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

Advanced Machine Learning and Deep Learning Techniques for Enhanced Cattle Identification and Detection: A Comprehensive Review

arXiv:2606.15655v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The need for effective cattle identification technology is now more acutely felt than ever in maintaining biosecurity, food safety, and supply chain efficacy in livestock management. This paper presents a systematic review of recent research in cattle identification using machine learning and deep learning techniques. The present systematic review measures the effectiveness of traditional and modern cattle identification techniques using studies from major academic databases, where articles were subjected to full-text review. Among these techniques, classical Machine Learning Techniques such as K-Nearest Neighbors and Support Vector Machines have demonstrated good results in cattle identification; however, Deep Learning Techniques, such as Convolutional Neural Networks, Residual Networks, and You Only Look Once, are better in cognition, detection, and identification tasks. Feature extraction relies on common techniques like Local Binary Pattern (LBP), Speeded-Up Robust Features (SURF), and Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT), while key features commonly used in these studies include muzzle prints and coat patterns. The review highlights key hurdles involving cattle identification, such as the limited number of publicly accessible datasets, issues with data quality susceptible to environmental changes and animal mobility, and high demand for real-time processing ability. The paper aims to inform researchers, policymakers, and stakeholders about implementing scalable, humane, and effective cattle identification systems to achieve sustainable livestock management.

02.
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

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Fully Quantum Algorithm for the 1-dimensional linear Lattice Boltzmann Method

arXiv:2606.16514v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A fully quantum algorithm for solving the one-dimensional linear advection-diffusion equation using the Lattice Boltzmann method as a numerical procedure is presented in this work. We start by presenting a state of the art of the current usage of quantum algorithms for solving ordinary and partial differential equations. We then describe two algorithms for the one-dimensional Lattice Boltzmann method with two degrees of freedom. The first one is an existing hybrid quantum-classical algorithm with measurements at each time step, and the second one is our improved version, viz. a fully quantum algorithm where only one measurement is needed at the end of the algorithm. The fully quantum algorithm is first executed on a quantum simulator and then compared with a classical approach. Subsequently, the fully quantum algorithm is run on a quantum system with 133 qubits to investigate the effect of noise and the depth of the circuit on the output state. We find fluctuations in the final result due to the decoherence noise of the qubits.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Visual Generation in the New Era: An Evolution from Atomic Mapping to Agentic World Modeling

Recent visual generation models have made major progress in photorealism, typography, instruction following, and interactive editing, yet they still struggle with spatial reasoning, persistent state, long-horizon consistency, and causal understanding. We argue that the field should move beyond appearance synthesis toward intelligent visual generation: plausible visuals grounded in structure, dynamics, domain knowledge, and causal relations. To frame this shift, we introduce a five-level taxonomy: Atomic Generation, Conditional Generation, In-Context Generation, Agentic Generation, and World-Modeling Generation, progressing from passive renderers to interactive, agentic, world-aware generators. We analyze key technical drivers, including flow matching, unified understanding-and-generation models, improved visual representations, post-training, reward modeling, data curation, synthetic data distillation, and sampling acceleration. We further show that current evaluations often overestimate progress by emphasizing perceptual quality while missing structural, temporal, and causal failures. By combining benchmark review, in-the-wild stress tests, and expert-constrained case studies, this roadmap offers a capability-centered lens for understanding, evaluating, and advancing the next generation of intelligent visual generation systems.

