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01.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-09

Molecular Tumor Boards clinical impact on patient care and structural features: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Authors:

by Luigi Russo, Erika Giacobini, Nicolò Lentini, Tommaso Osti, Maud Kamal, Stefania Boccia, Roberta Pastorino Background Molecular Tumor Boards (MTBs) bring together multidisciplinary experts to translate genomic data into clinical decisions in oncology, however, their overall clinical impact remains unclear. The aim of this systematic review is to assess the clinical impact of MTB-recommended therapies on patients with cancer outcomes. Methods and findings In this systematic review and meta-analysis, we searched PubMed, Embase, Scopus, and CENTRAL up to July 2025. We included studies of any design, both single-arm studies and studies with a comparator group, that reported the clinical impact of MTBs in patients who received MTB-guided therapy. Meta-analyses were performed separately by study design, using hazard ratios (HRs) for overall survival (OS) and progression-free survival (PFS), relative risks (RRs) for objective response rate (ORR) and disease control rate (DCR), and pooled proportions for PFS ratio ≥1.3. All meta-analyses were conducted using random-effects models based on the inverse variance method. We evaluated the risk of bias using the RoB 2.0 for RCTs and ROBINS-I for non-randomized studies.From 6,846 records, 78 studies (9,195 patients; 4,569 treated per MTB recommendations) were included. MTB-guided therapies were associated with reduced risk of death (HR 0.87; 95% CI [0.76, 1.01]; p = 0.069; I2 = 0.0% in RCTs; 0.62 in retrospective studies) and disease progression (HR 0.73; 95% CI [0.64, 0.84]; p 

02.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-21

GENATATORs: ab initio Gene Annotation With DNA Language Models

Inference of gene structure and location from genome sequences - known as de novo gene annotation - is a fundamental task in biological research. However, sequence grammar encoding gene structure is complex and poorly understood, often requiring costly transcriptomic data for accurate gene annotation. In this work, we benchmark current solutions and develop new methods of gene annotation. We show that pretrained DNA language model (DNA LM) embeddings do not capture the features necessary for precise gene segmentation, and that task-specific fine-tuning remains essential. We comprehensively evaluate the impact of model architecture, training strategy, receptive field size, dataset composition, and data augmentations on gene segmentation performance. We revisit standard evaluation protocols, showing that commonly used per-token and per-sequence metrics fail to capture the challenges of real-world gene annotation. We introduce and theoretically justify new biologically grounded metrics, along with benchmarking datasets that better capture annotation quality. We show that fine-tuned DNA LMs outperform existing annotation tools, generalizing across species separated by hundreds of millions of years from those seen during training, and providing segmentation of previously intractable non-coding transcripts and untranslated regions of protein-coding genes. Our results thus provide a foundation for new biological applications centered on accurate gene annotation.

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

Flexible Catalysis

arXiv:2510.01065v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In quantum information and computation, a central challenge is to determine which quantum states can be transformed into which others under restricted sets of free operations. While many transformations are impossible directly, catalytic processes can enable otherwise forbidden conversions: an auxiliary quantum state (the catalyst) facilitates the transformation while remaining unchanged. In this work, we introduce flexible catalysis, a generalization in which the catalyst is allowed to transform into a different auxiliary state, provided it remains a valid catalyst. We show that this framework subsumes both standard catalytic and multicopy transformations, and we analyse its advantages across several classes of free operations. In particular, we prove that when the free operations are local unitaries or permutation matrices, flexible catalysis enables state extractions that are unattainable with standard catalysis alone.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Multi-Rate Mixture of Experts for Accelerating Liquid Neural Network Training

