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

LLM-as-Code Agentic Programming for Agent Harness

arXiv:2606.15874v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Every major LLM agent framework gives the LLM the role of orchestrator; the model decides what to do next, when to call tools, and when to stop. We argue that token explosion, control-flow hallucination, and unreliable completion are not implementation bugs but architectural consequences of assigning the deterministic work of looping, branching, and sequencing to a probabilistic system. A better prompt or a stronger model cannot guarantee the reliability of the LLM agent. We therefore propose Agentic Programming, in which the program governs all control flow, and the LLM is itself part of it, an adaptive component we call LLM-as-Code and invoke only where a task calls for reasoning or generation. Within each call the model keeps full flexibility, but it cannot alter the program's execution path. With control in the program, the LLM's context is built from the execution history's call tree and forms a directed acyclic graph (DAG). Each call's context length is then determined by its call depth rather than by accumulation over steps. A case study of computer-use agents shows that the design is practical, not just a theoretical stance, substantially improving the stability of long visual operation sequences.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Orchestrated Reality: From Role-Play to Living, Playable Game Worlds – LLM-Driven World Simulation as a Parameterized-Action POMDP

arXiv:2606.16014v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many games rely on storytelling combined with systems that track levelling, NPC behaviour, and consequence simulation; bridging tightly-authored narrative with deeply-simulated worlds – most acute in sandbox and open-world settings – has been prohibitively expensive. LLM-driven worlds open a new path: a single harness can coordinate numerical state, narrative voice, storytelling pacing, and rule logic together. Realising this requires the LLM system to sustain a persistent world (who is where, what has just happened, what is currently true), which today's deployed systems do not: the narrative voice asserts state in free prose without any validated representation, so a fully autonomous game engine remains infeasible. We treat this as an architectural choice, not a limitation of language models, and report work in progress on a framework – orchestrated reality – that makes the world a canonical object owned by a singleton orchestration agent analogous to the tabletop-RPG Game Master (GM). We formalise an LLM-driven game world for a human player as a Parameterized-Action POMDP: state is a tree of canonical JSON entities, actions decompose as $a=(k, x_k)$ (a discrete intent kind plus structured JSON parameters), the agent observes only a narrative projection $o=O(s)$ of state, and the transition kernel $F$ is an LLM-driven Plan-Diff-Validate-Apply (PDVA) pipeline that commits schema-validated, content-hashed JSON deltas. We give the formal model, a JSON-state example, a worked single-turn example, and a catalogue of 15 illustrative incidents drawn from a real deployment showing the framework in action. Empirical validation through a planned human player study – together with multi-NPC concurrent agency and deployment as an RL environment – is situated as future work.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

VeriPilot: An LLM-Powered Verilog Debugging Framework

arXiv:2606.23759v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Verilog debugging remains one of the most time-consuming stages in digital circuit design. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled automated debugging; however, most existing approaches rely solely on test outputs and compiler feedback in an end-to-end manner, limiting their effectiveness on complex bugs. A key challenge is that the root cause of an error may be far removed from its observable outputs, making it difficult for LLMs to trace long dependency chains in code. This challenge is further exacerbated in large codebases, where long context lengths hinder efficient reasoning. To address these limitations, we propose VeriPilot, an LLM-powered debugging framework that leverages golden reference models to enable fine-grained bug localization and repair. VeriPilot goes beyond output-level comparison by aligning internal variable semantics between the Verilog design and its corresponding golden model through LLM-based analysis. It then performs step-by-step signal tracing using Control-Data-Flow Graphs (CDFGs) derived from static analysis, identifying a minimal set of suspicious code regions along with their correct counterparts from the golden model. These structured insights are subsequently provided to the LLM to guide reasoning and automated code repair. Experimental results on the Comprehensive Verilog Design Problems (CVDP) benchmark from NVIDIA demonstrate that VeriPilot improves the repair success rate of GPT-4o from 54.3\% to 85.71\%, significantly enhancing both bug localization accuracy and repair effectiveness for complex Verilog designs. The source code and benchmark are publicly available at Github https://github.com/YihanWn/VeriPilot.git.

