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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

M-CTX: Exact and Scalable Spatial Context Retrieval for Trajectory Analytics

arXiv:2606.15244v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern trajectory predictors increasingly condition on external spatial context, such as map geometry, signed distance fields (SDFs), and nearby moving agents. While this context improves prediction quality, constructing it for every training anchor has become a hidden systems bottleneck. In a representative maritime AIS pipeline, spatial context construction requires roughly 17 CPU-days for a 5.48M-anchor corpus, dominating the cost of the downstream predictor. We present M-CTX, an exact and scalable spatial context-retrieval framework for trajectory analytics. M-CTX recasts context construction as an ingest-once, query-many spatial database workload and replaces three brute-force stages – OSM range retrieval, SDF computation, and moving-vessel neighbour lookup – with composable, index-backed operators. Its learned range-index backend, BR-LZ, provides recall-complete MBR-overlap range retrieval and reduces candidate amplification by 1.1x–2.7x relative to global-expansion one-curve baselines. Across four maritime regions, eight baseline systems, synthetic workloads with up to 40M spatial features, and 10^7-record AIS streams, M-CTX reproduces the reference context exactly. On the 5.48M-anchor corpus, it reduces context construction from about 17 CPU-days to 1.8 hours, a measured 226x end-to-end speed-up. An optional storage mode further compresses SDF context by 64x with only a 0.04 m ADE change. These results establish exact spatial context retrieval as a first-class database problem in modern trajectory analytics. Code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/mark000071/M-CTX-Traj.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Lower Complexity Bounds for Nonconvex-Strongly-Convex Bilevel Optimization with First-Order Oracles

Authors:

arXiv:2511.19656v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Although upper bound guarantees for bilevel optimization have been widely studied, progress on lower bounds has been limited due to the complexity of the bilevel structure. In this work, we focus on the smooth nonconvex-strongly-convex setting and develop new hard instances that yield nontrivial lower bounds under deterministic and stochastic first-order oracle models. In the deterministic case, we prove that any first-order zero-respecting algorithm requires at least $\Omega(\kappa^{3/2}\epsilon^{-2})$ oracle calls to find an $\epsilon$-accurate stationary point, improving the optimal lower bounds known for single-level nonconvex optimization and for nonconvex-strongly-convex min-max problems. In the stochastic case, we show that at least $\Omega(\kappa^{5/2}\epsilon^{-4})$ stochastic oracle calls are necessary, again strengthening the best known bounds in related settings. Our results expose substantial gaps between current upper and lower bounds for bilevel optimization and suggest that even simplified regimes, such as those with quadratic lower-level objectives, warrant further investigation toward understanding the optimal complexity of bilevel optimization under standard first-order oracles.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Kolmogorov-Arnold Reservoir Computing

arXiv:2606.19984v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reservoir computing offers a lightweight framework for forecasting dynamical systems but may struggle to capture long-range dependencies due to limited representational capacity. Conventional reservoir computing recurrently uses trainable reservoirs with hyperparameter sensitivity, while the next-generation reservoir computing removes recurrence at the cost of rapidly growing feature dimensions. Here, we develop Kolmogorov-Arnold Reservoir Computing (KARC), which replaces reservoirs with explicit basis-function expansions inspired by the Kolmogorov-Arnold representation theorem. We rigorously show that KARC is a lightweight design of Kolmogorov-Arnold networks (KANs), preserving the potential expressive capacity of KANs while admitting efficient closed-form training of reservoir computing. At comparable cost, KARC outperforms existing reservoir computing methods on challenging benchmarks including partial differential equations. It can also be integrated with generative diffusion models for text-to-image generation. This work thus establishes a principled bridge between reservoir computing and KANs, enabling efficient and high-fidelity dynamical system forecasting.

