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

TNODEV: Toolbox for Neural ODE Verification

Authors:
Abdelrahman Sayed Sayed↗Pierre-Jean Meyer↗Mohamed Ghazel↗

arXiv:2606.16567v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural ordinary differential equations (neural ODE) have started to appear in safety critical settings such as continuous-time controllers for cyber-physical systems and classifiers integrated into automated decision pipelines, raising the question of whether their behavior can be formally verified. Existing tools dedicated to neural ODE provide only a single reachability call without iterative input set refinement, limiting the precision of their verdicts to whatever one reachability call can deliver. We present TNODEV, the first sound formal verifier for neural ODE that integrates a falsification checker, a fast interval-based reachability backend based on continuous-time mixed monotonicity, a verification and refinement loop with three input-set splitting heuristics, and a parallel scheduler in a single end-to-end pipeline. TNODEV supports safe-set inclusion verification on pure neural ODE, neural ODE in closed loop with a neural network controller and general neural ODE (GNODE), with the safe set specified either as an interval or as the half-space intersection induced by a target classification label. We evaluate TNODEV on a range of benchmarks across safe-set inclusion and classification-robustness properties, including a direct reachability comparison against NNV~2.0 and CORA and a verification comparison against NNV2.0 on MNIST general neural ODE classifiers.

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02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Physics-Informed Discovery of Yield Functions in Plasticity via Convex Neural Representations

Authors:
Hyeonbin Moon↗Donghyuk Cho↗Jecheon Yu↗Jeong Whan Yoon↗Seunghwa Ryu↗

arXiv:2606.19375v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Identifying anisotropic yield functions remains challenging since yielding is not directly observed in full-field mechanical measurements, directional calibration can require many loading directions, and selecting an appropriate analytical form is nontrivial. This study proposes a physics-informed framework for discovering yield functions from full-field displacement data and reaction force data, without stress observations, plastic strain measurements, direct yield surface data, or a prescribed parametric yield function. The framework identifies the yield function as a mechanically constrained constitutive component inside elastoplastic stress integration, rather than through direct stress-space supervision. The yield function is represented by a convex neural network that enforces convexity and positive homogeneity of degree one while imposing the assumed tension-compression symmetry, and this neural yield function is trained with a differentiable stress update and a physics-informed force equilibrium loss across multiple loading cases. The proposed framework is validated using finite element (FE) benchmark studies with von Mises, Hill 1948, and Yld2000-2d yield functions, assessing yield contour agreement, displacement-noise sensitivity, identifiability through plastically active stress states, epistemic uncertainty, and polynomial-surrogate deployment. This study provides a mechanics-constrained pathway for discovering anisotropic yield functions from displacement and force data while keeping the identified component within the structure of elastoplastic stress integration.

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03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

LLM-Based Visual Explanation Evaluation Framework for Assessing the Explainability of Facial Skin Disease Classification Models

Authors:
Gyuyeon Na↗

This study proposes a domain-specific LLM-based Visual Explanation Evaluation Framework for assessing Grad-CAM explanations in facial skin disease diagnosis models. While previous studies have primarily focused on improving classification performance through data augmentation techniques, relatively few studies have systematically examined whether model explanations are grounded in clinically relevant lesion regions. In this study, geometric augmentation, color-based augmentation, and mixed augmentation strategies were applied to facial skin disease classification models based on EfficientNet-B0, MobileNetV3, and ResNet18. Grad-CAM was employed to generate visual explanations representing the models' decision-making processes. Furthermore, an LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation framework was designed using GPT-5.5, Gemini 3.5 Flash, and Claude Sonnet 4.6 to assess Grad-CAM explanations from the perspectives of lesion localization and explanation trustworthiness. To improve evaluation consistency and clinical grounding, a progressive prompt engineering strategy was introduced, incorporating evaluation rubrics, clinical knowledge, penalty rules, and structured output formats.

