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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Milstein-type Schemes for Hyperbolic SPDEs

arXiv:2512.19647v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This article studies the temporal approximation of hyperbolic semilinear stochastic evolution equations with multiplicative Gaussian noise by Milstein-type schemes. We take the term hyperbolic to mean that the leading operator generates a contractive, not necessarily analytic $C_0$-semigroup. Optimal convergence rates are derived for the pathwise uniform strong error \[ E_h^\infty := \Big(\mathbb{E}\Big[\max_{1\le j \le M}\|U_{t_j}-u_j\|_X^p\Big]\Big)^{1/p} \] on a Hilbert space $X$ for $p\in [2,\infty)$. Here, $U$ is the mild solution and $u_j$ its Milstein approximation at time $t_j=jh$ with step size $h>0$ and final time $T=Mh>0$. For sufficiently regular nonlinearity and noise, we establish strong convergence of order one, with the error satisfying $E_h^\infty\lesssim h\sqrt{\log(T/h)}$ for rational Milstein schemes and $E_h^\infty \lesssim h$ for exponential Milstein schemes. This extends previous results from parabolic to hyperbolic SPDEs and from exponential to rational Milstein schemes. Moreover, root-mean-square error estimates are strengthened to pathwise uniform estimates. Numerical experiments validate the convergence rates for the stochastic Schrödinger equation. Further applications to Maxwell's and transport equations are included.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

CountZES: Counting via Zero-Shot Exemplar Selection

Object counting in complex scenes is particularly challenging in the zero-shot (ZS) setting, where instances of unseen categories are counted using only a class name. Existing ZS counting methods that infer exemplars from text often rely on off-the-shelf open-vocabulary detectors (OVDs), which in dense scenes suffer from semantic noise, appearance variability, and multi-instance proposals. Alternatively, random image-patch sampling is employed, which fails to accurately delineate object instances. Since counting is sensitive to exemplar quality, such selection strategies often yield poorly representative exemplars, leading to inaccurate count estimation. To address these issues, we propose CountZES, an inference-only approach for object counting via ZS exemplar selection. CountZES discovers diverse exemplars through three synergistic stages: Detection-Anchored Exemplar (DAE), Density-Guided Exemplar (DGE), and Feature-Consensus Exemplar (FCE). DAE refines OVD detections to isolate precise single-instance exemplars. DGE introduces a density-driven, self-supervised paradigm to identify statistically consistent and semantically compact exemplars, while FCE reinforces visual coherence through feature-space clustering. Together, these stages yield a complementary exemplar set that balances textual grounding, count consistency, and feature representativeness. Experiments on diverse datasets demonstrate CountZES superior performance among ZOC methods while generalizing effectively across domains.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

FreeStory: Training-Free Character Consistency for Free-Form Visual Storytelling

Visual storytelling aims to generate image sequences that are both aligned with narrative prompts and consistent in character appearance across images. Recent training-free methods improve character consistency by reusing attention features, but rely on structured prompts where full character descriptions are repeated in every prompt. This assumption simplifies the task but deviates from natural storytelling, where characters are typically introduced once and later referred to using pronouns or type-based expressions. We propose FreeStory, a training-free framework that reformulates character consistency under free-form prompts as entity-grounded feature reuse. Our method associates reference mentions with their corresponding character descriptions and combines dynamic character masks, correspondence-aware feature matching, key-value injection, and query blending to preserve identity while retaining generation diversity. We also introduce FreeStoryBench, a benchmark for this setting that includes both single- and multi-character stories. Experiments show that FreeStory achieves state-of-the-art performance among training-free methods on structured benchmarks and stronger overall consistency over baselines under free-form prompts.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

