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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Conditional Latent Diffusion Model with Fourier-based Motion Modelling for Virtual Population Synthesis

In-silico trials of medical devices require the generation of virtual populations of anatomies. In cardiovascular applications, virtual anatomy is typically represented as a 3D+t mesh sampled from a generative model. However, most existing mesh generators focus on static anatomy, while sequence models often lack explicit periodicity. To this end, we propose 4D F-MeshLDM, a conditional generative framework comprising a convolutional mesh VAE to encode meshes, a structural latent space that parameterises motion using a truncated Fourier series, and a diffusion prior that learns the latent distribution over Fourier coefficient tokens. By conditioning the diffusion process on clinical covariates via affine modulation, we enable controllable synthesis. Sampling tokens and performing inverse Fourier synthesis yield cycle-consistent latent trajectories, which can be decoded into 3D+t cardiac mesh sequences. Experiments on 5,000 UK Biobank subjects demonstrate that 4D F-MeshLDM outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in anatomical fidelity and achieves near-zero cycle closure error. Furthermore, the generated cohorts accurately preserve clinical functional indices, highlighting the potential of our framework for reliable in-silico cardiac trials.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Plasma protein prioritisation in rheumatoid arthritis reveals druggable targets and shared biology with cardiovascular diseases

Abstract Background Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is an autoimmune inflammatory disease with complex and incompletely understood molecular mechanisms. Understanding circulating proteins associated with RA may improve understanding of disease biology and clarify its pathological links with cardiometabolic comorbidities. Methods A proteome-wide two-sample Mendelian randomisation (MR) drug target analysis was conducted using plasma proteins measured in 54,219 participants from the UK Biobank Pharma Proteomics Project as exposures and RA and cardiometabolic diseases as the outcomes. Summary statistics for RA included 53,663 cases and 1,070,200 controls. Colocalisation analysis was performed to confirm shared single causal variants and prioritise RA proteins supported by both MR and colocalisation. The prioritised proteins were then evaluated in the Accelerating Medicines Partnership RA Phase II synovial single-cell dataset for cell-type expression patterns. Druggability was then assessed followed by analysis of genetic overlap between RA-associated proteins and cardiometabolic diseases. Results 37 plasma proteins had a causal effect on RA risk, supported by combined evidence from MR and conditional colocalisation. In synovial tissue, TPPP3, RARRES2, AKAP12, and GGT5 were predominantly expressed in stromal and endothelial cell clusters. Druggability assessment identified IFNGR2, IL6R, CD40, and FCGR2B as Tier 1 targets. However, several biologically relevant proteins, including RARRES2, AKAP12, TPPP3, and SNX2, had limited available druggability data. Genetic overlap analysis demonstrated shared protein signals between RA and cardiovascular diseases, including overlap of RARRES2 and TPPP3 with coronary artery disease (CAD) and FCGR2B with atrial fibrillation (AF). To approximate the therapeutic effect of target inhibition, the direction of effect estimates for proteins showing overlap between RA-CAD and RA-AF was reversed. Conclusion This study identified circulating proteins involved in RA pathogenesis and reveals shared mechanisms between RA and cardiovascular diseases. While some proteins showed clear translational potential targets, several prioritised proteins had limited available druggability information and could not be confidently classified. Addressing these gaps may help identify new targets relevant to RA management. Future work should also use phenome-wide MR studies to evaluate potential on-target adverse effects of protein inhibition across RA-CAD and RA-AF.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Extending Covariant Fluctuation Theorems into Quantum Regime through Quasiprobability Approach

arXiv:2606.14519v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The covariant formulation of stochastic thermodynamics requires treating the stochastic work as a 4-vector, posing significant challenges for quantum systems due to the non-commutativity. We introduce a new quasiprobability distribution for the work 4-vector, which combines the Wigner and Margenau-Hill quasiprobabilities. This extends the covariant fluctuation theorems from classical to quantum regime. We illustrate our findings with a scalar field driven by classical particles with a generalized version of trace formula. Our work establishes a quasiprobability approach to studying relativistic quantum thermodynamics in a covariant way.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