arXiv:2606.12240v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multivariate time-series data often exhibit complex temporal dependencies, irregular sampling, and heterogeneous dynamics across multiple time scales, making accurate sequence modeling particularly challenging. Traditional recurrent neural networks (RNNs), such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, operate in discrete time and may struggle to effectively capture continuous and irregular temporal behaviors. Liquid Neural Networks (LNNs) address some of these limitations through continuous-time dynamics, but standard LNN architectures typically rely on a single dynamical system, limiting their ability to model heterogeneous temporal patterns. To address these challenges, we propose a Multi-Rate Mixture-of-Experts (MR-MoE) framework built on top of Liquid Neural Networks. In the proposed architecture, multiple LNN-based experts operate at distinct time scales, enabling the model to explicitly separate fast-changing dynamics from slow-evolving temporal trends. A gating network further enables adaptive expert specialization based on input conditions. In addition, we incorporate both feature-level and temporal attention mechanisms to improve robustness, interpretability, and long-range dependency modeling. Feature-level attention suppresses noisy or irrelevant variables, while temporal attention selectively focuses on informative historical states. We evaluate the proposed framework on a complex multivariate time-series prediction task and compare it against strong baselines, including LSTM, monolithic LNN, and standard MoE models. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed MR-MoE framework consistently achieves improved AUROC and AUPRC performance while maintaining favorable computational efficiency. These results highlight the effectiveness of combining continuous-time dynamics, multi-scale expert decomposition, and adaptive attention mechanisms for time-series modeling.

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

Phi-Actor-Critic: Steering General-Sum Games to Pareto-Efficient Correlated Equilibria

arXiv:2606.11284v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-world multi-agent systems, from traffic coordination to resource allocation, are often modeled as general-sum games where individual incentives conflict with collective welfare. In these settings, the central challenge is not merely finding an equilibrium, but selecting socially desirable outcomes among many suboptimal Nash equilibria. Standard deep multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) methods struggle with this problem, as value-decomposition approaches are constrained by monotonicity assumptions and policy-gradient methods often converge to stable but socially inefficient equilibria. To address this limitation, we propose $\Phi$-Actor-Critic ($\Phi$-AC), a framework that leverages swap regret minimization to steer learning toward high-welfare correlated equilibria (CE). To make counterfactual regret estimation tractable in deep MARL, $\Phi$-AC employs a centralized attention critic that predicts vector-valued regrets in a single forward pass, avoiding computationally expensive counterfactual simulations. We further introduce a Lagrangian-based equilibrium selection mechanism that optimizes social welfare while enforcing stability through regret constraints. Experiments on matrix games, Multi-Agent Particle Environments (MPE), and the Melting Pot Harvest scenario demonstrate that $\Phi$-AC learns efficient and stable coordination strategies across diverse mixed-motive settings while maintaining high collective return and competitive fairness.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Population-scale detection of methylation outliers from long-read genome sequencing

Background: Aberrant DNA methylation can mediate the functional effects of rare genetic variation and contribute to imprinting disorders, repeat expansion diseases, and other pathogenic regulatory mechanisms. Long-read sequencing technologies now enable genome-wide detection of CpG methylation alongside genetic variation from a single assay. However, methods for systematic identification and interpretation of methylation outliers from long-read sequencing data remain limited. Methods: We developed METAFORA, a computational workflow for detecting methylation outlier regions from PacBio and Oxford Nanopore long-read sequencing data. METAFORA constructs population-level methylation references, segments the genome into correlated CpG blocks, infers technical and biological sources of variation through hidden factor estimation, models uncertainty due to variable depth sequencing, and computes covariate-adjusted methylation outlier scores for individual samples. We applied METAFORA across large long-read sequencing cohorts and integrated methylation outliers with multi-omic data. METAFORA is implemented as a snakemake workflow available at https://github.com/tjense25/METAFORA. Results: METAFORA identified methylation outlier regions associated with rare structural variants, tandem repeat expansions, and imprinting abnormalities. We found outlier regions were enriched for molecular outliers across transcriptomic and chromatin accessibility datasets, supporting their functional relevance in gene regulation. In a representative case, METAFORA identified an imprinting defect affecting the GNAS locus associated with an STX16 deletion. Conclusions: METAFORA enables scalable detection and interpretation of methylation outliers from long-read sequencing data and provides a framework for integrating epigenetic outliers with genomic and multi-omic analyses. These approaches may improve interpretation of rare regulatory variation and support discovery of clinically relevant epigenetic abnormalities in genomic medicine.

