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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

\texttt{Range-Arithmetic}: Verifiable Deep Learning Inference on an Untrusted Party

arXiv:2505.17623v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Verifiable computing (VC) has gained prominence in decentralized machine learning systems, where resource-intensive tasks like deep neural network (DNN) inference are offloaded to external participants due to blockchain limitations. This creates a need to verify the correctness of outsourced computations without re-execution. We propose \texttt{Range-Arithmetic}, a novel framework for efficient and verifiable DNN inference that transforms non-arithmetic operations, such as rounding after fixed-point matrix multiplication and ReLU, into arithmetic steps verifiable using sum-check protocols and concatenated range proofs. Our approach avoids the complexity of Boolean encoding, high-degree polynomials, and large lookup tables while remaining compatible with finite-field-based proof systems. Experimental results show that our method not only matches the performance of existing approaches, but also reduces the computational cost of verifying the results, the computational effort required from the untrusted party performing the DNN inference, and the communication overhead between the two sides.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Offline Channel-Independent QAOA Angles for RIS Power Aggregation: Unit-Circle Phase Dictionaries and Infinite-Size Spin-Glass Limits

arXiv:2606.24540v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) maximize received power by setting per-element phases. Discrete-phase optimization is NP-hard in the worst case, while the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) applied to RIS faces limited phase alphabets, either per-problem angle optimization or uncharacterized training cost exposed to barren plateaus, and no scalable performance benchmark. We introduce a $2^{M}$-phase $\theta$ dictionary for optimizing power $\|\mathbf{A} \, e^{j\theta}\|^{2}$ having $K \times N$ channel matrix $\mathbf{A}$ and QAOA angle offline optimization with instance and size-independent infinite-size limit of the mixed-$q$ Gaussian ensemble of Basso et al. Our design bounds the spin-Hamiltonian interaction order to at most quartic for any $M$, and the deployed order-2 reduction lies below the even-$q\!\ge\!4$ regime in which constant-level QAOA limitations are proved. We perform analytical, state-vector, matrix-product-state and Pauli-path-simulation numerical studies for $N=K \leq 100$ and QAOA depth $p=9$, verifying offline angle transfer to Rayleigh, Rician/line-of-sight, cascaded double-fading and spatially-correlated RIS channels at $N\!\in\!\{5,12\}$. We observe performance reaching a near-optimal multi-start single-flip local-search reference for $N\!\le\!16$ under order-2 modeling with $2^{5}{=}32$-phase dictionary while the order-4 model shows a performance ceiling below the classical reference. The approach suggests a route to near-optimal large-$N$ performance on future fault-tolerant (FTQ) quantum computers, which enable the higher-depth QAOA circuits.

03.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

Few-Shot Classification of C. elegans Developmental Stages via Explainable Hierarchical Hyperbolic Graph Embeddings

Automated, accurate, and fast developmental-stage classification of C. elegans from microscopy-based morphological images is essential for aging research, drug screening, and disease modeling. However, it remains challenging due to morphological similarities between stages and the limited annotated data. In this work, we propose HyperDev, a hyperbolic few-shot learning framework that addresses these limitations by directly encoding developmental hierarchies in the embedding space, unlike conventional Euclidean approaches that treat stages as independent classes. HyperDev uses Poincare ball geometry, combined with a biologically informed developmental prior, to naturally represent stage relationships. We introduce our selfcurated C. elegans dataset spanning seven developmental stages (Egg, L1-L4, Adult, Dauer) with extreme class imbalance (6-8 samples per minority class). HyperDev achieves competitive classification accuracy (76.9-88.3%) while providing intrinsic explainability across nine 7-way few-shot evaluation settings. The learned embeddings exhibited strong biological alignment (Pearson r = 0.669, p < 0.001), while significantly outperforming ProtoNet (r = 0.187), MatchingNet (r = 0.235), and RelationNet (r = 0.464). These results establish hyperbolic geometry as a principled approach to explainable few-shot learning in biological imaging, where understanding learned representations is as critical as predictive performance. Clinical Relevance–By enabling explainable, data-efficient developmental staging from scarce samples, HyperDev supports improved phenotype quantification for aging research, disease modeling, and drug screening. Index Terms–Hyperbolic learning, few-shot classification, developmental staging, Caenorhabditis elegans, interpretability, explainability.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Reaffirming a Challenge to Bohmian Mechanics

