中 EN
Sign In Register

Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

AcademicHub aggregates real-time literature from top journals and preprint platforms. Build your personal research radar and let large language models compile cross-disciplinary analysis briefings automatically.

Sign In Register
01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Efficient Magic State Factory Via Transversal Non-Clifford Gate

Authors:
I-Chi Chen↗Hrushikesh Pramod Patil↗Huiyang Zhou↗Andrew Sornborger↗

arXiv:2606.16199v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Magic-state preparation is a central component of fault-tolerant quantum computing. Recent theoretical and experimental successes in code-switch-based magic-state preparation have underscored the promise of these methods for quantum error correction. Similarly, magic-state cultivation has likewise been demonstrated in both numerical and experimental settings. However, a thorough comparison between magic-state cultivation and code-switch-based magic-state factories is still missing. In this work, we carry out end-to-end simulations of magic-state preparation using code switching and compare its resource requirements and performance against magic-state cultivation. As part of this analysis, we develop a lattice-surgery protocol for transfer between the doubled color code and the rotated surface code. We extend the complete code-switching protocol to the $d=5$ doubled color code and perform the corresponding end-to-end simulations. Finally, we propose two fault-tolerant magic-state preparation protocols that combine phase-kickback checks with a transversal non-Clifford gate.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

How Far Can Chord-Symbol Time-Series Adaptation Carry Genre Identity? Capabilities and Boundaries in Multi-Genre Chord-Symbol Modeling

Authors:
Jinju Lee↗

arXiv:2606.07334v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This report treats chord-symbol sequences as an interpretable, controllable time series for genre-local harmonic modeling. The frozen Music Transformer base - released as a pop-jazz fine-tune endpoint but verified in this revision weight-identical to the pop-only Phase-0 baseline, so all gains are measured over a pure-pop prior (see Changes in v2) - is extended to eleven target genres: blues, bossa nova, Bach chorales, country, electronic, folk, funk, gospel, hip-hop, R&B/soul, and rock. The main evaluation compares LoRA, IA3, BitFit, prefix tuning, and full fine-tuning over 11 genres and 3 seeds, a complete 165-cell grid. All five methods improve over the frozen base on held-out chord prediction (macro gains +2.89 to +3.61 percentage points); LoRA and IA3 score highest, but pairwise Wilcoxon tests with Holm and Benjamini-Hochberg correction do not support a decisive winner. A matched-data-size control sharpens this: at a common corpus size IA3 stays on top while LoRA drops to last, so the small method gaps are partly data-driven rather than representational. A control-token baseline is also strong, and wrong-genre adapters often beat the frozen base, suggesting the adaptation effect is largely lightweight conditioning over a reusable harmonic base rather than genre-specific adapter memory. Further diagnostics (rank sweeps, wrong-genre rotation, a base-checkpoint ablation that v2 reinterprets as a same-weights control, chord-only genre classification, output-distribution statistics, real-song evaluation, duplicate analysis) support a bounded conclusion: chord-symbol adaptation reliably improves genre-local harmonic prediction, but chord symbols alone do not carry complete genre identity. Perceived genre authenticity and musical quality are left to controlled listener evaluation.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
03.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-08

TRACEY: an updated resource for SNARE protein domain annotation with improved HMMs and expanded sequence coverage

Authors:
Pulido-Quetglas↗Fasshauer↗

Motivation: SNARE proteins catalyse membrane fusion across the eukaryotic endomembrane system, from synaptic vesicle exocytosis to intracellular trafficking, endosomal and vacuolar transport, and autophagy, and their accurate domain annotation depends on the quality of profile models and the sequence diversity behind them. The original SNARE domain classification predates the recent expansion of eukaryotic sequence data, leaving its HMM profiles and subgroup coverage unable to resolve divergent and lineage-specific paralogs. Results: We present an updated release of TRACEY built on a resynchronized, non-redundant collection of 18,915 curated SNARE proteins spanning 1,188 species, together with a consolidated set of 83 HMM profiles, including 43 models for newly defined subgroups, reconstructed through an iterative, mixture-model-driven procedure. In direct comparison with the legacy models, at least ~75% of sequences in every overlapping group scored better with the new HMMs, indicating systematic gains in domain detection. A redesigned web interface adds multiparameter querying, FASTA download, and direct scanning of user-submitted sequences against the curated profiles. Availability and implementation: TRACEY is freely available at https://tracey.unil.ch.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

