Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

AcademicHub aggregates real-time literature from top journals and preprint platforms. Build your personal research radar and let large language models compile cross-disciplinary analysis briefings automatically.

01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Biophysical EPR Using Superconducting Resonators

arXiv:2606.23952v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present innovations that enable the use of superconducting resonators for high sensitivity, high bandwidth pulsed electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) measurements on biologically relevant samples with enhanced stability and throughput. A custom-built X-band pulsed EPR spectrometer with AWG and digital IF capability generated by an FPGA was used to control a novel patterned thin film planar superconducting microstrip resonator capable of generating Rabi fields sufficient to achieve 6 ns pi/2 Gaussian pulses using a 100 W solid-state HPA. The system allows automated sequential calibration, measurement, and analysis of five 3.5 uL samples contained in a sample cartridge. Performance was validated through measurements of double electron-electron resonance (DEER) distances in a variety of spin-labeled protein samples with biologically relevant concentrations, including measurements below 10 uM. The results enable broadening the scope of applications for both superconducting resonators and the use of EPR in biotechnology.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Beyond LoRA: Is Sparsity-Induced Adaptation Better?

arXiv:2606.13767v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) and its variants provide a memory- and compute-efficient alternative to full fine-tuning of pre-trained models. However, questions remain about the comparative generalizability of these approaches and how the structural restrictions on low-rank updates preserve effective adaptation performance. We present a historical framing, covering the past (full fine-tuning and original LoRA), the present (different variants of LoRA), and propose simpler, cheaper, parameter-efficient extensions by inducing sparsity within existing LoRA variants: Cheap LoRA (cLA), training a single low-rank factor with the other fixed (deterministically or, in its randomized variant, stochastically), and the chained circulant variant, ${c}^3$LA. We frame cLA as a structured instance of asymmetric LoRA, serving as a controlled column-subspace restriction of full fine-tuning. We derive information-theoretic generalization error bounds for these variants, marking one of the first endeavors in this area. Empirically, we evaluate 11 fine-tuning methods across 10 pre-trained models and 14 datasets, analyzing the fine-tuned models' performance and generalization using tools such as loss landscapes and spectral analysis. Despite the sensitivity of fine-tuned models to the pre-trained model, datasets, and other factors, our study suggests that restricting LoRA-based PEFT methods' adaptation to a sparse, structured column space remains competitive across tasks with their parameter-matched baselines while reducing up to 10% training time and peak GPU memory up to 15%, even with a naïve, non-optimized, sparse implementation. Our theoretical and empirical generalization measures provide a more consistent and principled approach to their cost-effective adaptation than commonly used analytical tools. Overview and code are available at: https://elicaden.github.io/Beyond_LoRA/.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Antimicrobial-resistant E. coli in human, animal and environmental reservoirs in rural Bangladeshi households with young children

In low-income countries, ESBL-producing Escherichia coli (ESBL-EC) is frequently detected in humans, animals and household environments, indicating widespread exposure to antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Established risk factors such as antibiotic use do not explain the high community carriage of AMR in all settings; identifying the dominant exposure pathways can inform interventions against AMR. We aimed to investigate (i) animal-human-environment sharing of AMR by assessing associations between the abundance of ESBL-EC in the household environment, domestic animal feces and young children's stool and (ii) household factors associated with ESBL-EC abundance in these reservoirs. We enrolled 112 households from the CRADLE trial in rural Bangladesh. We enumerated ESBL-EC in drinking water, food, child hand rinses, outdoor soil, indoor floor swabs, chicken and cow feces, and stool from children aged 6 months. We recorded indicators of sanitation, animal ownership/management, human and animal antibiotic use, and child exposure behaviors using structured questionnaires and spot checks. The highest prevalence of ESBL-EC was in child stool (95.6%) and animal feces (82.3-96.9%), followed by soil (48.2%) and floors (36.6%); < 10% of food, child hands and drinking water harbored ESBL-EC. The abundance of ESBL-EC in child stool was not associated with its abundance in any sampled matrix; the abundance in chicken but not cow feces showed positive correlations with soil, floors, child hands, and drinking water (correlation coefficients: 0.19-0.39, p-values < 0.05). Higher-quality latrines (improved, pour-flush, with slab) were associated with lower ESBL-EC abundance across matrices; unsafe animal management (animals roaming or spending the night inside the home) was associated with higher abundance. Child antibiotic use and exposure behaviors (soil ingestion, time spent on floor) were not associated with ESBL-EC abundance in child stool. We observed high AMR colonization among young children and domestic animals in rural Bangladesh not explained by traditional fecal-oral exposure pathways. Future studies should explore additional pathways and assess whether sanitation and animal management improvements can reduce AMR.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

