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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

An alternative approach to well-posedness of McKean-Vlasov equations arising in Consensus-Based Optimization

Authors:
Alessandro Baldi↗

arXiv:2512.19446v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this work we study the mean-field description of Consensus-Based Optimization (CBO), a derivative-free particle optimization method. Such a description is provided by a non-local SDE of McKean-Vlasov type, whose fields lack of global Lipschitz continuity. We propose a novel approach to prove the well-posedness of the mean-field CBO equation based on a truncation argument. The latter is performed through the introduction of a cut-off function, defined on the space of probability measures, acting on the fields. This procedure allows us to study the well-posedness problem in the classical framework of Sznitman. Through this argument, we recover the established result on the existence of strong solutions, and we extend the class of solutions for which pathwise uniqueness holds.

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

Calibrated Triage, Not Autonomy: Confidence Estimation for Medical Vision-Language Models

Authors:
Reza Khanmohammadi↗Kundan Thind↗Mohammad M. Ghassemi↗

A vision-language model can answer a question about a medical image fluently and confidently while barely using the image, leaning instead on language priors. In medicine this is the failure that matters most, because the answer looks trustworthy and is not, and the only protection is a confidence score reliable enough to tell the system when to abstain. We ask a deployment question rather than an accuracy one: how much imaging work a model can safely handle alone, and which confidence signal makes that possible. We evaluate seven confidence estimators across five open-weight LVLMs and three medical visual-question-answering datasets spanning broad clinical imaging, radiology, and pathology, with every probe trained only on natural images and applied without adaptation. Recast as bounded selective prediction (automate a case only when confidence clears a threshold, defer the rest), the comparison is cautionary. The standard metrics are poor guides: discrimination barely separates the methods, and the weak calibration of a cheap self-report is cheaply removed by off-domain temperature scaling without changing deployable yield. What distinguishes a usable estimator is the high-confidence region a clinician acts on: the weakest baselines are confidently wrong on 41 to 45 percent of their errors against 1 to 4 percent for the best probe, and no estimator is reliably best across domains or models. Safe handoff is governed at two levels: base-model competence sets a ceiling, so a well-calibrated score recovers roughly a third of radiology cases at a 20 percent error tolerance but almost none of pathology; the confidence layer then decides how much of that ceiling is reachable. The usable role today is calibrated triage, not autonomy: automate the cases a calibrated score marks safe, route the rest to a clinician. We release all outputs, correctness judgments, and confidence scores, with code.

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03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Optimal Sparsification of Gaussian Processes

Authors:
Shivam Nadimpalli↗

arXiv:2606.19763v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove an optimal dimension-free sparsification theorem for suprema of centered Gaussian processes. Given a bounded set $T\subseteq\mathbb{R}^n$, we show that the supremum of the canonical Gaussian process on $T$ can be $L^2$-approximated by the supremum of a shifted subprocess indexed by only $\exp(O(1/\varepsilon^2))$ points, with error at most $\varepsilon$ times the Gaussian width of $T$. In particular, the size of the approximating process is independent of both the ambient dimension and the cardinality of the original index set. This improves a recent sparsification theorem of De, Nadimpalli, O'Donnell, and Servedio (2026) by an exponential factor, and we show that the dependence on $\varepsilon$ is tight up to constants in the exponent. As consequences, we obtain an exponentially improved junta theorem for norms over Gaussian space and sharpen results on learning, property testing, and polyhedral approximation of convex sets under the Gaussian measure. The proof is based on an interpolation argument that combines Sudakov's minoration with the Brascamp–Lieb inequality.

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04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Meta-classification of one-class classification models using ranking correlation and nearest neighbor

Authors:
Toshitaka Hayashi↗Hamido Fujita↗Dalibor Cimr↗Richard Cimler↗Jitka K\"uhnov\'a↗

arXiv:2606.17858v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine Learning (ML) techniques have been applied to various problems. However, applying ML to ML models is an unexplored direction. For this purpose, this paper considers a meta-classification of one-class classification (OCC) models, because all ML models could be approximated as OCC models. The proposal represents OCC models as normality rankings and classifies them using nearest-neighbor and ranking-correlation metrics. The experiment classifies OCC models, where classes correspond to training datasets, algorithms, and hyperparameters. The proposal achieves high accuracy when class labels are datasets. Moreover, it can classify algorithms when the training datasets contain the same class. In addition, the discussion highlights that the classification of OCC models is essentially the classification of datasets that treats multiple samples as a single input. The experiment demonstrates the classification of datasets using sleeping records. The proposed method can provide a unified solution for classifying OCC models, datasets, and rankings. Source code is uploaded to the public repository https://github.com/ToshiHayashi/ClassOCC.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Quality-Preserving Imperceptible Adversarial Attack on Skeleton-based Human Action Recognition