RAMEN: Resolution-Adjustable Multimodal Encoder for Earth Observation

Authors:
Nicolas Houdr\'e↗Diego Marcos↗Hugo Riffaud de Turckheim↗Dino Ienco↗Laurent Wendling↗Camille Kurtz↗Sylvain Lobry↗

Earth observation (EO) data spans a wide range of spatial, spectral, and temporal resolutions, from high-resolution optical imagery to low resolution multispectral products or radar time series. While recent foundation models have improved multimodal integration for learning meaningful representations, they often expect fixed input resolutions or are based on sensor-specific encoders limiting generalization across heterogeneous EO modalities. To overcome these limitations we introduce RAMEN, a resolution-adjustable multimodal encoder that learns a shared visual representation across EO data in a fully sensor-agnostic manner. RAMEN treats the modality and spatial and temporal resolutions as key input data features, enabling coherent analysis across modalities within a unified latent space. Its main methodological contribution is to define spatial resolution as a controllable output parameter, giving users direct control over the desired level of detail at inference and allowing explicit trade-offs between spatial precision and computational cost. We train a single, unified transformer encoder reconstructing masked multimodal EO data drawn from diverse sources, ensuring generalization across sensors and resolutions. Once pretrained, RAMEN transfers effectively to both known and unseen sensor configurations and outperforms larger state-of-the-art models on the community-standard PANGAEA benchmark, containing various multi-sensor and multi-resolution downstream tasks. Our code and pretrained model are available at https://github.com/nicolashoudre/RAMEN.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Development and validation of a risk prediction algorithm to estimate all-cause mortality among community-dwelling Canadians: the Mortality Population Risk Tool (MPoRT)

Authors:
Manuel↗Bader Eddeen↗Fines↗Bennett↗Fisher↗Jessri↗Perez↗Tuna↗Sanmartin↗Sequeira↗Li↗Rosella↗…

BACKGROUND: The risk of all-cause mortality can inform decision-making for chronic disease prevention. We developed a predictive algorithm to estimate the 5-year risk of death among community-dwelling adults. METHODS: We derived and validated the Mortality Population Risk Tool (MPoRT) using data from population health surveys in Canada (the Canadian Community Health Survey) and the United States (the National Health Interview Survey), survey years 2001 to 2011, linked to vital statistics. The outcome was death within five years of the survey response. The algorithm was developed using data from Ontario respondents using a Cox proportional hazards model, then modified and re-estimated to allow cross-national assessment in Canada and the United States. Twenty-three prespecified predictors were assessed: seven sociodemographic, six behavioural, and ten general health and chronic disease. RESULTS: 527,369 respondents aged 20 to 105 years were included in the Canadian and United States development and validation cohorts, with 43,758 deaths during 3.68 million person-years follow-up. The final sex-specific MPoRT algorithms each contained 21 variables, showing strong discrimination (C-statistic: females 0.874 [0.871–0.877]; males 0.867 [0.865–0.871]) and good calibration overall and in 246 of 247 subgroups. Discrimination was modestly attenuated (0.01 decrease in C-statistic) in cross-national validation between Canada and the United States, with good calibration across all 71 subgroups. INTERPRETATION: MPoRT accurately discriminated all-cause mortality using only self-reported data, enabling broad application without clinical measures. While validation outside North America is needed to confirm broader applicability, MPoRT is designed for straightforward recalibration using routinely available national mortality data. This supports targeted chronic disease prevention strategies at both the population and individual levels, though the limitations inherent to self-reported predictors should be considered when interpreting predictions.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
06.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Relighting as a Probe of Visual Priors via Augmented Latent Intrinsics

Authors:
Xiaoyan Xing↗Xiao Zhang↗Sezer Karaoglu↗Theo Gevers↗Anand Bhattad↗

Image-to-image relighting requires representations that separate illumination from scene properties while preserving dense geometry, material, and photometric cues. We use this task as a probe of visual priors: unlike recognition tasks that reward invariance, relighting tests whether visual features retain the information needed for light transfer. Through a controlled generative relighting framework, we find that strong semantic encoders can degrade relighting quality, exposing a semantic–photometric trade-off between abstraction and physical fidelity. We introduce Augmented Latent Intrinsics (ALI), which balances this trade-off by fusing dense, pixel-aligned visual features into a latent-intrinsic relighting model and refining it with self-supervision on unlabeled real image pairs. ALI improves relighting quality, especially on glossy, metallic, and transparent materials, and demonstrates that generative relighting is an effective tool for quantifying what visual encoders encode about the physical world.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Revisiting LLM Adaptation for 3D CT Report Generation: A Study of Scaling and Diagnostic Priors

