens to Vulnerable Features: Mechanistic Localization of Jailbreaks

Authors:
Nilanjana Das↗Mathew Dawit↗Aman Chadha↗Manas Gaur↗

Jailbreak attacks expose a persistent failure mode in safety-aligned LLMs: models can be pushed into harmful behavior, but the internal representations enabling this shift remain poorly localized. Recent mechanistic safety studies often explain such behavior through broad representational objects, including global refusal directions, activation steering vectors, and refusal-related SAE features. We instead ask whether jailbreak vulnerability can be traced to finer-grained, prompt-conditioned SAE feature subgroups. We introduce a token-driven mechanistic pipeline that decomposes the residual stream of Gemma-2-2B into Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) features and identifies feature subgroups associated with unsafe behavior. Using single-category unsafe examples from BeaverTails to reduce cross-category interference, we extract harmful concepts from adversarial responses and align them with concept-relevant prompt tokens through subspace similarity. We then apply three feature-grouping strategies: cluster-based, hierarchical-linkage, and single-token-driven, to identify SAE feature subgroups across all 26 layers. Finally, we amplify the top features in each subgroup and evaluate the resulting generations with a standardized harmfulness judge. Single-token-driven grouping achieves harmfulness comparable to full cluster-based grouping, showing that individual harmful prompt tokens are sufficient to localize vulnerability-relevant SAE feature subgroups without relying on broader cluster-level aggregation. These subgroups appear across early and mid-to-late layers, with stronger concentration in mid-to-late layers, where targeted steering exposes specific model vulnerabilities. Overall, our results suggest that jailbreak susceptibility can be traced to sparse, token-localized SAE feature subgroups, complementing prior accounts based on broad adversarial, refusal, or steering directions.

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