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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

OTCHA: Optimal Transport-driven Confidence-aware Latent Hub Alignment for Multi-View Medical Image Classification

Multi-view imaging, such as mammography and chest radiography, is a standard component of clinical practice. However, medical images are often unregistered and contain view-specific artifacts or irrelevant background cues that can obscure diagnostically relevant findings. Many existing methods directly fuse per-view representations, allowing such irrelevant content to contaminate the fused embedding and reducing robustness under varying view configurations. We propose OTCHA, a confidence-aware latent hub token alignment module based on optimal transport (OT) that refines patch tokens before fusion for multi-view classification. OTCHA introduces a set of learnable latent hub tokens shared across views. For each view, we compute an OT plan between patch tokens and hub tokens that jointly considers feature similarity and geometry, and augment the OT formulation with token-conditional dustbins to enable partial matching and discard irrelevant tokens. The resulting transport plan provides token-wise matching confidence, which gates hub-mediated message passing and weights a novel optimal-transport-based representation alignment loss to stabilize refinement. Experiments on three multi-view medical image datasets demonstrate consistent improvements over competing baselines across diverse anatomies and view configurations. Our code is available at https://github.com/labhai/OTCHA.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Towards a future space-based, highly scalable AI infrastructure system design

arXiv:2511.19468v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: If AI is a foundational general-purpose technology, we should anticipate that demand for AI compute – and energy – will continue to grow. The Sun is by far the largest energy source in our solar system, and thus it warrants consideration how future AI infrastructure could most efficiently tap into that power. This work explores a scalable compute system for machine learning in space, using fleets of satellites equipped with solar arrays, inter-satellite links using free-space optics, and Google tensor processing unit (TPU) accelerator chips. To facilitate high-bandwidth, low-latency inter-satellite communication, the satellites would be flown in close proximity. We illustrate the basic approach to formation flight via an 81-satellite cluster of 1 km radius, and describe an approach for using high-precision ML-based models to control large-scale constellations. Trillium TPUs are radiation tested. They survive a total ionizing dose equivalent to a 5 year mission life without permanent failures, and are characterized for bit-flip errors. Launch costs are a critical part of overall system cost; a learning curve analysis suggests launch to low-Earth orbit (LEO) may reach $\lesssim$\$200/kg by the mid-2030s.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

ThousandWorlds: A benchmark for climate emulation of potentially habitable exoplanets

arXiv:2606.18338v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The search for life beyond Earth will depend on detecting faint signatures in the atmospheres of potentially habitable exoplanets. Interpreting those signatures requires understanding the host planet's climate: the same molecule may signal life on one planet and abiotic chemistry on another. Global climate models (GCMs) provide this understanding, but individual runs can require up to millions of core-hours and substantial domain expert time. Machine-learning emulators could remove this bottleneck, but progress has been limited by the absence of a curated, multi-model exoclimate dataset. We introduce ThousandWorlds, an ML-ready benchmark for exoclimate emulation and for the broader regime of low-data, multi-simulator, parameter-to-field regression. The dataset contains approximately 1800 simulations from five GCMs, mapping eight planet parameters to 3D atmospheric fields including temperature, humidity, winds, clouds, and radiation. Three nested subsets define progressively harder challenges: single-simulator regression, multi-simulator regression with complete observations, and multi-simulator regression with structured missingness. We propose two evaluation protocols: one for ranking methods, and one that measures performance relative to the disagreement between GCMs themselves. We evaluate seven baselines spanning simple methods, deep learning, and Gaussian processes. GP-based methods perform best, suggesting that ThousandWorlds exposes a regime where off-the-shelf deep learning does not yet succeed. Data: https://doi.org/10.57967/hf/8695. Code: https://github.com/edstevenson/ThousandWorlds.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Evaluating Open-Source LLMs for Multi-Label ATT&CK Technique Classification on CTI Reports

