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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Mach's principle in atomic transitions

Authors:
Subhajit Barman↗Bibhas Ranjan Majhi↗

arXiv:2606.11608v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the atomic transition probabilities in atom-mirror set-ups that are in circular motion. In one scenario, the atom is in circular motion inside a static cylindrical mirror. In the other scenario, the cylindrical mirror rotates around its central axis while the atom remains static. We report structural similarity in the atomic transition probabilities between these two cases – these probabilities are equivalent upon interchanging the field frequencies between the two scenarios. We interpret such an observation as a semi-classical phenomenon analogous to the classical Mach's principle.

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

Using AI in engineering education: a balancing act, driven by clear purpose

Authors:
Olya Kudina↗

arXiv:2606.16626v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Based on a questionnaire of 100 higher-education students, predominantly from engineering-related fields, and a critical review of recent literature, this chapter examines how students use and perceive Large Language Models (LLMs) in engineering education. Students primarily value LLMs for writing support, conceptual clarification, coding assistance, and brainstorming, while simultaneously expressing concerns about inaccuracies, bias, overreliance, academic integrity, and the burden of verification. Through an analysis of two dominant metaphors, namely LLMs as an "oracle" and as a "tutor," the chapter shows how these systems cultivate expectations of authority, expertise, and personalized learning that often exceed their actual capabilities. The chapter further argues that students' attachment to the promises of efficiency and personalized support reflects a form of "cruel optimism," where the perceived benefits of LLMs often depend on the very skills, vigilance, and expertise that students are still developing. Overall, the chapter argues for a purpose-driven and context-sensitive approach to AI integration in engineering education, emphasizing critical AI literacy, reflective assessment design, pedagogical caution, and consideration of broader ethical and environmental impacts.

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03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

PRISMR: Overcoming Parse Collapse in Multimodal Listwise Ranking via Parameterized Representation Internalization

Authors:
Hao Jiang↗Xin Li↗Annan Wang↗Zhi Yang↗Haoxiang Zhang↗Yichi Zhang↗Weisi Lin↗

arXiv:2606.12942v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative listwise ranking with Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) aims to capture global list context in a single forward pass, but its effectiveness degrades in long-context multimodal scenarios. We identify a recurring failure mode, parse collapse, where the autoregressive decoder produces fluent yet incomplete rankings by silently omitting candidates and terminating early. This failure stems from limited context utilization rather than simple formatting mistakes, making prompt engineering and constrained decoding insufficient. We propose PRISMR (Parameterized Representation Internalization for Semantic Multimodal Ranking), a framework that replaces transient in-context list processing with parametric structural conditioning. PRISMR uses a lightweight hypernetwork to encode multimodal candidates in parallel and generate item-specific LoRA weights, which are synthesized into an instance-specific adapter for a LMM. This paradigm enables more robust internalization of list structure while preserving the base model. We further introduce a large-scale multimodal review-ranking benchmark for evaluation. Experiments demonstrate that PRISMR substantially reduces parse collapse, improves listwise ranking performance, and transfers effectively across domains and instruction-tuned backbones.

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04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Rethinking Reward Supervision: Rubric-Conditioned Self-Distillation

Authors:
Siyi Gu↗Jialin Chen↗Sophia Zhou↗Arman Cohan↗Rex Ying↗

Post-training of reasoning language models is commonly driven by supervised distillation and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards. Distillation often relies on chain-of-thought annotations that are expensive to obtain and may themselves be noisy, incomplete, or partially incorrect; even when the final solution is correct, an imperfect rationale can interfere with learning. Reinforcement learning with verified rewards, on the other hand, typically compresses evaluative feedback into a scalar signal, obscuring which aspects of a response should be improved. We propose Rubric-Conditioned Self-Distillation, a framework that incorporates rubrics as structured, fine-grained feedback for on-policy self-distillation. Our method conditions the teacher model on criterion-level rubrics and uses it to provide token-level guidance on the student's own sampled trajectories. This design avoids treating a single reference rationale as the sole supervision target. Instead, rubrics specify what a strong response should satisfy, enabling more fine-grained credit assignment over the reasoning process than scalar reward optimization. We instantiate this framework with a two-stage pipeline that first learns to generate task-specific rubrics and then trains a rubric-guided reasoner. We evaluate on a diverse suite of science reasoning benchmarks and results show that rubric-conditioned self-distillation effectively converts rubric-level criteria into token-level guidance over the reasoning process, surpassing GRPO by 1.0 points and OPSD by 0.9 points on average.

