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

An AI Security Agent for University ACMIS: Multi-Vector Threat Detection and Automated Response

arXiv:2606.08270v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: University Academic Management Information Systems (ACMIS) are high-value targets for a wide spectrum of security threats including brute-force login attacks, payment fraud, privilege escalation, insider data theft, and academic integrity violations. Traditional rule-based intrusion detection systems are inadequate because many malicious activities are structurally indistinguishable from normal operations. This paper presents an AI-based security agent for ACMIS that combines supervised anomaly detection, behavioural analytics, and a natural language processing chatbot for secure password recovery. The agent monitors five operational layers: authentication, authorisation, financial transactions, user behaviour, and system health, and responds through a four-tier risk escalation framework. A modular architecture allows the core engine to be extended to other institutional systems. Experiments on a simulated ACMIS event log dataset of 147,922 sessions demonstrate a threat detection macro-average F1 of 0.966, compared to 0.156 for a rule-based baseline and 0.836 for a sequence-only (LSTM) baseline, with end-to-end critical-tier automated response latency under 1 ms on a single-node prototype. The integrated recovery chatbot achieves 97.1 percent identity verification accuracy and an 87.3 percent mass-reset attack detection rate with zero false positives on legitimate high volume recovery periods.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Machine-Learning Emulation of Satellite Greenhouse Gas Retrievals: Stability over Time

arXiv:2606.09313v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Retrieval algorithms are used to estimate atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHGs), such as carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4), by solving inverse problems from high-spectral-resolution satellite radiance measurements. However, these algorithms are computationally expensive, which makes real-time estimation at scale difficult. Machine-learning models have therefore been proposed as fast emulators of retrieval algorithms. Most existing studies, however, evaluate them only on test data from the same period as the training data. We study the stability over time of such emulators using data from the Greenhouse Gases Observing SATellite (GOSAT). We show that prediction accuracy generally deteriorates when the test period moves away from the training period. We also show that including time as an input feature substantially improves XCH4 prediction for Lasso and neural-network models. Among the methods considered, a simple Lasso model performs as well as or better than more complex methods such as neural networks, and yields more stable predictions over time. We further validate the results using the Total Carbon Column Observing Network (TCCON), a ground-based observation network. On the TCCON-matched dataset, the time-augmented Lasso achieves errors against TCCON that are comparable to the disagreement between GOSAT and TCCON for both XCO2 and XCH4.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Spatial Localization of Relativistic Quantum Systems: The Commutativity Requirement and the Locality Principle. Part II: A Model from Local QFT

arXiv:2604.04173v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper is the second and final part of a two-part study. We construct positive-energy relativistic spatial localization observables in Minkowski spacetime within standard quantum field theory, using the stress–energy–momentum tensor smeared with suitable test functions. For each fixed timelike direction, the construction gives positive operator-valued measures (POVMs) on spacelike hypersurfaces, well defined on every $n$-particle sector and satisfying a relativistic causality condition excluding superluminal propagation of detection probabilities. The observables are built from local or quasi-local field-theoretic quantities, thus providing a rigorous version of earlier heuristic proposals. In the one-particle sector, the construction reduces to the observable previously introduced by the author, and its first moment gives the Newton–Wigner position operator under appropriate normalization and centering assumptions. Because the Reeh–Schlieder theorem prevents the normally ordered stress–energy–momentum tensor from being positive on the full Fock space, we use quantum energy inequalities to obtain lower bounds controlling deviations from positivity. This leads to regularized operator families, bounded from below, which approximate the localization effects. Finally, we define conditional localization observables for finite laboratories through modified local energy operators. By Haag duality, the corresponding conditional POVMs belong to local von Neumann algebras and commute for causally separated regions, in accordance with the Araki–Haag–Kastler framework. The results show how commutativity of localization observables is recovered for conditional measurements in finite spacetime regions.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

CACR:Reinforcing Temporal Answer Grounding in Instructional Video via Candidate-Aware Causal Reasoning

The task of temporal answer grounding in instructional video (TAGV), which aims to locate precise video segments that respond to natural language queries, is increasingly important for direct video answer retrieval. This task remains challenging due to the need to comprehend semantically complex questions and to address the significant length mismatch between untrimmed videos and short target moments. Existing methods often suffer from sensitivity to irrelevant content or insufficient visual reasoning capabilities. To tackle these limitations, we propose a Candidate-Aware Causal Reasoning (CACR) framework. Our approach first employs a Visual-Language Pre-training based Candidate Selection (VBCS) algorithm to efficiently generate K candidate segments, then applies a temporal logic reasoning module enhanced by a rejection reward mechanism and optimized via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) for robust inference. Extensive experiments on six benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU), providing a new perspective for reasoning-based retrieval in long videos.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Smoothness Errors in Dynamics Models and How to Avoid Them