Authors:
Ziyi Chang↗Kanglei Zhou↗Xiaohui Liang↗Hubert P. H. Shum↗

Adversarial attacks on skeletal human action recognition have received significant attention. However, existing methods typically introduce noise-like perturbations that degrade motion quality post-attack, and thereby are inherently perceptible with recent advancements in S-HAR systems. We discover that this degradation stems from the gap between empirical and true risks during the optimization process of previous adversarial attacks. To address this issue, we propose an attack where adversarial motions are obtained without compromising their motion quality. To minimize the risk gap and preserve motion quality, we propose a distribution-based adversarial attack method without introducing noise-like perturbations. To faithfully evaluate the motion quality, we propose a new metric that aligns with human perception on real-world naturalness. Experiments have been conducted on the state-of-the-art S-HAR methods across two datasets, demonstrating the superiority of our method in both the attack success rate and the post-attack motion quality through qualitative and quantitative analyses. The success of our quality-preserving attack application and distribution-based method raises serious concerns about the robustness of action recognizers, highlighting the need for further enhancements in this domain.

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

Fisher Width: A Geometric Measure of Complexity on Statistical Manifolds

Authors:
Vu Khac Ky↗

arXiv:2606.18306v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Gaussian width is a central geometric complexity measure in high-dimensional probability, compressed sensing, convex optimization, and learning theory. It quantifies the average extent of a set along random directions, thereby capturing the effective dimension of constraint sets, hypothesis classes, and descent cones. However, this notion is intrinsically Euclidean. Statistical models instead carry a natural Riemannian geometry induced by the Fisher information metric, where directions are scaled according to statistical distinguishability rather than ambient Euclidean length. We introduce Fisher width, a Fisher-geometric analogue of Gaussian width for statistical manifolds. At a parameter point $\theta$, Fisher width replaces the Euclidean identity by the local metric tensor $G(\theta)^{1/2}$, measuring the Gaussian width of the Fisher-rescaled set. This makes the resulting quantity sensitive to local statistical curvature and invariant under smooth reparameterizations. We develop the basic theory of Fisher width, showing that it retains key structural features of Gaussian width, including concentration, metric perturbation stability, and spectral comparison bounds with the Euclidean baseline, while also capturing anisotropic geometric effects invisible to Euclidean measures. As an application, we prove a generalization bound for Fisher-Lipschitz hypothesis classes and propose computable estimators, which we evaluate empirically on MNIST across three model classes. Fisher width is to statistical manifolds what Gaussian width is to Euclidean convex bodies. This work lays the foundation for studying complexity and learning on curved statistical manifolds.

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07.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Dietary cholesterol activates a Ral-dependent pathway driving LDLR turnover

Authors:
Xue Feng↗

Metabolism of the hepatic low-density lipoprotein receptor (LDLR) is a key determinant of cholesterol homeostasis1,2. The molecular switches that coordinate LDLR trafficking and turnover in response to nutritional cues, including high dietary cholesterol, remain poorly defined3–6. Here we identify a new pathway regulated by Ral GTPases that links extracellular cholesterol signals to the intracellular trafficking machinery controlling LDLR turnover. Chronic dietary cholesterol activates the Ral proteins by increasing RAS activity, routing LDLR to lysosomes for degradation and inhibiting its recycling independently of transcriptional regulation or PCSK9. Constitutive activation of Ral via RalGAPB deletion or overexpression of constitutively active Ral mutants in hepatocytes reduces LDLR levels and impairs cholesterol clearance. Ral engages the endocytic RalBP1–REPS1 complex to promote LDLR internalization and lysosomal routing, where LDLR is degraded by the lysosomal protease cathepsin A (CTSA). Ral activation directs CTSA towards lysosomes for maturation while limiting its secretion, further promoting LDLR degradation in lysosomes. Genetic variants in this pathway significantly associate with altered cholesterol in humans. Pharmacological inhibition of CTSA activity increases hepatic LDLR function and improves cholesterol clearance, offering a potential new therapeutic strategy for hypercholesterolaemia and cardiovascular disease. Chronic dietary cholesterol activates Ral GTPases, which promote LDLR internalization and lysosomal degradation through RalBP1–REPS1 and CTSA, thereby reducing cholesterol clearance, whereas CTSA inhibition restores LDLR function and may offer a therapeutic strategy for cardiovascular disease.

