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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Pulmonary extracellular vesicles drive alveolar macrophage dysfunction via microRNA transfer in Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome

Background: Alveolar macrophage (AM) dysfunction contributes to Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) pathogenesis. We investigated the role of extracellular vesicles (EVs) in mediating this dysfunction. Methods: Pulmonary EVs were isolated from broncho-alveolar lavage and non-directed bronchial lavage samples of ventilated sepsis patients with and without ARDS, and post-operative control patients via ultracentrifugation. AMs were isolated from lung tissue resections of lobectomy patients. AMs were treated with pooled EVs for 24 hours prior to functional, metabolic and autophagy profiling. EV cargo was profiled via small RNA transcriptomics and proteomics. Mechanistic role of EV microRNAs was assessed via mimic / antagomir transfection. Results: Pulmonary EVs from sepsis patients with ARDS impaired AM efferocytosis, and control EVs had no effect. ARDS EV treatment enhanced AM mitochondrial-linked respiration, but not glycolysis. ARDS EV treatment impaired LC3B-II and LAMP1 expression, indicating dysregulated AM autophagy-lysosomal machinery. Proteomics revealed downregulation of innate immune pathways in ARDS EVs. Transcriptomics revealed enrichment of 24 microRNAs in ARDS EVs; miR-652-3p was the most enriched, validated by RT-qPCR. EV miR-652-3p was associated with 90-day mortality (9.20 vs 0.59 RQ, p=0.0295) and inversely correlated with oxygenation (PaO2/FiO2). AM transfection with miR-652-3p mimic induced similar dysregulation of function and autophagy as ARDS EVs. Transfection of ARDS EVs with antagomirs to miR-652-3p prior to AM treatment partially rescued efferocytosis and autophagy. Conclusions: Targeting EV miR-652-3p may restore alveolar macrophage function and reduce excessive inflammation, thus offering a novel therapeutic strategy for patients with ARDS.

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

EIBench: A Simulator-Based Benchmark and Turn-Credit RL for Emotion Management

Emotional intelligence (EI) in Large Language Models (LLMs) is often evaluated through static understanding tasks or single-response dialogue generation. However, emotion management is interactive: a good model should not only recognize a user's emotion, but also improve the user's emotional and relational state over several turns. We introduce EIBench, a simulator-based benchmark for interactive emotion management. EIBench contains 2,222 scenarios, with 2,009 for training and 213 for held-out testing. The scenarios are organized by a 2x2 taxonomy covering Support, Defense, Repair, and Charm, which together capture different forms of support, boundary maintenance, trust repair, and rapport building. In each scenario, an LLM simulator plays the user, updates an emotion-relation state after each turn, and maps the final state to an anchor-based score. This design makes EIBench both an evaluation benchmark and a training environment: the final state gives the outcome reward, while the per-turn state updates provide dense feedback for RL. We evaluate 15 open- and closed-source LLMs. Current models perform well on support and rapport-building scenes, but struggle with boundary maintenance under user pressure. To improve the EI ability of LLMs, we propose Centered Turn-Credit GRPO (CTC-GRPO), a GRPO extension that reuses the simulator's per-turn state updates as dense turn-level feedback while preserving the final outcome reward. CTC-GRPO improves Qwen3-8B from -22.4 to +22.4 on EIBench and also improves on out-of-distribution evaluations including SAGE (+12.4) and EQBench3 (+20.9%). Our results show that simulator-tracked user states can support both evaluation and training for multi-turn emotion management.

03.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Phylogenetic tree inference using generative models

Accurate inference of phylogenetic trees is fundamental to evolutionary biology, yet existing methods rely on complex pipelines involving multiple sequence alignment, explicit evolutionary models, and computationally intensive tree search procedures. Here, we present BetaInfer, a generative framework that reformulates phylogenetic tree inference as a sequence transduction problem. BetaInfer leverages hybrid transformer-based architectures to directly map sets of unaligned sequences to phylogenetic trees represented in Newick format. Trained on large-scale simulated evolutionary data with known ground truth, BetaInfer learns to capture complex evolutionary signals directly from sequence data. Ensemble-based generation of multiple candidate trees further improves robustness, reducing reconstruction error by over 30% relative to single predictions. Across extensive evaluations on both simulated and empirical datasets, BetaInfer achieves competitive performance relative to state-of-the-art phylogenetic pipelines, matching, and in some cases exceeding, the accuracy of established likelihood-based and distance-based methods under a wide range of conditions. Interpretability analyses reveal that BetaInfer leverages internal pairwise-distance computations to synthesize evolutionary relationships into an integrated, global representation that supports direct tree generation. Together, these results demonstrate that generative models can serve as a viable and scalable alternative to standard phylogenetic pipelines.