arXiv:2509.06584v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In our recent work, we reported the first measurement of the speed of tunnelling particles using a coupled waveguide system. The measured speed is operationally defined through a comparison of two orthogonal motions in a coupled waveguide system, is compatible with the standard definition of dwell time and with the Büttiker-Landauer tunnelling time, and does not presuppose a trajectory picture. Here we respond to objections raised in comments, referee reports, preprints, and articles. We distinguish two questions that are often conflated: whether Bohmian mechanics reproduces the measured density, and whether the standard guiding equation assigns the correct state of motion to the particles. The first point follows under the usual quantum equilibrium assumptions. The second is a separate physical assumption, since the standard guiding equation does not follow from the Schrödinger equation alone. We argue that, in the evanescent regime, the state of motion assigned by the standard guiding equation is in disagreement with the measured speed. To make the distinction explicit, we also present a bidirectional Bohmian model that reproduces the same stationary density while assigning finite speeds compatible with the speed inferred in the evanescent regime.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Which Models Perform Better in Inheritance Reasoning?

This paper presents the participation of team PSL in the QIAS 2026 Shared Task on Arabic Islamic inheritance reasoning. The task evaluates the ability of large language models to solve inheritance cases that require legal interpretation, multi-step reasoning, and precise numerical computation. We compare commercial and open-source models under a unified prompting strategy to assess their effectiveness in structured legal reasoning with minimal task-specific adaptation. \\ Our results show a clear gap in reliability between the two model families. Commercial models demonstrate stronger performance in identifying eligible heirs, applying exclusion rules, and maintaining consistency across reasoning steps. In contrast, open-source models exhibit greater instability, particularly in cases involving dependent legal decisions and fractional share adjustments. The best performance is achieved by Gemini 2.5 Flash, with an MRE of $0.989$.

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

Will AI Agents Free Us From Meaningless Work? A Human-Centered Analysis

arXiv:2606.12430v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Some claim that AI agents will free workers from the boring parts of their jobs, yet little is known about how workers themselves identify which tasks should be automated. Prior research focuses on occupations, overlooking that workers experience varying levels of meaning across tasks within the same role. We address this gap with a task-level analysis grounded in Graeber's theory of bullshit jobs. Using ratings from 202 workers on 171 workplace tasks, we (1) validate a five-item scale of perceived bullshitness, (2) show that perceived bullshitness strongly predicts desire for AI delegation, and (3) find that such tasks are also seen as requiring less human oversight. Together, these findings suggest that tasks perceived as bullshit are natural candidates for AI delegation, aligning worker preferences with perceived feasibility.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Self-Recognition Finetuning can Prevent and Reverse Emergent Misalignment

Emergent misalignment (EM) has been linked to the activation of misaligned persona vectors and evil character traits, suggesting that EM operates through disruption of the model's aligned character rather than direct learning of harmful content. Motivated by this connection, we study self-generated text recognition (SGTR) finetuning as a character-targeted intervention that is distinct from existing in-training defenses. We conduct two-stage finetuning experiments across three models (GPT-4.1, Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct, Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct) and multiple EM datasets to compare SGTR finetuning against benign finetuning baselines (correct domain-specific data, general knowledge, and word counting) to find it an effective defense in both reversal and prevention settings. We find that all interventions produce comparable EM reversal, but only when restoring capabilities that EM had degraded. For prevention, only SGTR finetuning consistently reduces misalignment without exacerbating any individual metric, suggesting that character fortification specifically drives prevention. We provide further evidence for EM's relation to the LLM's default character by showing that EM finetuning induces diversity into the LLM's identity self-reports, artificially corrupting self-recognition exacerbates misalignment caused by EM finetuning, and that removing the model's identity-bearing system prompt substantially reduces the effect of EM finetuning. Together, these findings reframe EM not as the adoption of a coherent misaligned persona but as the destabilization of aligned character.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Imperfect Visual Verification for Code Edition : A Case Study on TikZ