AI-driven Multimodal Representation Learning for Latent Mediation Structure Discovery of Socioeconomic Disadvantage, Psychosocial Factors, and Cardiometabolic Multimorbidity

Authors:

Social disadvantage is associated with multimorbidity, but the pathways linking social conditions to disease burden remain poorly understood. We developed an AI-driven multimodal mediation framework that integrates socioeconomic, psychosocial, clinical, laboratory, behavioral, and genomic data from the All of Us Research Program. Modality-specific variational autoencoders were used to derive latent representations of each data domain, and mediation analyses were subsequently performed in latent space to evaluate indirect associations between socioeconomic disadvantage, psychosocial factors, and multimorbidity. The final analytic cohort included 20,804 participants with complete multimodal data. Across 800 exposure–mediator–outcome combinations, mediation signals were concentrated within a small number of latent dimensions. The strongest indirect association linked a socioeconomic disadvantage dimension, a psychosocial vulnerability dimension, and a cardiometabolic multimorbidity dimension (NIE = 0.002517). The psychosocial dimension was characterized by poorer mental health, greater loneliness, lower social well-being, and lower health literacy, whereas the outcome dimension was associated with hypertension, diabetes, hyperlipidemia, obesity, chronic kidney disease, and heart disease. Bootstrap analyses supported the stability of the leading pathway. These findings suggest that psychosocial vulnerability may contribute to the association between socioeconomic disadvantage and cardiometabolic multimorbidity. More broadly, the proposed framework illustrates how AI-based representation learning can be used to investigate complex relationships across high-dimensional multimodal health data.

06.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-21

Antibody-Antigen Affinity Prediction with Chain-Aware Protein Language Modeling

Motivation: Antibody-antigen affinity determines which antibodies advance in therapeutic discovery, repertoire analysis and affinity maturation, but experimental measurements are sparse relative to the scale of sequence libraries. Structure-based predictors can exploit interface geometry when reliable complexes are available, yet early discovery often requires ranking many heavy-light chain pairs against antigens for which no complex structure exists. Existing sequence-based models are scalable, but frequently compress heavy and light chains into a single antibody representation or concatenate antibody and antigen features obscuring the chain-specific and epitope-specific signals that drive binding. Results: We present AbAffinity, a sequence-only chain-aware three-stream architecture that maintains heavy chain, light chain and antigen as distinct streams. It integrates frozen ESM-2 embeddings with heavy-chain CDR-focused pooling, heavy-light self-attention, adaptive fusion gating and gated cross-attention, training only a compact interaction module. On the SAAINT-DB benchmark, AbAffinity achieves strong predictive performance under ten-fold cross-validation and maintains robust accuracy on novel antigens. It consistently outperforms recent sequence-based models across external benchmarks including SAbDab, AB-Bind and SKEMPI 2.0. Ablation studies highlight the contributions of chain-specific representations, CDR-focused pooling and the gated interaction pathway. Integrated Gradients attributions recover known paratope and epitope residues at structurally validated interfaces. AbAffinity provides a lightweight, explainable sequence-first framework for antibody triage and prioritisation when structural information is limited or unavailable.

07.
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%).