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04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Which Models Are Our Models Built On? Auditing Invisible Dependencies in Modern LLMs

Authors:
Sanjay Adhikesaven↗Haoxiang Sun↗Sewon Min↗

Modern LLM training pipelines increasingly rely on other models to generate data, filter corpora, judge outputs, and guide development decisions. These dependencies are recursive: a model may depend on an upstream artifact whose own dependencies are documented only in separate releases and artifacts. As a result, the full dependency structure is fragmented across heterogeneous public artifacts, with complexity and recursive depth far outpacing humans' ability to trace. We introduce ModSleuth, an agentic system that recursively reconstructs LLM dependency graphs from public artifacts with source-grounded evidence. We find that the primary challenge is no longer information extraction, but defining what constitutes a dependency and reconciling artifact references across inconsistent documentation. We address these challenges through a formalization that distinguishes direct and indirect dependencies, represents heterogeneous pipeline roles through operation-centered relationships, and resolves artifact identities across names, versions, and repositories. Applying ModSleuth to four public-artifact-rich LLM releases, we recover 1,060 source-verified dependencies and construct large-scale dependency graphs of modern LLM development. These graphs reveal multi-hop license obligations, train-evaluation coupling, discrepancies between released and training-time artifacts, and documentation inconsistencies that would otherwise be difficult to uncover. We release ModSleuth and the resulting dependency graphs to support transparent analysis of the increasingly complex ecosystems underlying modern LLMs.

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

Pretrained self-supervised speech models can recognize unseen consonants

Authors:
Chihiro Taguchi↗\'Eric Le Ferrand↗Hirosi Nakagawa↗Hitomi Ono↗Kanji Kato↗Emily Prud'hommeaux↗David Chiang↗

Modern pretrained self-supervised automatic speech recognition models are trained on large-scale audio data to encode speech into contextualized representations. However, their training data are heavily skewed toward high-resource languages with little data from low-resource languages, raising concerns about the potential underrepresentation of typologically uncommon speech sounds such as click consonants primarily found in Khoisan languages. This leads to our central research question: Can these models recognize click consonants as accurately as other speech sounds? To address this question, we fine-tune and compare pretrained self-supervised speech models (Wav2Vec2 and HuBERT) on data from two click-rich Khoisan languages (G|ui and West !Xoon). Our results reveal that the fine-tuned models consistently recognize clicks more accurately than non-clicks, suggesting that self-supervision enables generalization across human speech sounds including rare phonemes.

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

STAR: SpatioTemporal Adaptive Reward Allocation for Text-to-Image RL Post-Training

Authors:
Jinjie Shen↗Wei Deng↗Xian Hu↗Daiguo Zhou↗Jian Luan↗

arXiv:2606.17979v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing RL post-training methods for text-to-image generation usually convert the final-image reward into a single scalar advantage and apply it with the same strength to the entire generative trajectory. However, text-to-image generation naturally has temporal and spatial structure: different denoising steps are responsible for different generation stages, and the content that truly determines text alignment often appears only in part of the image. This granularity mismatch makes it difficult for policy updates to focus on the generative components that actually affect the reward. To address this issue, we propose SpatioTemporal Adaptive Reward (STAR) Allocation for RL post-training of text-to-image diffusion and flow models. STAR uses text-image attention inside the generative model and starts from the core content that the user truly cares about in the prompt. It constructs spatial allocation maps that dynamically vary across denoising steps and rollouts, and allocates the same group-relative advantage to more relevant latent regions with almost no additional computational overhead. STAR then applies stronger policy updates to these regions through a spatially resolved policy objective. We use Stable Diffusion 3.5 Medium as the base model and evaluate on three tasks: GenEval, OCR text rendering, and PickScore. Experimental results show that STAR improves compositional semantic alignment, text rendering, and preference optimization without changing the external reward source, achieving $\mathbf{0.9759}$, $\mathbf{0.9757}$, and $\mathbf{23.60}$ on GenEval, OCR, and PickScore, respectively.