NeRD: Neuro-Symbolic Rule Distillation for Efficient Ontology-Grounded Chain-of-Thought in Medical Image Diagnosis

Interpretability is essential for trustworthy medical image diagnosis. However, existing concept-driven interpretable methods have key limitations: Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) require scoring all predefined concepts at inference time and for manual intervention, imposing a substantial burden on clinicians, while rationale-based generative approaches often select concepts by class discriminability, which can drift from diagnostic ontologies. To address these issues, we propose Neuro-Symbolic Rule Distillation (NeRD), a framework that produces efficient, ontology-grounded reasoning chains that are sufficient yet non-redundant, without manually crafting diagnostic rules. Experiments on two skin datasets demonstrate strong diagnostic performance and interpretability, and blinded expert evaluation confirms the clinical plausibility of NeRD rationales. Our method further enables a first expert-in-the-loop study for Multimodal Chain-of-Thought-based diagnosis, achieving efficient and effective concept-level intervention.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

AI Coding Agents in Social Science: Methodologically Diverse, Empirically Consistent, Interpretively Vulnerable

The deployment of LLM-based agents in scientific analysis raises opposing concerns: that agents may reduce methodological diversity, or that they may amplify the analytic flexibility through which researchers reach motivated conclusions. We argue these worries target two empirically separable layers: a design layer of methodological choices, and a verdict layer in which a decision rule maps estimates to a substantive claim. We test both by running 20 independent executions of Claude Code and Codex on a prominent immigration and social-policy against a many-analysts human baseline. At the design layer, Codex matches human methodological diversity and Claude Code produces nearly three times as many specifications; both agents' effect estimates remain broadly aligned with the human consensus, and no agent model exactly matches any human model. A prompt-induced anti-immigration researcher prior reorganizes each agent's methodological decisions but, unlike for biased human analysts in the same data, does not shift aggregate estimates or final verdicts; nor do agents reroute along the methodological axes humans use to bias their estimates. At the verdict layer, an explicit confirmatory prompt flips Claude Code's verdicts from 10% to 90% support while leaving its coefficient distribution essentially unchanged, operating through rule omission rather than rule softening. AI agents can rival or exceed human methodological diversity at the design layer while remaining vulnerable at the verdict layer. In our setting, the locus of AI bias is not estimation but interpretation.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Specific epigenetic age acceleration measures are associated with oral health outcomes in U.S. adults

Objectives: Oral health conditions impact a significant proportion of the global population. Chronological age is a known risk factor; however, characterization of epigenetic age remains limited and is expected to provide additional insight into biological mechanisms. Materials and Methods: The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) was used to analyze the effect of epigenetic age measures of DunedinPoAm, and epigenetic age acceleration (EAA) of Horvath, Hannum, Weidner, Lin, VidalBralo, PhenoAge, GrimAge, and GrimAge2, on various oral health outcomes from survey and examination results. Univariable and multivariable logistic regression were performed, adjusting for sex, race-ethnicity, education, poverty income ratio categories, and dental insurance coverage status. Results: DunedinPoAm was associated with the last dental appointment being for an existing issue (p=0.0093), poor general oral condition (p=0.0226), limiting food due to teeth problems (p=0.0031), and recommendation to see a dentist within the next two weeks (p=0.0171). EAAs for PhenoAge, GrimAge, and GrimAge2, were associated with a smaller number of oral health outcomes, whereas EAAs for Horvath, Hannum, Weidner, Lin, and Vidal-Bralo showed no associations. Conclusions: In a representative U.S. population, DunedinPoAm was most consistently positively associated with different adverse oral health outcomes compared with other epigenetic aging measures. Tracking specific epigenetic ages such as DunedinPoAm, EAA GrimAge, EAA GrimAge2, and PhenoAge, may aid in additional monitoring of oral health outcomes. Understanding specific aging-related CpGs associated with oral health may aid in elucidating underlying molecular mechanisms.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Deterministic Policy Gradient for Learning Equilibrium in Time-Inconsistent Control Problems