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

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

Curvature-Informed Potential Energy Surface for Protein-Ligand Binding Affinity Prediction

arXiv:2606.14217v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate prediction of protein-ligand binding affinity is essential for structure-based drug discovery. Recent geometric deep learning methods have achieved promising performance by representing protein-ligand complexes as three-dimensional graphs. However, most existing approaches mainly rely on static interaction geometry from a single bound conformation, while neglecting molecular flexibility and binding-induced conformational changes. To address this limitation, we propose a curvature-informed potential energy surface (CPES) graph neural network for protein-ligand binding affinity prediction, which incorporates physics-informed curvature representations to model conformational flexibility. CPES first derives curvature spectral descriptors from the Hessian of the potential energy surface evaluated at equilibrium configurations, whose eigenvalues define the local principal curvatures of the potential energy surface. It then uses spectral cross-attention to compare the unbound ligand and protein with the bound complex, thereby capturing binding-induced changes in conformational dynamics. In parallel, hierarchical protein-ligand interaction representations are learned from static structural features through geometry-aware message passing, soft clustering, and bidirectional cross-attention. Finally, CPES fuses the curvature-informed dynamic representations with static interaction representations for affinity regression. Extensive evaluations on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that CPES achieves improved predictive performance and offers physical interpretability.

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

An affordable hardware-aware neural architecture search for deploying convolutional neural networks on ultra-low-power computing platforms

arXiv:2606.16290v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hardware-aware neural architecture search (HW-NAS) allows the integration of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in microcontrollers devices by automatically designing neural architectures that can fit prearranged hardware constraints. However, state-of-the-art HW-NAS target high-performance microcontrollers, whose power consumption does not meet sensing nodes requirements. This work presents a HW-NAS generating tiny CNNs that can run on ultra-low-power microcontrollers, featuring a lightweight search procedure enabling its execution even on embedded devices. Empirical results on three well-known benchmarks for tiny computer vision proved that the proposed HW-NAS was able to generate tiny CNNs while preserving state-of-the-art classification accuracy.

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.AI) 2026-06-17

Ensemble RL through Classifier Models: Enhancing Risk-Return Trade-offs in Trading Strategies

Authors:

arXiv:2502.17518v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper presents a comprehensive study on the use of ensemble Reinforcement Learning (RL) models in financial trading strategies, leveraging classifier models to enhance performance. By combining RL algorithms such as A2C, PPO, and SAC with traditional classifiers like Support Vector Machines (SVM), Decision Trees, and Logistic Regression, we investigate how different classifier groups can be integrated to improve risk-return trade-offs. The study evaluates the effectiveness of various ensemble methods, comparing them with individual RL models across key financial metrics, including Cumulative Returns, Sharpe Ratios (SR), Calmar Ratios, and Maximum Drawdown (MDD). Our original experimental results demonstrate that ensemble methods often outperform base models in terms of risk-adjusted returns, providing better management of drawdowns and overall stability. However, both the original analysis and the additional reproduction reported in this version show that ensemble performance is sensitive to the choice of variance threshold \(\tau\), classifier group, RL-agent pair, and market universe. The reproduction evidence strengthens the conclusion that classifier-assisted ensemble selection can improve robustness, while also clarifying that the advantage is conditional rather than automatic across all datasets. This study emphasizes the value of combining RL with classifiers for adaptive decision-making, with implications for financial trading, robotics, and other dynamic environments.

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

BASENet: Band-Adapted Speech Enhancement Network with Cross-Band Attention

arXiv:2606.12662v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speech enhancement models typically apply uniform capacity across all frequencies, disregarding the non-uniform spectral resolution of human hearing. We propose BASENet, a frequency-adapted architecture that partitions the spectrum into Bark-scale bands and assigns each a scaled-capacity encoder derived from critical-band density, automatically granting deeper branches to perceptually dense low frequencies and lighter ones to high frequencies. A cross-band attention module captures harmonic dependencies across bands through compact frequency-pooled representations at linear complexity. Built on inverted residual blocks with dense connectivity and a convolutional recurrent network, BASENet achieves 3.55 PESQ and STOI~96% on VoiceBank+DEMAND with only 0.83M parameters and 7.3 G~MACs, the fewest parameters among all methods with PESQ > 3.50. A causal variant (3.44 PESQ) surpasses several non-causal baselines, confirming suitability for real-time streaming on resource-constrained devices.

