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

Towards Data-Efficient Cross-Device Generalization of Grad-Shafranov Equilibria via Transfer Learning Neural Operator

arXiv:2606.15512v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real-time reconstruction of magnetohydrodynamic equilibria is essential for plasma shaping, stability assessment and feedback control in magnetic confinement fusion. However, Grad-Shafranov equilibrium calculations remain largely device-specific and iterative, limiting their use in latency-constrained control settings. Existing neural approaches can accelerate individual equilibrium predictions, but they do not generally provide reusable models across changing plasma boundaries or tokamak geometries. Here we show that equilibrium reconstruction can be recast as a cross-device operator learning problem. We develop a domain-specific neural operator framework that maps geometry and profile parameters directly to the poloidal flux field, replacing repeated solve-on-demand computation with amortized operator inference. Using the analytically tractable Solov'ev family as a controlled Grad-Shafranov testbed, we generate equilibria across eight geometrically distinct tokamak-like configurations and benchmark five neural operator architectures under four transfer-learning strategies. Single-geometry pretraining gives poor transfer to unseen devices, whereas multi-geometry pretraining enables data-efficient adaptation. The Wavelet Neural Operator gives the strongest cross-geometry performance, reaching mean relative L2 errors below 4% with 100 labelled target equilibria and below 2% with full fine-tuning. The predicted magnetic fields satisfy the divergence-free constraint to numerical precision, and four architectures achieve millisecond or sub-millisecond inference. These results identify neural operator pretraining as a route towards reusable, real-time equilibrium inference across fusion device configurations.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Sharp Transitions for Subsystem Complexity

arXiv:2510.18832v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The circuit complexity of time-evolved pure quantum states grows linearly in time for an exponentially long time. This behavior has been proven in certain models, is conjectured to hold for generic quantum many-body systems, and is believed to be dual to the long-time growth of black hole interiors in AdS/CFT. Achieving a similar understanding for mixed states remains an important problem. In this work, we study the circuit complexity of time-evolved subsystems of pure quantum states. We find that for greater-than-half subsystem sizes, the complexity grows linearly in time for an exponentially long time, similarly to that of the full state. However, for less-than-half subsystem sizes, the complexity rises and then falls, returning to low complexity as the subsystem equilibrates. Notably, the transition between these two regimes occurs sharply at half system size. We use holographic duality to map out this picture of subsystem complexity dynamics and rigorously prove the existence of the sharp transition in random quantum circuits. Furthermore, we use holography to predict features of complexity growth at finite temperature that lie beyond the reach of techniques based on random quantum circuits. In particular, at finite temperature, we argue for an additional sharp transition at a critical less-than-half subsystem size. Below this critical value, the subsystem complexity saturates nearly instantaneously rather than exhibiting a rise and fall. This novel phenomenon, as well as an analogous transition above half system size, provides a target for future studies based on rigorous methods.

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

SpheriCity: Designing Trustworthy Conversational AI for Sustainability Decision Support

arXiv:2606.13854v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present SpheriCity, an expert-grounded conversational prototype designed to support trustworthy knowledge sensemaking from sustainability reports. City-level circularity assessment reports contain rich information about materials, infrastructure, and policy interventions, yet their length and heterogeneous structure make cross-document synthesis and comparison difficult for practitioners and researchers working on circular economy initiatives. While large language models (LLM) promise faster knowledge access and synthesis, their opaque reasoning, hallucinations, and lack of source transparency introduce risks for trust and interpretability, and require verification in high-stakes sustainability contexts. SpheriCity addresses these challenges through a provenance-first conversational agent that foregrounds evidence traceability, structured synthesis, and interaction scaffolds to support exploratory querying and cross-document synthesis across sustainability reports. We conducted a formative expert review with six sustainability experts using representative queries spanning cross-city comparison, policy summarization, and recommendation-oriented tasks. Experts evaluated responses across dimensions and provided qualitative reflections on the system's usefulness for sustainability knowledge work. Our results reveal that transparent sourcing, contextual explanation, interpretability, and alignment with expert workflow strongly shape expert trust and judgments of system usefulness. This work contributes (1) a conversational prototype for sustainability knowledge sensemaking, (2) an expert-grounded evaluation framework for assessing AI responses in high-stakes knowledge domains, and (3) design insights into how provenance, uncertainty communication, and integration in workflow influence expert users' trust in AI assistance for sustainability decision support.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

