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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Navigating User Behavior toward Personalized Multimodal Generation

arXiv:2606.24196v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern AIGC pipelines deliver high-fidelity images and videos but presuppose a well-formed creation instruction, while end users rarely articulate visual details, leaving generators misaligned with user demand. We study personalized content generation, which turns a user's interaction history into an executable instruction for downstream synthesis, and identify two obstacles: behavior must be encoded in a form legible to language reasoning, and the model must acquire instruction-writing skill absent from both pretraining and behavior data. We propose NaviGen, which represents each item with a dual identifier coupling a collaborative code and a textual code as a behavioral substrate and a semantic bridge in one token stream. On this representation, a two-stage SFT+RL pipeline first distills preference reasoning and instruction writing from evolutionarily searched supervision, then aligns generation with user intent through hierarchical and self-consistent rewards. Experiments across product, game, and short-video domains show that NaviGen improves personalized image and video generation, strengthens next-item prediction, and yields more specific, relevant, and visually generatable instructions. Our code is anonymously released at: https://github.com/iLearn-Lab/NaviGen.

02.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-24

Beyond statistical significance: ranking transcription factor binding motifs by effect size

Chromatin immunoprecipitation-sequencing (ChIP-seq) has wide use in identifying transcription factor binding sites. DNA sequence motifs specific to a targeted transcription factor occur more frequently near ChIP-seq peak centres. The most common approach to quantifying relative motif enrichment ranks motifs by p-value . Because sample sizes can vary substantially across examined motifs, p-value magnitudes may reflect this heterogeneity rather than the biological effect of interest. As alternatives, we considered four ranking methods based on effect sizes: (a) a modified Cliffs delta, (b) the lower bound of a frequentist asymptotic confidence interval, (c) the lower bound of a frequentist finite-sample confidence interval, and (d) the lower bound of a Bayesian credible region. Through extensive simulations, the four alternatives better recovered the simulated central- enrichment ordering under heterogeneous sample sizes. Using published ChIP-seq data for GATA3, the effect size methods ranked the known targeted motif highest, even compared to highly similar motifs for other GATA family members, while p-value ranking did not. In a separate SRF application, all four alternative methods also consistently ranked the known motif highest. We recommend the asymptotic confidence interval lower bound for its simplicity, ease of implementation, and intuitive interpretation. The software is freely available (https://github.com/ScottMastro/motif-ranking).

03.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-23

Systematic benchmarking of zero-shot utility and robustness in single-cell transcriptomic foundation models

Single-cell foundation models (scFMs) have been proposed as reusable representations for transcriptomic analysis, yet their practical utility and robustness when applied without task-specific fine-tuning remain incompletely characterized. Here, we systematically evaluated single-cell transcriptomic representations in zero-shot settings across 20 methods, 6 downstream tasks and 1,607 datasets comprising nearly 21.8 million cells. We characterized model behavior along three complementary dimensions: baseline utility, structural robustness, and dataset-level drivers of performance variability. Our large-scale analysis reveals a decoupling between utility and robustness: methods ranking highly on standard benchmarks often show marked instability under shifts in dataset structure. Furthermore, no single model performs uniformly well across tasks. In several tasks, classical statistical representations based on highly variable genes remain competitive under zero-shot conditions. Together, these results define the practical boundaries of zero-shot use in scFMs and provide a large-scale benchmark and decision framework for representation selection in single-cell genomics.

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

Adapting Vision-Language Models from Iconic to Inclusive for Multi-Label Recognition Without Labels

Understanding multi-label images remains a challenging task in computer vision. With the rapid progress of vision-language multimodal learning, vision-language models (VLMs) enable zero-shot recognition without labeled data. However, due to their intrinsic design, these models often prioritize the most iconic object and omit other contextual positives. This intrinsic bias conflicts with the nature of multi-label learning, thereby limiting their applicability. In this work, we propose an unsupervised framework that adapts VLMs from iconic recognition toward inclusive understanding, enabling label-free multi-label image recognition. Our approach consists of two key stages, ``cutting'' and ``sewing'': In the cutting stage, we present the multi-sampling response estimator to prevent the model from concentrating only on one single object. In the second sewing stage, the multi-object blend adaptation is introduced to adjust the labels to better conform to the multi-label distribution while preserving the intrinsic characteristics of the original model within only one epoch. Extensive experiments show that our framework significantly outperforms existing unsupervised approaches on four public datasets, even surpassing several representative weakly supervised baselines. These results demonstrate the potential of adapting pre-trained VLMs for more comprehensive visual understanding without manual annotations. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/iCVTEAM/TailorCLIP.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Trust Region On-Policy Distillation