Authors:
Vanshali Sharma↗Andrea M. Bejar↗Halil Ertugrul Aktas↗Quoc-Huy Trinh↗Debesh Jha↗Gorkem Durak↗Ulas Bagci↗

Recent advances in multimodal learning, including large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs), have demonstrated strong adaptability to natural images. However, extending their use to the medical domain, particularly for volumetric (3D) images, is challenging due to high computational complexity, volumetric dependencies and the semantic gap between visual features and clinical terminology. Naively fine-tuning LLMs on limited medical data often leads to overfitting and clinical hallucination, where linguistic fluency is prioritized over clinical factuality. In this study, we investigate parameter-efficient adaptation strategies for volumetric CT report generation and introduce RAD3D-Prefix, a lightweight diagnostic-prior conditioning framework that minimizes the need for extensive parameter training. This module integrates image embeddings with multi-label diagnostic classification logits, preserving critical clinical details while bridging the semantic gap. By keeping the LLM frozen, our method requires minimal trainable parameters and mitigates the risk of overfitting on small, domain-specific datasets. Through a systematic study spanning LLMs from 96.1M to 1.6B parameters, we find that fine-tuning is most beneficial for smaller LLMs, whereas freezing larger (~1B+ LLMs and training only lightweight projection layers provides a superior trade-off between performance, generalization, and computational efficiency. Across multiple automatic metrics and a clinical reader study, RAD3D-Prefix outperforms comparable parameter-efficient baselines and demonstrates strong out-of-domain generalization while using substantially fewer trainable parameters than fully fine-tuned alternatives.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Deja Vu at Scale: Paraphrase-Robust Detection of Duplicate Gherkin Steps in Behaviour-Driven Software Testing with Sentence-Transformer Embeddings and a 1.1M-Step Open Benchmark

Authors:
Ali Hassaan Mughal↗Noor Fatima↗Muhammad Bilal↗

Context. Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) suites in Gherkin accumulate step-text duplication with documented maintenance cost. Prior detectors either require runnable tests or are single-organisation, leaving a gap: a static, paraphrase-robust, step-level detector and a public benchmark to calibrate it. Objective. We release (i) the largest cross-organisational BDD step corpus to date, (ii) a labelled pair-level calibration benchmark, and (iii) a four-strategy detector with a consolidation-savings model linking clusters to ISO/IEC 25010 maintainability sub-characteristics. Method. The corpus contains 347 public GitHub repositories, 23,667 .feature files, and 1,113,616 Gherkin steps, SPDX-tagged. The detector layers exact hashing, normalised Levenshtein, sentence-transformer cosine, and a Levenshtein-banded hybrid. Calibration uses 1,020 manually labelled step pairs under a released rubric (60-pair overlap, Fleiss kappa = 0.84). We report precision, recall, and F1 with bootstrap 95% CIs under the primary rubric and a score-free relabelling, and benchmark against SourcererCC-style and NiCad-style lexical baselines. Results. Step-weighted exact-duplicate rate is 80.2%; median-repository rate is 58.6% (Spearman rho = 0.51). The top hybrid cluster has 20,737 occurrences across 2,245 files. Near-exact reaches F1 = 0.822 on score-free labels; semantic F1 = 0.906 under the primary rubric reflects a disclosed stratification artefact. Lexical baselines reach F1 = 0.761 and 0.799. The savings model estimates 893,357 corpus-wide eliminable step occurrences; on the median repository 62.5% of step lines are eliminable.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

NightFeats @ MMU-RAGent NeurIPS 2025: A Context-Optimized Multi-Agent RAG System for the Text-to-Text Track

