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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantum Global Variational Learning for Quantum Error Correction

arXiv:2606.08592v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Efficient quantum error correction is essential for the advancement of quantum computing. We propose a quantum neural network with a global structure that reduces the number of unitary matrices required in quantum circuits. This approach resulted in a 97% reduction in training time and up to a 25% improvement in the training completion rate, ultimately achieving a 100% success rate in training while surpassing the error correction performance reported in previous studies. In addition, we demonstrated the enhanced robustness of quantum error correction against internal network noise. Moreover, the fidelity of quantum error correction under internal network noise increased by up to 15% due to the reduced computational load.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

MASCOT-Android: A Curated Dataset and Automated Collection Pipeline for Android Malware Source Code Specimens

arXiv:2606.16072v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Compared with binaries and decompiled code, malware source code more directly reflects the attackers' original intent. However, the scarcity of source code and the high cost of manual review make such datasets difficult to build and maintain. We propose MASCOT-Android, a curated dataset of Android malware source code and an automated collection framework for scalable malware source code discovery on GitHub. A key finding of our work is that repository-level documentation alone provides a strong signal for malware source code collection. Our model extracts character-level TF-IDF features from 8,772 malware and 25,747 benign README documents and trains a LinearSVC classifier to distinguish malware repositories. This README-only model achieves an accuracy of 96.28\% and an FPR of 1.06\% in local evaluation. In addition, the model outputs confidence scores, allowing users to adjust the decision threshold to balance FPR and coverage, which is practical in real-world malware source code collection.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

How Auxiliary Reasoning Unleashes GUI Grounding in VLMs

Graphical user interface (GUI) grounding is a fundamental task for building GUI agents. However, general vision-language models (VLMs) struggle with this task due to a lack of specific optimization. We identify a key gap in this paper: while VLMs exhibit significant latent grounding potential, as demonstrated by their performance measured by Pointing Game, they underperform when tasked with outputting explicit coordinates. To address this discrepancy and bypass the high data and annotation costs of current fine-tuning approaches, we propose three zero-shot auxiliary reasoning methods. By providing explicit spatial cues such as axes, grids and labeled intersections as part of the input image, these methods enable VLMs to better articulate their implicit spatial understanding capabilities. We evaluate these methods on four GUI grounding benchmarks across seven open-source and proprietary VLMs. Experimental results show substantial gains from auxiliary reasoning. Mark-Grid Scaffold boosts Gemini-3.1-Pro from 11.72\% under direct inference to 95.20\% on ScreenSpot-v2, achieves state-of-the-art performance on ScreenSpot, and approaches the strongest fine-tuned methods on ScreenSpot-v2 and UI-I2E-Bench. Our code is available at https://github.com/liweim/AuxiliaryReasoning.

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

ModTGCN: Modularity-aware Graph Neural Networks for Text Classification

Graph-based text classification models typically rely on local neighborhood aggregation and overlook global community structure, despite semantic document graphs exhibiting strong class-consistent clustering. Ignoring this can blur class boundaries and lead to over-smoothing. We propose ModTGCN, a modularity-aware graph neural network for text classification that jointly optimizes cross-entropy and a modularity-based auxiliary objective to promote class-coherent document communities while preserving discriminative representations. The modularity term is computed on a document-document similarity graph derived from transformer embeddings (pretrained or fine-tuned). To improve scalability, we decouple the original heterogeneous TextGCN graph into separate document-word and word-word components, achieving 2x-10x faster training. We further study graph construction strategies, label-aware edge reweighting, and supervision choices for modularity optimization. Experiments on five benchmarks show consistent gains, with larger improvements on complex, low homophily datasets such as Ohsumed and 20NG.

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

Towards End-to-End Automation of AI Research

arXiv:2606.15497v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The automation of science is a long-standing ambition in the field of AI. While the community has made significant progress in automating individual components of the scientific process, a system that autonomously navigates the entire research lifecycle – from conception to publication – has remained out of reach. Here, we present the strongest demonstration to date toward automating the entire process end-to-end. We present The AI Scientist, which creates research ideas, writes code, runs experiments, plots and analyzes data, writes the entire scientific manuscript and performs its own peer review. Its ideas, execution, and presentation are of sufficient quality to produce a manuscript generated by an AI system that passes the first round of peer review at a major machine learning conference workshop. The workshop has an acceptance rate of 70 percent. Our system leverages modern foundation models within a complex agentic system. We evaluate The AI Scientist in two settings: a focused mode using human-provided code templates as an initial scaffold to conduct research on a specific topic, and a template-free, open-ended mode that leverages agentic search for wider scientific exploration. Both settings produce diverse ideas and automatically test, report on, and evaluate them. This achievement demonstrates AI's growing capacity for scientific contribution and signifies a potential paradigm shift in how research is conducted. As with any impactful new technology, there could be significant risks, including taxing overwhelmed review systems and adding noise to scientific literature. However, if developed responsibly, such autonomous systems could greatly accelerate scientific discovery.