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

Attention Expansion: Enhancing Keyphrase Extraction from Long Documents with Attention-Augmented Contextualized Embeddings

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved strong performance in keyphrase extraction (KPE), largely due to their ability to generate rich contextualized representations. However, long-document KPE remains challenging because salient keyphrase evidence may be scattered across distant document sections that cannot be jointly captured within the limited context window of most PLMs. Although long-context large language models (LLMs) can process broader textual contexts, their computational cost limits their practicality for efficient and high-throughput KPE. To overcome this limitation, we propose an attention expansion mechanism that augments PLM token representations with information from surrounding out-of-context chunks using pre-trained word embeddings. The proposed mechanism expands the effective contextual scope of PLM-based KPE models without requiring full-document attention or expensive LLM-based inference. We evaluate our approach across five PLM backbones, including general-purpose, scientific, task-specific, and long-context encoders, using two training regimes and five benchmark corpora from scientific and news domains. Experimental results demonstrate that attention expansion consistently enhances KPE performance across all evaluation settings, outperforming state-of-the-art models and yielding notable improvements in F1 score. The improvements extend to domain-specific, task-specialized, and native long-context models, showing that the proposed mechanism provides complementary information rather than merely compensating for limited input length. These results establish attention expansion as an efficient and effective strategy for long-document KPE.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

DiffusionBench: On Holistic Evaluation of Diffusion Transformers

Diffusion transformer (DiT) research on image generation has converged to a single evaluation setup: class-conditional generation on ImageNet. While methods improve the FID and related metrics, it is increasingly unclear whether they reflect real progress in generative modeling. The natural alternative, i.e., text-to-image (T2I) generation, is perceived as too costly or inconvenient to train and evaluate and is often skipped. We argue that this perception no longer holds. We introduce NanoGen, a unified DiT training and evaluation framework. NanoGen matches state-of-the-art DiT baselines on ImageNet and, with 12 lines of configuration change, also trains competitive text-to-image models. It currently supports RAE, VAE, pixel-space, and MeanFlow diffusion methods under both ImageNet and T2I setups. Under NanoGen, training T2I requires comparable compute to ImageNet. After training 21 latent diffusion models with NanoGen, we observe that method ranking shows no strong correlation between ImageNet and T2I generation: Pearson correlation is between -0.377 and -0.580 across three metrics. This suggests that a method which improves class-conditional ImageNet FID may show no corresponding improvement on T2I, clearly indicating the necessity of evaluating DiTs on both tasks. To this end, we summarize ImageNet and text-to-image results, which yields DiffusionBench, a holistic benchmark for DiT research. We recommend reporting DiffusionBench in place of ImageNet alone: methods that improve DiffusionBench are more likely to reflect broader progress.

06.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

OmniOPD: Logit-Free On-Policy Distillation via Speculative Verification

On-Policy Distillation (OPD) trains a student model on its own generative trajectories under dense token-level feedback from a stronger teacher, mitigating both the off-policy distribution shift of Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and the sparse credit assignment of Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, standard OPD faces two coupled limitations. First, it requires direct access to the teacher's token-level logits, excluding a broad class of capable proprietary models from serving as teachers. Second, the token-level logit signal itself is brittle, depending on a narrow overlap of plausible next tokens between teacher and student, and prone to amplifying degenerate patterns such as repetition loops. In this paper, we introduce OmniOPD, a novel framework that addresses both limitations through a logit-free, chunk-level supervision signal. OmniOPD replaces deterministic logit matching with Monte Carlo rollouts that approximate the teacher's local preferences through a continuous semantic similarity metric over multi-token chunks, and concentrates this supervision via a peak-entropy scheduler that audits the student only at its high-uncertainty reasoning forks. A Dirichlet-Multinomial Bayesian prior and a base-model KL anchor further bound the variance of discrete sampling and prevent policy collapse across unaudited tokens. Across competitive benchmarks, OmniOPD surpasses the standard OPD approach by up to +28.64% on math, confirming that chunk-level semantic verification extracts a more reliable learning signal than token-level logit matching, whose high information density is offset by significant noise and brittleness. Furthermore, when paired with stronger black-box teachers such as Claude-4.5-Haiku and Gemini-2.5-Flash, OmniOPD achieves an additional +9.54% relative on math over its open-weight teacher counterpart, advancing the student past the performance of self-exploratory RL.