arXiv:2606.11798v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we develop a continuous-time model-free reinforcement learning algorithm to learn deterministic equilibrium policies in general time-inconsistent control problems. Utilizing the extended Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman system, we recast the original time-inconsistent problem into an equivalent two-stage problem. In the first stage, for given auxiliary functions, we employ the deterministic policy gradient approach to learn an optimal policy in an auxiliary time-consistent control problem. In the second stage, given the updated policy, we exploit the inner fixed point iterations and some martingale characterizations to learn the auxiliary functions. As a theoretical contribution, we provide some mild model assumptions and establish the convergence of inner fixed point iterations. By repeating this actor-critic style of iterations across two stages, our algorithm aims to learn the equilibrium under different sources of time-inconsistency in a unified manner. The superior effectiveness of the proposed algorithm are illustrated in two classical financial applications with time-inconsistency: mean-variance portfolio management and optimal tracking portfolio under non-exponential discounting.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Trap-Quenched Matter-Wave Optics for Dual Species Lensing

arXiv:2606.14577v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dual-species atom interferometry in space promises precise tests of the Universality of Free Fall (UFF), with a sensitivity that grows quadratically with the extended interrogation time accessible in weightlessness. These tests demand exquisite control over the expansion energies of both condensed sources as well as over their differential center-of-mass dynamics. We propose a trap-quenched collimation technique featuring in-trap excitations of collective modes compatible with state-of-the-art atom-chip setups. Using NASA's Cold Atom Laboratory aboard the International Space Station, we demonstrate it on a single-species $^{87}$Rb condensate. By controlling the center-of-mass release dynamics we observe free expansion times up to 700 ms and measure a two-dimensional expansion energy of $k_B \cdot 78\pm 9 \;\mathrm{pK}$ in the imaging plane. A detailed model of the magnetically-induced dynamics indicates that this corresponds to a two-dimensional expansion energy of about $k_B \cdot 15^{+12}_{-5}\; \mathrm{pK}$ along two of the condensate's eigenaxes. Finally, we theoretically study this trap-quenched collimation scheme for a $^{41}$K-$^{87}$Rb mixture, predicting a simultaneous collimation that meets the expansion energy requirements for a state-of-the-art UFF test at the $10^{-15}$ accuracy level.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Comparative Evaluation of Machine Learning and Deep Learning Models for Early Prediction of Severe Acute Pancreatitis: A Multi-Model Study Using the 2012 Revised Atlanta Classification

Authors:

**Background:** Acute pancreatitis (AP) is a common gastrointestinal emergency with a subset of patients progressing to severe acute pancreatitis (SAP), which carries substantial morbidity and mortality. Current clinical severity scores such as BISAP, APACHE II, Ranson, and the Modified CT Severity Index require upon 48 hours of observation before reliable assessment is possible, limiting early triage. Machine learning (ML) approaches using routine admission laboratory values may enable earlier, more accurate prediction. **Methods:** We evaluated 11 models spanning three architectural families classical ML (Logistic Regression, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting), feedforward deep learning (MLP, Residual MLP, Attention MLP), and recurrent deep learning (LSTM, Stacked LSTM, Bidirectional LSTM, LSTM+Attention, CNN-LSTM) on a Chinese AP cohort of 722 patients (585 severe, 137 mild) labelled according to the 2012 Revised Atlanta Classification. Performance was assessed via 5-fold stratified cross-validation using AUC-ROC, F1 score, sensitivity, specificity, and PPV, with decision thresholds optimised for maximal F1. **Results:** Random Forest achieved the highest AUC of 0.877 (F1=0.917, sensitivity=96.8%, PPV=87.1%), followed closely by Gradient Boosting (AUC=0.874, F1=0.918). Classical ML models consistently outperformed deep learning counterparts. CNN-LSTM was the best recurrent model (AUC=0.777) but remained inferior to all classical approaches. LSTM-family models produced AUC values of 0.684-0.777, reflecting the cross-sectional tabular nature of the data. **Conclusions:** Random Forest provides robust, high-sensitivity early prediction of SAP severity using routine admission data. External prospective validation is required before clinical deployment. **Keywords:** acute pancreatitis; severity prediction; machine learning; random forest; deep learning; LSTM; Revised Atlanta Classification; early triage

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

PANDA: An LLM-Enhanced Performance-Driven Analog Design Framework Bridging Design Intent and Layout Generation

arXiv:2606.15052v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional design of analog circuits heavily relies on manual interventions across topology, sizing, and layout, with prior automation addressing stages in isolation. In this work, we propose PANDA, an LLM-enhanced framework that bridges high-level design intent to final layout by actively managing cross-stage dependencies through guided topology synthesis, substructure-aware sizing, and constraint-driven layout generation. This shifts automation from algorithm-centric execution to intent-centric co-design, reducing turnaround time from days or weeks to hours while improving design performance.