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

Kernel of Partition Paths: A Unified Representation for Tree Ensembles

arXiv:2606.18853v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A recent line of work has reframed individual decision trees as linear models on engineered features associated with their splits, opening routes for oracle inequalities and feature-importance reinterpretation, but leaving open the question of what unified geometric object a forest induces when one indexes its feature map by nodes rather than by splits. The present paper studies that object. KPP indexes the feature map by the nodes of the forest, weighted by a path metric that turns each coordinate into a component of a squared-Euclidean path-isometric embedding. KPP unifies four pillars under a single non-diagonal Gram that carries a metric: prediction, exact additive attribution, deterministic Lipschitz robust radius in the KPP metric, and uniform Rademacher risk bounds for regression and classification under fixed, honest, or cross-fit conditioning. All probabilistic guarantees are conditional on the representation and are stated under three explicit conditioning regimes; the robust-radius guarantee is deterministic in the KPP metric rather than in a norm on the raw input. Conjectured fast-rate refinements for both regression and classification are stated as open problems and are not claimed as theorems.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

PEARL: Self-Evolving Assistant for Time Management with Reinforcement Learning

Overlapping calendar invitations force busy professionals to repeatedly decide which meetings to attend, reschedule, or decline. We refer to this preference-driven decision process as calendar conflict resolution. Automating this decision process is crucial yet challenging. Scheduling logistics can drain hours, and human delegation often fails at scale, which motivates us to ask: Can we trust large language models (LLMs) or language agents to manage time? To enable a systematic study of this question, we introduce CalConflictBench, a benchmark for long-horizon calendar conflict resolution. In CalConflictBench, conflicts are presented to agents round-by-round over a calendar year, requiring them to infer and adapt to user preferences progressively. Our experiments show that current LLM agents perform poorly with high error rates, e.g., Qwen-3-30B-Think has an average error rate of 35%. To address this gap, we propose PEARL, a reinforcement-learning framework that (i) augments the language agent with an external preference memory that stores and updates inferred strategies (e.g., attendee priorities, topic importance, time/location preferences), and (ii) optimizes the agent with round-wise rewards that directly supervise decision correctness, ranking quality, and memory usage across rounds. Experiments on CalConflictBench show that PEARL achieves an error reduction rate of 0.76 and a 55% improvement in average error rate compared to the strongest baseline.

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

UniRED: Unified RGB-D Video Frame Interpolation with Event Guidance

High frame-rate RGB-D videos are crucial for a variety of downstream tasks, including motion analysis, dynamic scene understanding, and 3D reconstruction. However, due to hardware and sensing constraints, practical RGB-D cameras are typically limited to low frame rates, making it difficult to capture rapid scene dynamics. Existing video interpolation methods have achieved strong performance on RGB data, but they are not readily applicable to RGB-D scenarios, where they often yield blurry boundaries, visible artifacts, and degraded geometric consistency. Furthermore, motion estimation from only two boundary frames is inherently under-constrained in complex dynamic scenes. Event cameras, by contrast, provide asynchronous measurements with ultra-high temporal resolution, offering dense motion cues. In this paper, we propose a unified multimodal framework for RGB-D video interpolation that jointly exploits RGB appearance, depth geometry, and event-based temporal cues. Specifically, it first extracts and fuses RGB, depth and event cues, then estimates bidirectional flow with motion basis refinement for RGB and Z-axial refinement for depth, and finally synthesizes the target RGB-D frame via bidirectional warping and soft blending. In addition, we construct a new RGB-D-Event dataset to alleviate the scarcity of tri-modal training data. Extensive experiments on a public benchmark and the proposed dataset demonstrate that our method achieves superior photometric fidelity for RGB interpolation and stronger geometric accuracy for depth interpolation than existing approaches.