07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-25

Convergence Rates for Semistochastic Processes

arXiv:2606.25135v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study processes that consist of deterministic evolution punctuated at random times by disturbances with random severity; we call such processes semistochastic. Under appropriate assumptions such a process admits a unique stationary distribution. We develop a technique for establishing bounds on the rate at which the distribution of the random process approaches the stationary distribution. An important example of such a process is the dynamics of the carbon content of a forest whose deterministic growth is interrupted by natural disasters (fires, droughts, insect outbreaks, etc.).

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers for Nonlinear Matrix Decompositions

arXiv:2512.17473v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present an algorithm based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for solving nonlinear matrix decompositions (NMD). Given an input matrix $X \in \mathbb{R}^{m \times n}$ and a factorization rank $r \ll \min(m, n)$, NMD seeks matrices $W \in \mathbb{R}^{m \times r}$ and $H \in \mathbb{R}^{r \times n}$ such that $X \approx f(WH)$, where $f$ is an element-wise nonlinear function. We evaluate our method on several representative nonlinear models: the rectified linear unit activation $f(x) = \max(0, x)$, suitable for nonnegative sparse data approximation, the component-wise square $f(x) = x^2$, applicable to probabilistic circuit representation, and the MinMax transform $f(x) = \min(b, \max(a, x))$, relevant for recommender systems. The proposed framework flexibly supports diverse loss functions, including least squares, $\ell_1$ norm, and the Kullback-Leibler divergence, and can be readily extended to other nonlinearities and metrics. We illustrate the applicability, efficiency, and adaptability of the approach on real-world datasets, highlighting its potential for a broad range of applications.

09.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

DynamicDemiLog: A Single Sketch for Ultrafast Similarity, Frequency, and Cardinality Estimation

Probabilistic cardinality estimators (HyperLogLog), similarity sketches (MinHash), and frequency estimators (Count-Min Sketch) are fundamental approximate data structures that each target one primary problem. We present DynamicDemiLog (DDL), a sketch that unifies cardinality estimation, set similarity, containment, element frequency and composition in one tiny data structure built from a single pass over the input stream. Using an inverted index over 200,687 RefSeq sketches (159,567 organisms), DDL performs all-to-all sketch similarity comparison of the full database in 30 seconds (128 threads, indexed) - over 375x faster per query than Mash's brute-force all-to-all comparison of 91,282 sketches, or 31x faster without the index, at double the sketch resolution. DDL extends the LogLog register with a mantissa: each register stores a floating-point-encoded hash value consisting of an integer exponent (the leading-zero count) and a fractional mantissa (the sub-leading-zero bits), rather than the integer leading-zero count alone. This preserves enough hash information for meaningful register-by-register comparison - a property that standard 6-bit registers lack - while improving on LogLog's cardinality estimation machinery, including DynamicLogLog's early exit mask for high-throughput streaming. With a default 10 mantissa bits (16-bit registers, 2,048 buckets, 4 KB), DDL achieves a per-register false-match rate of 0.018% on unrelated random same-size sets (compared to 17.0% for LL6, a basic HyperLogLog implementation), enabling Weighted Kmer Identity (WKID), Average Nucleotide Identity (ANI), containment, and completeness estimation from register comparison alone. A 16-bit per-register observation counter provides element frequency information at trivial additional computation cost, and an additional byte tracks element composition (GC content, for biological data). Furthermore, DDL's high-specificity registers enable an inverted index structure (DDLIndex) that answers similarity queries against a database of N sketches in O(B + M) time, where M is the number of matching index entries, compared to O(NxB) for pairwise comparison.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