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05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Representation-Induced Symmetry Trapping in Adaptive Variational Quantum Simulations of Multi-Reference Topologies

Authors:
Hermawan Kresno Dipojono↗

arXiv:2606.13387v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating the trainability of adaptive quantum chemistry algorithms under multi-reference static correlation requires understanding how representation topologies intertwine with molecular geometry. We systematically expose a deep physical dependence on point-group symmetry by evaluating a spin-conserved SUSD operator pool across highly stretched configurations (2 x Re) of asymmetric LiH, symmetric BeH2, and asymmetric H2O. Under asymmetric distortions, the non-local mapping constraints of the Bravyi-Kitaev transformation create an optimization trapping effect–an encodement-locked manifestation of the broader barren plateau crisis. Crucially, by comparing these to the symmetrical stretching baseline of BeH2, we demonstrate that the preservation of point-group symmetry structurally protects the optimization landscape, proving that ansatz symmetry restrictions are necessary but insufficient without accounting for the underlying fermion-to-qubit representation. While current methods rely on numerical pruning to throttle pool sizes, our structural approach establishes that the mapping representation remains a critical factor in maintaining landscape trainability. Furthermore, exploiting structural overlap within our pool, we introduce a covariance-driven, adaptive shot-allocation filter. Diverging from static energy-variance minimization frameworks, our allocation engine operates as a dynamic runtime diagnostic tool. By continuously monitoring the gradient precision threshold epsilon, it aggressively prunes dead symmetry channels and triggers an automated circuit-termination sequence upon detecting representation-induced flat-lined states (dE/dtheta approx 0). This integration of algebraic measurement reuse with topology-aware statistical filtering provides a promising, resource-efficient strategy for executing deep variational algorithms on early fault-tolerant architectures.

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06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Menopausal symptoms in peri- and postmenopausal women: systematic review and meta-analysis of prevalence, incidence, comorbidities, and clinical outcomes

Authors:
He↗Wang↗Chen↗Zheng↗Li↗Wu↗Thio↗C. H. L↗Snieder↗Zhang↗

Introduction: The global epidemiology of menopausal symptoms among middle-aged and elderly women remains unclear. Methods: Data on prevalence, comorbidities, incidence and outcomes of menopausal symptoms published up until March 1st 2019 were searched in PubMed, Embase and Cochrane databases. We used a random-effects model to compute point estimates of prevalence for 24 types of menopausal symptoms. We narratively summarized the patterns of the comorbidities, incidence and outcomes of menopausal symptoms due to limited data. Results: A total of 239 studies (n{approx}2.5 million middle-aged and elderly women) from 56 countries and regions were included in the analysis. The global pooled prevalence analysis revealed that hot flashes (48%) and night sweats (30%) were highly prevalent, alongside psychological symptoms like insomnia (47%), irritability (46%), anxiety (39%), and depression (30%). Physical symptoms including joint aches/pain (50%), backache (47%), and tiredness (61%) were also commonly reported. Heat intolerance showed the highest prevalence (76%), while symptoms like urinary incontinence (24%) and poor appetite (8%) were less frequent. These findings highlight the diverse and widespread impact of menopause on women globally, with significant variations across symptom types. Africa showed the highest pooled prevalence across a series of symptoms, compared with other continents. We observed high prevalence in developing countries, especially for psychological and physical symptoms; significant intra-Asian variation in vasomotor symptoms; hypertension and obesity as the most common comorbidities; joint pain, urinary incontinence, and vasomotor symptoms as the most incident complaints; and positive associations with cardiovascular disease in the psychological (depression and insomnia) and physical (joint pain) domains. Conclusion: This study highlights the global burden of menopausal symptoms, with significant differences across continents. The findings call for more inclusive research on underrepresented groups (particularly in Africa) and further investigation into drivers of this marked global heterogeneity in prevalence of menopausal symptoms and their comorbidities, incidence and outcomes.