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

Virtual Speech Therapist: A Clinician-in-the-Loop AI Speech Therapy Agent for Personalized and Supervised Therapy

This paper develops Virtual Speech Therapist (VST), an intelligent agent-based platform that streamlines stuttering assessment and delivers customized therapy planning through automated and adaptive AI-driven workflows. VST integrates state-of-the-art deep learning-based stuttering classification, and multi-agent large language model (LLM) reasoning to support evidence-based clinical decision-making. The VST begins with the acquisition and feature extraction of patient speech samples, followed by robust classification of stuttering types. Building on these outputs, VST initiates an agentic reasoning process in which specialized LLM agents autonomously generate, critique, and iteratively refine individualized therapy plans. A dedicated critic agent evaluates all generated therapy plans to ensure clinical safety, methodological soundness, and alignment with peer-reviewed evidence and established professional guidelines. The resulting output is a comprehensive, patient-specific therapy draft intended for clinician review. Incorporating clinician feedback, the system then produces a finalized therapy plan suitable for patient delivery, thereby maintaining a clinician-in-the-loop paradigm. Experimental evaluation by expert speech therapists confirms that VST consistently generates high-quality, evidence-based therapy recommendations. These findings demonstrate the system's potential to augment clinical workflows, reduce clinician burden, and improve therapeutic outcomes for individuals with speech impairments. An interactive user interface for the proposed system is available online at: https://vocametrix.com/ai/stuttering-therapy-planning-agent , facilitating real-time stuttering assessment and personalized therapy planning.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Learning High Coverage Discriminative Parsimonious Rulesets

arXiv:2606.14156v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning systems based on IF-THEN rule representations readily offer interpretability, making them a crucial focus in contemporary AI research. A key objective for such rule sets is to achieve both high discriminative power and interpretability. While existing state-of-the-art algorithms implicitly prioritize predictive accuracy, they often fall short on one or more quality metrics that ensure interpretability, such as coverage and parsimony of rule sets. Motivated by this, this paper propose the development of CDPR, which aims to create highly accurate and interpretable rule sets for classification problems. To the best of our knowledge, this represents the first attempt to establish such an approach. In this study, we introduce two algorithms rooted in submodular maximization, which not only provide provable guarantees on coverage but also yield rule sets that are both discriminative and parsimonious. We empirically demonstrate that rule sets learned through our approaches achieve higher accuracy and interpretability and has more than a 2.5-fold improvement in average coverage rates when compared to the next best algorithm.

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

AME: A Multi-Type Contributor Attribution Framework in Generative AI Markets

Generative AI enables value creation through multi-stage collaboration among heterogeneous contributors, including training data, base models, fine-tuning behaviors, and prompts. However, how to fairly allocate the data value remains largely unexplored. This paper formulates multi-stage generative AI value allocation as a new research problem and identifies three core challenges: heterogeneous data contribution valuation, data rights mapping, and trustworthy execution. We propose AME (Attribution-Mapping-Execution) framework, a unified framework that integrates data contribution valuation, data rights mapping, and trustworthy execution into a single workflow. Experimental results demonstrate that AME framework achieves data value allocation outcomes more consistent with human reference judgments while maintaining low-cost trustworthy execution. Our work provides an initial foundation for value assessment and revenue allocation in generative AI data markets.

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

Pixel-TTS: Image based Text Rendering for Robust Text-to-Speech

Recent advances in pixel-based text modeling show that representing text as images enables models to exploit visual cues for language understanding. Grounding text in its visual form allows structurally similar characters with different Unicode encodings to produce similar embeddings, benefiting cross-lingual and zero-shot scenarios. Conventional text-based approaches treat each character independently, limiting generalization to unseen characters and requiring embedding expansion during cross-lingual adaptation. We propose Pixel-TTS, the first framework for visually grounded speech synthesis. It renders text as images and projects them through a 2D convolutional layer to generate embeddings. This design eliminates embedding matrix expansion during fine-tuning while improving robustness to unseen characters and orthographic variations. Extensive experiments show Pixel-TTS achieves competitive performance with strong baselines, faster convergence and robust zero-shot generalization.