arXiv:2606.18166v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Classifying Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) using MITRE Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge (ATT&CK) is essential for proactive defense, but historically required extensive human effort. Pre-Large Language Model (LLM) automation sped up this process, but could not resolve the complex language and multi-step attack patterns found in unstructured CTI reports. LLMs addressed previous limitations by using contextual reasoning to understand unstructured text. However, current evaluations rely on simplified, single-technique sentences that ignore the complexity of real-world CTI reports, which often leads to inflated performance results. Consequently, the baseline performance of open-source LLMs on complex unstructured CTI reports remains unevaluated. To address this gap, we constructed a ground-truth dataset of 2,076 human-annotated sentences (1,281 technique-positive, 795 negative) from 83 complex unstructured CTI reports. These sentences were mapped to 114 unique ATT&CK techniques using a six-phase annotation process, achieving \k{appa} = 0.68 inter-annotator agreement. Using this dataset, we evaluated seven open-source LLMs ranging from 8B to 236B parameters across prompt strategy and temperature configurations. The highest-performing LLM achieved a micro-averaged F1 score of 0.22, establishing the empirical baseline for multi-label ATT&CK classification on complex unstructured CTI. Parameter size showed a statistically significant positive correlation with F1 score. Prompt strategy and temperature produced no statistically significant gains across model configurations. These results indicate that current open-source LLMs are insufficient for production-grade ATT&CK classification. The dataset, benchmark, and findings provide a reproducible foundation for future CTI research.

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

Structural MRI Synthesis for Alzheimer's Disease via Conditional Diffusion on Anatomical Masks

arXiv:2606.18354v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in generative machine learning models have significantly improved medical imaging, offering promising solutions for data augmentation, privacy preservation, and improved model generalization. However, synthesizing high-quality structural MRI data for Alzheimer's Disease (AD) remains challenging due to the subtle, region-specific, and progressive anatomical changes associated with neurodegeneration. In this paper, we extend the Med-DDPM conditional diffusion model – originally designed for brain tumor synthesis – to generate 3D structural MRIs specifically tailored to AD. We adopted Med-DDPM due to its established stability and structural fidelity compared to other generative models, which makes it particularly suitable for capturing the subtle anatomical changes characteristic of AD. Our approach conditions the diffusion process on anatomical segmentation masks derived from the ADNI dataset, incorporating key AD-relevant brain structures into the generation process. We systematically evaluate the quality and utility of the synthetic images by training segmentation models on real, synthetic, and hybrid (mixed) datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that segmentation models trained exclusively on synthetic data achieve comparable Dice scores (0.6532) to those trained on real data (0.6513), while exhibiting significantly enhanced recall. Notably, models trained on hybrid datasets (mixing real and synthetic images) outperform both real and synthetic-only baselines, achieving a Dice score of 0.7244. These findings underscore the successful use of conditional diffusion models for generating anatomically accurate, AD-specific synthetic MRIs, and highlight their potential for enhancing training data availability, improving diagnostic accuracy, and promoting research reproducibility in neuroimaging studies.

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

Hierarchical Multi-Modal Retrieval for Knowledge-Grounded News Image Captioning

Traditional image captioning methods often struggle to generate comprehensive, context-rich descriptions, especially for details not directly observable from visual cues. To overcome this, we propose a novel retrieval-augmented image captioning framework that generates captions with deeper insights, such as object attributes, event context, and underlying significance, by leveraging external knowledge. Our approach features a hierarchical multi-modal article retrieval mechanism that moves beyond monolithic text entities. This retrieval considers article structure-aware features, including weighted textual components (e.g., headlines, body sections) and visual placement patterns, alongside multi-faceted similarity computations (content–visual, visual–visual, and discourse positioning). A subsequent contextual relevance refinement stage further enhances the retrieved information. The retrieved articles then serve as the knowledge base for caption generation: first, a VLM generates a concise image description; second, we segment relevant information from the retrieved articles based on this description; and finally, an LLM utilizes both the description and extracted knowledge to generate a comprehensive, contextually detailed caption. We participated in the ACM Multimedia EVENTA 2025 Challenge and achieved 5th place with an overall score of 0.2824 on the private test set of the OpenEvent-V1 dataset. Source code is publicly released at https://github.com/mf0212/EVENTA-Challange.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Squeeze-Release: Iterative Pruning with Exact Structural Minimization