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

SPADE: Split-and-Delay Embeddings for Autoregressive High-Granularity Calorimeter Simulation

arXiv:2606.11304v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce SPADE (SPlit And Delay Embeddings), an autoregressive transformer for sequences whose tokens carry multiple features. Rather than embedding these features jointly, SPADE embeds them independently. Delaying each feature stream relative to the previous one allows intra-token correlations to be learned by the standard self-attention mechanism. Applied to point-cloud calorimeter shower generation in the highly granular ILD detector, SPADE is competitive with the state of the art AllShowers model on photon showers, and substantially outperforms its VQ-VAE-based predecessor OmniJet-$\alpha_C$. The mechanism is applicable to any generative task with multi-feature tokens, enabling LLM-style pretraining workflows for higher-dimensional data.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Multiple-time Quantum Imaginary Time Evolution

arXiv:2512.10875v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum Imaginary-Time Evolution (QITE) is a powerful method for preparing ground states on quantum hardware. However, executing QITE has costly measurement budgets for general Hamiltonians. Both fidelity and computational cost are strongly dependent on the definition of suitable local domains and Hamiltonian partitions. In this work, we introduce the Multiple-Time QITE algorithm (MT-QITE). We show how using more than one imaginary time substantially improves the fidelity of the resulting ground state as well as the measurement overhead with respect to the previously published QITE algorithm, while preserving its deterministic character and its independence from ad hoc ansatze. Moreover, unlike QITE and other QITE-based algorithms, MT-QITE is parallelizable, and we show that even in Hamiltonians with non-local interactions, partitioning may entail a computational advantage.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Avatar V: Scaling Video-Reference Avatar Video Generation

Generating avatar videos that are not merely visually similar to a target individual but behaviorally recognizable, faithfully reproducing their talking rhythm, gestural tendencies, and expression dynamics, remains an open challenge. Existing methods predominantly condition on single static images, which provide insufficient identity information and cannot capture dynamic motion traits, while standard pixel-level objectives underserve the perceptually critical facial regions that determine avatar fidelity. We present Avatar V, a production-scale framework that addresses these limitations through video-reference-conditioned identity modeling. Rather than compressing identity into fixed-size embeddings, the model conditions directly on the full token sequence of a reference video, learning to reproduce both static identity attributes (facial geometry, skin texture) and dynamic behavioral patterns (talking rhythm, micro-expressions) through attention over the reference context. We introduce Sparse Reference Attention, an asymmetric mechanism achieving linear-complexity conditioning on arbitrarily long references; a motion representation stream enabling closed-loop talking style transfer; and an identity-aware super-resolution refiner inheriting the full reference conditioning. These are supported by a data engine curating 100M+ training clips from 50M raw videos, and a five-stage training pipeline with flow matching pre-training, personality fine-tuning, two-phase distillation (>10x acceleration), and RLHF alignment, deployed across thousands of GPUs. Avatar V generates 1080p videos of unlimited duration, achieving state-of-the-art identity preservation, lip synchronization, and generation quality on our cross-scene benchmark, consistently outperforming leading systems including Seedance 2.0, Kling O3 Pro, Veo 3.1, and OmniHuman 1.5 in both automated metrics and human evaluation.

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

Spectral Retrieval-Augmented Time-Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.19412v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time series forecasting leverages historical patterns to predict future values, but traditional methods face challenges when dealing with complex, non-stationary patterns that are difficult to memorize during training. Retrieval-augmented approaches have emerged as promising solutions by retrieving similar historical patterns to enhance predictions. However, existing retrieval methods suffer from two fundamental limitations: spectral blindness, which overlooks critical frequency-domain characteristics that capture underlying periodic structures, and temporal recency, which treats all historical data equally without emphasizing recent, more relevant patterns. In this paper, we propose SpecReTF, a novel retrieval method that addresses these issues by converting time series into windowed frequency representations, measuring similarity with a combined metric that captures both amplitude and phase information. To balance recency and historical context, we apply an exponential moving average weighting scheme that emphasizes recent windows. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that SpecReTF outperforms time-domain retrieval methods, achieving superior forecasting accuracy across diverse, non-stationary time series.