11.
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.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

PEC-Home: Interpretation of Progressively Elliptical Commands in Smart Homes

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have empowered home assistants with natural language interaction capabilities. However, current assistants overlook the progressive omission that occurs in human dialogue as shared context accumulates, leading to more elliptical expressions for efficient communication. Thus, current assistants still struggle to interpret such elliptical expressions accurately, which limits their effectiveness in real-world applications. In practical smart home scenarios, assistants face two major challenges caused by elliptical commands: (1) referential ambiguity caused by different environmental expectations among multiple users; and (2) intention ambiguity resulting from user preferences that evolve over time or change with the environment. To address these challenges, we introduce PEC-Home, the first simulated home dataset specifically designed for interpreting progressively elliptical commands in smart homes. Extensive experiments on various LLMs, including GPT-4o, show that existing home assistants struggle to execute user-intended operations based solely on elliptical commands. Even when equipped with tools for storing and retrieving user dialogue history, execution accuracy remains below that achieved with complete commands.}.

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

DiFlow-TTS: Compact and Low-Latency Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech with Discrete Flow Matching

Zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) has made significant progress in replicating unseen voices, yet balancing generation quality and inference efficiency remains challenging. Autoregressive models suffer from high latency, while diffusion-based approaches are constrained by training-time configurations. Moreover, most flow-based methods operate in continuous space, which introduces optimization challenges because continuous token spaces are inherently more complex than discrete ones. To address these limitations, we propose DiFlow-TTS, a novel zero-shot TTS framework based on discrete flow matching. The model consists of a deterministic Phoneme-Content Mapper for linguistic modeling and a Factorized Discrete Flow Denoiser that simultaneously generates prosody and acoustic token streams. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach across multiple evaluation metrics.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

ExpRL: Exploratory RL for LLM Mid-Training

arXiv:2606.17024v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse reward reinforcement learning (RL) has become a standard tool for improving LLM reasoning, but its success depends critically on the coverage present in the base model. In practice, models are often primed for RL through mid-training on curated reasoning traces that teach useful primitive skills such as decomposition, verification, or self-correction. Although effective, this strategy requires manually specifying what the model should learn, and it remains unclear whether such primitive coverage is enough for much harder problems, which require combining these skills into broader solution strategies. We study a more automated approach: RL-based mid-training using large corpora of human-written question-answer data. Rather than treating reference solutions as targets to imitate, our method, ExpRL, uses them as reward scaffolds: references are hidden from the policy and used only to construct problem-specific grading rubrics for judging on-policy reasoning traces. The policy samples from the original problem prompt, while an LLM judge compares the sampled reasoning trace against the reference solution and assigns outcome-level or process-level dense rewards. This lets ExpRL reinforce partial progress, useful intermediate reductions, and productive reasoning behaviors that sparse final-answer rewards often fail to upweight. On challenging math reasoning tasks, ExpRL yields stronger RL priming than SFT, sparse-reward GRPO, and self-distillation, and provides a better initialization for subsequent sparse-reward RL. Additional mixed-domain experiments further suggest that ExpRL can extend beyond the original math-only setting.

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

Optimism Stabilizes Thompson Sampling for Adaptive Inference

arXiv:2602.06014v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Thompson sampling (TS) is widely used for stochastic multi-armed bandits, yet its inferential properties under adaptive data collection are subtle. Classical asymptotic theory for sample means can fail because arm-specific sample sizes are random and coupled with the rewards through the action-selection rule. We study adaptive inference for Thompson sampling with Gaussian randomized indices in $K$-armed stochastic bandits with independent sub-Gaussian reward noises, and identify optimism as a key mechanism for restoring stability, meaning that each arm's pull count concentrates around a deterministic scale. This stability yields asymptotically valid Wald inference despite adaptive sampling. First, we prove that variance-inflated TS is stable for any $K \ge 2$, including the challenging regime where multiple arms are optimal, with asymptotically uniform allocation over optimal arms and sharp logarithmic pull-count asymptotics for suboptimal arms. This resolves the $K$-armed extension question raised by \citet{halder2025stable}, using new winner-map and Lyapunov-drift techniques to control allocation among multiple optimal arms. Second, we analyze an alternative optimistic modification that keeps the Gaussian index variance unchanged but adds an explicit mean bonus to the index center, and establish a similar stability conclusion. In summary, suitably implemented optimism stabilizes Thompson sampling and enables asymptotically valid Wald inference in multi-armed bandits, while incurring only a mild additional regret cost.