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

Plug-and-Play image restoration with Stochastic deNOising REgularization

Plug-and-Play (PnP) algorithms are a class of iterative algorithms that address image inverse problems by combining a physical model and a deep neural network for regularization. Even if they produce impressive image restoration results, these algorithms rely on a non-standard use of a denoiser on images that are less and less noisy along the iterations, which contrasts with recent algorithms based on Diffusion Models (DM), where the denoiser is applied only on re-noised images. We propose a new PnP framework, called Stochastic deNOising REgularization (SNORE), which applies the denoiser only on images with noise of the adequate level. It is based on an explicit stochastic regularization, which leads to a stochastic gradient descent algorithm to solve ill-posed inverse problems. A convergence analysis of this algorithm and its annealing extension is provided. Experimentally, we prove that SNORE is competitive with respect to state-of-the-art methods on deblurring and inpainting tasks, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Steady-State Noise Signatures of Lindbladian Exceptional Points

arXiv:2606.13377v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Exceptional points (EPs) are non-Hermitian degeneracies at which two or more eigenvalues and their corresponding eigenvectors coalesce. In open quantum systems, exceptional points can arise in the Lindbladian governing the dissipative dynamics. Their signatures have so far been mainly identified in finite-time observables, such as transient currents, while steady-state average currents generally provide no direct evidence of the underlying exceptional-point structure. In this work, we demonstrate that signatures of Lindbladian EPs can nevertheless be accessed in the steady-state regime through current noise. We derive general expressions for current correlation functions within a Lindblad master-equation framework and show, in particular, how exceptional points affect their behaviour as a function of the time delay. We illustrate these results with the paradigmatic example of two interacting qubits coupled to two reservoirs, where the steady-state noise clearly distinguishes overdamped, underdamped, and critical regimes. Our results establish current correlation functions as a steady-state probe of Lindbladian EPs in open quantum systems.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

When Rules Learn: A Self-Evolving Agent for Legal Case Retrieval

arXiv:2606.17220v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Legal case retrieval remains challenging due to the complexity of legal language and the need for precise lexical alignment between queries and relevant cases. Although dense retrieval models have achieved notable progress, empirical studies show that BM25 continues to serve as a strong baseline in this domain. It motivates us to propose a self-evolving framework for rule-driven query rewriting that enhances BM25 without any parameter training. The framework equips an LLM-based agent with an automatic evaluation environment, enabling it to iteratively create rewriting rules, plan validation experiments over rule combinations, and eliminate ineffective rules based on historical feedbacks. We evaluate our method on the Chinese legal case retrieval benchmark LeCaRD-v2. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms non-evolutionary baselines, including human-designed rules and greedy rule selection, particularly when powered by a highcapacity core LLM. We also conduct detailed analyses to investigate the mechanisms underlying self-evolution. Our findings reveal that LLM's capabilities to leverage previous experimental results and its intrinsic knowledge of rule elimination play critical roles in refining the rule set via self-evolution.

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

Toward Training-Free Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection in 3D Medical Images: A Batch-Based Approach Using 2D Foundation Models

Authors:

Zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) is attractive for medical imaging because clinical systems must handle heterogeneous acquisition protocols, changing patient populations, and pathologies for which annotated training data may be unavailable. Most existing zero-shot anomaly detection methods are designed for 2D images, and their direct extension to 3D medical volumes is limited by the scarcity of large-scale volumetric foundation models or by the difficulty of utilizing volumetric context. We propose CS3F, a training-free batch-based framework for ZSAD in 3D medical images using 2D foundation models. Each volume is decomposed along multiple anatomical axes and encoded slice-wise by a 2D vision transformer. These are then converted into localized volumetric tokens by pooling neighboring slice features. Anomaly scores are obtained from cross-subject mutual similarity: tokens that lack close analogues in other subjects are assigned higher anomaly scores. To reduce the attenuation of focal lesion signals caused by depth pooling, we introduce a coarse-to-fine tokenization strategy that enables fine-resolution volumetric scoring without exhaustive matching. CS3F is evaluated on brain MRI across metastases, glioma, and stroke, as well as validated on lung CT to test generalizability beyond atlas-aligned brain MRI. The results show that frozen 2D foundation models can support anomaly localization in 3D medical images, and that the benefit of fine tokenization depends strongly on lesion contrast and imaging modality.