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

LLM-Powered AI Agent Systems and Their Applications in Industry

Authors:
Guannan Liang↗Qianqian Tong↗

arXiv:2505.16120v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has reshaped agent systems. Unlike traditional rule-based agents with limited task scope, LLM-powered agents offer greater flexibility, cross-domain reasoning, and natural language interaction. Moreover, with the integration of multi-modal LLMs, current agent systems are highly capable of processing diverse data modalities, including text, images, audio, and structured tabular data, enabling richer and more adaptive real-world behavior. This paper comprehensively examines the evolution of agent systems from the pre-LLM era to current LLM-powered architectures. We categorize agent systems into software-based, physical, and adaptive hybrid systems, highlighting applications across customer service, software development, manufacturing automation, personalized education, financial trading, and healthcare. We further discuss the primary challenges posed by LLM-powered agents, including high inference latency, output uncertainty, lack of evaluation metrics, and security vulnerabilities, and propose potential solutions to mitigate these concerns.

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08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Measurement noise limits the advantage of nonlinear models over linear models in biomedical prediction

Authors:
Marc-Andre Schulz↗Kerstin Ritter↗

arXiv:2606.18420v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On biomedical tabular data, flexible models such as deep networks, gradient-boosted trees, and kernel methods are repeatedly matched or beaten by linear and logistic regression given the same features. The usual reaction is to treat this as a model-side shortfall, to be fixed with more data, a better architecture, or tuning, on the assumption that the nonlinear structure is there and the model has failed to capture it. We argue that these fixes cannot help when the binding limit is the measurement rather than the model, as it frequently is in biomedicine. Additive noise blurs the population-optimal predictor, and because blurring removes a function's fine, rapidly varying detail before its broad shape, it erases nonlinear structure faster than linear structure. A degree-$k$ interaction is attenuated by the $k$-th power of feature reliability, while the linear part is attenuated only once. At the reliabilities typical of biomedical measurement, the nonlinear advantage can vanish even when the underlying biology is strongly nonlinear, and what the noise removes cannot be recovered by a larger cohort or a more flexible model, only by better measurement. The nonlinearity is hidden, not absent, and a tie between linear and flexible models is not by itself a verdict on the biology. These pieces are classical, drawn from measurement-error statistics, psychometrics, and Gaussian analysis, and we assemble them into an exact excess-risk identity. Measurement reliability is one of three conditions, alongside sample size and feature representation, that must align for a flexible model to help, and together they leave only a narrow window that most biomedical tasks fall outside. Across 140 UK Biobank tasks, the gap between flexible and linear models, where it exists, carries the predicted noise signature, and the three conditions can be separated by intervention but not by a benchmark alone.

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09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Average entropy of Bogoliubov-Kubo-Mori random state ensemble

Authors:
Sohail↗Lu Wei↗

arXiv:2606.17960v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Random states play a foundational role in different branches of modern quantum science. In this work, we study a recently proposed random state ensemble induced from von Neumann entropy through the Bogoliubov-Kubo-Mori (BKM) metric. In particular, we derive an exact yet explicit formula of average entanglement entropy over BKM ensemble. In obtaining the formula, we only make use of properties of normalization constant of the ensemble in the absence of its correlation kernel, contrary to average entropy computation of other ensembles. This new framework paves the way for calculating higher-order cumulants of BKM ensemble beyond the average.

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10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

General circuit mapping algorithm for neutral atom quantum computers

Authors:
Neven Gentil↗Lous S. Rianne↗Aida Todri-Sanial↗

arXiv:2606.20503v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neutral atom quantum computers (NAQC) are emerging as a promising, scalable quantum computing platform because of their long qubit coherence, flexible qubit arrangement, and multiqubit gate capabilities. However, circuit execution often requires physically moving qubits, making compilation a critical optimization challenge. We propose a circuit independent mathematical framework built on graph-theoretic combinatorial optimization that determines the minimal number of required qubit transfers. This model captures spatial constraints specific to NAQC platforms with zone-limited gate operations and multi-qubit gates. From this framework, we encode the qubit mapping problem as a nonlinear integer program and solve it using a genetic algorithm, enabling trade-offs between minimizing the total traveled distance and the number of parallel transfer operations. Compared to the state-of-the-art scalable compiler for zoned architectures, our approach consistently finds fewer transfers. Depending on the optimization focus, our method produces shorter traveled distances or fewer parallel transfer operations. This work provides both theoretical guaranties and a practical tool for efficient, architecture-aware quantum circuit compilation. As a result, practitioners can generate hardware-aware mappings that reduce movement-induced errors and better exploit atom transfer parallelism, directly improving execution efficiency on NAQC devices.

