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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

NTIRE 2024 Challenge on Image Super-Resolution (x4): Methods and Results

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2024 challenge on image super-resolution ($\times$4), highlighting the solutions proposed and the outcomes obtained. The challenge involves generating corresponding high-resolution (HR) images, magnified by a factor of four, from low-resolution (LR) inputs using prior information. The LR images originate from bicubic downsampling degradation. The aim of the challenge is to obtain designs/solutions with the most advanced SR performance, with no constraints on computational resources (e.g., model size and FLOPs) or training data. The track of this challenge assesses performance with the PSNR metric on the DIV2K testing dataset. The competition attracted 199 registrants, with 20 teams submitting valid entries. This collective endeavour not only pushes the boundaries of performance in single-image SR but also offers a comprehensive overview of current trends in this field.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Towards a Dynamic and Fixed-budget Memory Bank for Efficient Streaming Video Understanding

Currently, streaming video understanding is still a daunting task for existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Its difficulties not only lie in handling the ever-increasing video frames, but also in the unpredictability of future video content and input instructions. In this paper, we study this task from the perspective of constructing a dynamic but fixed-budget memory bank, and propose a novel and training-free approach termed CausalMem. CausalMem is dedicated to constructing a dynamic visual memory update mechanism, thereby maximizing the amount of information in streaming video within a limited memory space, much like the human brain. In practice, CausalMem estimates the redundancy of visual tokens and updates the memory bank via an online semantic basis, which models the principal semantics of the observed video stream. To validate CausalMem, we apply it to two representative MLLMs, namely LLaVA-OneVision and Qwen2.5-VL respectively, and conduct extensive experiments on both streaming and offline video understanding benchmarks. The experimental results not only show the great advantages than existing methods under both streaming and offline settings, e.g., $+3.2\%$ and $+3.0\%$ average accuracy gains respectively, but also witness the superior semantic preservation for streaming videos, e.g., using 12$k$ token budgets to memorize hour-long streaming videos, which achieves more than 20$\times$ visual token compression ratio and only occupies about 82 MB storage. Our code is given in \href{https://github.com/hktk07/CausalMem}{CausalMem}.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Infinite-Level Hierarchy of Solvable Quantum Circuits

arXiv:2606.23803v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dual-unitary circuits have emerged as a paradigm of exactly solvable yet non-integrable quantum dynamics. Recently, a generalization of dual unitarity attempting to extend the phenomenology of exactly solvable circuits has been introduced through a hierarchy of conditions, with dual unitarity as the first level. However, beyond the second level the proposed generalized dual-unitary hierarchy ceases to be solvable in the whole spacetime. We present an infinite hierarchy of solvability conditions remedying this problem. These new conditions can be combined with the generalized dual-unitary hierarchy to obtain circuits for which correlation functions and entanglement dynamics can be analyzed exactly in the whole spacetime. We show that this novel hierarchy possesses non-trivial solutions at every level. Our results demonstrate that dual unitarity can be systematically extended while preserving solvability, opening up investigations of exactly solvable non-integrable systems with more general properties.

04.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

EditorForge: An Active-Site-Aware Framework for Inverse-Folding-Based Protein Redesign