11.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-22

Isotopic evidence for a cold and distant origin of 3I/ATLAS

Interstellar objects provide the only directly observable samples of icy planetesimals formed around other stars, and can therefore provide insight into the diversity of physical and chemical conditions occurring during exoplanet formation1−3. Here we report isotopic measurements of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, which reveal an elemental composition unlike any Solar System body. The water in 3I/ATLAS is enriched in deuterium, at a level of D/H = (0.98 ± 0.06)%, which is more than an order of magnitude higher than in known comets, while its range of 12C/13C ratios (141–191 for CO2 and 123–172 for CO) exceeds typical values found in the Solar System, as well as nearby interstellar clouds and protoplanetary disks. Such extreme isotopic signatures indicate formation at temperatures  ≲ 30 K in a relatively metal-poor environment. When interpreted with respect to models for Galactic chemical evolution, the carbon isotopic composition implies that 3I/ATLAS may have accreted as long ago as 12 billion years, following a period of intense, early star formation. 3I/ATLAS thus represents a preserved fragment of an ancient planetary system.

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

Similarity-based representation factorization for revealing interpretable dimensions in representational data

The study of representations is widespread across fields, including neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence. While representations are often studied and compared through similarities between stimuli, current methods provide only limited access to the dimensions that shape these representations and are often limited in interpretability. To overcome these challenges, here we introduce Similarity-Based Representation Factorization (SRF), a general computational method for recovering low-dimensional, non-negative, interpretable embeddings from similarity matrices derived from measured data. Across simulations and many neural, behavioral, and computational datasets, SRF recovers interpretable dimensions from diverse forms of representational data, even for very sparsely sampled, incomplete data. The dimensions derived from these datasets match those obtained by task-specific models, predict independent behavioral properties, improve exploratory analysis, and offer higher power for confirmatory hypothesis testing than comparing similarity matrices. Together, these results establish SRF as a general-purpose method with broad applications for uncovering, understanding, and using the dimensions underlying representations.

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

Contextual Invertible World Models: A Neuro-Symbolic Agentic Framework for Colorectal Cancer Drug Response

arXiv:2603.02274v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Precision oncology is currently limited by the small-N, large-P paradox, where high-dimensional genomic data is abundant but pharmacological response samples are sparse. While deep learning achieves predictive accuracy, it frequently fails to provide the mechanistic clarity required for clinical adoption. We present the Contextual Invertible World Model (CIWM), a Neuro-Symbolic Agentic Framework that bridges this gap by integrating a quantitative machine learning emulator with a Large Language Model reasoning layer. Utilising a stringently curated, high-fidelity data engineering pipeline on the Sanger GDSC dataset (\( N=83 \)), we isolate true biological signals from in vitro artifacts to establish a rigorous baseline predictive correlation for complex transcriptomics (\( r=0.268 \)). Through Inverse Reasoning, we perform in silico CRISPR perturbations across the colorectal landscape. The framework autonomously overturns classical mechanistic assumptions, identifying a hierarchical dominance of mutant KRAS over the APC/Wnt-axis in driving 5-fluorouracil resistance (\( \Delta=-0.0469 \)) via a "KRAS Shield" mapped to MAPK/PI3K networks. Furthermore, the agentic layer identified a "PIK3CA Paradox", revealing that repairing PIK3CA inadvertently increases chemoresistance (\( \Delta=+0.0085 \)) by triggering a compensatory feedback loop that hyperactivates the dominant MAPK survival pathway.