GrowLoop: Self-Evolving Conversation Evaluation Seeded by Human

With the rapid advancement of large language models, evaluating human-likeness in open-ended conversation has become increasingly important. However, human-likeness is a form of tacit knowledge that humans perceive intuitively, yet the underlying criteria resist explicit formulation. Human judgments vary widely, with strong agreement on some cases and legitimate disagreement on others. Meanwhile, the criteria behind human judgments remain implicit, leaving no clear basis for constructing cases. Further, what counts as human-likeness is not static, but evolving with model capability and human expectations. Despite progress in evaluation methods such as expert-authored benchmarks, Reward Models, and self-evolving benchmarks, none addresses all three challenges simultaneously. Therefore, we propose GrowLoop, a self-evolving conversation evaluation system that continuously adapts as models advance and scenarios shift. Starting from minimal human seed annotations, LLM agents iteratively extract and refine evaluation rubrics through Heuristic Learning. Human-AI agreement is required where annotators converge, while only plausibility is expected where they diverge. Moreover, the Rubric-Case co-evolution mechanism enables continuous evolution. When the evaluation target shifts, new human seeds expand the system's coverage accordingly. When applied to human-likeness evaluation in open-ended conversation, the AI judge guided by these rubrics not only substantially outperforms existing methods in alignment with human judgments, but also uncovers issues that annotators overlook. The resulting benchmark effectively discriminates models across capability tiers and reveals where they fall short, while generalizing to new scenarios and adapting as models advance. Our work shifts the benchmarking paradigm from manual updates or difficulty scaling to comprehensive, continuous self-evolution.

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

Co-Scraper: query-aware DOM Pruning and Reusable Scraper Synthesis for Lightweight Web Data Extraction

arXiv:2606.14821v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The abundant and heterogeneous nature of web content necessitates automated information extraction, and generating scrapers that can be reused across similar web pages offers an effective solution for scalable data extraction. In this work, we propose Co-Scraper, a two-stage framework capable of handling the hierarchical complexity of long HTML documents. By integrating a query-aware DOM pruning mechanism with stable extraction strategy induction, Co-Scraper can effectively transforms web content into executable programmatic wrappers using a fine-tuned Qwen3-8B model. On the test set of SWDE, Co-Scraper achieves state-of-the-art performance with an F1 score of 94.78% and a reuse success rate of 90.39%. This framework significantly enhances the accuracy and resilience of data extraction, providing a highly efficient approach for web data acquisition tasks.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Reinforcement Learning for Accelerated Aerodynamic Shape Optimisation

arXiv:2507.17786v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a reinforcement learning (RL) based adaptive optimization algorithm for aerodynamic shape optimization focused on dimensionality reduction. The form in which RL is applied here is that of a surrogate-based, actor-critic policy evaluation MCMC approach allowing for temporal 'freezing' of some of the parameters to be optimized. The goals are to minimize computational effort, and to use the observed optimization results for interpretation of the discovered extrema in terms of their role in achieving the desired flow-field. By a sequence of local optimized parameter changes around intermediate CFD simulations acting as ground truth, it is possible to speed up the global optimization if (a) the local neighbourhoods of the parameters in which the changed parameters must reside are sufficiently large to compete with the grid-sized steps and its large number of simulations, and (b) the estimates of the rewards and costs on these neighbourhoods necessary for a good step-wise parameter adaption are sufficiently accurate. We give an example of a simple fluid-dynamical problem on which the method allows interpretation in the sense of a feature importance scoring.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

CARE: Competence-Aware Reward Shaping for Adaptive Reasoning Length in Video-MLLMs

In multimodal video reasoning, reinforcement learning-based methods typically rely on simplistic and inflexible reasoning-length control strategies that fail to adapt to the model's evolving competence. This mismatch may suppress necessary exploration at early stages, while encouraging redundant reasoning and inefficient decoding once the model becomes more competent. In this paper, we propose CARE, a competence-aware reward shaping framework for adaptive reasoning length optimization in multimodal reasoning. Specifically, CARE maintains a smoothed competence estimate via an exponential moving average of pass rates, and uses it to route training into progressive stages that shift the reward preference from exploration-oriented long-form reasoning to efficiency-oriented concise reasoning. To avoid conflating verbosity with intrinsic task complexity, CARE further normalizes reasoning effort with batch-level statistics, and introduces a posterior amplifier to strengthen reward signals for unexpectedly strong performance on historically difficult samples. The proposed mechanism is seamlessly integrated into the GRPO training pipeline and incurs no additional inference-time overhead. Extensive experiments on multiple video reasoning and general video understanding benchmarks demonstrate that CARE consistently improves reasoning accuracy, stabilizes reinforcement learning, and significantly enhances token efficiency. Moreover, CARE exhibits a characteristic inverted-U trajectory of reasoning length during training, and yields shorter yet more informative reasoning traces at convergence, indicating effective adaptive allocation of reasoning budget. We provide the source code for our proposed CARE framework and experiments at https://github.com/1Pansy/Video-CARE.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Cluster LOCO: Feature Importance For Interpreting Clusters