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11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

MassSpecGym in the Wild: Uncovering and Correcting Evaluation Pitfalls in AI-Driven Molecule Discovery

Authors:
Hongxuan Liu↗Roman Bushuiev↗Ivy Lightheart↗Mrunali Manjrekar↗Anton Bushuiev↗Magdalena Lederbauer↗Filip Jozefov↗Yinkai Wang↗Soha Hassoun↗Josef Sivic↗James Taylor↗Runzhong Wang↗…

arXiv:2606.19624v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable benchmarking is critical for developing machine learning models for tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) based molecule discovery. Subtle issues in experimental design and model evaluation procedures can degrade the trustworthiness of such benchmarks and lead to erroneous conclusions. We conduct a thorough review of model evaluation issues in the recent MS/MS machine learning literature, using the standard MassSpecGym benchmark suite as a case study to illustrate the impact of these issues. We find evaluation issues in at least 17 of 26 papers reporting MassSpecGym benchmark results in the first year of its adoption. We isolate three classes of failures: (i) data leakage, (ii) shortcut learning, and (iii) implementation bugs and metric divergence. Through extensive experimentation and code replication, we quantify the impact of these issues and show how they corrupt the evaluation standards MassSpecGym was designed to enforce. We distill our findings into recommendations generalizable to MS/MS challenges, benchmarks, and custom evaluation setups. We also release MassSpecGym v1.5, an implementation of our recommendations in the MassSpecGym benchmarking suite which addresses the failure modes identified in this audit. MassSpecGym v1.5 is publicly available at https://github.com/pluskal-lab/MassSpecGym.

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

Generative modelling powered by room-temperature polariton condensates

Authors:
Yuan Wang↗Marcin Muszynski↗Avinash Dash↗Rishabh Kaurav↗Vinod M. Menon↗Oleksandr Kyriienko↗

arXiv:2606.15344v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative modelling requires efficient stochastic nonlinear transformations and physical platforms that can naturally realise them. We experimentally demonstrate that nonlinear optical systems operating in the strong light-matter coupling regime can serve as physical transformation layers for conditional generative modelling. Specifically, we develop a workflow in which room-temperature exciton-polariton condensates formed in organic dye microcavities act as a physical stochastic transform within a generative adversarial network and enable conditional digit-to-image translation. By using the nonlinear many-body dynamics and intrinsic stochasticity of polariton condensates, the workflow outperforms baseline approaches based on digitally injected perturbations. We find that polariton-enabled sampling via generative adversarial network (Polariton GAN) yields improved inception score, digit preservation accuracy and structural similarity compared with both digital sampling and laser-based systems. We further show that spatially correlated output variations can naturally regularise adversarial training and enhance output diversity. Our results establish polariton condensation as a new computational resource for generative modelling, opening a pathway towards physics-enhanced machine learning systems.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Bridging Information Asymmetry: A Hierarchical Framework for Blind Face Restoration with Reduced Uncertainty

Authors:
Zhengjian Yao↗Jiakui Hu↗Kaiwen Li↗Hangzhou He↗Xinliang Zhang↗Shuang Zeng↗Lei Zhu↗Yanye Lu↗