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07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Ouroboros-Spatial: Closing the Data-Model Loop for Spatial Reasoning

Authors:
Enhan Zhao↗Wei Wu↗Yuanrui Zhang↗Xueliang Zhao↗Di He↗

Spatial reasoning remains a persistent challenge for multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Existing approaches largely rely on large-scale, statically curated datasets, where all training samples are treated uniformly regardless of the model's evolving capabilities. This static paradigm is inherently data-inefficient: training capacity is often spent on samples that are either trivial or overly difficult for the model at its current stage. To address this limitation, we propose Ouroboros-Spatial, a self-evolving training framework in which the model plays dual roles as a proposer and a solver. In each iteration, a frozen proposer generates spatial question-answer (QA) pairs from 3D scene metadata and raw video frames, together with executable code for deriving reliable ground truth. A learnable solver is then fine-tuned on the accepted samples, and its per-sample prediction confidence is used as a difficulty signal. This signal is fed back to the proposer in the next iteration, guiding it to generate questions better matched to the solver's current capabilities. Through this closed-loop design, the training distribution co-evolves with model ability, reducing redundant trivial examples while filtering out ambiguous or uninformative samples with limited learning value. Across six spatial reasoning benchmarks, Ouroboros-Spatial substantially improves Qwen3-VL-4B and Qwen3-VL-8B while using an order of magnitude fewer training examples than recent large-scale curated datasets. On VSI-Bench, it yields absolute gains of 9.9 and 6.8 points for the 4B and 8B models, respectively, enabling both to outperform a wide range of strong open-source and proprietary baselines.

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08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Meet UD_Czech-PDTC: A Large and Genre-Rich Treebank in Universal Dependencies

Authors:
Marie Mikulov\'a↗Barbora \v{S}t\v{e}p\'ankov\'a↗Daniel Zeman↗Jan \v{S}t\v{e}p\'anek↗Milan Straka↗Jan Haji\v{c}↗

Czech has been part of Universal Dependencies since its first release in 2015. It has also been one of the best represented languages, with the Prague Dependency Treebank being order of magnitude larger than most other UD treebanks. More recently, three other datasets from the Prague family were added and the annotations thoroughly revisited, forming the "Prague Dependency Treebank-Consolidated" (PDT-C). In comparison to the original PDT, PDT-C is more than twice as large, but it is also much more diverse in terms of genres and domains. In this paper, we describe the conversion of the new resource to Universal Dependencies. While the two annotation schemes are relatively similar at the first sight, there are numerous small differences in topology of the dependency structures and in granularity of the POS and relation type inventories. We demonstrate a selection of such differences on examples, discuss the diverging motivations, as well as ways to overcome the differences during conversion. We argue that while PDT is less "universal" and more tightly bound to one language, its multi-layer annotation is rich and provides all information needed for basic UD trees, and much more.

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09.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

GeroEngine: Generative single-cell aging trajectories reveal a bidirectionally traversable identity core and direction-specific inflammatory remodeling

Authors:
Bhak↗Jeon↗

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) maps aging tissues at high resolution but is destructive, preventing longitudinal tracking; dropout and zero-inflation artifacts, amplified by shift-invariant linear simulations, confound age-associated variability. We developed GeroEngine, a technical-artifact-aware framework combining VAE-based trajectory simulation, LOPO cross-validation, linear baselines, reverse traversal, and reverse-directed network inference. In microglia and HSCs, the VAE reduced technical-artifact carryover while preserving trajectory heterogeneity and improving alignment to artifact-reduced reference manifolds. Consensus GeroTargets and GeroRegulators defined tissue-specific GeroNetworks organized into three pillars: lineage/replication identity collapse, a sex-dimorphic endocrine/stress core, and inflammatory remodeling. Forward and reverse simulations aligned to the common young[->]old aging axis revealed a sign-coherent, direction-specific program: identity/replication targets were bidirectionally recovered, whereas MHC/NF-{kappa}B inflammatory programs were preferentially forward-recovered. These results support identity collapse as a deep traversable core of aging and nominate upstream homeostatic restoration over downstream inflammatory suppression.

