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

PHINN: Persistent Homology Inspired Neural Network for Rare-Event Time Series Generation

arXiv:2606.15452v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Rare events in time series are critical to model but hard to learn due to data scarcity. Current generative models struggle with extreme values. We observe that rare events leave distinct topological fingerprints - transitions in Betti numbers from point-cloud embeddings - that are more stable and discriminative than statistical moments. We introduce PHINN, a flow-matching framework using dynamic Betti curves as conditioning signals and a persistence landscape loss for homology consistency. It scales to multivariate data, includes a natural-language interface to set Betti targets, supports cross-domain meta-learning and few-shot generation, and provides certified adversarial robustness. On financial, epidemiological, and multi-modal benchmarks, PHINN outperforms statistical and diffusion baselines in topological fidelity (beta-RMSE down 41-63%, transition accuracy up 84%) and matches jump-diffusion models in tail coverage while exceeding them in shape fidelity. All results have 95% confidence intervals.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Beyond Benchmarks: Continuous Edge Inference for Fine-Grained Roadside Perception

Continuous AI inference on resource-constrained edge hardware introduces deployment effects that are largely invisible to conventional benchmark evaluation, including temporal instability in streaming video, thermal throttling under sustained load, and workload-dependent performance variability. We present Edge-TSR, a deployment-oriented continuous edge inference system for sustained roadside perception on the NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano. Edge-TSR integrates detection, tracking, fine-grained classification, and a lightweight track-aware temporal stabilization mechanism that improves streaming inference consistency with negligible computational overhead. Our central finding is that benchmark-centric evaluation systematically overstates deployed edge inference performance. Across three state-of-the-art baselines, we observe consistent 20-30% relative degradation when transitioning from static-image evaluation to real-world streaming deployment. Edge-TSR addresses this gap through temporal inference stabilization, recovering up to 10.16% classification accuracy over per-frame inference baselines while maintaining sustained real-time performance under continuous operation. We evaluate the complete system under diverse real-world deployment conditions, jointly characterizing inference quality, latency, throughput, and thermal behavior during long-duration operation. A 55-minute vehicular deployment over a 26 km route demonstrates sustained operation at 16.18 FPS within safe thermal limits on a single embedded device without cloud offload. Our findings show that deployment-aware evaluation and temporal inference stabilization are necessary components of continuously operating edge AI systems intended for real-world sensing deployments. We release a sample annotated streaming video evaluation dataset and full system implementation to support reproducible deployment-centric evaluation.

03.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Lethal plague outbreaks in Lake Baikal hunter-gatherers 5,500 years ago

Plague is among the most devastating diseases in human history1. However, early strains of the plague-causing bacterium Yersinia pestis lacked virulence factors that are required for the bubonic form until around 3,800 years ago2,3. Consequently, the morbidity and mortality of early plague strains remain unclear. Here we describe early plague strains that are associated with two phases of outbreaks among mid-Holocene hunter-gatherers near Lake Baikal in southeast Siberia, beginning from about 5,500 years ago. These outbreaks occur across four hunter-gatherer cemeteries, with a 39% detection rate for plague infection. By reconstructing kinship pedigrees, we show that small familial groups were affected, consistent with human-to-human spread of disease, and that the first outbreak occurred within a single generation. The infections appear to have resulted in acute mortality, especially among children (aged 8 to 11 years). We further note functional differences, including in the ypm superantigen locus, which is also present in present day Yersinia pseudotuberculosis. The new strains diverge ancestrally to known Y. pestis and constrain the timing of its emergence, indicating that this happened before approximately 5,700 years ago. These findings show that plague outbreaks happened earlier than previously thought and were indeed lethal. We contend that the occurrence of outbreaks among mid-Holocene hunter-gatherer communities well outside the sphere of Late Neolithic Europe challenges the notion that higher population densities and lifestyle changes during the Neolithic agricultural transition were prerequisites for plague epidemics. Analyses of ancient DNA from hunter-gatherers near Lake Baikal in southeast Siberia around 5,500 years ago indicate that highly virulent Yersinia pestis emerged earlier than previously estimated, far from the next known cases of infection in Late Neolithic Europe.

