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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Entanglement in the Dicke subspace

arXiv:2602.15800v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We provide a complete mathematical theory for the entanglement of mixtures of Dicke states. These quantum states form an important subclass of bosonic states arising in the study of indistinguishable particles. We introduce a tensor-based parametrization where the diagonal entries of these states are encoded as a symmetric tensor, enabling a direct translation between entanglement properties and well-studied convex cones of tensors. Our results bridge multipartite entanglement theory with semialgebraic geometry and the theory of completely positive and copositive tensors. This dictionary maps separability to completely positive tensors, the PPT property to moment tensors, entanglement witnesses to copositive tensors, and decomposable witnesses to sum of squares tensors. Using this framework, we construct explicit PPT entangled states in three or more qutrits, disproving a recent conjecture. We establish that PPT entanglement exists for all multipartite systems with local dimension d >= 3 and n >= 3 parties. We also show that, for mixtures of Dicke states, the PPT condition with respect to the most balanced bipartition implies all other PPT conditions. We further connect bosonic extendibility of mixtures of Dicke states to the duals of known hierarchies for non-negative polynomials, such as the ones by Reznick and Polya. We thus provide semidefinite programming relaxations for separability and entanglement testing in the Dicke subspace.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Zero-Shot Active Feature Acquisition via LLM-Elicitation

arXiv:2606.18933v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Active feature acquisition (AFA) sequentially selects which features to observe to reach a classification or ranking decision. Its central limitation is reliance on large amount of labeled data to fit probabilistic models guiding acquisition. Large language models (LLMs) supply unsupervised domain knowledge, but are poor sequential planners. Asking one to both know and decide conflates capabilities best kept separate. Here, we develop a framework for zero-shot AFA through disciplined elicitation: asking the LLM only for what it can be trusted to return, the unary deviations and pairwise co-variations that are the sufficient statistics of a Markov random field (MRF). We apply our framework to two settings: binary classification and top-$k$ identification. In practice, the LLM reliably returns only discriminative statistics, what distinguishes the classes rather than each class in isolation, which precludes classical AFA. We apply a maximum-entropy closure that resolves this gauge ambiguity. We evaluate on a cohort of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) patients, an active clinical setting where diagnostic ambiguity and patient heterogeneity obstruct stable treatment strategies. Our framework outperforms the LLM both on real labels and on its own extracted beliefs. Where it matters most, on the hardest patients, our top-$k$ acquisition policy markedly outperforms all existing methods.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

How far have we gone in Generative Image Restoration? A study on its capability, limitations and evaluation practices

Generative Image Restoration (GIR) has achieved impressive perceptual realism, but how far have its practical capabilities truly advanced compared with previous methods? To answer this, we present a large-scale study grounded in a new multi-dimensional evaluation pipeline that assesses models on detail, sharpness, semantic correctness, and overall quality. Our analysis covers diverse architectures, including diffusion-based, GAN-based, PSNR-oriented, and general-purpose generation models, revealing critical performance disparities. Furthermore, our analysis uncovers a key evolution in failure modes that signifies a paradigm shift for the perception-oriented low-level vision field. The central challenge is evolving from the previous problem of detail scarcity (under-generation) to the new frontier of detail quality and semantic control (preventing over-generation). We also leverage our benchmark to train a new IQA model that better aligns with human perceptual judgments. Ultimately, this work provides a systematic study of modern generative image restoration models, offering crucial insights that redefine our understanding of their true state and chart a course for future development.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Performance and Interpretability of Convolutional, Transformer, and Hybrid Deep Learning Models in Colorectal Histology Classification