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

Humor Style Drives Laughter, Topic Shapes Acceptability: Evaluating Bilingual Personal and Political Robot-Delivered AI Jokes

arXiv:2606.13256v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Humor plays a central role in human social relationships, and recent advances in computational humor create new opportunities for integrating humor into human-robot interaction (HRI). While large language models (LLMs) can generate diverse forms of humor, it remains unclear how humor style, joke content, and language preference shape perceptions of robot-delivered humor in group settings. In this exploratory study, we employed a mixed factorial design in which participants evaluated AI-generated jokes delivered by a robot in a university classroom. We examined the effects of humor type (Affiliative, Self-Enhancing, Aggressive, Self-Defeating) and joke content (person-related vs. political) on perceived funniness and appropriateness, as well as preferred language. Results show that humor type significantly influences funniness, with Aggressive and Affiliative humor rated higher, while joke content primarily affects appropriateness, with person-related jokes preferred over political ones. Language preference was shaped by both joke content and participants' self-reported fluency and humor practices.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Encoder Winners Do Not Reliably Transfer Across VLA Backbone Scale: A Frozen-Backbone Grafting Diagnostic

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies typically inherit their vision encoder from upstream VLM releases, but it is unclear whether an encoder choice validated on a small VLA transfers to a larger backbone. We introduce a frozen-backbone grafting diagnostic: the vision tower of a released VLA is replaced by a candidate encoder under a fixed protocol (adaptive average pooling, LayerNorm, and a single trainable linear projector), with the language model and action expert frozen. Across four encoders, two LIBERO suites, two backbones (SmolVLA-450M and $\pi_{0.5}$-3.3B), and two-to-three seeds per cell (40 main grafting runs plus native, LoRA, pooling, and zero-/shuffled-image controls, all scored by offline action MSE), the small-backbone winner does not reliably select the large-backbone top tier: SigLIP is best on SmolVLA across both suites, while on $\pi_{0.5}$ DINOv2-small leads the spatial suite and the object suite is a seed-sensitive near-tie band; three of the four backbone-suite comparisons (and 11 of 12 seed-level cells) support backbone-dependent rankings. The grafting wrapper is itself non-neutral with opposite sign across backbones (+45-56% MSE on the SmolVLA native tower, -50-52% on $\pi_{0.5}$), so all conclusions are conditional on the fixed grafting protocol. We position frozen grafting as a cheap target-backbone diagnostic to run before committing to an encoder at scale, not as a closed-loop deployment claim.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Accelerating Speculative Diffusions via Block Verification

arXiv:2606.13426v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speculative decoding speeds up LLM inference by using a draft model to generate tokens, with an acceptance-rejection scheme that ensures that the output matches the target distribution. Adapting this to continuous diffusions is difficult because speculative sampling requires drawing from a residual distribution. While straightforward in discrete spaces, efficiently sampling this residual in continuous space is non-trivial. Consequently, existing diffusion adaptations either use computationally inefficient sampling techniques or rely on an alternative scheme. In this work, we introduce a novel scheme that efficiently implements the original speculative sampling mechanism for diffusion models. Our approach offers a critical advantage over current methods: it enables us to adapt block verification from LLMs to diffusions – which provably improves the acceptance rate of drafts. Furthermore, we formalize and analyze the Free Drafter, a heuristic self-speculative drafter for diffusions that requires no training. By enabling block verification, our Free Drafter yields up to a 6.3% speedup over existing speculative methods with no additional training and negligible overhead beyond the existing parallel verification pass.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