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10.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-23

VCBench: A Multi-Dimensional Benchmark for Single-Cell Foundation Models

Authors:
Weidener↗L. S↗Brkic↗Jovanovic↗Ulgac↗Meduri↗

Single-cell foundation models are increasingly positioned as virtual cells, yet their capabilities are assessed by fragmented, largely single-task benchmarks that obscure where these models improve on simple baselines. VCBench addresses this by synthesizing four independent virtual-cell frameworks into seven capability dimensions: perturbation response prediction, cross-species universality, gene regulatory network (GRN) inference, modality integration, temporal dynamics, multi-scale integration, and in silico experimentation. Each dimension is assessed for operational testability under current architectures and datasets: five admit direct or proxy evaluation, while multi-scale integration and in silico experimentation are structurally untestable as end-to-end tasks. We evaluate five foundation models (Geneformer, scGPT, UCE, TranscriptFormer, Arc State) against pre-registered linear and nearest-neighbor baselines across the five testable dimensions, and report three findings. First, the baselines match or exceed every foundation model on four of the five scored dimensions, replicating the reported competitiveness of linear baselines on perturbation prediction and extending it to cross-species transfer, GRN inference, and temporal ordering. Second, TranscriptFormer alone exceeds the strongest baseline on cross-modal RNA-to-protein prediction (53% Pearson improvement, with a documented contamination caveat) and is the only model to reach Level 2 in the pre-registered Virtual Cell (VC) Level rubric; the architectural choice behind this advantage simultaneously causes a spectral collapse that destroys its temporal-ordering performance, a tradeoff invisible to single-task benchmarks. Third, no foundation model publishes a complete cell-level training manifest, leaving data contamination undetectable to users. Alongside the benchmark, VCBench releases a Contamination Reporting Schema and contributes two further methodological tools: a common-label-set protocol that controls for class-count confounds in cross-species transfer, and a spread-error correlation probe for epistemic calibration.

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11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Towards Federated Long-Tailed Graph Learning: An Energy-Guided Dual Decoupling Approach

Authors:
Lianshuai Guo↗Zhongzheng Yuan↗Xunkai Li↗Meixia Qu↗Wenyu Wang↗

arXiv:2606.24237v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated Graph Learning facilitates collaborative graph modeling across distributed clients while preserving data privacy. However, real-world data categories frequently exhibit long-tailed distributions. Such statistical scarcity severely degrades performance in two ways: it biases the global model toward majority classes, and it structurally isolates minority nodes by submerging them in heterophilic, head-dominated neighborhoods. While existing methods attempt topology-agnostic statistical compensations, they often fail under data scarcity. Instead of recovering tail nodes, they overfit the structural noise from adjacent dominant classes, leading to representation degradation. To address these limitations, we propose FedEPD, a framework built on a dual decoupling paradigm that separates topological purification from semantic recalibration. Specifically, FedEPD utilizes distribution-aware Dirichlet energy pruning to filter spatial heterophilic edges. It then overcomes Non-IID distribution shifts by extracting robust global prototypes from topologically central nodes, which are incorporated into local representations via a spatial low-pass prototype injection. Furthermore, a two stage alternating optimization strategy strictly protects majority decision boundaries while improving minority accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FedEPD achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse long-tailed benchmarks, yielding absolute improvements of up to 4.97% in Accuracy and 5.48% in Macro-F1.

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

Atlas: Orchestrating Heterogeneous Models and Tools for Multi-Domain Complex Reasoning

Authors:
Jinyang Wu↗Guocheng Zhai↗Ruihan Jin↗Jiahao Yuan↗Yuhao Shen↗Shuai Zhang↗Zhengqi Wen↗Jianhua Tao↗

The integration of large language models (LLMs) with external tools has significantly expanded the capabilities of AI agents. However, as the diversity of both LLMs and tools increases, selecting the optimal model-tool combination becomes a high-dimensional optimization challenge. Existing approaches often rely on a single model or fixed tool-calling logic, failing to exploit the performance variations across heterogeneous model-tool pairs. In this paper, we present ATLAS (Adaptive Tool-LLM Alignment and Synergistic Invocation), a dual-path framework for dynamic tool usage in cross-domain complex reasoning. ATLAS operates via a dual-path approach: (1) training-free cluster-based routing that exploits empirical priors for domain-specific alignment, and (2) RL-based multi-step routing that explores autonomous trajectories for out-of-distribution generalization. Extensive experiments across 15 benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms closed-source models like GPT-4o, surpassing existing routing methods on both in-distribution (+10.1%) and out-of-distribution (+13.1%) tasks. Furthermore, our framework shows significant gains in visual reasoning by orchestrating specialized multi-modal tools.