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

Estimating Mutual Information between Time Series and Temporal Event Sequences Across Diverse Analysis Tasks

arXiv:2606.01602v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Pairwise dependence measures such as correlation and causality are fundamental to temporal data mining, yet there is still no principled and robust way to quantify dependence between heterogeneous data types, especially between continuous time series and discrete temporal event sequences. Existing approaches rely on ad hoc transformations or mutual-information estimators that are highly sensitive to quantization, repeated values, and event redundancy, leading to biased or unstable results in practice. We propose a nonparametric mutual information estimator that directly measures the dependence between time series and event sequences without data transformation, learning, or ad hoc discretization. Our method models the continuous-discrete duality of real-world time series to handle quantization and repeated-value artifacts and introduces a latent event clustering strategy to mitigate bias from event co-occurrence and redundancy. Together, these yield a robust and unified framework that bridges discrete and continuous mutual information. We evaluate the proposed estimator on four representative tasks: discrete-continuous time-delayed mutual information for causality analysis, global and local temporal repetition discovery, discrete covariate selection for time series forecasting, and continuous feature selection for classification. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show consistent improvements over existing methods in accuracy, robustness, and interpretability, positioning our approach as a general-purpose dependence operator for heterogeneous temporal data, similar to Pearson correlation for homogeneous time series. Code available at: https://github.com/HaojiHu/Multimodal-Temporal-Data-Quantification

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

Conformal Risk-Averse Decision Making with Action Conditional Guarantee

arXiv:2606.05551v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reliable decision making pipelines powered by machine learning models require uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods that come with explicit safety guarantees. Conformal prediction provides such UQ by wrapping ML predictions into prediction sets, and recent work by Kiyani et al. (2025b) established that these sets can be translated into optimal risk-averse decision policies – yet only inheriting marginal safety guarantees. We generalize and strengthen their results by (i) introducing action-conditional conformal prediction, which yields safety guarantees conditioned explicitly on each action taken by the decision maker, (ii) showing that action-conditional prediction sets serve as a proxy for the feasible decision space for risk-averse decision makers aiming to optimize action-conditional value-at-risk, and (iii) proposing a principled finite-sample algorithm based on pinball-loss minimization, connecting the framework of Gibbs et al. (2025) to action-conditional guarantees. Experiments on two real-world datasets confirm that our approach significantly improves action-conditional performance over conformal baselines.

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

Gaussian Spatial Priors for Anatomy-Aware Object Detection in Surgical Videos

Detecting anatomical structures in surgical video is essential for intraoperative safety frameworks such as the Critical View of Myopectineal Orifice (CVMPO) in inguinal hernia repair. While prominent structures like the Cooper's Ligament and Triangle of Doom are reliably detected by standard methods, smaller structures such as the epigastric vessels remain challenging due to their visual ambiguity and intermittent visibility. We observe that the spatial relationship between structures is anatomically constrained, and propose a Gaussian Spatial Prior (GSP) module that encodes this relationship as a compact, parametric bias injected into the self-attention of a DAB-DETR decoder. The prior is computed offline from training annotations as a small set of frozen Gaussian parameters and recomputed at each decoder layer using the iteratively refined reference points. On a dataset of inguinal hernia repair videos with 5-fold cross-validation, GSP improves dependent class detection by $+33.5\%$ ($AP_{50}$) over DAB-DETR and $+53.9\%$ over YOLOv26, while also improving anchor detection by $+6.0\%$. These gains are statistically significant across all folds ($p=0.012$, paired $t-$test).