arXiv:2606.14346v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unstructured pruning produces sparse weight tensors, but the standard implementation keeps tensor shapes unchanged so the deployed model is no smaller than before pruning. We present an exact structural rewrite, which we call minimization, that converts a masked network into a smaller dense network with the same forward function up to floating-point rounding. The Squeeze-Release cycle iterates pruning and minimization with an intermediate release step that re-enables the exact-zero positions inside the compacted tensors as small calibrated noise, turning otherwise wasted capacity back into trainable parameters. Successive cycles use that capacity to find structural redundancy a single pass cannot reach. We additionally introduce CompensatedLayerNorm, a function-preserving replacement for LayerNorm that extends minimization to channel reduction across LayerNorm-equipped residual streams. Squeeze-Release compresses the deployable network to 39x smaller than the unpruned model on a fully-connected model network and 14.8x smaller on modern CNN (ConvNeXt-Tiny), at comparable accuracy. In addition we prove that the rewrite can be extended to transformer architectures.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Epipolar Geometry Improves Video Generation Models

Video generation models have advanced significantly through the latent diffusion transformers trained with rectified flow techniques. Yet these models still struggle with geometric inconsistencies, unstable motion, and visual artifacts that break the illusion of realistic 3D scenes. 3D-consistent video generation could significantly impact numerous downstream applications in generation and reconstruction tasks. We explore how epipolar geometry constraints improve modern video diffusion models. Despite using massive training data, these models fail to capture fundamental geometric principles. We align diffusion models using pairwise epipolar geometry constraints via preference-based optimization, directly addressing unstable trajectories and geometric artifacts through mathematically principled geometric enforcement. Our approach efficiently enforces geometric principles without requiring end-to-end differentiability. Evaluation demonstrates that classical geometric constraints provide more stable optimization signals than modern learned metrics. Training on static scenes with dynamic cameras ensures metric quality while the model generalizes to various dynamic scenes. By bridging data-driven learning with classical computer vision, we reduce epipolar error by 31% and improve human-rated consistency from 54% to 72% without compromising visual quality.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Stealthy World Model Manipulation via Data Poisoning

arXiv:2606.18697v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model-based learning agents use learned world models to predict future states, plan actions, and adapt to new environments. However, the process of updating world models from collected experience creates a training-time attack surface: adversarially poisoned fine-tuning trajectories can manipulate the learned dynamics and thereby corrupt downstream planning. In this paper, we propose SWAAP, the first two-stage data poisoning framework for learned world models. In the first stage, SWAAP identifies a harmful target world model that induces low-return behavior under planning while remaining close to clean dynamics, using first-order bilevel optimization enabled by a transition-gradient theorem. In the second stage, SWAAP realizes this target through stealth-constrained gradient matching, modifying only a limited fraction of fine-tuning transition targets so that the induced training gradients steer the victim model toward the adversarial target, while a prediction-error regularizer encourages the poisoned targets to remain close to the world model's natural approximation error. To assess attack stealthiness, we evaluate defenses and detectability across three stages of the poisoning pipeline: pre-training detection of poisoned transitions, robust training during fine-tuning, and test-time monitoring of the resulting world model. Across diverse continuous-control tasks, SWAAP causes substantial performance degradation while keeping poisoned transitions close to clean data and evading the evaluated non-adaptive residual/CUSUM/TRIM-style defenses. These results reveal a practical vulnerability in world-model adaptation pipelines and highlight the need for robustness methods that protect both world-model training data and learned dynamics.