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

Benchmarking LLM Agents on Meta-Analysis Articles from Nature Portfolio

Meta-analysis is a demanding form of evidence synthesis that combines literature retrieval, PI/ECO-guided study selection, and statistical aggregation. Its structured, verifiable workflow makes it an ideal substrate for evaluating systematic scientific reasoning, yet existing benchmarks lack ground truth across the full retrieval-screening-synthesis pipeline. We introduce MetaSyn, a dataset of 442 expert-curated meta-analyses from Nature Portfolio journals. Each entry pairs a research question with PI/ECO criteria, a retrieval corpus of 140k PubMed articles, verified positive studies, hard negatives that are topically similar but PI/ECO-ineligible, and complete search strategies and date bounds. Benchmarking twelve pipeline configurations (nine RAG variants and a protocol-driven agent) reveals a critical screening bottleneck: despite a retrieval ceiling of 90.9% recall at K=200, no system recovers more than 52.7% of ground-truth included literature. Current LLMs fail to reliably separate eligible studies from PI/ECO-failing distractors in pools of comparable topical relevance. Stage-attributed metrics capture where systems succeed and fail; a single end-to-end score does not.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

SIMMER: Benchmarking Latent Failures in LLM Executable Planning with a World Model

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as planners for autonomous agents in household environments. While existing benchmarks evaluate whether LLM-generated plans execute successfully, they overlook a critical type of failure: latent failures. Unlike immediate failures that trigger instant feedback at execution time and enable timely correction, latent failures do not immediately halt plan execution but silently compromise goal achievement. In severe cases, they cause irreversible harm. To address this gap, we introduce SIMMER, a benchmark for evaluating latent failures in LLM planning through a human-curated symbolic world model grounded in the kitchen domain. SIMMER defines a world model comprising 77 actions, 262 unique objects, and approximately 46,800 possible interactions that are semantically realistic, derived from real-world cooking scripts. It then leverages a state machine executor that validates plans against the world model and detects immediate precondition violations, latent hazards, and irreversible failures. Experiments across six LLMs show that even frontier models achieve at most 17% error-free plans. Moreover, up to 56% of plans contain latent failures, the majority of which lead to irreversible consequences. We further demonstrate that explicit state reasoning via counterfactual foresight simulation can reduce latent failures by up to 72% and irreversible cases by up to 75%, suggesting a promising direction for more robust LLM planners.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

When LLMs Analyze Scars: From Images to Clinically-Meaningful Features

Medical image classification faces a fundamental dilemma: while deep learning models achieve remarkable performance at scale, real-world clinical scenarios often suffer from severe data scarcity due to annotation costs, privacy constraints, and disease rarity. This challenge is particularly pronounced in pathological scar classification, where differentiating keloids from hypertrophic scars requires subtle expert knowledge and labeled images are extremely limited. We propose a novel paradigm that repositions large language models (LLMs) as knowledge-driven feature engineers rather than end-to-end classifiers. We call this framework ScaFE (Scar Feature Engineering). Our key insight is that LLMs encode rich medical knowledge that can be externalized as executable feature extraction code, enabling the transformation of high-dimensional images into low-dimensional, clinically interpretable representations. Specifically, we prompt an LLM with established scar assessment criteria to generate deterministic Python code that extracts features aligned with clinical scoring systems such as the Vancouver Scar Scale. Our approach offers three key advantages: (1) data efficiency, achieving robust performance with limited training samples by decoupling knowledge acquisition from statistical learning; (2) privacy preservation, as raw images are processed locally without exposure to external LLMs; and (3) interpretability, through explicit features grounded in clinical reasoning. Extensive experiments on scar classification demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms end-to-end deep learning baselines or using LLMs as black-box classifiers under limited data conditions, establishing a promising direction for integrating LLMs into data-efficient and clinically transparent medical AI systems.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Holographic Complexity, Extremality, and Cosmic Censorship

arXiv:2604.20170v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a holographic complexity origin for the third law of black-hole mechanics and weak cosmic censorship. In both complexity equals action and complexity equals volume prescriptions, the relative complexity between subextremal and extremal AdS black holes diverges logarithmically. For overcharged RN-AdS, explicit calculations in both prescriptions show that the near-singularity action terms are power-law divergent or finite, while the maximal-volume contribution is finite. Thus, the extremal-to-naked relative complexity also diverges, obstructing finite-time transitions.

