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

Dynamic Execution Commitment of Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models predominantly adopt action chunking, i.e., predicting and committing to a short horizon of consecutive low-level actions in a single forward pass, to amortize the inference cost of large-scale backbones and reduce per-step latency. However, committing these multi-step predictions to real-world execution requires balancing success rate against inference efficiency, a decision typically governed by fixed execution horizons tuned per task. Such heuristics ignore the state-dependent nature of predictive reliability, leading to brittle performance in dynamic or out-of-distribution settings. In this paper, we introduce A3, an Adaptive Action Acceptance mechanism that reframes dynamic execution commitment as a self-speculative prefix verification problem. A3 first computes a trajectory-wise consensus score of actions via group sampling, then selects a representative draft and prioritizes downstream verification. Specifically, it enforces: (1) consensus-ordered conditional invariance, which validates low-consensus actions by judging whether they remain consistent when re-decoded conditioned on high-consensus actions; and (2) prefix-closed sequential consistency, which guarantees physical rollout integrity by accepting only the longest continuous sequence of verified actions starting from the beginning. Consequently, the execution horizon emerges as the longest verifiable prefix satisfying both internal model logic and sequential execution constraints. Experiments across diverse VLA models and benchmarks demonstrate that A3 eliminates the need for manual horizon tuning while achieving a superior trade-off between execution robustness and inference throughput.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Brain-gut axis imaging, motion correction with 11C-carfentanil total-body PET

Background: Mu-opioid receptors (MORs) are expressed throughout the body including in the brain and gastrointestinal (GI) tract. Total-body PET imaging of the brain and GI tract offers a promising approach for cross-sectional in vivo evaluation of the MOR brain-GI axis. However, intestinal motility and bladder filling introduce motion throughout the GI tract over the scan window. Here we establish analysis methodology to account for motion for dynamic imaging of the brain-GI axis, to further characterize peripheral MORs throughout the body and provide a framework for semi-automatic total-body PET modeling. Methods: 4 subjects underwent 90-min dynamic [11C]-carfentanil (cfn) total-body PET acquisitions at baseline, after intravenous naloxone (central antagonist) administration, and after orally administered loperamide (peripheral agonist and P-glycoprotein substrate). Thalamic MOR availability was measured using the Logan reference tissue model. Using CT-based segmentation, the GI tract was subdivided into anatomical segments, in addition to other peripheral organs (e.g., liver, psoas muscle). Frame-by-frame semi-automatic motion correction was performed with three distinct reference frames (11-14 min post-injection, p.i., 35-40 min p.i., and 85-90 min p.i.). The performance of these three were compared to manual correction. Compartment modeling and Logan graphical analysis were performed to estimate relevant kinetic parameters (K1, VT, VTLogan). Results: Across the 4 subjects and regions, kinetic parameter estimates were highly correlated (r>0.7) for K1, VT and VT Logan when comparing semi-automatic (reference frame at 35-40 min p.i.) and manual correction. With semi-automatic motion correction, graphical-based estimation of VTLogan in the gastrointestinal tract was significantly decreased with loperamide relative to baseline (p

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

PI-Hunter: Automated Red-Teaming for Exposing and Localizing Prompt Injections

arXiv:2606.12737v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly evolving into agentic systems that interact with external tools and environments, introducing new security risks such as indirect prompt injection attacks through untrusted external sources. Existing defenses mainly focus on blocking malicious content at inference time, and current red-teaming methods primarily optimize attack success. As a result, developers have limited visibility into how latent prompt injections emerge and propagate through agents. We propose PI-Hunter, an automated agentic auditing framework for proactive vulnerability exposure in LLM agents. PI-Hunter constructs realistic source-aware test cases and iteratively evolves them through feedback-driven exploration to induce agents to retrieve and reveal latent malicious instructions embedded within external environments. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks, agent architectures, attacks, and defenses demonstrate that PI-Hunter substantially improves vulnerability exposure and attack-surface coverage over strong automated red-teaming baselines, while remaining effective under existing prompt injection defenses.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