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

On the Adversarial Robustness of Multimodal LLM Judges

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly used as automated judges, e.g., for image quality and safety assessment. However, their adversarial robustness remains largely unexplored, threatening the fairness and reliability of automated judging. To bridge this gap, we introduce RobustMLLMJudge, the first general framework for evaluating the adversarial robustness of general-purpose MLLMs when functioning as judges. It covers diverse attacks against popular judge approaches across quality and safety evaluation scenarios. Using RobustMLLMJudge, we reveal that i) different MLLM judges are highly vulnerable to score-inflating adversarial attacks; and ii) although effective, these attack methods face a critical challenge due to unique constraints in the evaluation protocols of MLLM judges. We further propose MGSIA, namely Manifold-Guided Semantic Induction Attack, a novel method that bypasses these constraints to enable more effective and transferable attacks on MLLM judges. The core idea of MGSIA is to combine affirmative semantic induction with high-score manifold alignment: it maximizes the probability that judges yield affirmative responses (e.g., "Yes") to binary semantic queries, while regularizing adversarial representations toward high-score centers estimated from proxy protocols. Together, these objectives yield transferable score-inflating perturbations. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority and generalizability of MGSIA in deceiving advanced MLLM judges under different evaluation scenarios, highlighting the need for robust MLLM judges. Code and data will be made available at https://github.com/mala-lab/RobustMLLMJudge.

16.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-11

Microglia at a key inflection point in Alzheimer’s disease

Authors: Unknown Author

We analyzed brains from octogenarians and cognitively resilient centenarians to understand why some individuals with substantial Alzheimer’s disease pathology develop dementia whereas others remain cognitively intact. Spatial transcriptomics revealed gene expression changes in discrete tissue domains surrounding amyloid plaques and tau pathology that distinguish early, clinically silent, disease from later stages associated with cognitive decline.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Grouped Query Experts: Mixture-of-Experts on GQA Self-Attention

arXiv:2606.20945v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Self-attention is central to Transformer performance and is often the most expensive part of the Transformer at long context lengths because its pairwise token interactions scale quadratically with sequence length. Standard dense attention also applies the same set of attention heads to every token regardless of token difficulty or information content. This uniform activation can waste compute, especially as sequences grow longer and attention cost increases rapidly. We propose Grouped Query Experts (GQE), a mixture-of-experts layer on top of grouped-query attention (GQA). Within each GQA group, a router selects k query-head experts per token while all key-value (KV) heads remain dense and unchanged. Thus, GQE keeps the KV cache benefits of GQA and reduces only the active query-head computation. On a fixed 30B token budget at the 250M parameter scale, GQE matches the all-active GQA baseline in downstream accuracy while activating half the query heads per token.

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

RTSGameBench: An RTS Benchmark for Strategic Reasoning by Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2606.18950v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often struggle with strategic reasoning, i.e., anticipating and influencing other agents' actions, under uncertainty in competitive and cooperative settings. Real-time strategy (RTS) games can be a natural testbed for diagnosing this limitation, as they demand coordination with allies, adaptation to opponents' strategy, and long-horizon planning under partial observability. However, existing RTS benchmarks offer limited evaluation scope, lack systematic competency diagnosis, and remain fixed in the pre-designed scenario coverage. To address these limitations, we present RTSGameBench, which is built on Beyond All Reason, a large-scale RTS game with an expanded battlefield that demands broader strategy diversity than the existing testbeds. The proposed benchmark provides evaluations through diverse gameplay across various matchup structures, diagnostic assessment via mini-games, each targeting an individual strategic competency, and extensible coverage via a self-evolving generation framework that converts free-form queries into new mini-games, improving over successive cycles. Additionally, for VLMs to operate in large-scale RTS games, we provide RTSGameAgent that manages units by an FSM with agentic memory. We empirically validate that multiple state-of-the-art VLMs do not perform well when matchups demand tighter coordination, multiagent coordination and when task scale increases.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Learning Fine-Grained Correspondence with Cross-Perspective Perception for Open-Vocabulary 6D Object Pose Estimation