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

Disentangling Dynamical Systems: Causal Representation Learning Meets Local Sparse Attention

arXiv:2603.14483v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Parametric system identification methods estimate the parameters of explicitly defined physical systems from data. Yet, they remain constrained by the need to provide an explicit function space, typically through a predefined library of candidate functions chosen via available domain knowledge. In contrast, deep learning can demonstrably model systems of broad complexity with high fidelity, but black-box function approximation typically fails to yield explicit descriptive or disentangled representations revealing the structure of a system. We develop a novel identifiability theorem, leveraging causal representation learning, to uncover disentangled representations of system parameters without structural assumptions. We derive a graphical criterion specifying when system parameters can be uniquely disentangled from raw trajectory data, up to permutation and diffeomorphism. Crucially, our analysis demonstrates that global causal structures provide a lower bound on the disentanglement guarantees achievable when considering local state-dependent causal structures. We instantiate system parameter identification as a variational inference problem, leveraging a sparsity-regularised transformer to uncover state-dependent causal structures. We empirically validate our approach across four synthetic domains, demonstrating its ability to recover highly disentangled representations that baselines fail to recover. Corroborating our theoretical analysis, our results confirm that enforcing local causal structure is often necessary for full identifiability.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Similarity-based representation factorization for revealing interpretable dimensions in representational data

The study of representations is widespread across fields, including neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence. While representations are often studied and compared through similarities between stimuli, current methods provide only limited access to the dimensions that shape these representations and are often limited in interpretability. To overcome these challenges, here we introduce Similarity-Based Representation Factorization (SRF), a general computational method for recovering low-dimensional, non-negative, interpretable embeddings from similarity matrices derived from measured data. Across simulations and many neural, behavioral, and computational datasets, SRF recovers interpretable dimensions from diverse forms of representational data, even for very sparsely sampled, incomplete data. The dimensions derived from these datasets match those obtained by task-specific models, predict independent behavioral properties, improve exploratory analysis, and offer higher power for confirmatory hypothesis testing than comparing similarity matrices. Together, these results establish SRF as a general-purpose method with broad applications for uncovering, understanding, and using the dimensions underlying representations.

06.
Science (Express) 2026-06-02

Another red alert for American science | Science

Authors: Unknown Author

Although research has bipartisan support in the US Congress, and trust in science is above 75% across the country, the Trump administration seems as determined as ever to mortally wound the nation’s scientific enterprise. After the scientific community persuaded Congress to restore most of the president’s draconian cuts to research funding last year, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), under Russell Vought, has found new ways to circumvent the will of Congress and starve American science. At the beginning of this year, OMB dragged its feet in releasing instructions to federal agencies for how to distribute the funding appropriated by Congress, leading to lags in dispersal. Now, OMB has proposed revising the rules that govern how federal dollars are spent. The changes would inevitably lead to unlegislated reductions in funding and damage US leadership in science, both in academia and industry.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

A Cross-Model VLM-Judge Protocol for Single-Image 3D Mesh Quality (and Why Cheap Proxies Fall Short)

arXiv:2606.18451v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Single-image-to-3D generators are improving quickly, but there is no agreed, human-free way to tell whether one generated mesh is better than another. Practitioners commonly rely on cheap automatic proxies (render-space CLIP similarity and mesh geometry-validity statistics), yet how well these track perceived quality is unestablished. We make two contributions. First, we propose and validate a reproducible VLM-judge evaluation protocol: a fixed 24-view headless render rig, two independent vision-language judge families, and a mandatory position-bias correction that queries both presentation orders and keeps only order-consistent verdicts. The two judge families agree substantially with each other (Cohen's kappa = 0.66), well above the chance-agreement floor. Second, using this protocol as the reference, we show the cheap proxies do not substitute for it. Geometry validity is only a weak signal on average (because, as we show, it is bimodal) and stays below our pre-registered target, while render-CLIP is at chance. A learned Bradley-Terry head collapses onto a single manifoldness statistic (giving render-CLIP a negative weight) and matches geometry-only exactly, so learning the feature weights buys nothing. The proxy is also bimodal: it is significantly above chance on contrasts with visible geometric defects but at chance on ambiguous contrasts, consistent with geometry validity tracking the judge only when the defect is visually salient. We therefore recommend the VLM-judge protocol as a reliable, reproducible evaluator under the conditions tested (two feed-forward generators on Google Scanned Objects, with a face-drop degradation regime) and advise against geometry/CLIP proxies as optimization targets.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Shadow Engineering of Quantum Processes