10.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

An AI-Powered Trisomy 21 Research Assistant

Down syndrome, caused by trisomy 21, increases the risk of diverse co-occurring conditions. With more than 34,000 related publications indexed in PubMed as of early 2026, keeping pace with this expanding literature is challenging. While general-purpose large language models are widely used for information retrieval, they often rely on broad training data rather than specific evidence. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves rigor and reliability of responses by linking model outputs to source texts. In research, source texts are peer-reviewed articles. Standard implementations treat all manuscript sections equally, allowing background text to rank as highly as experimental results. To focus model outputs on experimentally supported responses, we developed the T21 Research Assistant, a section-aware RAG system that prioritizes Results sections to ground responses in primary experimental evidence. The system draws exclusively from 1,789 open-access Down syndrome publications from PubMed Central, including 327 NIH INCLUDE-funded studies, and uses a multistage pipeline for query validation, retrieval, reranking, synthesis, and citation verification. Built on NVIDIA Nemotron models, it generates structured, cited responses. Evaluation using expert-curated questions demonstrated strong performance, achieving a BERTScore F1 of 0.712 and recall of 0.758, comparable to or exceeding leading proprietary and open-source models. T21 Research Assistant is available at: https://bioinformatics.cuanschutz.edu/t21-res-assi/

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Noise-Adaptive Predictive Dynamical Decoupling

arXiv:2606.15769v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protecting quantum coherence against realistic environmental noise remains one of the fundamental obstacles to scalable quantum technologies. We develop a noise-adaptive dynamical decoupling framework that combines analytical open-quantum-system modeling with machine-learning-based forecasting for a qubit interacting with random telegraph noise. Unlike conventional dynamical decoupling protocols based on fixed pulse schedules, the proposed approach continuously forecasts short-time coherence evolution and adaptively applies control pulses according to the instantaneous noise dynamics. We investigate stationary and non-stationary environments spanning both Markovian and non-Markovian regimes. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the machine-learning-assisted adaptive control strategy substantially outperforms conventional periodic dynamical decoupling while using a comparable number of control pulses. The improvement becomes particularly pronounced in non-Markovian and non-stationary regimes, where memory effects, coherence revivals, and temporally evolving noise strongly limit the effectiveness of static pulse protocols. These results establish predictive machine-learning-assisted dynamical decoupling as a promising and scalable framework for adaptive quantum control in realistic noisy quantum devices.

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

Mind the Perspective: Let's Reason Recursively for Theory of Mind

arXiv:2606.11724v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Theory of Mind (ToM) reasoning requires inferring agents' beliefs from partial and asymmetric observations, which remains an open challenge for LLMs. Existing prompting-based approaches improve ToM reasoning through observable-event filtering or temporal belief chains, without explicitly modeling nested beliefs. We introduce RecToM, an inference-time framework for ToM reasoning that models nested beliefs via recursive perspective construction. RecToM constructs each character perspective from the preceding character perspective along the character chain specified by the question, reducing higher-order belief questions to actual-world questions within the final constructed perspective. We further provide a KD45 analysis showing that RecToM's perspective construction induces a well-formed belief modality beyond simple event filtering. Experiments on ToM benchmarks, including Hi-ToM, Big-ToM, and FanToM, across multiple LLM backbones show that RecToM consistently outperforms recent advanced approaches, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Notably, RecToM reaches 100\% accuracy on Hi-ToM with GPT-5.4 and Qwen3.5, a benchmark requiring higher-order ToM reasoning.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

EquiDexFlow: Contact-Grounded SE(3)-Equivariant Dexterous Grasp Generative Flows

Most learned dexterous grasp generators relegate contact forces to a downstream verification step, so a kinematically-plausible pose can still violate the conditions for a stable physical grasp. We address this with EquiDexFlow, an SE(3)-equivariant flow-matching model that jointly predicts wrist pose, joint angles, fingertip contacts, surface normals, and contact forces from an object point cloud. Our architecture projects contacts onto the object surface and forces into the Coulomb friction cone by construction, so placement and friction compliance hold without loss penalties. We prove end-to-end SE(3) equivariance and verify it empirically over 200 rotations, with wrist residuals below $0.04^\circ$ and exactly zero joint deviation. Trained on 8,100 force-closure grasps across 81 objects for the 16-DoF Allegro Hand, our model achieves zero friction violations, the best composite score, and the lowest wrench residual among all ablation variants. We retarget decoded fingertip contacts to a 16-DoF LEAP Hand via per-finger inverse kinematics, and our hardware-feasible refinement places every joint at least 5% inside its actuator envelope while preserving wrench balance. On the physical robot, retargeted EquiDexFlow-decoded grasps complete open-loop pick-and-hold trials on all six test objects, with every asymmetric object succeeding at both the canonical pose and a $120^\circ$ co-rotation. Videos, code, and checkpoints are available at https://equidexflow.github.io.

