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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Vibrato Expression Control for Singing Voice Conversion with Improving Independent Control

arXiv:2606.17126v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Singing style is a crucial aspect of a natural and expressive singing voice. Singers utilize singing styles to convey the feeling or emotion of the songs. Several works have been proposed to control singing style for making the more expressive singing voice. Recently, VibE-SVC successfully controls vibrato by predicting high-frequency F0 contour. In this paper, we introduce a singing voice conversion framework, called VibE-SVC2, to improve singing style conversion performance and controllability. The model offers control over two types of singing styles: a pitch style and a timbre style. For the pitch style, to resolve the pitch-energy entanglement issue that is unresolved in our previous work, we introduce a novel Energy Style Converter to address remaining style information in the energy contour. In addition, we propose a Zero-shot Pitch Style Converter, which mimics the pitch style of reference audio. To expand the controllability of the model, we propose vibrato rate scaling that is an independent control of vibrato extent, which is unavailable in VibE-SVC. For the timbre style, we extend the model to handle a variety of phonation styles. However, addressing specific styles such as vocal fry poses a challenge, as conventional F0 extraction often fails due to their inherent subharmonic characteristics, which degrades the conversion quality. To address this, we propose a novel Subharmonic Correction algorithm to refine the F0 contour for more natural timbre conversion. Through comprehensive objective and subjective evaluations, we demonstrate that VibE-SVC2 provides fine-grained, independent control over two types of singing styles, outperforming existing methods.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Mechanisms of Introspective Awareness

arXiv:2603.21396v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent work has shown that LLMs can sometimes detect when steering vectors are injected into their residual stream and identify the injected concept – a phenomenon termed "introspective awareness." We investigate the mechanisms underlying this capability in open-weights models. First, we find that it is behaviorally robust: models detect injected steering vectors at moderate rates with 0% false positives across diverse prompts and dialogue formats. Notably, this capability emerges specifically from post-training; we show that preference optimization algorithms like DPO can elicit it, but standard supervised finetuning does not. We provide evidence that detection cannot be explained by simple linear association between certain steering vectors and directions promoting affirmative responses. We trace the detection mechanism to a two-stage circuit in which "evidence carrier" features in early post-injection layers detect perturbations monotonically along diverse directions, suppressing downstream "gate" features that implement a default negative response. This circuit is absent in base models and robust to refusal ablation. Identification of injected concepts relies on largely distinct later-layer mechanisms that only weakly overlap with those involved in detection. Finally, we show that introspective capability is substantially underelicited: ablating refusal directions improves detection by +53%, and a trained bias vector improves it by +75% on held-out concepts, both without meaningfully increasing false positives. Our results suggest that this introspective awareness of injected concepts is robust and mechanistically nontrivial, and could be substantially amplified in future models. Code: https://github.com/safety-research/introspection-mechanisms.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Finsler Geometry, Graph Neural Networks, and You

arXiv:2606.17185v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graph neural network architectures based on the graph Laplacian approximate the Laplace-Beltrami operator, thus limiting their application to isotropic operators. As a nonlinear alternative to the Laplace-Beltrami operator, we consider estimates of the Finsler Laplacian on point clouds sampled from a manifold. We prove that these discrete estimates converge to the true operator on the manifold as the number of point samples grows. Moreover, we show that this operator can be expressed as a graph neural network layer, which we use to define a family of Finslerian graph neural networks constrained to express Finsler geometry. We show that Finslerian graph neural networks recover the geometry underlying nonlinear diffusion equations in practice.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Interpretable Alzheimer's Diagnosis via Multimodal Fusion of Regional Brain Experts

Accurate and early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is critical for effective intervention and requires integrating complementary information from multimodal neuroimaging data. However, conventional fusion approaches often rely on simple concatenation of features, which cannot adaptively balance the contributions of biomarkers such as amyloid PET and MRI across brain regions. In this work, we propose MREF-AD, a Multimodal Regional Expert Fusion model for AD diagnosis. It is a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework that models mesoscopic brain regions within each modality as independent experts and employs a gating network to learn subject-specific fusion weights. Utilizing tabular neuroimaging and demographic information from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), MREF-AD achieves competitive performance over strong classic and deep baselines while providing interpretable, modality- and region-level insight into how structural and molecular imaging jointly contribute to AD diagnosis. The source code is available at https://github.com/PennShenLab/mref-ad.