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

Learning Policy from a Single Trajectory in Average-Reward Markov Decision Process

Authors:
Jongmin Lee↗Ernest K. Ryu↗Vaneet Aggarwal↗

arXiv:2606.16729v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While there is an extensive body of work characterizing the sample complexity of discounted cumulative-reward MDPs, finite sample analyses for average-reward MDPs have been limited, and most existing works rely on restrictive assumptions such as ergodicity or access to a generative model. In this work, we establish the first finite sample complexity guarantees from a single trajectory for weakly communicating average-reward MDPs. To this end, we study the dynamics of a single trajectory in weakly communicating MDPs and based on this analysis, we develop novel model-free methods. Notably, our value-based and policy-based methods provide finite sample complexity guarantees of $\widetilde{O}(1/\varepsilon^2)$ and $\widetilde{O}(1/\varepsilon^4)$ from a single trajectory in weakly communicating MDPs, respectively. Furthermore, we introduce the first model-free method that requires no prior knowledge of problem-dependent quantities for communicating MDPs.

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

CAGE: Curvature-Aware Gradient Estimation For Accurate Quantization-Aware Training

Authors:
Soroush Tabesh↗Mher Safaryan↗Andrei Panferov↗Alexandra Volkova↗Dan Alistarh↗

arXiv:2510.18784v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Despite significant work on low-bit quantization-aware training (QAT), there is still an accuracy gap between such techniques and native training. To address this, we introduce CAGE (Curvature-Aware Gradient Estimation), a new QAT method that augments the straight-through estimator (STE) gradient with a curvature-aware correction designed to counteract the loss increase induced by quantization. CAGE is derived from a multi-objective view of QAT that balances loss minimization with the quantization constraints, yielding a principled correction term that depends on local curvature information. On the theoretical side, we introduce the notion of Pareto-optimal solutions for quantized optimization, and establish that CAGE yields strong convergence guarantees in the smooth non-convex setting. In terms of implementation, our approach is optimizer-agnostic, but we provide a highly-efficient implementation that leverages Adam statistics. CAGE significantly improves upon the prior state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy, for similar computational cost: for QAT fine-tuning, it halves the compression accuracy loss relative to the prior best method, while for QAT pre-training of Llama models, its accuracy for 3-bit weights-and-activations (W3A3) matches the accuracy achieved at 4-bits (W4A4) with the prior best method. The official implementation can be found over https://github.com/IST-DASLab/CAGE .

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

Nonlinear Two-Time-Scale Stochastic Approximation: A Sharp Phase Transition and How to Beat It

Authors:
Dhruv Sarkar↗Vaneet Aggarwal↗

arXiv:2606.14488v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent finite-time analyses of nonlinear two-time-scale stochastic approximation show that under contractive assumptions the slow iterate $Y_k$ with stepsizes $\beta_k=\Theta(k^{-1})$ and $\alpha_k=\Theta(k^{-a})$, $a\in(1/2,1)$, generally satisfies a mean-square rate of order $k^{-a}$; decoupled $k^{-1}$ rates require strong local linearity. We identify a sharp regularity-dependent boundary. In a rate-determining normal form where the slow drift contains a locally linear leakage and a nonlinear remainder of order $1+\rho$ ($\rho\in[0,1]$), the uncorrected recursion satisfies \[ \mathbb{E}\|Y_k\|^2 \le C\bigl(k^{-1}+k^{-a(1+\rho)}\bigr), \] and a matching scalar Gaussian lower bound shows that the slower term is unavoidable without modifying the update. Thus the decoupled $k^{-1}$ rate is guaranteed for the uncorrected recursion exactly when $a(1+\rho)\ge 1$. This lower bound concerns only the naive update; it is not an information-theoretic obstruction. We demonstrate this by equipping the normal-form recursion with an auxiliary online bias estimator \[ M_{k+1}=M_k+\gamma_k(R(X_k)-M_k),\qquad \beta_k\ll\gamma_k\ll\alpha_k, \] and subtracting $M_k$ from the slow update. Under the same stability, moment, and remainder assumptions, the corrected recursion achieves $\mathbb{E}\|\widetilde Y_k\|^2=O(k^{-1})$ for every $\rho\in[0,1]$, including regimes where the uncorrected update provably suffers the slower rate. Finally, we prove localized transfer theorems that extend the phase-transition mechanism to general nonlinear TTSA in fast-manifold coordinates. The proofs are non-asymptotic and rely on two Abel-transform cancellations: one for the locally linear fast-error leakage, and one for the tracked nonlinear bias.