Deep learning has become an important tool in computational pathology, enabling automated analysis of histopathological images. While convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have traditionally dominated this field, transformer-based and hybrid architectures have recently demonstrated promising performance. However, comprehensive comparisons of these approaches for colorectal histopathology remain limited. This study evaluated twelve ImageNet-pretrained CNN, transformer, and hybrid architectures using the Kather colorectal histopathology dataset containing 5,000 image tiles from eight tissue classes. All models were trained using a standardized transfer-learning and fine-tuning protocol and assessed using multiple performance metrics, including accuracy, precision, sensitivity, specificity, F1-score, ROC-AUC, Cohen's kappa, and Matthews correlation coefficient. All evaluated models achieved high classification performance, with accuracies ranging from 93.2% to 97.1%. EVA-02 achieved the highest overall performance (97.1% accuracy, 97.0% F1-score), closely followed by ViT-B/16. Among CNNs, ResNet34 and ConvNeXt-Tiny demonstrated highly competitive performance, achieving accuracies of 96.4% and 96.3%, respectively. Transformer architectures generally produced the strongest results across evaluation metrics, although the performance gap between the best transformer and CNN models was relatively small. Per-class analysis showed consistently strong classification performance across all tissue categories, with Complex Stroma representing the most challenging class. Overall, transformer-based architectures achieved the highest predictive performance, whereas modern CNNs provided a favorable balance between accuracy and model complexity. These findings provide a comprehensive benchmark of major deep learning paradigms for colorectal histopathology classification.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

AdaPLD: Adaptive Retrieval and Reuse for Efficient Model-Free Speculative Decoding

Speculative decoding accelerates generation by verifying multiple drafted tokens in a single target-model forward pass, reducing sequential decoding iterations. Model-free variants avoid auxiliary draft models by reusing text and model states already available during generation, but their speedup depends on the reliability of the constructed drafts. We identify two limitations of existing reuse-based methods: lexically anchored retrieval has limited recall under surface-form variation, and deterministic span copying can be brittle when the retrieved context does not uniquely determine the continuation. We propose AdaPLD, a training-free method that adaptively improves both retrieval and draft construction. AdaPLD preserves high-precision lexical reuse while using semantic similarity to recover additional reuse opportunities when lexical matching fails. It further constructs branched reuse hypotheses to account for continuation uncertainty, rather than relying on a single copied span. Across diverse benchmarks, AdaPLD reduces target-model forward passes and achieves up to $3.10\times$ decoding speedup.

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

Foresight: Iterative Reasoning About Clues that Matter for Navigation

arXiv:2606.12550v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open-world mapless navigation from sparse language instructions requires resolving underspecified goals and inferring which environmental cues are relevant for reaching the goal. For instance, reaching an out-of-view destination may require interpreting ramps, signs, or detours that reveal where to go or which route to take. Prior works are limited by their reliance on known navigation factors and closed-set factor categories, or identify cues before motion planning and miss plan-dependent cues. We argue that pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can discover novel instruction-relevant cues, but require adaptation to focus on which cues matter and how they should influence motion planning. We realize these ideas in Foresight, a test-time framework in which a finetuned VLM alternates between proposing image-space motion plans and critiquing them using the language goal and visual context. Subsequent plans are conditioned on prior critiques, enabling iterative motion refinement before execution. To align plan critiques and refinements with open-set behavior preferences, we learn a reward model from human feedback and use it to post-train the VLM with reinforcement learning in the plan-critique loop. In offline evaluations and 6 real-world environments, Foresight improves average task success by 37% and reduces interventions per mission by 52% relative to state-of-the-art test-time reasoning and foundation-model baselines, while running in real-time on a Jetson AGX Orin. We will release code, data, and training details to support future work on test-time reasoning for robot motion refinement. Additional videos at: https://amrl.cs.utexas.edu/foresight