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

Dual-Network PINNs for Optimal Control: A Reproducible Benchmark on the Mass-Spring-Damper System

arXiv:2606.15271v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work presents a transparent and reproducible benchmark study of a direct dual-network Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) formulation for the optimal control of a mass-spring-damper system. The classical linear-quadratic optimal control problem is solved by two independent classical methods – Pontryagin's Minimum Principle with single shooting, and direct transcription through trapezoidal collocation – and recast as a constrained optimization problem solved by two feedforward neural networks: a state network whose boundary conditions are enforced exactly through a composite cubic-and-mask ansatz, and an unconstrained control network. The composite loss combines the physics residual at the collocation points with a trapezoidal approximation of the cost functional, weighted by a single scalar hyperparameter. On the benchmark considered, the PINN reproduces the classical optimal cost to four significant digits, satisfies the terminal state constraints exactly by construction, and produces pointwise state and control errors that fall within the spread of the two classical references. Training is approximately two orders of magnitude slower than classical shooting on this benchmark, which is honestly reported. The contribution is methodological clarity rather than methodological novelty: the formulation and the accompanying Google Colab implementation are intended to lower the barrier to entry for practitioners exploring PINN-based optimal control without prior exposure to adjoint methods or two-point boundary value problems.

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

Pass@K Policy Optimization: Solving Harder Reinforcement Learning Problems

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms sample multiple n>1 solution attempts for each problem and reward them independently. This optimizes for pass@1 performance and prioritizes the strength of isolated samples at the expense of the diversity and collective utility of sets of samples. This under-utilizes the sampling capacity, limiting exploration and eventual improvement on harder examples. As a fix, we propose Pass-at-k Policy Optimization (PKPO), a transformation on the final rewards which leads to direct optimization of pass@k performance, thus optimizing for sets of samples that maximize reward when considered jointly. Our contribution is to derive novel low variance unbiased estimators for pass@k and its gradient, in both the binary and continuous reward settings. We show optimization with our estimators reduces to standard RL with rewards that have been jointly transformed by a stable and efficient transformation function. While previous efforts are restricted to k=n, ours is the first to enable robust optimization of pass@k for any arbitrary k

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

Peak-Based Nuclide Identification in HPGe $\gamma$-Spectrometry with Machine Learning and SHAP

arXiv:2606.14874v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: High-purity germanium gamma spectra often require time-consuming analyses from subject matter experts. Photopeaks within these spectra are carefully fitted and numerical methods are employed to assist with nuclide identification (NID) and quantification. Amending the list of nuclides identified by analysis software can be nontrivial. When many samples need to be analyzed, it is therefore challenging to make timely and correct decisions. Supervised machine-learning-based NID can serve as an expert-informed, automated tool to improve the initial set of radionuclides suggested to an analyst and more effectively drive subsequent quantification. To that end, we implemented machine learning models that map photopeaks carefully fitted by analysts to NID results for experimental spectra containing various isotopic combinations drawn from a set of 65 isotopes. The best model achieved an F1 score of 0.97, markedly surpassing the F1 score of 0.84 achieved by traditional software when compared using a nuclide library comprising the same 65 isotopes assessed by the models. Finally, we illustrated the most important input features for model predictions using Shapley Additive Explanations. These explanations revealed that the models use physically relevant photopeaks when making predictions for the isotopes in our nuclide library.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Viability of engineered AAVs via protein language models