Inverse-folding models can rapidly generate protein sequences compatible with a supplied backbone, but unconstrained redesign is poorly suited to enzyme and genome-editor-associated domains, where catalytic, substrate-proximal, and conserved structural regions must remain protected. In this paper, we present EditorForge, a modular constraint-and-audit suite for editor-domain protein redesign that wraps fixed-backbone inverse folding with explicit design masks, fixed-position enforcement, active-site-proximity auditing, active-site-shielded regeneration, and downstream structural quality control. Using full-length Moloney murine leukemia virus reverse transcriptase structure 4MH8 (MMLV RT 4MH8) as a demonstration target, EditorForge first restricted redesign to a bounded 25-position envelope while fixing 428 residues. An initial audit detected active-site-proximal failure modes despite fixed-position integrity. Later, the Active Site Shield module then removed five unsafe design positions, replaced them with lower-contact alternatives, and regenerated candidates under stricter constraints. Post Shield Audit evaluated 24 regenerated candidates, all of which satisfied the hard sequence/mask and active-site-shield constraints. For the eight candidates that were selected or returned for structure-prediction/refolding quality control. Enhanced RefoldQC found that all 8 evaluated predicted structures passed the computational structure-QC screen. That said, the selected 8 candidates passed the computational structure-QC screen, with global C RMSD values of 1.2061–1.5555~[A], active-site C RMSD values of 0.4098–1.8397~[A], mutation-neighborhood C RMSD values of 1.3155-1.6848~[A], and average pLDDT-like confidence values of 94.87-95.11. In short, EditorForge provides a reproducible triage layer that converts general inverse-folding output into constrained and editor-specific candidate sets for downstream structural and biological review on top of existing structural prediction tools.

05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Joint convergence in Wiener chaos via transport hierarchy and Malliavin covariances

arXiv:2606.14812v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the joint convergence in distribution of a sequence $X_N = I_p(f_N)$ of multiple Wiener–Itô integrals of order $p\geq 2$ that converges to a Gaussian limit $Z\sim N(0,\sigma^2)$, together with another sequence $Y_N = I_q(g_N)$ converging in law. The central finding is that the joint convergence of $(X_N, Y_N)$ is completely governed by the asymptotic behavior of the iterated Malliavin covariances $Y_{r+1,N} = \langle DX_N, DY_{r,N}\rangle_H$, $r\geq 0$: joint convergence holds as soon as these covariances converge jointly with $Y_N$, and the structure of the limiting distribution is then explicitly determined by their limits. Moreover, the convergence of the Malliavin covariances is necessary for joint convergence, as shown by a counterexample. When $q

06.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-05

Heuristic multi-site optimization for protein sequence design using Masked Protein Language Models

Authors:

by Lijuan Wang, Yuze Wang, Chen Qiu, Liwei Xiao, Xianliang Liu, Junjie Chen Protein sequence design for tailored functional properties is a fundamental task in protein engineering, with critical applications in drug discovery and therapeutic development. Efficient navigation of the combinatorial vastness of protein sequence space to identify functional variants remains a formidable challenge. Conventional approaches, which predominantly rely on template-based local search or single-residue mutagenesis, are constrained by their susceptibility to local optima and their potential risk of destabilizing native structural stability. In this study, we introduce ProtHMSO, a heuristic multi-site optimization framework leveraging masked protein language models (ProtLMs) for context-aware sequence exploration. ProtHMSO mimics natural evolutionary mechanisms by employing ProtLM-derived substitution probabilities to guide heuristic searches for synergistic mutations, thereby constraining combinatorial search spaces through evolutionary and biophysical priors. ProtHMSO is further applied to replace the exploration strategies in genetic algorithms (GAs) and Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) for improving their convergence efficiency. Benchmark experiments demonstrate that protein sequences generated by ProtHMSO exhibit superior functional performance and closer alignment with natural sequence distribution, compared with state-of-the-art methods. These advancements highlight that ProtHMSO has strong potential and compatibility to accelerate functional protein discovery, offering a robust framework for efficient and context-aware exploration of protein sequence space.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Learning universal approximations for partial differential equations with Physics-Informed Broad Learning System

arXiv:2606.19754v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Partial differential equations (PDEs) play a central role in modeling complex physical, biological, and engineering systems. While traditional numerical solvers are robust, they often incur prohibitive computational costs due to mesh dependencies, whereas recent Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) offer a mesh-free alternative but frequently suffer from slow convergence and optimization instability. To bridge this gap, this article proposes the Physics-Informed Broad Learning System (PIBLS), a novel backpropagation-free framework that reformulates PDE solving as a direct least-squares optimization. We improved an algorithm within this framework to handle nonlinear PDEs efficiently and provide a rigorous mathematical proof establishing the universal approximation property of PIBLS for these equations. Experiments on linear and nonlinear PDEs demonstrate that PIBLS is one to three orders of magnitude faster than conventional PINNs while achieving significantly higher solution accuracy. This framework provides a computationally efficient paradigm for scientific machine learning, offering a practical, high-speed alternative for real-time simulation and design optimization tasks.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Dark state spectroscopy in nonlinear waveguide quantum electrodynamics