HUGE-Bench: A Benchmark for High-Level UAV Vision-Language-Action Tasks

Existing UAV vision-language navigation (VLN) benchmarks have enabled language-guided flight, but they largely focus on long, step-wise route descriptions with goal-centric evaluation, making them less diagnostic for real operations where brief, high-level commands must be grounded into safe multi-stage behaviors. We present HUGE-Bench, a benchmark for High-Level UAV Vision-Language-Action (HL-VLA) tasks that tests whether an agent can interpret concise language and execute complex, process-oriented trajectories with safety awareness. HUGE-Bench comprises 4 real-world digital twin scenes, 8 high-level tasks, and 2.56M meters of trajectories, and is built on an aligned 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS)-Mesh representation that combines photorealistic rendering with collision-capable geometry for scalable generation and collision-aware evaluation. We introduce process-oriented and collision-aware metrics to assess process fidelity, terminal accuracy, and safety. Experiments on representative state-of-the-art VLA models reveal significant gaps in high-level semantic completion and safe execution, highlighting HUGE-Bench as a diagnostic testbed for high-level UAV autonomy.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Skill-Constrained Model Predictive Control for Resilient Manufacturing Supply Chains

arXiv:2606.17269v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In skill-constrained production-inventory systems, the qualified human capacity available tomorrow depends on training decisions made today: production requires certified workers, certifications decay unless maintained, and training consumes the same scarce worker hours that production needs now. We study a closed-loop skill-constrained model predictive controller that, at every shift, solves a finite-horizon mixed-integer program over production, inventory, backlog, and training, with binary predicted certification, hard production eligibility, and an interpretable terminal value that prices certified-capacity gaps at the horizon boundary; only the first-period action is applied before replanning. On synthetic, seed-controlled SkillChain-Gym scenarios - announced and surprise new-skill shocks, demand shocks, absenteeism, forecast- and availability-quality modes, capacity-boundary and training-rate sweeps, and negative controls - we evaluate the controller against production-only and maintenance-only ablations, static cross-training insurance plans, and a strong reactive heuristic, under an ex-ante locked configuration and paired statistics. The result is regime dependence, not superiority: no policy class dominates. Predictive control helps when skill or labor bottlenecks are forecastable early enough for training to complete; lean static insurance remains hard to beat under surprise shocks, near the demand-capacity boundary, and wherever pre-shock slack makes insurance cheap. Attribution ablations separate certification maintenance, re-acquisition of lapsed certifications, and greenfield skill acquisition. Forecastability, not adaptivity per se, decides when predictive control pays.

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

Efficient Adaptive Data Acquisition via Pretrained Belief Representations

arXiv:2606.25197v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning effective policies for adaptive data acquisition remains challenging: posterior-based methods rely on surrogate models and posterior approximations that can be misspecified or biased, while direct policy-learning methods map from historical observations and fail to exploit available model representations, making learning harder. We introduce policy learning with belief representations (POLAR), based on the insight that optimal data acquisition depends on the observation history only through a sufficient belief state. Specifically, POLAR decouples representation learning from policy learning by leveraging pretrained predictive foundation models as belief-state encoders, training a policy head on top of their representations. This yields a simple, unified amortised policy learning framework for Bayesian experimental design, Bayesian optimisation, and active learning, differing only in the task-specific utility used to train the policy. Empirically, we find that POLAR outperforms state-of-the-art amortised methods across diverse tasks while requiring far fewer training samples, demonstrating a significant step in the scalability and efficiency of amortised data acquisition.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

MiroBench: Benchmarking Realism in Agentic Simulation of Real-world Discussions

arXiv:2606.14715v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM agents are increasingly used to simulate real world interactions, but it remains unclear whether simulated behaviors preserve the content patterns and interaction dynamics of real human behaviors. Existing evaluations remain fragmented, which makes it difficult to compare systems or measure progress. In this paper, we focus on Reddit discussions as a concrete first step toward evaluating real-world social simulation. Reddit threads provide public, topic-grounded, multi-party interactions where people share experiences, debate, seek advice, express emotion, and collectively respond to products, events, and social issues. These discussions offer an observable window into broader social behavior, making them a useful setting for testing whether LLM agents can reproduce not only fluent text, but also the distributional patterns and interaction dynamics of real online communities. We introduce MiroBench, a benchmark for Reddit discussion simulation built from 4,292 real Reddit threads. MiroBench uses statistical tests to compare generated and real discussions across four major aspects: repetition and semantic uniformity, narrative content, toxicity and aggression, and structural complexity. Experiments across five domains and five models show that current simulators remain distributionally mismatched with real Reddit threads, while a lightweight prompt-based improvement procedure provides only limited gains. MiroBench offers a concrete benchmark for measuring, diagnosing, and improving realism in LLM-based social simulation.