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

Are LLM Evaluators Really Narcissists? Sanity Checking Self-Preference Evaluations

Authors:
Dani Roytburg↗Matthew Bozoukov↗Matthew Nguyen↗Jou Barzdukas↗Mackenzie Puig-Hall↗Narmeen Oozeer↗

Recent research has shown that large language models (LLMs) favor their own outputs when acting as judges, undermining the integrity of automated post-training and evaluation workflows. However, it is difficult to disentangle which behaviors are explained by narcissism versus experimental confounds. Specifically, LLM evaluators may deliver self-preferring verdicts when comparing responses to questions they fail on; these verdicts may not depend on the identity of the author, but on evaluator quality. We correct this by directly comparing the judge's voting distribution in cases where it evaluates itself versus another model. This evaluator quality baseline reveals that only 51% of examples in previous findings retain statistical significance against this null hypothesis, covering 89.6% of total self-preference probability mass. Finally, we compare the entropy of voting distributions, suggesting uncertainty-driven overlap, and show that our procedure enables more careful documentation against the backdrop of judge-bias research.

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10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Accelerated Stochastic Min-Max Optimization Based on Bias-corrected Momentum

Authors:
Haoyuan Cai↗Sulaiman A. Alghunaim↗Ali H. Sayed↗

arXiv:2406.13041v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Lower-bound analyses for nonconvex strongly-concave minimax optimization problems have shown that stochastic first-order algorithms require at least $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-4})$ sample complexity to find an $\varepsilon$-stationary point. Some works indicate that this complexity can be improved to $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-3})$ when the stochastic loss gradient is Lipschitz continuous. The question of achieving enhanced convergence rates under distinct conditions, remains open. In this work, we address this question for optimization problems that are nonconvex in the minimization variable and strongly concave or Polyak-Lojasiewicz (PL) in the maximization variable. We introduce novel bias-corrected momentum algorithms utilizing efficient Hessian-vector products. We establish convergence conditions and demonstrate a lower iteration complexity of $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-3})$ for the proposed algorithms. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated through applications to robust logistic regression and robust adaptive cruise control.

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11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Generalised Eigenvalue Geometry of Semantic Adversarial Attacks

Authors:
Martin Anthony↗Kaveh Salehzadeh Nobari↗

arXiv:2606.19212v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent empirical work shows that semantically equivalent paraphrases can fool financial sentiment classifiers: although a paraphrase remains close to the original under a strong reference embedding, it may shift the target model's representation enough to change the predicted class. Existing robustness theory either assumes a single-model threat model or focuses mainly on empirical attack algorithms. We develop a continuous local model of semantic paraphrase perturbations that captures this two-model structure. We show that the worst-case local displacement of the target representation, subject to a proxy-model budget, is governed by the largest generalised eigenvalue of a matrix pencil $(A,B)$ constructed from the Jacobians of the two embedding maps. The resulting attackability index $\lambda^*(x)$ is intrinsic to the local paraphrase geometry and the chosen embedders, yields a closed-form prediction-flip condition for affine readouts, and supports conservative population and finite-sample attackability certificates. For uniform control over classes of affine readouts, we derive a distribution-free VC bound for binary attackability indicators and a scale-sensitive margin bound based on an attackability-adjusted margin that subtracts a local geometric penalty from the standard classifier margin. We also connect the continuous theory to discrete paraphrase search, identify an asymmetry between successful and unsuccessful finite searches, and give a covering condition under which the discrete and continuous settings agree. Finally, we propose an empirical verification framework using soft-token relaxations and generated paraphrase sets to assess the local eigenvalue geometry, prediction-flip condition, and finite-search approximation on a deployed financial-text classifier.