arXiv:2606.14592v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Clustering is widely used for exploratory analysis and scientific discovery, driving insights from market segmentation to biological data analysis, but its outputs can be difficult to interpret, audit, and reproduce as modern datasets become increasingly large and complex. Reliable use of clustering requires understanding which features drive the discovered structure, yet feature-level explanations for clustering remain scarce compared with methods in supervised learning. Furthermore, existing clustering feature importance scores are often tied to specific algorithms and data assumptions. To address these challenges, we propose Cluster LOCO (Leave-One-Covariate-Out), a family of model-agnostic feature importance scores for clustering. Cluster LOCO is built on feature occlusion and clustering generalizability, defined as whether cluster labels learned on one subset of the data can be accurately predicted on held-out samples. For any chosen clustering algorithm, Cluster LOCO quantifies a feature's importance by measuring how much its removal degrades generalizability. We first introduce Cluster LOCO-Split, which relies on data splitting, and then extend it to Cluster LOCO-MP, a minipatch ensemble-based version designed for large-scale data. Across synthetic simulations and an application to cell-type discovery in single-cell transcriptomics, we show that Cluster LOCO more reliably recovers informative features than existing clustering feature importance methods.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

The Personalization Trap: How User Memory Alters Emotional Reasoning in LLMs

When an AI assistant remembers that Sarah is a single mother working two jobs, does it interpret her stress differently than if she were a wealthy executive? As personalized AI systems increasingly incorporate long-term user memory, understanding how this memory shapes emotional reasoning is critical. We investigate how user memory affects emotional intelligence in large language models (LLMs) by evaluating 15 models on human-validated emotional intelligence tests. We find that identical scenarios paired with different user profiles produce systematically divergent emotional interpretations. Across validated user-independent emotional scenarios and diverse user profiles, systematic biases emerged in several high-performing LLMs where advantaged profiles received more accurate emotional interpretations. Moreover, LLMs demonstrate significant disparities across demographic factors in emotion reasoning and supportive recommendations tasks, indicating that personalization mechanisms can embed social hierarchies into models' emotional reasoning. These results highlight a key challenge for memory-enhanced AI: systems designed for personalization may reinforce social inequalities. To mitigate these disparities, we curate a general-purpose preference dataset designed to reduce demographic profiles' influence on emotional understanding.

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Experiments with Optimal Model Trees

arXiv:2503.12902v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Model trees provide an appealing way to perform interpretable machine learning for both classification and regression problems. In contrast to ``classic'' decision trees with constant values in their leaves, model trees can use linear combinations of predictor variables in their leaf nodes to form predictions, which can help achieve higher accuracy and smaller trees. Typical algorithms for learning model trees from training data work in a greedy fashion, growing the tree in a top-down manner by recursively splitting the data into smaller and smaller subsets. Crucially, the selected splits are only locally optimal, potentially rendering the tree overly complex and less accurate than a tree whose structure is globally optimal for the training data. In this paper, we empirically investigate the effect of constructing globally optimal model trees for classification and regression with linear support vector machines at the leaf nodes. To this end, we present mixed-integer linear programming formulations to learn optimal trees, compute such trees for a large collection of benchmark data sets, and compare their performance against greedily grown model trees in terms of interpretability and accuracy. We also compare to classic optimal and greedily grown decision trees, random forests, and support vector machines. Our results show that optimal model trees can achieve competitive accuracy with very small trees. We also investigate the effect on the accuracy of replacing axis-parallel splits with multivariate ones, foregoing interpretability while potentially obtaining greater accuracy.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Frontier: Towards Comprehensive and Accurate LLM Inference Simulation