arXiv:2606.12035v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Characterizing quantum processes is essential for hardware benchmarking, error diagnosis, and algorithm verification. While recent work [PRX QUANTUM 4, 040337 (2023)] extended classical shadows from quantum state to quantum process, enabling efficient single-channel $\mathcal{E}$ property prediction, its applicability to composite processes $f(\mathcal{E}_1, \mathcal{E}_2,\cdots, \mathcal{E}_k)$ remains unexplored. We introduce shadow engineering, a framework encoding the classical shadows of processes into sparse transfer matrices to predict $f(\mathcal{E}_1, \mathcal{E}_2,\cdots, \mathcal{E}_k)$ properties with proven polynomial sample complexity, matching single-channel efficiency while exponentially lower than quantum process tomography. Crucially, this approach repurposes existing $\mathcal{E}_m$-shadow data without physical execution of $f(\mathcal{E}_1, \mathcal{E}_2,\cdots, \mathcal{E}_k)$, enabling flexible quantum process characterization with minimal hardware overhead. We demonstrate the framework's effectiveness and practicality on a superconducting quantum processor for typical applications such as error mitigation and Hamiltonian dynamical simulation. This framework unlocks new capabilities for predicting complex quantum behaviors without physical re-execution, with immediate applications in near-term device calibration and quantum simulation.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Improved Stochastic Optimization of LogSumExp

arXiv:2509.24894v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The LogSumExp function, dual to the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, plays a central role in many important optimization problems, including entropy-regularized optimal transport (OT) and distributionally robust optimization (DRO). In practice, when the number of exponential terms inside the logarithm is large or infinite, optimization becomes challenging since computing the gradient requires differentiating every term. We propose a novel convexity- and smoothness-preserving approximation to LogSumExp that can be efficiently optimized using stochastic gradient methods. This approximation is rooted in a sound modification of the KL divergence in the dual, resulting in a new $f$-divergence called the Safe KL divergence. Our experiments and theoretical analysis of the LogSumExp-based stochastic optimization, arising in DRO and continuous OT, demonstrate the advantages of our approach over existing baselines.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Semantically-Aware Diver Activity Recognition Framework for Effective Underwater Multi-Human-Robot Collaboration

Effective multi-human-robot collaboration is essential for expanding human-led operations in the challenging and high-risk underwater environment. For autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to become true teammates, they must be able to comprehend their surroundings and recognize a diver's activities to offer assistance and ensure safety. Towards this goal, we introduce DAR-Net, a novel transformer-based framework that analyzes complex underwater scenes to classify diver activities. Our contribution lies in a semantically guided learning formulation that couples transformer-based temporal reasoning with pixel-level scene supervision. This multi-loss training strategy explicitly aligns global activity recognition with local human-robot interaction semantics, which is particularly critical in low-visibility underwater conditions. To address the significant challenge of data scarcity in this domain, we present the first-ever Underwater Diver Activity (UDA) dataset, a foundational resource containing over 2,600 annotated images with pixel-level masks. Through rigorous experimental evaluations in a controlled environment, we demonstrate that DAR-Net achieves promising accuracy in recognizing six distinct diver activities, outperforming state-of-the-art models. While this dataset provides a crucial baseline, our work serves as a pioneering step, laying the groundwork for future research and facilitating the development of more intelligent, collaborative underwater robotic systems.

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

On Local Population-Risk Certificates

Authors:

arXiv:2606.19147v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper develops local certificates for population-risk increments around a current model. For a local candidate set \(\mathcal D\), the certificate is a two-sided confidence band for \(P({\ell_{\theta+v}-\ell_\theta})\) over \(v\in\mathcal D\). As an application, the upper endpoint of this band yields a risk-controlled update rule: an update is accepted only when its certified upper endpoint is nonpositive; otherwise the current model is retained.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Search Discipline for Long-Horizon Research Agents