arXiv:2606.15693v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLMs have significantly advanced code generation, enabling the synthesis of functional programs. While recent systems achieve strong performance on many coding benchmarks, tasks involving programs such as TikZ that generate visual artifacts remain challenging, in particular on visual code customization. Unlike generation from scratch, customization requires localized, semantics-preserving edits: the model must locate relevant code, modify it according to the instruction, and preserve the remaining structure and rendering. Approaches based on post-hoc iterative refinement/correction where a verifier provides feedback to guide corrections, have shown promise. However, in the case of programs with a visual outcome such as in TikZ, where correctness is harder or likely impossible to formalize and evaluate automatically, deterministic verifiers do not exist. Hence, developers can only rely on imperfect verifiers. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study to answer:to what extent can iterative refinement remain effective when the verifier itself is unreliable?} We use TikZ as a focused case study that isolates the core difficulties of the problem (weak code structure, fine-grained visual semantics, and difficult feature localization) in a controlled and challenging setting. We define visual code customization as an iterative editing problem with an imperfect oracle, and introduce a framework for analyzing such iterative refinements. We conduct a large-scale study and evaluate multiple LLM-based and tool-augmented visual verifiers within iterative refinement pipelines, and perform extensive manual annotation of refinement trajectories to assess verifier behavior and feedback quality. Our findings show that even imperfect verifiers can determine with moderate accuracy whether visual instructions are applied to code, achieving F1-scores up to 0.815. Feedback improves iterative refinement, especially for weaker models, adding 11–20 perfect customizations for Qwen3-vl-30b-a3b-Instruct, while stronger models like Gemini-3 gain fewer improvements (+5) but benefit more from accurate verification that prevents premature acceptance. Feedback is effective only when it precisely identifies image issues, provides actionable guidance, addresses all relevant problems, and remains grounded in the original instruction.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

TSegAgent: Zero-Shot Tooth Segmentation via Geometry-Aware Vision-Language Agents

Automatic tooth segmentation and identification from intra-oral scanned 3D models are fundamental problems in digital dentistry, yet most existing approaches rely on task-specific 3D neural networks trained with densely annotated datasets, resulting in high annotation cost and limited generalization to scans from unseen sources. Thus, we propose TSegAgent, which addresses these challenges by reformulating dental analysis as a zero-shot geometric reasoning problem rather than a purely data-driven recognition task. The key idea is to combine the representational capacity of general-purpose foundation models with explicit geometric inductive biases derived from dental anatomy. Instead of learning dental-specific features, the proposed framework leverages multi-view visual abstraction and geometry-grounded reasoning to infer tooth instances and identities without task-specific training. By explicitly encoding structural constraints such as dental arch organization and volumetric relationships, the method reduces uncertainty in ambiguous cases and mitigates overfitting to particular shape distributions. Experimental results demonstrate that this reasoning-oriented formulation enables accurate and reliable tooth segmentation and identification with low computational and annotation cost, while exhibiting strong generalization across diverse and previously unseen dental scans.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Deconvolution-based cell-type specific DNA methylation-wide and transcriptome-wide association studies identify risk CpG sites and genes associated with colorectal cancer risk

Bulk tissue-based DNA methylation-wide (MWAS) and transcriptome-wide association studies (TWAS) have identified CpG sites and genes associated with colorectal cancer (CRC) risk, but do not account for cellular heterogeneity. To address this, we developed a deconvolution-informed framework to infer cell-type specific DNA methylation and gene expression profiles from bulk normal colon tissues using reference single-cell epigenomic and transcriptomic datasets. We performed cell-type specific MWAS (ctMWAS) using deconvoluted DNA methylation data from 293 normal colon samples and conducted cell-type specific TWAS (ctTWAS) using deconvoluted gene expression data from 707 normal colon samples. Genetically predicted methylation and expression models were integrated with CRC GWAS summary statistics (78,473 cases and 107,143 controls) to identify risk-associated CpG sites and genes. Through ctMWAS, ctTWAS, and colocalization analyses, we identified 178 significant cell-type-specific CpG sites in 106 loci and 68 risk genes in 40 loci, including 26 previously unreported loci. Through additional integrative methylation-gene analysis, we prioritized 132 candidate risk genes, the majority of which were supported by multi-omics evidence and stage-specific dysregulation across the adenoma-carcinoma and serrated-carcinoma progression pathways. Pathway enrichment analyses implicated pathways involved in DNA double-strand break repair, TP53 regulation, TGF-{beta} signaling, and innate immune responses. Among prioritized genes, 14 were identified as putative druggable targets linked to 90 FDA-approved or clinical-stage drugs. Experimental validation supports an oncogenic role for SF3A3. These findings demonstrate that deconvolution-informed integrative analyses enable cell-type-resolved identification of epigenetic and transcriptional mechanisms underlying CRC susceptibility and provide insights into disease biology, prevention, and therapeutic target discovery.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Witnessing Spin-Orbital Entanglement using Resonant Inelastic X-Ray Scattering