On-Policy Distillation (OPD) is a fundamental technique for efficient post-training of large language models (LLMs), with broad applications in agent learning, multi-task enhancement, and model compression. However, OPD training becomes unstable when the teacher and student distributions differ substantially, as teacher supervision on student-generated tokens may yield unreliable policy gradients and even cause optimization failure. This work addresses reliable on-policy token-level supervision through credit assignment strategies, and proposes Trust Region On-Policy Distillation, TrOPD. It features the following characteristics: 1) Trust-Region On-Policy Learning: TrOPD performs OPD only in regions where the teacher provides reliable supervision, mitigating the optimization difficulty of the K1 reverse-KL estimator under distribution mismatch. 2) Outlier Estimation: For outlier regions, we explore gradient clipping, masking, and forward-KL estimation to reduce the adverse effects of unreliable supervision. 3) Off-Policy Guidance: The student continues generation from teacher prefixes and uses forward KL to imitate off-policy guidance, encouraging on-policy exploration toward reliable regions. Experiments show that TrOPD consistently outperforms SoTA OPD baselines, including OPD, EOPD, and REOPOLD, across mathematical reasoning, code generation, and general-domain benchmarks.

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

Landscape-Similarity-Guided Optimization in Divide-and-Conquer QAOA

arXiv:2602.21689v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Divide-and-conquer strategies mitigate hardware constraints for the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices by partitioning large interaction graphs into smaller, hardware-compatible sub-problems. However, this approach introduces a severe classical training bottleneck: a decomposition across $m$ boundary nodes generates $2^m$ distinct sub-problems that typically require independent optimization. In this work, we demonstrate that across diverse synthetic and real-world interaction graphs, the variational landscapes of these reduced QAOA instances actually exhibit a robust universality. Adapting the replica-overlap framework of spin-glass physics, we define a landscape-overlap order parameter $q$ to quantify geometric correlations between energy landscapes, revealing a sharp landscape-similarity transition as graph connectivity is tuned. Exploiting this, we introduce Doubly Optimized QAOA (DO-QAOA), an adaptive pipeline that collapses the sub-problems from $2^m$ distinct sub-problems into $K=\mathcal{O}(1)$ effective landscape classes. By performing optimization on a single representative sub-problem and dynamically transferring parameters to remaining sub-problems, DO-QAOA lowers runtime and quantum measurement overhead by orders of magnitude while maintaining a competitive Approximation Ratio Gap (ARG).

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

A Recipe for Long-Context Reasoning in Large Language Models via On-Policy Optimization and Distillation

Existing approaches to post-train models for long-context tasks face complementary limitations: (i) supervised fine-tuning (SFT) provides stable supervision but suffers from exposure bias; (ii) reinforcement learning methods such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) train on model-generated trajectories but struggle with long-horizon credit assignment and sparse rewards; and (iii) on-policy distillation (OPD) provides dense token-level guidance but does not directly optimize task rewards. We study these complementary strategies for long-context alignment and derive a recipe that combines GRPO with OPD-style teacher guidance: the student learns from its own rollouts using outcome-level rewards, while a stronger teacher provides dense token-level regularization in place of the standard reference policy. This is especially useful when process-level supervision is difficult to obtain. To support this study, we introduce LongBlocks, a synthetic multilingual dataset spanning multi-hop reasoning, contextual grounding, and long-form generation. Through controlled ablations, we isolate the roles of cold-start initialization, teacher anchoring, and data mixing, showing that our recipe yields a more stable and effective path to long-context reasoning than GRPO or OPD while preserving short-context capabilities.