Blind face restoration remains a persistent challenge due to the inherent ill-posedness of reconstructing holistic structures from severely constrained observations. Current generative paradigms, while capable of synthesizing realistic facial details, remain limited by the under-constrained nature of blind restoration, where severely degraded inputs can be mapped to plausible yet identity-inconsistent outputs. To address this issue, we present Pref-Restore, a hierarchical framework for BFR with reduced restoration uncertainty. Our design is organized around three complementary principles: (1) Semantic Information Augmentation, where an auto-regressive semantic branch converts image and text cues into structured tokens that provide a stable high-level anchor; (2) Texture-level Fidelity Alignment, where the diffusion generator is trained under this anchor to recover identity-relevant details; and (3) Fidelity-constrained Preference Optimization, where a face-aware reward refines the diffusion trajectory while controlling the quality–fidelity trade-off. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks show that Pref-Restore achieves state-of-the-art performance, with stronger identity-sensitive fidelity and lower restoration uncertainty across repeated sampling. Systematic ablations further attribute these gains to the proposed hierarchical design, showing the necessity of staged training, the robustness and quality dependence of the text pathway, and the benefit of fidelity-constrained preference optimization.

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14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Decomposing Prediction Mechanisms for In-Context Recall

Authors:
Sultan Daniels↗Dylan Davis↗Dhruv Gautam↗Wentinn Liao↗Gireeja Ranade↗Anant Sahai↗

arXiv:2507.01414v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a new family of toy problems that combine features of linear-regression-style continuous in-context learning (ICL) with discrete associative recall. We pretrain transformer models on sample traces from this toy, specifically symbolically-labeled interleaved state observations from randomly drawn linear deterministic dynamical systems. We study if the transformer models can recall the state of a sequence previously seen in its context when prompted to do so with the corresponding in-context label. Taking a closer look at this task, it becomes clear that the model must perform two functions: (1) identify which system's state should be recalled and apply that system to its last seen state, and (2) continuing to apply the correct system to predict the subsequent states. Training dynamics reveal that the first capability emerges well into a model's training. Surprisingly, the second capability, of continuing the prediction of a resumed sequence, develops much earlier. Via out-of-distribution experiments, and a mechanistic analysis on model weights via edge pruning, we find that next-token prediction for this toy problem involves at least two separate mechanisms. One mechanism uses the discrete symbolic labels to do the associative recall required to predict the start of a resumption of a previously seen sequence. The second mechanism, which is largely agnostic to the discrete symbolic labels, performs a "Bayesian-style" prediction based on the previous token and the context. These two mechanisms have different learning dynamics. To confirm that this multi-mechanism (manifesting as separate phase transitions) phenomenon is not just an artifact of our toy setting, we used OLMo training checkpoints on an ICL translation task to see a similar phenomenon: a decisive gap in the emergence of first-task-token performance vs second-task-token performance.

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15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantum Energy Teleportation under Equilibrium and Nonequilibrium Environments

Authors:
Xiaokun Yan↗Kun Zhang↗Jin Wang↗

arXiv:2511.01518v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum energy teleportation (QET), implemented via local operations and classical communication, enables carrier-free energy transfer by exploiting quantum resources. While QET has been extensively studied theoretically and validated experimentally in various quantum platforms, enhancing energy output for mixed initial states, as the system inevitably interacts with environments, remains a significant challenge. In this work, we study QET performance in a two-qubit system coupled to equilibrium or nonequilibrium reservoirs. We derive an analytical expression for the energy output in terms of the system Hamiltonian eigenstates, enabling analysis of energy output for mixed states. Using the Redfield master equation, we systematically examine the effects of qubit detuning, nonequilibrium temperature difference, and nonequilibrium chemical potential difference on the energy output. We find that the energy output for mixed states often follows that of the eigenstate with the highest population, and that nonequilibrium environments can enhance the energy output in certain parameter regimes.

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

VideoMDM: Towards 3D Human Motion Generation From 2D Supervision

Authors:
Amir Mann↗Gal Michael Harari↗Merav Keidar↗Or Litany↗

We introduce VideoMDM, a diffusion-based framework that trains 3D human motion priors directly from accurate 2D poses extracted from monocular videos, without any 3D ground truth. A pretrained 2D-to-3D lifter provides approximate 3D pose sequences that serve as a noisy teacher: these are diffused, denoised by the model in 3D, and supervised in 2D by reprojecting the prediction and comparing against accurate keypoints. We show that, under mild assumptions, a depth-weighted 2D reprojection loss is equivalent in expectation to direct 3D supervision, and we adapt standard 3D motion regularizers - velocity consistency and over-parameterized representation alignment - to this 2D setting. Unlike methods that lift 2D to 3D only at inference, VideoMDM learns a coherent 3D motion manifold during training. On HumanML3D it nearly closes the gap to fully 3D-supervised MDM (FID 0.88 vs 0.54); On real video datasets Fit3D and NBA the method learns to generate motions consistently preferred by humans, with strong quantitative results.