14.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-21

Expanding the GUSome: Structure-guided identification and characterization of gut microbial β-glucuronidases

The gut microbiome-encoded {beta}-glucuronidase (GUS) enzymes have a significant effect on human physiology through their deglucuronidation activity on endogenous and exogenous glucuronides. GUS activity also significantly influences the pharmacokinetics, efficacy and toxicity of various drugs including chemotherapeutic drugs. Given their crucial role in drug metabolism, GUS enzymes have emerged as promising targets for therapeutic intervention. Here, we have identified and characterized 79 unique GUS enzymes through a structure-guided approach. Structural modelling of these GUS enzymes revealed a conserved core and active-site residues with significant variations in the number and nature of the C-terminal domains. A new classification system based on the number and type of additional C-terminal domains is presented for the GUS proteins. Further, GUS enzymes have been categorized into different loop categories linked to their substrate preferences. The relationship between domain architecture and loop-type is explored by sequence similarity network analysis. We could successfully express, purify and validate GUS processing capability of a panel of identified GUS proteins. The nature of oligomer organization has been deciphered by SEC and DLS studies. Further, we have identified additional GUS enzymes capable of processing SN-38G, glucuronidated form of anticancer drug, irinotecan. These newly identified GUS enzymes will offer valuable insights into gut microbial GUS diversity and their role in understanding the population-specific drug-induced adverse effects on human health.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Do Safety Monitors Stay Reliable After an Update? Benchmarking and Predicting Activation-Monitor Staleness

Authors:

Activation monitors-lightweight probes trained on a language model's internal representations-are an increasingly common layer in deployment safety stacks. Deployed models however are rarely static: they are quantized, fine-tuned, adapted with LoRA, or served with merged adapters while the monitor remains frozen. We present the first systematic test of whether this implicit contract holds: whether activation monitors trained on a base model remain reliable after these routine model updates. Across multiple safety-relevant monitors, model depths, update families, and open-weight models, we find a sharp split: quantization-style updates largely preserve frozen probe performance, while fine-tuning-style updates frequently make probes stale. Fragility is highly monitor-dependent, with privacy/PII probes most affected and refusal-compliance probes comparatively stable, showing that retraining a behavior need not stale its corresponding monitor. QLoRA is especially damaging despite NF4 quantization alone being relatively benign, suggesting that quantization becomes riskier when combined with adaptation. We further show that degradation is predictable from pre-deployment features, enabling revalidation budgets to be triaged toward the monitors most likely to fail. These results suggest that fine-tuning should trigger activation-monitor revalidation by default, while prediction can help prioritize which monitors to check first.

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

SCAN: Enhance Time Series Anomaly Detection via Multi-Scale Neighborhood-Centered Clustering

arXiv:2606.19255v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time series anomaly detection plays a crucial role in a wide range of real-world applications. Reconstruction-based methods have become the mainstream paradigm, but they suffer from over-generalization and under-generalization problems, which are challenging to balance. To address this, we introduce multi-scale clustering to enhance reconstruction-based methods. At the representation level, we integrate the cluster center representations of normal patterns to constrain the model to target representative normal patterns for reconstruction, preventing dominance of powerful capacity and representation capability. At the anomaly criterion level, we derive anomaly confidence score based on cluster membership probability and combine it with reconstruction error, providing dual criteria for detection. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the cluster center representations and anomaly confidence score depends on the clustering performance. Accordingly, we extract neighborhood-centered representations for multi-view clustering to improve clustering performance. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets from diverse application domains demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of SCAN.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Posterior Refinement: Fast Language Generation via Any-Order Flow Maps

Non-autoregressive generation offers a powerful paradigm for iterative refinement, allowing models to recursively critique, erase and regenerate arbitrary subsets of tokens. However, existing non-autoregressive models fail to realize this potential. Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) suffer from factorization error, causing sample quality to collapse when generating multiple tokens simultaneously. Flow Map Language Models (FMLMs) circumvent this bottleneck via joint sequence transport for excellent few-step generation, but sacrifice the inference-time flexibility of MDMs. We introduce FMLM+, a framework that bridges this gap by equipping FMLM with masking-style noise schedules. While generating the full sequence in a single step, FMLM+ simultaneously scores the global consistency of each token a posteriori. We leverage this to introduce Posterior Refinement, a novel inference-time refinement strategy that enables the model to adaptively self-correct its outputs, matching the performance of discrete baselines with 32x fewer NFEs. Across diverse benchmarks, we demonstrate that FMLM+ with Posterior Refinement improves the speed–quality tradeoff over both MDM and FMLM families, providing a scalable foundation for high-fidelity language modeling.