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

Rotation-Invariant Spherical Watermarking via Third-Order SO(3) Representation Coupling

Reliable watermarking of panoramic imagery is fundamentally challenged by arbitrary 3D rotations. As panoramas are defined on the sphere, they naturally transform under the action of $SO(3)$, rendering conventional planar representations and augmentation-based robustness strategies inadequate and devoid of theoretical guarantees. To address this, we formulate panoramas as spherical signals and leverage $SO(3)$ representation theory to derive provably rotation-invariant descriptors. While spherical harmonic coefficients transform equivariantly under rotations, the natural invariant constructions are typically limited to zeroth-order statistics which eliminate directional information and severely constrain embedding capacity. In this work, we introduce a principled third-order invariant construction by coupling higher-order $SO(3)$ irreducible representations via tensor products and projecting onto the trivial representation. This yields a spherical invariant bispectrum that preserves phase information while remaining strictly rotation-invariant. Leveraging this property, we embed watermarks into higher-order spherical harmonic coefficients and recover them from invariant bispectral scalars, enabling reliable extraction under arbitrary 3D rotations. We provide a theoretical proof of $SO(3)$ invariance for it and demonstrate experimentally its near-perfect robustness to continuous rotations while maintaining high visual fidelity.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantum Nonlocal Games on Graph Ensembles

arXiv:2606.16784v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum entanglement is one of the most striking discoveries in all of science. This effect allows, for instance, two spatially separated agents to coordinate their actions, without communication, to an extent that is both counter-intuitive, and provably impossible by any other physical means. A recently discovered example is that of mobile agents (players) performing spatial coordination tasks such as rendezvous, where the agents aim to meet on a network without communication. Until now, demonstrations of this advantage have relied on highly idealized conditions: agents are assumed to have complete knowledge of the topography, and experiments have been restricted to simulations using data generated by qubits within a single quantum processor. Here we address both limitations by developing a theory for graph ensembles that capture topographical uncertainty and by experimentally demonstrating the advantage in rendezvous scenarios between physically separated ion-trap systems with access to remote entanglement. Moreover, we simulate a broader set of problems on superconducting hardware. Surprisingly, when players are given the ability to gather more local information the quantum advantage increases – a feat impossible by classical means. Our findings establish a concrete route toward practical quantum advantages in motion coordination problems. More broadly, they point to a new way of using portable quantum devices to enhance collective decision-making in uncertain environments.

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

Simultaneous Latent Budget Trees for Stratified Classification

arXiv:2606.13295v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In the era of Explainable Artificial Intelligence, there is a renewed focus on single trees for their ease of interpretation. This paper introduces Simultaneous Latent Budget Trees, a probabilistic machine learning framework for classification trees in the presence of a stratification factor such as a temporal, spatial, or demographic variable, acting as a control variable or potential confounder. Standard tree growth procedures are not designed to optimize a conditional split rule. A model-based split rule is proposed in which child nodes are interpreted as latent components of a simultaneous mixture model, such as the Simultaneous Latent Budget Model and its constrained versions, fitted to the parent node. Mixing parameters drive the observations, differently for each group, to the child nodes whereas latent budgets parameters update the response classes profile of each level of the control variable. Parameters are estimated by least squares considering a neural network perspective of the model. An informative tree structure can be interactively visualized with interpretation aids on the node and the paths, including visual pruning and decision tree selection procedure. Suitable measures are proposed to handle an unbalanced response class distribution. The proposed methodology is applied to investigate gender-related differences in disease progression of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. The SLBT library with the various tree-based algorithms is available in the linked GitHub repository.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Pragmatic Inference for Moral Reasoning Acquisition: Generalization via Metapragmatic Links

While moral reasoning has emerged as a promising research direction for large language models (LLMs), achieving robust generalization remains a critical challenge. This challenge arises from the gap between what is said and what is morally implied. In this paper, we build on metapragmatic links and Moral Foundations Theory to close this gap. Specifically, we develop a pragmatic inference approach that enables LLMs, given a moral situation, to acquire the metapragmatic links between moral reasoning objectives and the social variables that influence them. We adapt this approach to three different moral reasoning tasks to demonstrate its adaptability and generalizability. Experimental results show that our approach significantly enhances LLMs' generalization in moral reasoning, paving the way for future research to leverage pragmatic inference across a wide range of moral reasoning tasks.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Native Active Perception as Reasoning for Omni-Modal Understanding