04.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

Perturbation Curve models continuous transcriptional response trajectories and improves prediction of genetic modulations

Single-cell CRISPR screens, Perturb-seq, have revolutionized functional genomics by revealing biological causality. However, although perturbation assignments are typically represented as discrete labels, the cell-level effective strength of perturbations is often continuous and diverse. Current analytical frameworks struggle to decouple the variability in perturbation strength from the diversity of downstream responses. Here, we present Perturbation Curve (PertCurve), a nonlinear, curve-based computational framework that models the trajectories of transcriptomic responses by explicitly incorporating diverse perturbation magnitudes and strengths. By ordering cells by perturbation strength, we demonstrate that PertCurve accurately recapitulates the response magnitudes and reveals the distinct modularity and asynchrony patterns of downstream gene behaviors. These patterns are categorized into archetypes, including proportional, sensitive, and threshold responses. By applying this framework across CRISPRi/a modalities, we identify universal response patterns in viral infection, apoptosis, and proliferation genes, and reveal previously overlooked context-specific regulatory features in cell differentiation. Finally, incorporating PertCurve into perturbation prediction models and evaluation metrics enhances predictive performance, delivering actionable insights for refining established models.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Memory as a Wasting Asset: Pricing Flash Endurance for Embodied Agents, and the Limits of Doing So

arXiv:2606.18144v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A robot's flash endurance is a non-renewable stock: every persisted write spends one of a few thousand program/erase cycles and never refills, yet no fielded robot memory system prices which memories are worth an erase cycle. We treat embodied memory as depreciating capital and price that stock with a single endurance shadow price $\eta$, which makes cost-minimizing placement across a RAM / on-board NVM / cloud hierarchy a threshold in a wear-augmented per-byte index. The index is cost-optimal whatever the sign of the value-write association $\chi$; only when $\chi > 0$ does the optimum turn non-monotone, sending a robot's most valuable memories off its flash. The pivot is thus empirical, and we measure $\chi$ on real robot logs at a pre-specified gate: its sign is a property of the deployment regime – positive on recurrent long-horizon manipulation ($\hat{\chi} \approx +1.0 \times 10^{-3}$, replicated at full power), null on a shorter-horizon suite, and negative on non-recurrent teleoperation. Two boundaries scope the result. The endurance budget is dormant on premium 3,000-P/E TLC at datasheet prices and binding on the commodity QLC/eMMC ($\sim$1,000 P/E) that cheaper edge robots run. And where it binds, a learned wear-aware controller only ties price-based routing on task value, because realized value is tier-invariant across RAM, NVM, and cloud: the rent governs device lifetime and cost, not task performance. Whether wear-aware placement improves task value remains open – $\chi$ is measured against a value proxy, and the non-monotone optimum, while proven, is not yet observed in data.

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

The Truth Stays in the Family: Enhancing Contextual Grounding via Inherited Truthful Heads in Model Lineages

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have produced many specialized multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) that share common foundational LLMs, forming distinct model lineages. It remains unclear whether a fundamental behavioral link exists between the foundational LLMs and downstream variants. We investigate this question by quantifying head-level context-truthfulness scores. Across diverse LLM and MLLM lineages, including Vicuna-, Qwen2.5-, LLaMA2-, and Mistral-based models, we find that Truth Scores are strongly preserved within model families, even after instruction tuning or multimodal adaptation. We further show that this inheritance is consistent with attention-head weight preservation, and that context-truthful heads attend to query-relevant evidence. Building on this finding, we propose TruthProbe, a soft-gating strategy that amplifies context-truthful heads while preserving other head contributions. TruthProbe improves contextual truthfulness on HaluEval and reduces multimodal hallucination on POPE and CHAIR, with base-LLM Truth Scores transferring effectively to their fine-tuned LLM and MLLM descendants. Code is available at https://github.com/miso-choi/TruthProbe.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

A Multi-Center Benchmark for Abdominal Disease Diagnosis and Report Generation from Non-Contrast CT