arXiv:2512.06718v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Entanglement plays a central role in quantum technologies, yet its characterization and control in materials remain challenging. Recent developments in spectrum-based entanglement witnesses have enabled new strategies for quantifying many-body entanglement in macroscopic materials. Here, we develop a protocol for detecting spin-orbital entanglement using experiment-accessible resonant inelastic x-ray scattering (RIXS). Central to our approach is the construction of a Hermitian generator from experimentally measurable spectra, which allows us to compute the quantum Fisher information (QFI) available in spin–orbital systems. The resulting QFI provides upper bounds for $k$-producible states and thus serves as a robust witness of spin-orbital entanglement. To account for realistic experimental limitations, we further extend our framework to include relaxed QFI bounds applicable to measurements lacking full polarization resolution.

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

DeepRHP: A Hybrid Variational Autoencoder for Designing Random Heteropolymers as Protein Mimics

arXiv:2606.11651v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Synthetic random heteropolymers (RHPs), consisting of a predefined set of monomers, offer an approach toward the design of protein-like materials. These RHPs, if designed appropriately, can mimic protein behavior and function. As such, there is a need for computational tools to efficiently guide RHP design. We bridge this gap by developing DeepRHP, a modified variational autoencoder (VAE) model under a semi-supervised framework. By equipping a classical VAE with an additional feature-based VAE, DeepRHP forces the latent space to capture structures of critical chemical features as well as individual RHP sequence patterns. In this sense, our method is versatile by allowing any relevant features to be incorporated in a hybrid manner. We demonstrate the effectiveness of DeepRHP by suggesting potential monomer compositions that stabilize membrane proteins (e.g. Aquaporin Z) in non-native environments and cross-validating our prediction with published results. The concordance between our model and true RHP function suggests strong potential in utilizing hybrid autoencoder architectures to guide RHP design for proteins and other biological compounds.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

LakeFM: Toward a Foundation Model for Aquatic Ecosystems Using Irregular Multivariate Multi-depth Time Series Data

arXiv:2606.11268v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding and forecasting lake dynamics is critical for monitoring water quality and ecosystem health across lakes and reservoirs. While machine learning methods have been recently applied to ecological time-series data, existing works assume regular sampling in time and depth, and struggle to generalize across lakes with heterogeneous variables, depths, and observation patterns. To address these limitations, we introduce \textsc{LakeFM}, a foundation model for aquatic systems, pre-trained on large-scale ecological datasets comprising both simulated and observed lakes. Through extensive empirical evaluation, we show that \textsc{LakeFM} learns meaningful representations spanning broader lake-level characteristics, and achieves competitive or often superior-forecasting performance compared to existing time-series foundation and non-foundation models, while producing physically plausible predictions consistent with real-world lake dynamics.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Trajectory-Level Redirection Attacks on Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies bring natural language into closed-loop robot control, enabling robots to execute manipulation tasks directly from text instructions. The same interface gives text a recurring role in control because the prompt is reused at every replanning step, and each prompt-conditioned action changes the future observations on which the policy acts. Existing VLA attacks study adversarial prompts that elicit targeted low-level actions or make such actions persist across changing images. We identify a stronger trajectory-level failure mode: a prompt that still $appears$ to specify the intended task but redirects the final physical outcome. We mathematically formalize this setting as $command-preserving trajectory redirection$, a prompt-only threat model in which the attacker chooses one prompt before the episode, all policy and environment components remain fixed, and the prompt must stay close to the benign instruction while omitting target words and correction language. To find such prompts, we introduce an on-policy prompt search method that uses rollouts to discover perturbations whose closed-loop behavior tracks a target task while satisfying the command-preserving constraints. Experiments in simulation and on hardware show that near-benign prompt perturbations can redirect VLA rollouts to attacker-specified targets. These results expose a trajectory-level vulnerability in VLA instruction grounding: text that appears to preserve the intended command can still give an adversary control over the robot's final physical outcome. Project website: https://vla-redirection-attack.github.io/