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

On the Variance of Temporal Difference Learning and its Reduction Using Control Variates

arXiv:2606.20357v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We analyze the variance of temporal difference (TD) learning using the phased setting with tabular representation, and show that one of the mechanisms behind its ability to reduce variance is by effectively aggregating over a larger number of independent trajectories. Based on this insight, we demonstrate that (1) the variance of TD is asymptotically bounded from above by Monte Carlo (MC) estimators, and (2) shorter horizon updates incurs less variance for a fixed number of samples. Beyond TD, we show that Direct Advantage Estimation (DAE), a method for estimating the advantage function, can be seen as a type of regression-adjusted control variate, which achieves a tighter bound on the variance compared to TD in the large-sample limit. Finally, we numerically illustrate the behaviors of these estimators with carefully designed environments.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

How Do Instructions Shape Speech? Cross-Attention Attribution for Style-Captioned Text-to-Speech

arXiv:2606.20532v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Style-captioned text-to-speech systems use natural language to control voice characteristics, but how individual words influence acoustic output remains unclear. Understanding this is critical for diagnosing failure modes and improving controllability in expressive TTS. We propose cross-attention attribution for speech diffusion models, adapting the DAAM framework to the speech domain for the first time, and apply it to CapSpeech-TTS. Our method extracts per-token heatmaps across 25 layers and 24 ODE steps. We analyze 3,600 (style caption, text transcript) combinations comprising 120 style captions conditioning the generation of 30 text transcripts each, revealing how caption tokens shape waveforms. Results show: (1) style tokens have lower temporal variance than content/function tokens, confirming global conditioning; (2) style attention correlates with F0 and energy; (3) style conditioning peaks in early steps and deep layers; (4) attention entropy reaches its minimum at layer 17, co-occurring with the style importance peak, indicating maximal network selectivity at the most style-critical stage. This is the first study of how natural language influences cross-attention in speech diffusion models

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

Prediction of Alzheimer's Disease Risk Factors from Retinal Images via Deep Learning: Development and Validation of Biologically Relevant Morphological Associations in the UK Biobank

The systemic, metabolic, lifestyle factors have established associations with Alzheimer's Disease (AD) through epidemiologic and AD-specific biomarker studies. Whether colored fundus photography (CFP) contains retinal structural signatures corresponding to these AD-related risk domains remains unclear. To determine whether deep learning (DL) models can predict 12 AD-related risk factors from CFP and to characterize the retinal structures underlying these predictions, thereby assessing whether CFP reflects pathways to AD vulnerability. Using 62,876 CFPs from 44,501 unique participants from the UK Biobank, DL models were trained to predict 12 factors linked to AD incidence: 6 categorical (sex, smoking, sleeplessness, economic status, alcohol use, depression) and 6 continuous (age, age at completing education, BMI, systolic, diastolic blood pressure, HbA1c). Model performance, model saliency, and saliency-derived scores (CAM-Score) were evaluated and compared to retinal morphometry. The scores were also compared between incident-AD cases (average 8.55 years before onset) and matched controls. Performance of DL ranged from AUROC= 0.5654-0.9480 for categorical and R2=-0.0291-0.7620 for continuous factors, outperforming most of the morphometry-machine learning models. Saliency-based score consistently highlighted biologically meaningful regions, particularly the optic nerve head and retinal vasculature. It also aligned with present morphometric variations. Several saliency-based scores differed significantly between incident AD and matched controls, suggesting potential overlap between retinal correlates of risk factors and preclinical AD-associated changes. CFP encodes retinal signatures linked to AD risk factors. Although not diagnostic, DL-derived retinal representations may uncover biologically meaningful risk-related structural changes mirroring the potential AD vulnerability.