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

Minimal Oversight: Uncertainty-Aware Governance for Delegated AI Systems

arXiv:2606.15563v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI systems increasingly delegate decisions to specialized models, evaluators, tools, and supervisory controllers. The central AI problem is no longer only model accuracy, but uncertainty-aware governance: how much autonomy to grant, which evidence should calibrate trust, what performance ceiling a delegated AI system can sustain, and when human intervention becomes necessary. We propose the Minimum Sufficient Oversight Principle (MSO), a variational principle for principled autonomy delegation: minimize governance burden on the Fisher information manifold subject to a delivery constraint. The resulting Euler-Lagrange solution yields a water-filling allocation of governed delegation across the task space. Building on a revealed-action governed delegation channel model, we prove a capacity theorem for stationary symbolwise review policies, derive a local first-order approximation relating workflow complexity to quality degradation, and give a drift-dominated autonomy-time scaling law linking intervention timing to effective capacity, complexity, and drift. Within this framework, masking appears as a structural AI-governance pathology: corrected performance can hide the competence signal needed to calibrate trust. Synthetic simulations and a semi-real reconstructed workflow support design prescriptions including upstream-first correction, sensitivity-based intervention, and explicit feasibility checks before autonomy is expanded. The result is a computable framework for uncertainty, planning, and oversight in delegated AI systems. A companion Python package is available at https://github.com/crbazevedo/delegation-lab.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Emission of time-ordered photon pairs from a coherently-driven Kerr microcavity

arXiv:2601.06468v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Weakly-interacting many-body systems possess remarkable quantum properties that are essential components of quantum technologies, and constitute a topic of fundamental interest. Here we show that in a solid-state nonlinear microcavity embedding discrete modes of exciton-dressed photons, we can isolate a single eigenmode of quantum fluctuations from the much brighter coherent fraction of the field. In this regime, we perform frequency- and time-resolved correlations measurements between photons on the red and blue side of the fluctuations spectrum. When the average number of fluctuation quanta is smaller than one, we observe the formation of large pairwise time-ordered correlations: red photon first and blue photon second. We show that this peculiar time-ordering correlation emerges spontaneously from the interplay between frequency-resolved detection, and the non-trivial internal quantum structure of the elementary fluctuations.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Realistic noise synthesis reduces bias and improves tissue microstructure estimation with supervised machine learning

arXiv:2606.02044v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion MRI enables non-invasive probing of tissue microstructure, but accurate parameter estimation is challenged by noise-related effects. In supervised machine learning frameworks trained on simulated data, discrepancies between the noise characteristics of simulated and acquired signals introduce a form of covariate shift, whereby the input signal distribution differs between training and inference. We investigated the impact of this mismatch on microstructure parameter estimation and propose a realistic noise synthesis (RNS) framework to mitigate it. RNS incorporates both the Rician expectation and the effective post-processing noise variance into simulated training signals. The Rician expectation was modelled using a noise standard deviation estimated with MPPCA, while the effective standard deviation was derived from spherical harmonic residuals of preprocessed data. The method was evaluated using the cylinder-zeppelin and the SANDI models on simulated datasets across multiple SNR levels and on in vivo diffusion data with repeated acquisitions. Sensitivity to noise misestimation was also assessed. Ignoring magnitude-induced noise effects during training produced systematic, SNR-dependent parameter bias, particularly at low SNR. Incorporating the Rician expectation substantially reduced bias to the level of noise-aware nonlinear least-squares fitting. Modelling the effective standard deviation further improved precision. Performance was largely independent of regression architecture but sensitive to accurate noise estimation. These findings demonstrate that realistic noise modelling in simulated training data mitigates signal-domain covariate shift and is essential for unbiased supervised microstructure estimation, particularly in low-SNR regimes associated with high b-values or high spatial resolution.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

How Useful is Causal Invariance for Domain Adaptation in Finite-Sample Settings?

arXiv:2606.12680v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine learning models often degrade when they are deployed on a target distribution that differs from the source distributions they were trained on. Recent work in causality-based domain generalization has shown how shared causal structure between domains can induce invariant predictors, e.g., models on a subset of features which have stable risk across structured domain shifts. However, the extent to which such population-level causal invariances can lead to gains in finite-sample settings remains underexplored. In particular, in practice we often have access to a few labeled target samples, a setting called supervised domain adaptation (sDA). In this paper, we explore when (full or partial) causal knowledge can provably improve supervised domain adaptation. As a first step, we study linear regression, where full or partial causal knowledge specifies a collection of invariant or possibly invariant feature subsets, each yielding a source-trained candidate predictor. We derive matching upper and lower bounds showing that finite-sample gains are governed by the target-risk margins separating the candidates, together with the finite-source estimation error. When these margins are sufficiently large relative to $n_Q$, an adaptive aggregation procedure can match the best candidate predictor while avoiding negative transfer relative to target-only learning. On the other hand, when the margins are too small, no algorithm can reliably exploit the candidate collection to obtain faster finite-sample rates. We further connect these margins to structural shift magnitude in linear SCMs and validate the theory on real-world causal benchmarks.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Neural Posterior Estimation of Terrain Parameters from Radar Sounder Data