arXiv:2606.11997v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum systems face a fundamental trade-off: they must remain decoupled from the environment to maintain long coherence times, yet they require interactions with the environment to be accessible for measurement. As a prime example, emitter arrays coupled to waveguides facilitate collective modes that, owing to interference, can suppress radiation into the waveguide. While complete destructive interference creates perfectly dark states with infinite lifetimes, their inherent decoupling makes them unmeasurable in standard waveguide quantum electrodynamics. Consequently, current approaches must rely on system non-idealities that permit measurement but limit the coherence times. In this work, we lift this limitation by proposing the use of weakly squeezed light generated in \{chi}(2) nonlinear waveguides for the spectroscopy of completely dark states. We show that the fluorescence spectrum probes transitions between the dressed dark states of the emitter array. This work paves the way towards the measurement and control of dark states, with applications for robust quantum memories, computation, and communication.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Lifecycle-Aware Dynamic Analysis for Secure ML Model Execution

arXiv:2606.19023v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The growing reliance on pre-trained Machine Learning (ML) models has introduced new attack surfaces. Recent vulnerabilities demonstrate that malicious behavior can be embedded within model artifacts, often bypassing existing defenses. Current model-scanning solutions primarily rely on static, format-specific rules or known attack signatures, which limit their ability to generalize across frameworks and to detect novel exploitation paths. In contrast, we propose a solution that focuses on the effects an attack has on the host system executing the model and builds on foundational intuitions about ML model execution. In particular, we observe that ML models operate within well-defined lifecycle phases and that, within each phase, interactions with the host system are highly structured and predictable. We translate these intuitions into Moat, a dynamic lifecycle-aware approach for securing ML model execution, and instantiate this design in Re-Moat, our reference implementation. We evaluate Re-Moat across multiple ML frameworks using 77,974 real-world model artifacts from the Hugging Face Hub, 31 Proofs-of-Concept (PoCs) from CVEs, and 334 models from a state-of-the-art dataset, and compare it against state-of-the-art model-scanning solutions. Our results show that our approach detects all evaluated attack classes while maintaining a close-to-zero false-positive rate, validating our intuitions and motivating dynamic analysis for securing ML model execution.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Intrapartum Oxytocin and Maternal Outcomes Following Vaginal and Unscheduled Cesarean Delivery

Objective To examine whether intrapartum synthetic oxytocin exposure for labor induction or augmentation is associated with breastfeeding and postpartum depressive and traumatic stress symptoms. Methods We studied 1,296 postpartum women who delivered at a single tertiary care center, with assessments from the third trimester through approximately two months postpartum. Intrapartum oxytocin exposure was obtained from electronic medical records. Outcomes included exclusive breastfeeding, postpartum depression, and childbirth-related traumatic stress. Analyses were stratified by delivery mode and adjusted for key maternal and obstetric covariates. Results Overall, 63.3% of participants received intrapartum oxytocin. Among participants with vaginal delivery, oxytocin exposure was associated with lower exclusive breastfeeding at two months after adjustment (58.2% vs 70.3%; adjusted RR 0.86, 95% CI 0.76- 0.97; p = 0.02), but not with postpartum mental health outcomes. Among participants with unscheduled cesarean delivery, oxytocin exposure was independently associated with higher immediate postpartum depressive symptoms (F = 4.97, p = 0.03), acute childbirth-related stress (F = 4.56, p = 0.03), and two-month childbirth-related posttraumatic stress symptoms (F = 4.30, p = 0.04), but not two-month depressive symptoms. Conclusion Intrapartum oxytocin exposure was associated with lower exclusive breastfeeding after vaginal delivery and modestly higher childbirth-related distress after unscheduled cesarean delivery. These findings suggest that oxytocin exposure may mark or contribute to postpartum vulnerability in specific delivery contexts.