PersonaDrive: Human-Style Retrieval-Augmented VLA Agents for Closed-Loop Driving Simulation

Closed-loop driving simulators typically populate their environments with non-ego traffic agents that behave largely the same way, produced either by rule-based traffic managers or by learned models trained toward a single behavioral mode. Recent work introduces style variation through post-hoc labels on observational data or LLM-inferred reward weights, but these signals act as proxies for what a style should reward rather than demonstrations of humans explicitly asked to drive in that style. We introduce PersonaDrive, a pipeline that conditions a vision-language-action (VLA) driving agent on retrieved demonstrations from a style-instructed human driving dataset, in which participants drive CARLA leaderboard routes under aggressive, neutral, and conservative instructions on a driver-in-the-loop rig. The pipeline has three stages: (i) offline triplet mining over per-style human driving data using a combined image-text similarity score; (ii) training a lightweight retrieval head that fuses frozen visual features with a small control encoder over per-style databases; and (iii) fine-tuning a single VLA backbone to treat retrieved context points as in-context behavioral demonstrations during waypoint prediction. At inference, the same backbone is conditioned on any style by swapping which per-style database the retrieval head queries, so selecting a style requires no per-style retraining while enabling human-style, style-diverse non-ego agents for closed-loop simulation. On Bench2Drive, PersonaDrive (no style) improves the driving score by 4.6% over SimLingo and 2.5% over HiP-AD, and under style conditioning attains the highest driving score in every style within a roughly 2% band (its weakest style surpassing the strongest baseline, DMW, by 5.4%), while average speed and acceleration rise by 18% and 25% from the conservative to the aggressive instruction.

05.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Fast formation to reinforce lithium-rich cathodes

作者:

Formation in lithium-ion battery manufacturing typically involves low-rate charge–discharge cycles to establish stable electrode–electrolyte interfaces—a time-consuming process1–4. Here, our findings on lithium-rich layered oxide cathodes challenge the necessity of conventional formation, which can even shorten battery lifespan. Fast formation, on the other hand, reduces production cost and enhances capacity and stability. Multiscale synchrotron-based techniques show that residual lithium ions after the initial charge are critical for subsequent structural evolution and cycling performance. Deep lithium de-intercalation causes severe structural degradation and capacity loss due to the inherently fragile lithium-deficient matrix. By contrast, the residual lithium ions from fast formation enhance reversibility through a self-pinning effect, preventing pernicious lattice deformation and reinforcing the ion-storage framework. Adjusting the initial charge current density from 0.2 C to 2 C improves reversible capacity by 20% and extends cycle life by more than 36%. This approach can also be extended to other electrode systems, providing insights for more-efficient battery production. Fast formation in lithium-ion batteries outperforms conventional slow formation, lowering costs and improving battery capacity, stability and cycle life, offering broader application to electrode systems.

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

Sat2City v2: Native 3D City Asset Generation from a Single Satellite Image

Generating explicit 3D city assets from a single satellite image is important for digital twins, urban simulation, and geospatial intelligence. Unlike satellite-to-street-view synthesis, the task requires a reusable textured mesh with plausible geometry and controllable appearance rather than a 3D proxy optimized only for rendering a small set of images or videos. The ICCV Sat2City framework made a first step by conditioning cascaded sparse-voxel latent diffusion on satellite-derived height maps, but its appearance was random, its training data were synthetic, and its task-specific VAE did not scale well to noisy real-world reconstructions. We present Sat2City v2, a journal extension that adapts a pretrained native structured-latent 3D foundation model to weakly aligned satellite images and textured meshes. We build a real-world dataset with 16,241 satellite-mesh pairs across 24 regions in 9 cities. Instead of learning a 3D representation from noisy city meshes, Sat2City v2 encodes each mesh into a pretrained native 3D latent space, fine-tunes a satellite-conditioned geometry flow, and uses the decoded shape to anchor satellite-conditioned texturing. This retains Sat2City's geometry-to-appearance cascade while enabling appearance-controllable generation from the satellite input. Experiments on metric-scale DSM reconstruction and generative city-asset benchmarks for geometry and appearance show that Sat2City v2 achieves the best overall performance among evaluated baselines. Overall, Sat2City v2 advances satellite-to-city generation from rendering-oriented 3D proxies to explicit textured mesh assets, supported by, to the best of our knowledge, the first documented satellite-mesh paired dataset collected from matched geographic crops for this asset-level task. Project page: https://ai4city-hkust.github.io/Sat2City-v2/