Capsid engineering has greatly improved the performance of recombinant AAV vectors used for gene therapy. One commonly used strategy is the insertion of a short, 7-mer, peptide into surface-exposed loops to modify receptor interactions and enhance cell entry. While effective in receptor retargeting and improved transduction, these insertions might destabilize the capsid protein, hinder assembly, and thus limit production. While previous attempts have used deep mutational scanning and AI to predict which insertions are viable, there is lack in understanding the structural consequences of these peptide insertions at the amino-acid level. Here we combined experiments, deep sequencing and large protein language models to gain insight on the impact of 7-mer insertions on the VR-VIII region. We first characterize the biochemical properties of viable insertions, thus identifying which residues are well tolerated, and which should instead be avoided. We then focus on the nearby context of those insertions, by studying the effect of the linkers, either for highly diverse libraries or for individual variants known for their efficiency. Next, we study the broader context, by extending our analysis to the whole capsid sequence, and identifying regions that can tolerate insertions without long-ranged structural deformations that could affect capsid functionality. We conclude with a cross-serotype comparison and a viability analysis of tens of previously engineered variants. Our work showcases how AI can uncover structure-function rules governing the success of engineered AAV capsids.

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

EgoPhys: Learning Generalizable Physics Models of Deformable Objects from Egocentric Video

Humans naturally understand object physics through everyday interactions, but faithfully predicting complex deformable dynamics, such as elastic materials and fabrics, remains a major challenge for computer vision and robotics. We present EgoPhys, a framework that constructs deformable physical digital twins from egocentric RGB-only video using generalizable priors. EgoPhys overcomes the limitations of existing methods to enable controllable deformable digital twin generation from egocentric videos by distilling per-object inverse-physics solutions into a compact codebook, enabling prediction of dense spring stiffness fields for unseen objects without per-spring test-time optimization. Trained with generalizable priors from diverse egocentric interactions, EgoPhys outperforms baselines in reconstruction, future prediction, and zero-shot generalization. To support training and evaluation, we curate an egocentric interaction dataset covering diverse deformable objects, scenes, and manipulation styles. We deploy EgoPhys on a real xArm6 robot, demonstrating that a digital twin initialized from a single egocentric human play video can serve as an internal world representation to aid in deformable-object planning, highlighting egocentric RGB observations as a scalable path toward real-to-sim pipelines.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

FactCheck: Feasibility-aware Long-term Action Anticipation with Multi-agent Collaboration

Long-term action anticipation (LTA) aims to predict an ordered sequence of future verb-noun actions from a partially observed video. While this task serves as the foundation for embodied intelligence, anticipating physically feasible long-term actions remains a critical challenge. Existing methods, which operate in an open-loop manner, often hallucinate non-existent objects, violate object affordances, or disregard object states, as they lack explicit mechanisms to verify action feasibility against the physical environment. To address this, we propose FactCheck, a novel multi-agent collaboration framework that improves feasibility through a closed-loop "Observe-Plan-Verify" mechanism. FactCheck decomposes the complex LTA task into specialized roles: an Observer that recognizes historical actions from video observations and constructs a dual-form structured memory, comprising a History Action Abstract that captures high-level human intentions and environmental status, and a History Action Graph that encodes object states and temporal dependencies; a Planner that generates draft future actions conditioned on both low-level historical actions and high-level History Action Abstract; and a Verifier that rigorously validates the draft against the History Action Graph and refines infeasible actions. Extensive experiments on the EPIC-Kitchens-55 and EGTEA Gaze+ benchmarks demonstrate that FactCheck consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Our work establishes a new paradigm for feasibility-aware long-term action anticipation, effectively closing the loop of action recognition, action prediction and action verification.