18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

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

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

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Loss-Shift Transfer via Bayes Quotients

arXiv:2606.13178v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transfer learning is usually studied as a consequence of distribution shift. This paper identifies an orthogonal failure mode in which the data distribution is fixed and the loss changes. This setting is called loss shift. A loss determines which information in \(X\) is Bayes-relevant, and two losses may therefore require different representations even under the same joint law \(P(X,Y)\). The idea is formalized using Bayes quotients, which allow losses to be ordered by refinement. In the Bayes-quotient formulation, strict refinement gives an immediate qualitative obstruction. A source-minimal representation for a coarser loss is insufficient for a strictly finer target loss. For finite-output log loss, this obstruction becomes an exact quantitative identity. The excess risk is the conditional information about \(Y\) discarded by the representation. Experiments in controlled, learned, synthetic-image, and real-image settings show the predicted effect, i.e., classification-equivalent representations can have different optimal log-loss performance under a fixed data distribution.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

A Novel Correction Method for QT Interval in the Presence of Left Bundle Branch Block Morphology

Background Accurate assessment of the QT interval is challenging in the presence of QRS prolongation, such as during ventricular pacing or bundle branch block. Current correction methods are heterogeneous and lack consensus. To evaluate the relationship between QRS duration and QT interval during ventricular pacing and to develop a practical correction method for QT assessment. Methods In this prospective single-centre study, 94 patients undergoing electrophysiology study for supraventricular tachycardia were included. Standardised pacing was performed at the same cycle length from the right ventricular (RV) apex, high output and low output pacing from His catheter, and coronary sinus (reference). QRS and QT intervals were measured from 12-lead ECGs. Changes in QT (QT) and QRS duration (QRS) were analysed using linear regression and mixed-effects modelling. QT correction formulas of the form QT corrected = QT N x QRS were evaluated using Bland-Altman analysis across multiple coefficients. Results A significant positive correlation between QRS and QT was observed across all pacing sites (r = 0.52-0.74, p < 0.001). In mixed-effects modelling, QRS was a strong independent predictor of QT (0.59, p < 0.001), with no significant interaction between pacing site and QRS, supporting a consistent relationship across pacing locations. Bland-Altman analysis demonstrated that correction coefficients of 0.65-0.70 minimised systematic bias compared with lower coefficients, with similar precision across models (SD 16 ms) and no evidence of proportional bias. A coefficient of 0.65 provided the most balanced performance between bias and variability. Conclusion QT prolongation during ventricular pacing is primarily driven by QRS widening and follows a consistent linear relationship across pacing sites. A simple correction using QT corrected = QT 0.65 x (QRS 100 ms) provides a practical and accurate method for QT assessment, with potential clinical applicability in patients with conduction abnormalities or ventricular pacing.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

LLM-Powered Virtual Population for Demand Simulation and Pricing

We develop an LLM-powered virtual population model that simulates demand for pricing decisions, in settings where products are described by rich unstructured information, such as text descriptions and images, and where decision makers need not only mean-demand predictions but also uncertainty estimates for counterfactual prices. Our model represents exposed customers as draws from a finite mixture of customer personas. For each persona, product, and candidate price, an LLM elicits a persona-level purchase probability using both structured persona information and unstructured product information. These probabilities are aggregated through calibrated mixture weights to form a predictive distribution of aggregate demand. The resulting simulator can evaluate counterfactual prices under various pricing objectives, including expected revenue and risk-aware criteria such as conditional value at risk. We test the framework on an online H&M fashion dataset with product descriptions and images. The calibrated LLM-based simulator achieves the best overall predictive performance among the models considered, and supports sample-efficient pricing decisions. Our framework provides a practical way to use LLMs as demand simulators for products with limited historical demand data but rich product information. By producing a full predictive demand distribution rather than only a point forecast, it enables managers to compare candidate prices, quantify demand uncertainty, and choose prices that target either average-case revenue or risk-aware objectives.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Look Again Before You Abstain:Budgeted Conformal Evidence Acquisition for Reliable Vision-Language Model

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) hallucinate: they assert visual details that the image does not support. A principled remedy is selective prediction with a distribution-free guarantee-verify each claim and abstain when the claim is not grounded, so that the hallucination rate among asserted claims is provably bounded. We show, however, that this guarantee is bought at a brutal price: to keep the hallucination rate below $5\%$ on a balanced object-existence benchmark, a state-of-the-art conformal filter must abstain on more than $80\%$ of claims. We argue that abstention is wasteful when more visual evidence is cheaply available, and introduce Budgeted Conformal Evidence Acquisition (BCEA), which replaces the binary answer/abstain decision with a three-way choice: answer, abstain, or acquire additional visual evidence by re-examining the image (zooming, cropping, or applying a claim-specific intervention) under a bounded compute budget. We make two observations. First, acquisition that is plugged naively into a calibrated filter breaks the statistical guarantee – realized risk overshoots the target by up to $17$ points – because the acquisition step destroys the exchangeability that conformal calibration relies on. Second, folding the entire acquisition policy into the score function and re-calibrating on post-acquisition scores restores the finite-sample guarantee while still recovering coverage. BCEA further uses structured, claim-type-specific interventions. Across the POPE benchmark and COCO-constructed existence and spatial-relation claims, on four open VLMs, BCEA controls the hallucination rate at the target level and consistently improves coverage over a guaranteed-abstention baseline.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Closing the Approximation Gap in Simulation-free Latent SDEs

