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

Microscopic exceptional points in the post-selected open Jaynes–Cummings model

arXiv:2606.14982v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Phenomenological non-Hermitian Hamiltonians track selected signatures of complex reservoir dynamics, while post-selected no-jump effective Hamiltonians derived from microscopic open-system theory reveal the underlying system–reservoir physics. We derive such a Hamiltonian for the open Jaynes–Cummings model using a Moore–Penrose normalized $\mathrm{su}(2)$ representation that removes the vacuum-sector singularity and diagonalizes the full Hamiltonian by one operator rotation. Starting from a zero-temperature bosonic reservoir, we obtain a Gorini–Kossakowski–Sudarshan–Lindblad master equation under the Born–Markov approximation with full Bohr-frequency resolution. We use partial Bohr-frequency resolution to build a consistent post-selected no-jump Hamiltonian near exceptional points, where decay rates become comparable to Rabi frequencies and remove the scale separation behind full resolution. The normalized $\mathrm{su}(2)$ form of the resulting non-Hermitian Jaynes–Cummings Hamiltonian reveals the effects of Lamb-shifted detuning, diagonal loss imbalance, and reservoir-modified coupling. Our microscopic exceptional-point analysis recovers the experimentally reported single-excitation exceptional point for unequal independent losses and identifies regimes absent from the standard phenomenological model; for example, equal correlated losses with orthogonal channel phase produce a second-order exceptional point at the same loss-to-coupling ratio in every excitation sector.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

DIMOS: Disentangling Instance-level Moving Object Segmentation

Moving instance segmentation (MIS) attracts increasing attention due to its broad applications in traffic surveillance, autonomous driving, and animal tracking. Event cameras record asynchronous brightness changes, providing high temporal resolution and dynamic range, which makes them highly sensitive to motion information. By fusing event and image features, motion cues from events can complement spatial details from images, enhancing the performance of MIS. However, current multimodal MIS methods still struggle to segment small moving instances, as event cameras often yield sparse features under limited resolution. Moreover, event features entangle appearance attributes with motion cues, which further restricts effective cross-modal fusion. To address these challenges, we first propose a dual-disentangling feature extraction framework that separates and extracts appearance and motion information within both image and event modalities, thereby improving feature density. Subsequently, a multi-granularity cross-modal alignment is introduced to align distributionally and semantically consistent features across modalities, enabling more effective fusion with rich spatial and temporal details. The experiment results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in multimodal MIS, especially for small instances under challenging conditions such as fast motion and low-light settings.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Certified Finite-Shot Operating Windows for Virtual Distillation and Symmetry Verification

arXiv:2606.15464v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum error mitigation methods are usually compared through their infinite-shot bias, but on real devices the comparison is decided by finite sampling budgets, estimator instabilities, and per-shot resource costs. We develop a finite-shot operating-window theory that makes this comparison certifiable for virtual distillation (VD) and symmetry verification (SV): for each method we derive a mean-squared-error law with explicit, non-asymptotic remainder constants. For VD, the law captures the statistical bias and denominator instability of its quotient estimator, with a concentration certificate locating the sample size beyond which the quotient is trustworthy; for SV, it isolates the bias floor left by undetectable errors and the sampling penalty set by the acceptance probability. A selection trichotomy classifies any two-method comparison into a tie, uniform dominance, or a genuine tradeoff with a certified crossing window, including a self-consistency test that rejects spurious crossings. The theory makes falsifiable predictions – operating-window locations scaling as $p^{-2}$ or $p^{-1}$ in the noise rate, and the sign pattern of all pairwise comparisons – which exact white-box experiments confirm with fitted exponent $-1.97$ against the predicted $-2$ and with $300/300$ sign agreement, within a pre-registered analysis whose single failed gate, an over-strict all-instance criterion, is reported and audited in full. Gate-level simulation and archived runs on two IBM backends then test the windows under device conditions: idealized VD windows exist, but realistic interferometry overhead and denominator instability erase them, and calibrated SV is the practical winner in the tested QAOA instances. This absence of a universal winner is not a failure of mitigation; it is the regime structure that certified operating windows predict.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

The Unsteady Return of Command-Following: Recovery and Instability of Bedside Motor Command-Following After Acute Brain Injury