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

SCR-Guided Difficulty-Aware Optimization for Infrared Small Target Detection

Infrared small target detection remains challenging due to severe background clutter, low contrast, and weak spatial responses where geometric overlap alone is insufficient to characterize detection quality. In this work, we propose REEM (Reweighted Explicit-visibility Enhanced Modulation), a lightweight SCR-guided difficulty-aware optimization framework that incorporates Signal-to-Clutter Ratio (SCR) as a physically meaningful visibility prior during training. Instead of modifying the network architecture or directly optimizing SCR, REEM computes a ground-truth local SCR from the input image and applies a differentiable modulation to the soft-IoU learning signal, emphasizing low-visibility targets while preserving stable optimization and identical inference behavior. REEM is integrated into a U-Net-based MSHNet without introducing additional parameters, architectural modifications, or inference-time overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate consistent improvements over the baseline, achieving higher IoU and detection probability (Pd) together with substantially reduced false alarms (FA), particularly under challenging low-visibility conditions. These results suggest that SCR-guided difficulty-aware optimization provides an effective and physically grounded complement to conventional overlap-based objectives for infrared small target detection. The code is available at https://github. com/yall-in-one/Reemm.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

What's Missing in Vision-Language Models? Probing Their Struggles with Causal Order Reasoning

Despite the impressive performance of vision-language models (VLMs) on downstream tasks, their ability to understand and reason about causal relationships in visual inputs remains unclear. Robust causal reasoning is fundamental to solving complex high-level reasoning tasks, yet existing benchmarks often include a mixture of reasoning questions, and VLMs can frequently exploit object recognition and activity identification as shortcuts to arrive at the correct answers, making it challenging to truly assess their causal reasoning abilities. To bridge this gap, we introduce VQA-Causal and VCR-Causal, two new benchmarks specifically designed to isolate and rigorously evaluate VLMs' causal reasoning abilities. Our findings reveal that while VLMs excel in object and activity recognition, they perform poorly on causal reasoning tasks, often only marginally surpassing random guessing. Further analysis suggests that this limitation stems from a severe lack of causal expressions in widely used training datasets, where causal relationships are rarely explicitly conveyed. We additionally explore fine-tuning strategies with hard negative cases, showing that targeted fine-tuning can improve model's causal reasoning while maintaining generalization and downstream performance. Our study highlights a key gap in current VLMs and lays the groundwork for future work on causal understanding.

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

MatchLM2Lite: A Scalable MLLM-to-Lite Framework for Reproduced Content Identification

Content moderation is critical for online video platforms to ensure content safety, protect creators, and sustain positive user experiences. Beyond filtering harmful content, platforms must guarantee content authenticity at scale so that users are exposed to diverse, original videos rather than low-value reproductions. We present MatchLM2Lite, a real-time, production-grade reproduced content identification (RCI) system that leverages the powerful understanding of a multimodal large language model (MLLM) distilled into a small and fast-inference model. Our system jointly models video, audio, and text signals, operating on pairs of videos to produce fine-grained reproduction scores. The system comprises two modules, MatchLM and MatchLite, and a two-stage training recipe. First, our high-capacity MLLM, MatchLM, serves as a teacher model to define the upper bound of RCI performance. Its capabilities are then distilled into a compact student model, MatchLite. This design allows MatchLite to deliver low-latency, high-throughput inference on video pairs while preserving much of MatchLM's accuracy, making it suitable for integration into real-time recommendation systems. MatchLM achieves an F1-score improvement of +8.57 compared to our previous production model. After knowledge distillation, MatchLite retains a +6.55 gain in F1-score while reducing computational cost by 35x. Deployed at scale, MatchLM2Lite enables efficient, pairwise multimodal RCI, stably serving online traffic at high queries per second (QPS) with an end-to-end latency below 30 seconds. This system has reduced the reproduced video view rate on our platform by 2.5% without degrading user engagement, demonstrating its effectiveness in a large-scale production environment.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Reliable Error Estimation for PINNs: Lower and Upper A Posteriori Bounds