Authors:
Quentin Fever↗Naziha Aslam↗

We present NightFeats, a structured multi-agent retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system submitted to the MMU-RAGent competition at NeurIPS 2025, where it was awarded Best Dynamic Evaluation in the text-to-text track. Rather than targeting benchmark maximization, this work proposes a principled pipeline that decomposes knowledge synthesis into three coordinated phases: retrieval, curation, and composition, each governed by explicit intermediate representations and handoff contracts. Inspired by Agentic Context Engineering (ACE), the system introduces temporal-semantic reranking, bounded contradiction reconciliation, and citation-preserving composition as core architectural primitives. Competition results show that NightFeats surpasses proprietary baselines including Claude-SonnetV2 and Nova-Pro on LLM-as-a-Judge and Human Likert evaluations, confirming that architectural transparency and verifiable evidence grounding are better aligned with human preferences than systems optimizing narrowly for automatic similarity metrics.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

A Bifurcation Theory Framework for Gradient Descent on the Edge of Stability

Authors:
Eric Gan↗

arXiv:2606.15551v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Edge of Stability (EoS) phenomenon, where gradient descent operates with sharpness exceeding the classical convergence threshold yet the loss decreases over long timescales, is ubiquitous in modern deep learning but remains poorly understood in realistic settings. Prior rigorous analyses have been largely confined to scalar or low-dimensional losses with specific structural forms. In this work, we develop a bifurcation theory framework for gradient descent on the edge of stability that applies directly to overparameterized neural networks. By decomposing the training dynamics into components normal and tangent to the manifold of minimizers, we show that stable EoS training arises from a flip bifurcation in the normal direction, governed by the sign of the first Lyapunov coefficient, while the tangent dynamics drift toward regions of decreasing sharpness. Under mild spectral and geometric assumptions on the loss landscape, we prove convergence to the minimizing manifold when training at the EoS threshold. As a corollary, we recover and unify prior results: we show that the product-stability condition of Gan (2026) is an instance of our framework.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Towards Federated Long-Tailed Graph Learning: An Energy-Guided Dual Decoupling Approach

Authors:
Lianshuai Guo↗Zhongzheng Yuan↗Xunkai Li↗Meixia Qu↗Wenyu Wang↗

arXiv:2606.24237v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated Graph Learning facilitates collaborative graph modeling across distributed clients while preserving data privacy. However, real-world data categories frequently exhibit long-tailed distributions. Such statistical scarcity severely degrades performance in two ways: it biases the global model toward majority classes, and it structurally isolates minority nodes by submerging them in heterophilic, head-dominated neighborhoods. While existing methods attempt topology-agnostic statistical compensations, they often fail under data scarcity. Instead of recovering tail nodes, they overfit the structural noise from adjacent dominant classes, leading to representation degradation. To address these limitations, we propose FedEPD, a framework built on a dual decoupling paradigm that separates topological purification from semantic recalibration. Specifically, FedEPD utilizes distribution-aware Dirichlet energy pruning to filter spatial heterophilic edges. It then overcomes Non-IID distribution shifts by extracting robust global prototypes from topologically central nodes, which are incorporated into local representations via a spatial low-pass prototype injection. Furthermore, a two stage alternating optimization strategy strictly protects majority decision boundaries while improving minority accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FedEPD achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse long-tailed benchmarks, yielding absolute improvements of up to 4.97% in Accuracy and 5.48% in Macro-F1.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

OpenTie: Open-vocabulary Sequential Rebar Tying System

Authors:
Sai Fan↗Mingze Liu↗Haozhen Li↗Haobo Liang↗Yixing Yuan↗Yanke Wang↗

Robotic practices on the construction site emerge as an attention-attracting manner owing to their capability of tackling complex challenges, especially in the rebar-involved scenarios. Most of existing products and research are mainly focused on the collection of large amounts of data with model training demands. To fulfill this gap, we propose OpenTie, a 3D training-free rebar tying framework utilizing a RGB-to-point-cloud generation and an open-vocabulary rebar detection on the real-world test. We implement the OpenTie via a robotic arm with a binocular camera and guarantee a high accuracy by applying the prompt-based object detection method on the image filtered by our proposed post-processing procedure for the image-to-point-cloud generation framework. Our pipeline requires no training efforts and outperforms the training-based object detection, i.e., YOLO-based method, with the verification on the real-world sequential rebar tying test. The system is flexible for horizontal and vertical rebar tying tasks and holds the potential application to the real construction site with possibility of commercialization.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

On the Stability of Nonlinear Dynamics in GD and SGD: Beyond Quadratic Potentials