Open-vocabulary 6D object pose estimation empowers robots to manipulate arbitrary unseen objects guided solely by natural language. However, a critical limitation of existing approaches is their reliance on unconstrained global matching strategies. In open-world scenarios, trying to match anchor features against the entire query image space introduces excessive ambiguity, as target features are easily confused with background distractors. To resolve this, we propose Fine-grained Correspondence Pose Estimation (FiCoP), a framework that transitions from noise-prone global matching to spatially-constrained patch-level correspondence. To systematically eliminate background interference, FiCoP first employs an object-centric disentanglement step to isolate the target from macro-level environmental noise. Building upon this localized region, our core methodological innovations are twofold. Firstly, a Cross-Perspective Global Perception (CPGP) module is proposed to fuse dual-view features, establishing structural consensus through explicit context reasoning and text-guided semantic injection. Secondly, we design a Patch Correlation Predictor (PCP) that leverages a patch-to-patch correlation matrix as a structural prior. This generates a precise block-wise association map, acting as a spatial filter to enforce fine-grained, noise-resilient matching. Experiments on the REAL275 and Toyota-Light datasets demonstrate that FiCoP improves Average Recall by 8.0% and 6.1%, respectively, compared to the state-of-the-art method, highlighting its capability to deliver robust and generalized perception for robotic agents operating in complex, unconstrained open-world environments. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/zjjqinyu/FiCoP.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Dynamic Symmetric Point Tracking: Tackling Non-ideal Reference in Analog In-memory Training

arXiv:2602.21321v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Analog in-memory computing (AIMC) performs computation directly within resistive crossbar arrays, offering an energy-efficient platform to scale large vision and language models. However, non-ideal analog device properties make the training on AIMC devices challenging. In particular, its update asymmetry can induce a systematic drift of weight updates towards a device-specific symmetric point (SP), which typically does not align with the optimum of the training objective. To mitigate this bias, most existing works assume the SP is known and pre-calibrate it to zero before training by setting the reference point as the SP. Nevertheless, calibrating AIMC devices requires costly pulse updates, and residual calibration error can directly degrade training performance. In this work, we present the first theoretical characterization of the pulse complexity of SP calibration and the resulting estimation error. We further propose a dynamic SP estimation method that tracks the SP during model training, and establishes its convergence guarantees. In addition, we develop an enhanced variant based on chopping and filtering techniques from digital signal processing. Numerical experiments demonstrate both the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Hybrid Transformer-Mamba for Weakly Supervised Volumetric Medical Segmentation

Weakly supervised segmentation enables model training from plane-level labels. Existing methods often rely on 2D encoders, neglecting the volumetric nature of medical data. We propose TranSamba, a hybrid Transformer-Mamba architecture designed to capture 3D context via cross-plane modeling. TranSamba augments a Vision Transformer backbone with Cross-Plane Mamba blocks, leveraging linear-time modeling for efficient information exchange across neighboring planes. This exchange improves in-plane self-attention and subsequent attention maps for object localization. TranSamba maintains linear time complexity and constant space complexity with respect to the input volume depth. Extensive experiments on three datasets covering diverse modalities and pathologies show that TranSamba achieves state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating the generalizable efficacy of cross-plane modeling. Code is available at: https://github.com/YihengLyu/TranSamba.

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

Self-Evolving Visual Questioner

Vision-language models (VLMs) are typically trained as passive answerers, while their ability to actively ask diverse, non-trivial, visual-centric and grounded questions remains underexplored. Existing visual questioners' performance is bottlenecked by the availability of high-quality training data or the cost of curating them. We show that a VLM can continuously improve itself as a visual questioner without any external supervision. We propose a self-evolving framework that uses a VLM itself as both a proposer and a filter to produce harder, more informative, and visual-centric questions, while maintaining their exploration diversity to avoid training collapse. These questions are then used to train the VLM in both questioner and answerer modes. To evaluate the questioner, we introduce an agentic protocol that assesses questions along perception, reasoning, and diversity dimensions. Experiments across various backbone VLMs show that our method substantially enhances the quality and substantially expands the difficulty boundary of autonomous question generation. Under the same budget, our self-supervision is more effective than training on the static source data. Moreover, the self-evolving questioner remains a competitive or even better answerer.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Constraint-Aware Quantum Optimization of Defect Configurations in Doped ZrO2: XY-Mixer QAOA and Grover Adaptive Search