11.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Hermite trace polynomials and chaos decompositions for the Hermitian Brownian motion

arXiv:2207.13180v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: For a non-zero parameter $q$, we define Hermite trace polynomials, which are multivariate polynomials indexed by permutations. We prove several combinatorial properties for them, such as expansions and product formulas. The linear functional determined by these trace polynomials is a state for $q = \frac{1}{N}$ for $N$ a non-zero integer. For such $q$, Hermite trace polynomials of different degrees are orthogonal. The product formulas extend to the closure with respect to the state. The state can be identified with the expectation induced by the $N \times N$ Hermitian Brownian motion. Hermite trace polynomials are martingales for this Brownian motion, while the elements in the closure can be interpreted as stochastic integrals with respect to it. Using the grading on the algebra, we prove several chaos decompositions for such integrals, as well as analyze corresponding creation and annihilation operators. In the univariate, pure trace polynomial case, trace Hermite polynomials can be identified with the Hermite polynomials of matrix argument.

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

Learning with a Single Rollout via Monte Carlo Pass@k Critic

arXiv:2606.25451v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Estimating token-level advantages in reinforcement learning (RL) for language models remains challenging because scaling up episodic experience collection is expensive. The difficulty intensifies for baseline advantage estimation methods, where repeated sampling causes trajectories to diverge into substantially different reasoning prefixes. In this context, RL algorithms such as GRPO prove limited: an outcome reward is too sparse to be attributed to specific actions like intermediate steps, and comparisons across sampled traces are non-trivial because they are heterogeneous. To mitigate both the computational cost of repeated sampling and the difficulty of credit assignment, we study single-rollout proximal policy optimization (SR-PPO) featuring token-level credit assignment in RL for language models. Instead of estimating advantages by normalizing episodic returns within the candidate group, we train a calibrated token-level credit critic using Monte Carlo outcomes from one rollout per prompt. Specifically, we use the critic to predict the Pass@k success probability at the prompt prefix, which is derived from a Pass@1 attempt. This choice yields a more selective learning signal than Pass@1: it discounts easily solved prefixes while prioritizing hard ones whose success probability remains marginal. We show that as $k$ increases, Pass@k converges to a reachability indicator, reflecting whether a prefix can lead to at least one successful continuation. In an explicit state graph, the limit ($k \rightarrow \infty$) can be computed in $O(|V|+|E|)$ time, offering a promising surrogate for direct credit assignment without the need to sample contrastive traces. As an initial validation, SR-PPO exhibits stable learning dynamics, along with consistent gains in Pass@128 success rates on mathematical reasoning benchmarks such as HMMT26 and AIME24.

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

Acquisition state behaves as a structured, measurable variable governing lung-nodule AI: kernel-driven measurement instability and noise-driven detection fragility, invisible to DICOM metadata

AI governance for medical imaging is formalizing: the 2026 ACR-SIIM Practice Parameter recommends local acceptance testing and ongoing drift monitoring, and the ACR Assess-AI registry monitors AI outputs using DICOM metadata for context. We argue that a necessary, currently unmonitored layer sits beneath output metrics: whether incoming studies remain within the acquisition envelope a model was validated on. Using a LUNA16-trained MONAI RetinaNet lung-nodule detector, we test whether acquisition state behaves as a structured, measurable variable. On real paired CT differing only in reconstruction kernel (NLST B30f vs B80f), kernel alone shifted AI-measured diameter and flipped a Fleischner size category in 5.2% (8 of 155) of nodules at fixed patient and acquisition, while detection confidence was unchanged (Wilcoxon p=0.22). Under controlled LIDC-IDRI perturbations the effects dissociated by axis: the noise axis degraded detection confidence (p=5.9e-32, concentrated in nodules under 6 mm) but not measurement, while the frequency/kernel axis corrupted measurement (p=8.6e-13) but not detection. A 4-feature pixel fingerprint recovered reconstruction identity (patient-level AUC about 0.95 on real CT, 0.995 on a QIBA phantom) where the ConvolutionKernel DICOM tag was uninformative (identical labels across reconstructions). The kernel axis transported across four manufacturers (leave-one-vendor-out AUC 0.94-0.98, matching the within-vendor ceiling). Acquisition state thus maps to distinct AI failure modes, frequency content to measurement reliability and noise to detection sensitivity, and is not recoverable from metadata. Acquisition-aware, input-side validation is the missing layer for the acceptance-testing and drift-monitoring requirements now entering imaging-AI accreditation.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Delta-Based Target Reformulation for Short-Term Electricity Load Forecasting Using LSTM and Transformer Models