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Robust and Interpretable Adaptation of Equivariant Materials Foundation Models via Sparsity-promoting Fine-tuning

arXiv:2606.18691v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pre-trained materials foundation models, or machine learning interatomic potentials, leverage general physicochemical knowledge to effectively approximate potential energy surfaces. However, they often require domain-specific calibration due to physicochemical diversity as well as mismatches between practical computational settings and those used in constructing the pre-training data. To address this, we propose a sparsity-promoting fine-tuning method that selectively updates model parameters by exploiting the structural properties of E(3)-equivariant materials foundation models. On energy and force prediction tasks across molecular and crystalline benchmarks, our method matches or surpasses full fine-tuning and equivariant low-rank adaptation while updating only $\sim$3~\% of parameters, and in some cases as little as $\sim$0.5~\%. Beyond energy and force calibration, we further demonstrate task generalizability by applying our method to magnetic moment prediction and magnetism-aware total energy modeling. Finally, analysis of sparsity patterns reveals physically interpretable signatures, such as enhanced $d$-orbital contributions in transition metal systems. Overall, our results establish sparsity-promoting fine-tuning as a flexible and interpretable method for domain specialization of equivariant materials foundation models.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Estimating carbon pools in the European Shelf sea environment: replacing reanalysis by model-informed machine learning?

Authors:

arXiv:2508.10178v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Shelf seas are important for the economy and the carbon cycle, but shelf sea observations for carbon pools are often sparse, or highly uncertain. An alternative can be provided by carbon reanalyses (whether assimilating proxy variables, such as chlorophyll-$a$, or directly carbon), but these are often expensive to run. We propose to use a computationally cheap ensemble of neural networks (i.e. deep ensemble) to learn the relationship between the directly observable (atmospheric, riverine and ocean) variables and marine carbon pools from a coupled physics-biogeochemistry model. The deep ensemble was trained on a North-West European Shelf (NWES) physical-biogeochemistry model free run simulation. After training, the deep ensemble was run using inputs from the NWES reanalysis instead of the free run, demonstrating that it can efficiently predict several NWES carbon pools (e.g., detritus, zooplankton, heterotrophic bacteria) in much better agreement with the reanalysis than the free run, while also providing uncertainty information. We further show that the deep ensemble performs similarly well when it is driven directly by the observations assimilated into the reanalysis, with the limitation that carbon pools can then be predicted only at the observed locations and times. We focus on explainability of the results and demonstrate potential use of the deep ensembles for future climate what-if scenarios. We suggest that model-informed machine learning presents a viable alternative to expensive reanalyses and could complement observations, wherever they are missing and/or highly uncertain.

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

Enhancing Visual Feature Attribution via Weighted Integrated Gradients

arXiv:2505.03201v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Integrated Gradients (IG) is a widely used attribution method in explainable AI, particularly in computer vision applications where reliable feature attribution is essential. A key limitation of IG is its sensitivity to the choice of baseline (reference) images. Multi-baseline extensions such as Expected Gradients (EG) assume uniform weighting over baselines, implicitly treating all baseline images as equally informative. In high-dimensional vision models, this assumption often leads to noisy or unstable explanations. This paper proposes Weighted Integrated Gradients (WG), a principled approach that evaluates and weights baselines to enhance attribution reliability. WG introduces an unsupervised criterion for baseline suitability, enabling adaptive selection and weighting of baselines on a per-input basis. The method preserves the core axiomatic properties of IG in a generalized weighted-baseline form. Under an expected, proxy-based fitness–relevance monotonicity assumption, WG provides a probabilistic justification for assigning larger weights to more informative baselines. Experiments on commonly used image datasets and models show that WG improves over EG under our protocol, with up to 36% gains across evaluated convolutional and Transformer architectures. These gains come with additional fitness-evaluation cost, so WG should be viewed as an attribution-fidelity trade-off rather than a faster alternative to EG. By moving beyond the assumption that all baselines contribute equally, Weighted Integrated Gradients offers a clearer and more reliable approach to explaining computer-vision models, improving both understanding and practical usability in explainable AI.