arXiv:2606.12050v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) combine machine learning with physical laws to solve differential equations. While existing results provide rigorous a posteriori upper bounds for PINN prediction errors, complete certification also requires complementary lower information in order to obtain computable two-sided error enclosures. In this paper, we derive computable a posteriori lower bounds for PINN errors in ordinary differential equations on suitable certified state-space domains under a localized strong monotonicity condition. We combine these estimates with complementary localized upper bounds under a one-sided Lipschitz condition, which is weaker than the global Lipschitz assumption used in previous work and can yield sharper upper error bands. The resulting bounds depend only on the neural-network approximation, the ODE residual, and local monotonicity and growth constants, and therefore do not require access to the exact solution. For linear time-invariant and time-varying systems, we further derive explicit formulas in terms of the minimal and maximal eigenvalues of the symmetric part of the system matrix. We also discuss the distinction between soft and hard enforcement of initial conditions in PINNs and explain why exact enforcement can make the scalar lower certificate uninformative. To recover nontrivial lower information in the linear setting, we use a signed-residual finite-probe certificate based on coordinate unit vectors. We also formulate a certificate-informed training strategy in which the propagated upper certificate is used as an auxiliary regularizer, while lower certificates remain post-training diagnostics. Altogether, the proposed framework provides rigorous and practically computable error certificates for PINN approximations of ODEs, while making explicit the domains and model classes for which the assumptions can be verified.

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

Selective Rotary Position Embedding

Position information is essential for language modeling. In softmax transformers, Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE) encode positions through fixed-angle rotations, while in linear transformers, order is handled via input-dependent (selective) gating that decays past key-value associations. Selectivity has generally been shown to improve language-related tasks. Inspired by this, we introduce Selective RoPE, an input-dependent rotary embedding mechanism, that generalizes RoPE, and enables rotation in arbitrary angles for both linear and softmax transformers. We show that softmax attention already performs a hidden form of these rotations on query-key pairs, uncovering an implicit positional structure. We further show that in state-space models and gated linear transformers, the real part manages forgetting while the imaginary part encodes positions through rotations. We validate our method by equipping gated transformers with Selective RoPE, demonstrating that its input-dependent rotations improve performance in language modeling and on difficult sequence tasks like copying, state tracking, and retrieval.

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

LentiAvatar: Pseudo-Multiview Reconstruction and Subpixel Prism Rendering for Real-Time Stereoscopic Communication

Real-time stereoscopic video communication has long been a goal of immersive telepresence, yet practical systems still require specialized capture rigs or reduce remote users to a single portrait view. We present LentiAvatar, a Gaussian head-avatar system that connects monocular avatar capture with subpixel-encoded glasses-free lenticular display for real-time autostereoscopic communication. From a monocular portrait video, LentiAvatar reconstructs a controllable head avatar and optimizes it for the lateral viewing zones induced by the display. The method uses natural head turns as pseudo-multiview (PMV) supervision to constrain regions that are otherwise weakly observed in monocular training, including hair, ears, jaw contours, and neck boundaries. Reliable side frames are yaw-binned, aligned to virtual cameras, and supervised within a strict head-and-hair domain; contour-aware losses and staged regularization further suppress ghosting, alpha leakage, and depth instability while preserving lateral detail. At runtime, LentiAvatar renders 32 virtual views and encodes them into a 4K lenticular raster with calibrated subpixel-routing masks. The live-tracker prototype sustains 10.65 FPS, and a subject-specific distilled driver raises the same display pipeline to 38.49 FPS.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Battery-Explicit Thermodynamic Witnesses of Bell Post-Quantumness