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Food insecurity, caloric intake and nutritional status among children under 5 years old: a predictive modelling analysis of the MAL-ED multi-country cohort

Background For children at risk of acute malnutrition, being able to predict and forecast dietary intakes and/or nutritional evolution would support decision-making, particularly in crisis settings where ground data collection is unfeasible or scant. We explored whether statistical models could offer accurate predictions of caloric intake or anthropometric (weight-for-height Z score, WHZ) changes, given intake, household food insecurity and other plausible predictors. Methods We reanalysed data from the Malnutrition and Enteric Disease (MAL-ED) multi-country (Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Peru, South Africa, Tanzania) birth cohort (2009-2014), which consistently tracked household food insecurity experience, dietary intake, anthropometry, infectious disease symptoms, breastfeeding and other variables among children 9 to 35 months old. We quantified the performance on cross-validation of three models: (M1) change in WHZ as a function of household food insecurity; (M2) change in WHZ as a function of caloric intake; (M3) caloric intake as a function of household food insecurity. We compared random forests, lasso regressions, additive models and generalised boosted regressions. All models included age, sex, birth weight, urban versus rural residence, breastfeeding status and the longitudinal prevalence of diarrhoea, acute respiratory infection and fever as additional predictors. Results Altogether, M1, M2 and M3 leveraged 2957, 23,651 and 2013 longitudinal child observations, respectively. Both at country and individual level, there was low correlation among the key variables of interest. All three models featured low performance and moderate to extreme regression dilution, even when fitted to each country cohort separately. Discussion This secondary analysis based on data from a rigorous observational study suggests that statistical prediction of key variables along the causal pathway to childhood acute malnutrition may not be feasible. These negative findings may in part be explained by error in predictor measurement and the narrow range of both predictor and outcome values in the MAL-ED cohort, relative to the more extreme scenarios common to crisis settings. They also imply that mechanistic models requiring caloric intake as an input cannot rely on a statistical shortcut of this kind and must instead depend on empirical data or scenario assumptions.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Changes in hierarchical brain dynamics of rumination following mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for depression

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a leading cause of disability worldwide with risk of onset and recurrence linked to depressive ruminative thought patterns. Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) is an evidence-based treatment for depression that targets the ability to recognise, decenter, and disengage from ruminative thought patterns. Elucidating how MBCT impacts hierarchical brain organisation may be key to understanding the processes by which MBCT can modulate ruminative tendencies. In a randomised controlled functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) trial on individuals with MDD (N=80) before and after MBCT in addition to treatment as usual (TAU), we investigated changes in hierarchical brain organisation during resting-state and rumination. We built whole-brain models to obtain generative connectivity (GEC) matrices per patient and quantified brain hierarchy by measuring the global directedness and regional trophic levels in each GEC, in which greater directedness reflects more directional information flow and less recurrence. Global directedness in MBCT+TAU compared to TAU increased during rumination, with no changes during resting-state. Furthermore, increased regional breadth of hierarchy during rumination was related to improvements in clinical and behavioural outcomes following MBCT+TAU. Increased brain hierarchy during rumination following mindfulness training may be consistent with a shift away from self-reinforcing negative mental loops towards more differentiated and less coupled cognitive and bodily cycles, supporting MBCT's ability to interrupt ruminative processes. Hierarchical brain dynamics may hold promise as a treatment-sensitive marker and a potential mechanism of therapeutic change in MBCT for depression.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

LLM-Assisted Stance Detection in Scientific Discourse: A Test Case in Bayesian Cognitive Science