10.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

Nickel-Driven Dynamics of Urease in Sporosarcina pasteurii: Integrated Computational and Experimental Insights

Urease is a nickel-dependent enzyme that plays an important role in urea hydrolysis and in a process named as microbial-induced calcium carbonate precipitation (MICP), which is widely used in sustainable environmental biotechnology. Despite its ecological importance, urease powers Biogrout (biocementation), a promising green technology for soil stabilization and infrastructure repair. Yet, the relationship between nickel availability, enzyme activation, and bacterial fitness remains poorly understood. In this study, we reveal a striking dual effect of nickel on Sporosarcina pasteurii: while high Ni2+ concentrations strongly inhibit growth (IC50 {approx} 637.7 {micro}M), they simultaneously boost specific urease activity up to six-fold. This uncoupling between biomass and enzymatic efficiency highlights a previously overlooked adaptive strategy under metal stress. Using structural bioinformatics and molecular docking, we show that Ure1–the catalytic subunit–exhibits the strongest nickel affinity (-4.3 kcal{middle dot}mol-1), supported by highly conserved active-site residues, whereas accessory proteins UreE and UreG display moderate and weak binding, consistent with their roles in metal delivery and GTP-dependent maturation. In addition, microscopic observations confirmed that calcium carbonate precipitation was most pronounced at intermediate nickel concentrations (approximately 400-1000 {micro}M), whereas higher concentrations ([≥]1000-1300 {micro}M) led to reduced mineral formation due to loss viable cells. Taken together, these results indicates that nickel availability controls both urease activation and bacterial fitness, and that an optimal balance is required to maximize biomenerilization efficiency in environmental applications, particularly in biocementation technology.

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

DarkVGGT: Seeing Through Darkness Using Thermal Geometry without Daylight Tax

Recent feed-forward 3D reconstruction methods have demonstrated strong performance and flexibility in efficient end-to-end scene geometry estimation from image streams. However, their reliance on visible-light appearance makes them vulnerable in dark and low-visibility environments, where RGB cues are severely degraded and geometric evidence becomes ambiguous. To address this challenge, we propose DarkVGGT, an RGB-T feed-forward geometry framework that uses physics-aware thermal modeling for robust 3D estimation in low-light scenes. DarkVGGT introduces two complementary modules. First, physics-inspired thermal factorization extracts emissive-dominant, geometry-consistent thermal cues while isolating sparse reflective residuals that may introduce geometric ambiguity. Second, geometry-shared thermal routing isolates modality-invariant geometric structures from thermal-specific patterns, selectively injecting reliability-aware structural guidance into the RGB stream. Together, these components enable accurate thermal-informed geometry estimation under degraded RGB conditions while largely preserving performance in well-lit environments. Experiments on low-visibility RGB-T benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements in both depth and camera pose estimation over existing feed-forward geometry baselines.

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

Why Tree-Style Branching Matters for Thought Advantage Estimation in GRPO

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) trains Chain-of-Thought reasoning with verifiable rewards, but estimating thought-level advantages without value functions often suffers from high variance. Although tree-style branching is used in practice to reduce variance, it lacks a theoretical explanation of why it works and whether it is important or potentially necessary. We study thought-level advantage estimation in GRPO from a variance perspective under a minimal tree-style setting where multiple continuations are sampled for each thought. Using the multivariate delta method, we reveal a sampling-dimension asymmetry. Increasing sampled thoughts ($K$) leaves a strictly positive estimation-variance floor, whereas increasing continuations per thought ($M$) drives the leading-order estimation variance to zero at rate $1/M$. This implies that, within the fixed-temperature GRPO-style estimator without value models studied here, accurate thought-level advantage estimation cannot be achieved by scaling thought sampling alone, making continuation-level branching a principled and potentially necessary mechanism rather than a heuristic. Experiments further provide empirical evidence for its effectiveness and potential necessity, demonstrating improved optimization stability, training efficiency, and final performance not only in math but also across vision domains and under different model architectures and sizes.