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

Data Bias Mitigation under Coverage Constraints & The Price of Fairness

arXiv:2606.20461v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine learning models have been shown to exhibit discriminatory outcomes or degraded performance for individuals at the intersection of multiple sensitive attributes, such as race and gender. This stems in part from two interrelated challenges: the lack of principled measures for quantifying bias (potentially intersectional), and insufficient representation of intersectional subgroups in training data. We extend a recent bias mitigation framework to incorporate coverage constraints that enforce sufficient representation across groups, including intersectional subgroups. Since achieving exactly zero bias for all groups may not be data efficient (meaning it may require large amounts of data), our solution trades small approximation errors in bias for greater data efficiency while satisfying coverage constraints. We also formulate bias mitigation as an integer linear program that optimizes over all mitigation strategies, and characterize the price of fairness, the minimum data modification cost, as a function of fairness tolerance. This is essential both for legal compliance, where regulations may mandate specific fairness thresholds, and for data governance, enabling practitioners to make informed trade-offs between bias reduction and data modification (particularly, data purchasing) costs. We evaluate our techniques on publicly available datasets, demonstrating that bias mitigation via our framework preserves predictive accuracy across multiple classifiers, and that coverage constraints, while motivated by statistical considerations, are essential for preserving downstream ML performance.

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

Provable Recovery of Locally Important Signed Features and Interactions from Random Forest

arXiv:2512.11081v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Feature and Interaction Importance (FII) methods are essential in supervised learning for assessing the relevance of input variables and their interactions in complex prediction models. In many domains, such as personalized medicine, local interpretations for individual predictions are often required, rather than global scores summarizing overall feature importance. Random Forests (RFs) are widely used in these settings, and existing interpretability methods typically exploit tree structures and split statistics to provide model-specific insights. However, theoretical understanding of local FII methods for RF remains limited, making it unclear how to interpret high importance scores for individual predictions. We propose a novel, local, model-specific FII method that identifies frequent co-occurrences of features along decision paths, combining global patterns with those observed on paths specific to a given test point. We prove that our method consistently recovers the true local signal features and their interactions under a Locally Spike Sparse (LSS) model and also identifies whether large or small feature values drive a prediction. We illustrate the usefulness of our method and theoretical results through simulation studies and a real-world data example.

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

VeriGraph: Towards Verifiable Data-Analytic Agents

LLM-based agents have demonstrated strong capabilities in data-intensive analytical tasks, yet their outputs are rarely verifiable: a reliance on linear text trajectories makes their reasoning difficult to audit. In particular, deterministic computations over raw data and semantic deductions over natural-language claims are often entangled in an unstructured stream, leaving numerical conclusions hard to reproduce and qualitative judgments hard to inspect. To address this, we propose VeriGraph, a traceable neuro-symbolic reasoning framework that enables agents to construct an explicit heterogeneous evidence directed acyclic graph (DAG) during execution. VeriGraph introduces three evidence-expansion primitives, namely computational, grounding, and derivational expansion, to connect raw data, interpreter variables, computed results, and natural-language claims in a unified graph. Under this formulation, structural traceability is reduced to graph reachability from raw data sources to terminal claims, while semantic support is measured by claim-level evidence evaluation. To improve graph construction, we further design a graph-based policy optimization strategy with a composite reward that jointly supervises answer correctness, computational integrity, and derivational coherence. Experiments on four benchmarks show that VeriGraph-8B achieves the highest overall score among all baselines. More importantly, VeriGraph produces auditable evidence graphs with substantially stronger claim grounding, achieving a 87.61\% Grounding Rate under our claim-level evidence support evaluation. These results suggest that explicit evidence-graph construction is a promising path toward verifiable data-analytic agents. Our code is available at https://github.com/ignorejjj/VeriGraph.

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

A Text Recognition Dataset from Sahidic Coptic Ancient Manuscripts

In this work, we target Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) in low-resource scenarios, which arise from underrepresented languages, rare scripts, and degraded visual conditions typical of historical documents. We introduce SCAM (Sahidic Coptic Ancient Manuscripts), a new line-level dataset built from digitized ancient manuscripts written in the extinct Sahidic Coptic dialect. The dataset reflects a realistic and challenging setting, as it combines heterogeneous acquisition conditions across libraries with typical manuscript degradations such as ink fading, bleed-through, and material deterioration. In addition to visual complexity, SCAM poses significant linguistic challenges due to the scarcity of resources for Sahidic Coptic, its uncommon alphabet, and dialect-specific diacritics. To support research in low-resource HTR, we benchmark several state-of-the-art approaches based on different paradigms, highlighting their limitations and strengths in this setting. Our results underline the gap between current HTR performance on well-resourced modern scripts and historically grounded, low-resource scenarios, thus providing a reference point for future developments.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