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

YOLO-AMC: An Improved YOLO Architecture with Attention Mechanisms for Building Crack Detection

Crack detection plays an important role in infrastructure inspection and Structural Health Monitoring (SHM). However, cracks typically appear as thin, low-contrast structures and are easily affected by background noise, posing challenges for existing object detection models. This study proposes an improved YOLO-based architecture with integrated attention mechanisms, termed YOLO-AMC (YOLO with Attention Mechanisms for Crack Detection), to enhance automated crack detection performance. Based on YOLOv11, the original C2PSA module is removed, and multiple attention mechanisms, including Global Attention Mechanism (GAM), Residual Convolutional Block Attention Module (Res-CBAM), and Shuffle Attention (SA), are introduced into the multi-scale feature fusion layers of the Neck to strengthen cross-scale feature integration. Experimental results demonstrate that YOLO-AMC consistently outperforms baseline models YOLOv11n and YOLOv8n across multiple evaluation metrics. Among the evaluated attention modules, GAM achieves the best detection performance, obtaining mAP@0.5 = 0.9917 and mAP@0.5:0.95 = 0.9506 on the test dataset, which are higher than those of YOLOv11 (0.9833 / 0.9112) and YOLOv8 (0.9707 / 0.8921). Furthermore, while maintaining a computational complexity of 7.6 GFLOPs, the proposed model achieves 110.95 FPS on an NVIDIA RTX 4090 platform and approximately 5 FPS on a Raspberry Pi 5 edge device, demonstrating a favorable trade-off between accuracy and deployment efficiency. The implementation code for this study is available on GitHub at https://github.com/CY-Tsai24/YOLO-AMC.

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

An Algebraic Matrix Spencer Theorem

arXiv:2606.16005v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop an algebraic approach to matrix discrepancy based on the representation theory of finite-dimensional C$^*$-algebras. As an application, we resolve a substantial structured special case of the Matrix Spencer conjecture. In particular, we show that for every family of contractions $A_1,\ldots,A_n$ that are contained in a finite-dimensional $C^*$-algebra $\mathcal A$ with $dim_{\mathbb C} (\mathcal A) \lesssim n$, there exists signs $x\in\{\pm1\}^n$ such that $\|\sum_{i=1}^n x_i A_i\| \le O(\sqrt n)$. As a noteworthy special case, our main result also resolves the Group Spencer conjecture of (Bandeira'24). We furthermore prove that Matrix Spencer continues to hold for low-rank perturbations of matrix families coming from an $C^*$-algebra of small dimension.

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

Landmark-free Assessment of Lower-limb Alignment with Implicit Neural Shape Functions from Knee Radiographs

Radiographic assessment of lower-limb alignment (LLA) is important for predicting joint health and surgical outcomes in total knee arthroplasty. Traditional measurement methods are manual and time-consuming, while recent machine learning approaches typically rely on locating a fixed set of anatomical landmarks. This dependence limits flexibility and may require re-annotation when clinical definitions change. To address this, we propose an automated workflow using Implicit Neural Shape Functions (INSF). Rather than relying on explicit landmark coordinates, we encode the anatomy into a compact latent space and regress clinical alignment measurements directly from these latent codes. This architecture allows for rapid extendability to new tasks without altering the backbone representation. We trained our method on an internal dataset of 566 knee radiographs, each annotated with the outline of the femur and tibia. We evaluated it on both an internal test dataset of 50 patients and a separate external set of 402 preoperative cases from the MRKR dataset. Manual clinical measurements are available for these data, and the MRKR measurements will be made publicly accessible. Performance was comparable to state-of-the-art landmark-based methods and manual agreement, while offering a flexible shape representation that can be extended to additional measurement tasks.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

The Optimal Rate Function in Covariant Quantum State Tomography

arXiv:2606.16948v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The problem of quantum tomography is to estimate an unknown quantum state $\rho$ from a measurement of $n$ copies of $\rho$. One can ask which tomography protocol, i.e.\ which choice of multi-copy measurement, gives the best possible estimate of $\rho$. To do so, we characterize tomography protocols by their rate function, which governs the exponential rate at which a protocol assigns probability to a particular estimate $\sigma$ of the true state $\rho$. This rate function is a quantum mechanical generalization of the classical relative entropy between the true state and its estimate, and depends on the choice of protocol. It is bounded by the quantum relative entropy, and we show that this bound is sharp: for any $\rho$ and $\sigma$ we construct a family of protocols whose rate functions converge to the quantum relative entropy $D(\sigma\|\rho)$. We consider the family of covariant tomography protocols; these are the basis independent state estimation schemes that assume no prior information about $\rho$ and $\sigma$. Keyl described a specific tomography protocol based on Schur sampling, and conjectured that among all covariant tomography protocols it has the largest possible rate function for all $\sigma$ and $\rho$. We prove this conjecture. The resulting rate function is an annealed version of quantum relative entropy, due to the cost of learning the eigenbasis in covariant quantum state tomography.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