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Agents All the Way Down; A Methodology for Building Custom AI Agents from Substrate to Production

arXiv:2606.11869v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Custom AI agents areagents that live inside their own application, talk to their own data and tools, enforce their own security boundaries, and carry their own brand and audit trail. What separates them from the general-purpose tier is fit, not capability: each is built for one job, by the engineer who will maintain it. No published practice sets out how to build one end to end. The pieces are everywhere (function-calling APIs, the Model Context Protocol, code agents to pair with), but the practice that chains them lives in podcasts, blogs, and leaked system prompts. This paper writes that practice down as a methodology, Agents All the Way Down: two preconditions crossed once and kept, then three practices repeated for the agent's life. The preconditions are (P1) Substrate, the LLM as a software component, framed as tools, then system, then messages under prompt-caching; and (P2) Building blocks: function calling, MCP, CLI orchestration, the liteshell pattern, the agent loop, skills, characters, hooks, and scaffolding. The practices are (P3) prototype with a general-purpose agent; (P4) harvest, fold, and ship the result as a CLI, the Turtle pattern; and (P5) agent-tests-agent, in which a general-purpose agent drives it through behavioural scenarios, a complement to classical testing, not a replacement. The working loop is P3 to P4 to P5 and back, and one corollary falls out for free: multi-agent orchestration is just CLI composition. The methodology is framework-free by construction. It was distilled from the AAC, a custom agent for the open-source LAMB platform, built in about ten days by one developer with an AI pair-programmer and in production . We present it as a transferable practice, independent of any language or framework.

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

Long-range nonstabilizerness of topologically encoded states from mutual information

arXiv:2605.22424v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study long-range nonstabilizerness (LRN), namely the obstruction to remove nonstabilizerness with shallow-depth local quantum circuits. In one-dimensional settings, the mutual information between disconnected spatial regions has proven to be a powerful tool to diagnose LRN. In this work, we focus on encoded states of two-dimensional topologically-ordered systems, and explore the ability of the mutual information to serve as a diagnostic of LRN. Focusing on the concrete setting of lattice models defined on a torus, we show that information about LRN can be gained from the analysis of the mutual information between non-overlapping regions containing non-contractible loops, and of the change of such mutual information under modular real-space transformations. We exemplify this idea in the toric code and the non-abelian string-net model with doubled Fibonacci topological order. In the former case, we show that the mutual information provides a full classification, certifying LRN for all encoded non-stabilizer states. In the latter case, instead, our approach does not lead to a full classification, as it detects LRN for all states except from a finite subset with special transformation properties under the modular group. Finally, we discuss how our results on LRN constrain the logical gates that can be implemented fault-tolerantly on the torus.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

From Chatbot to Digital Colleague: The Paradigm Shift Toward Persistent Autonomous AI

arXiv:2606.14502v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are undergoing a fundamental transformation from conversational generators into integrated AI systems capable of reasoning, action, memory, and self-improvement. We conceptualize this transition as a shift from Chatbot to Digital Colleague: from conversational answers to persistent work. We organize this transition along two tightly coupled dimensions. First, at the cognitive core level, LLMs are advancing from Chatbot-era "fast thinking" systems driven by next-token prediction toward Thinking LLMs that leverage inference-time computation, Chain-of-Thought reasoning, reflection, process supervision, and reinforcement learning to support more deliberate and reliable cognition. Second, at the tool-augmented task execution level, LLMs are progressing from tool-calling Agents that invoke external resources in an ad hoc manner toward OpenClaw-style workstation systems (OpenClaw) equipped with persistent Workspaces, skills, verification loops, and governance. The "Workspace + Skill" paradigm makes episodic tool use colleague-like via state persistence, reusable procedures, task closure, and experience reuse. We examine data construction shifts from instruction-response pairs to State-Action-Observation trajectories and evaluation from static benchmarks to sandboxed, auditable, self-evolving AI ecosystems.