Authors:

arXiv:2606.17692v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate short-term electricity load forecasting is critical for the reliable and economic operation of modern power systems, under non-stationarity arising from weather variability, calendar effects, and evolving consumption patterns. While deep learning models such as LSTMs and Transformers show promising performance, most existing studies focus on direct absolute load prediction without explicitly addressing target non-stationarity. Motivated by classical time-series differencing techniques in ARIMA models, this paper investigates a delta-based target reformulation for short-term electricity load forecasting using deep learning. Instead of directly predicting absolute load values, the proposed formulation trains models to predict the change in load between consecutive time steps, with final forecasts reconstructed using the last observed load. This aims to stabilize the learning target and reduce forecasting difficulty. Using multi-year, hourly real-world electricity load data from India, augmented with meteorological variables from the NASA POWER project and calendar features, this study evaluates LSTM and Transformer models under both formulations, benchmarking them against LightGBM. Experiments are conducted for hour-ahead and day-ahead horizons, assessing performance via Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE). Results show that delta-based reformulation consistently improves forecasting accuracy for hour-ahead prediction across all evaluated models, yielding MAPE reductions of over 50% compared to absolute formulations. For day-ahead forecasting, delta targets specifically benefit deep sequence models (LSTM and Transformer), while LightGBM remains competitive under the absolute formulation. These findings indicate that while delta reformulation is a powerful inductive bias for neural networks, its efficacy is model- and horizon-dependent.

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

EpiBench: Verifiable Evaluation of AI Agents on Epigenomics Analysis

arXiv:2606.13602v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce EpiBench, a verifiable benchmark for short-horizon epigenomics analysis. EpiBench evaluates whether agents can make well-defined analysis decisions from realistic workflow states and return deterministically gradable answers. The benchmark includes 106 evaluations across CUT\&Tag/CUT\&RUN, ATAC-seq, ChIP-seq, and DNA methylation workflows. Across 5,088 valid trajectories from 16 model-harness pairs, no system passed a majority of attempts: GPT-5.5 / Pi led at 45.0\% (143/318 attempts; 95\% confidence interval (CI), 36.3–53.7), followed by GPT-5.5 / OpenAI Codex at 39.9\% (127/318 attempts; 95\% CI, 31.6–48.3). Claude Opus 4.8 Max / Pi and GPT-5.4 / Pi each passed 39.0\% (124/318 attempts; 95\% CI, 30.2–47.8 and 31.0–47.0, respectively). Performance varies across assay types, and many failed runs still contain parts of the correct answer. Agents often found the right files and computed useful intermediate results, but failed when the task required deeper, assay-specific scientific judgment.