arXiv:2605.08179v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Radar sounders are electromagnetic instruments that can probe deep into the subsurface of Earth and other planetary bodies by processing the echo of transmitted radar waves. Conventional approaches for analyzing such data rely on approximate assumptions and often produce point estimates that ignore parameter correlations as well as galactic and measurement noise. We propose a simulation-based inference approach to terrain parameter inversion from radar sounder data, where synthetic observations from a GPU-based simulator are used to train a neural network-based density estimator for neural posterior estimation (NPE). By explicitly conditioning on reference surface assumptions, the proposed framework allows systematic evaluation of posterior robustness to reference surface variability. We demonstrate that our NPE model is well calibrated on simulated data and transferable to real Mars radar profiles, where we analyze terrain parameters using literature-informed reference values.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Efficient certification of intractable quantum states with few Pauli measurements

arXiv:2511.07300v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Efficient verification of quantum computational resources is crucial as experiments advance toward fault-tolerance. Universal quantum computation can be achieved by consuming resource states through simple Pauli measurements, yet a significant gap remains between states that are easy to certify and those required for universality. We focus on Clifford-enhanced Product States, a class of resource states obtained by applying Clifford circuits to a product of single-qubit, potentially magic, states. While essential for universal computation, the certification of such states has previously relied on query oracles that are \#P-hard to implement, leaving their efficient, oracle-free verification an open challenge. In this work, we demonstrate that such classically intractable resource states can be efficiently verified using only Pauli measurements. Our protocol achieves sample- and time-efficiency in both i.i.d.\ and adversarial settings. This work fills a gap in Pauli-based certification, providing a new practical pathway to verify resource states that drive universal Pauli-based quantum computation.

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

Grouped Query Experts: Mixture-of-Experts on GQA Self-Attention

arXiv:2606.20945v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Self-attention is central to Transformer performance and is often the most expensive part of the Transformer at long context lengths because its pairwise token interactions scale quadratically with sequence length. Standard dense attention also applies the same set of attention heads to every token regardless of token difficulty or information content. This uniform activation can waste compute, especially as sequences grow longer and attention cost increases rapidly. We propose Grouped Query Experts (GQE), a mixture-of-experts layer on top of grouped-query attention (GQA). Within each GQA group, a router selects k query-head experts per token while all key-value (KV) heads remain dense and unchanged. Thus, GQE keeps the KV cache benefits of GQA and reduces only the active query-head computation. On a fixed 30B token budget at the 250M parameter scale, GQE matches the all-active GQA baseline in downstream accuracy while activating half the query heads per token.

13.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

GeroQubit: a lightweight, honesty-first de-novo design platform for geroscience-native small molecules with calibrated uncertainty

Authors:

Computational molecule generation has outpaced its own credibility. We present GeroQubit, a GPU-free de-novo design platform that organizes candidates along a target x tissue x hallmark model and reports every signal alongside its measured baseline. We treat our tissue aging-signature readout as a mechanistic structural prior that we explicitly disclose is not validated against lifespan, and we surface efficacy only through a structure-to-lifespan k-NN whose weak but real signal (leave-one-out rho ~ 0.145) is wrapped in empirically-calibrated conformal intervals (90% target, 90.3% measured coverage). On a held-out retrospective recovery of ~1,940 ChEMBL binders against decoys, the score reaches ROC-AUC 0.945 with ~20x enrichment at 1% (BEDROC 0.91) and survives a scaffold-disjoint split - yet we report that it collapses to near-random (AUC 0.62) on genuinely novel chemotypes. Molecules are assembled reaction-first, so every candidate carries a verified synthetic route and atom-level synthon provenance; ADMET is handled as a multi-objective Pareto problem. We frame the disclosed weak signals and the hard-case failures not as flaws but as the honest, decision-useful output the field's own critics demand.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Talking to Your Data: Exploring Embodied Conversation as an Interface for Personal Health Reflection