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

TaskFusion: Continual Anomaly Detection for Heterogeneous Tabular Data

arXiv:2606.11844v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual anomaly detection in tabular data is challenging and remains largely underexplored, particularly in settings with heterogeneous feature schemas, distribution shifts, and severe class imbalance. In many real-world applications, data arrive sequentially from diverse domains, rendering conventional continual learning methods ineffective due to their reliance on a fixed input space. We propose a continual learning (CL) method, which can overcome these challenges and continually learn from different tasks. Our method consists of three main parts: our AGF model, Taskfusion augmentation, and outlier exposure. The AGF-model maps task-specific features into a shared space, then aligns distributions to reduce representation drift, and learns anomaly decision boundaries in the aligned space. To improve stability, we introduce Taskfusion augmentation, combining boundary-aware interpolation within tasks to refine the model anomaly boundaries and cross-task mixing to transfer anomaly structure across datasets. To handle class imbalance and memory constraints, we employ tabular dataset distillation to store compact synthetic replay samples, which are jointly used with augmented data in an outlier exposure objective for robust anomaly detection. We evaluate the approach on 21 heterogeneous datasets across multiple domains. Results show that our approach substantially improves continual anomaly detection performance over sequential fine-tuning and other CL baselines while reducing catastrophic forgetting and maintaining stable detection across heterogeneous datasets.

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

Unlocking Latent Dimensions: Exploring Representations of Large-Scale X-ray Scattering Data using Variational Autoencoders

arXiv:2606.14999v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scientific user facilities generate X-ray scattering data faster than traditional workflows can process them. We address this challenge across two settings, offline dataset exploration and live on-the-fly analysis. We train a domain-specific attention-based Convolutional Variational Autoencoder (C-VAE) on 1.5 million X-ray scattering images to learn low-dimensional representations capturing structural variation across diverse experimental conditions. The learned latent space reveals well-organized clusters and smooth trajectories reflecting experimental progression. It further supports controlled synthetic scattering image generation across diverse structural states. When deployed without retraining, the model organizes time-resolved film formation experiments at two synchrotron facilities into interpretable latent structures. Benchmarking against DINOv3 (ViT-7B), a general-purpose vision foundation model, demonstrates that domain-specific training yields more interpretable latent organization for scattering data. Both workflows are integrated within Latent Space Explorer, a component of the MLExchange platform, supporting interactive structural exploration across archived datasets and live experiments.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Demonstration of Exponential Quantum Speedup with Constant-Depth Compiled Circuits for Simon's Problem

arXiv:2604.27457v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We demonstrate exponential algorithmic quantum speedup for a restricted-Hamming-weight version of Simon's problem, in which the hidden string $b$ is promised to satisfy $HW(b)\le w$ for a Hamming-weight cutoff $w$, on present-day superconducting quantum processors. We introduce a hardware-aware compilation strategy that reduces the quantum part of each Simon query circuit to constant depth. The resulting compiled circuits have $O(1)$ depth, require only linear nearest-neighbor connectivity, map directly onto common device layouts, and avoid additional routing and SWAP overhead. Implemented on IBM's $156$-qubit Boston and $120$-qubit Miami processors, these circuits achieve sufficient fidelity to exhibit algorithmic quantum speedup without error suppression. Using the number-of-queries-to-solution (NTS) metric, we observe exponential speedup over the classical lower-bound benchmark for all restricted-Hamming-weight cutoffs $w\ge 4$ on Boston and across low-to-intermediate Hamming-weight cutoffs on Miami; at higher Hamming-weight cutoffs on Miami, we still observe polynomial speedup. The same construction also enables unrestricted instances of Simon's problem, corresponding to $w=n$ for problem size $n$, over the finite problem-size ranges for which our NTS computation is feasible; in this regime, the observed scaling advantage is not limited to the restricted-Hamming-weight setting. These results show that careful hardware-aware compilation can make quantum speedup experimentally accessible for a canonical hidden-subgroup problem in the NISQ regime.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Intrinsic spectral structure of bipartite nonlocal magic resource

arXiv:2606.24368v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bipartite nonlocal magic resource (BNMR) quantifies the irreducible nonstabilizerness residing in bipartite entanglement, yet its evaluation is intractable due to the full Hilbert space optimization. Here, we introduce a canonical encoding framework that exactly confines the BNMR of an arbitrary bipartite pure state within a minimal encoding core. This dimension reduction proves that pure-state BNMR is an intrinsic function of the nonzero Schmidt spectrum, extending its invariance from local unitary transformations to local isometries. Leveraging this spectral link, we derive the leading quadratic response of BNMR under spectral perturbations around its zeros. We apply this quadratic response to Haar-random states, deriving and numerically validating the BNMR profile: its distribution is sharply localized at the symmetric bipartition and exponentially suppressed toward asymmetric cuts, in stark contrast to the broadening Page curve of entanglement. Finally, we provide a closed-form expression for the BNMR of Schmidt rank-2 states, uncovering a hierarchy collapse in generalized GHZ states where bipartite and global nonlocal magic resources coincide exactly.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