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

Constituency Structure over Eojeol in Korean Treebanks

Authors:
Jungyeul Park↗Chulwoo Park↗

The design of Korean constituency treebanks raises a central representational question concerning the choice of terminal units. Although Korean words are morphologically complex, treating morphemes as constituency terminals can obscure the distinction between word-internal morphology and phrase-level syntactic structure, and can create mismatches with eojeol-based dependency resources. This paper argues for an eojeol-based constituency representation, with morphological segmentation and fine-grained POS information encoded in a separate, non-constituent layer. A comparative analysis shows that, under explicit normalization assumptions, the Sejong, Penn Korean, and KAIST treebanks can be compared over a shared eojeol-based constituency backbone. Building on this result, we outline an eojeol-based annotation scheme that preserves interpretable constituency, supports cross-treebank comparison and constituency-dependency alignment, and provides a surface-form terminal layer for future end-to-end Korean constituency parsing.

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17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Cardiac rhythm development: A wearable device index of risk for physical and mental illness in adolescence

Authors:
Giampetruzzi↗Kircanski↗Pine↗D. S↗Gotlib↗I. H↗

Objective. The autonomic nervous system, which regulates cardiac rhythm, undergoes pronounced maturation across adolescence. How cardiac rhythm develops over this period, however, and whether individual differences in its development forecast mental and physical illness, remain open questions. We used three waves of Fitbit data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study to characterize the developmental trajectory of the cardiac rhythm and to test whether variation in that trajectory predicts onset of psychopathology and cardiometabolic disease. Methods. 8,301 adolescents contributed 242,811 valid Fitbit wear days across Waves 2 (Mage=12), 4 (Mage=14), and 6 (Mage=16). Cosinor mixed-effects models yielded three rhythm parameters per session: mesor (24-hour mean), amplitude (diurnal swing), and acrophase (peak timing). We first characterized age- and sex-specific trajectories, cross-wave stability, and factors shaping the rhythm. We then used parallel-process latent growth models to test whether within-person changes in rhythm tracked symptom trajectories, and hierarchical logistic models to test whether rhythm parameters predicted the first clinical onset of psychopathology and of obesity and hypertension. Results. The cardiac rhythm changed substantially across adolescence: mesor decreased, amplitude flattened, and acrophase shifted later. Within-person change in the rhythm tracked change in blood pressure, BMI, and trajectories of depression and ADHD symptoms. Higher mesor predicted incident onset of all five outcomes controlling for demographics, baseline symptoms, and behavior (ORs 1.36-1.54); amplitude, acrophase, and rhythm instability conferred additional risk. Conclusions. The 24-hour cardiac rhythm is a passively measurable substrate of adolescent autonomic development that indexes transdiagnostic risk for psychiatric and cardiometabolic illness.