Background/Objective: Following a verbal command marks the bedside transition from unresponsiveness to overt recovery of consciousness after acute brain injury. Its timing across phenotypes, stability once present, and dependence on sedation are uncharacterized at scale. Methods: Retrospective cohort of adults with acute brain injury, first intensive care unit stay, MIMIC-IV. Command-following was the Glasgow Coma Scale motor response "Obeys Commands." Among patients not following commands at admission, cumulative incidence was estimated with death or hospice and discharge without recovery as competing events. Instability was quantified as transient first recovery and threshold crossings; examinations were tagged for concurrent sedation. Principal findings were externally validated in the multicenter eICU Collaborative Research Database. Results: Of 13,900 brain-injured patients with three or more motor examinations, 5,498 (39.6%) were not following commands at admission. The cumulative incidence of first command-following was 43.5% by 24 hours and 65.0% by 14 days, ranging at 14 days from 36.9% in anoxic injury to 77.2% in ischemic stroke (anoxic versus ischemic stroke at 72 hours, difference 0.41; adjusted P = .002). Among 3,573 patients who recovered, the first recovery was transient in 22.2%, and 62.4% crossed the threshold repeatedly. Non-following was strongly associated with sedation, consistent with an arousal-dependent examination. In eICU, the 14-day incidence was 64.8%, and transient first recovery was 22.7%, closely matching the primary cohort. Conclusions: After acute brain injury, overt bedside command-following returns early but unsteadily, with phenotype-dependent timing, threshold fluctuation, and strong dependence on sedation. A single charted observation is an unreliable index of the underlying state.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Spin mixing induced dynamics of spinor solitons in $F=1$ Bose Einstein condensates

arXiv:2606.14231v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We explore soliton interactions in a homogeneous spinor $F=1$ Bose Einstein Condensate (BEC) in the presence of a magnetic field, focusing on dark bright dark and bright dark bright configurations. We investigate how these interactions depend on the phase differences among bright solitons and their influence during the dynamics. Our findings align with prior non spinor results, i.e., repulsion among in phase bright solitons and attraction among out of phase pairs in self repulsive atomic BECs. The potential bright soliton attraction, added to the short range repulsion of dark dark soliton interactions, can lead to bound states. However, we find that these bound states break in the presence of spinor interactions due to the particle exchange dynamics between the hyperfine states of the components. Additonally, we develop an effective classical model to describe the soliton dynamics, using a Lagrangian approach. The accuracy of the model is tested by comparing it against numerical simulations. Our results suggest that the proposed model captures the essential features of soliton behavior in the presence of spin interactions, and provides congruent soliton trajectories and interspecies particle exchange dynamics in most of the cases.

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

FloatDoor: Platform-Triggered Backdoors in LLMs

arXiv:2606.19535v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in sensitive settings such as software engineering, where their outputs directly shape downstream artifacts. Recent work has shown that an identical model can produce measurably different outputs depending on the deployment platform, a consequence of non-associative floating-point arithmetic and divergent kernel implementations. We study the security implications of this platform-dependent variability and uncover a novel attack surface on LLM deployments. We introduce FloatDoor, the first input-independent, platform-triggered backdoor attack against generative LLMs. The compromised model exhibits adversary-chosen behavior when served on a target platform and is otherwise benign. FloatDoor is realized through two lightweight LoRA adapters, one that amplifies inter-platform numerical divergence and one that binds the resulting platform signature to a malicious downstream task, while leaving aggregate model utility largely intact. FloatDoor exploits a pronounced time-of-check, time-of-use gap between model auditing and serving. We demonstrate FloatDoor on Qwen3-4B across a broad range of deployment targets, including NVIDIA GPUs, Google TPUs, AWS Graviton, and Alibaba Yitian-710. As a final case study, we show that FloatDoor reliably induces exploitable code vulnerabilities on a chosen target platform. Our results establish a new class of attacks on LLM deployments and underscore the pressing need for trusted model supply chains in sensitive, LLM-powered applications.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Leave-One-Out-, Bootstrap- and Cross-Conformal Anomaly Detectors

arXiv:2402.16388v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The need for uncertainty quantification in anomaly detection systems has become increasingly important. In this context, effectively controlling Type I error rates without inflating Type II error rates in these systems can build trust and reduce costs associated with false discoveries. The field of conformal anomaly detection emerges as a promising approach for providing respective statistical and finite-sample validity guarantees through model calibration. However, reliance on calibration data imposes practical limitations, especially in low-data regimes. In this work, we formally define and evaluate leave-one-out-, bootstrap-, and cross-conformal methods for conformal anomaly detection, building on methods from the field of conformal prediction. Looking beyond the classical split-conformal approach, we show that derived methods for calculating resampling-conformal $p$-values offer a practical compromise between the data efficiency of full-conformal (transductive) approaches and the computational efficiency of split-conformal (inductive) methods. We validate derived methods and quantify their improvements for a range of one-class classifiers and datasets.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