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

Tyler: Typed Latent Reasoning for Language Models – When to Think, What to Compute, and How Much to Allocate

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting improves reasoning in large language models (LLMs) by externalizing intermediate computation as discrete text tokens, but this textual interface also introduces redundancy and inference overhead. Latent reasoning offers a promising alternative by carrying part of the computation in continuous representations. However, existing methods typically predefine when latent computation is invoked and how it is allocated during decoding, leaving a key problem unresolved: when to invoke latent computation, what type of computation to perform, and how much budget to allocate. We propose Typed Latent Reasoning (Tyler), a typed and budget-aware framework for latent reasoning during autoregressive decoding. Tyler learns a policy that, at each decoding step, chooses between emitting a text token and switching to a latent computation module specialized for a particular reasoning function. Once invoked, an operator maps the current reasoning state into latent tokens that support global planning, local state updates, or reusable procedural abstraction. Across extensive experiments on three backbone LLMs, Tyler improves accuracy by up to 14.49 points over CoT and by up to 4.30 points over the strongest competing baseline. It further generalizes across diverse reasoning domains and achieves the best final-stage performance with the lowest forgetting.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

The Scaffold Effect: How Prompt Framing Drives Apparent Multimodal Gains in Clinical VLM Evaluation

arXiv:2603.28387v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Trustworthy clinical AI requires that performance gains reflect genuine evidence integration rather than surface-level artifacts. We evaluate 12 open-weight vision-language models (VLMs) on binary classification across two clinical neuroimaging cohorts, \textsc{FOR2107} (affective disorders) and \textsc{OASIS-3} (cognitive decline). Both datasets come with structural MRI data that carries no reliable individual-level diagnostic signal. Under these conditions, smaller VLMs exhibit gains of up to 58\% F1 upon introduction of neuroimaging context, with distilled models becoming competitive with counterparts an order of magnitude larger. A contrastive confidence analysis reveals that merely mentioning MRI availability in the task prompt accounts for 70-80\% of this shift, independent of whether imaging data is present, a domain-specific instance of modality collapse we term the scaffold effect. Expert evaluation reveals fabrication of neuroimaging-grounded justifications across all conditions, and preference alignment, while eliminating MRI-referencing behavior, collapses both conditions toward random baseline. Our findings demonstrate that surface evaluations are inadequate indicators of multimodal reasoning, with direct implications for the deployment of VLMs in clinical settings.

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

Cross-Modal Benchmarking for Robotic Perception in Natural Environments

Natural environments present a complex challenge to robotics perception systems. Current models, particularly vision foundation models, are largely trained on structured, urban environments leading to weaknesses in their perception for field robotics tasks. We showcase the limitations of current models using our recently released WildCross benchmark, a new cross-modal benchmark for place recognition and metric depth estimation in large-scale natural environments. WildCross comprises over 476K sequential RGB frames with semi-dense depth and surface normal annotations, each aligned with accurate 6DoF pose and synchronized dense lidar submaps. In this work, we provide an expanded analysis of the benchmark results from the recent WildCross benchmark, with particular emphasis on expanded metric depth estimation experiments. Access to the code repository and dataset for this work can be found at https://csiro-robotics.github.io/WildCross.

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

Multi-Modal Attention for Automated Disaster Damage Assessment Using Remote Sensing Imagery and Deep Learning

Timely and accurate disaster damage assessment is crucial for effective emergency response, resource allocation, and recovery. Traditional methods, which often rely on manual inspections or sparse data, are typically slow and error-prone. This paper introduces a novel framework leveraging remote sensing imagery and deep learning to automate building damage classification. Using pre- and post-disaster satellite imagery, our model categorizes buildings into four damage levels: no damage, minor damage, major damage, and destroyed. The core innovation is a multi-modal attention mechanism that fuses bi-temporal features to explicitly detect and assess structural changes. We employ a lightweight ConvNeXT-Tiny backbone to ensure efficient processing without compromising performance. Key contributions include: (1) a cross-attention module for multi-modal data fusion, (2) an optimized preprocessing pipeline for large-scale datasets, and (3) robust data augmentation techniques. Experiments on a large-scale disaster dataset demonstrate an overall classification accuracy of 94.90%. The model effectively discriminates between damage categories and remains resilient to incomplete data. This system significantly improves assessment speed and accuracy, aiding emergency responders in prioritizing interventions. This work advances automated disaster damage detection by integrating multi-temporal imagery with deep learning, offering a scalable solution for real-time response.