08.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-20

Brain morphology in Anorexia Nervosa and its subtypes: A multi-cohort study of individual participant data

by Fabio Bernardoni, Dominic Arold, Luis Schoppik, Klaas Bahnsen, Ruiyang Ge, Clara Moreau, Lasse Bang, Federico D’Agata, Giovanni Abbate-Daga, Christian K. Tamnes, Iain Campbell, Owen O’Daly, Ulrike Schmidt, Guido Frank, Stefanie Horndasch, Andreas Hess, Arnd Dörfler, Hans-Christoph Friederich, Joe Simon, Angela Favaro, Luca Lavagnino, Christina E. Wierenga, Amanda Bischoff-Grethe, Amy E. Miles, Allan Kaplan, Aristotle Voineskos, Paul A. M. Smeets, Annemarie A. van Elburg, Unna Danner, Sophia I. Thomopoulos, Laura Berner, Neda Jahanshad, Sophia Frangou, Joseph A. King, Paul Thompson, Stefan Ehrlich Background In a recent coordinated meta-analysis of neuroimaging data, we reported gray matter (GM) alterations in acutely underweight patients with anorexia nervosa (AN). Here, we extend these findings by examining individual variation in brain structure within AN, individual-level differentiation between AN and healthy controls (HC), and differences between AN subtypes, with potential relevance for understanding clinical heterogeneity. Methods and findings We analyzed individual-level data from 11 international sites in the ENIGMA Eating Disorders Working Group, including 570 female participants with AN and 739 HC. We examined cortical thickness, cortical surface area and subcortical volumes in AN versus HC using three complementary approaches: (i) group-level differences in a mega-analysis correcting for age effects, (ii) frequencies of extreme deviations (infra-/supranormal; z  1.96) based on normative reference models by the CentileBrain Initiative, and (iii) individual-level classification performance using machine learning. The same analytic framework was applied to compare AN restricting versus binge-eating/purging subtype, additionally correcting for BMI effects.Mega-analyses reinforced previous meta-analytic findings of pronounced and widespread GM deficits in AN compared to HC. Normative modelling revealed that the frequency of infranormal z-scores (23/68 cortical thickness, 13/14 subcortical volume metrics) and supranormal z-scores (35/68 cortical thickness, 17/68 cortical surface area metrics) was significantly higher in AN than expected based on reference data. Individuals with AN could be reliably differentiated from HC using machine-learning classifiers (ROC–AUC = 0.75–0.81). In contrast, neither group-level differences nor frequency of extreme z-scores differed between AN subtypes, and individuals with different subtypes could not be reliably differentiated from each other. Importantly, the observational design cannot distinguish neurobiological differences related to AN from the effects of starvation or low BMI in the AN versus HC analyses. The lack of differences between subtypes does not exclude brain structural differences between AN subtypes that might be detectable with other modalities or analytic approaches. Conclusion Using a mega-analytic approach, we confirm widespread GM deficits in AN, show that these alterations are (in some patients) extreme, and demonstrate that they enable robust classification with superior performance compared to most MRI-based psychiatric classification studies. The absence of differences between AN subtypes may reflect shared neurobiology, though other imaging modalities may reveal distinctions beyond brain structure.

09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Model-independent upper bounds for the prices of Bermudan options with convex payoffs

arXiv:2503.13328v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Suppose $\mu$ and $\nu$ are probability measures on $\mathbb{R}$ satisfying $\mu \leq_{cx} \nu$. Let $a$ and $b$ be convex functions on $\mathbb{R}$ with $a \geq b \geq 0$. We are interested in finding $$\sup_{\mathbf{M}} \sup_{\tau} \mathbb{E}^{\mathbf{M}} \left[ a(X) I_{ \{ \tau = 1 \} } + b(Y) I_{ \{ \tau = 2 \} } \right] $$ where the first supremum is taken over consistent models $\mathbf{M}$ (i.e., filtered probability spaces $(\Omega, \mathbf{F}, \mathbb{F}, \mathbb{P})$ such that $Z=(z,Z_1,Z_2)=(\int_{\mathbb{R}} x \mu(dx) = \int_{\mathbb{R}} y \nu(dy), X, Y)$ is a $(\mathbb{F},\mathbb{P})$ martingale, where $X$ has law $\mu$ and $Y$ has law $\nu$ under $\mathbb{P}$) and $\tau$ in the second supremum is a $(\mathbb{F},\mathbb{P})$-stopping time taking values in $\{1,2\}$. Our contributions are first to characterise and simplify the dual problem, and second to completely solve the problem under some structural assumptions on the measures $\mu$ and $\nu$ (namely that $\mu$ and $\nu$ are absolutely continuous probability measures that satisfy the Dispersion Assumption). A key finding is that the canonical set-up in which the filtration is that generated by $Z$ is not rich enough to define an optimal model and additional randomisation is required. This holds even though the marginal laws $\mu$ and $\nu$ are atom-free. The problem has an interpretation of finding the robust, or model-free, no-arbitrage bound on the price of a Bermudan option with two possible exercise dates, given the prices of co-maturing European options.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Optimal learning of quantum channels in diamond distance