arXiv:2606.11522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autoresearch agents now propose, evaluate, and select scientific candidates against a metric, and that metric is usually an aggregate reduced over a heterogeneous space of regions, slices, or cohorts. We show that when scientific validity lives in that disaggregated structure, the aggregate can rank the wrong candidate first. The headline number improves while the structure underneath inverts, so a decision made on the number accepts a candidate that quietly breaks the model. The failure is not domain-specific. It appears wherever a candidate's validity is multi-dimensional but its verifier is a single reduction. We demonstrate the inversion on a fire-model task in the Ecosystem Demography model. The highest-scoring candidate and a slightly lower one are within noise of each other on global score, yet the top-scoring one collapses the protected boreal regions while the other preserves them. What separates them is the per-region behavior, not the headline number. This decision should not be left to the agent that produced the candidates. The agent optimizing the score is the last party likely to catch the score being wrong, and a prompt has no remaining turn once the agent has stopped. We move the decision to an external control loop that audits each candidate on its disaggregated behavior and acts after the agent has decided. It can demote a candidate the agent would have accepted, and it can reopen a run the agent had declared finished. Our contribution is the inversion finding itself, and a search-discipline protocol that decides on reviewable candidate-effect evidence instead of the score.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Power Term Polynomial Algebra for Boolean Logic

arXiv:2603.13854v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce power term polynomial algebra, a representation language for Boolean formulae designed to bridge conjunctive normal form (CNF) and algebraic normal form (ANF). The language is motivated by the tiling mismatch between these representations: direct CNFANF conversion may cause exponential blowup unless formulas are decomposed into smaller fragments, typically through auxiliary variables and side constraints. In contrast, our framework addresses this mismatch within the representation itself, compactly encoding structured families of monomials while representing CNF clauses directly, thereby avoiding auxiliary variables and constraints at the abstraction level. We formalize the language through power terms and power term polynomials, define their semantics, and show that they admit algebraic operations corresponding to Boolean polynomial addition and multiplication. We prove several key properties of the language: disjunctive clauses admit compact canonical representations; power terms support local shortening and expansion rewrite rules; and products of atomic terms can be systematically rewritten within the language. Together, these results yield a symbolic calculus that enables direct manipulation of formulas without expanding them into ordinary ANF. The resulting framework provides a new intermediate representation and rewriting calculus that bridges clause-based and algebraic reasoning and suggests new directions for structure-aware CNFANF conversion and hybrid reasoning methods.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

TIMI: Training-Free Image-to-3D Multi-Instance Generation with Spatial Fidelity

Precise spatial fidelity in Image-to-3D multi-instance generation is critical for downstream real-world applications. Recent work attempts to address this by fine-tuning pre-trained Image-to-3D (I23D) models on multi-instance datasets, which incurs substantial training overhead and struggles to guarantee spatial fidelity. In fact, we observe that pre-trained I23D models already possess meaningful spatial priors, which remain underutilized as evidenced by instance entanglement issues. Motivated by this, we propose TIMI, a novel Training-free framework for Image-to-3D Multi-Instance generation that achieves high spatial fidelity. Specifically, we first introduce an Instance-aware Separation Guidance (ISG) module, which facilitates instance disentanglement during the early denoising stage. Next, to stabilize the guidance introduced by ISG, we devise a Spatial-stabilized Geometry-adaptive Update (SGU) module that promotes the preservation of the geometric characteristics of instances while maintaining their relative relationships. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method yields better performance in terms of both global layout and distinct local instances compared to existing multi-instance methods, without requiring additional training and with faster inference speed.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Models Take Notes at Prefill: KV Cache Can Be Editable and Composable

Authors:

arXiv:2606.17107v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Prefix caching reuses prefill only across an exactly shared prefix, so one changed field invalidates the entire downstream cache. Yet overwriting the field's own key/value vectors and reusing the rest leaves the model acting on the old value. The reason, established causally across four model families: at prefill the model has already written the field-conditioned conclusion onto downstream notes; the field's own key/value drives under 1% of the decision. Read as a notebook of memoized conclusions, two capabilities follow. (1) It is editable. A salient erratum amends the notes; and with chain-of-thought, editing the field alone recovers the decision (1.00 at 8B, ~1% compute), while without CoT it is ignored. (2) It is composable. The notes are position-portable, so a precompiled skill can be RoPE-repositioned and spliced into any context, indistinguishable from full recompute (logit cosine 0.90-0.999, twelve models) at O(L) rather than O(L^2) time-to-first-token. A unified edit+compose agent stays decision-identical to recompute at up to 14.9x lower latency. The approach applies to any per-token attention KV cache, validated across scale, quantization, Mixture-of-Experts, and multimodal caches, and extends to several attention variants through small adapters. Because the erratum is append-only, it composes with production prefix caching: in an online vLLM benchmark it keeps the prefix cache-aligned (98.5% hit-rate), cutting p90 time-to-first-token by 53-398x.