Authors:
Rotem Mulayoff↗Sebastian U. Stich↗

arXiv:2602.14789v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The dynamical stability of the iterates during training plays a key role in determining the minima obtained by optimization algorithms. For example, stable solutions of gradient descent (GD) correspond to flat minima, which have been associated with favorable features. While prior work often relies on linearization to determine stability, it remains unclear whether linearized dynamics faithfully capture the full nonlinear behavior. Recent work has shown that GD may stably oscillate near a linearly unstable minimum and still converge once the step size decays, indicating that linear analysis can be misleading. In this work, we explicitly study the effect of nonlinear terms. Specifically, we derive an exact criterion for stable oscillations of GD near minima in the multivariate setting. Our condition depends on high-order derivatives, generalizing existing results. Extending the analysis to stochastic gradient descent (SGD), we show that nonlinear dynamics can diverge in expectation even if a single batch is unstable. This implies that stability can be dictated by a single batch that oscillates unstably, rather than an average effect, as linear analysis suggests. Finally, we prove that if all batches are linearly stable, the nonlinear dynamics of SGD are stable in expectation.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
14.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Probing picometre-scale interlayer deformations via hyperbolic polaritons

Authors:
Shu Zhang↗

The resilience of van der Waals (vdW) materials to large strain fields makes them an ideal platform for tuning electronic, optical and magnetic properties1–4. Although in-plane strain is readily mapped, non-invasive and quantitative characterization of out-of-plane strain remains a formidable challenge, particularly for picometre-scale deformations buried at interfaces. Here we demonstrate a polaritonic optical method that uses the mid-infrared out-of-plane hyperbolic polaritons (oHPs) mode to detect interlayer deformations in prototypical vdW polar insulator–hexagonal boron nitride (hBN). This method uses the softening mechanism of out-of-plane transverse optical (oTO) phonons induced by interlayer strain, enabling highly sensitive detection of picometre-scale deformations. Although these oTO phonon modes are typically spectroscopically ‘dark’, their strain response is activated through the oHPs, achieving an atomic displacement sensitivity of about 10 pm (about 8 × 10−7 times the probing wavelength), enabling ultradeep-subwavelength mechanical interlayer deformation detection. This is experimentally validated in both planar hBN and at the buried interface of quantum dot–hBN nanotube heterostructures. This polariton-based picometrology bridges nanomechanics and photonics, providing a non-destructive lens to visualize hidden stress landscapes with atomic precision. A new polaritonic optical method that uses the mid-infrared out-of-plane hyperbolic polaritons mode is described and experimentally validated to allow the examination of picometre-scale interlayer deformations, providing a bridge between nanomechanics and photonics.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

EcoBin: A Two-Stage Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Contamination-Aware Waste Classification

Authors:
Raghav Senthil Kumar↗

Waste classification models have become highly accurate at sorting waste, often exceeding 95% on benchmark datasets. However, these models fail to account for contamination in recyclable waste. We present EcoBin, a two-stage deep convolutional neural network that classifies household waste by its disposal pathway and that explicitly accounts for contamination. The first stage is a base waste classifier built on an EfficientNetV2-S backbone that assigns each of the thirty waste categories in our dataset to one of four disposal pathways. The second stage is a contamination classifier that inspects any item routed toward recycling and overrides the decision to garbage when contamination is detected. Because no public dataset of contaminated recyclables exists, we synthesize one by segmenting images of clean recyclable objects with a U2-Net model and compositing realistic contamination textures onto their surfaces. The first stage achieves 87.42% test accuracy and a 96.13% pathway-adjusted accuracy. Meanwhile, the contamination stage distinguishes clean from contaminated items with a 0.99 ROC-AUC. On a test set of contaminated recyclables, the complete pipeline routes 24 of 25 items correctly, compared with only 1 of 25 for the base classifier alone. A McNemar's test confirms that the improvement contributed by the contamination stage is statistically significant (p < 0.001).