DiRecT: Safe Diffusion-Based Planning via Receding-Horizon Denoising

arXiv:2606.15359v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion models have emerged as powerful tools for planning and control by learning multimodal distributions over actions and trajectories. Yet reliable inference-time safety enforcement remains a key barrier to their deployment in safety-critical tasks. Existing approaches typically project each denoising iterate onto the feasible set, even though constraints are defined only on the final clean trajectory. Enforcing feasibility on noisy intermediate samples can therefore overconstrain the sampling dynamics, substantially degrading sample quality. To address this limitation, we introduce DiRecT (Diffusion-based planning via Receding-horizon denoising with Terminal constraints), a training-free algorithm for constrained sampling from diffusion models via stochastic optimal control (SOC). DiRecT enforces constraints only on the final clean sample, avoiding unnecessary restrictions on the intermediate denoising dynamics. Inspired by model predictive control, we derive a principled receding-horizon surrogate for the otherwise intractable constrained SOC formulation, yielding an efficient algorithm that cleanly separates stochastic denoising from constraint satisfaction, progressively steering samples toward feasible final trajectories without distorting the learned diffusion dynamics. Furthermore, DiRecT is highly flexible: it can leverage off-the-shelf or domain-specific optimizers, incorporate priors over environment dynamics, and optimize additional soft rewards. Extensive experiments on safe planning benchmarks demonstrate that DiRecT substantially improves deployment safety and task performance over existing diffusion-based planning baselines.

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

AI4SLT: Empirical Processes in Lean 4 for Formal Statistical Learning Theory

We present the first comprehensive Lean 4 formalization of statistical learning theory (SLT) grounded in empirical process theory. Our en-to-end formal infrastructure implement the missing contents in latest Lean library, including a complete development of Gaussian Lipschitz concentration, Dudley's entropy integral theorem for sub-Gaussian processes, and an application to least-squares (sparse) regression with a sharp rate. The project was carried out using a human-AI collaborative workflow, in which humans design proof strategies and AI agents execute tactical proof construction, leading to the human-verified Lean 4 toolbox for SLT. Beyond implementation, the formalization process exposes and resolves implicit assumptions and missing details in standard SLT textbooks, enforcing a granular, line-by-line understanding of the theory. This work establishes a reusable formal foundation and opens the door for future developments in machine learning theory. The code is provided in https://github.com/YuanheZ/lean-stat-learning-theory.

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

Toward Generalist Autonomous Research via Hypothesis-Tree Refinement

Scientific progress depends on a repeated loop of exploration, experimentation, and abstraction. Researchers test candidate directions, interpret the evidence, and carry the resulting lessons into later attempts. We study how an AI agent can run this loop autonomously over long horizons. We introduce Arbor, a general framework for autonomous research that combines a long-lived coordinator, short-lived executors, and Hypothesis Tree Refinement (HTR), a persistent tree that links hypotheses, artifacts, evidence, and distilled insights across time. The coordinator manages global research strategy over the tree, while executors implement and test individual hypotheses in isolated worktrees. As results return, Arbor updates the tree, propagates reusable lessons, refines the search frontier, and admits verified improvements. This design turns autonomous research from a sequence of local attempts into a cumulative process in which strategy, execution, and evidence are carried across time. We evaluate Arbor under Autonomous Optimization (AO), an operational setting where an agent improves an initial research artifact through iterative experimentation without step-level human supervision. Across six real research tasks in model training, harness engineering, and data synthesis, Arbor achieves the best held-out result on all six tasks, attaining more than 2.5x the average relative held-out gain of Codex and Claude Code under the same task interface and resource budget. On MLE-Bench Lite, Arbor reaches 86.36% Any Medal with GPT-5.5, the strongest result in our comparison.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Detail++: Training-Free Detail Enhancer for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) generation have led to impressive visual results. However, these models still face significant challenges when handling complex prompt, particularly those involving multiple subjects with distinct attributes. Inspired by the human drawing process, which first outlines the composition and then incrementally adds details, we propose Detail++, a training-free framework that introduces a novel Progressive Detail Injection (PDI) strategy to address this limitation. Specifically, we decompose a complex prompt into a sequence of simplified sub-prompts, guiding the generation process in stages. This staged generation leverages the inherent layout-controlling capacity of self-attention to first ensure global composition, followed by precise refinement. To achieve accurate binding between attributes and corresponding subjects, we exploit cross-attention mechanisms and further introduce a Centroid Alignment Loss at test time to reduce binding noise and enhance attribute consistency. Extensive experiments on T2I-CompBench and a newly constructed style composition benchmark demonstrate that Detail++ significantly outperforms existing methods, particularly in scenarios involving multiple objects and complex stylistic conditions.