Passive models for long video understanding typically rely on a "watch-it-all" paradigm, processing frames uniformly regardless of query difficulty, causing computational cost to grow with video duration. Although interactive frameworks have emerged, they often rely on global pre-scanning, and their context cost still scales with video length. We propose OmniAgent, the first native omni-modal agent that formulates video understanding as a POMDP-based iterative Observation-Thought-Action cycle. OmniAgent executes on-demand actions to selectively distill audio-visual cues into a persistent textual memory, effectively decoupling reasoning complexity from raw video duration. To operationalize this, we introduce (1) Agentic Supervised Fine-Tuning to bootstrap native active perception via best-of-N trajectory synthesis with dual-stage quality control, and (2) Agentic Reinforcement Learning with TAURA (Turn-aware Adaptive Uncertainty Rescaled Advantage), which leverages turn-level entropy to steer credit assignment toward pivotal discovery turns. Crucially, OmniAgent exhibits positive test-time scaling, where performance improves as the number of reasoning turns increases, validating the efficacy of active perception. Empirical results across ten benchmarks (e.g., VideoMME, LVBench) demonstrate that OmniAgent achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models. Notably, on LVBench, our 7B agent outperforms the 10$\times$ larger Qwen2.5-VL-72B (50.5% vs. 47.3%).

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Scalable Physics-Inspired Transformers for Spin Glasses

arXiv:2606.22984v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Efficient sampling of the Boltzmann distribution in frustrated spin glasses is central to statistical mechanics and combinatorial optimization. Despite advances in machine-learning-based approaches, two issues persist: limited understanding of why variational models fail to benefit from increased scale, unlike the monotonic scaling law of large language models; and high computational cost on large systems that negates advantages over classical sampling methods. Here, we develop a physics-inspired transformer with interpretable sparse attention and spin-tailored positional embeddings to address these challenges. By further leveraging FlashAttention for parallel ancestral sampling, it achieves up to two orders of magnitude speedup over vanilla variational autoregressive networks, enabling neural-network simulations of spin-glass systems to unprecedented sizes on a single GPU. It can resolve full probability distributions, free energies, and overlap statistics across temperatures, for Sherrington-Kirkpatrick and 2D or 3D Edwards-Anderson models, where existing machine-learning methods encounter limitations at certain temperatures. This framework thus establishes a scalable paradigm for frustrated spin-glass systems.

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

MoSE: Mixture of Slimmable Experts for Efficient and Adaptive Language Models

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models scale large language models efficiently by sparsely activating experts, but once an expert is selected, it is executed fully. Hence, the trade-off between accuracy and computation in an MoE model typically exhibits large discontinuities. We propose Mixture of Slimmable Experts (MoSE), an MoE architecture in which each expert has a nested, slimmable structure that can be executed at variable widths. This enables conditional computation not only over which experts are activated but also over how much of each expert is utilized. Consequently, a single pretrained MoSE model can support a more continuous spectrum of accuracy-compute trade-offs at inference time. We present a simple and stable training recipe for slimmable experts under sparse routing, combining multi-width training with standard MoE objectives. During inference, we explore strategies for runtime width determination, including a lightweight test-time training mechanism that learns how to map router confidence/probabilities to expert widths under a fixed budget. Experiments on GPT-style models, various routing regimes, zero-shot downstream reasoning benchmarks, and continual pre-training adaptation of DeepSeek model show that MoSE matches or improves standard MoE at full width and consistently shifts the compute-quality frontier toward lower inference FLOPs. The code can be found at: https://github.com/tnurbek/mose.