How Much Can We Trust LLM Search Agents? Measuring Endorsement Vulnerability to Web Content Manipulation

Large language model (LLM)-based search agents synthesize open-web content into actionable recommendations on behalf of users, creating a risk that attacker-published pages are transformed into endorsed claims. We introduce SearchGEO, a controlled evaluation framework for measuring endorsement corruption in LLM-based web-search agents, combining a web-evidence manipulation pipeline, a five-mode attack taxonomy, and multiple output-level metrics. We evaluate 13 LLM backends on 308 cases each. Results show that vulnerability patterns vary across backends: overall attack success rate (ASR) ranges from 0.0% on Claude-Sonnet-4.6 to 31.4% on Gemini-3-Flash, the strongest attack mode differs by model family, and the same deployment scaffold could amplify or decrease ASR on different backends. An auxiliary agent-skill probe, where endorsement becomes an install command, exposes a sharp split among otherwise robust backends: Claude over-rejects while GPT over-trusts. These findings argue for treating recommendation reliability under adversarial search content as a first-class dimension of backend safety evaluation.

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

MPC-Patch-Bench: Security-Aware LLM Code Patch for Multi-Party Computation

arXiv:2606.11416v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Repository-level benchmarks for evaluating Large Language Model (LLM) code repair on Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC) software do not yet exist, and directly transplanting general-purpose benchmarks such as SWE-bench fails on three structural fronts: (i) MPC repositories are dominated by generic Python infrastructure rather than cryptographic logic; (ii) high-value MPC fixes lack the standardized tests rigid extraction pipelines require; and (iii) standard fail-to-pass evaluation is insufficient for code that must also be cryptographically safe. MPC is increasingly deployed for privacy-preserving machine learning, biomedical collaboration, and secure analytics. Existing MPC-specific code-synthesis efforts cover only operator-level or single-framework tasks; evaluating LLM agents on real repository-level MPC repair instead demands MPC-aware data curation and a verifier matched to the security and numerical-fidelity guarantees MPC programs must obey neither of which existing benchmarks provide. We introduce MPC-Patch-Bench, a repository-level benchmark organised around two frameworks. (1)The Data Curation Framework combines a domain-specific curation agent that filters raw pull requests through three cryptographic layers with a human-AI completion engine that synthesizes missing problem statements and Fail-to-Pass/Pass-to-Pass tests, yielding 205 fully verified instances. (2)The MPC Verifier provides dedicated security and numerical-fidelity checks via dynamic differential testing against plaintext oracles and MPC-specific static analysis rules that flag unsafe reveals, insecure arithmetic, and illegal public/private casts. The strongest evaluated LLM functionally resolves only 22.9% of MPC-Patch-Bench tasks; the MPC Verifier further reduces verified resolution to 17.1%, with up to 40% of functionally-passing patches rejected for cryptographic or numerical-fidelity violations.

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

RNN(p) for Power Consumption Forecasting

arXiv:2209.01378v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: An elementary Recurrent Neural Network that operates on p time lags, called an RNN(p), is the natural generalisation of a linear autoregressive model ARX(p). It is a powerful forecasting tool for variables displaying inherent seasonal patterns across multiple time scales, as is often observed in energy, economic, and financial time series. The architecture of RNN(p) models, characterised by structured feedbacks across time lags, enables the design of efficient training strategies. We conduct a comparative study of learning algorithms for these models, providing a rigorous analysis of their computational complexity and training performance. We present two applications of RNN(p) models in power consumption forecasting, a key domain within the energy sector where accurate forecasts inform both operational and financial decisions. Experimental results show that RNN(p) models achieve excellent forecasting accuracy while maintaining a high degree of interpretability. These features make them well-suited for decision-making in energy markets and other fintech applications where reliable predictions play a significant economic role.