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

On the Oracle Complexity of Interpolation-Based Gradient Descent

arXiv:2606.19878v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent work on first-order optimizers for empirical risk minimization (ERM) has suggested that smoothness of ERM loss functions in the training data, rather than in the optimization parameters, can be leveraged to improve the oracle complexity of gradient descent (GD) methods. In this paper, we propose an inexact gradient method, piecewise polynomial interpolation-based gradient descent (PPI-GD), which approximates the full gradient in each iteration by querying the first-order oracle at equidistant points in the data domain to construct polynomial interpolants of the resulting gradient samples over appropriately sized patches of the data domain. We analyze the oracle complexity of PPI-GD for strongly convex and non-convex loss functions when the data space dimension is bounded by a polylogarithmic function of the number of training samples, and find it to outperform several GD variants in key regimes when the loss function is sufficiently smooth. Furthermore, our analysis extends several techniques from the error analysis of bicubic spline interpolants to the setting of $d$-variate tensor product polynomial interpolants which may be of independent interest in interpolation analysis.

09.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

SMLMFlow: Improving Structural Resolution in Single Molecule Localization Microscopy with Flow Matching

While Single Molecule Localization Microscopy (SMLM) aims to generate precise coordinates of molecular targets in cells, the resulting point clouds are inherently blurred by additive noise sources across the experimental, imaging, and processing workflow. This blurring often limits SMLM's ability to accurately quantify complex assembled structures required to address biological issues, despite reported localization precision down to a couple of nanometers. Here, we present SMLMFlow, a machine learning framework for improving structural resolution in SMLM datasets that combines a graph neural network and a hierarchical transformer with flow matching. We show that SMLMFlow improves structural resolution and downstream quantification across different structures, including filaments and protein nano-clusters, and generalizes to new unseen photophysics models.

10.
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.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

"We don't complain; it's just part of being a woman": frequency, knowledge, and sociocultural beliefs about dysmenorrhoea in a South African university cohort

Introduction Dysmenorrhoea is highly prevalent globally and interferes with engagement in education, work, social participation, and quality of life. Although evidence suggests that sociocultural beliefs influence how menstrual pain is understood and managed, relatively little research has explored dysmenorrhoea-related knowledge and beliefs within South Africa. This study aimed to (1) determine the frequency of dysmenorrhoea, (2) assess dysmenorrhoea-related knowledge and compare knowledge between menstruating and non-menstruating individuals, and (3) explore commonly held generational, cultural, and religious beliefs related to dysmenorrhoea in a South African university cohort. Methods We analysed data collected as part of a cross-sectional survey conducted among staff and students at a South African university. Participants completed demographic questions, items assessing dysmenorrhoea-related knowledge, and an adapted Working Ability, Location, Intensity, Days of Pain, Dysmenorrhoea (WaLIDD) questionnaire. Participants were also invited to provide free-text responses describing generational, cultural, and religious beliefs about dysmenorrhoea. Quantitative data were analysed descriptively and compared between menstruating and non-menstruating participants. Free-text responses were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Results A total of 863 participants completed the survey, including 578 current or past menstruators. The frequency (95%CI) of dysmenorrhoea was 75.4% (71.7-78.9). Most participants were classified as having moderate (53%) or severe (31%) dysmenorrhoea on the WaLIDD scale. Awareness of dysmenorrhoea was higher among participants who had menstruated than among those who had never menstruated (80.4% vs 55.3%, p

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

Hallucination Detection and Correction in Medical VLMs via Counter-Evidence Verification

