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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

CPAM: Context-Preserving Adaptive Manipulation for Zero-Shot Real Image Editing

Editing natural images using textual descriptions in text-to-image diffusion models remains a significant challenge, particularly in achieving consistent generation and handling complex, non-rigid objects. Existing methods often struggle to preserve textures and identity, require extensive fine-tuning, and exhibit limitations in editing specific spatial regions or objects while retaining background details. This paper proposes Context-Preserving Adaptive Manipulation (CPAM), a novel zero-shot framework for complicated, non-rigid real image editing. Specifically, we propose a preservation adaptation module that adjusts self-attention mechanisms to preserve and independently control the object and background effectively. This ensures that the objects' shapes, textures, and identities are maintained while keeping the background undistorted during the editing process using the mask guidance technique. Additionally, we develop a localized extraction module to mitigate the interference with the non-desired modified regions during conditioning in cross-attention mechanisms. We also introduce various mask-guidance strategies to facilitate diverse image manipulation tasks in a simple manner. CPAM can be seamlessly integrated with multiple diffusion backbones, including SD1.5, SD2.1, and SDXL, demonstrating strong generalization across different model architectures. Extensive experiments on our newly constructed Image Manipulation BenchmArk (IMBA), a robust benchmark dataset specifically designed for real image editing, demonstrate that our proposed method is the preferred choice among human raters, outperforming existing state-of-the-art editing techniques. The source code and data will be publicly released at the project page: https://vdkhoi20.github.io/CPAM

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

Towards a Unified Generative Model for Scarce Time Series with Domain Experts

arXiv:2606.15172v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Synthesizing realistic time series with generative models has wide-ranging applications in real-world scenarios. Despite recent progress, most existing methods are trained under the assumption of abundant training data, which substantially limits their effectiveness in data-scarce settings. In this paper, we propose TimeMoDE, a novel framework that integrates Diffusion Transformers with Mixture-of-Experts to exploit both domain adaptability and diffusion-stage awareness for time series generation under data scarcity. It is pre-trained on a large-scale collection of multi-domain datasets to extract domain-agnostic temporal representations and domain-specific information benefiting generalization during fine-tuning. We propose Domain Prompts to condition expert assignment for indistinguishable noised tokens, mitigating the limitations of capturing inter-dataset relationships. Moreover, we incorporate diffusion timestep signals to equip the experts with awareness of time series degradation variations, facilitating adaptive calibrate to stage-dependent denoising requirements. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TimeMoDE outperforms existing methods under diverse low-data settings. It establishes an innovative paradigm for advanced time series few-shot generation.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Fourier Dimensions of Mandelbrot Cascades under Minimal Integrability

作者:

arXiv:2606.08703v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This note announces exact Fourier dimension formulas for canonical Mandelbrot cascade measures under the minimal Kahane Peyriere integrability condition and records the canonical b adic extension on cubes. In the dyadic interval setting, the theorem is proved in a balanced vector weight model allowing dependence between sibling weights. Almost surely on non extinction, the Fourier, energy, and L2 dimensions all equal the energy exponent. The scalar specialization gives the canonical Mandelbrot Kahane Fourier dimension formula under the minimal integrability condition. On the circle, the endpoint formula is given by the endpoint lower local dimension exponent. For the b adic Mandelbrot cascade on cubes, the Fourier dimension is the minimum of 2 and the energy exponent, with the universal Fourier barrier at dimension two providing the high dimensional obstruction.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Towards an Inferentialist Account of Information Through Proof-theoretic Semantics

arXiv:2605.05368v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Information is one of the most widely-discussed concepts of the current era. However, a great deal of insightful work notwithstanding, it is yet to be given wholly convincing logical or mathematical foundations. Without them, we lack adequate reasoning tools for understanding the complex ecosystems of systems upon which the society depends. We seek to rectify this by taking a first step towards developing an inferentialist semantic theory of information. There are three key interacting components. First, conceptual analysis: the metaphysics of information. Dretske expressed the key concepts of information in terms of intentionality, truth, and transmissibility. We replace truth with inferability, and trace the consequences of this replacement. Second, logic: proof-theoretic semantics (P-tS) provides a mathematical-logical realization of inferentialist reasoning. Using P-tS, we develop the first steps towards a mathematical-logical theory of an inferentialist primitive unit of information, the 'inferon'. This proof-theoretic approach counterpoints the model-theoretic view of information articulated in situation theory. Furthermore, we argue that it facilitates addressing all three components of van Benthem and Martinez's categorization of the understandings of information, as range, as correlation, and as code. Our focus is on information-as-correlation. Third, systems: the P-tS tools we develop provide the basis for a mathematical account of distributed systems modelling – a key tool from informatics for understanding the organization of information processing systems. This yields a reasoning-based theory of information flow in models of distributed systems. Overall, we seek to give a conceptually rigorous mathematical-logical account of information and its role within informatics, grounded in inference and reasoning.