17.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Gene ancestries reveal diverse microbial associations during eukaryogenesis

The origin of eukaryotes remains a central enigma in biology1. Continuing debates agree on the pivotal role of a symbiosis between an alphaproteobacterium and an Asgard archaeon2,3. However, the nature, timing and contributions of other potential bacterial partners4–6 and the role of interactions with viruses7–9 remain contentious. To address these questions, we used advanced phylogenomic approaches and comprehensive datasets spanning the known diversity of cellular life and viruses. Our analysis provided a revised reconstruction of the last eukaryotic common ancestor (LECA) proteome, in which we traced the phylogenetic origin of each protein family. We found compelling evidence for multiple waves of horizontal gene transfer from diverse bacterial donors, with some likely to have preceded mitochondrial endosymbiosis. We inferred plausible traits of the major donors and their functional contributions to the LECA. Our findings support a contribution of horizontal gene transfers to shaping the proteomes of pre-LECA ancestors and suggest a facilitating role of Nucleocytoviricota viruses. Taken together, our results suggest that ancient eukaryotes may have originated within complex microbial ecosystems through a succession of diverse associations that left a footprint of horizontally transferred genes. Phylogenomic reconstruction of the proteome of the last eukaryotic common ancestor sheds light on the origin of eukaryotes, indicating an important role of horizontal transfer of genes from diverse bacterial and viral donors.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

CRIS: Cross-Plane Self-Supervised Isotropic Restoration for Anisotropic Volumetric Imaging Across Modalities

Anisotropic volumetric acquisitions are common in clinical MRI and volume electron microscopy (vEM), where sparse through-plane sampling creates thick slices or sections that degrade orthogonal reformats and downstream analysis. We present CRIS, a cross-plane self-supervised framework for isotropic restoration without paired isotropic ground truth. CRIS casts 3D restoration as 2D stripe completion on orthogonal reformats of an isotropic grid: high-resolution in-plane slices are synthetically degraded and periodically masked for training, while at inference blank slices define the isotropic grid, two orthogonal reformats are restored, and predictions are fused by multi-view averaging. We evaluate CRIS on two MRI cohorts and two microscopy benchmarks up to 8x anisotropy. On brain MRI, CRIS achieves 32.921 +/- 0.436 dB PSNR and 0.9631 +/- 0.0027 SSIM, outperforming interpolation, SMORE4, SIMPLE, SA-INR, and ATME, and gives the best segmentation consistency (Dice 0.940 +/- 0.004, ASSD 0.245 +/- 0.014 mm, HD99 1.275 +/- 0.061 mm). On reference-free abdominal MRI, CRIS reduces FID/KID to 48.714/0.023. On vEM, CRIS outperforms interpolation, NIIV, and vEMINR, reaching 29.133 dB/0.834 3D PSNR/SSIM at 4x, 27.123 dB/0.734 on EPFL at 8x, and 21.915 dB/0.699 on noisy hemibrain data. In a robustness experiment, one variable-gap CRIS model evaluated across gap factors 3–7 and coronal, axial, and sagittal degradations maintained higher PSNR/SSIM than interpolation (36.36–31.14 dB and 0.977–0.932 vs. 33.07–27.85 dB and 0.951–0.853). These results support CRIS as a modality-flexible route to isotropic restoration without paired isotropic targets or configuration-specific retraining. Code is available at https://github.com/adi-hatav/CRIS.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Diffusion-Refined Segmentation and Vision-Language Interpretation for Pediatric Brain Tumor MRI