A Pfaffian quantum Hall state of ultracold bosons

arXiv:2606.12409v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fractional quantum Hall states are a cornerstone of topological physics, hosting fractionally charged quasiparticles with exotic statistics that promise to enable topologically protected quantum information processing. Among these, the Pfaffian state introduced by Moore and Read implements a p-wave pairing structure that supports excitations with non-Abelian exchange statistics. Despite extensive study in electronic systems, direct access to its pairing structure has remained limited. Here we realize a three-particle bosonic Pfaffian state of ultracold $^{87}\mathrm{Rb}$ atoms in an optical lattice subject to a Floquet-engineered synthetic magnetic field. Using a Bayesian-optimized adiabatic protocol, we prepare a state exhibiting Pfaffian pairing correlations. Site-resolved measurements of multi-point density correlations reveal a pronounced suppression of short-range three-body coincidences, reflecting the underlying pairing structure. We further probe the state's transport response through Hall drift measurements. Our results establish a bottom-up approach to engineering non-Abelian topological order and lay the groundwork for future explorations of anyonic braiding in synthetic matter.

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

HemExp: Clinically-Guided Latent Diffusion for Modeling Hematoma Expansion

Hematoma expansion (HE) after spontaneous intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) is a major determinant of acute triage and treatment decisions in neurosurgical care. However, most existing methods provide either a binary expansion risk or a single follow-up volume, limiting uncertainty-aware decisions. We introduce HemExp, a clinically-guided latent diffusion model that generates patient-specific follow-up non-contrast CT images, along with segmentations of intraparenchymal and intraventricular hemorrhage. Generation is conditioned on baseline imaging, clinical variables, and an explicit expansion indicator, enabling controllable simulation of realistic clinical scenarios. HemExp uses a hemorrhage-aware multi-head variational autoencoder and models progression as the difference between baseline and follow-up latent representations with a conditional diffusion model. The model is trained on paired scans from 450 patients across multiple centers and evaluated on 107 patients from a held-out institution. HemExp produces spatial HE probability maps by generating multiple synthetic follow-up images per patient to estimate distributions of plausible follow-up hematoma volumes. Perturbing clinical inputs such as symptom-onset-to-imaging time or anticoagulant status shifts the predicted follow-up volume distribution. HemExp extends binary predictors and demonstrates robust estimation of clinically relevant outcomes in the imaging space, such as hematoma volume, intraventricular involvement, and mass effects. Overall, our results support controllable latent diffusion as a promising direction for uncertainty-aware modeling of early ICH progression.

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

Context-Aware Feature-Fusion for Co-occurring Object Detection in Autonomous Driving

Object detection in autonomous driving requires precise localization and an inherent understanding of the relational context between co-occurring objects. In extremely complex heterogeneous environments rare classes, small-scale objects, and frequently appearing objects are difficult for standard object detection frameworks to handle. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called Context-Centric Feature Fusion (CCFF), which utilizes two attention-based modules, Local Context Fusion Module (LCFM) uses the RoI-to-RoI self-attention mechanism to resolve spatial interactions, mainly considering small and partially obscured objects, while Global Context Attention Module (GCAM) converts the co-occurrence of objects priors by pooling top-K RoI features into a global context attention token, avoiding the computational overhead of pixel-level global pooling. This fusion of local and object-centric global features yields contextualized embeddings that enhance classification results and co-occurring objects detection. Our method is evaluated on two datasets, Cityscapes and BDD100K which demonstrate significant improvement on relational consistency, achieving a Category-level Consistency Strategy (CCS) of 0.973 and 0.969, respectively. Furthermore, our approach produces substantial gains in small object detection (AP_S: 14.1%) and successfully recovers rare classes such as "Train" that are typically lost in large distributions. Our efficiency report shows that the framework processes images in real time with a 0.2 FPS overhead. The code is available at https://github.com/BinayKSingh/CCFF.