Qualitative coding is central to social science, but expert annotation is difficult to scale. LLMs offer a possible extension, yet require careful validation when the target construct is interpretive, theoretically loaded, and only indirectly expressed. We study this problem in a difficult case: detecting whether authors treat Bayesian models as descriptions of mental and neural mechanisms (realism) or as useful mathematical tools (instrumentalism). Our method combines a theory-driven codebook, expert-coded reference annotations, a diagnostic-gated prompt-optimization search yielding a shared zero-shot prompt for three frontier LLMs (GPT-5.1, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro Preview), and multi-rater reliability analysis. The final prompt achieved a held-out combined reliability score of 0.76 (harmonic mean of ICC = 0.79 and $\alpha$ = 0.74), with all diagnostics satisfied. Deployed on 6,858 quotes from 210 articles, the three LLMs reached substantial quote-level agreement (ICC = 0.80; $\alpha$ = 0.76; combined = 0.78) and near-perfect article-level rank stability ($r$ = 0.96-0.97 across rater pairs). The corpus was predominantly weakly realist, but article-level stances were rarely uniform: only 1.4% of articles used a single band, while 59.5% spanned four or more. Low-level perception/motor articles scored 8.8 Realism points higher than high-level cognition articles ($p < .001$, $d = 0.60$), quantifying a long-held qualitative intuition. We present this as an expert-led case study; the framework is intended to generalize to similar theoretically demanding tasks, not to all qualitative analysis.

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

Where's the Plan? Locating Latent Planning in Language Models with Lightweight Mechanistic Interventions

arXiv:2605.07984v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study planning site formation in language models – where internal representations of structurally-constrained future tokens form during the forward pass, and whether they causally drive generation. Using rhyming-couplet completion as a clean test of forward-looking constraint, we apply two lightweight methods (linear probing and activation patching) across Qwen3, Gemma-3, and Llama-3 at more than ten scales. Probing shows that future-rhyme information is linearly decodable at the line boundary, with signal that strengthens with scale in all three families. Activation patching reveals that only Gemma-3-27B causally relies on this encoding, exhibiting a handoff in which the causal driver migrates from the rhyme word to the line boundary around layer 30. Every other model we test conditions on the rhyme word throughout generation, with near-zero causal effect at the line boundary despite strong probe signal. We localize the Gemma-3-27B handoff to five attention heads through two-stage path patching that recover ~90% of the rhyme-routing capacity at the newline.

11.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

SPARQ-MI leverages end-to-end spatial single-cell analysis of the tumor microenvironment

Detailed spatial analysis of the tumor micro-environment (TME) through multiplexed fluorescence imaging requires quantitative image-processing and data-analysis methods. While data-preprocessing down to segmentation of individual cells is captured by available methods, statistical analysis of single-cell features is compromised by the uneven noise distribution especially in complex tissues such as the TME, as well as by labor-intensive manual cell-type annotation and region segmentation. Here, we present SPARQ-MI (Spatial Phenotyping, Architecture Reconstruction and Quantification from Multiplexed Imaging) for streamlined spatial single-cell analysis, along with a tissue microarray PhenoCycler data-set with 37 fluorescent channels from melanoma patients under immunotherapy. We demonstrate that SPARQ-MI enables robust reconstruction of the cellular and spatial composition in this and other tissue types. Our analysis reveals associations of the cell-state and spatial location of CD8 T cells with response to immunotherapy. Overall, SPARQ-MI allows for quantitative analysis of complex fluorescence histology samples under minimal user input, and accounting for spatially uneven coverage of antibody signals, setting the stage for quantitative analysis of clinical samples.