Vision-Language models (VLMs) reliability in medical diagnosis is challenged by trust-undermining hallucinations. Existing hallucination detection approaches mainly focus on identifying factual inconsistencies between generated text and reference data. While some studies analyze where models attend in images, they seldom verify whether such attention truly reflects the visual evidence supporting the generated text. To address this gap, we propose Co}unter-Evidence Verification (CoEV), a training-free plug-and-play framework that detects and corrects hallucinations through evidence-based factual consistency verification. CoEV performs bidirectional verification between textual assertions and visual evidence, testing whether each statement is supported by its corresponding evidence region, and assigns each statement into a four-quadrant diagnostic map capturing combinations of text factuality and visual grounding. CoEV detects hallucinated content and serves as a post hoc refinement tool, correcting hallucinations without retraining. Extensive experiments on four medical datasets show that CoEV combats hallucinations in VLMs.For hallucination detection, CoEV consistently outperforms existing methods, improving average PR-AUC and ROC-AUC by 3.0% and 3.9% absolute points respectively, with notable gains of up to 18.5% in specific VQA scenarios. For hallucination correction, it improves Micro-F1 by up to 12.5%, reduces hallucination rates by over 11.9% on medical report generation, and also boosts medical VQA accuracy. These results show that CoEV enables reliable detection and correction of hallucinations, providing clinicians with dependable, evidence-based cues for diagnosis. Code will be released upon acceptance.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Boltzmann Attention: Learnable Ising Couplings for Cooperative Attention

arXiv:2606.12478v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Attention mechanisms are central to modern sequence models, yet standard attention computes relevance primarily through individual query–key similarities. Although softmax normalization introduces competition among positions, a standard attention layer does not explicitly parameterize learnable interactions between attention decisions. This limits its ability to directly model cooperative or antagonistic co-attention structure within the attention mechanism itself. We propose Boltzmann attention, an energy-based generalization in which attention patterns are governed by an interacting Ising model. The method augments the usual data-dependent local fields with learnable pairwise couplings, allowing the model to represent inter-position correlations beyond those captured by softmax or sigmoid attention. Experiments on character-level language modeling and synthetic bracket matching show that Boltzmann attention consistently improves over standard softmax attention within a standard Transformer architecture, with the advantage becoming more pronounced as sequence length increases. A four-way ablation confirms that the improvement arises from the learnable pairwise couplings. These results suggest that explicit inter-position interactions provide a principled enhancement for attention-based sequence modeling. Moreover, the Ising formulation opens a natural path toward quantum-computing-based sampling strategies: we demonstrate that diabatic quantum annealing provides a practical training method while maintaining competitive performance with exact Boltzmann computation.

14.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-12

A new method for augmenting short time series, with application to pain events in sickle cell disease

Authors:

by Kumar Utkarsh, Nirmish R. Shah, Tanvi Banerjee, Daniel M. Abrams Researchers across different fields, including but not limited to ecology, biology, and healthcare, often face the challenge of sparse data. Such sparsity can lead to uncertainties, estimation difficulties, and potential biases in modeling. Here we introduce a novel data augmentation method that combines multiple sparse time series datasets when they share similar statistical properties, thereby improving parameter estimation and model selection reliability. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach through validation studies comparing Hawkes and Poisson processes, followed by application to subjective pain dynamics in patients with sickle cell disease (SCD), a condition affecting millions worldwide, particularly those of African, Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and Indian descent.

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

Approximate quantum error correction theory of non-isometric codes

arXiv:2606.13559v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Non-isometric encoding arises in various important contexts in quantum error correction, most notably in the finite-energy, non-ideal codewords inevitable in experimental realizations of continuous-variable codes, and holographic quantum gravity. In this work, we present a general and systematic theory of non-isometric quantum error-correcting codes. In particular, we employ the approximate quantum error correction framework to quantitatively study the fundamental limitations imposed by non-isometric encodings on the accuracy of quantum error correction and implementation of logical operations. We apply our theory to analyze GKP and tiger codes under energy constraints, and discuss the implications to holography.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Evidence-guided AI regularization for suicidal ideation prediction in pediatric bipolar disorder