From Trainee to Trainer: LLM-Designed Training Environment for RL with Multi-Agent Reasoning

Reinforcement learning pipelines for Large Language Model (LLM) training often rely on manually redesigned environments between stages, requiring practitioners to heuristically infer which configuration will best improve the current policy. To automate this process, we propose the LLM-as-Environment-Engineer framework in which the current policy model analyzes failure trajectories together with contextual information and proposes modifications to the next-stage training environment configuration. We also introduce MAPF-FrozenLake, a controllable testbed whose generator exposes multi-dimensional environment configurations, making it suitable for studying and benchmarking environment redesign. On this testbed, we condition the environment engineer on structured summaries of policy behavior, failure cases, and environment statistics, from which it produces the configuration for the next training stage. With Qwen3-4B as the backbone, our framework achieves the strongest aggregate performance on our benchmarks, outperforming larger proprietary LLMs (e.g., GPT, Gemini) and fixed-environment training baselines. We further analyze which forms of context are most effective, finding that successful environment updates rely on failure evidence and preserve configurations that already work. Interestingly, the current RL checkpoint serves as a better environment engineer than the original base model, suggesting that policy learning improves the model's ability to diagnose its remaining weaknesses.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Mitigating Visual Hallucinations in Multimodal Systems through Retrieval-Augmented Reliability-Aware Inference

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in vision-language understanding and natural-language response generation. However, these systems can still produce overconfident predictions and hallucination-like outputs, particularly when the visual evidence is weak, ambiguous, or semantically inconsistent. Most existing approaches focus on improving multimodal representation alignment or retrieval-augmented generation, while providing limited mechanisms to quantify instance-level prediction reliability or identify incorrect visual outputs. This work proposes a retrieval-augmented reliability-aware inference framework for trustworthy multimodal visual understanding. The proposed framework constructs an external visual evidence database using pretrained visual embeddings and nearest-neighbor retrieval over normalized feature representations. Retrieved evidence is used to estimate prediction trustworthiness through multiple reliability indicators, including similarity strength, class-support agreement, evidence margin, entropy-based uncertainty, and an aggregate reliability score. Based on these signals, a decision gate determines whether the system should accept the prediction, answer with caution, or abstain/fallback when evidence is insufficient. A multimodal response-generation layer then produces a final user-facing response conditioned on the reliability decision. Experiments on ImageNet-100 demonstrate that the proposed reliability-aware framework improves accepted prediction accuracy from 85.84\% to 88.88\% at 89.04\% coverage. The hallucination-like accepted wrong-answer rate is reduced from 14.16\% to 11.12\%. These results show that integrating retrieval evidence, reliability estimation, and selective decision gating can improve calibration and reduce overconfident visual errors without retraining large multimodal models.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Weisfeiler Lehman Test on Combinatorial Complexes: Generalized Expressive Power of Topological Neural Networks

arXiv:2605.00725v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Topological neural networks have emerged as effective tools for modeling higher-order relational structures beyond pairwise graphs, including hypergraphs, simplicial complexes, and cell complexes. However, existing Weisfeiler-Leman type expressivity analyses are typically developed on different structural domains and rely on domain-specific neighborhood systems, making their expressive powers difficult to compare within a common formalism. In this paper, we introduce the Combinatorial Complex Weisfeiler-Leman (CCWL) framework, a unified expressive power refinement defined on combinatorial complexes. By exploiting the ability of combinatorial complexes to represent both set-type relations and part-whole hierarchies, CCWL performs topological color refinement through four structural neighborhoods: boundary, co-boundary, lower adjacency, and upper adjacency. We show that, under specified lifting maps, CCWL can simulate several domain-specific WL-type refinements, thereby providing a common theoretical baseline for analyzing topological message passing. We further study the neighborhood sufficiency problem and prove that, under explicit coverage conditions, a reduced refinement using only lower- and upper-adjacent bridge information preserves the distinguishing power of the full four-neighborhood CCWL refinement. Guided by this theoretical result, we instantiate the reduced refinement as the Combinatorial Complex Isomorphism Network (CCIN). Experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that CCIN achieves competitive performance against representative graph and topological neural network baselines. Ablation studies and resource-efficiency analyses further support the effectiveness of the proposed lower/upper-neighborhood design.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