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

When to Trust, How to Distill: Multi-Foundation Model Guidance for Lightweight, Robust Scientific Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.19363v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The deployment of Time-Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) in physical sciences is hindered by a critical trade-off: while these models encode rich, universal temporal dynamics, they suffer from severe distributional misalignment when applied zero-shot to specific scientific domains, and their computational cost prohibits deployment in edge-computing sensor networks. We address a fundamental challenge: How can we extract latent structural knowledge from misaligned foundation models (FM) to train lightweight, specialized forecasters? We propose Gated Uncertainty-Aware Routing for Distillation (Guard), a novel framework that reframes multiteacher distillation as an instance-wise decision process with two adaptive mechanisms: (1) a Contextual Router that dynamically selects the most relevant teacher based on local input statistics, exploiting complementarity across diverse foundation models; and (2) an Uncertainty-Gated Temperature mechanism that acts as a "circuit-breaker," automatically attenuating distillation strength when teacher confidence diverges from domain reality. We evaluate our proposed lightweight framework on four climate-critical domains: meteorology, ecosystem carbon flux, soil moisture, and energy grids. Our method significantly reduces RMSE relative to a fixed-weight multi-teacher distillation baseline, successfully distilling knowledge from pretrained FMs (teachers) even when they exhibit suboptimal zero-shot accuracy due to distribution shift between the original and target data domains. We demonstrate that these domain-misaligned teachers can still serve as critical correctives, outperforming the globally superior FMs on 28.5% of the hardest instances. Ultimately, this enables high-precision scientific forecasting suitable for resource-constrained edge deployment. Code is available at https://github.com/RupasreeDey/GUARD-KDD2026.

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

Vulcan: Instance-specialized, Verifiable Systems Heuristics Through LLM-driven Search

arXiv:2512.25065v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Systems resource management tasks rely primarily on hand-designed heuristics. However, growing hardware heterogeneity and workload diversity require heuristics specialized to particular deployment instances, making manual design expensive and difficult to scale. In this paper, we explore how to synthesize systems heuristics using LLMs. The main challenge is ensuring that generated heuristics execute safely, integrate correctly with the surrounding system, and still achieve strong performance. We propose Vulcan, a framework that identifies LLM-friendly interfaces that isolate core decision logic from the rest of the implementation. With Vulcan, LLM-generated code is restricted to simple stateless decision functions, while trusted runtime abstractions provide rich derived statistics for meaningful policy exploration without system-integration bugs. To ensure execution safety, LLMs synthesize heuristics in a restricted language, Anvil, that guarantees important properties by construction. We evaluate Vulcan across three well-studied domains and demonstrate up to 4.9x higher savings for spot-VM scheduling, up to 2x lower miss ratios for cache eviction, and up to 10% higher application performance for tiered-memory systems, while ensuring execution safety throughout.

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

Geodesic Calculus on Implicitly Defined Latent Manifolds

arXiv:2510.09468v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Latent manifolds of autoencoders provide low-dimensional representations of data, which can be studied from a geometric perspective. We propose to describe these latent manifolds as implicit submanifolds of some ambient latent space. Based on this, we develop tools for a discrete Riemannian calculus approximating classical geometric operators. These tools are robust against inaccuracies of the implicit representation often occurring in practical examples. To obtain a suitable implicit representation, we propose to learn an approximate projection onto the latent manifold by minimizing a denoising objective. This approach is independent of the underlying autoencoder and supports the use of different Riemannian geometries on the latent manifolds. The framework in particular enables the computation of geodesic paths connecting given end points and shooting geodesics via the Riemannian exponential maps on latent manifolds. We evaluate our approach on various autoencoders trained on synthetic and real data.

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

From Democracies to Autocracies: How AI Systems Enable Authoritarianism by Design

arXiv:2606.17286v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI-enabled authoritarianism is not confined to autocracies. In this paper, we provide greater transparency by investigating and mapping the lifecycles of six AI systems deployed in different political regimes, ranging from the US to China. By drawing on an extensive range of sources (academic publications, investigative research reports, third-party evaluations, media interviews, government procurement notices), we conduct a systematic, qualitative comparison across systems to identify the critical technical and operational features that enable authoritarianism within their respective political contexts. We find that enabling features include the centralization and co-optation of administrative data for law enforcement and political punishment, regulatory gaps that fail to deter misuse, weak user compliance that nullifies human oversight mechanisms, and the encoding of protected group traits that identify members of vulnerable populations. We find that these features are present across systems deployed in autocratic and democratic regimes, albeit in varying configurations. We also find that both centralized and fragmented AI systems can contribute to authoritarianism by exploiting governance gaps: centralized systems directed by executive authorities, particularly within security and military institutions, are often not subjected to formal oversight mechanisms, while fragmented systems diffuse accountability between stakeholders, paving the way for entrenchment. These findings reveal that AI-enabled authoritarianism is distributed, resulting from design and operational choices made by developers, administrators, and users alike. We conclude with recommendations for developers and policymakers to mitigate these risks.