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

Readout-Induced Leakage in Superconducting Circuits with Nonlinear Couplings

Authors:
Sumeru Hazra↗Wei Dai↗Daniel K. Weiss↗Pranav D. Parakh↗Luigi Frunzio↗Michel H. Devoret↗

arXiv:2606.16055v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In superconducting circuits, drive-induced unwanted transitions limit the readout power, thereby constraining readout speed and fidelity. When such transitions excite the qubit into leakage states, they produce correlated errors that are particularly harmful for quantum error correction. Native nonlinear qubit-readout resonator coupling is a promising alternative to conventional linear hybridization because it provides intrinsic Purcell protection and stricter selection rules for multiphoton processes. In realistic devices, however, we show that such a coupling alone neither eliminates nor necessarily suppresses drive-induced transitions. Instead, if not appropriately engineered, these couplings often worsen the situation by introducing additional parasitic processes. Moreover, the rates of these unwanted transitions remain sensitive to the choice of readout frequency, regardless of the coupling mechanism. We demonstrate that readout-induced leakage can thus vary by orders of magnitude even when readout frequencies differ by less than ~7%. Our results establish that the benefits of native nonlinear couplings are realized only through informed device design, including the spectral placement of relevant auxiliary modes and elimination of parasitic ones.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

PromptMN: Pseudo Prompting Language

Authors:
Enkhzol Dovdon↗

Prompting has become the primary interface between humans and generative AI, yet many natural language prompts remain fragile: roles, goals, constraints, and expected outputs are often buried in prose or left implicit. In agentic and software development workflows, a misread at the first handoff can propagate through every step, since a significant portion of agent failures stem from context ambiguities rather than model limitations. This paper introduces PromptMN, a pseudo-prompting domain-specific language that annotates natural language with compact, %-prefixed typed directives covering roles, goals, requirements, priorities, constraints, plans, inputs, and outputs. Semantic resolution lets authors write in any order while the model interprets directives by function. PromptMN sits between informal prompting and programming-style pseudocode: structured enough to be inspectable and reusable, yet lightweight enough for analysts, managers, developers, and stakeholders across the software development lifecycle (SDLC). PromptMN also pairs with reverse prompt engineering. Asking a model to restate a desired outcome as PromptMN lets users inspect the inferred roles, goals, constraints, and missing assumptions before acting, reducing repair cycles and yielding a reusable artifact for aligning people and AI tools. PromptMN's feasibility is evaluated across several frontier models, including Claude Fable 5, Claude Opus 4.8, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and GPT-5.5. The models correctly resolved PromptMN instructions, including complex structures such as repetition, conditionals, methods, and a prime-checking task, without fine-tuning. The same vocabulary applies across new codebases, maintenance, and redesign in the SDLC scenarios presented. While large-scale validation remains future work, these early results suggest PromptMN is a practical step toward clearer, more reviewable human-to-AI interaction.

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14.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Detection of anisotropic cosmic structures on a gigaparsec scale

Authors:
Francesco Sylos Labini↗

Galaxy redshift surveys map the cosmic web and provide a key observational test of whether the Universe becomes statistically homogeneous and isotropic on sufficiently large scales, as assumed by the cosmological principle underpinning the standard cosmological model1. In this framework, beyond the nonlinear regime of structure formation, inhomogeneous and anisotropic features are expected to fade rapidly, reflecting the near-isotropic primordial density field and its subsequent gravitational evolution. Although supported by the small amplitude of cosmic microwave background anisotropies2, this view is increasingly challenged by the complex network of large-scale structures and voids in the galaxy distribution3–6, as well as by independent probes reporting possible large-scale deviations from statistical homogeneity7 and isotropy8,9. Here we show that the galaxy distribution exhibits persistent anisotropic structures extending to scales on the order of one gigaparsec. Using the Angular Distribution of Pairwise Distances (ADPD)10, a parameter-free statistic that measures directional correlations, we detect anisotropy signals exceeding those in isotropic controls and geometry-matched ΛCDM mock catalogues with conservative significance greater than 3σ. These results provide direct evidence that directional coherence persists to larger scales than predicted in the standard framework, challenging the assumption of large-scale isotropy. They call for a reassessment of how homogeneity and isotropy are realized in the observed Universe and motivate new tests of cosmological models based on directional statistics. Using the parameter-free Angular Distribution of Pairwise Distances for measuring directional correlations, evidence is found for coherent anisotropic structures extending over gigaparsec scales, challenging the assumption that the Universe becomes statistically isotropic on sufficiently large scales.