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

Asynchronous Decentralized Federated Learning over Lossy Wireless Links via Reception- and Age-Aware Aggregation

arXiv:2606.10774v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Decentralized Federated Learning(DFL) enables collaborative model training across wireless edge nodes, including IoT deployments, autonomous vehicles, UAV swarms, and satellite constellations. Operating over lossy wireless links under constraints, these systems cannot rely on retransmissions, so model parameters must be accepted as partial chunks, leading to two key failure modes, which are selection bias, where poor-quality links are systematically under-represented in gossip aggregation, and update staleness, where asynchronous nodes contribute outdated models. We prove that classical gossip aggregation introduces irreducible selection bias proportional to the link-loss rate. We propose DFL-AA (Decentralized Federated Learning with Adaptive AoI-weighted Aggregation), which corrects selection bias using Inverse Probability Weighting (IPW) with online channel estimation and mitigates staleness via Age-of-Information (AoI) decay without requiring a global clock. We prove that DFL-AA removes link-quality distortion in expectation and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across varying loss rates and heterogeneous channel conditions on fixed directed topologies.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Food Colorings in Child-Targeted Ultra-Processed Foods in Brazil: Market Prevalence and Parental Perceptions

Child-targeted marketing on packaged foods can shape children's food preferences and parents' purchasing decisions, yet many products with child-targeted marketing are ultra-processed foods (UPFs) and contain cosmetic additives such as food colorings, which have raised concerns about adverse effects on children's health and behavior. This mixed-methods study examined the prevalence of food colorings in child-directed UPFs and explored parents' perceptions and knowledge of these additives in beverages commonly consumed by children. Quantitative data were obtained from the Mintel Global New Products Database to identify child-directed products launched in Brazil between 2018 and 2021, measured as having at least one child-targeted marketing strategy in the food package, and whether they contained food colorings. Qualitative data came from seven focus groups with parents of children aged 2-5 and 6-11 years in Brazil, alongside a brief survey assessing participants' ability to identify food colorings on product labels. Among 5,078 UPFs launched during the study period, 23.0% contained child-targeted marketing, and 40.3% of these had food colorings. The highest prevalence was observed in carbonated beverages, candies, and ice creams, in which more than half of products contained food colorings. Parents generally understood that food colorings are used to make products more attractive to children and associated them with potential health risks, but reported difficulties avoiding them. These findings highlight the widespread presence of food colorings in child-targeted UPFs in Brazil and underscore the need for stronger regulatory measures to restrict the use of food colorings and improve labelling on food packages.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

JourneyFormer: Encoding Airbnb Guest Journey with Sequence Modeling

arXiv:2606.19108v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sequence modeling has become increasingly popular in recommendation and ranking algorithms, owing to its capacity to model users' historical behaviors and infer user intentions. Despite its theoretical simplicity, the practical deployment of a sequence model in production is non-trivial due to complexity of the sequence and sparse labels. For example, in Airbnb, guest sequences are often long, exploratory and complex, and we focus on booking labels, which are sparse. As such, we are often required to make various design decisions regarding data and modeling to strike a balance between effectiveness and scalability. This work delved into these production challenges and deployed JourneyFormer, a sequence modeling solution for search ranking at Airbnb. We detail crucial design considerations, covering aspects such as guest event selection, ID embeddings, model architecture, and label attribution. Additionally, we describe several tailored strategies to accelerate model training and inference. JourneyFormer has been successfully deployed within Airbnb's production, where its effectiveness and impact have been evidenced not only by improved offline ranking metrics but also by significant gains in key business metrics through online A/B testing across 2 production surfaces.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Calibrating Decision Robustness via Inverse Conformal Risk Control

arXiv:2510.07750v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Robust optimization safeguards decisions against uncertainty by optimizing against worst-case scenarios, yet their effectiveness hinges on a prespecified robustness level that is often chosen ad hoc, leading to either insufficient protection or overly conservative and costly solutions. Recent approaches using conformal prediction construct data-driven uncertainty sets with finite-sample coverage guarantees, but they still fix coverage targets a priori and offer little guidance for selecting robustness levels. We propose a new framework that provides distribution-free, finite-sample guarantees on both miscoverage and regret for any family of robust predict-then-optimize policies. Our method constructs valid estimators that trace out the miscoverage–regret Pareto frontier, enabling decision-makers to reliably evaluate and calibrate robustness levels according to their cost–risk preferences. The framework is simple to implement, broadly applicable across classical optimization formulations, and achieves sharper finite-sample performance. This paper offers a principled data-driven methodology for guiding robustness selection and empowers practitioners to balance robustness and conservativeness in high-stakes decision-making.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Synchronization of Quasi-Particle Excitations in a Quantum Gas with Cavity-Mediated Interactions