Background: Suicide prediction models in psychiatry often rely on purely data-driven feature selection, which can produce unstable and clinically opaque predictor sets in modest-sized samples. We developed Evidence-Based AI LASSO (EBAL), an evidence-guided regularization framework that incorporates curated clinical evidence into feature-specific penalty factors for interpretable prediction. Methods: Baseline data from 136 youth with confirmed bipolar spectrum disorder in the Greater Houston Area Bipolar Registry were analyzed using 20 candidate clinical predictors. Forty higher-level evidence documents on suicidality and related predictor domains were curated through a structured evidence synthesis workflow and indexed as an auditable evidence corpus. An open-weight large language model assigned feature-specific penalty factors using a prespecified scoring rubric, and these penalties were used to fit a weighted LASSO model. EBAL was compared with a standard evidence-agnostic LASSO using nested leave-one-out cross-validation. Results: For suicidal ideation, EBAL achieved an AUROC of 0.768, balanced accuracy of 0.757, sensitivity of 0.758, and specificity of 0.757. The standard LASSO achieved an AUROC of 0.760 and balanced accuracy of 0.715. EBAL improved balanced accuracy (+0.042, p=0.010) and Matthews correlation coefficient (+0.079, p=0.010), while retaining fewer stable predictors than standard LASSO (11/20 vs 18/20). The strongest positive predictors were current depressed mood, duration of mood disorder illness, and comorbid generalized anxiety disorder. For suicidal behavior, both models performed near chance and retained all candidate predictors. Limitations: The study was cross-sectional, single-site, and modest in sample size, with no external validation cohort. Conclusions: EBAL produced a sparser and more clinically coherent model for suicidal ideation in pediatric bipolar disorder, but did not improve prediction of suicidal behavior. These findings support evidence-guided regularization as a transparent strategy for aligning psychiatric prediction models with prior clinical knowledge while preserving interpretability.

17.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Two-component exciton condensates in an electron–hole bilayer

Authors:

Macroscopic quantum coherence emerges when bosons condense into a Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC)1–5. Excitons are a long-sought solid-state route to high-temperature BECs with strong interactions, electrical tunability and potentially multicomponent spinor order, but conclusive evidence for equilibrium condensation has remained elusive. Here we report evidence for two-component exciton BECs in MoSe2/hBN/WSe2 electron–hole bilayers6–9 by probing the spin–valley susceptibility of constituent electrons and holes. This heterostructure hosts equilibrium exciton fluids with four spin–valley flavours. Magneto-optical spectroscopy in a dilution refrigerator reveals three exciton condensate phases with distinct flavour polarizations. At zero magnetic field, the many-body ground state is a coherent superposition of two condensed intravalley exciton flavours. Under a magnetic field, the intravalley exciton condensate first switches to a two-component intervalley condensate through a first-order quantum phase transition at a weak critical field and then turns into a fully polarized single-component condensate at high fields. The condensate signatures form a dome in density–temperature space, persisting up to approximately 1.8 K. Our results establish van der Waals electron–hole bilayers as a versatile platform for strongly interacting, multicomponent exciton BECs. Macroscopic quantum coherence arises in two-component exciton Bose–Einstein condensates within MoSe2/hBN/WSe2 electron–hole bilayers, exhibiting distinct spin–valley polarized phases, quantum phase transitions under magnetic fields and stable condensate behaviour up to approximately 1.8 K.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Asymmetric quantum steering harvested near a Lorentz-violating BTZ black hole

arXiv:2606.12766v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We investigate the harvesting of quantum steering and its directional asymmetry between two Unruh-DeWitt detectors in a Lorentz-violating BTZ black hole spacetime. Since the detectors are located at different radial positions outside the black hole, they experience inequivalent local environments induced by gravitational redshift, causing Alice to undergo stronger effective thermal noise than Bob. Remarkably, we uncover a counterintuitive phenomenon in which the detector subjected to a higher effective temperature exhibits stronger steerability than the other one, revealing a nontrivial inversion of thermal intuition in curved spacetime. Furthermore, quantum steering survives only within a finite window of detector energy gaps and reaches its maximum within an optimal regime. We find that Lorentz violation suppresses steering most strongly near this optimal energy gap, indicating an enhanced sensitivity of maximal correlation extraction to symmetry breaking effects. Our results demonstrate that Lorentz violation acts as a geometric constraint on the quantum information capacity of spacetime, simultaneously restricting both the strength and the directionality of quantum correlations.