Read & Discuss → View Source →
16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Possibilistic Predictive Uncertainty for Deep Learning

Authors:
Yao Ni↗Jeremie Houssineau↗Yew-Soon Ong↗Piotr Koniusz↗

Deep neural networks achieve impressive results across diverse applications, yet their overconfidence on unseen inputs necessitates reliable epistemic uncertainty modeling. Existing methods for uncertainty modeling face a fundamental dilemma: Bayesian approaches provide principled estimates but remain computationally prohibitive, while efficient second-order predictors lack rigorous connections between their specific objectives and epistemic uncertainty quantification. To resolve this dilemma, we introduce Dirichlet-approximated possibilistic posterior predictions (DAPPr), a principled framework grounded in possibility theory. We define a possibilistic posterior over parameters, project it to the prediction space via supremum operators, and approximate the projected posterior using learnable Dirichlet possibility functions. This projection-and-approximation strategy yields a simple training objective with closed-form solutions. Despite its simplicity, extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks show that DAPPr achieves competitive or superior uncertainty quantification performance over state-of-the-art second-order predictors while maintaining both principled derivation and computational efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/MaxwellYaoNi/DAPPr.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Principled RL for Flow Matching Emerges from the Chunk-level Policy Optimization

Authors:
Yifu Luo↗Haoyuan Sun↗Xinhao Hu↗Penghui Du↗Keyu Fan↗Bo Li↗Sinan Du↗Xu Wan↗Zhiyu Chen↗Bo Xia↗Yongzhe Chang↗Changqian Yu↗…

Recent Progress in post-training flow matching for text-to-image (T2I) generation with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has demonstrated strong potential. However, it is hindered by a critical limitation: inaccurate advantage attribution. In this work, we argue that aggregating consecutive steps into a coherent 'chunk' and shifting the policy optimization paradigm from GRPO's step level to the chunk level can effectively mitigate the negative impact of this issue. Building on this insight, we propose Group Chunking Policy Optimization (GCPO), the first chunk-level reinforcement learning approach for post-training flow matching. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GCPO achieves superior performance on both standard T2I benchmarks and preference alignment, with up to 43% relative gains over GRPO, highlighting the promise of chunk-level policy optimization. The code is available on https://github.com/xingzhejun/GCPO.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Can Agents Distinguish Visually Hard-to-Separate Diseases in a Zero-Shot Setting? A Pilot Study

Authors:
Zihao Zhao↗Frederik Hauke↗Juliana De Castilhos↗Sven Nebelung↗Daniel Truhn↗

The rapid progress of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has led to increasing interest in agent-based systems. While most prior work in medical imaging concentrates on automating routine clinical workflows, we study an underexplored yet clinically significant setting: distinguishing visually hard-to-separate diseases in a zero-shot setting. We benchmark representative agents on two imaging-only proxy diagnostic tasks, (1) melanoma vs. atypical nevus and (2) pulmonary edema vs. pneumonia, where visual features are highly confounded despite substantial differences in clinical management. We introduce a multi-agent framework based on contrastive adjudication. Experimental results show improved diagnostic performance (an 11-percentage-point gain in accuracy on dermoscopy data) and reduced unsupported claims on qualitative samples, although overall performance remains insufficient for clinical deployment. We acknowledge the inherent uncertainty in human annotations and the absence of clinical context, which further limit the translation to real-world settings. Within this controlled setting, this pilot study provides preliminary insights into zero-shot agent performance in visually confounded scenarios.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

DSB: Dynamic Sliding Block Scheduling for Diffusion LLMs

Authors:
Lizhuo Luo↗Shenggui Li↗Yonggang Wen↗Tianwei Zhang↗

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative for text generation, distinguished by their native support for parallel decoding. In practice, block inference is crucial for avoiding order misalignment in global bidirectional decoding and improving output quality. However, the widely-used fixed, predefined block (naive) schedule is agnostic to semantic difficulty, making it a suboptimal strategy for both quality and efficiency: it can force premature commitments to uncertain positions while delaying easy positions near block boundaries. In this work, we analyze the limitations of naive block scheduling and disclose the importance of dynamically adapting the schedule to semantic difficulty for reliable and efficient inference. Motivated by this, we propose Dynamic Sliding Block (DSB), a training-free block scheduling method that uses a sliding block with a dynamic size to overcome the rigidity of the naive block. To further improve efficiency, we introduce DSB Cache, a training-free KV-cache mechanism tailored to DSB. Extensive experiments across multiple models and benchmarks demonstrate that DSB, together with DSB Cache, consistently improves both generation quality and inference efficiency for dLLMs. Code is released at https://github.com/lizhuo-luo/DSB.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
20.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-23