Multiphasic contrast-enhanced CT (CECT) is widely used for abdominal lesion characterization, yet it carries inherent risks of contrast-induced nephropathy, escalates acquisition burden, and heavily contributes to radiologist workload. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel multi-center benchmark for multi-organ abdominal disease diagnosis and automated radiology report generation, which learns to synthesize contrast-enhanced findings from single-phase non-contrast CT (NCCT). To support this, we curated a large-scale dataset of paired NCCT-CECT studies and their corresponding contrast-enhanced radiology reports from two centers, partitioned into internal sets and an external validation cohort. Under a unified evaluation protocol, we benchmarked five contemporary deep learning architectures encompassing chest-specific, abdomen-specific, and general-purpose multimodal domains. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NCCT retains diagnostic signals, achieving an average multi-organ AUC of 69.1% on the internal cohort and 63.1% on the external cohort, respectively. By releasing this dataset and standardized benchmark publicly, this study aims to catalyze future research into safer, resource-efficient, and globally accessible contrast-free abdominal imaging workflows. Code is available at: https://github.com/xmed-lab/TriALS-Report.

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

Price of metric universality in vector quantization is at most 0.11 bit

arXiv:2602.05790v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fast computation of a matrix product $W^\top X$ is a workhorse of modern LLMs. To make their deployment more efficient, a popular approach is that of using a low-precision approximation $\widehat W$ in place of true $W$ (``weight-only quantization''). Information theory demonstrates that an optimal algorithm for reducing precision of $W$ depends on the (second order) statistics of $X$ and requires a careful alignment of vector quantization codebook with PCA directions of $X$ (a process known as ``waterfilling allocation''). Dependence of the codebook on statistics of $X$, however, is highly impractical. This paper proves that there exist a universal codebook that is simultaneously near-optimal for all possible statistics of $X$, in the sense of being at least as good as an $X$-adapted waterfilling codebook with rate reduced by 0.11 bit per dimension in the case when $W$ is Gaussian. Such universal codebook would be an ideal candidate for the low-precision storage format, a topic of active modern research, but alas the existence proof is non-constructive. Equivalently, our result shows existence of a net in $\mathbb{R}^n$ that is a nearly-optimal covering of a sphere simultaneously with respect to all Hilbert norms.

09.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Mitochondria tethered to the nucleus secure its energy supply

Direct interactions between the cell’s powerhouses and nuclear pores might channel energy straight into the nucleus, fuelling cell division and differentiation. Direct interactions between the cell’s powerhouses and nuclear pores might channel energy straight into the nucleus, fuelling cell division and differentiation.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Geometry of Lightning Self-Attention: Identifiability and Dimension

arXiv:2408.17221v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider function spaces defined by self-attention networks without normalization, and theoretically analyze their geometry. Since these networks are polynomial, we rely on tools from algebraic geometry. In particular, we study the identifiability of deep attention by providing a description of the generic fibers of the parametrization for an arbitrary number of layers and, as a consequence, compute the dimension of the function space. Additionally, for a single-layer model, we characterize the singular and boundary points. Finally, we formulate a conjectural extension of our results to normalized self-attention networks, prove it for a single layer, and numerically verify it in the deep case.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Reliability and construct validity of the Technology Device Interference Scale in a sample of children and parents

There is increasing interest in parent-child technoference: the interference with personal interactions caused by technology devices. This study examined the reliability and construct validity of the Technology Device Interference Scale (TDIS) to measure technoference in a sample of Canadian parents and children. Parents (n=883) and children (n=376) were recruited from clinical and community settings and completed the TDIS for their own and family member technoference over three timepoints (T1=2023, T2=2024, T3=2025). TDIS internal consistency, test-retest reliability, and construct validity were assessed using Cronbachs alpha, intraclass correlation coefficient, and confirmatory factor analysis, respectively. The TDIS showed good internal consistency and adequate to good construct validity when used by children to report on their own technoference (all >.70; CFI>.95, TLI>.95, RMSEA.70; CFI>.95, TLI>.90, RMSEA[≤].11). The TDIS had low to acceptable internal consistency and poor model fit for parent report of their own technoference ( range: .63 - .66; CFI