arXiv:2512.10214v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum process tomography, the task of estimating an unknown quantum channel, is a central problem in quantum information theory. A long-standing open question is how many uses of an unknown channel are required to learn it in diamond distance, the standard metric for distinguishing quantum processes. While quantum state tomography is well understood, for general channels the problem remained open beyond the unitary case. Here we establish the query complexity of channel tomography with optimal dependence on the dimension parameters, at any fixed constant accuracy. We design an algorithm showing that any channel with input/output dimensions $d_{\mathrm{in}},d_{\mathrm{out}}$ and Kraus rank at most $k$ can be learned to accuracy $\varepsilon$ using $O(d_{\mathrm{in}}d_{\mathrm{out}}k/\varepsilon^{2})$ channel uses. Conversely, we prove that $\Omega(d_{\mathrm{in}}d_{\mathrm{out}}k)$ uses are necessary at constant accuracy and that, for non-minimal Kraus rank, a separate $\Omega(1/\varepsilon^{2})$ contribution is unavoidable. Since channels subsume states, unitaries, isometries, and measurements as special cases, our protocol provides a unified framework for these tomography tasks, yielding new guarantees for isometry and measurement tomography while recovering known optimal scalings for state and unitary tomography. Our algorithm follows the natural strategy of performing optimal tomography on the Choi state. The main technical contribution is to show that this suffices to control the induced diamond-distance error, avoiding the dimension loss incurred by a naive conversion from Choi-state trace distance to channel diamond distance. The protocol uses the channel non-adaptively to prepare Choi-state copies, purifies them in parallel, and performs optimal pure-state tomography on the resulting purifications. Hence, we reduce channel tomography to pure-state tomography.

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

Reliability-Asymmetric Spacecraft Autonomy: Co-Designing a Capable Learned GNC Stack with a Verified, Adaptation-Aware Runtime Shield

arXiv:2606.25366v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep-space missions need onboard autonomy that is both capable and certifiable. Rule-based autonomy is certifiable but brittle, while learned autonomy is capable but hard to verify. We present AMPLE-GNC, a three-tier guidance, navigation, and control stack. Its capability path combines a small foundation-model commander that maps natural language to PDDL+, a constraint-screening verifier, and a fault-adaptive controller. All three are bounded by a runtime shield with nine linear-temporal-logic invariants whose predictor soundness is machine-checked by the Kind 2 model checker. On a 6-DOF Basilisk testbed, we make three contributions. First, we deploy an edge commander. Fine-tuning a pretrained 360M model with grammar-constrained decoding gives a hard output-validity guarantee and 84% planner-executable actions. On a de-leaked test, novel-phrasing generalization is 38% exact and 51% action, rising to 48% exact after phrasing-diversity re-finetuning; we separate syntactic validity from semantic accuracy. Second, we introduce a fault-adaptive controller. Rapid Motor Adaptation infers latent actuator faults online and recovers 97.8% of actuator-sign faults and 94.4% of continuous-gain faults within the training randomization envelope. Fault-unaware PD and from-scratch end-to-end RL both score 0%, while the strongest classical-adaptive baseline reaches 55% on continuous gain. Beyond the envelope, a split-conformant retrain scores 57-67%, and adding 4x more in-regime data worsens performance, showing that randomization breadth, not data volume, drives generalization. Robustness is flat under star-tracker noise to 0.005. Third, we show that a latching safe-hold shield can suppress even a capable controller. A split-conformal recovery-deadline certificate with adaptation-aware engagement reconciles safety and recovery, keeping the controller 94.5% autonomous while still catching non-recovery.