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

Closed-Loop Graph Algorithm Execution with Small Language Models: Step Accuracy and Rollout Reliability

Authors:
Michal Podstawski↗

arXiv:2606.24980v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Small language models offer an efficient alternative to large-scale systems, but their ability to execute structured algorithms over multiple dependent decisions remains poorly understood. We study graph algorithm execution as a closed-loop prediction problem in which a model repeatedly selects the next action from the current graph and algorithmic state. Our evaluation framework covers several classical graph procedures, multiple synthetic graph families, and disjoint training, validation, and test partitions. It assesses both local decision quality and global execution behaviour using step accuracy, exact rollout accuracy, constraint validity, partial solution quality, prefix survival, and intervention-based diagnostics. The results show that adaptation can produce reliable policies for structural procedures such as traversal and coloring, while weighted algorithms remain substantially more sensitive to error accumulation. More broadly, the findings demonstrate that strong next-step prediction does not necessarily translate into reliable autonomous execution and motivate evaluating algorithmic language models through complete closed-loop rollouts rather than isolated decisions.

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

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

Authors:
Emre Yusuf↗Ren Takahashi↗Jayabrata Bhaduri↗

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.

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20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

PostDeg: Placement Beats Parameterization in LayerNorm GNNs

Authors:
Yash Tomar↗Aryav Das↗

arXiv:2606.14022v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LayerNorm-based GNNs routinely erase the topology signals (degree, centrality, $k$-core) that node-selection policies should depend on, but the literature has not located where in the residual block the erasure happens. We answer that question: a positive per-node scalar inserted before LayerNorm is divided out up to a stabilizer term, while the same scalar inserted after LayerNorm reaches the score head as representation magnitude. The surviving slot is the post-LayerNorm position. We instantiate it with PostDeg, a parameter-free post-LayerNorm inverse-degree scale, and pre-register four falsifiers (graphwise scalars, extra LayerNorm, expressive same-slot capacity, backbone-agnostic source) that would reject the rule. PostDeg gains $+3.5\%/+2.5\%/+5.6\%$ over the LN backbone on influence maximization, network dismantling, and maximum independent set, with $10/10$ paired-seed wins per task; none of the four falsifiers fires. The takeaway is that placement, not parameterization, carries the gain – a small invariance check that generalizes to any positive topology scalar in any normalized residual stack.

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

Technical Report for ICRA 2026 GOOSE 2D Fine-Grained Semantic Segmentation Challenge: Leveraging DINOv3 for Robust Outdoor Scene Understanding in Field Robotics

Authors:
Jaeil Park↗Hyobin Choi↗Sangjin Lee↗Hyungtae Lim↗Sung-Hoon Yoon↗

The GOOSE 2D Fine-Grained Semantic Segmentation Challenge at the ICRA 2026 Workshop on Field Robotics evaluates dense semantic segmentation of off-road imagery over a fine-grained taxonomy of 64 classes and 11 evaluated non-void coarse categories. We present the first-place solution to this challenge. Our solution comprises two complementary improvements: (a) a network-level design that combines a self-supervised DINOv3 ViT-L/16 backbone, a ViT-Adapter, and a Mask2Former mask-classification decoder, together with a coarse-category auxiliary loss on the global [CLS] token; and (b) an inference-time aggregation strategy based on multi-scale and horizontal-flip test-time augmentation and an ensemble of the top three checkpoints selected using Codabench scores. Our method achieves an official composite score of 76.57%, consisting of 69.32% fine-class mIoU and 83.81% category-level mIoU, and ranks first on the final phase leaderboard: www.codabench.org/competitions/14257/#/results-tab.

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22.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-18

Mechanisms underlying spontaneous and evoked calcium responses in oligodendrocyte precursor cells: A modeling investigation