MOSAIC: Methylation-Oriented Site Analysis and Information Classifier for Robust Epigenomic Classification of Acute Leukemia in Clinical Cohorts with Variable Tumor Purity

DNA methylation-based classification offers a rapid diagnostic complement to conventional molecular workflows in acute leukemia. Existing classifiers are trained on array-derived reference cohorts whose construction favors specimens with adequate tumor content, leaving clinically relevant low-purity specimens underrepresented and classifier robustness in this regime uncharacterized. On held-out low-purity specimens, existing classifiers were concordant with expert pathology in only 7 of 10 (MARLIN) and 5 of 10 (ALMA) cases, motivating a classifier built to maintain accuracy at low tumor purity. We developed MOSAIC (Methylation-Oriented Site Analysis and Information Classifier), a neural network classifier built to maintain accuracy across the full range of tumor purities encountered in clinical practice. MOSAIC is a neural network trained on publicly available array-based methylation data augmented with native methylation calls from Oxford Nanopore sequencing. MOSAIC was evaluated on low-purity specimens held out entirely from training. On these held-out low-blast leukemia specimens, all below 25% blasts and including a case at 1.4%, MOSAIC was concordant with expert pathology in every case, recovering the correct subtype where diluted disease signal would otherwise be mistaken for normal or unrelated tissue. Gradient-based saliency analysis showed that the network relies on a partially distinct set of discriminative CpG probes when classifying low-blast specimens. MOSAIC demonstrates that augmenting training with clinically representative clinical specimens yields methylation-based leukemia classification that maintains effectiveness under the variable tumor purity of real clinical cohorts.

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

Optimization of Secret Key Rate for BB84 under Collective Rotation Noise

arXiv:2605.21140v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Practical quantum key distribution (QKD) systems operate under noise, but security of most protocols have been analyzed under ideal noiseless scenarios. In this work, we investigated security performance of BB84 protocol under effect of collective rotation noise. Using theoretical quantum information frameworks, we analyzed key security parameters including quantum bit error rate (QBER), mutual information and secret key rate (SKR). Security of protocol is studied under various eavesdropping scenarios based on intercept and resend attacks. Our results show that collective rotation noise has a significant impact on the information shared between the two parties. Particularly, we extended prior treatments by suggesting a noise engineering strategy where we identified a non-zero noise range where information accessed by Eve is minimized while corresponding SKR degradation remains relatively small. This analysis provide insights into robustness of BB84 protocol under realistic noisy channels and may contribute towards development of more resilient QKD systems.

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

Semantic search for 100M+ galaxy images using AI-generated captions

Finding scientifically interesting phenomena through slow manual labeling campaigns severely limits our ability to explore the billions of galaxy images produced by telescopes. In this work, we develop a pipeline to create a semantic search engine from completely unlabeled image data. Our method leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to generate descriptions for galaxy images, then contrastively aligns a pre-trained astronomy foundation model with these embedded descriptions to produce searchable embeddings at scale. We find that current VLMs provide descriptions that are sufficiently informative to train a semantic search model that outperforms direct image similarity search. Our model, AION-Search, achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on finding rare phenomena despite training on randomly selected images with no deliberate curation for rare cases. Furthermore, we introduce a VLM-based re-ranking method that nearly doubles the recall for our most challenging targets in the top-100 results. For the first time, AION-Search enables flexible semantic search for over 100 million galaxy images, enabling discovery from previously infeasible searches, including the identification of 36 new extragalactic stellar stream candidates. More broadly, our work provides an approach for making large, unlabeled scientific image archives semantically searchable, expanding data exploration capabilities in fields from Earth observation to microscopy. The code, data, and app are publicly available at https://github.com/NolanKoblischke/AION-Search