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

Conformal Candidate Certification for Offline Model-Based Optimization

Authors:

arXiv:2606.15217v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline model-based optimization (MBO) proposes candidates by optimizing a surrogate trained on a fixed historical dataset. Because candidates are deliberately out-of-distribution, surrogate rankings are least reliable exactly where the optimizer is most aggressive, yet existing methods provide no per-candidate statistical certificate that a design meets a target threshold. We propose Conformal Candidate Certification (CCC), a post-hoc wrapper that attaches a calibrated one-sided lower bound to each candidate and advances only those whose bound exceeds the target. We show that entropy-regularized surrogate maximization induces a Gibbs-tilted proposal, so the same surrogate supplies importance weights for weighted conformal prediction without a separate density-ratio estimation step. In a controlled synthetic study, CCC certifies $16.7\%$ of an aggressive proposal pool with empirical coverage 0.990 at nominal 0.90, while standard conformal prediction ignoring the covariate shift collapses to 0.416 coverage.

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

Connect the Dots: Training LLMs for Long-Lifecycle Agents with Cross-Domain Generalization Via Reinforcement Learning

This work presents a general framework for training large language models (LLMs) to "Connect the Dots" (CoD), a meta-capability required by long-lifecycle agents: as an LLM-based AI agent gets deployed in an environment, it solves a long sequence of tasks while continuously exploring the environment, learning from its own experiences, and iteratively self-updating its context about the environment, thereby achieving progressively better performance on future tasks conditioned on the updated context. Major components of the CoD framework include: (1) algorithm design and infrastructure for end-to-end reinforcement learning (RL) with long rollout sequences interleaving solve-task and update-context episodes; (2) tasks and environments for incentivizing and eliciting the targeted meta-capability in LLMs during training, as well as for faithfully measuring progress during evaluation. We present proof-of-concept implementations of the CoD framework, including a GRPO-style RL algorithm with fine-grained credit assignment, as well as tasks and environments tailored to the targeted meta-capability (rather than domain-specific LLM capabilities or standard task-by-task RL). Empirical results validate the efficacy of end-to-end RL training in the CoD setting, and demonstrate the potential for out-of-distribution generalization – within the training domains, across different domains, and from CoD to Ralph-loop settings – of the elicited meta-capability. Our investigation of CoD connects several lines of prior works, and opens up new opportunities for advancing LLMs and AI agents. To facilitate further research and applications, we release our implementations at \url{https://github.com/agentscope-ai/Trinity-RFT/tree/research/cod/examples/research_cod}.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

QueryGaussian: Scalable and Training-Free Open-Vocabulary 3D Instance Retrieval

arXiv:2606.19733v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Efficiently retrieving specific 3D instances from large-scale scenes via natural language prompts remains a formidable challenge in multimedia analysis. Existing approaches predominantly follow a "scene-level embedding" paradigm, which requires distilling high-dimensional semantic features into every 3D primitive. This strategy suffers from a fundamental architectural bottleneck: memory and computational costs scale linearly with scene complexity, inevitably triggering out-of-memory (OOM) failures in city-scale environments. To address this barrier, we propose QueryGaussian, a training-free framework for expeditious and scalable open-vocabulary 3D instance retrieval. Unlike holistic semantic distillation, QueryGaussian employs an instance-level query mechanism that decouples semantic understanding from geometric representation. Specifically, we leverage pre-trained 2D vision models to interpret user prompts and lift segmentation masks into 3D via a concurrent maximum-weight association strategy, ensuring semantic-visual consistency. To mitigate projection ambiguity, we introduce a temporal fusion module with multi-stage adaptive density clustering. Experimental results demonstrate that QueryGaussian not only matches the accuracy of state-of-the-art methods but also delivers a decisive efficiency leap, reducing GPU memory usage by over 70% and accelerating inference by 180x. Crucially, QueryGaussian enables expeditious instance retrieval on city-scale scenes containing tens of millions of Gaussians using consumer-grade hardware.