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

Multiagent Protocols with Aggregated Confidence Signals

arXiv:2606.13591v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Confidence is used for reliability, oversight, and a range of downstream decision tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP), yet no existing method produces or evaluates a confidence for the output of a multiagent system. Prior work uses confidence within multiagent debate (MAD) to weight messages, trigger debate, or calibrate individual agents, but it never aggregates these into a single confidence for the system itself. We introduce three protocols that produce a final answer along with a single aggregated confidence by first transforming raw confidence signals to make them comparable across models, then combining them via soft voting or a probability fusion we call Bayesian fusion. This aggregated confidence is substantially more discriminative (AUARC) than that of the best single agent or the standard debate baselines, while correctness (F1-score) stays stable and recovers the losses MAD incurs on more ambiguous tasks. Analyzing two estimators, sequence probability and self-report, alongside parametric and non-parametric calibrators, we find that calibration improves F1 for both estimators while AUARC is less reliant on it. We evaluate six homogeneous and heterogeneous debating pairs per benchmark, across five benchmarks and four task types, spanning a range of model capabilities and sizes.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Heterogeneity of Treatment Effect of Aspirin and Clinically Significant Bleeding in Older Adults

Aim: The global population of older adults is growing, and older age is linked to higher bleeding risk. Although guidelines discourage aspirin for primary prevention in healthy older adults due to bleeding harms outweighing benefits, many continue taking it without a clear indication. It remains unclear whether all older adults face uniform aspirin-related bleeding risk or if certain subgroups are more vulnerable. Methods: We analyzed data from 19,114 ASPREE trial participants to develop machine learning models using 116 baseline variables. Random forest (RF) and random survival forest (RSF) models predicted 5-year bleeding risk, and participants were stratified into low, intermediate, and high-risk groups based on the 20th and 80th percentiles of predicted risk. We assessed heterogeneity of treatment effect (HTE) by testing treatment-by-risk group interactions on the relative scale using Fine-Gray models, and on the absolute scale using observed 5-year cumulative incidence rates. Results: Over a median follow-up of 4.7 years, 626 major bleeding events occurred. The RF model had moderate discrimination (AUC = 0.65, 95% CI: 0.63-0.67) and good calibration (Brier = 0.032, 95% CI: 0.029-0.034). Statistically significant HTE was observed on the relative scale, with the greatest relative increase in bleeding risk seen in the low-risk group (subdistribution hazard ratio = 2.26, 95% CI: 1.27-4.01). On the absolute scale, low-risk participants experienced higher bleeding with aspirin (absolute risk difference (ARD) = 1.17%, 95% CI: 0.37-1.95), but heterogeneity in ARDs was not statistically significant (Cochran's Q p > 0.45). Similar findings were observed when using the RSF model. Conclusion: Participants at lowest baseline bleeding risk experienced the greatest relative increase in bleeding risk with aspirin therapy. We found statistically significant heterogeneity in treatment effects on the relative but not absolute scale. These findings support an individualized, risk-based approach to aspirin therapy decision-making in older adults.