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

Aligned but Stereotypical? How System Prompts Shape Demographic Bias in LLM-Based Text-to-Image Models

Authors:
NaHyeon Park↗Na Min An↗Kunhee Kim↗Soyeon Yoon↗Jiahao Huo↗Hyunjung Shim↗

Text-to-image (T2I) systems increasingly rely on Large Language Model (LLM)-based text conditioning to interpret and expand user prompts. While this improves prompt understanding and text-image alignment, we find that it can also introduce implicit demographic assumptions, even when demographic attributes are unspecified. To systematically investigate this behavior across varying levels of prompt ambiguity and complexity, we construct a comprehensive benchmark covering diverse prompt settings. Evaluations on eight recent T2I models show that LLM-based systems consistently exhibit stronger demographic skew than non-LLM-based baselines. We further analyze system prompts, a component unique to LLM-based T2I systems that guides prompt interpretation and expansion. Our analyses show that these instructions strongly influence text embeddings, which subsequently leads to biased image generations. Motivated by these findings, we propose FairPro, a training-free debiasing framework that adaptively generates fairness-aware instructions while preserving user intent. Experiments demonstrate that FairPro substantially reduces demographic disparities while maintaining prompt fidelity.

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16.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

A high-quality chromosome-scale reference genome assembly for Asparagus racemosus var. CIM-Shakti (Shatavari), a medicinal plant of Ayurvedic importance

Authors:
Tyagi↗Sharma↗Shivani↗Gupta↗Paterson↗A. H↗Trivedi↗P. K↗

Asparagus racemosus Wild., commonly known as Shatavari, is an important medicinal plant in Ayurveda and is valued for its steroidal saponins, particularly shatavarin compounds, which contribute to its adaptogenic, galactagogue, immunomodulatory, and therapeutic properties. Despite its medicinal and economic importance, genomic resources for this species have remained limited, restricting molecular breeding, pathway discovery, and comparative evolutionary studies within Asparagaceae. Here, we report a high quality chromosome scale reference genome assembly of A. racemosus var. CIM Shakti generated using PacBio HiFi long read sequencing and Omni C chromatin conformation scaffolding. The pseudo haploid assembly spans 817 Mb across 53 scaffolds, with a scaffold N50 of 98.50 Mb, L50 of 5, and a largest scaffold of 113.80 Mb. Ten major chromosome scale pseudomolecules were resolved, corresponding to the haploid chromosome complement of A. racemosus. The assembly showed high gene space completeness, with BUSCO completeness of 99.8% against the Eukaryota dataset and 98.0% against the Embryophyta dataset. BlobToolKit profiling further supported assembly quality, with GC content of approximately 39 to 40% and no major evidence of contamination. EDTA based repeat annotation identified 580.93 Mb of interspersed repetitive elements, accounting for 71.06% of the 817.57 Mb genome assembly. The repeat landscape was dominated by LTR retrotransposons, particularly Gypsy elements, which accounted for 25.01% of the assembly, followed by unclassified LTR elements at 26.58% and Copia elements at 4.84%. Structural and functional annotation identified 29,199 protein coding genes represented by 29,199 transcript models, 138,433 exons, and 125,201 CDS features. The annotation was structurally robust, with an average gene length of 4,605.1 bp, 4.74 exons per transcript, and 97.80% of transcripts containing multiple exons. The CIM Shakti reference genome provides a foundational genomic resource for investigating steroidal saponin biosynthesis, sex chromosome evolution, repeat driven genome expansion, and comparative genomics in Asparagaceae. This assembly will support future studies on medicinal trait improvement, conservation genomics, and genomics assisted breeding of climate resilient Shatavari cultivars.

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17.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

FeatureMSEA: Metabolic Feature-based Metabolite Set Enrichment Analysis

Authors:
Liu↗Wang↗Huan↗Shen↗

Liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) untargeted metabolomics detects thousands of metabolic features, but converting these chemical signals into metabolite set-level biological knowledge remains challenging. This is because most features lack unambiguous metabolite identities. Conventional metabolite set enrichment analysis (MSEA) generally requires identified metabolites and metabolite-level ranked inputs, leaving much of the untargeted feature space unused. Here, we present FeatureMSEA, a feature rank-based framework for metabolite set enrichment directly from metabolic features with ambiguous annotations. FeatureMSEA integrates multi-evidence feature-to-metabolite annotation, feature rank-based enrichment scoring, permutation-based inference, and iterative leading-edge-guided annotation refinement, with an optional LLM-assisted module for post-enrichment interpretation. In null comparisons of randomly split healthy samples, FeatureMSEA detected no significant metabolite sets, whereas metabolite-set spike-in simulations showed recovery of implanted signals. In a cerebrospinal fluid metabolomics study of Huntington's disease, FeatureMSEA identified dysregulated metabolite sets related to amino acid metabolism, mitochondrial energy metabolism, and neuroactive signaling. MS/MS-based annotation analysis further showed that FeatureMSEA refinement reduced annotation ambiguity and prioritized chemically consistent candidate metabolites. In summary, FeatureMSEA provides a general framework for extracting metabolite set-level biological insights from LC-MS untargeted metabolomics in which confident metabolite identification remains incomplete.