arXiv:2504.17731v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Driven-dissipative quantum systems can undergo transitions from stationary to dynamical phases, reflecting the emergence of collective non-equilibrium behavior. We study such a transition in a Bose-Einstein condensate coupled to an optical cavity and develop a cavity-assisted Bragg spectroscopy technique to resolve its collective modes. We observe dissipation-induced synchronization at the quasiparticle level, where two roton-like modes coalesce at an exceptional point. This reveals how dissipation microscopically drives collective dynamics and signals a precursor to a dynamical phase transition.

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

Morpheus: A Morphology-Aware Neural Tokenizer and Word Embedder for Turkish

Turkish is agglutinative: meaning is carried by morphemes, yet the subword tokenizers that drive modern language models split words by corpus statistics, fragmenting semantically loaded suffixes and – in the case of WordPiece and rule-based analyzers – failing to decode their output back to the original text. This paper presents Morpheus, a neural morpheme-boundary model for Turkish that is at once a lossless, morphology-aware tokenizer and a word-embedding producer. A differentiable Poisson-binomial dynamic program turns per-character boundary probabilities into soft morpheme memberships during training and exact segments at inference, with no string normalization, so $\mathrm{decode}(\mathrm{encode}(w)) = w$ holds by construction. Because the model is neural, the same forward pass that tokenizes also emits a structured word embedding. Among reversible tokenizers – the only ones valid for generation – Morpheus attains the lowest bits-per-character ($1.425$), roughly doubles the gold morphological alignment of the subword family (MorphScore macro-F1 $0.61$ vs.\ ${\sim}0.32$), and uses ${\sim}19\%$ less GPU memory than 64K-vocabulary subword tokenizers. As an embedder, frozen Morpheus vectors lead on lexical retrieval (root-family MAP $0.85$) and same-root verification (ROC-AUC $1.00$), surpassing the multilingual retriever BGE-M3 and BERTurk; on context- and inflection-dependent tasks (NER, case/number probing) the heavier contextual encoders remain ahead – a trade-off we attribute to Morpheus's root-centric geometry. Code: https://github.com/lonewolf-rd/TurkishMorpheus; model: https://huggingface.co/lonewolflab/Morpheus-TR-50K; interactive demo: https://huggingface.co/spaces/lonewolflab/morpheus-tr-demo.

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

PHANTOM: A Large-Scale Dataset of Multimodal Adversarial Attacks for Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2606.24388v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a large-scale, open-source dataset of pre-generated adversarial attacks for vision-language models (VLMs). The dataset is designed to be diverse, representative, and practical, extending existing benchmarks by covering 10 high-level categories and 55 subcategories of harmful intents. Our primary goal is to make adversarial data accessible to the research community, given the computational cost and complexity of generating large numbers of attacks. The dataset comprises 47 524 adversarial samples, generated using state-of-the-art attack strategies from recent literature. Our work complements existing efforts by consolidating and extending prior benchmarks from multiple established sources, resulting in 7 826 intents, and introduce an additional category to broaden coverage. This provides realistic evaluation resources for studying model robustness and alignment. Our dataset intends to enable researchers and practitioners to systematically evaluate the robustness and safety of VLMs, fine-tune attack-generation models, and develop or stress-test defensive guardrails under diverse adversarial conditions. By releasing this resource, we aim to lower the barrier to adversarial research and foster more reproducible, comprehensive, and comparable evaluations of VLM safety.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Non-negative Elastic Net Decoding for Information Retrieval