arXiv:2606.17767v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Personal health data from wearables are typically presented through dashboards of charts and summary statistics, requiring users to actively interpret patterns and implications. We explore an alternative interaction paradigm: engaging with personal health data through an embodied conversational agent that facilitates objective data reflection in dialogue with the user. We present a system that combines lightweight preprocessing of wearable data with a Unity-based embodied character. Internally, the system follows a dual-agent design in which an Observer agent extracts descriptive statistics and temporal trends, and a Presenter agent communicates these findings through "spoken statistics," intentionally refraining from clinical advice to isolate the impact of the interaction modality. We evaluate this approach through a simulated-self user study (N=5) using a within-subject design. Participants adopted health personas and goals derived from the LifeSnaps dataset to compare traditional dashboard exploration with embodied conversational reflection. Our evaluation focuses on perceived understanding, the specificity of generated actions, and the cognitive shift from passive viewing to active sensemaking. The paper contributes a functional prototype, a design pattern for objective health data narrative generation, and early empirical insights into how embodiment affects the interpretation of personal health metrics.

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

SENTINEL: Failure-Driven Reinforcement Learning for Training Tool-Using Language Model Agents

Language model agents are increasingly effective in solving realistic tasks through multi-turn tool use. However, training reliable tool-using agents remains challenging in practice. While reinforcement learning provides an on-policy paradigm for improving agents from their own environment interactions, its effectiveness depends heavily on the training task distribution. When tasks are fixed before training, the task distribution can become increasingly mismatched with the policy's evolving capabilities, causing many rollouts to be spent on uninformative tasks. We propose SENTINEL, a failure-driven reinforcement learning framework that turns the Solver's rollout failures into targeted training tasks. SENTINEL follows a Controller–Proposer–Solver loop: the Controller analyzes failed trajectories and summarizes recurring error patterns, the Proposer generates executable tasks that stress these weaknesses, and the Solver is trained on the targeted tasks. On Tau2-Bench Retail with Qwen3-4B-Thinking-2507, SENTINEL improves Pass\^{}1 from 66.4 to 74.9 and outperforms RL on general synthetic tasks across Pass\^{}k metrics. These results demonstrate that model failures provide an effective and scalable source of targeted training signal for improving tool-using language model agents.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Fast and Slow Variational Continual Learning

arXiv:2606.24007v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Continual learning remains a major challenge for modern deep networks, partly because commonly used optimizers lack inherent mechanisms for continual adaptation. One such natural mechanism is fast and slow adaptation to balance stability and plasticity. This mechanism has deep roots in neuroscience and biology, but there is no consensus on how to best incorporate it in commonly used optimizers. Here, we show that this can be easily done via the VCL framework, where past posteriors are used as priors in the future. Our key idea is to incorporate slow adaptation via merging of past posteriors to slow down the drift in the knowledge as learning progresses. The merged posterior is then used as the prior in the VCL update to implement the fast-weight updates. These steps can be seamlessly implemented in the IVON optimizer, whose form and costs are nearly identical to that of Adam. We call this new optimizer the Continual IVON (CoVON) optimizer and show that it not only consistently improves over existing VCL optimizers, but also performs better than other weight-regularization strategies across domain-incremental learning, continual pre-training, and fine-tuning of large language models.