A Dual Edge Spatial Jacobian Image Graph for Interpretable Diabetic Retinopathy Grading

Automated diabetic retinopathy (DR) grading from colour fundus photographs can achieve strong predictive performance, but clinical interpretation requires more than an image-level label. It requires understanding how lesion evidence is distributed around retinal vessels and how this evidence relates to quantitative vascular biomarkers. We present a dual-edge spatial-Jacobian image graph for interpretable DR grading. Each fundus image is represented as a graph node with four aligned evidence streams: AutoMorph vessel information ($X_1$), DR-XAI-style lesion evidence maps ($X_2$), a 128-dimensional lesion-based contrastive image embedding ($X_3$), and AutoMorph morphometric biomarkers ($X_4$). The spatial edge branch ($X_{12}$) encodes vessel-lesion geometry, while the Jacobian branch ($X_{34}$) models embedding-biomarker sensitivity. Lightweight two-token attention fuses both edge families into a final image graph. On 2,910 matched non-augmented APTOS images, the full graph achieves 0.8076 accuracy, 0.8312 quadratic weighted kappa, 0.5915 macro-F1, and 0.9330 adjacent-grade accuracy; referable DR reaches 0.9055 accuracy and 0.9711 AUROC. The framework is positioned as an explainable representation-learning tool for lesion-biomarker hypothesis generation, rather than as a deployment-ready clinical classifier. The code is available at https://github.com/Inamullah-Colab/dual-edge-dr-graph-xai.

16.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Physics-Driven Zero-Shot Reconstruction of Isotropic 3D Fluorescence Microscopy under Undersampled Acquisition

Three-dimensional (3D) imaging represents the development of next generation of fluorescence microscopy. However, routine axial down-sampling makes isotropic resolution unrealistic. Here, we propose DeepUI, a physical zero-shot framework designed to achieve isotropic 3D fluorescence images from a low axial sampling rate. DeepUI fully leverages the intrinsic characteristics of 3D images through physics-guided degradation, which incorporates spatial-frequency joint learning to generate a scaled optical transfer function, combined with noise degradation and an up-sampling branch. Typically requiring just 5 minutes for training and 0.5 minutes for high-throughput and fast prediction, we demonstrate the superior performance of DeepUI to get isotropic results, and the exclusivity to axial down-sampling conditions, even in more challenging conditions, including defocused background, noise, and resolution blur.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

A New Perspective on Precision and Recall for Generative Models

arXiv:2511.02414v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: With the recent success of generative models in image and text, the question of their evaluation has recently gained a lot of attention. While most methods from the state of the art rely on scalar metrics, the introduction of Precision and Recall (PR) for generative model has opened up a new avenue of research. The associated PR curve allows for a richer analysis, but their estimation poses several challenges. In this paper, we present a new framework for estimating entire PR curves based on a binary classification standpoint. We conduct a thorough statistical analysis of the proposed estimates. As a byproduct, we obtain a minimax upper bound on the PR estimation risk. We also show that our framework extends several landmark PR metrics of the literature which by design are restrained to the extreme values of the curve. Finally, we study the different behaviors of the curves obtained experimentally in various settings.