16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

ClawEnvKit: Automatic Environment Generation for Claw-Like Agents

Constructing environments for training and evaluating claw-like agents remains a manual, human-intensive process that does not scale. We argue that what is needed is not just a dataset, but an automated pipeline capable of generating diverse, verified environments on demand. To this end, we introduce ClawEnvKit, an autonomous generation pipeline that instantiates this formalism from natural language descriptions. The pipeline comprises three modules: (1) a parser that extracts structured generation parameters from natural language input; (2) a generator that produces the task specification, tool interface, and scoring configuration; and (3) a validator that enforces feasibility, diversity, structural validity, and internal consistency across the generated environments. Using ClawEnvKit, we construct Auto-ClawEval, the first large-scale benchmark for claw-like agents, comprising 1,040 environments across 24 categories. Empirically, Auto-ClawEval matches or exceeds human-curated environments on coherence and clarity at 13,800x lower cost. Evaluated across 4 model families and 8 agent harness frameworks, we find that harness engineering boosts performance by up to 15.7 percentage points over a bare ReAct baseline, completion remains the primary axis of variation with no model saturating the benchmark, and automated generation enables evaluation at a scale previously infeasible. Beyond static benchmarking, ClawEnvKit enables live evaluation: users describe a desired capability in natural language and obtain a verified environment on demand, turning evaluation into a continuous, user-driven process. The same mechanism serves as an on-demand training environment generator, producing task distributions that adapt to an agent's current weaknesses rather than being bounded by existing user logs.

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

One Transit Is All You Need: Detecting Exoplanets Through Learned Stellar Behaviour with EXOVEIL

arXiv:2606.02778v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: I present EXOVEIL, a transit detection system that learns what a star's brightness should look like and flags when reality disagrees. Unlike existing systems that require phase-folded input, EXOVEIL operates on raw flux time series and can detect planets that transit only once.A Transformer world model, trained on 16,499 Kepler light curves with transit-masked self-supervised learning, predicts expected stellar flux. A matched-filter detector with variance weighting extracts transit signals from the prediction residuals. A learned classifier (XGBoost) separates planets from false positives, achieving AUC 0.938 on Kepler DR25. Applied to single-transit injection-recovery, EXOVEIL recovers 32% of transits at 1000 ppm depth a task where all classification-based systems score 0% by construction. A blind search of 3,737 Kepler stars yields 179 new transit-like signals not present in the DR25 TCE catalogue, including 46 monotransit candidates. Applied withoutretraining to 47 confirmed TESS planets in the PLATO LOPS2 field, EXOVEIL achieves 100% recovery, demonstrating zero-shot cross-mission transfer. At PLATO's 25-second cadence, detection reaches 100 ppm – approaching the Earth-analog regime. I provide the first application of conformal prediction to transit detection (95.9% empirical coverage) and release the system as pip install exoveil with pretrained weights and a candidate catalogue.

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

Fast Speech Foundation Model Distillation Using Interleaved Stacking

Distilling a large speech foundation model (SFM) into an efficient student model has been successfully applied to low-resource environments. Although distillation reduces inference latency, it requires an additional student model training. However, the training efficiency of SFM distillation remains underexplored. In this work, we explore training acceleration of SFM distillation to speed up model deployment. We examine the potential of stacking, in which the model depth is progressively increased through training until the target model depth is reached. While existing stacking methods improve training speed, they suffer from performance degradation. To handle this limitation, we propose interleaved stacking, a novel stacking method that consistently preserves layer position throughout the stacking process. This property is particularly critical in SFMs, in which each layer encodes distinct layer-specific knowledge. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed method on SUPERB.

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

Polyp-D2ATL: Deep Domain-Adaptive Transfer Learning for Colorectal Polyp Classification under Label Distribution Shift

Early and highly accurate prediction of colorectal polyps, as an important sign of one of the most dangerous types of cancer, will result in saving more lives. Despite the advancements in colorectal polyp classification, many challenges remain in obtaining an automated polyp prediction system that is able to diagnose the difficult-to-predict polyps accompanied by different features in real scenarios, where the model can handle imbalanced data, label distribution shift, and cross-modality generalization successfully. In this study, we propose Polyp-D2ATL, a novel framework accompanied by a specific training strategy, which mitigates these limitations and effectively predicts the different classes of polyps belonging to the NICE classification. Our extensive experiments on the PICCOLO validation and test sets demonstrate that the proposed Polyp-D2ATL significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art models across various reliable metrics, achieving an accuracy of 82.38%, a Macro-F1 of 77.49%, and a specificity of 87.47% on the validation set, alongside consistent improvements on the held-out test set which demonstrates the generalization capacity and clinical applicability of the proposed approach.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Realistic noise synthesis reduces bias and improves tissue microstructure estimation with supervised machine learning