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

Nous: An Attempt to Extract and Inject the Cognition Behind Prediction-Market Behavior

Authors:

arXiv:2606.13038v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As LLM agents proliferate in prediction markets and collective decision-making, they risk a cognitive monoculture: agents built on shared foundation models produce correlated forecasts, and recent measurement finds frontier-model errors correlated at r ~ 0.77. We ask whether human cognitive diversity can be recovered from behavior and transferred to LLM agents. Nous extracts a structured eight-dimension behavioral profile from real Polymarket trading activity and injects it into agents through prompts. Our central finding is a dissociation between the two halves of that pipeline. Extraction works, partially: across 100 wallets, 8 of 14 parameters are temporally stable (split-half ICC >= 0.5, bootstrap CI lower bound > 0.3; contrarian score reaches ICC ~ 0.9); wallets are identifiable from their profiles well above chance (top-1 retrieval 17-22% vs. 1% chance); and two of four pre-specified dimensions rank-correlate with future realized profit out-of-sample, though the correlations do not survive behavioral-confound controls. Prompt-level injection does not measurably transmit it: on a semantic embedding metric, structured injection shows no significant advantage over a length-matched control on any model, and the diversity it induces neither reduces ensemble error correlation nor improves Brier score – a null that persists across exploratory checks on sampling temperature, profile diversity, and question difficulty. Measuring the prompts themselves locates the compression before the model: the structure-to-narrative translator emits near-uniform prompts whose spread does not track profile spread. We position Nous as measuring the cognitive-monoculture problem and the limits of a prompt-level remedy, motivating deeper, below-the-prompt injection (fine-tuning, activation steering). Code, frozen profiles, prompts, and model outputs: https://github.com/WillChienT/nous-paper

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

No Hidden Prompts Needed! You Can Game AI Peer Review with Presentation-Only Revisions

As AI-generated reviews move from experimental tools into peer-review infrastructure, most robustness concerns have focused on explicit attacks such as hidden instructions and prompt injection. We study a harder and more policy-relevant failure mode: no hidden text, no prompt injection, and no changes to methods, experiments, figures, equations, proofs, or numerical results. The attacker modifies only presentation-level content, such as the abstract, contribution framing, related work, discussion, and narrative structure. We introduce adversarial repackaging: a closed-loop attack that uses AI-reviewer feedback to search for presentation-level revisions while keeping the scientific evidence fixed. Across three mainstream AI reviewers, adversarial repackaging achieves a 75.1% attack success rate and a mean score gain of +1.21/10. The effect is not explained by ordinary prose polishing. We also reveal that strategies that change how the reviewer interprets the paper, such as related-work repositioning and analytical discussion expansion, substantially outperform surface edits such as local polishing, table formatting, and algorithm boxes. Our analysis reveals two deeper structural failure modes. First, AI reviewers are easier to impress than to convince: highlighting strengths reliably increases perceived merit, while attempts to dissolve weaknesses frequently backfire. Second, AI reviewers can confuse the appearance of addressing a limitation with actually resolving it, allowing unchanged evidence to be reinterpreted as stronger scientific contribution. These results show that the deployment risk is not only malicious hidden instructions, but the emergence of paper presentation itself as an optimization surface. We release a contamination-free rolling benchmark and attack framework for testing whether AI reviewers remain anchored to scientific content under presentation-only edits.

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

Right Regions, Wrong Labels: Semantic Label Flips in Segmentation under Correlation Shift

The robustness of machine learning models can be compromised by spurious correlations between non-causal features in the input data and target labels. A common way to test for such correlations is to train on data where the label is strongly tied to some non-causal cue, then evaluate on examples where that tie no longer holds. This idea is well established for classification tasks, but for semantic segmentation the specific failure modes are not well understood. We show that a model may achieve reasonable overlap while assigning the wrong semantic label, swapping one plausible foreground class for another, even when object boundaries are largely correct. We focus on this semantic label-flip behaviour and quantify it with a simple diagnostic (Flip) that counts how often ground truth foreground pixels are assigned the wrong foreground identity while remaining predicted as foreground. In a setting where category and scene are correlated during training, increasing the correlation consistently widens the gap between common and rare test conditions and increases these within-object label swaps on counterfactual groups. Overall, our results motivate assessing segmentation robustness under distribution shift beyond overlap by decomposing foreground errors into correct pixels, flipped-identity pixels, and missed-to-background pixels. We also propose an entropy-based, ground truth label-free `flip-risk' score, which is computed from foreground identity uncertainty, and show that it can flag flip-prone cases at inference time. Code is available at https://github.com/acharaakshit/label-flips.