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

Diffusion-based Cumulative Adversarial Purification for Vision Language Models

Vision Language Models (VLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in multimodal understanding, yet their susceptibility to adversarial perturbations poses a significant threat to their reliability in real-world applications. Despite often being imperceptible to humans, these perturbations can drastically alter model outputs, leading to erroneous interpretations and decisions. This paper introduces DiffCAP, a novel diffusion-based purification strategy that can effectively neutralize adversarial corruptions in VLMs. We theoretically establish a provable recovery region in the forward diffusion process and meanwhile quantify the convergence rate of semantic variation with respect to VLMs. These findings manifest that adversarial effects monotonically fade as diffusion unfolds. Guided by this principle, DiffCAP leverages noise injection with a similarity threshold of VLM embeddings as an adaptive criterion, before reverse diffusion restores a clean and reliable representation for VLM inference. Through extensive experiments across six datasets with three VLMs under varying attack strengths in three task scenarios, we show that DiffCAP outperforms existing defense techniques by a substantial margin. Notably, DiffCAP significantly reduces both hyperparameter tuning complexity and the required diffusion time, thereby accelerating the denoising process. Equipped with theorems and empirical support, DiffCAP provides a robust and practical solution for securely deploying VLMs in adversarial environments. The source code is available at https://github.com/JasonFu1998/DiffCAP.

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

A Robust Point Cloud Analysis Framework Inspired By Primary Visual Cortex

Despite significant advancements in point cloud analysis, reducing energy consumption and improving robustness remain understudied, largely due to the inherent limitations of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). To address this issue, we draw inspiration from the primary visual cortex and propose a Dendritic-Connected Continuous-Coupled Neural Network (DC-CCNN), a novel Brain-Inspired Neural Network (BINN) architecture for point cloud analysis. By combining discrete and continuous encoding, our design replaces traditional Multilayer Perceptrons (MLPs) with more efficient and robust BINNs. Building upon this framework, we further propose an extended model, DC-CCNN++, to improve robustness under complex corruption conditions. Specifically, we introduce a Neuro-Inspired Robust Modulation-and-Readout Module (NRMR) to enhance feature stability and decision robustness through global-context gain modulation and dual-code evidence integration. We also design a Cortically Inspired Progressive Variability Training (CPVT) strategy, which progressively exposes the model to structured environmental variability while preserving stable clean-sample anchors during training. Experimental results show that DC-CCNN++ improves the performance of brain-inspired networks on point cloud analysis while maintaining performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods. Compared with the original DC-CCNN, it achieves stronger results on both classification and part segmentation, and exhibits enhanced robustness against sparsity, occlusion, Gaussian noise, salt-and-pepper noise, and spatial transformations. With its efficiency, robustness, and biologically grounded design, DC-CCNN++ provides a promising alternative to traditional deep learning methods for point cloud analysis. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DC-CCNNpp-44E3.

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

VoidPadding: Let [VOID] Handle Padding in Masked Diffusion Language Models so that [EOS] Can Focus on Semantic Termination

MDLMs generate text by denoising a preallocated masked response canvas, making response-length modeling central to instruction tuning. Existing MDLMs often inherit the autoregressive convention of using repeated \texttt{[EOS]} tokens for padding during instruction tuning, giving \texttt{[EOS]} a dual role as both a semantic terminator and a padding token. We show that this dual role is a root cause of \texttt{[EOS]} overflow under large-block decoding. To decouple these roles, we propose VoidPadding, which introduces \texttt{[VOID]} for padding and reserves \texttt{[EOS]} for termination. During inference, the learned \texttt{[EOS]} signal enables early stopping, while the learned \texttt{[VOID]} signal guides adaptive response canvas expansion. On Dream-7B-Instruct, VoidPadding improves the block-size-averaged four-task mean across mathematical reasoning and code generation benchmarks by \(+17.84\) points over the original model and \(+6.95\) points over RainbowPadding, while reducing decoding NFE by 55.7\% on average. Code is available at https://github.com/Haru-LCY/VoidPadding.

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

Appearance-Invariant Detection of Suggestive Motion via Laban Movement Descriptors

Content moderation in online multiplayer 3D virtual environments is increasingly automated, yet detection has focused on images, video, and audio, leaving suggestive motion a blind spot. We present a motion-only classification pipeline that detects suggestive and explicit movement from SMPL skeleton trajectories using Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) descriptors. On a dataset spanning everyday, artistic, suggestive, and explicit movement (17+ hours of video), a logistic regression trained on 61-feature LMA descriptors reaches 68% binary SFW/NSFW accuracy (70% random forest) under a leak-free evaluation protocol. At this level, our descriptor performs comparably to a learned video model trained on the same motion re-rendered as appearance-free video, a gray figure with no clothing, skin, or scene. The indirectness (tortuosity) of each joint's trajectory, measured as the ratio of the joint's path length to its net displacement, peaks at the suggestive tier, showing that the Direct-to-Indirect polarity of Laban's Space factor provides an interpretable marker of the shift from functional to suggestive motion. Ultimately, Laban-based kinematic descriptors offer a lightweight, interpretable approach to suggestive-motion detection: every decision decomposes into named, theory-grounded features. Because the classifier operates on pose trajectories alone, moderation can run directly on avatar poses in virtual environments, with no appearance data.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Schrödinger's Navigator: Imagining an Ensemble of Futures for Zero-Shot Object Navigation