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

A Multi-level Analysis of Factors Associated with Student Performance: A Machine Learning Approach to the SAEB Microdata

arXiv:2510.22266v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Identifying the factors that influence student performance in basic education is a central challenge for formulating effective public policies in Brazil. This study introduces a multi-level machine learning approach to classify the proficiency of 9th-grade and high school students using microdata from the System of Assessment of Basic Education (SAEB). Our model uniquely integrates four data sources: student socioeconomic characteristics, teacher professional profiles, school indicators, and principal management profiles. A comparative analysis of four ensemble algorithms confirmed the superiority of a Random Forest model, which achieved 90.2% accuracy and an Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 96.7%. To move beyond prediction, we applied Explainable AI (XAI) using SHAP, which revealed that the school's average socioeconomic level is the most dominant predictor, demonstrating that systemic factors have a greater impact than individual characteristics in isolation. The primary conclusion is that academic performance is a systemic phenomenon deeply tied to the school's ecosystem. This study provides a data-driven, interpretable tool to inform policies aimed at promoting educational equity by addressing disparities between schools.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

SP-GCRL: Influence Maximization on Incomplete Social Graphs

arXiv:2605.12513v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Influence maximization (IM) in real platforms is challenged by incomplete, noisy social graphs and non-stationary diffusion dynamics. We propose SP-GCRL, a social-propagation-aware graph contrastive reinforcement learning framework that learns end-to-end seed selection under partial observability.We first introduce a social-propagation-aware nonlinear diffusion function to model reinforcement/diminishing effects and probability drift under repeated exposure; we then construct dual structural views and perform contrastive learning to obtain node representations robust to missing edges and weak ties, while replacing expensive strategy metrics with a GAT-based regression surrogate to improve efficiency and scalability; finally, we use DDQN to learn an end-to-end seed selection policy on top of these representations. Experiments on multiple real-world networks show that SP-GCRL achieves significant gains over heuristic and learning-based baselines across budgets and topologies, while maintaining strong large-scale scalability.

21.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Critical parameters of germ-monotone families of branching random walks

arXiv:2602.21062v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a broad class of families of branching random walks on a countable set $X$, which we refer to as germ-monotone branching random walks (GMBRWs). The processes in each family are parametrized by a positive parameter $\lambda>0$, which controls the overall reproductive speed, and they are monotonically increasing in $\lambda$ with respect to the germ order, a notion that extends classical stochastic domination. This framework encompasses a wide range of models, including classical continuous-time branching random walks, as well as discrete-time counterparts of certain non-Markovian processes such as ageing branching random walks. We define a general notion of critical parameter $\lambda(A)$ associated with each subset $A \subseteq X$, which serves as a threshold separating almost sure extinction in $A$ from positive probability of survival in $A$. This unifies and extends the classical global and local critical parameters $\lambda_w$ and $\lambda_s$, which can be recovered as special cases. We then investigate how modifications of the reproduction laws, either on a finite set or on a more general subset of $X$, affect these critical parameters. Our results extend earlier contributions in the literature.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

AdaSTORM: Scaling LLM Reasoning on Dynamic Graphs via Adaptive Spatio-Temporal Multi-Agent Collaboration

arXiv:2606.16328v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable potential in dynamic graph reasoning, but suffer from a scaling bottleneck: current models can only handle graphs with tens of nodes, constrained by exponential reasoning overhead and finite context windows. While multi-agent systems (MAS) offer collective reasoning and topology-aware orchestration, capabilities naturally suited for graph-structured tasks, their application to dynamic graphs remains unexplored. This paper presents Scaling LLM Reasoning on Dynamic Graphs via Adaptive Spatio-Temporal Multi-Agent Collaboration (AdaSTORM), a framework that reformulates large-scale dynamic graph reasoning into two stages: (i) Adaptive Partitioning, partitioning large-scale dynamic graphs into subregions that match the model's reasoning capacity while minimizing inference cost; and (ii) Collaborative Reasoning, aligning graph partition topologies with a spatio-temporal decoupled multi-agent architecture. AdaSTORM is the first multi-agent framework tailored for dynamic graph reasoning. Extensive experiments show that AdaSTORM successfully breaks through the scaling bottleneck, scaling reasoning to thousand-node graphs with over 90% accuracy across several large-scale dynamic graph settings without external tools, significantly outperforms seven competitive baselines. Furthermore, it achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on existing benchmarks and generalizes robustly to real-world datasets. The source code is available at: https://github.com/irisorchid107/AdaSTORM/.