Authors:

arXiv:2606.24922v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum optimization offers a route to searching the large defect-configuration spaces that arise in materials design. We develop an end-to-end, constraint-aware quantum optimization workflow for composition-defect search in a doped ZrO2 thermal-barrier-coating (TBC) material system, using a MACE-MPA-0 energy dataset to fit a 24-variable QUBO over 8 cation-occupation and 16 oxygen-vacancy variables with exactly two rare-earth substitutions and one oxygen vacancy, yielding 448 feasible configurations. The QUBO surrogate reproduces the MACE energies with held-out R2 = 0.997 (full-data R2 = 0.999, RMSE = 17 meV). We validate two complementary quantum pathways against exact enumeration: a constraint-preserving XY-mixer QAOA that confines sampling to the feasible subspace and places 86% of probability mass within 1 meV of the MACE optimum at depth p = 3, and a fault-tolerant constrained Grover Adaptive Search oracle with explicit fixed-point arithmetic, branch-safe comparison, feasibility checking, and phase kickback. Across threshold cases, the validated oracle uses 324 high-level logical qubits, or 352 to 358 with conservative clean-ancilla v-chain accounting, and requires 3.6 to 4.3 x 104 Toffoli gates per Grover (GAS) iteration. An idealized feasible-space amplification estimate suggests up to a 240x reduction in total Toffoli cost relative to the full 224 occupation space, providing a resource-estimation bridge between materials-informed QUBO modeling, constraint-aware QAOA, and fault-tolerant threshold search.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Trajectories of brain structure and function in young adult carriers of genetic frontotemporal dementia variants

Background and Objectives: Converging evidence hints at neurodevelopmental effects in genetic frontotemporal degeneration (FTD). In cross-sectional studies, for some genes, young adult FTD variant carriers show differences in brain volumes and cognition compared to familial non-carriers. However, longitudinal trajectories may more sensitively capture FTD-related neurodevelopmental vs. neurodegenerative changes than cross-sectional approaches. This study examined longitudinal trajectories of brain volumes, executive function, and plasma biomarkers in young adult carriers compared to familial non-carriers, as measures of neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative outcomes of FTD-causing variants. Methods: This longitudinal cohort study comprised participants, aged 18-30 years, from the FTD Prevention Initiative across Europe, Canada, and the USA. Genetic groups included C9orf72 (47%), MAPT (30%), and GRN (23%). Linear mixed-effects models were computed to assess longitudinal outcomes across age between groups, controlling for sex, scanner (for brain volumes), and education (for executive function); random effects accounted for between-subject variability nested within family membership. Results: Variant carriers (n=147) and familial non-carriers (n=113) did not differ in age (mean{+/-}SD, 25.9{+/-}3.2 years), sex (53% female), or number of visits (2.1{+/-}1.7). Young adult C9orf72 repeat expansion carriers exhibited smaller thalamic volumes than non-carriers at the reference age of 26 years (b=-982.8mm3, SE=317.0, p=0.0046, f2=0.32), with relatively stable trajectories across ages 18-30 (i.e., no change over time). Trajectories of rostral anterior cingulate volumes differed in C9orf72 carriers and non-carriers across age, where carriers showed relatively stable trajectories and non-carriers showed age-appropriate declines (b=64.4mm3, SE=29.9, p=0.035, f2=0.07). For MAPT and GRN, there were little to no differences in total brain, cortical, or subcortical volumes between groups and over time. No longitudinal differences were observed between carriers and non-carriers in executive function, or plasma NfL or GFAP for any genetic group. Discussion: C9orf72 repeat expansions were linked to smaller average thalamic volumes and stable trajectories between ages 18 to 30, supporting potential neurodevelopmental origins. The modest evidence supporting an absence of difference in neurodegenerative biomarkers and executive function suggests minimal early neurodegeneration and functional preservation in young adulthood.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Multi-fidelity aerodynamic data fusion by autoencoder transfer learning

arXiv:2512.13069v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate aerodynamic prediction often relies on high-fidelity simulations; however, their prohibitive computational costs severely limit their applicability in data-driven modeling. This limitation motivates the development of multi-fidelity strategies that leverage inexpensive low-fidelity information without compromising accuracy. Addressing this challenge, this work presents a multi-fidelity deep learning framework that combines autoencoder-based transfer learning with a newly developed Multi-Split Conformal Prediction (MSCP) strategy to achieve uncertainty-aware aerodynamic data fusion under extreme data scarcity. The methodology leverages abundant Low-Fidelity (LF) data to learn a compact latent physics representation, which acts as a frozen knowledge base for a decoder that is subsequently fine-tuned using scarce HF samples. Tested on surface-pressure distributions for NACA airfoils (2D) and a transonic wing (3D) databases, the model successfully corrects LF deviations and achieves high-accuracy pressure predictions using minimal HF training data. Furthermore, the MSCP framework produces robust, actionable uncertainty bands with pointwise coverage exceeding 95%. By combining extreme data efficiency with uncertainty quantification, this work offers a scalable and reliable solution for aerodynamic regression in data-scarce environments.