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

A Clinician-Centered Pipeline for Annotation and Evaluation in Ultrasound AI Studies

arXiv:2606.19174v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Clinician-centered evaluation is critical for validating medical AI systems, especially in ultrasound imaging where quantitative metrics do not always capture clinical usability. Existing medical image platforms primarily focus on dataset labeling. They lack integrated support for blinded model comparison and reproducible evaluation workflows. We present a clinician-centered pipeline for remote annotation and evaluation in ultrasound AI studies. The proposed pipeline uses a centralized server and lightweight browser interfaces to enable clinicians to perform annotation, blinded ranking, and review without local dataset downloads. The pipeline also supports multi-rater participation, centralized result aggregation, and automated statistical analysis. We validate the pipeline in a fetal ultrasound segmentation study with six raters spanning expert, generalist, and non-expert experience levels. The system automatically generated Spearman correlation, Kendall's $\tau$, and top-1 selection statistics. Results indicated moderate to strong agreement across experts and other groups. The blinded evaluation results showed a tendency for later active learning models to be preferred. These outcomes suggest that the pipeline can support clinician-centered annotation and reproducible human-\ac{AI} evaluation studies in ultrasound imaging. The proposed pipeline is available on \href{https://github.com/13204942/SonoRate}{GitHub}.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Approximation Properties of Evolutionary Dynamics in Continuous-Time Finite State Space Games

Authors:

arXiv:2606.11193v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This thesis studies the convergence of finite-population stochastic evolutionary dynamics to their deterministic mean-field limit in continuous-time finite state space games. We first develop refined ergodic theorems for Markov chains with a single positive-recurrent class, guaranteeing the existence of a unique invariant distribution and almost-sure convergence of time averages. Next, we prove that the mean-field model, described by a system of Lipschitz-continuous ordinary differential equations, admits a unique solution that depends continuously on its initial condition and that constitutes the almost-sure limit for the empirical distributions with fixed policy. Furthermore, we show that every Mixed Stationary Nash Equilibrium of the mean-field game is approximated by a Nash equilibrium of the corresponding $N$-player game within an error $\epsilon$ for sufficiently large $N$. We finally demonstrate, by Kurtz's theorem, that the empirical state-policy distribution converges in probability to the mean-field trajectory. Numerical simulations conducted in MATLAB confirm the theoretical $\mathcal{O}(N^{-1/2})$ convergence rate in both models across a range of population sizes.

19.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

Systematic functional annotation of thousands of BAHD acyltransferases in plant genomes using Protein Language Model and phylogenomic tools

The functional annotation of plant genes lags significantly behind their genomic annotation. Closing this gap requires thorough cataloging of reported protein activities alongside predictive methods that scale beyond sequence-similarity inference. Focusing on the BAHD acyltransferase enzyme family as a model, we assembled FuncZymeDB-BAHD, a large database of 2,705 LLM-retrieved and curated enzyme-acceptor-donor activities covering 336 BAHDs from 156 plant species, a 2-to-6-fold expansion over Swiss-Prot and prior compilations. We further developed FuncPred-OG, which maps queries to orthologous groups and previously characterized enzymes in FuncZymeDB-BAHD, returning hits with high evidence provenance. FuncPred-OG enabled functional prediction of over half of BAHDs across 85 plant proteomes, of which five novel predictions were validated via in vitro assays and recent studies. For the remaining BAHDs without FuncPred-OG annotation, we developed FuncPred-AI, where logistic-regression classifiers trained on protein language model embeddings achieved high Area-Under-the-Precision-Recall-curve (AUPR) scores and correct-hit rates up to 93%. FuncPred-AI yielded >1 probable donor/acceptor annotation for 99.9% (8894/8897) of BAHDs in our pan-plant dataset. Finally, the FuncPred workflow and datasets were deployed on a web portal for broader utilization, potentially reducing experimentalist efforts for selecting candidates from days to minutes. Overall, this framework provides a generalizable template for functional annotation of entire enzyme families.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Optimizing bias-tailored quantum error correction beyond code-capacity noise