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

SegDINO: Introducing Multi-Scale Structure into DINO for Efficient Medical Image Segmentation

Self-supervised DINO models provide strong transferable visual representations, yet applying them directly to image segmentation remains challenging. Existing approaches commonly rely on heavy decoders with complex upsampling, introducing substantial parameter and computational overhead. We observe that introducing scale into DINO features is far more critical than increasing decoder capacity. In this work, we present SegDINO, an efficient segmentation framework that integrates a DINOv3 backbone with lightweight scale modeling. SegDINO introduces Token Pyramid Adaptation (TPA) to reorganize intermediate DINO features into a pseudo multi-scale hierarchy, and Scale-Aware Decoding (SAD) for efficient intra-scale refinement and top-down multi-scale propagation. We further curate PanCT, a new CT dataset containing 284 patients with expert-annotated pancreatic tumors, to assess SegDINO's ability to handle difficult small-lesion cases. Extensive experiments on PanCT and three public benchmarks demonstrate that SegDINO achieves state-of-the-art results with high efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/script-Yang/segdino_v2.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Amortized Probabilistic Retrieval of Atmospheric CO2 from OCO-2 Spectra Using Deep Learning with Laplace Approximations and Normalizing Flows

arXiv:2606.17413v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Space-based monitoring of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) is essential for constraining the global carbon budget. NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) estimates column-averaged dry-air mole fractions of CO2 (XCO2) using high-resolution spectra. However, current operational retrieval algorithms are computationally expensive and do not properly quantify uncertainties. We present a novel deep learning framework that addresses these challenges. Due to the difficulties of ground-truth data for real satellite observations, we develop and validate our approach using a high-fidelity simulation dataset. This dataset, created to support OCO-2 uncertainty quantification (UQ), incorporates realistic forward model errors. Our architecture encodes spectral bands using a multi-branch neural network and estimates posteriors of the full CO2 column or desired summaries thereof using two scalable UQ methods: Laplace approximations and normalizing flows. Our approach has five key advantages relative to operational "full-physics" solvers: (1) Amortization: Inference is orders of magnitude faster, enabling real-time processing of massive data streams; (2) Model error robustness: By training on simulations that explicitly include model discrepancies, our method accounts for systematic errors often neglected by standard inversions; (3) Point estimate accuracy: We achieve superior predictive accuracy compared to baseline methods; (4) Improved UQ: The probabilistic outputs yield better-calibrated uncertainty estimates; and (5) Non-Gaussian posteriors: When utilizing normalizing flows, our framework successfully models complex, asymmetric posterior distributions, overcoming the limitations of the Gaussian assumption. These results suggest that simulation-based deep learning is a viable path toward next-generation operational processing systems.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

MRMU: A New Paradigm for Mendelian Randomization by Accounting for Measured Covariates and Unmeasured Confounders

Mendelian randomization (MR) is a powerful approach for causal inference, however, its reliability is frequently compromised by unadjusted covariates and unmeasured confounders, such as unmeasured pleiotropy and sample structure. To address these challenges, we introduce MRMU, a novel paradigm for the MR framework. Unlike traditional single-variable or multivariable MR methods, MRMU selects instrumental variables only from the exposure of interest and estimates one exposure effect at a time, while jointly accounting for measured covariates and unmeasured confounders. This design improves the reliability of MR analyses. In simulations and real data, MRMU achieved better type I error control, higher statistical power, and more accurate effect estimation than existing MR methods. Applying to coronary artery disease (CAD), MRMU identified robust cardiometabolic risk factors, including LDL-C, APOB, systolic blood pressure, body mass index, and smoking initiation, with consistent evidence across multiple CAD datasets. In contrast, traits such as HDL-C, height, and educational attainment, which were found to be significant by existing MR methods, were no longer supported by MRMU. MRMU further supported blood pressure-related traits, rather than lipid traits, as the more relevant pathway linking urate to CAD. Finally, by integrating large-scale plasma proteomics data, MRMU identified candidate CAD drug targets beyond established HMGCR- and PCSK9-related pathways, highlighting its utility for therapeutic target prioritization.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Biochemical fingerprinting of human scalp hair reveals endocannabinoid related compounds as potential biomarker indicators of altered mitochondrial bioenergetics in immune cells from female patients with major depressive disorder