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

PEFT-MedSAM: Efficient Fine-Tuning of Medical Foundation Models for Explainable Skin Lesion Segmentation

Authors:
Asad Channa↗Abdullah Khan↗Asghar Ali Chandio↗Aamir Akbar↗Shahzad Memon↗Aqib Hussain↗Ameer Hamza↗

Automated segmentation of skin lesions using deep learning models for dermoscopic images can be very helpful in finding melanomas earlier than they would normally be detected. However, most deep learning methods available do not perform well. The aim of this paper is to present a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method called PEFT-MedSAM for adapting the Medical Segment Anything Model (MedSAM) to automatically segment dermoscopic skin lesions. The PEFT-MedSAM method uses only the lightweight mask decoder for training the model while keeping the pre-trained image encoder and prompt encoder frozen. The experiments performed on the ISIC 2018 benchmark dataset shows that PEFT-MedSAM obtains a dice coefficient of .9411 and an intersection over union value of .8918 when compared to both a fully trained U-Net baseline (.8715 dice coefficient) and zero-shot MedSAM inference (.8997 dice coefficient). The external validation of the model using PH2 dataset shows .9467 dice coefficient with +/- .0310 standard deviation. Supportive evidence for these claims include a p-value less than .0001 for Wilcoxon signed rank tests comparing the two datasets and bootstrap-estimated 95% confidence intervals of [.9364,.9447] that represent the estimated range of possible values for the average dice coefficient obtained by repeating the test. To increase clinical trustworthiness, we used Grad-CAM explainability along with a pointing game based evaluation methodology to evaluate the CNN baseline model on the validation set. The results showed that we had an accuracy rate of 98.27% on the validation set of 519 images and confirmed that the model classified regions containing skin lesions.

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19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Cost-Optimal Decision Diagrams for Stochastic Boolean Function Evaluation

Authors:
Xia Zong↗Tuomo Lehtonen↗Jussi Rintanen↗

arXiv:2606.24672v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In many decision-making scenarios, acquiring information incurs different costs. We consider the problem of constructing a deterministic evaluation strategy that minimizes the expected cost of evaluating a propositional formula under variable costs and a probability distribution over truth assignments. We present a branch-and-bound algorithm with variable-selection heuristics, pruning, and caching. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first practical exact algorithm for this level of generality. Experiments on random instances demonstrate scalability and quantify the efficiency-quality trade-off of a greedy beam-search variant. We additionally evaluate a structured heart-disease diagnosis instance. Finally, we prove that the problem is $\#P$-hard and contained in $\mathrm{PSPACE}$.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Benchmarking Large Vision-Language Models on Fine-Grained Image Tasks: From Evaluation to Diagnosis

Authors:
Hong-Tao Yu↗Chen-Wei Xie↗Yuxin Peng↗Serge Belongie↗Xiu-Shen Wei↗

Recent advancements in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable multimodal perception and reasoning capabilities. While numerous benchmarks have evaluated LVLMs from holistic or task-specific perspectives, their capabilities on fine-grained image tasks-fundamental to computer vision-remain insufficiently understood. To address this gap, we introduce FG-BMK, a comprehensive fine-grained evaluation benchmark containing 1.01 million questions and 0.28 million images, covering diverse scenarios from common object-centric domains to specialized domains. FG-BMK jointly evaluates dialogue-level fine-grained semantic recognition and feature-level visual discriminability through human-oriented and machine-oriented paradigms, enabling diagnostic analysis of whether LVLM failures arise from insufficient visual representations, weak visual-to-semantic grounding, or limited fine-grained knowledge. Through extensive experiments on a diverse set of representative LVLMs/VLMs, we find that current LVLMs remain inadequate fine-grained recognizers, with failures arising from intertwined bottlenecks in visual representations, semantic grounding, modality alignment, and category-level knowledge. We further analyze training design factors for improving fine-grained capabilities and examine how visual and linguistic perturbations affect LVLM predictions. These findings provide diagnostic insights into the limitations of current LVLMs and offer guidance for future data construction and model design in developing more reliable LVLMs for fine-grained visual tasks. Our code is open-source and available at https://fg-bmk.github.io/.