Accurate pediatric brain tumor segmentation remains challenging due to limited annotated data, heterogeneous imaging phenotypes, diffuse tumor boundaries, and class imbalance across tumor subregions. Here, we present a two-stage deep learning framework for improving multi-modal pediatric brain MRI segmentation and clinical interpretation. First, we evaluate 3D Res U-Net and Swin-UNETR baselines on BraTS-PEDs MRI scans, using four co-registered modalities to predict tumor core, whole tumor, and enhancing tumor regions. Second, we introduce diffusion-based refinement models conditioned on coarse Swin-UNETR predictions, including a 3D DDPM refiner and MedSegDiff. Conditioning substantially improves diffusion stability and performance, particularly for enhancing tumor boundary segmentation. Conditioned MedSegDiff achieves the strongest boundary agreement with the lowest HD95. Finally, predicted tumor volumes and representative segmentation overlays are integrated with a multimodal language model to generate structured radiology-style reports. Together, our results suggest that coarse-to-refined diffusion segmentation can improve pediatric tumor boundary delineation and support end-to-end interpretable AI-assisted neuro-oncology workflows.

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

Quantifying the Impact of Lossy Compression on Neural Generative Surrogate Modeling

arXiv:2606.15959v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural networks are used as generative surrogate models for scientific discovery, which are trainable approximations of scientific simulations. These models enable users to replace time-consuming numerical simulations with learned alternatives, providing quick solutions. However, high-fidelity generative surrogate models require massive training datasets, which can create storage and I/O challenges. Lossy compression is a promising way to reduce this burden, but compression errors may affect the model quality in subtle ways, making it challenging to quantify their impact. In this work, we examine how lossy compression of training data impacts the quality of generative surrogate models. We begin by characterizing the uncertainty inherent in training neural networks, showing that identical training configurations can produce different models. By exploiting this variability, we propose a method to estimate how much compression-induced error a surrogate model can tolerate without affecting its accuracy. Evaluation of two application simulations demonstrates that our approach significantly reduces memory/storage requirements and speeds up training while producing high-quality surrogate models. These results show that lossy compression saves data storage up to 23.7x and 39x with negligible impact on the quality of the surrogate model. Meanwhile, reducing the size of the training data set also enhances the data loading speed and reduces the training time by up to 3x.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

From Sorting Algorithms to Scalable Kernels: Bayesian Optimization in High-Dimensional Permutation Spaces

arXiv:2507.13263v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Bayesian Optimization (BO) is a powerful tool for black-box optimization, but its application to high-dimensional permutation spaces is severely limited by the challenge of defining scalable representations. The current state-of-the-art BO approach for permutation spaces relies on an exhaustive $\Omega(n^2)$ pairwise comparison, inducing a dense representation that is impractical for large-scale permutations. To break this barrier, we introduce a novel framework for generating efficient permutation representations via kernel functions derived from sorting algorithms. Within this framework, the Mallows kernel can be viewed as a special instance derived from enumeration sort. Further, we introduce the Merge Kernel , which leverages the divide-and-conquer structure of merge sort to produce a compact, $\Theta(n\log n)$ to achieve the lowest possible complexity with no information loss and effectively capture permutation structure. Our central thesis is that the Merge Kernel performs competitively with the Mallows kernel in low-dimensional settings, but significantly outperforms it in both optimization performance and computational efficiency as the dimension $n$ grows. Extensive evaluations on various permutation optimization benchmarks confirm our hypothesis, demonstrating that the Merge Kernel provides a scalable and more effective solution for Bayesian optimization in high-dimensional permutation spaces, thereby unlocking the potential for tackling previously intractable problems such as large-scale feature ordering and combinatorial neural architecture search.

22.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

AutoZyme: An Autonomous Agentic Framework to Optimize Bioinformatics Software

Performance bottlenecks in widely used genomics and bioinformatics software present a substantial and growing burden as biological datasets continue to increase in size and number. Relieving these bottlenecks relies largely on expert manual optimization and therefore remains difficult to scale. Here we present AutoZyme, an agentic framework for scientific software optimization. Given a target function, AutoZyme builds benchmarks, identifies bottlenecks, and iteratively tests code changes, retaining only those that improve runtime while preserving output. We evaluated AutoZyme on 45 functions, improving runtime without substantial memory increases in over 95% of cases considered. Across 38 functions from Seurat, Scanpy and related packages in genomics and bioinformatics, AutoZyme reduced runtime by a median of 8.52-fold, with the largest reductions exceeding 676-fold. The optimized functions are distributed through AutoZyme-Library as drop-in replacements for existing analysis pipelines. We also release AutoZyme as a reusable framework for optimizing additional user-specified packages and functions.