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

Unassigned Agents in Compilation-based Multi-agent Path Finding

arXiv:2606.15797v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Compilation-based techniques represent an important stream of solvers for multi-agent path finding (MAPF) due to their modularity and adaptability for non-standard variants of the problem. While in the standard MAPF the task is to navigate all agents from their initial positions to given individual goal positions without any collision, variants where a different requirement for agents is used are also relevant. Such a variant is MAPF with unassigned agents (UA-MAPF) where some agents have the same setting as in the standard MAPF with initial positions and goals while the remaining agents have the initial position but have no goal - unassigned agents. Despite unassigned agent do not need to reach any goal position they have to be moved out of the way of the standard agents if needed which represent a specific challenge. We show in this paper that UA-MAPF can be expressed in recent compilation-based techniques for MAPF based on formulating the problem as Boolean satisfiability, namely we adapt SMT-CBS and NRF-SAT, the recent solvers based on counterexample guided abstraction refinement and non-refined abstractions.

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

Robin-Neumann Coupling of PINN and FEM Solvers: A Steklov-Poincaré View, with Application to Fluid-Structure Interaction with Contact

arXiv:2606.14181v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) are meshless and carry moving geometry and topology change through resampling of collocation points; the finite-element method (FEM) is the workhorse for boundary-fitted discretisations. Coupling the two across a shared interface promises the best of both, yet existing PINN-FEM schemes are validated only empirically. We put the coupling on a domain-decomposition footing: viewing each solver as a Steklov-Poincaré (trace-to-flux) operator, we transfer the classical Dirichlet-Neumann (DN) divergence diagnosis and its Robin-Neumann (RN) cure, including a closed-form, sweep-free interface impedance, and prove a PINN-specific contraction theorem: a trained network realises only a perturbed Steklov operator with a per-step training residual, and RN still contracts, with no shared-eigenbasis hypothesis, to a floor set by the achieved training loss. Because a PINN has no stiffness matrix, we introduce a Fourier-mode interface probe that recovers the network's resolvable Steklov eigenvalues to within 0.5% and doubles as a diagnostic of the network's spectral cap. The theory predicts measured PINN-FEM contraction rates to within 7% on 1D and 2D Poisson couplings, and a two-slab analogue of the large-added-mass regime shows RN's per-mode impedance matching winning decisively where tuned scalar relaxation saturates. We demonstrate the framework on a Stokes/rigid-disc problem with Alart-Curnier contact: the meshless PINN fluid absorbs the topology change at contact by collocation exclusion alone, no remeshing and no cut cells, and the static-equilibrium contact reaction matches the submerged weight to 0.4% under mesh refinement. We quantify remaining limitations: the warm-started PINN drifts off the Stokes manifold over long horizons, and matched FEM-FEM benchmarks attribute pre-impact squeeze-film signatures to PINN under-resolution.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Rapid Cavity-Based Mid-Circuit Measurement and Feedforward in a Neutral Atom Array

arXiv:2606.24869v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Measuring part of a quantum system in the midst of its evolution and acting on the result in real time is essential for numerous quantum information protocols. Neutral-atom arrays are a leading platform for quantum information processing, but their mid-circuit measurement-and-feedforward cycle times have remained slow, typically exceeding 1 ms. Here we demonstrate fast mid-circuit measurement and real-time feedforward in an array of atomic qubits coupled to a high-finesse optical cavity. Local light shifts tune individual data qubits out of resonance with the cavity, shielding their coherence, while a near-resonant probe drives a selected qubit whose emission is collected with Purcell enhancement. Mid-circuit measurements of four qubits with sub percent infidelity reduce the coherence of a fifth unmeasured data qubit by less than 2%. We implement real-time feedforward to correct measurement-induced phase shifts and to realize an adaptive circuit for optimal quantum state discrimination and conditional state preparation. Our approach reduces the measurement-and-feedforward cycle time to below 100 $\mu$s and establishes optical cavities as a route to fast control of neutral-atom quantum systems.