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17.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-13

Testing the reliability of AI-generated protein structures

Authors:
Xu↗Salzberg↗

Although AlphaFold2 and its competitors have demonstrated remarkable abilities to predict protein structure, more work is needed to explore the limitations of these methods. Here we investigated the reliability of AlphaFold2 and ColabFold by creating a set of realistic but false protein sequences, using ColabFold to predict their structure, and then asking how often the program produces a high-scoring structure for a sequence that does not represent a protein. We determined that AlphaFold2 has a very small but non-zero false positive rate, estimated here at approximately 1 in 435 if one uses a threshold pLDDT score of 70 to define positive predictions. We also discovered, serendipitously, that some high-scoring sequences in the human genome were not false positives, but instead were previously unknown and un-annotated pseudogenes. These latter findings indicate that some well-established human annotations of protein-coding genes may have incorrectly extended the 5-prime untranslated regions too far. They also suggest that the false positive rate of AlphaFold2 is low enough that almost any high-scoring structure, even in a noncoding region, is worthy of further investigation.

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18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

From Drift to Coherence: Stabilizing Beliefs in LLMs

Authors:
SongEun Kim↗Seungyoo Lee↗Edwin Fong↗Hyungi Lee↗Juho Lee↗

arXiv:2606.17832v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are often hypothesized to perform implicit Bayesian inference, yet a key coherence condition, the martingale property of predictive beliefs, has been shown to fail in controlled synthetic in-context learning settings. We revisit this question in a more typical usage regime: generic multiple-choice question answering. Exploiting the discrete answer space, we compute exact predictive distributions and study belief dynamics induced by autoregressive answer resampling. We introduce prompted predictive resampling (PPR), where an LLM generates a sequence of answers to the same question. Empirically, PPR reveals early-stage belief drift, indicating martingale violations. However, after sufficient resampling steps, the belief process self-stabilizes and converges to a coherent predictive distribution. Based on this observation, we further propose (i) a seed-answer prompting strategy to accelerate stabilization, and (ii) a self-consistency loss that amortizes early-stage drift into the model via fine-tuning. Experiments on multiple-choice QA benchmarks show that our methods substantially reduce belief drift and improve predictive coherence without sacrificing accuracy.

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

Escaping the Cognitive Well: Efficient Competition Math with Off-the-Shelf Models

Authors:
Xingyu Dang↗Rohit Agarwal↗Rodrigo Porto↗Anirudh Goyal↗Liam H Fowl↗Sanjeev Arora↗

arXiv:2602.16793v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In the past year, custom and unreleased math reasoning models reached gold medal performance on the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO). Similar performance was then reported using large-scale inference on publicly available models but at prohibitive costs (e.g., 3000 USD per problem). In this work, we present an inference pipeline that attains best-in-class performance on IMO-style math problems at an average inference cost orders of magnitude below competing methods while using only general-purpose off-the-shelf models. Our method relies on insights about grader failure in solver-grader pipelines, which we call the Cognitive Well (iterative refinement converging to a wrong solution that the solver as well as the pipeline's internal grader consider to be basically correct). Our pipeline addresses these failure modes through conjecture extraction, wherein candidate lemmas are isolated from generated solutions and independently verified alongside their negations in a fresh environment (context detachment). On IMO-ProofBench Advanced (PB-Adv), our pipeline achieves 67.1 percent performance using Gemini 3.0 Pro with an average cost per question of approximately 31 USD. At the time of evaluation, this represented the state-of-the-art on PB-Adv among both public and unreleased models, and more than doubles the success rate of the next best publicly accessible pipeline, all at a fraction of the cost.