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

Attention Sinks in Diffusion Transformers: A Causal Analysis

Attention sinks – tokens that receive disproportionate attention mass – are assumed to be functionally important in autoregressive language models, but their role in diffusion transformers remains unclear. We present a causal analysis in text-to-image diffusion, dynamically identifying dominant attention recipients per timestep and suppressing them via paired, training-free interventions on the score and value paths. Across 553 GenEval prompts on Stable Diffusion~3 (with SDXL corroboration), removing these sinks does not degrade text-image alignment (CLIP-T) or preference proxies (ImageReward, HPS-v2) at $k{=}1$; only under stronger interventions ($k\!\geq\!10$) does HPS-v2 exhibit a metric-dependent boundary, while CLIP-T remains robust throughout. The perceptual shifts induced by suppression are nonetheless sink-specific – $\sim\!6\times$ larger than equal-budget random masking – revealing an empirical dissociation between trajectory-level perturbation and semantic alignment in diffusion transformers. \footnote{Code available at https://github.com/wfz666/ICML26-attention-sink.}

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

On Regret Bounds of Thompson Sampling for Bayesian Optimization

arXiv:2603.09276v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study a widely used Bayesian optimization method, Gaussian process Thompson sampling (GP-TS), under the assumption that the objective function is a sample path from a GP. Compared with the GP upper confidence bound (GP-UCB) with established high-probability and expected regret bounds, most analyses of GP-TS have been limited to expected regret. Moreover, whether the recent analyses of GP-UCB for the lenient regret and the improved cumulative regret upper bound can be applied to GP-TS remains unclear. To fill these gaps, this paper shows several regret bounds: (i) a regret lower bound for GP-TS, which implies that GP-TS suffers from a polynomial dependence on $1/\delta$ with probability $\delta$, (ii) an upper bound of the second moment of cumulative regret, which directly suggests an improved regret upper bound on $\delta$, (iii) expected lenient regret upper bounds, and (iv) an improved cumulative regret upper bound on the time horizon $T$. Along the way, we provide several useful lemmas, including a relaxation of the necessary condition from recent analysis to obtain improved regret upper bounds on $T$.

19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Excursion Fluctuations and Spectral Universality in Gaussian Fields

arXiv:2606.15630v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the large-scale spatial fluctuations of excursion volumes for a class of smooth stationary Gaussian fields. In the case of Berry's random wave model in dimension $d \geq 2$, we show that the spatial fluctuations for fixed $u>0$ converge to the fractional Gaussian field $(-\Delta)^{-1/4}W$ in the space of tempered distributions $\mathcal S'(\mathbb{R}^d)$, where $W$ is the $d$-dimensional Gaussian white noise. This explains the long-range correlations in the apparent filament structure of the Random Plane Wave model. For a class of smooth planar Gaussian fields whose spectral density has a power-law singularity at the origin, we prove convergence to fractional Gaussian fields with an index determined by the singularity exponent. More generally, the results illustrate that, for stationary random measures, large-scale spatial fluctuations are determined by the behaviour of the spectral measure density exponent near zero.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Understanding Sample Efficiency in Predictive Coding

arXiv:2605.11911v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Predictive Coding (PC) is an influential account of cortical learning. Much of recent work has focused on comparing PC to Backpropagation (BP) to find whether PC offers any advantages. Small scale experiments show that PC enables learning that is more sample efficient and effective in many contexts, though a thorough theoretical understanding of the phenomena remains elusive. To address this, we quantify the efficiency of learning in BP and PC through a metric called ``target alignment'', which measures how closely the change in the output of the network is aligned to the output prediction error. We then derive and empirically validate analytical expressions for target alignment in Deep Linear Networks. We show that learning in PC is more efficient than BP, which is especially pronounced in deep, narrow and pre-trained networks. We also derive exact conditions for guaranteed optimal target alignment in PC and validate our findings through experiments. We study full training trajectories of linear and non-linear models, and find the predicted benefits of PC persist in practice even when some assumptions are violated. Overall, this work provides a mechanistic understanding of the higher learning efficiency observed for PC over BP in previous works, and can guide how PC should be parametrised to learn most effectively.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

The Protective Role of Belonging and Socioeconomic Status in Dropout Intent Among Minority Ethnic Students: A Mixed Methods Study