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

Unifying spacetime approaches to quantum mechanics

arXiv:2606.12539v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent efforts to formulate quantum mechanics in a way that treats space and time on a more equal footing have led to a large variety of spacetime-oriented approaches. In this work we present a detailed study of spacetime states, the objects that play the role of quantum states in the recently introduced framework of spacetime quantum mechanics, and show that the main proposals in the literature are different manifestations of the same underlying object. Path integrals, quantum states over time, pseudo-density matrices, the Page and Wootters mechanism, superdensity operators, and timelike-entanglement proposals all arise from spacetime states through particular evaluations, reduced information, linear maps, or quantum channels. This unification provides explicit mathematical representations of these formalisms, reveals relations among them, and clarifies the spacetime information each one captures. We also study the broader relevance of the spacetime-state point of view for Leggett-Garg inequalities, OTOCs, temporal tensor networks, fermionic systems, relativistic QFTs, quantum reference frames, and classical physics, together with additional insights and perspectives revealed by the common unifying framework.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Measurement Plasticity: Sensor-Level Adaptation for Vision-Language Models

We propose Multi-View Physical-prompt (MVP) for Test-Time Adaptation (TTA), a forward-only framework that moves TTA from tokens to photons by treating the camera exposure triangle (i.e., ISO, shutter speed, and aperture) as physical prompts. At inference, MVP acquires selected multiple physical views using a source-affinity score, evaluates digitally augmented variants of each retained view and filters the lowest-entropy predictions, and aggregates predictions with hard voting. This selection-then-vote design is simple, calibration-friendly, and requires no gradients or model modifications. On ImageNet-ES and ImageNet-ES-Diverse, MVP outperforms digital-only TTA on both Auto-Exposure and a combination with conventional sensor control. MVP remains effective under reduced parameter candidates that lower capture latency, demonstrating its practicality.

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

Towards Modality-imbalanced Federated Graph Learning: A Data Synthesis-based Approach

arXiv:2606.20382v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: MultiModal Federated Graph Learning (MM-FGL) offers a natural collaborative training paradigm, but its practical deployment is challenged by two granularities of modality imbalance. Client-level imbalance occurs when certain clients lack entire modalities, while node-level imbalance occurs when individual nodes exhibit missing visual or textual attributes. While several relevant studies exist, our investigation reveals that they predominantly target graph-agnostic or centralized scenarios, rendering them difficult to adapt directly. To address these challenges, we formalize modality-imbalanced MM-FGL as an implicit graph-aware latent semantic representation synthesis problem. This paradigm recovers missing modal semantics directly within the representation space, thereby maximizing alignment with the original data's semantic distribution and mitigating the high variance induced by missing modalities. To this end, we propose FedMGS (Federated Modality-aware Graph Synthesis), which integrates three core components. The availability-aware graph encoder prevents missing modalities from contaminating local structural propagation. The prototype-guided latent semantic synthesizer establishes cross-client semantic anchors for unavailable modalities. The reliability-calibrated semantic fusion mechanism regulates the impact of recovered latent representations prior to predictive readout. Extensive experiments on four tasks show that FedMGS consistently outperforms competitive baselines with gains up to 17.41% with best efficiency-performance tradeoff.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