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

Contextual Bandits for Maximizing Stimulated Word-of-Mouth Rewards

arXiv:2606.15146v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Stimulated word-of-mouth is a strategy that promotes information sharing through prompts or incentives. Optimizing stimulated word-of-mouth through social networks requires identifying and targeting connected users who are most susceptible to spillover, a phenomenon where the influence of recommendations extends beyond the immediate audience to impact their connected users. The probability of spillover varies across individuals, and their connections, leading to heterogeneity. Understanding and accurately estimating the spillover probabilities among users in social networks is crucial for improving the effectiveness of stimulated word-of-mouth. To address this, we present a novel contextual multi-armed bandit framework that learns individual spillover probabilities and ranks connected users to maximize rewards from stimulated word-of-mouth. Experiments on real-world network datasets demonstrate that accounting for spillover heterogeneity enhances the targeting precision of top-$k$ connected users, boosting rewards and outperforming baseline methods that do not learn individual spillover effects.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Constrained Variable Projection for Structured Problems

arXiv:2606.23939v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Variable projection is a classical technique for separable nonlinear least-squares problems, in which variables that enter linearly are eliminated exactly, yielding a reduced nonlinear problem. By expressing this framework as a particular instance of a broader class of bilevel optimization problems, we develop a constrained variable-projection framework for data-science models, where the remaining variables are subject to convex constraints and the eliminated variables arise from a lower-level least-squares problem. In particular, by interpreting variable projection as a collapsed bilevel optimization problem, we derive exact reduced-gradient formulas compatible with automatic differentiation and propose a conditional-gradient algorithm for the resulting constrained reduced problem. We establish convergence guarantees under standard smoothness and compactness assumptions, and discuss extensions to structured lower-level variables. Numerical experiments on sparse autoencoding, dictionary learning, blind deconvolution, and few-shot learning suggest that the method can improve wall-clock efficiency and data efficiency relative to natural joint-optimization baselines.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Fusion Learning from Dynamic Functional Connectivity: Combining the Amplitude and Phase of fMRI Signals to Identify Brain Disorders

arXiv:2603.24603v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Dynamic functional connectivity (dFC) derived from resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has been extensively utilized in brain science research. The sliding window correlation (SWC) method is a widely used approach for constructing dFC by computing correlation coefficients between amplitude time series of signals from pairs of brain regions. In this study, we propose an integrated approach that incorporates both amplitude and phase information of fMRI signals to improve the detection of brain disorders. Specifically, we introduce a multi-scale fusion learning framework, namely MSFL, which leverages two complementary dFC features derived from SWC and phase synchronization (PS). Here, SWC captures amplitude correlations, while PS measures phase coherence within dFC. We evaluated the efficacy of MSFL in classifying autism spectrum disorder and major depressive disorder using two publicly available datasets: ABIDE I and REST-meta-MDD, respectively. The results indicate that MSFL significantly outperforms existing comparative models. Moreover, we performed model explanation analysis using the SHAP framework, which showed that both types of dFC features from SWC and PS contribute to detecting brain disorders.

22.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-15

Environmental “knees” and “wiggles” as strong stabilizers of species’ range limits set by interspecific competition

by Farshad Shirani, Benjamin G. Freeman Whether interspecific competition is a major contributing factor to setting species’ range limits has been debated for a long time. Theoretical studies have proposed that the interactions between interspecific competition and disruptive gene flow along an environmental gradient can halt range expansion of ecologically similar species where they meet. However, the stability of such range limits has not been well addressed. We use a deterministic mathematical model of adaptive range evolution over a continuous habitat to show that the range limits set by interspecific competition are unlikely to be evolutionarily stable if the environmental optima for fitness-related traits vary (almost) linearly in space. That is, in a linear environment without a dispersal barrier or a third (or more) species, the range borders formed between two competing species constantly move towards the weaker species. We demonstrate that environmental nonlinearities such as “knees” and “wiggles”—wherein an isolated sharp change or a step-like change occurs in the steepness of a trait optimum—can strongly stabilize competitively formed range limits. The stabilization mechanism relies on the contrast that such nonlinearities create in the level of disruptive gene flow to the peripheral population of each species, and succeeds when an additional process, such as Allee effects, prevents the establishment of an infinitesimal population in the presence of an abundant competitor. We show that the stability of the range limits at these nonlinearities is robust against moderate environmental disturbances. Whether strong disturbances such as rapid high-amplitude climate changes can destabilize such range limits depends on how the competitive dominance of the species changes across the nonlinearity. Therefore, our findings underscore the importance of assessing species’ competitive ability when predicting responses to climate change, and identify geographic regions where established range limits are likely to persist as well as regions where shifting limits may eventually stabilize.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Model selection with proper scoring rules on data sets of time series