19.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-17

Machine learning-driven identification of virulence determinants in <i>Borrelia burgdorferi</i> associated with human dissemination

by Hoa Thanh Nguyen, Catherine A. Brissette Lyme disease, the most common tick-borne infectious disease in the United States, presents with highly variable clinical outcomes, ranging from localized erythema migrans to severe disseminated complications affecting the heart, joints, and nervous system. The bacterial determinants underlying this phenotypic variation remain largely unknown, limiting our ability to predict disease progression and optimize treatment strategies. Here, we applied machine learning (ML) approaches to identify specific amino acid residues within surface-exposed virulence factors that predict human dissemination phenotypes. Utilizing the published whole genome sequences from 299 clinical Borrelia burgdorferi isolates collected from the United States and Slovenia over a 30-year period (1992–2021), we extracted and characterized translated amino acid sequences (variants) of seven known virulence factors (BB_0406, BBK32, DbpA, OspA, OspC, P66, and RevA). Protein variants were classified based on their association with disseminated versus localized infections using clinical metadata. Cramér’s V analysis revealed possible strong associations between dissemination phenotypes and five adhesins: BBK32, DbpA, OspC, P66, and RevA. We developed ML models using five algorithms with multiple feature selection strategies, achieving robust predictive performance for DbpA, OspC, and RevA variants (all performance metrics > 0.7). Feature importance analysis identified 57, 29, and 42 key predictive residues for DbpA, OspC, and RevA, respectively. Notably, B-cell epitope prediction revealed significant enrichment of ML-identified residues within predicted epitope regions for OspC (11 overlapping residues, OR = 3.57, p = 0.006) and RevA (12 overlapping residues, OR = 2.37, p = 0.048), suggesting these residues may influence immune recognition and bacterial persistence. This study establishes the first computational framework linking Borrelia protein sequence variants to clinical dissemination phenotypes, providing molecular insights into Lyme disease pathogenesis that may inform the development of improved diagnostics and therapeutic targets.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Model selection with proper scoring rules on data sets of time series

arXiv:2606.24715v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We consider the problem of model selection between probabilistic models on data sets of time series. Chosen a proper scoring rule, we denote by the term score the average value of the scoring rule on the test of an individual time series. For model selection, we need aggregating the values of the scores across multiple time series. Three summary statistics are commonly used for model selection: mean score, median score, and mean rank. Results in previous papers show that these statistics can yield conflicting decisions; we show how the conflicting conclusions are due to the skewness of the distribution of scores. We also show that as the test set of each time series of the data set increases, the different model selection criteria progressively converge to the same conclusion. However, for short tests sets, only the mean score identifies the true model as the best. We illustrate these phenomena with an analysis on intermittent time series, including the data set of the M5 competition, where we underline the importance of having a large test set. In such experiments, we further notice that model selection based on mean ranks remains unchanged using different scaling factors.

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

Self-Supervised Learning of Iterative Solvers for Constrained Optimization

arXiv:2409.08066v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The real-time solution of parametric optimization problems is critical for applications that demand high accuracy under tight real-time constraints, such as model predictive control. To this end, this work presents a learning-based iterative solver for constrained optimization, comprising a neural network predictor that generates initial primal-dual solution estimates, followed by a learned iterative solver that refines these estimates to reach high accuracy. We introduce a novel loss function based on Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) optimality conditions, enabling fully self-supervised training without pre-solved optimizer solutions. Theoretical guarantees ensure that the training loss function attains minima exclusively at KKT points. A convexification procedure enables application to nonconvex problems while preserving these guarantees. Experiments on two nonconvex case studies demonstrate speedups of up to one order of magnitude compared to state-of-the-art solvers such as IPOPT, while achieving orders of magnitude higher accuracy than competing learning-based approaches.