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Phase controlled spectral topology, dynamic stability and sensitivity in Non-Hermitian Cavity Magnonics

arXiv:2606.16522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We theoretically investigate a non-Hermitian cavity-magnon platform in which coherent photonmagnon interactions and reservoir-mediated dissipative coupling interfere through a single externally tunable phase. We show that this interference phase provides a universal control parameter that continuously rotates the effective coupling between Hermitian and anti-Hermitian regimes, enabling dynamic transitions between level repulsion and level attraction without modifying intrinsic system parameters. The resulting phase-controlled non-Hermitian topology gives rise to exceptional points, linewidth engineering, and zero-damping conditions. Owing to the propagation-direction dependence of the dissipative interaction, the system further exhibits strong nonreciprocal transport and phase-tunable isolation arising from asymmetric hybridization of the cavity and magnon modes. Beyond its spectral and transport properties, we establish a direct connection between nonHermitian spectral topology and nonequilibrium population dynamics. The interference phase governs the stability of the hybrid modes, driving transitions between stable relaxation, critical slowing down near exceptional points, oscillatory energy exchange, and exponentially amplified dynamics. We further demonstrate that the same phase-controlled exceptional topology can be exploited for enhanced sensing, where the eigenvalue response exhibits the characteristic square-root scaling associated with exceptional-point physics. Our results provide a unified framework linking spectral topology, directional transport, dynamical stability, and sensing functionality through reservoirengineered interference in cavity magnonic systems.

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

Mutual Distillation of Dual-Foundation Models for Semi-Supervised PET/CT Segmentation

Organ segmentation from PET/CT is critical for quantitative analysis and radiotherapy planning in oncology. To ease the high annotation cost of PET/CT segmentation, semi-supervised learning (SSL) provides a practical and effective solution for developing deep models with limited labeled data. Recent developments in visual foundation models have demonstrated remarkable adaptability with improved efficiency. In this work, we propose a mutual distillation framework that seamlessly exploits both structural and functional foundation models, which act as modality-specific generalists for distilling knowledge from structural CT and metabolic PET imaging. By bridging the gap between the task-specific precision of student models and the segmentation priors of generalist foundation models, we propose MuDuo, a mutual distillation framework that synergistically leverages SAM-Med3D for CT and SegAnyPET for PET to distill their knowledge into a lightweight student network. Our approach eliminates the need for manual prompts while maximizing the utility of unlabeled data for automatic segmentation, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the AutoPET dataset with only 5 labeled cases. Our source code is available at https://github.com/Wu-beining/MuDuo.

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

Membership Inference Attacks against Large Audio Language Models

arXiv:2603.28378v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present the first systematic Membership Inference Attack (MIA) evaluation of LALMs. Using Multi-modal Blind Baselines based on textual, spectral and prosodic features, we demonstrate that common audio datasets exhibit near-perfect train/test separability (AUC ~ 1.0) even without model inference, thus MIA may primarily detect distribution shift. We therefore introduce a blind-baseline protocol to control for this confound. Under this protocol, we identify that the distribution-matched datasets enable reliable MIA evaluation without distribution-shift artifacts. We benchmark multiple MIA methods and conduct modality disentanglement experiments on these datasets. The results reveal that LALM memorization is cross-modal, arising only from binding a speaker's vocal identity with its text. These findings establish a principled standard for auditing LALMs beyond spurious correlations. Our codebase is available at https://github.com/snooow1029/ALM_MIA.