arXiv:2605.21312v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern LLM serving is no longer homogeneous or monolithic. Production systems now combine disaggregated execution, complex parallelism, runtime optimizations, and stateful workloads such as reasoning, agents, and RL rollouts. Simulation is attractive for exploring this growing design space, yet existing simulators lack the architectural completeness and decision-grade fidelity it demands. Their monolithic-replica abstractions are ill-suited to disaggregated serving, while average-case analytical proxies can distort SLA predictions and even reverse optimization conclusions. We present Frontier, a discrete-event simulator for modern LLM inference serving. Frontier features a disaggregated abstraction. It captures the structure and dynamics of modern serving systems by modeling co-location, Prefill-Decode Disaggregation (PDD), and Attention-FFN Disaggregation (AFD) with role-specific cluster workers, incorporating key runtime optimizations (e.g., CUDA Graphs, speculative decoding) within the scheduler-batch-engine loop, and supporting stateful requests for emerging workloads. It further provides accurate and generalizable predictions of computation, communication, and memory costs across diverse serving scenarios with complex workload compositions. On 16-H800 GPU testbed, Frontier achieves an average throughput error below 4%. Compared with state-of-the-art simulators, it reduces end-to-end latency error from 44.9% to 6.4% under co-location and from 51.7% to 2.6% under disaggregation. It scales to over 1K GPUs on commodity CPUs and enables new use cases such as SLA-dependent Pareto frontier exploration, heterogeneous disaggregated allocation, agentic reasoning scheduling validation, and RL post-training reconfiguration. We release Frontier at https://github.com/NetX-lab/Frontier.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Rethinking Shrinkage Bias in LLM FP4 Pretraining: Geometric Origin, Systemic Impact, and UFP4 Recipe

arXiv:2606.20381v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: FP4 training promises substantial reductions in memory and computation cost for LLM pretraining, yet current FP4 hardware paths and recipes, including NVIDIA Blackwell/Rubin-class systems and AMD MI350-series GPUs, remain centered on E2M1 data elements. In this study, we identify a fundamental limitation of that choice: non-uniform formats such as E2M1 inherently suffer from Shrinkage Bias, a systematic negative rounding error caused by the geometric asymmetry of their representable bins. We show that this bias accumulates multiplicatively across layers and is amplified by the Random Hadamard Transform (RHT), providing a unified explanation for the training instability observed in existing E2M1-based FP4 recipes. In contrast, uniform grids (E1M2/INT4) bypass this grid-geometry error and better convert the improved bucket utilization from RHT into higher quantization quality. Based on this finding, we propose UFP4, a uniform 4-bit training recipe that applies RHT to all three training GEMMs while restricting stochastic rounding to dY alone. On Dense 1.5B, MoE 7.9B, and MoE 124B long-run pretraining, UFP4 consistently achieves lower BF16-relative loss degradation than strong E2M1-based baselines, supported by scaling-law analysis and ablation studies. Our results suggest that future accelerators should support E1M2/INT4-style uniform 4-bit grids as first-class training primitives alongside E2M1.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Two Stages of Folding: Convergent Mechanisms in AI Protein Folding Trunks

arXiv:2602.06020v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: How do protein structure prediction models fold proteins? We investigate this question through causal interventions on the folding trunks of ESMFold, OpenFold, and Boltz-1. Across all three models, we find a shared two-stage computational structure. In the first stage, early blocks initialize pairwise biochemical signals: features like charge propagate from sequence into pairwise representations through architecture-specific pathways. In the second stage, late blocks develop pairwise spatial features: distance and contact information accumulate in the pairwise representation. We verify these mechanisms causally by showing that steering charge and distance features induces predictable structural changes. Furthermore, these representations are functionally interchangeable: pairwise states can be linearly aligned and substituted across models. Together, these results suggest that folding trunks with different architectures, inputs, and training procedures converge on a shared representational organization for mapping sequence chemistry into spatial geometry.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Unsupervised Learning of Efficient Exploration: Pre-training Adaptive Policies via Self-Imposed Goals