The relationship between serotonin transporter occupancy and extracellular serotonin concentration is hyperbolic, not linear: implications for safely tapering antidepressants

Background: Hyperbolic tapering is an increasingly recognized approach for discontinuing serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SRI) antidepressants that involves non-linear dose reductions with equal stepwise reductions in serotonin transporter (SERT) occupancy to mitigate withdrawal symptoms. Its theoretical basis is the hyperbolic relationship between SRI dose and SERT occupancy reported in radioligand imaging studies. Hyperbolic tapering implicitly assumes that changes in SERT occupancy approximate changes in biologic effect and withdrawal risk. Because SERT occupancy plateaus across the therapeutic dose range of SRIs, this framework predicts relatively small biologic effects and withdrawal risk within this range. However, SERT occupancy influences serotonergic activity only indirectly via its effects on extracellular serotonin concentrations, and the relationship between these two variables is poorly characterized. Methods: We developed a two-pathway clearance model derived from mass-action kinetics to evaluate the steady-state relationship between SERT occupancy and extracellular serotonin concentrations under chronic SRI treatment. Results: Our analysis indicates that serotonin concentrations increase hyperbolically as transporter occupancy increases, suggesting that biologically meaningful differences in serotonergic signaling persist across the therapeutic dose range of SRIs despite plateauing occupancy. Conclusions: Our model predicts a hyperbolic relationship between SERT occupancy and extracellular serotonin concentrations, suggesting that changes in occupancy may not map proportionally onto serotonergic effect. These findings provide a potential mechanistic explanation for dose-dependent clinical effects of SRIs despite plateauing transporter occupancy and generate testable hypotheses regarding antidepressant tapering strategies. Empirical validation is warranted.

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

AsyncOPD: How Stale Can On-Policy Distillation Be?

arXiv:2606.24143v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own rollouts guided by teacher feedback and is becoming increasingly important for large language model (LLM) post-training. Like reinforcement learning (RL), however, OPD faces an on-policy systems bottleneck, as rollouts can dominate training time for reasoning workloads. Asynchronous training pipelines can alleviate this bottleneck by decoupling rollout generation from learner updates, but doing so introduces stale-policy data. While prior work has studied stale data in asynchronous RL, its effects in OPD remain underexplored. We present the first systematic study of staleness in asynchronous OPD, focusing on a practical setting where teacher feedback is implemented through local KL losses and full-vocabulary teacher logits are too expensive to store or transfer, necessitating finite teacher-score caches. We first show that KL direction changes the stale-data problem: teacher-weighted forward KL is more robust to stale rollouts, whereas student-weighted reverse KL is vulnerable. Second, for this vulnerable reverse-KL case, we study whether methods designed to stabilize asynchronous RL can mitigate OPD staleness. In our experiments, they do not improve over a simpler OPD-specific surrogate: recomputing the reverse-KL signal under the current student at learner time. Third, we analyze how finite teacher-score caches create a bias-variance tradeoff for sparse and sampled reverse-KL OPD estimators. This motivates multi-sample Monte Carlo (MC), which preserves MC correctability while reducing one-sample variance. Finally, we present and open-source AsyncOPD, a fully asynchronous OPD training pipeline built from these estimator choices. Experiments show that AsyncOPD improves training throughput by $1.6\times$ to $3.8\times$ over strict synchronous training while reaching comparable accuracy.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

A Collective-Spin Derivation of the Uniform Magnon Hamiltonian in Cavity Magnonics

arXiv:2606.13830v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a direct collective-spin derivation of the effective uniform-mode Hamiltonian used in cavity magnonics. Starting from a nearest-neighbor Heisenberg ferromagnet coupled to long-wavelength magnetic fields, we show that the relevant dynamics can be restricted to the fully symmetric spin sector, where the exchange interaction contributes only a constant energy shift and the ferromagnet behaves as a macrospin of length $Ns$. Applying the Holstein–Primakoff transformation directly to this total spin yields the usual uniform magnon mode and its leading nonlinear corrections without first introducing site-resolved bosonic operators. This collective formulation makes explicit the interpretation of the ferromagnet as a synthetic large-spin atom and provides a compact route to the effective Hamiltonians used in driven and Floquet cavity magnonics. As a physical consequence, the leading nonlinear correction produces an occupation-dependent reduction of the effective magnon–photon coupling, providing a simple signature of finite-spin saturation under strong uniform-mode driving.