15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-20

Systematic Evaluation of Feature Representations for Cancer-Associated sORF Prediction in Non-coding RNA

Short open reading frames (sORFs) within non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) have arisen as a hidden layer of gene regulation, encoding small peptides that represent a new class of cancer regulators with diagnostic and therapeutic potential. However, inferring associations between sORFs to specific cancer types remains challenging and requires computational approaches for accurate prediction. Recently, the CoraL framework introduced the first computational approach for predicting cancer-associated peptides, focusing primarily on model architecture while overlooking how feature extraction strategies influence predictive accuracy. We present a systematic evaluation of machine learning models and feature extraction approaches to predict cancer-associated sORFs across 15 cancer types. We benchmarked seven traditional machine learning algorithms combined with three feature extraction methods: k-mer frequency, Word2Vec embeddings, and genomic language model (gLM)-based embeddings. To our knowledge, this is the first study applying gLM-derived embeddings to the prediction of cancer-associated sORFs in ncRNA. Our results show that traditional machine learning models with appropriate feature extraction outperform the CoraL baseline across all cancer types, achieving up to 10% higher accuracy in some of the 15 evaluated datasets. Interestingly, k-mer features consistently outperformed gLM embeddings without fine-tuning, suggesting that local sequence composition may provide more discriminative information for this task and that pre-trained genomic representations may require task-specific adaptation to fully capture these patterns. Additionally, we observed that the way sequences are tokenized, such as the k-mer length, can affect performance: longer fragments (e.g., k=7) sometimes reduced accuracy for Random Forest but had a smaller effect on MLP. Our findings suggest that appropriate feature engineering can provide greater improvements than increasing model complexity.

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

PlaceRep: Geospatial Place Representation Learning from Large-Scale Point-of-Interest Data

arXiv:2507.02921v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning effective representations of urban environments requires capturing spatial structure beyond fixed administrative boundaries. Existing geospatial representation learning approaches typically aggregate Points of Interest (POIs) into pre-defined administrative regions such as census units or ZIP code areas, assigning a single embedding to each region. However, POIs often form semantically meaningful groups that extend across, within, or beyond these boundaries, defining places that better reflect human activity and urban function. To address this limitation, we propose PlaceRep, a geospatial representation learning method that constructs place-level representations by clustering spatially and semantically related POIs. PlaceRep summarizes large-scale POI graphs from U.S. Foursquare data to produce general-purpose urban region embeddings while automatically identifying places across multiple spatial scales. By eliminating model pre-training, PlaceRep provides a scalable and efficient solution for multi-granular geospatial analysis. Experiments using the tasks of population density estimation and housing price prediction as downstream tasks show that PlaceRep outperforms most state-of-the-art graph-based geospatial representation learning methods and achieves up to a x100 speedup in generating region-level representations on large-scale POI graphs. The implementation of PlaceRep is available at https://github.com/mohammadhashemii/PlaceRep.

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

GENEB: Why Genomic Models Are Hard to Compare

Progress in genomic foundation models is difficult to assess due to fragmented benchmarks, incompatible evaluation protocols, and task-specific reporting. As a result, claims of superiority or generality across models are often not directly comparable. We introduce GENEB, a large-scale diagnostic benchmark that evaluates frozen representations from 40 genomic foundation models across 100 tasks spanning 13 functional categories under a unified probing-based protocol, including few-shot regimes. GENEB enables controlled comparison across model scale, architecture, tokenization, and pretraining data while explicitly exposing task-level trade-offs. Our analysis shows that aggregate leaderboards are unstable: model rankings vary sharply across task categories, scale provides only modest and inconsistent gains, and architectural and pretraining alignment frequently outweigh parameter count. These results highlight limitations of current evaluation practices and position GENEB as a reference framework for principled comparison and category-aware model selection in genomic machine learning.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

How Well Do Large Language Models Capture Human Personality?