Dense retrieval has become the dominant paradigm in information retrieval, in which each document is scored against a query by the inner product of their vector embeddings, and the top-$k$ documents by score are retrieved for this query. However, since each document's score depends solely on the embedding of the query and itself, the retrieval process is oblivious to the content of the entire corpus. Therefore, dense retrieval cannot avoid selecting semantically similar documents from the corpus, which may result in a non-diverse, redundant set of retrieved documents. To this end, we approach retrieval as a joint decoding problem, in which documents are selected as a set with regard to the context of the rest of the corpus. To achieve this, we propose Non-Negative elastic Net (NNN) decoding, which selects documents whose embeddings jointly reconstruct the query embedding as a sparse non-negative linear combination. Our main theoretical result establishes a strict separation between dense retrieval and NNN decoding. For any corpus, every query correctly handled by dense retrieval is also handled by NNN decoding, while on corpora containing correlated documents, NNN decoding additionally handles queries that dense retrieval cannot. Experimental results indicate that applying NNN decoding to frozen embeddings trained for inner-product scoring yields consistent improvements across several benchmarks. Moreover, we introduce an end-to-end training procedure which optimizes the embeddings for NNN decoding, producing significant performance gains surpassing in all metrics and benchmarks compared to dense retrieval. Our work establishes a new paradigm for leveraging dense embeddings in information retrieval, beyond the standard practice of inner-product scoring.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

A Fast and Effective Method for Euclidean Anticlustering: The Assignment-Based-Anticlustering Algorithm

arXiv:2601.06351v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Anticlustering is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem that consists of partitioning a set of objects into equal-sized groups called anticlusters such that the objects in the same anticluster are as dissimilar as possible and thereby representative of the entire set of objects. Here we study the case where the dissimilarity metric is the squared Euclidean distance between the respective feature vectors. Applications of Euclidean anticlustering include social studies, cross-validation, creating mini-batches for stochastic gradient descent, and finding balanced K-cut partitions. In particular, machine-learning applications such as mini-batch generation involve million-scale datasets and very large values of K, making scalable anticlustering algorithms essential. We propose a new algorithm, the Assignment-Based Anticlustering (ABA) algorithm, that scales to instances with millions of objects and hundreds of thousands of anticlusters within seconds to minutes, which is far beyond what existing anticlustering methods can manage. We demonstrate here, via an extensive computational study, that our algorithm outperforms existing anticlustering methods in both solution quality and running time. This is so also for anticlustering with categories. For the related problem of balanced K-cut partitioning, our algorithm is superior to the well-known METIS method. The code of our algorithm is available on GitHub.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Examining the Cognitive Gap Between Authors and Peer Reviewers on Academic Paper Novelty

Novelty is a crucial metric for assessing the quality of academic papers. Scholars strive to highlight the novel aspects of their work, particularly in the title, abstract, and introduction. Peer review, serving as the gatekeeper of scientific rigor, rigorously evaluates the novelty of papers, yet a cognitive gap may exist between author self-promotion and reviewer evaluation. To investigate this, we analyzed 15,328 academic papers published in Nature Communications from 2016 to 2021, along with their peer-review comments. We found that both reviewers and authors emphasize result-oriented innovation, with reviewers adopting a more comprehensive evaluation perspective. Furthermore, by examining promotional intensity against inherent paper novelty, we found that its effect depends on the paper's actual innovation level. Highly innovative papers benefit from stronger promotional language, receiving more positive evaluations. We also found that promotional language significantly correlates with reviewer disagreement on novelty specifically for papers of moderate innovativeness, whereas it has negligible impact for papers with either very high or very low novelty. This reveals how promotional language operates most prominently in the gray area of academic evaluation.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Q-Net: Queue Length Estimation via Kalman-based Neural Networks