HKVM-RAG: Key-Value-Separated Hypergraph Evidence Organization for Multi-Hop RAG

Multi-hop RAG poses a data-engineering problem beyond passage matching: under fixed retrieval budgets, a system must organize retrieved text into evidence units that expose answer chains. Dense retrievers score passages independently, while graph-based memories make associations explicit but often rely on pairwise or entity-centered keys that fragment multi-hop evidence. We present HKVM-RAG, a key-value-separated evidence-organization layer. It assembles answer-path hyperedges from cached passage-level LLM evidence tuples and uses them as retrieval keys, while retaining passage text as answer values. To isolate key-space design, our fixed-substrate protocol holds the tuple cache, candidate passages, reader, and evaluation budget constant across pairwise graph and hypergraph variants. Weighted hypergraph key-value retrieval improves over KG-PPR by +3.426 F1 on 2WikiMultiHopQA and +3.592 F1 on MuSiQue; HotpotQA shows that higher structured support coverage need not yield standalone answer-F1 gains. We therefore study WHG-KV as an evidence-control signal rather than a dense-retrieval replacement. Oracle and train-to-dev analyses identify support selection as repairable, and a dense-aware controller combines frozen ColBERTv2 and HKVM rank/score features using out-of-fold HKVM predictions. It reaches 88.846, 65.073, and 85.810 F1 on the three benchmarks, improving over ColBERTv2 by +11.084, +6.763, and +5.966 F1. Source-level ablations show that matched non-WHG structured signals do not match the WHG-KV gains. These results provide bounded evidence that key-value-separated hypergraph organization can serve as a reusable evidence-control mechanism for multi-hop RAG.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Token-Level Entropy Reveals Demographic Disparities in Language Models

We ask whether demographic identity, signaled by a name alone, systematically reshapes the generative distribution of a language model. Measuring full-vocabulary Shannon entropy at temperature zero across six open-weight base models and 5,760 implicit sentence-completion prompts (e.g., "Tanisha walked into the office on a Monday morning and"), we find that Black-associated names produce higher first-token entropy than White-associated names across all six architectures - opposite to the output-level homogeneity bias documented under explicit demographic prompting (Lee et al., 2024) - and Black-associated names always produce greater entropy above identity-neutral baselines than White-associated names ($\Delta\Delta > 0$ in all six models). Women-associated names co-occur with lower first-token entropy (DL-pooled $\hat\beta = -0.041, p = .019$) and more homogeneous outputs ($\hat\alpha = +0.024, p < .001$) than men-associated names - a pattern convergent with homogeneity bias; race and gender effects are additive. Instruction tuning does not attenuate the race gap (matched-format DL-pooled $\hat{\beta}=+0.153$). Running the same templates with explicit group labels instead of names yields null race effects in 10 of 12 models where implicit probing is significant - establishing that probing methodology is a primary determinant of which distributional structure is recovered.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

The biological clock of multimorbidity: temporal dynamics of disease co-occurrence in primary care

Multimorbidity is the dominant clinical reality of primary care, yet the temporal dynamics governing when and how persistent comorbidity associations emerge remain poorly characterised. Most large-scale comorbidity studies adopt a single observation window after an index diagnosis, implicitly assuming that associations detectable at one year are equally detectable at five. Using 11 years of electronic health records from 5,821,197 individuals in Catalan primary care, we applied a matched cohort design across nine complementary follow-up windows, five cumulative (0-1 to 0-5 years) and four conditional (1-2 to 4-5 years), to 1,315 index diseases, identifying 144,030 significant directed comorbidity associations in the five-year network. We found that 60.1% of these associations required at least three years of follow-up and were undetectable in shorter-window analyses, demonstrating that observation window length is a primary determinant of which comorbidities can be observed. To organise this temporal heterogeneity, we introduce the biological clock of multimorbidity: a two-dimensional framework that positions ICD-10 disease categories according to their rates of cumulative signal attenuation and the persistence of conditional risk. This framework identifies four reproducible temporal patterns (episodic, chronic stable, chronic progressive, and transient-persistent) that are robust under bootstrap resampling, leave-one-disease-out sensitivity analysis, and alternative clustering approaches. The biological clock is systematically modulated by sex, with Blood/Immune and Musculoskeletal disorders showing the largest sex differences in temporal dynamics. Network analysis identified 19 disease "initiators" that generate broad downstream comorbidity burdens and 21 "sinks" representing convergent endpoints of multiple disease trajectories. Comparison with hospital-based Danish data from 6,909,676 individuals showed that shared associations were 2.7-fold enriched over chance expectation (hypergeometric test, p

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Steering the Noise: Turning Random Perturbations into Effective Descent for Memory-Efficient LLM Fine-Tuning