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21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

SPICE-Q and Large-Scale Quantum Chip Production

Authors:
Cai↗Ling Qiao↗Bin Yang↗Fumin Luo↗Chang Liu↗WeiGui Guo↗GuoRong Zhang↗XueFei Liu↗Qinglang Guo↗Bin Wu↗

arXiv:2606.17907v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose SPICE-Q, a SPICE-inspired design-technology co-optimization framework for superconducting quantum processors. Rather than replacing tools such as HFSS, Qiskit Metal, pyEPR, SQcircuit, SQuADDS, scqubits, or QuTiP, SPICE-Q aims to connect them through a unified, traceable data chain spanning process rules, layout, electromagnetic simulation, energy-participation-ratio and circuit quantization, Hamiltonian extraction, noise analysis, cryogenic test, and manufacturing feedback. The central mapping is from process and PDK constraints to layout geometry, electromagnetic modes, equivalent circuit parameters, effective Hamiltonians, and finally metrics such as frequency, coupling, anharmonicity, decoherence, readout performance, and yield. This flow must capture Josephson-junction variability, transmon frequency allocation, resonator and Purcell constraints, coupler crosstalk, microwave routing, 3D interconnects, material/interface loss, package modes, and wafer-scale process statistics. By introducing standardized model interfaces, statistical parameter models, model cards, version governance, and closed-loop calibration from cryogenic and fabrication data, SPICE-Q frames superconducting quantum-chip design as an engineering workflow rather than a collection of isolated simulations. We argue that scalable and fault-tolerant quantum processors will require such a continuous model chain from device physics and electromagnetic fields to quantum dynamics, noise, manufacturability, and system-level yield.

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22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Cardiac positronium lifetime in human PET: a reproducible right-left ventricular contrast that is not explained by blood oxygenation

Authors:
Zermeno↗E. D↗

Background. Ortho-positronium (o-Ps) lifetime, now measurable in vivo on long-axial-field-of-view (LAFOV) PET/CT, has been proposed as a biomarker of tissue oxygenation and hypoxia. Because o-Ps lifetime is dominated by tissue free-volume structure while the oxygen- specific contribution is small, whether an in-vivo lifetime contrast reflects oxygenation rather than anatomy is an open, identifiability-limited question. Aim. To test the oxygenation hypothesis directly using the heart's natural arterial/venous oxygenation contrast, with a built-in anatomical control. Methods. We re-analysed a public [82Rb]Cl human cardiac LAFOV PET/CT dataset (5.30 x 10^8 evaluated three-photon events). Per-compartment o-Ps lifetimes were extracted with a background-plus-two-component exponentially-modified-Gaussian (EMG) model. The list-mode to image mapping and right/left ventricle (RV/LV) identity were established lifetime-free (the mapping reproduces the provider's reconstructed image at block-correlation 0.998 and wins a joint multi-organ alignment panel). We applied a confound battery: registration stress test, blood-core vs wall, lung-air and wall-myocardium partial-volume, tissue density; and a structure/position-matched control (pulmonary artery, deoxygenated, vs aorta, oxygenated). An isotope-matched 82Rb uniform-quartz reference bounded the instrument's positional behaviour. All results were produced by two independent analysis pipelines. Results. RV o-Ps lifetime exceeded LV by delta tau = +0.304 ns (RV 1.700 +/- 0.172, LV 1.396 +/- 0.130 ns; about 1.4 sigma), in the oxygen-expected direction; the contrast was stable across +/-16 mm registration perturbation (sign preserved in 100% of 342 shifts) and resided in the blood core, not the wall. However, the matched-vessel control was null: pulmonary artery minus aorta = -0.011 +/- 0.344 ns. Lung-air and wall-myocardium partial-volume were disfavoured, and the effect fell within the isotope-matched 82Rb instrumental positional envelope (about 0.1-0.35 ns over 40 mm in uniform material). Conclusion. On this single subject, the cardiac o-Ps lifetime contrast does not provide a clean readout of blood oxygenation: an oxygenation effect of the observed (about 0.3 ns) magnitude is ruled out by the matched control, while a small physiological effect cannot be excluded. We provide a reusable confound-control battery for evaluating future in-vivo o-Ps oxygenation claims. Multi-subject replication with anatomy decoupled from oxygenation is required.