arXiv:2606.24715v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We consider the problem of model selection between probabilistic models on data sets of time series. Chosen a proper scoring rule, we denote by the term score the average value of the scoring rule on the test of an individual time series. For model selection, we need aggregating the values of the scores across multiple time series. Three summary statistics are commonly used for model selection: mean score, median score, and mean rank. Results in previous papers show that these statistics can yield conflicting decisions; we show how the conflicting conclusions are due to the skewness of the distribution of scores. We also show that as the test set of each time series of the data set increases, the different model selection criteria progressively converge to the same conclusion. However, for short tests sets, only the mean score identifies the true model as the best. We illustrate these phenomena with an analysis on intermittent time series, including the data set of the M5 competition, where we underline the importance of having a large test set. In such experiments, we further notice that model selection based on mean ranks remains unchanged using different scaling factors.

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

Shape of Thought: Progressive Object Assembly via Visual Chain-of-Thought

Multimodal models for text-to-image generation have achieved strong visual fidelity, yet they remain brittle under compositional structural constraints, notably generative numeracy, attribute binding, and part-level relations. To address these challenges, we propose Shape-of-Thought (SoT), a visual CoT framework for process-supervised progressive shape assembly in the rendered 2D domain, without external engines at inference time. SoT trains a unified multimodal autoregressive model to generate interleaved textual plans and rendered intermediate states, helping the model capture shape-assembly logic without producing explicit geometric representations. Unlike text-only CoT, each decision is grounded in a rendered state, making counts, attachments, topology, and intermediate part-addition errors inspectable across the trajectory. To support this paradigm, we introduce SoT-26K, a large-scale dataset of grounded assembly traces derived from part-based CAD hierarchies, and T2S-CompBench, a benchmark for evaluating structural integrity and trace faithfulness. Fine-tuning on SoT-26K achieves 88.4% on component numeracy and 84.8% on structural topology, outperforming direct generation by +24.2 points on component numeracy and +19.3 points on structural topology. SoT establishes a transparent testbed for rendered-domain structure-aware generation. The code is available at https://github.com/yuhuo03/Shape-of-Thought.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

A Multi-Modal Framework with Cross-Subject Pseudo-Labeling and Semantic Alignment for Micro-Gesture Recognition

Micro-gestures (MGs) are spontaneous and subtle body movements that frequently convey hidden human emotions. Recognizing MGs in untrimmed videos remains highly challenging due to their extremely low signal-to-noise ratio, severe long-tailed class distribution, and the inherent domain shift encountered in cross-subject evaluation scenarios. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive multi-modal framework for Track 1 of the 4th MiGA-IJCAI Challenge. To capture fine-grained representations, we design a saliency-guided multi-modal extraction pipeline integrating 68-keypoint skeleton joint coordinates, 3D heatmap volumes, and high-resolution RGB visual features. We introduce a gentle square-root smoothed weighting mechanism paired with an Orthogonal Semantic Embedding Loss to protect tail classes without compromising overall recognition capabilities. More importantly, to bridge the cross-subject generalization gap, we propose a Cross-Modal Pseudo-Labeling (CMPL) strategy for unsupervised domain adaptation, which significantly boosts single-modal robustness. A temperature-scaled soft-voting mechanism is finally utilized to alleviate overconfidence during late fusion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves a competitive F1-score of 68.13\%, securing the 4th place.