arXiv:2606.18263v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate human populations via persona prompting, often under the assumptions that richer persona descriptions improve behavioral fidelity, similarly sized attribute combinations are equally simulatable, and persona definitions generalize across tasks. In this work, we formalize these assumptions and systematically evaluate them across multiple architectures, scales, and simulation settings. We identify a fundamental limitation we term persona manifold collapse, where increasingly expressive persona specifications lead to systematic contraction of representational and behavioral diversity. Across models, increasing persona complexity consistently reduces inter-persona separation in latent space and weakens behavioral differentiation in downstream simulation tasks. These effects persist across multiple analyses as richer personas fail to preserve human subgroup disagreement, performance varies across attribute combinations of similar size, and adding descriptive detail often degrades rather than improves simulation fidelity. Surprisingly, simple Age-Gender personas consistently outperform richly specified Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) across industries, achieving substantially higher downstream prediction accuracy. We find that collapse is not uniform across attributes. Certain combinations remain behaviorally stable and preserve stronger alignment with human responses, forming localized regions we term alignment bridges. Together, our results provide empirical and conceptual foundations for understanding the limits of persona-conditioned simulation, highlighting the need for representation-aware persona construction rather than increasing persona expressivity alone.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Beyond Fully Random Masking: Attention-Guided Denoising and Optimization for Diffusion Language Models

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) offer an efficient alternative to autoregressive models through parallel decoding, yet existing post-training methods largely rely on random masking strategies that overlook intrinsic token dependencies. In this work, we present an empirical analysis of attention in dLLMs and show that tokens attending more strongly to unmasked context exhibit greater generation stability and play a critical role in reasoning. Motivated by these findings, we propose AGDO, an attention-guided denoising and optimization framework that aligns both training and optimization with attention-derived dependencies. AGDO determines the denoising order based on attention structure and emphasizes attention-critical tokens during supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. Experiments on mathematical and coding benchmarks demonstrate that AGDO consistently improves reasoning performance, outperforming state-of-the-art post-training methods for dLLMs.

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

Anatomy of Post-Training: Using Interpretability to Characterize Data and Shape the Learning Signal

arXiv:2606.12360v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language-model post-training is the main stage at which model behavior is shaped, yet it still largely involves optimization of scalar rewards that summarize diverse desiderata. This abstraction gives practitioners little visibility into what their data actually teaches models, allowing spurious correlations to be learned by a model and inducing undesirable behaviors such as over-stylization and sycophancy. To address this problem, we ask: can we inspect a preference dataset before optimization and decide, at the level of concepts, which behaviors a model should be allowed to learn? Motivated by this, we introduce a data-centric post-training pipeline that uses interpretability protocols to develop statistical hypotheses for the latent concepts separating preferred from dispreferred generations, making them explicit for fine-grained user feedback. Building on this view, we unify several interpretability-based training protocols as ways of shaping rewards via feature or data interventions. Empirically, we show that our pipeline diagnoses undesirable signals in existing preference data, mitigates off-target learning, and can also help amplify or shape desired properties such as safeguards and model personality. More broadly, our results suggest that interpretability can turn post-training from optimizing opaque proxy rewards into a process of auditing and sculpting the learning signal itself.

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

Smoothness Errors in Dynamics Models and How to Avoid Them

arXiv:2602.05352v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Modern neural networks have shown promise for solving partial differential equations over surfaces, often by discretizing the surface as a mesh and learning with a mesh-aware graph neural network. However, graph neural networks suffer from oversmoothing, where a node's features become increasingly similar to those of its neighbors. Unitary graph convolutions, which are mathematically constrained to preserve smoothness, have been proposed to address this issue. Despite this, in many physical systems, such as diffusion processes, smoothness naturally increases and unitarity may be overconstraining. In this paper, we systematically study the smoothing effects of different GNNs for dynamics modeling and prove that unitary convolutions hurt performance for such tasks. We propose relaxed unitary convolutions that balance smoothness preservation with the natural smoothing required for physical systems. We also generalize unitary and relaxed unitary convolutions from graphs to meshes. In experiments on PDEs such as the heat and wave equations over complex meshes and on weather forecasting, we find that our method outperforms several strong baselines, including mesh-aware transformers and equivariant neural networks.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