Zero-shot object navigation (ZSON) requires robots to find target objects in unseen environments without task-specific fine-tuning or pre-built maps, a key capability for general-purpose service robots. Yet methods that perform well in simulation often degrade in cluttered real-world scenes with severe occlusion and latent hazards, where large unseen regions make single-scene inference brittle and unsafe. We propose Schrödinger's Navigator, a belief-aware framework that reasons at inference time over multiple trajectory-conditioned imagined 3D futures. Given candidate paths, a trajectory-conditioned 3D world model predicts hypothetical observations and maintains a superposition of plausible scene realizations rather than committing to one map. An adaptive occluder-aware sampler directs imagination to uncertainty-critical regions, while a Future-Aware Value Map (FAVM) aggregates imagined futures for robust, proactive action selection. Experiments in simulation and on a physical Go2 quadruped show that Schrödinger's Navigator outperforms strong ZSON baselines, improving hidden-target discovery and risk-aware waypoint selection in occlusion-heavy navigation scenarios. These results highlight imagined 3D futures as a scalable and generalizable strategy for zero-shot navigation in uncertain real-world environments.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Preserved Medial Temporal Lobe Flexibility Predicts Memory Generalization Only in the Context of Good Sleep Quality among Older African Americans

Objectives: Poor sleep quality is a risk factor for Alzheimer's disease (AD). Older African Americans experience disproportionately high rates of sleep disturbance and AD. Medial temporal lobe (MTL) flexibility reflects dynamic neural reorganization and may be a marker of generalization performance. This study examined whether sleep quality moderates the association between MTL flexibility and memory generalization. Methods: Fifty older African Americans (MeanAge=69.7{+/-}6.21 years; 80% women) underwent rs-fMRI to quantify MTL flexibility, Rutgers Acquired Equivalence Task for memory generalization, and Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index for sleep quality. Results: Greater MTL flexibility was associated with better generalization (r=0.367, p=.017). Good sleepers showed higher MTL flexibility (F(1,44)=8.11, p2=.156, p=.007) and superior generalization (F(1,46)= 12.33, p2=.211, p=.001). Sleep quality significantly moderated the MTL flexibility and generalization relationship ({beta}=-1.519, p=.012). Conclusions: Preserved MTL flexibility may confer generalization only in good sleepers, suggesting that sleep disturbance may disrupt the MTL neural resilience among older African Americans.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Does Text Actually Help? Uncovering and Resolving Text Collapse in Multimodal Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.19413v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal time series forecasting, which pairs numerical sequences with domain-relevant textual reports, promises to inject world knowledge into forecasting pipelines. However, we uncover a critical failure mode in existing frameworks that we term text collapse: the text branch converges to a content-independent transformation, contributing negligible discriminative signal regardless of the input description. We argue that text collapse is a consequence of a fundamental asymmetry in time series forecasting: the numerical input is strongly autocorrelated with the output, making the numerical backbone inherently dominant, while the text branch, despite carrying complementary and often critical information, is insufficiently utilized, leading to its systematic underexploitation. To address this, we propose REST-TS (Residual-Exclusive Supervision for Text in Time Series), which turns the asymmetry into a design principle: the numerical backbone produces its own independent numerical forecast, and the text branch is exclusively supervised to predict the structured components of the residual, the prediction gap that numbers cannot explain. Because no numerical pathway can reduce these losses, the text branch must extract genuine content from the input description. Evaluated across diverse real-world domains and backbone architectures, REST-TS achieves state-of-the-art performance and consistently demonstrates greater text-branch utilization than existing frameworks, providing strong empirical evidence that supervising the text branch on the residual compels it to extract genuine content from the input.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Compact Geometric Representations of Hierarchies