arXiv:2509.24725v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Estimating queue lengths at signalized intersections is a long-standing challenge in traffic management. Partial observability of vehicle flows complicates this task despite the availability of two privacy-preserving data sources: (i) aggregated vehicle counts from loop detectors near stop lines, and (ii) aggregated floating car data (aFCD) that provide segment-wise average speed measurements. However, how to integrate these sources with differing spatial and temporal resolutions for queue length estimation is rather unclear. Addressing this question, we present Q-Net: a queue estimation framework built upon a state-space formulation. This design addresses key challenges in queue modeling, such as violations of traffic conservation assumptions. Q-Net follows the Kalman predict-update structure and maintains physical interpretability in both the state evolution and measurement models. Q-Net uses an AI-augmented Kalman filter to learn time-varying gain dynamics from data. The framework supports real-time implementation and improves spatial transferability by grouping aFCD measurements into fixed-size local groups, making the number of learnable parameters independent of section length. Evaluations on urban main roads in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, show that Q-Net outperforms baseline methods, tracks queue formation and dissipation accurately, and mitigates aFCD-induced delays. By combining data efficiency, interpretability, real-time applicability, and spatial transferability, Q-Net makes accurate queue length estimation possible without costly sensing infrastructure like cameras or radar.

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

LLM-as-an-Investigator: Evidence-First Reasoning for Robust Interactive Problem Diagnosis

arXiv:2606.13220v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as interactive assistants for technical problem solving. However, when users provide incomplete descriptions or plausible but unverified explanations, LLMs may prematurely align with these assumptions and propose solutions before collecting sufficient evidence. We refer to this behavior as user-driven sycophancy: the tendency of an LLM to reinforce a user-provided hypothesis instead of testing alternative explanations. This paper introduces LLM-as-an-Investigator, an evidence-first agentic AI methodology for robust problem diagnosis. The approach is implemented through a Solution Investigator Agent, which estimates the ambiguity of an initial problem description, generates candidate hypotheses, asks targeted clarification questions, and updates hypothesis probabilities after each answer. Rather than producing an immediate response, the agent continues the investigation until the evidence makes one candidate explanation stronger than the alternatives. To evaluate the approach, we build a benchmark from solved technical forum threads in mechanical, electrical, and hydraulic domains. We use a three-agent evaluation pipeline in which a Problem-Solution Extractor Agent converts solved threads into structured cases, a Ground-Truth Evaluator Agent simulates the user while hiding the known solution, and the tested assistant attempts to recover the solution through dialogue. The experiments compare standard assistants, reasoning-oriented LLMs, and the proposed investigator-based model across LLM backbones. In addition to diagnostic accuracy, we analyze how standard assistants follow misleading user hypotheses in diagnostic cases. The results show that the proposed approach identifies the problem more accurately than direct prompting and reasoning-only baselines, while its evidence-first protocol helps reduce user-induced conversational bias.

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

Learning Topological Representations for Molecular Dynamics

arXiv:2606.14737v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations generate trajectories in a high-dimensional configuration space whose analysis critically depends on molecular descriptors, typically handcrafted observables or learned kinetic embeddings. Designing descriptors that are both expressive and broadly applicable, however, remains challenging. We study persistent homology (PH) as a general-purpose representation for MD and introduce the masked Flood complex, a protein-tailored modification of a recently introduced simplicial complex construction that emphasizes inter-residue structure at low computational cost. Vectorized persistence diagrams then provide information-rich, geometry-aware summaries of protein conformations, which we evaluate on protein class prediction, frame-level observable regression, and Markov state model (MSM) estimation from learned low-dimensional coordinates in a single shared representation space. Results on the mdCATH dataset show that PH-based descriptors are competitive across tasks, with masked Flood PH yielding the most consistent overall performance. Further, when using topologically-informed MSMs as a drop-in replacement within the recent MarS-FM framework for generative modeling of protein conformations, we obtain consistently better ensemble statistics than MSMs based on physical observables. Finally, we explore the transferability of the generative model to qualitatively different, fast folding, proteins.