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

The Initial Exploration Problem in Knowledge Graph Exploration

arXiv:2602.21066v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Knowledge Graphs (KGs) enable the integration and representation of complex information across domains, but their semantic richness and structural complexity create substantial barriers for lay users without expertise in semantic web technologies. When encountering an unfamiliar KG, such users face a distinct orientation challenge: they do not know what questions are possible, how the knowledge is structured, or how to begin exploration. This paper identifies and theorises this phenomenon as the Initial Exploration Problem (IEP). Drawing on theories from information behaviour and human-computer interaction, including ASK, exploratory search, information foraging, and cognitive load theory, we develop a conceptual framing of the IEP characterised by three interdependent barriers: scope uncertainty, ontology opacity, and query incapacity. We argue that these barriers converge at the moment of first contact, distinguishing the IEP from related concepts that presuppose an existing starting point or information goal. Analysing KG exploration interfaces at the level of interaction primitives, we suggest that many systems rely on epistemic assumptions that do not hold at first contact. This reveals a structural gap in the design space: the absence of interaction primitives for scope revelation, mechanisms that communicate what a KG contains without requiring users to formulate queries or interpret ontological structures. In articulating the IEP, this paper provides a theoretical lens for evaluating KG interfaces and for designing entry-point scaffolding that supports initial exploration.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Rapid FinFET Modelling Using an Autoencoder

arXiv:2606.24046v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work presents a machine learning framework that leverages an autoencoder (AE) for the efficient modeling of FinFET. We first calibrated a BSIM-CMG model to generate a dataset of current-voltage (ID-VG) characteristics. This data was used to train an autoencoder that compresses full I-V curves into a low-dimensional latent space, which intrinsically encodes key device physics. A key innovation is the explicit incorporation of parameter such as drain to source voltage (VDS) as an input feature, enhancing the model ability to capture bias dependent variation. The trained model successfully reconstructs full I-V curves and directly extracts critical device metrics including threshold voltage (VTH), subthreshold slope (SS), and peak transconductance (gm). This approach demonstrates that data driven compact models, built from actual characterization data, can achieve high accuracy with minimal training data, providing a powerful tool for rapid device characterization, modelling and circuit level simulation.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Model-Free Reinforcement Learning Control for Resilient Cyber-Physical Systems

arXiv:2606.19069v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper compares the performance of model-free controllers on a nonlinear system under cyberattacks, including false data injection and denial-of-service attacks. Four RL reward types are analyzed for accuracy, cost, and resilience. Results show that the Lyapunov reward offers the best resilience with low tracking error. Exponential mode also provides good trade-offs with acceptable resilience under moderate training conditions. Progressive and linear rewards converge faster but are less robust. RL-MPCs show strong steady-state resilience but require longer training times; RL-PID controllers are faster with significantly less training time. Proximal Policy Optimization outperforms Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient with a significant reduction in KPI variance. This study serves to highlight how well-designed RL rewards can improve performance and resilience against cyber threats.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Learning Survival Models with Right-Censored Reporting Delays

arXiv:2510.04421v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Survival analysis provides statistical methods to model the time until an event occurs. Reporting delays arise when event times are not observed at their occurrence but are only revealed upon reporting. This issue is particularly critical for timely risk evaluation when the observation window is short due to administrative censoring. In this study, we incorporate right-censored reporting delays by jointly modeling parametric hazards for the event and reporting processes. We then construct a consistent estimator for the model parameters and develop a Monte Carlo expectation-maximization algorithm to compute it. To address the challenges posed by administrative censoring, we leverage these findings and propose a transfer-learning procedure. Experimental results demonstrate that our method improves the accuracy of timely risk evaluation under administrative censoring.

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

Learning from almost nothing: How neural networks survive heavy input corruption

arXiv:2606.11319v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning from imperfect data is a central theme in machine learning, connecting practical questions of robustness to fundamental questions of learnability. Here we examine attribute noise: learning from corrupted inputs while keeping the labels intact, a setting that has received considerably less analytical attention than its label-noise counterpart. We consider two types of corruption models: additive noise and replacement noise. Through experiments with multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) on corrupted classification datasets, we find that neural networks remain robust, maintaining well-above-chance accuracy even when inputs are >90% corrupted – far beyond human recognition. To understand this robustness, we analyze infinite-width networks in the heavy-corruption regime using a mean-field-inspired approach and derive a leading-order decision rule for the classification outcome: the network implements a prototype rule, the nearest-class-mean, assigning each test point to the class whose training-set average it most closely resembles. This leading-order decision rule is universal across a broad range of MLP architectures, holding for any depth, as well as a wide class of activation functions and noise distributions. The same centroid mechanism closely matches finite-width network behavior in our experiments and provides an interpretable and analytically tractable account of why learning can succeed even when individual training examples carry almost no signal.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Quality Improvement Based Implementation and Evaluation of a Decision Aid for Patients with Nephrolithiasis