Computing geometric representations of data is a cornerstone of modern machine learning, typically achieved by training dual encoders which map queries and documents into a shared embedding space. Recent work of You et al. [NeurIPS '25] has extended this approach to hierarchical retrieval, where relevance is determined by the ancestor-descendant relationships in a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). While previous work has shown that valid embeddings exist when the number of descendants is small, these bounds degrade significantly for deep hierarchies, requiring dimensions as large as the total number of nodes. In this paper, we investigate compact reachability embeddings for more general graph classes and provide theoretical guarantees for representing hierarchies using embeddings whose dimension depends on structural graph parameters. We prove that for any directed tree, there exists a reachability embedding in constant dimension 3, independent of the tree's size or depth. We generalize this result to graphs characterized by treewidth $t$, constructing embeddings of dimension $O(t \log n)$, where $n$ is the number of nodes. Complementing these upper bounds, we provide matching or near-matching lower bounds, showing that dimension $\Omega(n)$ is necessary for general DAGs and $\Omega(t/\log(n/t))$ is required for graphs of treewidth $t$. We also obtain upper and lower bounds parameterized by the number of cross-edges in the DAG. We additionally show that our embeddings can be constructed on real world datasets, and that they give much smaller dimensions in high recall regimes compared to prior embeddings with theoretical guarantees.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Deep Learning-Driven Inverse Design of Doherty Power Amplifiers Using Pixelated Combiners and Dual-State Impedance Synthesis

arXiv:2606.18395v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The output combiner of a Doherty power amplifier (PA) integrates load modulation, impedance matching, and phase compensation within a single network, making its design and synthesis highly challenging. In this paper, we propose a three-port Doherty combiner design methodology that combines deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), pixelated layout representations, and genetic algorithms (GA) with dual-state impedance synthesis to address both peak and back-off power conditions. As a proof of concept, two GaN HEMT Doherty PA prototypes incorporating three-port pixelated combiners are designed and fabricated. Both prototypes achieve a measured saturated output power exceeding 44.2 dBm with peak drain efficiency above 71.2% within 2.6-2.8 GHz. Furthermore, a drain efficiency as high as 64% is measured at the 6-dB back-off level. After applying digital predistortion, each prototype achieves an adjacent channel leakage ratio (ACLR) better than -51.3 dBc.

24.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-03

IsoPepTracker: An interactive web application for peptide-driven isoform analysis

Authors:

by Araf Mahmud, Chen Huang Alternative splicing affects 95% of multi-exon genes, generating protein isoforms with distinct functions. While current alternative splicing analyses effectively identify splice events at the RNA level, they provide limited protein-level insight. To address this gap, we developed IsoPepTracker (https://www.isopeptracker.org), a user-friendly web application for analyzing and visualizing differential peptides across canonical and novel isoforms that are theoretically detectable by shotgun mass spectrometry-based proteomics. IsoPepTracker features four modules: Canonical Isoform Analysis, Novel Isoform Discovery, Peptide Sequence Search, and Alternative Splicing Analysis. Each module is tailored for distinct and complementary proteogenomics analyses. Users can input genes, novel cDNA sequences, peptides, or alternative splicing results to pinpoint peptides of interest and identify their associations with target genes or isoforms. We demonstrate the straightforward application of IsoPepTracker in proteogenomics through case studies. IsoPepTracker not only provides informative peptide signatures to understand the protein-level consequences of alternative splicing but also supplies peptide candidates for validation in shotgun proteomics.

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

EcoBin: A Two-Stage Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Contamination-Aware Waste Classification

Waste classification models have become highly accurate at sorting waste, often exceeding 95% on benchmark datasets. However, these models fail to account for contamination in recyclable waste. We present EcoBin, a two-stage deep convolutional neural network that classifies household waste by its disposal pathway and that explicitly accounts for contamination. The first stage is a base waste classifier built on an EfficientNetV2-S backbone that assigns each of the thirty waste categories in our dataset to one of four disposal pathways. The second stage is a contamination classifier that inspects any item routed toward recycling and overrides the decision to garbage when contamination is detected. Because no public dataset of contaminated recyclables exists, we synthesize one by segmenting images of clean recyclable objects with a U2-Net model and compositing realistic contamination textures onto their surfaces. The first stage achieves 87.42% test accuracy and a 96.13% pathway-adjusted accuracy. Meanwhile, the contamination stage distinguishes clean from contaminated items with a 0.99 ROC-AUC. On a test set of contaminated recyclables, the complete pipeline routes 24 of 25 items correctly, compared with only 1 of 25 for the base classifier alone. A McNemar's test confirms that the improvement contributed by the contamination stage is statistically significant (p < 0.001).