arXiv:2601.19810v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unsupervised pre-training can equip reinforcement learning agents with prior knowledge and accelerate learning in downstream tasks. A promising direction, grounded in human development, investigates agents that learn by setting and pursuing their own goals. The core challenge lies in how to effectively generate, select, and learn from such goals. Our focus is on broad distributions of downstream tasks where solving every task zero-shot is infeasible. Such settings naturally arise when the target tasks lie outside of the pre-training distribution or when their identities are unknown to the agent. In this work, we (i) optimize for efficient multi-episode exploration and adaptation within a meta-learning framework, and (ii) guide the training curriculum with evolving estimates of the agent's post-adaptation performance. We present ULEE, an unsupervised meta-learning method that combines an in-context learner with an adversarial goal-generation strategy that maintains training at the frontier of the agent's capabilities. On XLand-MiniGrid benchmarks, ULEE pre-training yields improved exploration and adaptation abilities that generalize to novel objectives, environment dynamics, and map structures. The resulting policy attains improved zero-shot and few-shot performance, and provides a strong initialization for longer fine-tuning processes. It outperforms learning from scratch, DIAYN pre-training, and alternative curricula. Code is available at: https://github.com/Octavio-Pappalardo/ulee-jax

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Pythagoras-Prover: Advancing Efficient Formal Proving via Augmented Lean Formalisation

arXiv:2606.12594v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern Lean theorem provers achieve strong performance only with substantial training and inference compute, driven in part by scarce verified proof data and the long reasoning traces of formal proof search, making both supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and sampling expensive. We introduce Pythagoras-Prover, a compute-efficient open-source family of Lean theorem provers built for practical compute budgets. The family spans two generation paradigms: autoregressive models at 4B and 32B parameters, and a first proof-of-concept diffusion-based prover (4B) that iteratively refines Lean proofs at inference time. For training efficiency, we build a Lean-verified corpus stratified into easy, medium, and hard problems for curriculum SFT, so models acquire proof skills progressively from shorter, simpler proofs to longer, harder ones. During SFT, a dynamic proof-reasoning filtering scheme preserves informative proof traces while keeping each instance within an 8k-token context budget. We also introduce Augmented Lean Formalisation (ALF), which expands scarce verified corpora into variants of formal statements, populated via self-distillation for extra training signal without formally verifying every mutated instance. By perturbing known problems while preserving their formal character, ALF reduces reliance on any statement's surface form. Empirically, Pythagoras-Prover-4B surpasses DeepSeek-Prover-V2-671B at pass@32 on MiniF2F-Test (86.1% vs 82.4%) with ~167x fewer parameters, while Pythagoras-Prover-32B sets the open-source state of the art at 93.0% on MiniF2F-Test and solves 93 of 672 PutnamBench problems. We release MiniF2F-ALF, an ALF-mutated contamination-sensitive benchmark on which every evaluated model loses accuracy; here our 32B remains strongest and our 4B matches the prior state of the art, Goedel-Prover-V2-32B.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Actionable Interpretability Must Be Defined in Terms of Symmetries

arXiv:2601.12913v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper argues that interpretability research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) is fundamentally ill-posed as existing definitions of interpretability fail to describe how interpretability can be formally tested or designed for. We posit that actionable definitions of interpretability must be formulated in terms of *symmetries* that inform model design and lead to testable conditions. Under a probabilistic view, we hypothesise that four symmetries (inference equivariance, information invariance, concept-closure invariance, and structural invariance) suffice to (i) formalise interpretable models as a subclass of probabilistic models, (ii) yield a unified formulation of interpretable inference (e.g., alignment, interventions, and counterfactuals) as a form of Bayesian inversion, and (iii) provide a formal framework to verify compliance with safety standards and regulations.