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

Multi-Class Brain Tumor Classification Using Advanced Deep Learning Models: A Comparative Study

Despite recent advancements in deep learning, accurately classifying brain tumors from MRI images continues to pose challenges. In this research, we present a comprehensive evaluation of five different convolutional neural networks (CNN) architectures, including a customized baseline model and four pre-trained models - for use in classifying multi-class brain tumors using a clinically-sourced dataset of approximately 10,000 MRI images. We have utilized five different architectures; VGG16, VGG19, DenseNet121, and EfficientNetB0, which were all tested and trained within an identical experimental framework. Performance was measured by both overall accuracy and tumor-wise recall as a means to measure the clinically-relevant performance of each architecture. We found that EfficientNetB0 had the best overall classification accuracy at 95%, when compared to the other architectures tested; specifically VGG16 (94.37%), VGG19 (92.29%), DenseNet121 (90.91%) and the customized CNN (78.00%). An especially important finding of our research was the considerable improvement in detecting meningiomas; specifically, while simple CNNs could detect meningiomas with a recall rate of approximately 20%, EfficientNetB0 was able to detect meningiomas with a recall rate of 89%. Meningiomas are often difficult to detect because they can appear very subtly on MRI images. Additionally, an interesting finding was that the deeper VGG19 performed worse than the shallower VGG16. This indicates that in many cases the architectural efficiency of a CNN model may be more important than its depth when working with medical images. Overall, EfficientNetB0 appears to provide the optimal trade-off between classification accuracy, number of parameters used in the model and clinically meaningful performance.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Assessment of occupational aerosol exposure for laboratory technicians: A quantitative study using {Phi}X174 phage as a substitute virus

Authors:

This study aimed to clarify aerosol exposure risks throughout the workflow of a Biosafety Level 2 (BSL-2) polymerase chain reaction (PCR) laboratory, validate the suitability of the {Phi}X174 bacteriophage as an indicator virus, and provide evidence for biosafety control measures. The {Phi}X174 bacteriophage was used to simulate viral samples, and a concentration-bacteriophage plaque standard curve was constructed (R2=0.998). Five operational steps in a simulated PCR laboratory were quantitatively monitored for aerosol concentration using double-layer agar plates, with blank controls used to eliminate interference. Statistical analysis was employed to identify risk differences. Sample homogenization ((5.67 {+/-} 1.23) x 104 plaque-forming units (PFU)/m3) and nucleic acid extraction ((3.45 {+/-} 0.89) x 104 PFU/m3) were identified as high-/very high-risk steps. The viral load in the samples was strongly positively correlated with the aerosol concentration (r = 0.926, P

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

R2BC: Multi-Agent Imitation Learning from Single-Agent Demonstrations

arXiv:2510.18085v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Imitation Learning (IL) is a natural way for humans to teach robots, particularly when high-quality demonstrations are easy to obtain. While IL has been widely applied to single-robot settings, relatively few studies have addressed the extension of these methods to multi-agent systems, especially in settings where a single human must provide demonstrations to a team of collaborating robots. In this paper, we introduce and study Round-Robin Behavior Cloning (R2BC), a method that enables a single human operator to effectively train multi-robot systems through sequential, single-agent demonstrations. Our approach allows the human to teleoperate one agent at a time and incrementally teach multi-agent behavior to the entire system, without requiring demonstrations in the joint multi-agent action space. We show that R2BC methods match, and in some cases surpass, the performance of an oracle behavior cloning approach trained on privileged synchronized demonstrations across four multi-agent simulated tasks. Finally, we deploy R2BC on two physical robot tasks trained using real human demonstrations.