23.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

Pseudoperplexity Probes Memorization in Protein Language Models

Protein Language Models (pLMs) have significantly advanced computational biology. Yet their scale and reliance on redundant training data raise a fundamental question: do pLMs generalize the statistical grammar of proteins, or do they simply memorize their training data? To investigate this, we used pseudoperplexity as a probe for sequence-level memorization, comparing ProtT5's pseudoperplexity on a pre-training proxy dataset against a post-training holdout of genuinely novel sequences. To ensure a valid comparison, we matched the datasets by sequence length, cluster size, and taxonomic family. As a statistical baseline, we trained n-gram language models; analysis of higher-order n-gram composition and a statistically significant divergence in perplexity confirmed that the post-training sequences were genuinely novel at the local sequence level. ProtT5 showed a statistically significant difference in pseudoperplexity between seen and unseen sequences, though further analysis revealed this memorization signal to be modest. These findings suggest that ProtT5 exhibits detectable but limited memorization of its training data as measured by a pseudoperplexity-based probe.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

CrossEarth-Gate: Fisher-Guided Adaptive Tuning Engine for Efficient Adaptation of Cross-Domain Remote Sensing Semantic Segmentation

In Remote Sensing (RS), Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) has emerged as a key approach to activate the generalizable representation ability of foundation models for downstream tasks. However, existing specialized PEFT methods often fail when applied to large-scale Earth observation tasks, as they are unable to fully handle the multifaceted and unpredictable domain gaps (e.g., spatial, semantic, and frequency shifts) inherent in RS data. To overcome this, we propose CrossEarth-Gate, which introduces two primary contributions. First, we establish a comprehensive RS module toolbox to address multifaceted domain gaps, comprising spatial, semantic, and frequency modules. Second, we develop a Fisher-guided adaptive selection mechanism that operates on this toolbox. This selection is guided by Fisher Information to quantify each module's importance by measuring its contribution to the task-specific gradient flow. It dynamically activates only the most critical modules at the appropriate layers, guiding the gradient flow to maximize adaptation effectiveness and efficiency. Comprehensive experiments validate the efficacy and generalizability of our method, where CrossEarth-Gate achieves state-of-the-art performance on 16 out of 18 cross-domain benchmarks for RS semantic segmentation.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

i1: A Simple and Fully Open Recipe for Strong Text-to-Image Models

Diffusion models have consistently driven progress in text-to-image generation. However, it is challenging to attribute recent progress to specific modeling and data choices: state-of-the-art open-weight models provide limited ablations, and do not disclose their training data and full training details. The research community needs fully open (weights, data, and code) models as a foundation for further research; yet existing fully open models still fall significantly short of leading models in performance. In this project, we conduct a systematic investigation of the modeling and data design choices in text-to-image diffusion training and inference with 300+ controlled experiments totaling 700K+ TPU v6e hours. Our experiments highlight several empirical findings (e.g., equal weighting is a strong default for mixing curated datasets) and simple design decisions (e.g., larger text encoder adapters improve performance with minimal added parameters) for training strong models. Guided by these insights, we train i1, a 3B-parameter text-to-image diffusion model using only publicly available datasets. i1 is competitive with leading models on five representative benchmarks (GenEval, DPG, PRISM, CVTG-2K, and LongText), and outperforms the best existing fully open model by 29.5 absolute percentage points on average. We provide the i1 checkpoints, training and inference code, and the data processing pipeline. Together, our findings and the i1 recipe establish a practical foundation for future open research in text-to-image diffusion models. Our code is available at https://github.com/zlab-princeton/i1.