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

Arbor: Tree Search as a Cognition Layer for Autonomous Agents

arXiv:2606.12563v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Arbor is a multi-agent framework that introduces structured tree search as a cognition layer for autonomous agents operating in large, stateful action spaces. Prior autonomous optimization systems operate on isolated targets with stateless evaluation. Arbor instead maintains an explicit search tree of scored hypotheses that serves as the shared working memory across agents, evolving with every measurement, treating failures as diagnostic signal that reshapes subsequent exploration, and expanding as prior successes shift the bottleneck distribution. We validate Arbor on full-stack LLM inference optimization, a domain where achieving peak performance has historically required coordinated effort from engineering teams across the application, framework, compiler, kernel, and hardware stack. Arbor pairs an Orchestrator agent, which drives optimization by delegating to Domain Specialists across the inference stack, with a Critic agent that safeguards stability through root-cause analysis, introspection, and measurement validation – a checks-and-balances architecture where neither agent can unilaterally drive the system. Agent capabilities are decomposed into hard skills (domain expertise) and soft skills (coordination protocols that determine how contributions compose), enabling fully autonomous multi-day campaigns. Arbor achieves up to 193% inference throughput-latency Pareto improvement over vendor-optimized baselines, while a single agent without the harness plateaus at +33% throughput improvement and crashes irrecoverably within hours. Arbor generalizes to multiple generations of hardware platform, and run-to-run variance is within 2 percentage points demonstrating that the method is hardware-agnostic and reproducible.

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

Large-Language-Model Discovery of Quantum LDPC Codes through Structured Concept Evolution

arXiv:2606.24808v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantum computers could outperform classical machines on important problems, but only if the errors that pervade quantum hardware can be corrected at scale. Quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes offer a promising route to this goal by combining sparse parity checks with finite encoding rate and growing distance, but their construction remains a challenging discrete design problem. Here we introduce structured concept evolution (SCE), a search framework that pairs a large language model with a structured algebraic mutation grammar to discover lifted-product code families, a class of CSS qLDPC codes. Instead of asking the LLM to design codes from first principles, SCE evolves structured concepts consisting of algebraic specifications paired with executable programs that realize them, using hierarchical mutations that modify the group algebra, protograph geometry, or base space. Running SCE, we discover a diverse set of competitive code families, ranging from abelian constructions to families over non-abelian groups beyond those underlying standard designs such as bivariate-bicycle codes, and characterize them under code-capacity depolarizing noise with BP+OSD decoding. These results are obtained with lightweight models (GPT-5.4-mini and GPT-5.4-nano).

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Breaking the Solver Bottleneck: Training Task Generators at the Learnable Frontier

The limiting resource for training agents via reinforcement learning (RL) is increasingly frontier task supply: valid, solvable tasks just difficult enough to train the current model. As reasoning and agentic models improve, fixed task distributions saturate, while naive synthetic generation yields tasks that are trivial, impossible, or ill-posed. Training a task generator with RL to optimize validity and learnability can address this bottleneck, but direct optimization requires repeated solver rollouts per candidate. For software-engineering (SWE) tasks, a single rollout can take tens of minutes; solver-in-the-loop generator training is intractable. We introduce PROPEL, a solver-amortized framework for training task generators at the targeted solve rate. PROPEL trains a lightweight activation probe on a one-time labeled corpus of generated tasks and solver outcomes. The probe predicts target-solver pass rate from a frozen generator reference model and serves as a proxy for solve rate during generator optimization, reducing generator evaluation to a single forward pass. Across math, code, and software-engineering at multiple model scales, PROPEL shifts generation toward the targeted solve rate: for coding, tasks generated at the learnable frontier increase from $10.1\% \rightarrow 20.0\%$ for a Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct solver and from $5.3\% \rightarrow 12.6\%$ for a Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct solver. For SWE, PROPEL increases the share of generations at the targeted solve rate from $9.8\% \rightarrow 19.6\%$ for Qwen3.5-27B on repositories not seen during training of probe and generator.