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

Flow Matching for Efficient and Scalable Data Assimilation

arXiv:2508.13313v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Data assimilation (DA) estimates a dynamical system's state from noisy observations. Recent generative models like the ensemble score filter (EnSF) improve DA in high-dimensional nonlinear settings but are computationally expensive. We introduce the ensemble flow filter (EnFF), a training-free, flow matching (FM)-based framework that accelerates sampling and offers flexibility in flow design. EnFF uses Monte Carlo estimators for the marginal flow field, localized guidance for observation assimilation, and utilizes a novel flow path that exploits the Bayesian DA formulation. It generalizes classical filters such as the bootstrap particle filter and ensemble Kalman filter. Experiments on high-dimensional benchmarks demonstrate EnFF's improved cost-accuracy tradeoffs and scalability, highlighting FM's potential for efficient, scalable DA. Code is available at https://github.com/Utah-Math-Data-Science/Data-Assimilation-Flow-Matching.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Time-Conditioned and Multi-Time Survival Prediction from 2D PET/CT Projections in Lung Cancer

Accurate prediction of overall survival (OS) from positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) can support personalized treatment and follow-up strategies in oncology. However, the impact of temporal modeling on imaging-based survival prediction remains insufficiently explored. We investigate how different temporal formulations influence survival prediction by developing two complementary approaches: Attention-guided Time-Conditioned Survival (ATCS) and Multi-Time Survival (MTS). We retrospectively analyzed pre-treatment PET/CT images from 848 patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), including 556 for model development and 292 for held-out testing. A previously proposed Time-Conditioned Survival (TCS) model was used as a baseline. Models were trained using 5-fold cross-validation and evaluated on the test set using time-dependent area under the curve (AUC) at 6-month intervals from 0.5 to 5 years. Both ATCS and MTS outperformed the baseline TCS model, achieving mean AUCs of 0.794 and 0.793, respectively, compared to 0.767. ATCS performed better at earlier time points (0.5-3 years), whereas MTS performed better at later intervals (3.5-5 years). Combining tumor-specific and tissue-wise PET/CT features improved performance over either input alone. Finer temporal discretization improved short-term prediction, while coarser intervals provided more stable long-term estimates. These findings demonstrate that temporal modeling and input design influence PET/CT-based survival prediction. The proposed approaches enable time-specific survival estimation from pre-treatment imaging and may support improved risk stratification and clinical decision-making.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

AliceDB database and pipeline for identification of natural protein variants based on mass spectrometry measurement data

The natural variation that distinguishes living organisms within a single species is currently being studied intensively, primarily at the genetic level. Unfortunately, studies of natural variants at the level of protein gene products are not very common, mainly due to the lack of appropriate databases and bioinformatics tools. The main research technique used to study proteomes/peptidomes is mass spectrometry (MS). A classic method for interpreting raw mass spectrometry data in proteomic/peptidomic studies involves the use of databases containing representative (canonical) sequences that define the proteome of the organism under study. In this paper, we present the AliceDB database, which contains information on over 7 million natural variants of protein sequences described in the scientific literature for Homo sapiens. The data contained in the AliceDB database can be utilized using widely available and commonly used software for interpreting proteomic data. Test results regarding the use of the AliceDB database for the interpretation of proteomic data indicate that accounting for the presence of natural variants increases both the number and quality of identified proteins. Furthermore, it is easy to identify protein sequence variants that may, for example, be of significance in medicine.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

FUSE: Frequency-domain Unification and Spectral Energy Alignment for Multi-modal Object Re-Identification

Despite significant progress in multi-modal Re-Identification (ReID), existing methods tend to emphasize low-frequency cues. Consequently, they focus on attributes such as color, illumination, and coarse appearance, while overlooking mid and high-frequency structures that encode geometric, textural, and identity-discriminative details. This imbalance leads to incomplete spectral representations and unstable cross-modal alignment. To overcome these limitations, we introduce FUSE, a frequency-domain framework that reformulates multi-modal ReID as a two-stage process of spectral disentanglement and energy alignment. The proposed Spectral Decomposition Module (SDM) adaptively partitions features into low, mid, and high-frequency subspaces, enabling hierarchical spectral modeling. The Cross-Modal Alignment Module (CAM) further enforces energy alignment and subspace complementarity across modalities via frequency-consistency regularization. In addition, FUSE incorporates learnable frequency modulation to enhance robustness under varying illumination and heterogeneous sensor conditions. Extensive experiments on RGBNT201, RGBNT100, and MSVR310 show that FUSE achieves 9.1\% mAP and 9.5\% Rank-1 improvements, establishing an interpretable frequency-domain paradigm for multi-modal representation learning.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

DIRECT: When and Where Should You Allocate Test-Time Compute in Embodied Planners?