Multi-Scale Machine Learning for Antibody-Antigen Binding Affinity Prediction Using Deep Mutational Scanning and Structural Features

Authors:
Sivasubramani↗

Predicting how mutations alter antibody-antigen binding affinity is essential for antibody engineering and vaccine design, yet current methods generalize poorly to unseen complexes. We present a multi-scale machine learning framework integrating 93 descriptors across four modalities: physicochemical, structural, ESM-2 protein language model, and solvent-accessible surface area (SASA)/{Delta}{Delta}G_fold features. Under leave-one-complex-out deep mutational scanning (LOCO-DMS) cross-validation on AbAgym (36,541 mutations, 68 experiments, 13 pathogens), gradient boosting achieved MCC = 0.206; a confidence-stratified ensemble reached MCC = 0.374 (83.5% accuracy, 25.5% coverage). No single modality exceeds the majority baseline alone; only multi-scale fusion succeeds. Boltzmann ceiling analysis shows 45.9% of mutations are near-neutral (|{Delta}{Delta}G| < k_BT), bounding theoretical maximum MCC at 0.473; our method achieves 79.1% of this limit. Five deep learning architectures benchmarked under LOCO-DMS showed self-attention matching gradient boosting (MCC = 0.200). Cross-pathogen transfer failed systematically (mean 46.7%), confirming universal binding predictors remain an open challenge.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Generalized Kullback-Leibler Divergence Loss

Authors:
Jiequan Cui↗Beier Zhu↗Qingshan Xu↗Zhuotao Tian↗Xiaojuan Qi↗Bei Yu↗Hanwang Zhang↗Richang Hong↗

In this paper, we delve deeper into the Kullback-Leibler (KL) Divergence loss and mathematically prove that it is equivalent to the Decoupled Kullback-Leibler (DKL) Divergence loss that consists of (1) a weighted Mean Square Error (wMSE) loss and (2) a Cross-Entropy loss incorporating soft labels. Thanks to the decoupled structure of DKL loss, we have identified two areas for improvement. Firstly, we address the limitation of KL loss in scenarios like knowledge distillation by breaking its asymmetric optimization property along with a smoother weight function. This modification effectively alleviates convergence challenges in optimization, particularly for classes with high predicted scores in soft labels. Secondly, we introduce class-wise global information into KL/DKL to reduce bias arising from individual samples. With these two enhancements, we derive the Generalized Kullback-Leibler (GKL) Divergence loss and evaluate its effectiveness by conducting experiments on CIFAR-10/100, ImageNet, and vision-language datasets, focusing on adversarial training, and knowledge distillation tasks. Specifically, we achieve new state-of-the-art adversarial robustness on the public leaderboard – RobustBench and competitive knowledge distillation performance across CIFAR/ImageNet models and CLIP models, demonstrating the substantial practical merits. Our code is available at https://github.com/jiequancui/DKL.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Panel-level multilocus methylation quantification in native cell-free DNA by PCR-compatible sequential enzymatic processing

Authors:
Vaquer↗C. C↗Wetten↗P. A↗Garcia Samartino↗Rodriguez↗J. D↗Manzino↗N. R↗Perez Ravier↗Angeloni↗A. R↗…

DNA methylation is informative for liquid biopsy, but low template abundance, distributed methylation signals and workflow complexity limit implementation. Here we present Delta-HLD, a PCR-compatible methylation assay platform that quantifies methylation directly in native DNA through sequential hybridization, ligation and methylation-sensitive digestion. The assay co-reports methylation-dependent signals from multiple loci through a shared amplification architecture, generating a single panel-level PCR readout. We established the chemistry, optimized panel size and composition through model-guided experiments, and implemented the assay as a triplex qPCR workflow with per-sample internal process controls. Plasma proof-of-concept analyses showed discriminatory signal in CRC and proof-of-concept transferability to hepatocellular carcinoma. Additional platelet-retaining experiments identified a strategy to increase recovery of analyzable circulating templates while reducing genomic DNA recognition. Delta-HLD provides a compact PCR-compatible framework for low-input methylation analysis without base conversion.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Beyond Entropy: Learning from Token-Level Distributional Deviations for LLM Reasoning