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a severe psychiatric disorder that affects more than 350 million people worldwide, yet its biomolecular mechanisms are incompletely understood, and clinically applicable markers remain elusive. To shed new light on the underlying pathophysiology of MDD across multiple research disciplines, we first used a biochemical fingerprinting approach with human hair (the first 3 cm cut from the scalp) to identify changes in the total set of detectable metabolites and lipids (metabolipidomics) using quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (qToF-MS). In this study, we focused on endocannabinoid (ECB)-related lipid compounds and identified 7 candidate markers that differed between depressed and non-depressed female participants. Two phosphatidylinositols, namely PI 24:0 and PI 37:4, showed dose-dependent associations with the severity of depressive symptoms. Finally, to bridge hair findings with previously reported results in blood, we tested associations between changes in identified ECB-related compounds and parameters of mitochondrial respiratory activity in peripheral blood mononuclear cells. We found 17 significant associations, with the strongest effects for the lipids PI 24:0, MGDG-O 16:3, PG 12:0, and PI 37:4. Our approach not only identified novel associations between endocannabinoid (ECB)-related lipid dysregulation and impaired mitochondrial energy metabolism in MDD but also revealed ECB-related lipids as a possible surrogate marker of impaired bioenergetic metabolism in MDD, at least in immune cells. More research is needed to replicate these findings, ideally by testing reversibility in longitudinal intervention studies and by including both sexes in larger cohorts.

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

Analysing drivers and interdependencies in European electricity markets using XAI

arXiv:2606.19118v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Electricity markets are inherently complex systems characterised by strong nonlinearities, high-dimensional interactions, and increasing interdependence across regions. While deep neural networks (DNNs) have demonstrated strong predictive capabilities for electricity prices, their lack of interpretability limits their usefulness for understanding the underlying drivers of price formation. This paper addresses this gap by combining DNN models with explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) techniques to analyse the determinants of electricity prices across 39 European bidding zones. We employ SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) to quantify feature contributions and apply and extend SSHAP, an aggregation framework to improve interpretability in high-dimensional settings. The analysis identifies that renewable energy sources, particularly solar, play a disproportionately important role in price formation despite their lower share in total power generation. Gas prices remain a dominant and consistent driver across electricity markets, while interconnections significantly shape price dynamics, highlighting the strong interdependence of European electricity systems. In addition, a synthetic EU-wide electricity market is constructed to explore the counterfactual scenario of a fully integrated market with a single price.

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

Boosting Direct Preference Optimization with Penalization

Authors:

arXiv:2606.12505v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline preference optimization has become a practical substitute for reinforcement learning from human feedback, but pairwise objectives such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants use only the chosen and rejected responses stored in a static dataset. This leaves a useful signal unused: the response that the reference model itself would generate for the same prompt. We propose Direct Preference Optimization with Penalization (DPOP), a simple extension of DPO that augments the base preference loss with a gated penalty on reference-greedy responses. DPOP activates this penalty only when the current policy still assigns a lower likelihood to the preferred response than to the rejected response. On AlpacaEval 2.0, DPOP improves length-controlled win rate over DPO, SimPO, and AlphaDPO on both Llama-3-8b-it and Gemma-2-9b-it, achieving relative gains of 5.3\% and 4.4\% over baselines on the two models, respectively. Ablations further show that a SimNPO-style length-normalized penalty is stronger than NPO and token-level unlikelihood in this setting.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

A Unified Framework for Structured Flow Modeling: From Representation to Verification and Model Discovery

Authors:

arXiv:2605.18250v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Many dynamical systems can be described in terms of structured flows combining source/sink behavior, cyclic dynamics, and topology-constrained transport. These features arise across a wide range of physical, engineered, and data-driven systems. The objective of this work is to establish a unified perspective on such systems, to identify modeling approaches that balance expressivity, interpretability, computational complexity, and data requirements, and to investigate how highly expressive models can be used to uncover the dominant mechanisms underlying observed dynamics. Starting from the Helmholtz-Hodge decomposition of continuous vector fields, we review the recently proposed Graph Vector Field (GVF) framework and its discrete representation on simplicial complexes. We then introduce a hierarchy of alternative approaches, including parametric conditional models, linear graph dynamical systems, and reduced Hodge representations. Finally, we propose a verification and validation methodology based on benchmark datasets from well-understood physical systems and on systematic model-reduction and ablation studies. The resulting family of structured-flow models within a common framework, ranging from low-dimensional parametric representations to full GVF formulations, supports a diagnostic methodology in which gradient, curl, harmonic, and topological contributions are systematically assessed through ablation studies. This process enables the identification of dominant mechanisms underlying the observed dynamics and guides the construction of simplified models tailored to the available data and operational constraints. By separating structural verification, behavioral verification, and domain-specific validation, the proposed approach provides a foundation for scalable and interpretable analysis of complex dynamical systems across multiple application domains.