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20.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-10

A mean-field model of neural networks with PV and SOM interneurons reveals connectivity-based mechanisms of gamma oscillations

Authors:
Farzin Tahvili↗

by Farzin Tahvili, Martin Vinck, Matteo Di Volo Classic theoretical models of cortical oscillations are based on the interactions between two populations of excitatory and inhibitory neurons. Nevertheless, experimental studies and network simulations suggest that interneuron subclasses such as parvalbumin (PV) and somatostatin (SOM) exert distinct control over oscillatory dynamics. Yet, we lack a theoretical understanding of the mechanisms underlying oscillations in E-PV-SOM circuits and of the differences with respect to the classical mechanisms for oscillations in simpler E–I networks. Here, we derive a biologically realistic mean-field model of a canonical three-population E-PV-SOM circuit. This model robustly generates oscillations whose features are consistent with experimental observations, including the relative timing of PV and SOM activity and the effects of optogenetic perturbations. By reducing the model to a linear analytical form, we demonstrate that gamma oscillations emerge directly from the cell-specific connectivity of the three-population circuit. This connectivity motif alone accounts for experimentally observed phase relationships, with PV activity consistently leading that of SOM neurons. Together, this mean field model identifies a distinct structural mechanism giving rise to oscillations in canonical E–PV–SOM circuits and provides theoretical primitives for constructing large-scale, cell-type-specific models of cortical dynamics.

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21.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

Structural Analysis of Prostate Cancer N-Glycans Using Graph-Based Structural Metrics

Authors:
Kalyanthaya↗Gallegos↗Chow↗Pavletic↗Diaz Fernandez↗A. B↗Kilcoyne↗Joshi↗Nguyen↗D. H↗

The N-linked glycans are structurally complex carbohydrate modifications that regulate protein folding, immune recognition, and cellular signaling, and their expression is extensively remodeled during cancer progression, making them promising biomarkers. In this study, prostate cancer-associated N-glycans from a range of relevant peer-reviewed studies were curated and digitized to develop a versatile computational framework that quantitatively encodes their spatial complexity across diverse biological systems. We invented two indices – the Distance & Connectivity Index (DCI) and the Position & Composition Index (PCI) – to capture the spatial information in N-glycans as layered architectures, enabling calculation of residue-level path lengths, branching structure, and compositional diversity. DCI summarizes glycan structure as both a scalar and matrix representation, while PCI does the same but also captures monosaccharide diversity, linkage heterogeneity, and cross-layer branching features. These metrics were computed with GlycoAssessor, an open-source platform that extracts information for the DCI and PCI from glycans drawn via Symbol Nomenclature for Glycans (SNFG) notation. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was applied to evaluate whether glycans from prostate cancer tissues cluster distinctly in a disease-relevant manner. Results show that the spatial information in N-glycans: (1) increased in a multi-dimensional, non-linear manner, (2) objectively segregated structural themes, (3) could function as a potential prostate cancer biomarker that is distinct from mass-to-charge ratio and relative abundance, and (4) could objectively quantify novel subtype classifications of glycans associated with disease states and progression.

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22.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-15

Fung-AI: An AI/ML-driven pipeline for antifungal peptide discovery

Authors:
Daniel S. Berman↗

by Daniel S. Berman, Libby M. Lewis, Tom D. Curtis, Olivia N. Tiburzi, Daniel F. Q. Smith, Arturo Casadevall, Laura J. Dunphy Emerging fungal pathogens represent a concerning threat to both global health and food security. In this study, we aimed to address our rising vulnerability to fungal pathogens through the development of the Fung-AI pipeline: an AI/ML-driven approach for antifungal discovery. A generative adversarial network (GAN) was trained to generate novel candidate antifungal peptide sequences. Next, in silico antifungal and hemolytic classifiers were built to further prioritize AI-generated peptides for experimental validation. From a pool of ~10,000 candidates, thirteen peptides were selected for testing over two-stages of experimentation. Five peptides were found to display mild antifungal activity against the wheat pathogen, Fusarium graminearum, with minimal inhibitory concentrations (MICs) ranging from 250 µg/mL to 500 µg/mL. Four of the five peptides also showed activity against the human pathogen, Candida albicans (MIC: 500 µg/mL). Two of our AI-generated antifungal peptides additionally demonstrated low cytotoxicity in HepG2 human liver carcinoma cells (LC50 > 704.2 µg/mL) indicating that they may be useful as scaffolds for future optimization for therapeutic applications. None of our peptides were found to considerably inhibit the emerging pathogen C. auris, suggesting the need for pathogen-specific down-selection of candidate peptides. Overall, we present a proof-of-principle, generative-AI-based approach for the rapid design of de novo antifungal peptides.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