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

Evaluating Prompting-Based Defenses Against Domain-Camouflaged Injection Attacks

Authors:
Aaditya Pai↗

Domain-camouflaged injection attacks embed malicious instructions in retrieved content using domain-appropriate vocabulary, evading standard detectors that rely on syntactic injection markers. When detection fails, practitioners need to know which defense architectures reduce attack success. We evaluate five prompting-based defenses (spotlighting, paraphrasing, prompt sandwiching, and two combinations) against domain-camouflaged injection across three model families (Claude Haiku, Llama 3.1 8B, Gemini 2.0 Flash) and three deployment domains (financial, legal, general) using 3,510 trials. Paraphrasing retrieved content before agent processing is the most consistently effective defense in this benchmark, reducing camouflage attack success rate by 55-84\% depending on model, and achieves lower attack success rates than our Llama Guard 4 configuration on every model tested. Defense effectiveness is strongly model-dependent: spotlighting halves attack success on Claude Haiku but provides no benefit on Llama 3.1 8B. Financial domain deployments face the highest residual risk at 26-33\% baseline attack success rate, with no prompting-based defense fully eliminating the threat on weaker models. These results provide the first systematic evaluation of prompting-based defenses specifically against camouflage-class injection attacks and establish benchmark-based recommendations for practitioners. All tasks use synthetically constructed professional documents; whether these benchmark rankings generalize to real enterprise documents remains an open question.

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24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

PiDR: Physics-Informed Inertial Dead Reckoning for Autonomous Platforms

Authors:
Arup Kumar Sahoo↗Itzik Klein↗

arXiv:2601.03040v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A fundamental requirement for full autonomy is the ability to sustain accurate navigation in the absence of external data, such as GNSS signals or visual information. In these challenging environments, the platform must rely exclusively on inertial sensors, leading to pure inertial navigation. However, the inherent noise and other error terms of the inertial sensors in such real-world scenarios will cause the navigation solution to drift over time. Although conventional deep-learning models have emerged as a possible approach to inertial navigation, they are inherently black-box in nature. Furthermore, they struggle to learn effectively with limited supervised sensor data and often fail to preserve physical principles. To address these limitations, we propose PiDR, a physics-informed inertial dead-reckoning framework for autonomous platforms in situations of pure inertial navigation. PiDR offers transparency by explicitly integrating inertial navigation principles into the network training process through the physics-informed residual component. PiDR plays a crucial role in mitigating abrupt trajectory deviations even under limited or sparse supervision. We evaluated PiDR on real-world datasets collected by a mobile robot and an autonomous underwater vehicle. We obtained more than 29% positioning improvement in both datasets, demonstrating the ability of PiDR to generalize different platforms operating in various environments and dynamics. Thus, PiDR offers a robust, lightweight, yet effective architecture and can be deployed on resource-constrained platforms, enabling real-time pure inertial navigation in adverse scenarios.

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

PACT: Preserving Anchored Cores in Task-vectors for Model Merging

Authors:
Ningyuan Shi↗Zhipeng Zhou↗Hao Wang↗Chunyan Miao↗Peilin Zhao↗

arXiv:2606.18627v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model merging has emerged as a training-free alternative to multi-task learning, aiming to combine multiple task-specific fine-tuned models into a single multi-task model. Most existing model merging approaches follow the Task Arithmetic paradigm, which decomposes fine-tuned weights into pre-trained parameters and task vectors, and performs merging exclusively in the task-vector space. The effectiveness of this paradigm implicitly relies on the assumption that task-specific knowledge is encoded solely within task vectors. We argue that this assumption generally does not hold due to the intrinsic task preferences of pre-trained models. Specifically, we identify Load-Bearing Wall (LBW) dimensions, namely some task-critical knowledge that remains embedded in the pre-trained weights rather than being fully transferred into task vectors. We characterize LBW dimensions from both scalar-weight and subspace perspectives, thereby covering the major paradigms of existing model merging methods. Our analysis reveals that, by ignoring LBW dimensions, task-vector-based approaches fail to fully resolve task conflicts and may inadvertently damage task-specific knowledge encoded in the pre-trained model, leading to degradation. To address this issue, we propose PACT, which preserves the anchored task-specific cores (i.e., LBW dimensions) within task vectors by aligning their orthogonal complements with the subspace of the pre-trained weights. These aligned subspace components are then removed from the task vectors before applying existing model merging algorithms. Furthermore, we develop an efficient variant based on randomized SVD to improve scalability. PACT can be seamlessly integrated with existing methods. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that PACT consistently enhances mainstream model merging approaches and establishes new state-of-the-art performance.

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