19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Collapsibility in Multiparametric Models of Random Simplicial Complexes

Authors:

arXiv:2606.15276v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study collapsibility in the multiparametric models of random simplicial complexes, namely the lower and upper models. In the upper model, we improve upon a result of Farber and Nowik, and assert that the homology is a.a.s concentrated in a single dimension by proving that the complex collapses to that \di. In the lower model, we prove that the complex a.a.s collapses to the \di\ with maximal non-trivial cohomology. We then compare this threshold to the ones derived previously for the special cases of the clique complex (by Kahle) and the Linial-Meshulam model.

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

Beyond Scalar Scores: Exploring LLM-based Metrics for Clinical Significance Evaluation in Radiology Reports

Reliable evaluation of generated radiology reports requires strict clinical accuracy, as omitted critical findings or mischaracterized radiographic observations can directly affect patient care. Existing metrics obscure this requirement by reducing report quality to a medically ungrounded scalar. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) possess rich medical knowledge, they likewise struggle to draw a reliable boundary between clinically significant errors and harmless variation. We study this boundary using ReEvalMed benchmark as testbed and evaluate metric-level clinical significance from detecting true clinical errors ("Discrimination") and tolerating insignificant variations ("Robustness"). Across 8 LLM evaluators under one-pass and two-pass settings, we identify a widespread discrimination bias: models effectively detect errors but also over-penalize harmless rephrasings. To mitigate this, we synthesize 4k report pairs and train lightweight interpretable metrics on Qwen3-8B and MedGemma-4B. Our trained metric sharpens the clinical significance boundary, surpassing 32B-scale medical LLMs and remaining competitive with proprietary models. Crucially, the more costly two-pass setting fails to consistently improve overall performance and mainly trades discrimination for robustness. These findings suggest one-pass trained metrics as the practical choice for cost-sensitive deployment, with two-pass inference reserved for settings where D-R balance is critical. We will release the dataset and metric.

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

MambaH-Fit: Rethinking Hyper-surface Fitting-based Point Cloud Normal Estimation via State Space Modelling

We present MambaH-Fit, a state space modelling framework tailored for hyper-surface fitting-based point cloud normal estimation. Existing normal estimation methods often fall short in modelling fine-grained geometric structures, thereby limiting the accuracy of the predicted normals. Recently, state space models (SSMs), particularly Mamba, have demonstrated strong modelling capability by capturing long-range dependencies with linear complexity and inspired adaptations to point cloud processing. However, existing Mamba-based approaches primarily focus on understanding global shape structures, leaving the modelling of local, fine-grained geometric details largely under-explored. To address the issues above, we first introduce an Attention-driven Hierarchical Feature Fusion (AHFF) scheme to adaptively fuse multi-scale point cloud patch features, significantly enhancing geometric context learning in local point cloud neighbourhoods. Building upon this, we further propose Patch-wise State Space Model (PSSM) that models point cloud patches as implicit hyper-surfaces via state dynamics, enabling effective fine-grained geometric understanding for normal prediction. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that our method outperforms existing ones in terms of accuracy, robustness, and flexibility. Ablation studies further validate the contribution of the proposed components.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

The Acceptability of Three Co-Created Peer Support Interventions for People Living with Leprosy Reactions in Indonesia: A Mixed-Methods Pilot Study

Background: Leprosy reactions (LR) are immune-mediated complications associated with disability, emotional distress, and social isolation. We identified a gap in affected-individual-informed interventions that aim to improve the management of LR in healthcare settings. To address this gap, we assessed the acceptability of three peer-support interventions co-created with people affected by LR in Indonesia. Methods: Using an interactive learning and action approach, we co-created peer counselling, telesupport groups, and participatory video interventions which were piloted in an urban hospital and 13 rural community clinics. A mixed-methods design was applied with interviews, focus group discussions, and pre-post assessments involving four participant groups. Data were analyzed thematically using an acceptability framework. Results: One hundred participants were enrolled, and 92 completed the pilot intervention between November 2022 and July 2023. Qualitative findings showed that all interventions were acceptable. Peer counselling provided emotional reassurance through shared experiences and was perceived as trustworthy and supportive. Perceived burdens differed by setting, with time constraints in urban facilities and geographical barriers in rural clinics. Knowledge improved significantly among participants of peer counselling and telesupport groups in rural settings. Telesupport groups facilitated connection, information exchange, and continuity of care. Digital access and literacy limited participation for some, particularly in rural areas. The participatory video was perceived as reassuring and informative. Improvements in knowledge, attitude, practices, and mental well-being domain scores were observed among urban participants, but responses in rural settings showed less change. Participants and co-implementers reported increased self-efficacy, participants confidence to perform required behaviors within peer support interventions, with effects shaped by intervention and setting. Conclusions: The three co-created peer-support interventions were acceptable for individuals with LR in diverse healthcare settings. These outcomes highlight the importance and effectiveness of selective, and context-sensitive implementation of one or more peer-support modalities.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Partial Ring Scan: Revisiting Scan Order in Vision State Space Models