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

DSAEval: Evaluating Data Science Agents on a Wide Range of Real-World Data Science Problems

Recent LLM-based data agents aim to automate data science tasks ranging from data analysis to deep learning. However, the open-ended nature of real-world data science problems, which often span multiple taxonomies and lack standard answers, poses a significant challenge for evaluation. To address this, we introduce DSAEval, a benchmark comprising 641 real-world data science problems grounded in 285 diverse datasets, covering both structured and unstructured data (e.g., image and text). DSAEval incorporates three distinctive features: (1) Multimodal Environment Perception, which enables agents to interpret observations from multiple modalities, including text and vision; (2) Multi-Query Interactions, which mirror the iterative and cumulative nature of real-world data science projects; and (3) Multi-Dimensional Evaluation, which provides a holistic assessment across reasoning, code, and results. We systematically evaluate 13 recent advanced agentic LLMs using DSAEval. Our results show that Claude-Sonnet-4.5 achieves the strongest overall performance, MiMo-V2-Pro and GPT-5.2 lead in duration and step efficiency, respectively, and MiMo-V2-Flash is the most cost-effective. We further demonstrate that multimodal perception consistently improves performance on vision-related tasks, with gains ranging from 2.04\% to 11.30\%. Overall, while current data science agents perform well on structured data and routine data analysis workflows, substantial challenges remain in unstructured domains. Finally, we offer critical insights and outline future research directions.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

The Mathematics of AI Winters: The mathematical Taxonomy of Paradigm Fragility in AI Winter

arXiv:2606.12610v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Two major periods of reduced funding and confidence in artificial intelligence research, commonly called the first and second AI winters, are usually explained through engineering failure, commercial disappointment, and inflated expectations. This article develops a complementary thesis: that the dominant paradigms of those periods also met genuine formal barriers, including limitations of representation, optimisation, computational complexity, statistical learnability, and high-dimensional approximation. The contribution is synthetic rather than archival. We do not claim that particular theorems mechanically caused the winters; rather, we show that several central disappointments of early AI were aligned with mathematically precise bottlenecks. We analyse these bottlenecks through the perceptron impossibility results of Minsky and Papert, the complexity-theoretic hardness of exact neural-network training established by Blum and Rivest, minimax rates for nonparametric estimation in high dimension due to Stone, vanishing-gradient analyses by Hochreiter and by Bengio and collaborators, and classical statistical learning theory in the tradition of Vapnik and Chervonenkis, Valiant, and Blumer and collaborators. We then relate these barriers to the later breakthroughs that mitigated, rather than eliminated, them.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Bayesian Networks with Latent Time Embedding for Stage-Aware Causal Modeling of Alzheimer's Disease Progression

arXiv:2606.15784v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Alzheimer's disease (AD) progression is often described through the amyloid-tau-neurodegeneration, or AT(N), cascade. However, most longitudinal models represent this cascade either as a fixed sequence of biomarkers or as a black-box forecasting task. This makes it difficult to determine when biologically guided biomarker relationships influence future regional pathology. In this study, we introduce Bayesian Networks with Latent Time Embedding (BN-LTE), a Bayesian structural framework for stage-aware modeling of AD progression. BN-LTE estimates disease pseudotime from baseline biomarker profiles and constrains directed dependencies according to biologically plausible AT(N) ordering. Posterior spline-varying structural equations are then used to link initial multimodal measurements with future annualized regional tau-PET change. Across repeated subject-disjoint evaluations using ADNI data, BN-LTE shows strong spatial reconstruction of tau progression compared with the included forecasting baselines. Beyond spatial reconstruction, BN-LTE recovers posterior stage-varying AT(N)-constrained effects and identifies a mid-pseudotime window of amyloid sensitivity. This window is supported by model-implied g-formula contrasts, root-adjusted AIPW, mechanism-sensitive ablations, and robustness analyses across spline and prior specifications. Overall, these findings position BN-LTE as a Bayesian structural framework for forecasting tau progression while examining stage-dependent AT(N)-cascade mechanisms in observational longitudinal neuroimaging data. Our code is available at https://github.com/danleneurocom/BN-LTE.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Self-Adaptive Scale Handling for Forecasting Time Series with Scale Heterogeneity