Improving minority ethnic student retention is a global higher education priority. This mixed-methods study investigated how institutional belonging and socioeconomic status interact to shape dropout intentions among minority university students in the UK (N = 182). Quantitative results revealed that perceived course difficulty and lower subjective socioeconomic status were the strongest predictors of dropout intent. While the interaction between socioeconomic status and difficulty was non-significant, qualitative accounts showed distinct structural vulnerabilities. Financial strain restricted social integration, turning socioeconomic disparities into campus isolation. Conversely, representative curricula, diverse peer networks, and stable cultural in-groups (e.g., religious affiliations, living in the parental home) functioned as essential psychological buffers against academic exhaustion and alienation. Universities must shift from transactional models to sustained structural equity to protect vulnerable student groups.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Shuttling Compiler for Trapped-Ion Quantum Computers Based on Large Language Models

arXiv:2512.18021v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present the first shuttling compiler based on large language models (LLMs) for trapped-ion quantum computers, where qubits are shuttled between segments for gate execution and qubit storage. We fine-tune pre-trained LLMs on examples from linear and branched one-dimensional shuttling architectures. Thus, we obtain a layout-independent compilation strategy that learns the required shuttling operations directly from data. Using benchmark circuits with up to 16 qubits, such fine-tuned LLMs can now generate valid schedules for shuttling architectures. Notably, we also obtain a valid schedule for a previously unseen four-way junction layout. This demonstrates that trained LLMs can generalize to layouts not encountered during training. For various architectures, LLM-based schedules improve upon state-of-the-art baseline compiler results, reducing the shuttling effort by up to 15%.

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

Blind Dexterous Grasping via Real2Sim2Real Tactile Policy Learning

arXiv:2606.11767v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Blind grasping with a dexterous hand is a crucial manipulation capability. Nevertheless, learning such tactile-only policies for real robots remains challenging due to the tactile sim-to-real gap and the limited expressiveness of sparse tactile signals. To bridge this gap, we propose a framework for tactile-only blind grasping that is deployable on a physical multi-fingered robotic hand. Our approach combines three key components. First, we introduce a Real2Sim tactile calibration pipeline that constructs a contact-calibrated digital-twin simulator capable of reproducing real tactile signals. Second, we improve the expressiveness of sparse tactile observations using a layout-aware tactile encoder, which incorporates sensor-geometry priors through self-supervised pretraining. Third, to improve generalization to unseen objects, we train object-specific reinforcement-learning experts in the calibrated simulator and aggregate their successful grasp trajectories into a tactile-conditioned Diffusion Policy. We evaluate our method on a physical LEAP Hand equipped with distributed tactile sensing across 10 seen and 10 unseen objects. The deployed policy achieves a 27\% real-world grasp success rate across all 20 objects, without real-world grasping demonstrations or visual input. Simulation ablations show that layout-aware tactile pretraining improves grasping performance, while sensing-level evaluations confirm that Real2Sim calibration increases the consistency of tactile contact events between simulation and hardware. Together, these results suggest that contact-event calibration, geometry-aware tactile representation learning, and diffusion-based policy aggregation provide an effective path toward tactile-only blind grasping on real dexterous robotic hands. Project page:Dex-Blind-Grasp.github.io.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Data augmented bootstrap: Unifying confidence interval construction by approximate invariance

arXiv:2606.09049v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose the data augmented bootstrap (DAB), a framework for constructing confidence intervals from approximately invariant transformations of the data. As special cases, DAB recovers popular methods that rely on exact group symmetries, such as conformal prediction, wild bootstrap for Maximum Mean Discrepancy U-statistics and the recently proposed SymmPI. Meanwhile, DAB also recovers the classical bootstrap method, which exploits the dataset's approximate invariance under uniform sampling of data indices as the dataset size grows. For all DAB methods, we establish theoretical coverage results that interpolate between finite-sample and asymptotic guarantees according to the strength of the invariance, and without assuming a group structure. The approximate invariance is measured in the Kolmogorov distance and, for statistics that satisfy Gaussian universality, reduces to conditional mean and variance matching. This allows us to incorporate data augmentation (DA), a widely used machine learning heuristic based on approximate invariances, into known statistical methods. We empirically test the performance of incorporating DA into bootstrap, wild bootstrap and conformal prediction for simulated settings as well as for image, language and scientific data.