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) achieves strong performance but is often limited by the memory overhead of backpropagation. Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization avoids this overhead by estimating gradients through forward passes alone, yet it typically converges slowly because random Gaussian perturbations yield high-variance gradient estimates in high-dimensional parameter spaces. In this paper, we propose a plug-and-play framework that turns random perturbations into more effective descent directions. The key idea is to draw a small pool of candidate perturbations, evaluate their loss values, and then select or combine those that are best aligned with the optimization objective. We develop two instantiations of this idea: MeZO-GV, which forms a guiding vector from the contrast between low-loss and high-loss perturbation groups, and MeZO-Greedy, which keeps the single best perturbation within a fixed evaluation budget. We theoretically show that both strategies yield a larger per-step reduction in the objective than standard ZO estimation, leading to improved convergence rates. Experiments on LLMs of different scales and architectures confirm that the proposed methods integrate naturally with existing ZO optimizers and consistently improve convergence speed and task accuracy. On OPT-13B, our approach outperforms all ZO baselines across 11 benchmarks and exceeds gradient-based methods on 9 of them, while retaining the memory efficiency of forward-only optimization.

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

Anomaly Detection for Sparse and Irregular Multivariate Time Series with Latent SDEs

arXiv:2606.18898v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multivariate time series anomaly detection (MTSAD) is critical for a wide range of application areas, such as industrial monitoring, cybersecurity, or healthcare. Real-world data is often sparse, irregularly sampled or partially observed, yet existing methods assume uniformly sampled time series. We propose a generative approach based on Latent SDEs that projects the observed time series on a continuous-time stochastic dynamical system, directly being able to handle missing observations and irregular sampling, while also naturally capturing possible cyclic behavior that many real-world use cases inherently possess. Experiments on six anomaly benchmark datasets show that our proposed method ranks first among state-of-the-art baselines. We further demonstrate that our method remains robust under severe data sparsity, while performance significantly degrades for the tested baseline methods. These results highlight latent SDEs as a natural inductive bias for anomaly detection in multivariate time series, especially in presence of real-world irregularities.

24.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Very large cliques in a scale-free random graph

arXiv:2606.18722v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this short article we consider a preferential attachment random graph model with edge steps, studied by Alves, Ribeiro and Sanchis. Starting with an initial graph $\mathbb{G}_1$ formed by a vertex with a self-loop attached to it, the model evolves as follows. At every subsequent (discrete) time step, either with probability $p$ we add a vertex to the graph and connect it to exactly one of the older vertices selected with probability proportional to its degree, or with probability $1-p$ we add one edge between two existing vertices, both selected (independently) with probability proportional to their degrees. Let $\omega(\mathbb{G})$ be the clique number of a graph $\mathbb{G}$, i.e.\ the number of vertices in a largest complete subgraph of $\mathbb{G}_{}$. Alves, Ribeiro and Sanchis showed that, for any given $\varepsilon>0$, we have $\omega(\mathbb{G}_{2t})\geq t^{\frac{1-p}{2-p}(1-\varepsilon)}$ with high probability (i.e.\ with probability tending to $1$ as $t\rightarrow \infty$). Here we strengthen this bound by showing that, for any function $f:\mathbb{N}\mapsto \mathbb{N}$ that satisfies $f(t)\rightarrow \infty$ as $t\rightarrow \infty$, with high probability \[\omega(\mathbb{G}_{2t}) = \Omega\left(t^{\frac{1-p}{2-p}}\Big(\log^{\frac{1}{2-p}}(t)f(t)\Big)^{-1}\right).\]

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

The New Social Image: How AI Competency and AI Proactivity Influence Self- and Peer-Perceptions in the Workplace

arXiv:2606.00182v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Human-AI collaboration is considered the most promising way to incorporate AI in the workplace. What remains unexplored are the experiential consequences of this teaming. More specifically, in a team with AI, how humans perceive themselves (self-perception) and how they are perceived by their coworkers (peer perception) in terms of work ownership and job meaningfulness. In a 2x2x2 vignette study (n=50), participants rated perceptions of ownership, affect, job meaningfulness and satisfaction, and role dynamics across two levels (low/high) of AI proactivity and AI competency as within-subject factors, with point-of-view (self perception/peer perception) as between-subjects. Our results showed that AI with low competency or low proactivity generally improved feelings related to ownership, meaningfulness, satisfaction, and role dynamics, and also increased positive affect while reducing negative affect. However, these effects were often influenced by point-of-view. For instance, low AI proactivity resulted in higher job satisfaction from self-perception rather than peer perception. Based on our findings, we argue that designing AI for the future of work solely around performance metrics may not be adequate. Highly competent and proactive AI-driven systems can have undesirable impacts on perceptions of ownership, job identity, social image and team dynamics, and consequently, job meaningfulness.