arXiv:2606.17709v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We find that the substantial advantages predicted for bias-tailored quantum error correction (QEC) under code-capacity noise are strongly reduced once realistic syndrome extraction and circuit-level noise models are considered. We start by comparing XZZX codes to rectangular surface codes with a bias-dependent optimised anisotropy. Although code-capacity simulations predict an advantage of rectangular surface codes in the limit of high noise bias, this actually disappears under circuit-level noise, making the XZZX codes the preferred and simplest choice even for platforms that allow for a flexible variation of the code layout adapted to changes in noise calibration. Our results identify bias degradation during syndrome extraction under circuit-level noise as the central limitation of biased-tailored QEC. To partially mitigate this effect, we introduce a bias-filtering CNOT gadget that temporarily encodes the ancillary target qubit during syndrome extraction in a repetition code and, upon measurement and feed forward, manages to reduce the bias degradation. In a regime of high-bias and low-idle errors, this bias-filtering gadget yields a few-percent relative improvement of the XZZX code error threshold, demonstrating that lightweight bias-filtering strategies can recover part of the lost bias-tailoring advantage for realistic circuit-level noise.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

External Experience Serving in Production LLM Systems: A Deployment-Oriented Study of Quality-Cost Trade-offs

Production LLM systems accumulate reusable operational experience, but the practical deployment issue is not merely whether such experience can help. It is how different serving strategies trade off quality against online cost under realistic constraints. Injecting external experience can improve task quality, yet it also increases prompt burden, latency, and serving pressure. We study external experience serving as a deployment-oriented quality-cost trade-off problem. We evaluate this question in a real production moderation setting, with tool-use and GPQA as supporting contrast tasks that expose different output-cost regimes. We compare no-experience baselines, random experience controls, global prompt injection, and retrieval-based selective injection, and analyze both task quality and serving cost. The results show that, once experience becomes case-dependent, selective retrieval provides a stronger operating point than unconditional global injection. They further show that retrieval quality matters more than simply increasing Top-$K$, and that the same serving policy can exhibit substantially different cost-benefit profiles across short-output and decode-heavy regimes. These findings suggest that external experience is best treated as a selective, cost-aware serving decision rather than as a universal add-on. Overall, in the settings studied here, external experience pays off only when both the serving interface and the task-specific cost structure make its quality gains worth the online cost.

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

When Do Data-Driven Systems Exhibit the Capability to Infer?

arXiv:2606.11769v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The European AI Act is the first comprehensive regulation of artificial intelligence (AI), setting out extensive obligations, particularly for so-called high-risk and general-purpose AI systems. A key distinguishing feature of AI systems under the AI Act is the capability to infer. Since the AI Act does not clearly define what inference is, there is a gray area for certain data-driven systems. A specific example is credit scoring systems, which are listed by Annex III of the AI Act. At the same time, however, these are often implemented using statistical models for which it is unclear whether they have the capability to infer and thus fall under the AI definition of the AI Act at all. Motivated by statistical learning theory, this work develops a framework for grading different levels of the capability to infer. Based on the AI Act and the Commission Guidelines on the definition of an artificial intelligence system, we analyze which levels constitute sufficient capability to infer within the meaning of the AI Act and where further regulatory clarity is needed. We illustrate the framework by creating two realistic credit scoring workflows and show whether and where inference occurs in them. Our analysis illustrates that not only individual models but the entire data processing workflow must be considered. It also shows that the involvement of human experts during development can have significant influence on the capability to infer. Code can be found at https://github.com/fraunhofer-iais/inference-framework-creditscorecards.

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

Calibrated Sampling-Free Uncertainty Estimation in Bayesian Deep Learning

arXiv:2606.16214v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern deep learning models remain notoriously prone to overconfidence, limiting their reliability in high-stakes applications. Bayesian methods aim to counter this by learning a distribution over model parameters, and recent advances now make this feasible for large-scale architectures at costs comparable to AdamW. However, a challenge remains at test time: predictions must be averaged across many forward passes with weights sampled from the posterior, which is prohibitively expensive. Variance propagation offers an efficient alternative, computing layer-wise analytical approximations of uncertainty in a single forward pass. While such techniques are effective for MLPs, their extension to modern architectures remains challenging, due to increased depth and diversity of layer types. To fill this gap, we propose Calibrated Variance Propagation (CVP), which introduces a new propagation method for normalization layers, combines it with recent techniques for handling activation functions, and absorbs residual error through a light calibration step. CVP yields comparably accurate uncertainty estimates to MC sampling across transformers and CNNs, at a fraction of the cost. Against prior variance propagation work, CVP improves coverage at $0.5\%$ risk from $8.2\%$ to $14.6\%$ with BEiT-3 on Visual Reasoning (NLVR2) and from $2.6\%$ to $10.8\%$ with ViLT on VQAv2, with gains extending to convolutional architectures.