arXiv:2606.20010v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current time series forecasting (TSF) research predominantly focuses on scale-homogeneous data, where different time series share similar numerical magnitude ranges. However, in real-world industrial scenarios such as financial product sales, different time series often differ by orders of magnitude (scale heterogeneity). Since these series share similar temporal patterns, joint modeling is desirable for better data utilization, yet existing scaling methods either compress low-scale signals (global normalization) or destroy semantic discriminability and amplify inverse-scaling errors (window-based scaling). This paper proposes a self-Adaptive Scale-handling (AS) module that learns adaptive scale factors tailored to each input, preserving semantic discriminability while reducing inverse-scaling errors. AS consists of Scale Calibrating (SC), which calibrates prior mean scaling factors through neural networks, and Scaling Selection (SS), which decides whether to apply calibration or retain the original factor, avoiding over-calibration. Experiments on real-world fund sales datasets from Ant Fortune and Alipay show that AS seamlessly integrates into popular TSF models and consistently improves their performance. The code and dataset are available at the link https://github.com/Meteor-Stars/ASTSF.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

AI systems out-persuade expert humans

arXiv:2606.16475v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many societal decisions are settled by contests of persuasion. Conversational AI is a powerful new entrant in these contests, but whether it can out-persuade skilled and highly incentivized humans has remained unclear. Here, in a series of four preregistered experiments (n = 18,978 conversations from 6,923 people), we pitted AI systems against a range of human persuaders, including laypeople, winners of a separately preregistered four-round online persuasion tournament, professional canvassers, and world championship debaters. We found that AI systems were reliably more persuasive than expert humans, even when expert humans chose their issues, researched in advance, underwent hours of live, structured practice, and were incentivized with {\pounds}1,000 cash bonuses. In a follow-up study, AI's advantage persisted after experts received a coaching tool that let them practice against the AI that beat them, review their performance history, and see what AI would have said at key moments. We found converging evidence that AI's advantage stemmed from rapidly deploying larger quantities of information: after coaching, expert humans could tie an AI constrained to respond at human speeds and with human-length messages. In a final study, we show that AI's advantage extends to consequential real-world behavior: AI was nearly 3x more effective than professional canvassers from a UK fundraising firm at raising real-money donations to Save the Children. Together, these results establish that frontier AI systems out-persuade expert humans in conversation, with significant implications for political communication.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Rare protein-coding variation and the genetic architecture of height in >1.4 million individuals

Highly heritable, polygenic, and easily measured, adult height has long been the model trait in human genetics. While the landscape of height-associated common genetic variation has been studied extensively, rare variation remains relatively unexplored. Using rare protein-altering variants in a discovery set of 826,066 exomes, we identify 207 height-associated genes - 98% of which replicate in an additional 624,567 individuals. The rarest and most deleterious class of variation, singleton (frequency

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

Ingredient-Level Food Image Segmentation for Nutrition Awareness

Food images often contain several visible ingredients, so assigning one dish label to an entire image hides important visual structure. This work studies ingredient-level semantic segmentation on FoodSeg103, where the model predicts an ingredient class for each pixel. Two SegFormer variants were fine-tuned and evaluated under a controlled setup: SegFormer-B0 as the smaller baseline model and SegFormer-B1 as the larger final model. Both models use ImageNet-pretrained MiT backbones with newly initialized 104-class output layers. On the held-out FoodSeg103 test split of 2,135 images, B0 achieved 0.7709 pixel accuracy and 0.2521 mean IoU, while B1 achieved 0.7929 pixel accuracy and 0.3204 mean IoU. B1 improved every saved test metric, including a +0.0683 absolute gain in mean IoU. The system also converts predicted masks into visible ingredient-area percentages, giving a simple visual composition summary of the predicted meal. This summary can serve as a first-pass nutrition-awareness cue by providing a visual alternative to detailed food tracking similar to plate-based meal guidance, but it is not a direct estimate of calories, macronutrients, food mass, volume, density, or true portion size.