arXiv:2605.09149v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a battery-explicit thermodynamic witness of post-quantum Bell correlations. In each round, a single supplied excitation is routed into an explicit two-level battery if and only if a Bell-game condition is satisfied. The routing operation is implemented by an energy-preserving controlled SWAP, with all logical control registers taken to be degenerate. Thus the correlation resource does not create energy; it only determines the probability that the supplied excitation reaches the battery. The construction is first formulated for finite two-player XOR games. For any such game, the mean battery charge is exactly the game success probability multiplied by the battery gap. Optimizing over local, quantum, or nonsignalling behaviours therefore turns the corresponding game values into local, quantum, or nonsignalling thermodynamic ceilings. For the CHSH game, Tsirelson's bound becomes a strict quantum ceiling on the mean battery charge, while a PR-box behaviour reaches the single-excitation cap. The witness is trusted-module rather than device-independent: it assumes calibrated Hamiltonians, correct classical wiring, and a trusted energy-preserving battery module. We also discuss a reversible-controller implementation, finite-statistics certification from work data, robustness to imperfect battery readout, and cyclic bookkeeping showing that no positive net work is obtained once fuel restoration and memory erasure are included.

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

Robust State-Conditional Feature-Weighted Jump Models for Temporal Clustering

arXiv:2606.13146v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a robust feature-weighted jump model for time-dependent clustering. A penalty is used to encourage smoothness of transitions over time, while robustness is achieved through the use of a Tukey's biweight loss function. An additional parameter controls the variability of feature weights across states, allowing the model to assign state-specific relevance to each feature. We illustrate in simulation how the method accurately recovers the true cluster sequence and reliably identifies relevant features, outperforming competing approaches, particularly in the presence of outliers. We conclude with two empirical applications, one on the number of conflict-related homicides in Kosovo in the period 1998-2000, and another on macroeconomic performance of twelve European countries in the period 1949-2024.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Veriphi: Attack-Guided Neural Network Verification with Dataset-Dependent Training Methods

arXiv:2606.18454v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present Veriphi, a GPU-accelerated neural network verification system that combines fast adversarial attacks with formal bound certification using alpha,beta-CROWN methods. Through systematic experiments on MNIST and CIFAR-10 using three training methodologies (standard, adversarial, certified), we demonstrate that training method effectiveness is fundamentally dataset-dependent. Interval Bound Propagation (IBP) achieves 78% certified accuracy on simple MNIST (784 dimensions) but provides negligible certification performance on the more complex CIFAR-10 dataset, where PGD adversarial training dominates with 94% certification at small perturbations. We achieve 5x verification speedup through attack-guided falsification and scale our approach to production-size models (105.8M parameters) for real-world aerospace logistics optimization. Our results challenge the assumption that certified training universally outperforms adversarial training, showing context matters critically for verification strategy selection.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Pass@K Policy Optimization: Solving Harder Reinforcement Learning Problems

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms sample multiple n>1 solution attempts for each problem and reward them independently. This optimizes for pass@1 performance and prioritizes the strength of isolated samples at the expense of the diversity and collective utility of sets of samples. This under-utilizes the sampling capacity, limiting exploration and eventual improvement on harder examples. As a fix, we propose Pass-at-k Policy Optimization (PKPO), a transformation on the final rewards which leads to direct optimization of pass@k performance, thus optimizing for sets of samples that maximize reward when considered jointly. Our contribution is to derive novel low variance unbiased estimators for pass@k and its gradient, in both the binary and continuous reward settings. We show optimization with our estimators reduces to standard RL with rewards that have been jointly transformed by a stable and efficient transformation function. While previous efforts are restricted to k=n, ours is the first to enable robust optimization of pass@k for any arbitrary k

21.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Hierarchical Random Measures without Tables

arXiv:2505.02653v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The hierarchical Dirichlet process is the cornerstone of Bayesian nonparametric multilevel models. Its generative model can be described through a set of latent variables, commonly referred to as tables within the popular restaurant franchise metaphor. The latent tables simplify the expression of the posterior and allow for the implementation of Gibbs sampling algorithms to approximately draw posterior samples. However, managing their assignments can become computationally expensive, especially as the size of the dataset and the number of levels increase. In this work, we identify a prior for the concentration parameter of the hierarchical Dirichlet process that (i) induces a quasi-conjugate posterior distribution, and (ii) removes the need for tables, leading to more interpretable expressions for the posterior, with both a scalable and an exact algorithm to sample from it. Remarkably, this construction extends beyond the Dirichlet process, leading to a new framework for defining normalized hierarchical random measures and a new class of algorithms to sample from their posteriors. The key analytical tool is the independence of multivariate increments, that is, their representation as completely random vectors.