SegTME-UNI2: A Foundation Model-Based Framework for Generalisable Multiclass Cell Segmentation and LLM-Driven Tumour Microenvironment Characterisation in Histopathology

Authors:
Wan Siti Halimatul Munirah Wan Ahmad↗Faris Syahmi Samidi↗Mohammad Badal Ahmmed↗Vimal Angela Thiviyanathan↗Selvam James Thavaraj↗Anwar P. P. Abdul Majeed↗

Characterising the tumour microenvironment (TME) from routine H&E-stained histology images requires simultaneous cell segmentation, feature extraction, and interpretable clinical reporting. We present SEGTME-UNI2, a unified framework addressing these requirements. Its core is UNI2-UPERHOVER, a dual-head segmentation model pairing the UNI2-H pathology foundation model (ViT-Giant, pretrained on >100M tiles from 100K slides) with two parallel UperNet decoders: one for six-class semantic segmentation and one for horizontal-vertical gradient regression enabling watershed-based nuclear instance separation. To address the lack of pixel-level annotations in large real-world repositories, UNI2-UPERHOVER undergoes a three-stage progressive pseudo-label curriculum. Each stage trains a fresh model without weight transfer, driving improvement entirely via increased pseudo-label quality: Stage 1: Uses human-annotated PanNuke (7,901 images, 189,744 nuclei, 0.25 um/pixel). Stage 2: Uses entropy-filtered pseudo-labels from the Stage 1 model on 271,711 TCGA-UT scale-0 patches (0.5 um/pixel). Stage 3: Uses pseudo-labels from the Stage 2 model on all 1,608,060 TCGA-UT patches across six resolution scales (0.5-1.0 um/pixel). Segmentation outputs feed a structured TME feature extraction pipeline computing 20+ per-patch compositional, morphological, spatial entropy, and intercellular distance metrics. These are encoded as JSON and passed to a fine-tuned NVIDIA BioNeMo GPT model to generate clinically interpretable TME narratives. Preliminary validation on held-out PanNuke and TCGA-UT partitions demonstrates framework feasibility and internal consistency. The pseudo-labelled TCGA-UT dataset and UNI2-UPERHOVER checkpoint are publicly released to support large-scale TME profiling and spatial biology research.

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24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Self-Evolving Visual Questioner

Authors:
Yijun Liang↗Hengguang Zhou↗Ming Li↗Lichen Li↗Cho-Jui Hsieh↗Tianyi Zhou↗

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.

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

JE-IRT: A Geometric Lens on LLM Abilities through Joint Embedding Item Response Theory

Authors:
Louie Hong Yao↗Nicholas Jarvis↗Tiffany Zhan↗Saptarshi Ghosh↗Linfeng Liu↗Tianyu Jiang↗

Standard LLM evaluation practices compress diverse abilities into single scores, obscuring their inherently multidimensional nature. We present JE-IRT, a geometric item-response framework that embeds both LLMs and questions in a shared space. For question embeddings, the direction encodes semantics and the norm encodes difficulty, while correctness on each question is determined by the geometric interaction between the model and question embeddings. This geometry replaces a global ranking of LLMs with topical specialization and enables smooth variation across related questions. Building on this framework, our experimental results reveal that out-of-distribution behavior can be explained through directional alignment, and that larger norms consistently indicate harder questions. Moreover, JE-IRT naturally supports generalization: once the space is learned, new LLMs are added by fitting a single embedding. The learned space further reveals an LLM-internal taxonomy that only partially aligns with human-defined subject categories. We also show that simple linear probes of the embedding space recover cross-subject ability directions, such as an arithmetic axis that highlights quantitatively demanding questions in seemingly distant subjects like virology and global facts. JE-IRT thus establishes a unified and interpretable geometric lens that connects LLM abilities with the structure of questions, offering a distinctive perspective on model evaluation and generalization.

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