Authors:
Xuanzhi Feng↗Zhengyang Li↗Zeyu Liu↗Haoxi Li↗Yuming Jiang↗Bing Guo↗Jingcai Guo↗Jie Zhang↗Song Guo↗

arXiv:2606.19771v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has significantly advanced Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning; however, it faces a fundamental optimization instability: uniform token updates precipitate entropy collapse, leading to premature convergence to suboptimal strategies, whereas excessive Shannon Entropy maximization can cause entropy explosion, driving blind exploration toward incoherent reasoning chains. To resolve this dichotomy, we introduce the Independent Combinatorial Tokens (ICT) framework, which shifts the optimization focus from scalar uncertainty to the distributional properties of token logits. By leveraging the Jensen-Shannon (JS) divergence between token logits distributions, ICT identifies tokens with distinctive distributional patterns as critical branching points for guiding effective exploration in LLM reasoning. Our theoretical analysis, grounded in both Shannon and second-order Rényi entropy, proves that selectively updating on these tokens regulates policy concentration: it reduces the overall distribution uncertainty measured by Shannon entropy, while controlling probability concentration captured by second-order Rényi entropy. This dual effect prevents over-concentrated token generation from weakening exploration and effectively stabilizes the training landscape. Empirical results demonstrate that updating only the top 10% of unique tokens on Qwen2.5 (0.5B/1.5B/7B) models yields an average pass@4 improvement of 4.58%, with a maximum gain of 14.9%, over GRPO, 20-Entropy, and STAPO baselines across seven benchmarks spanning math, commonsense, and Olympiad-level problems.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
24.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

AMaNITA: an end-to-end workflow for native tRNA nanopore sequencing data analysis

Authors:
Katopodi↗X.-L↗Pryszcz↗L. P↗Llovera↗Ollivier↗Cozzuto↗Ponomarenko↗Novoa↗E. M↗

Transfer RNA (tRNA) molecules serve as essential adapters during protein translation. While direct RNA sequencing (DRS) via Oxford Nanopore Technologies has emerged as a powerful platform for systematic tRNAome profiling, we currently lack a simple and robust statistical framework for nanopore tRNA data analyses. Here, we address this gap by developing AMaNITA (Abundance, Modifications, and Nanopore Intensity Toolbox Application), an end-to-end bioinformatic workflow that enables simplified, robust, and scalable analyses of nanopore native tRNA sequencing datasets. AMaNITA streamlines the entire analytical trajectory: from upstream processing (basecalling, mapping, filtering, batch effect correction) to downstream assessment of differential tRNA abundance and modification stoichiometry. The workflow generates an interactive HTML report for data exploration and analysis, allowing the user to download the source data files and resulting plots. AMaNITA can be executed using Singularity from the command line, without requiring installation of dependencies.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

VeriPilot: An LLM-Powered Verilog Debugging Framework

Authors:
Yihan Wang↗Cheng Liu↗Jiazheng Zhang↗Lei Zhang↗Long Cheng↗Xiaowei Li↗Huawei Li↗

arXiv:2606.23759v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Verilog debugging remains one of the most time-consuming stages in digital circuit design. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled automated debugging; however, most existing approaches rely solely on test outputs and compiler feedback in an end-to-end manner, limiting their effectiveness on complex bugs. A key challenge is that the root cause of an error may be far removed from its observable outputs, making it difficult for LLMs to trace long dependency chains in code. This challenge is further exacerbated in large codebases, where long context lengths hinder efficient reasoning. To address these limitations, we propose VeriPilot, an LLM-powered debugging framework that leverages golden reference models to enable fine-grained bug localization and repair. VeriPilot goes beyond output-level comparison by aligning internal variable semantics between the Verilog design and its corresponding golden model through LLM-based analysis. It then performs step-by-step signal tracing using Control-Data-Flow Graphs (CDFGs) derived from static analysis, identifying a minimal set of suspicious code regions along with their correct counterparts from the golden model. These structured insights are subsequently provided to the LLM to guide reasoning and automated code repair. Experimental results on the Comprehensive Verilog Design Problems (CVDP) benchmark from NVIDIA demonstrate that VeriPilot improves the repair success rate of GPT-4o from 54.3\% to 85.71\%, significantly enhancing both bug localization accuracy and repair effectiveness for complex Verilog designs. The source code and benchmark are publicly available at Github https://github.com/YihanWn/VeriPilot.git.

Read & Discuss → View Source →