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

Diffusion Models for Adaptive Sequential Data Generation

arXiv:2606.06007v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Generating realistic synthetic sequential data is critical in real-world applications across operations research, finance, healthcare, energy systems, and scientific computing, where time-indexed observations are used for prediction, simulation, risk assessment, and data-driven decision-making. While diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in generating static data, their direct extensions to sequential settings often fail to capture temporal dependence and information structure. Designing diffusion models that can simulate sequential data in an adapted manner, and hence without anticipation of future information, therefore remains an open challenge. In this work, we propose a sequential forward-backward diffusion framework for adapted time series generation. Our approach progressively injects and removes noise along the sequence, conditioning on the previously generated history to ensure adaptiveness. A novel score-matching objective is introduced for efficient parallel training. We derive rigorous statistical guarantees under a generic framework, then establish score approximation, score estimation, and distribution estimation results with ReLU networks serving as a concrete instance. Empirically, we validate our method on synthetic data, including ARMA models and Gaussian processes, and demonstrate its effectiveness in constructing mean-variance optimal portfolios.

23.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Dietary cholesterol activates a Ral-dependent pathway driving LDLR turnover

Authors:

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

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

Geometry-Consistent Endoscopic Representations for Image-Guided Navigation via Structured Foundation Model Adaptation

Accurate vision-based navigation in monocular endoscopy is difficult due to limited depth cues, weak tissue texture, non-rigid deformation, and substantial appearance variation across domains, all of which complicate pose estimation, depth prediction, and image-to-anatomy alignment. Although recent vision foundation models have shown promise, their learned representations often remain insufficiently geometry-consistent, hindering stable feature correspondence and limiting their reliability for downstream navigation tasks. We propose a unified framework for learning geometry-consistent and domain-robust image representations for monocular endoscopy. The framework combines a synthetic data pipeline that provides accurate geometric supervision with Hierarchy-Aware Geometry-Semantic Adaptation, a structured alternative to standard LoRA that inserts low-rank adapters selectively across the transformer hierarchy and couples them with layer-wise training objectives to encourage geometric correspondence in intermediate features and semantic consistency in deeper features. Experiments on public and proprietary datasets show improved geometric and semantic representation quality, leading to better performance on downstream navigation tasks including pose estimation and monocular depth estimation. The learned representations show favorable synthetic-to-real transfer on clinical bronchoscopy and provide a useful initialization for adaptation to sinus endoscopy and colonoscopy under limited supervision. The framework also shows favorable scaling with model size and training data. These results support hierarchy-aware, geometry-guided adaptation as a practical approach for endoscopic representation learning.

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

DiverseDiT: Towards Diverse Representation Learning in Diffusion Transformers

Recent breakthroughs in Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have revolutionized the field of visual synthesis due to their superior scalability. To facilitate DiTs' capability of capturing meaningful internal representations, recent works such as REPA incorporate external pretrained encoders for representation alignment. However, the underlying mechanisms governing representation learning within DiTs are not well understood. To this end, we first systematically investigate the representation dynamics of DiTs. Through analyzing the evolution and influence of internal representations under various settings, we reveal that representation diversity across blocks is a crucial factor for effective learning. Based on this key insight, we propose DiverseDiT, a novel framework that explicitly promotes representation diversity. DiverseDiT incorporates long residual connections to diversify input representations across blocks and a representation diversity loss to encourage blocks to learn distinct features. Extensive experiments on ImageNet 256x256 and 512x512 demonstrate that our DiverseDiT yields consistent performance gains and convergence acceleration when applied to different backbones with various sizes, even when tested on the challenging one-step generation setting. Furthermore, we show that DiverseDiT is complementary to existing representation learning techniques, leading to further performance gains. Our work provides valuable insights into the representation learning dynamics of DiTs and offers a practical approach for enhancing their performance.