arXiv:2606.16138v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recovering dynamical systems from noisy observations is a recurring challenge across scientific domains, including neuroscience and physics. Latent stochastic differential equations (SDEs) address this by modeling the system as an unobserved state that evolves according to a learnable SDE and generates the observations. Variational inference (VI) provides a tractable objective for fitting latent SDEs. Traditional VI algorithms evaluate this objective by numerical simulation over a time discretization, trading fidelity for computational cost. A recent class of algorithms, simulation-free VI, sidesteps this tradeoff by parameterizing the posterior through its instantaneous marginals rather than its drift. In this work, we show that the efficiency of existing simulation-free VI algorithms comes at a price: their parameterizations restrict the approximate posterior to a subset of the SDEs available to simulation-based methods, degrading posterior inference and parameter learning. We propose Helmholtz-SDE, a simulation-free VI algorithm that closes this gap by optimizing over path laws compatible with a prescribed collection of marginals. Helmholtz-SDE recovers dynamics more faithfully than prior simulation-free methods, with the largest gains under high posterior uncertainty. It further matches the performance of simulation-based VI at a fraction of the runtime.

24.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

PhyloZoo: a unified framework for phylogenetic network analysis in Python

Authors:

Reticulate evolutionary processes (events in which lineages merge, such as hybridization, recombination, and horizontal gene transfer) are widespread across nature but cannot be represented by phylogenetic trees alone. Phylogenetic networks have therefore become an important modelling tool, yet existing software is typically tied to specific inference paradigms and provides limited support for working with multiple network representations in a unified and programmable environment. PhyloZoo is an open-source Python framework that lowers the barrier to developing practical, easy-to-use software for phylogenetic network analysis. It provides data structures and algorithms covering the main representations used in the field, together with dedicated visualization tools and robust I/O for all major phylogenetic file formats. A particular emphasis lies on semi-directed phylogenetic networks, which explicitly represent root uncertainty and have so far received limited support in existing software. By offering a shared foundation for developing interoperable tools and a combinatorial layer that supports computational proofs and theoretical exploration, PhyloZoo enables reproducible workflows for applied, methodological, and theoretical studies of reticulate evolution. Availability and implementation: PhyloZoo is implemented in Python and installable from PyPI, with source code, documentation, and examples available at https://github.com/nholtgrefe/phylozoo.

25.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Amplified Arctic iceberg traffic reshapes benthic biodiversity

The Arctic is undergoing rapid warming, resulting in retreating sea ice and glaciers1, yet how cryospheric changes propagate into the deep ocean remains poorly understood2. Here we identify a climate-driven mechanism linking accelerating glacier disintegration to an increase in deep-sea hard-bottom habitats far beyond calving fronts. Seafloor observations in Fram Strait show a localized increase in the density and patchiness of dropstones delivered by debris-laden icebergs. At the same time, four decades of shipboard records show that the occurrence of icebergs increased abruptly in the early 2000s. Backtracking links these icebergs to the main outlet glaciers in northeast Greenland and the Russian High Arctic. In northeast Greenland, the timing of glacier destabilization coincides with this rise, whereas sparse satellite coverage in the Russian sector limits temporal attribution despite indications of enhanced glacier activity. A model sensitivity study shows that, apart from intensified calving, a more dynamic sea ice cover enhances downstream transport of glacial ice. Along these pathways, increased iceberg activity could reshape deep-sea habitats through enhanced melt and associated lithogenic input, and elevate navigational hazards as maritime traffic expands in the Arctic. Although modest compared with the iceberg discharges of Pleistocene Heinrich events, this mechanism provides a modern analogue of long-range cryospheric influence on the seafloor in a warming climate. Accelerated Arctic glacier disintegration and a more dynamic sea ice cover are increasing iceberg-delivered dropstones in the deep ocean, reshaping seafloor habitats and extending cryospheric impacts far beyond glaciers.