Introduction Patients with nephrolithiasis face challenges in making a high-quality, preference sensitive decision. Our prior work established feasibility and patient acceptance of a software-based decision aid (DA). The objectives for this study were to identify implementation strategies for the DA in routine care and determine whether DA implementation enhances decisional quality for patients. Methods New nephrolithiasis patients were recruited from the institution Medical Center from June 2018 to April 2024 to receive a software-based pre-visit DA that measured care preferences and used decision analysis to rank treatments. The RE-AIM framework and Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycles were used to improve implementation outcomes. Patients completed survey instruments evaluating decisional conflict, shared decision-making, care satisfaction, and treatment choice following their provider visit. These metrics were compared in the DA cohort (n=81) to those in a usual care cohort (n=78) with Wilcoxon rank-sum and Chi-square (or Fishers exact) tests. Results Implementation data revealed sustained reach and progressive improvement in fidelity. The DA cohort reported higher decisional quality relative to controls (p=0.003) and reported greater support/advice to make a choice (p=0.005). The DA cohort more often discussed options with their doctor (87.5% vs 69.2%, p=0.005) and were more likely to be promoters of their provider (p

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

UniMM: A Unified Mixture Model Framework for Multi-Agent Simulation

arXiv:2501.17015v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Simulation plays a crucial role in assessing autonomous driving systems, where the generation of realistic multi-agent behaviors is a key aspect. In multi-agent simulation, the primary challenges include behavioral multimodality and closed-loop distributional shifts. In this study, we formulate a unified mixture model (UniMM) framework for generating multimodal agent behaviors, which can cover the mainstream methods including regression-based mixture models and discrete NTP models. Furthermore, we introduce a closed-loop sample generation approach tailored for mixture models to mitigate distributional shifts. Within the UniMM framework, we recognize critical configurations from both the model and data perspectives. We conduct a systematic examination of various model configurations, and comprehensively characterize their effects. Moreover, our investigation into the data configuration highlights the pivotal role of closed-loop samples in achieving realistic simulations. To extend the benefits of closed-loop samples across a broader range of mixture models, we further introduce a temporal disentanglement-and-alignment mechanism to address the shortcut learning and off-policy learning issues. Leveraging insights from our exploration, the distinct variants proposed within the UniMM framework, including discrete, anchor-free, and anchor-based models, all achieve state-of-the-art performance on the WOSAC benchmark.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Zeta: Dual Whitening for Matrix Optimization via Coordinate-Adaptive Preconditioning

arXiv:2606.14187v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large-scale neural network training increasingly relies on matrix-aware optimizers that exploit the structure of weight parameters beyond element-wise adaptation. However, existing matrix-aware methods such as Muon have an underappreciated vulnerability: their core operation, Newton-Schulz iteration, depends critically on input conditioning, yet the raw momentum matrices exhibit severe coordinate-wise scale heterogeneity. In this paper, we first verify this scale heterogeneity through a chi-square uniformity test, showing that intra-matrix scale imbalance is prevalent across Transformer layers and that coordinate whitening effectively corrects it. Motivated by this finding, we propose Zeta, a dual whitening optimizer that applies coordinate whitening and spectral whitening in a strictly ordered pipeline. The ordering is not a tunable choice but follows from a mathematical dependency: coordinate whitening establishes the statistical isotropy that spectral whitening requires to function reliably. We further prove that this dual pipeline strictly reduces orthogonalization error relative to pure spectral methods by improving the condition number of the input. Empirically, Zeta matches or surpasses strong baselines across language modeling (0.6B to 8B parameters), mixture-of-experts architectures, and vision tasks, demonstrating that resolving scale imbalance before orthogonalization leads to faster convergence and better generalization. Code is available at https://gitcode.com/kevin259/MindSpeed.