arXiv:2606.02044v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion MRI enables non-invasive probing of tissue microstructure, but accurate parameter estimation is challenged by noise-related effects. In supervised machine learning frameworks trained on simulated data, discrepancies between the noise characteristics of simulated and acquired signals introduce a form of covariate shift, whereby the input signal distribution differs between training and inference. We investigated the impact of this mismatch on microstructure parameter estimation and propose a realistic noise synthesis (RNS) framework to mitigate it. RNS incorporates both the Rician expectation and the effective post-processing noise variance into simulated training signals. The Rician expectation was modelled using a noise standard deviation estimated with MPPCA, while the effective standard deviation was derived from spherical harmonic residuals of preprocessed data. The method was evaluated using the cylinder-zeppelin and the SANDI models on simulated datasets across multiple SNR levels and on in vivo diffusion data with repeated acquisitions. Sensitivity to noise misestimation was also assessed. Ignoring magnitude-induced noise effects during training produced systematic, SNR-dependent parameter bias, particularly at low SNR. Incorporating the Rician expectation substantially reduced bias to the level of noise-aware nonlinear least-squares fitting. Modelling the effective standard deviation further improved precision. Performance was largely independent of regression architecture but sensitive to accurate noise estimation. These findings demonstrate that realistic noise modelling in simulated training data mitigates signal-domain covariate shift and is essential for unbiased supervised microstructure estimation, particularly in low-SNR regimes associated with high b-values or high spatial resolution.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Differential Unfolding: Efficient Unfolding Reconstruction for Video Snapshot Compressive Imaging

While Deep Unfolding Networks (DUNs) dominate video Snapshot Compressive Imaging (SCI), they remain constrained by a uniform design philosophy. Existing methods repeatedly stack high-complexity priors with identical structures, ignoring the fact that optimization trajectories converge toward static states. This results in representation stagnation, where high-cost computations are wasted on minimal feature updates. To address this inefficiency, we present Differential Unfolding (DU), a heterogeneous framework that replaces uniform repetition with dynamic evolution. Central to DU is the Differential Evolutionary Framework (DEF), which partitions the unfolding process into two complementary roles: structural anchoring and differential evolution. In this scheme, high-parameter general stages are sparsely deployed to generate high-fidelity feature foundations. Complementing these, lightweight differential stages employ a Differential Representation Prior (DRP) to propagate and refine these foundational features through a differential mechanism. By integrating Differential Representation Attention (DRA) for evolving attention maps and a Differential Modulated FFN (DM-FFN) for feature rectification, DRP effectively models cross-stage variations with minimal overhead. By focusing computational resources on dynamic evolution rather than static redundancy, DU achieves a superior trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. Extensive experiments verify that our method establishes new state-of-the-art results while significantly slashing computational overhead. https://github.com/Muyuan-Zhang/DU

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

SAFARI: Scaling Long Horizon Agentic Fault Attribution via Active Investigation

arXiv:2606.24626v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As autonomous agents tackle increasingly complex multi-step, multi-agent tasks, their execution trajectories have scaled beyond the constraints of even the largest context windows. Current methods for effectively diagnosing agent failures load the full trajectory into an LLM's context window, which suffers from attention dilution and fails when agentic traces inevitably exceed context limits. To address this, we introduce SAFARI (Scaling long-horizon Agentic Fault AttRibution via active Investigation), a framework that replaces linear context loading with a tool-augmented diagnostic loop. By equipping LLMs with a specialized toolbox to read and search trajectory segments alongside a persistent Short-Term Memory (STM) for cross-turn reasoning, SAFARI effectively decouples diagnostic accuracy from architectural context limits. Our experiments demonstrate that SAFARI outperforms state-of-the-art results by 20% on the Who&When dataset within a 1M token budget, and by 19% on TRAIL GAIA subset on a 25K token budget. Most significantly, SAFARI maintains a 0.58 precision even when the target fault resides 5x beyond the model's native context window, a scenario where traditional evaluators fail entirely.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Geometric and Quantum Kernel Methods for Predicting Skeletal Muscle Outcomes in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