State Space Models (SSMs) have emerged as efficient alternatives to attention for vision tasks, offering lineartime sequence processing with competitive accuracy. Vision SSMs, however, require serializing 2D images into 1D token sequences along a predefined scan order, a factor often overlooked. We show that scan order critically affects performance by altering spatial adjacency, fracturing object continuity, and amplifying degradation under geometric transformations such as rotation. We present Partial RIng Scan Mamba (PRISMamba), a rotation-robust traversal that partitions an image into concentric rings, performs order-agnostic aggregation within each ring, and propagates context across rings through a set of short radial SSMs. Efficiency is further improved via partial channel filtering, which routes only the most informative channels through the recurrent ring pathway while keeping the rest on a lightweight residual branch. On ImageNet-1K, PRISMamba achieves 84.5% Top-1 with 3.9G FLOPs and 3,054 img/s on A100, outperforming VMamba in both accuracy and throughput while requiring fewer FLOPs. It also maintains performance under rotation, whereas fixed-path scans drop by 1~2%. These results highlight scan-order design, together with channel filtering, as a crucial, underexplored factor for accuracy, efficiency, and rotation robustness in Vision SSMs. Code will be released upon acceptance.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

SPATIA: Multimodal Generation and Prediction of Spatial Cell Phenotypes

Understanding how cellular morphology, gene expression, and spatial context jointly shape tissue function is a central challenge in biology. Image-based spatial transcriptomics technologies now provide high-resolution measurements of cell images and gene expression profiles, but existing methods typically analyze these modalities in isolation or at limited resolution. We address the problem by introducing SPATIA, a multi-level generative and predictive model that learns unified, spatially aware representations by fusing morphology, gene expression, and spatial context from the cell to the tissue level. SPATIA also incorporates a spatially conditioned generative framework with confidence-aware OT reweighting and morphology-profile alignment for modeling target-state morphology distributions. Specifically, we propose a confidence-aware flow matching objective that reweights weak optimal-transport pairs based on uncertainty. We further apply morphology-profile alignment to encourage biologically meaningful image generation, enabling the modeling of microenvironment-dependent phenotypic transitions. We assembled a multi-scale dataset consisting of 25.9 million cell-gene pairs across 17 tissues. We benchmark SPATIA against 18 models across 12 tasks, spanning categories such as phenotype generation, annotation, clustering, gene imputation, and cross-modal prediction. SPATIA achieves improved performance over state-of-the-art models, improving generative fidelity by 8% and predictive accuracy by up to 3%.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Self-Preference Is Weak or Absent in Verifiable Instruction-Following Revision: A Four-Model Test Under Genuine Authorship

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly review and revise text, including their own. A documented self-preference bias (models favoring their own generations when acting as judges) raises the question of whether models also resist valid corrections to their own writing. We test this in a setting where "valid" is decided not by another model but by a deterministic verifier: instruction-following revision on IFEval. A model writes a draft; the official IFEval checker confirms the draft violates a constraint and that a candidate edit fixes it; the model then accepts or rejects that edit either as the genuine in-context author or as a fresh model that sees the draft neutrally. Across four mid-tier model families and 85 author-versus-fresh comparisons, we find no detectable self-preference: authors reject verified-good fixes to their own drafts at essentially the same rate as fresh models judging the same drafts (gap -5.1 pp, 95% CI [-12.9, +2.7]). A self-skepticism hint from a smaller pilot did not replicate at scale. The one robust observation is qualitative: when authors do reject a verified-good fix, 97% of their stated reasons are flaw-catching rather than preference, that is, about the character of rejections, not an elevated rate. Effects smaller than ~13 pp cannot be excluded at this sample size.