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

How Far Can Chord-Symbol Time-Series Adaptation Carry Genre Identity? Capabilities and Boundaries in Multi-Genre Chord-Symbol Modeling

Authors:

arXiv:2606.07334v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This report treats chord-symbol sequences as an interpretable, controllable time series for genre-local harmonic modeling. The frozen Music Transformer base - released as a pop-jazz fine-tune endpoint but verified in this revision weight-identical to the pop-only Phase-0 baseline, so all gains are measured over a pure-pop prior (see Changes in v2) - is extended to eleven target genres: blues, bossa nova, Bach chorales, country, electronic, folk, funk, gospel, hip-hop, R&B/soul, and rock. The main evaluation compares LoRA, IA3, BitFit, prefix tuning, and full fine-tuning over 11 genres and 3 seeds, a complete 165-cell grid. All five methods improve over the frozen base on held-out chord prediction (macro gains +2.89 to +3.61 percentage points); LoRA and IA3 score highest, but pairwise Wilcoxon tests with Holm and Benjamini-Hochberg correction do not support a decisive winner. A matched-data-size control sharpens this: at a common corpus size IA3 stays on top while LoRA drops to last, so the small method gaps are partly data-driven rather than representational. A control-token baseline is also strong, and wrong-genre adapters often beat the frozen base, suggesting the adaptation effect is largely lightweight conditioning over a reusable harmonic base rather than genre-specific adapter memory. Further diagnostics (rank sweeps, wrong-genre rotation, a base-checkpoint ablation that v2 reinterprets as a same-weights control, chord-only genre classification, output-distribution statistics, real-song evaluation, duplicate analysis) support a bounded conclusion: chord-symbol adaptation reliably improves genre-local harmonic prediction, but chord symbols alone do not carry complete genre identity. Perceived genre authenticity and musical quality are left to controlled listener evaluation.

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

LiteOdyssey: A Lightweight Reasoning AI Agent for Interpretable Rare-Disease Diagnosis

arXiv:2606.16149v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most medical AI systems improve by scaling additional machinery: more fine-tuning data, more agents, and/or larger retrieval databases. In rare-disease diagnosis, however, such scaling can produce systems that are difficult to deploy, audit, and maintain. We asked whether state-of-the-art diagnostic performance could instead be achieved by extending the reasoning chain of a single AI agent: guiding it with a diagnostic policy, developed through human-AI collaboration and augmenting with freely available biomedical tools. We introduce LiteOdyssey, a lightweight rare-disease diagnostic framework that guides reasoning language model through a clinical genetics workflow. This framework was developed through Policy Iteration with Human Feedback (PIHF) and uses dynamic access to public biomedical tools. On two challenging benchmarks that provide only patient clinical features, LiteOdyssey achieved state-of-the-art performance, with an overall disease Recall@1 of 59.3% over the combined 1,243 cases of LIRICAL (n = 370) and the PhenoPacket Store (n = 873). Both benchmarks have a high proportion of ultra-rare disease (a prevalence below 1 in 1,000,000, with ultra-rare shares of approximately 45% and 52.8%, respectively). On the more difficult PhenoPacket subset, where causal diseases were not mapped to Orphanet in our rarity-mapping pipeline, LiteOdyssey achieved 60.7% Recall@1, compared with 10.7% for the same baseline model (GPT-5.4) without tools. This performance was achieved without fine-tuning, multi-agent ensembles, or a large case-retrieval database. Gains were also observed in the following: on cases never seen during development, on a private cohort of real-world rare disease patients, and on a smaller open-weights model. LiteOdyssey suggests a path toward rare-disease AI systems that are accurate, easier to deploy, and more transparent for physician review.