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

Optimal Deterministic Multicalibration and Omniprediction

arXiv:2606.20557v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A model is multicalibrated on a collection of group weights $G$ if it is calibrated – i.e. unbiased even conditional on its prediction – not just overall, but also after reweighting contexts by each $g \in G$. It is a useful property for many downstream applications and is a basic desideratum of trustworthy machine learning. Before this work, all predictors known to attain the minimax-optimal $\widetilde O(\varepsilon^{-3})$ sample complexity rate for $\varepsilon$-multicalibration were randomized, while deterministic predictors were known only with substantially worse sample complexity. Whether randomization is necessary for optimal sample complexity in multicalibration was explicitly asked by [CLNR26] and implicitly in several prior works. We resolve this open problem by giving a minimax-optimal multicalibration algorithm that outputs a deterministic predictor. We then generalize the algorithm to produce optimal deterministic predictors that satisfy outcome indistinguishability (OI) with respect to finite or finitely covered collections of tests. As an application, this also gives deterministic omnipredictors and panpredictors with optimal sample complexity, resolving open problems posed by [OKK25] and [BHHLZ25].

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

ttda704 at SemEval-2026 Task 6: Structured Chain-of-Thought Prompting for Political Evasion Detection

This paper describes our system for SemEval-2026 Task 6, which addresses the classification of political evasion strategies in English question-answer pairs extracted from U.S. presidential interviews. We systematically compare two distinct paradigms: (1) Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Qwen3 models (4B-32B) using QLoRA, enhanced with tiered upsampling and weighted cross-entropy loss to address severe class imbalance, and (2) structured Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting of reasoning-capable API models, namely DeepSeek-V3.2 and Grok-4-Fast. Our evaluation demonstrates that structured CoT prompting of reasoning-enabled models substantially outperforms our baseline parameter-efficient fine-tuning implementation in absolute Macro F1. Our best system, Grok-4-Fast with extended reasoning and few-shot hierarchical CoT prompting, achieves a Macro F1 of 0.5147 on Subtask 2 (9-class evasion) and 0.7979 on Subtask 1 (3-class clarity), ranking 8th out of 33 teams on Subtask 2 and 13th out of 41 teams on Subtask 1 on the official leaderboard. Furthermore, our ablation studies reveal key insights into effective prompt design for evasion detection: presenting labels within a hierarchical taxonomy helps structure model reasoning, while few-shot exemplars provide task calibration. However, the strongest prompt variants are not statistically distinguishable in Macro F1, and explicitly enabling extended reasoning modes yields substantial performance gains by facilitating the multi-step pragmatic analysis required to detect evasive intent.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Phase Transitions in Attention: A Bayesian Theory of Copy Head Emergence

arXiv:2606.12058v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Attention is the key mechanism underlying in-context learning in transformers, and attention patterns have been observed empirically to emerge abruptly during training. We present a Bayesian theory of feature learning in attention; we then focus on how the copy subcircuit in the first layer of an induction head is learned by analyzing a single-layer softmax attention network trained on a copy task. We derive a closed-form posterior over the attention matrix and reduce it to a low-dimensional order parameter space. This reduction reveals a phase transition in the amount of training data, which we verify using both Bayesian sampling and standard training with Adam. We contrast our results with linear attention and find that softmax attention exhibits a first-order phase transition while in linear attention an initial second-order phase transition is followed by a smooth, continuous evolution toward the structured attention pattern (crossover). Our work provides a first-principles theoretical account of the abrupt emergence of the copy subcircuit, reminiscent of the one observed in training large language models.

25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Extremal representations of functions of matrices and applications to multivariate prediction

arXiv:2606.19359v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Motivated by two seminal results of multivariate prediction theory by Helson and Lowdenslager and by Wiener and Masani we prove extremal representations of functions of matrices and derive their prediction-theoretic consequences. We also sketch a way to obtain matricial inequalities from our results. The main goal of the paper is the computation of the infimum of a set of values of the form $tr(A \Delta A^*)$, where $\Delta$ is a given non-negative Hermitian $n \times n$ matrix and the choices for $A$ exhauste a certain set of $n \times n$ matrices. In particular, we focus on norm-bounded unit spheres with certain types of properties of unitary invariance, what allows an application of the theory of majorization.