Authors:
Martin Lardy↗

by Martin Lardy, Leqi Wang, Claire Guerrier, Veronica T. Cheli, Pablo M. Paez, Anmar Khadra Calcium (Ca2+) signaling has emerged as a central regulator of activity-dependent myelination in oligodendrocytes. These Ca2+ signals encompass both the stimulus-independent spontaneous Ca2+ local transients (SCaLTs) generated intrinsically in a voltage-independent manner or facilitated by the membrane voltage, as well as evoked responses triggered by ATP and glutamate release. To investigate the regulatory mechanisms underlying this combined spiking activity, we developed a stochastic spatiotemporal flux-balance model of Ca2+ transients in oligodendrocyte precursor cells (OPCs). The model incorporates all the relevant fluxes in these cells and integrates membrane voltage dynamics with a Ca2+-induced Ca2+-release (CICR) mechanism using parameters fitted to Ca2+ fluorescence recordings. The model reproduced the intrinsic and voltage-facilitated SCaLTs in OPCs in the absence of purinergic and glutamatergic receptors, and captured the three distinct patterns of evoked Ca2+ responses induced by prolonged ATP and glutamate stimulations identified using machine classifier. The model highlighted the role of ATP and glutamate in generating these clusters, and showed that the fast dynamics of CICR is key to producing these evoked responses. Further analysis of the model also revealed that voltage-gated L- and T-type Ca2+ channels slightly increase the frequency of SCaLTs, while stimulation with ATP and glutamate, using randomly distributed pulses mimicking in vivo conditions, leads to an increase in both the amplitudes of Ca2+ spikes (i.e., the combination of SCaLTs and evoked responses) and the prevalence of wide spikes, especially upon glutamate stimulation. Bifurcation analysis of the deterministic version of the model, in the absence of diffusion, demonstrated that ATP and glutamate stimulation can shift the system into an oscillatory regime, thereby increasing the deterministic component of SCaLT dynamics. This study thus offers a comprehensive representation of OPC Ca2+ transients linking recorded in vitro behaviors to in vivo dynamics.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

CacheRL:Multi-Turn Tool-Calling Agents via Cached Rollouts and Hybrid Reward

Authors:
Md Amirul Islam↗Sumiran Thakur↗Huancheng Chen↗Su Min Park↗Jiayun Wang↗Gyuhak Kim↗

We present CacheRL, a system for training small agent foundation models that achieves 92 percent process accuracy on multi-step tool-calling tasks, approaching GPT-5's 94 percent while requiring 100 times less compute. Our approach addresses three challenges in practical agent training: transferring tool-calling knowledge from large models at scale, enabling reinforcement learning without costly live tool execution, and learning robustly from noisy cached environments. CacheRL introduces three key innovations. First, a hybrid thinking trajectory pipeline augments agent trajectories with LLM-generated reasoning traces, producing training examples that teach models not only what tools to call but also why. Second, the CacheAgentLoop eliminates live execution costs through a three-tier fuzzy cache while preserving trajectory fidelity using token-level masking. Third, a cache-tier-aware reward dynamically adjusts answer-quality weights to avoid penalizing models for cache-induced limitations. Through iterative supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), CacheRL improves Qwen3-4B-Thinking's validation reward from 0.43 to 0.78. On public agentic tool-calling benchmarks, our model achieves competitive performance against frontier models such as GPT-5. Ablation studies show that removing knowledge transfer reduces performance by 41 percent, while cache-aware rewards contribute a 17 percent improvement. Interestingly, reinforcement learning improves training stability but yields limited gains beyond strong supervised fine-tuning, suggesting that data quality and reward design play a more important role than complex optimization methods in building practical small agent models.

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25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Breaking the Mirror: Activation-Based Mitigation of Self-Preference in LLM Evaluators

Authors:
Dani Roytburg↗Matthew Bozoukov↗Matthew Nguyen↗Jou Barzdukas↗Simon Fu↗Narmeen Oozeer↗

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly serve as automated evaluators, yet they suffer from "self-preference bias": a tendency to favor their own outputs over those of other models. This bias undermines fairness and reliability in evaluation pipelines, particularly for tasks like preference tuning and model routing. We investigate whether lightweight steering vectors can mitigate this problem at inference time without retraining. We introduce a curated dataset that distinguishes self-preference bias into justified examples of self-preference and unjustified examples of self-preference, and we construct steering vectors using two methods: Contrastive Activation Addition (CAA) and an optimization-based approach. Our results show that steering vectors can reduce unjustified self-preference bias by up to 97\%, substantially outperforming prompting and direct preference optimization baselines. Yet steering vectors are unstable on legitimate self-preference and unbiased agreement, implying self-preference spans multiple or nonlinear directions. This underscores both their promise and limits as safeguards for LLM-as-judges and motivates more robust interventions.

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