On Pitfalls of $RemOve-And-Retrain$: Data Processing Inequality Perspective

The RemOve-And-Retrain (ROAR) benchmark is widely used to evaluate feature attribution methods, yet its validity remains underexplored from an information-theoretic perspective. We show that model- and data-agnostic post-processing of attribution maps (transformations that, by the data processing inequality, cannot add information about the decision function) can often improve ROAR scores. This means that an improved ROAR ranking is not, by itself, evidence that an attribution map carries more information about the model. We trace this failure mode to a bias toward spatially blurry masks. Experiments on CIFAR-10, SVHN, and CUB-200 show a consistent association between blurriness and ROAR performance, a pattern that also appears in the ROAD variant. We provide guidelines for more cautious removal-based benchmarking, with implications for validating mechanistic understanding of neural network internals.

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

Safe Exploration via Policy Priors

arXiv:2601.19612v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safe exploration is a key requirement for reinforcement learning (RL) agents to learn and adapt online, beyond controlled (e.g. simulated) environments. In this work, we tackle this challenge by utilizing suboptimal yet conservative policies (e.g., obtained from offline data or simulators) as priors. Our approach, SOOPER, uses probabilistic dynamics models to optimistically explore, yet pessimistically fall back to the conservative policy prior if needed. We prove that SOOPER guarantees safety throughout learning, and establish convergence to an optimal policy by bounding its cumulative regret. Extensive experiments on key safe RL benchmarks and real-world hardware demonstrate that SOOPER is scalable, outperforms the state-of-the-art and validate our theoretical guarantees in practice.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Modern analog computing for solving differential and matrix equations

arXiv:2606.13179v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In recent years, driven by the computational demands of data-intensive applications such as artificial intelligence and scientific computing, analog computing has gained renewed interest. Given the diversity of computational tasks and recent advancements in analog CMOS circuits and resistive memory technologies, we refer to the evolving landscape as modern analog computing. In this context, we identify three core computational primitives: solving differential equations, solving matrix equations, and performing matrix-vector multiplications, and we explore the connections among them. We also examine various hardware implementations of these analog computing operators, including those built with discrete components, integrated circuits, and resistive memory devices. Among these, resistive memory arrays emerge as particularly promising due to their implementation efficiency. The paper then surveys recent progress in leveraging modern analog computing to solve differential and matrix equations using both advanced analog CMOS circuits and resistive memory arrays. Finally, we discuss the applications of these circuits, the precision and scalability issues and their potential solutions, the relationship with in-memory computing, and the unique computational complexity of analog computing. This paper provides a unified perspective on analog computing, highlighting its strengths, current developments, and challenges, and positioning it as a pivotal enabler of next-generation computational frontiers.

25.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-18

Ten simple rules for turning your qualifying exam into an NIH-style fellowship proposal: A guide for graduate students

by Courtney Peña-Lima, Cameron S. Bader, Brendan K. Ball, Troy C. Dildine, Mekhala V. Dissanayake, Iris van ‘t Erve, Albina Ibrayeva, Amy Nippert, M.K. Quinn, Chelse Spinner, Samuel Thompson, Antonio Tomasso, Crystal M. Botham Qualifying exams, often referred to as “quals” or candidacy exams, are an important milestone in doctoral programs. Although the style of quals varies greatly by program and institution, it is usually a proposal that requires students to develop research ideas as well as their scientific writing skills. Many quals are modeled after funding mechanisms that graduate students can apply to and on a topic that the student will pursue in their dissertation. This paper offers graduate students a step-by-step guide on how to turn their quals into a fellowship-style research proposal, using National Institutes of Health (NIH) mechanisms as a benchmark, as this is the norm within US research institutions. This paper will be most useful for students who have completed or are in the process of completing proposal-based qualifying exams, usually in the second year of a doctoral program.