arXiv:2601.00921v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) affects hundreds of millions of people worldwide, and skeletal-muscle dysfunction is clinically important. Quantum machine learning is increasingly explored for biomedical prediction, but its value in small biomarker cohorts requires benchmarking against strong classical baselines. We analysed a cigarette-smoke COPD cohort of 213 animals with blood and bronchoalveolar-lavage biomarkers to predict tibialis anterior muscle weight, muscle quality, and force. We developed a kernel-geometric quantum hybrid method in which synthetic symmetric positive definite (SPD) references are mapped through a reproducing kernel Hilbert space, compressed using train-only random projection, normalised, and supplied to low-dimensional quantum regression circuits. We benchmarked this approach against classical ridge/kernel models, SPD relational representations, and quantum-kernel regression (QKR). All methods were evaluated using condition-stratified repeated cross-validation. The largest numerical improvement was observed for muscle weight, where the proposed method had the numerically lowest mean root mean squared error (RMSE), approximately 1.8% below the best classical comparator; paired fold-level testing did not establish statistically significant superiority after Holm adjustment, but the endpoint is biologically meaningful. The method also had the numerically lowest mean RMSE for muscle quality. For force, biomarker-only Ridge performed best, suggesting a more linear endpoint structure.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

EmoMind: Decoding Affective Captions from Human Brain fMRI

Decoding visual experience from brain activity has advanced substantially, but current brain-to-text systems largely recover semantic content while discarding affect. Additionally, language models can generate emotional text when prompted with categorical labels, but such labels collapse rich inter-subject variability into coarse discrete bins. We present EmoMind, the first end-to-end pipeline for decoding affective captions directly from fMRI signals. EmoMind first retrieves a semantically grounded neutral scene description from brain-decoded visual features, then rewrites it using a continuous 34-dimensional emotion vector decoded from the same fMRI recording. To control the balance between content preservation and affective expression, we train the rewriter with classifier-free guidance against an identity-preserving null branch, enabling smooth interpolation between semantic fidelity and affective expressivity. We evaluate affective caption generation with a three-axis validation framework spanning subject-specificity, structural geometry, and causal control. We further augment this framework with a synthetic-brain substitution test that probes robustness to the measurement apparatus, and we benchmark each axis against GPT-4 prompted with brain-decoded top-5 emotion labels as a strong discrete baseline. Across two independent emotion fMRI datasets, EmoMind significantly outperforms label-prompted GPT-4 on all three axes, with the largest gains on metrics that require person-specific affective structure rather than population-level emotion aggregation. These results establish continuous brain-decoded affect as a viable control signal for individualized affective caption generation and open new directions for studying individual affective brain organisation.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

TS-ICL: A Flexible Time-Indexed Foundation Model for Time Series via In-Context Learning

arXiv:2606.05878v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Foundation models mark a profound paradigm shift in time series modeling, with task-specific models being superseded by general-purpose zero-shot models. Yet, current approaches primarily focus on forecasting, while real-world time series are often irregularly and partially observed, requiring models that can jointly forecast, impute missing values, and handle degraded sampling conditions. To address these challenges, we introduce TS-ICL, a novel probabilistic In-Context Learning encoder–regressor Transformer that unifies forecasting and imputation. TS-ICL formulates time series tasks as timestamp-aligned regression and naturally incorporates covariates by training on synthetic dependency structures generated from a novel causal data prior. Empirically, TS-ICL achieves a new state-of-the-art in imputation, while remaining competitive with leading forecasting foundation models across both univariate and covariate-aware benchmarks. It shows particularly strong performance in forecasting with partially observed look-back windows.