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed as high-level planners for embodied agents, with an emerging strategy of scaling test-time compute to improve capability. However, we observe that doing so increases latency, token usage, and FLOPs while yielding uneven, often diminishing gains in downstream success, limiting where embodied agents can be deployed. We argue that choosing when and where to spend test-time compute is central to bringing frontier performance to the real world. We introduce DIRECT, a routing framework that uses multimodal scene context to allocate compute per prompt, improving the success–cost Pareto frontier over fixed model selection. Across three dominant scaling axes, namely chain-of-thought depth, model size, and memory history, our experiments on VLABench and RoboMME show that test-time compute is not a uniform lever: different axes yield qualitatively distinct capability gains. We validate these insights on a physical Franka arm in a DROID setup spanning zero-shot manipulation and long-horizon chaining, where our router matches or exceeds a stronger model's success rate at up to 65% lower average latency. Ultimately, our results show that naively scaling test-time compute is wasteful, and that DIRECT can provide frontier-level embodied planning in robotic systems at a fraction of the cost. Project page can be found at jadee-dao.github.io/direct/.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Critically Engaged Pragmatism: Scientific Norm and Social, Pragmatist Epistemology for AI Science Evaluation Tools

arXiv:2601.09753v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI science evaluation tools aim to assess research credibility. As with traditional metrics such as impact factors, their edicts can be decontextualised and repurposed in problematic ways. To address this, I propose Critically-Engaged Pragmatism as a scientific norm enjoining scientific communities to scrutinise the purposes and purpose-specific reliability of AI science evaluation tools. To foster Critically Engaged Pragmatism, creators of AI science evaluation tools should transparently and fully report design, training, and benchmarking details to facilitate assessments of purpose-specific reliability, liability to different types of error, and bias. What count as best practices for the transparent reporting of AI science evaluation tools should be updated as new forms of error, bias, and gamesmanship are discovered. Under this framework, AI science evaluation tools are not objective arbiters of scientific credibility. Rather, they are the object of critical discursive practices that ultimately ground the credibility of scientific communities.

12.
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.

13.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

A mosaic of whole-body representations on the human precentral gyrus

Understanding how the body is represented in the motor cortex is key to understanding how the brain controls movement. Although the motor cortex has been mapped in animal models at a fine scale1–10, characterization in humans remains primarily limited to low-resolution recording11–16 and stimulation techniques17–20. Here we created a comprehensive map of the human motor cortex at single-neuron resolution, spanning microelectrode array recordings from 20 arrays across 8 individuals with paralysis from spinal cord injury, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or brainstem stroke, all enrolled in brain–computer interface clinical trials. These arrays broadly sample the crown of the precentral gyrus (PCG; thought to be composed largely of the premotor cortex (Brodmann area 6)). We found that body parts were highly intermixed, such that the entire body was represented in all sampled locations of the PCG, although the relative strength of body parts was roughly consistent with the motor homunculus17,18. We also found two speech-preferential areas with a broadly tuned, orofacial-dominant area in between them. Throughout the PCG, movement representations of the four limbs were interlinked, with homologous movements of different limbs (for example, toe curl and hand close) having correlated representations. These data provide evidence consistent with an intermixed, interrelated and behaviour-centred organization of the motor cortex3,21. The resulting map also provides important targeting information for brain–computer interfaces that seek to restore motor function. A comprehensive map of the human motor cortex at single-neuron resolution is described.

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

SuCo: Sufficiency-guided Continuous Adaptive Reasoning

Despite remarkable performance on complex tasks, Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) often generate excessively long Chain-of-Thoughts (CoT), inflating computational costs even for simple queries. Existing efforts to mitigate this inefficiency typically rely on discrete reasoning modes or fixed budget tiers, lacking a principled criterion of when reasoning is sufficient. In this work, we introduce Minimal Sufficient CoT (MSC), defined as the shortest prefix of a CoT trajectory which is adequate for producing the correct answer. We empirically show that MSC not only reduces reasoning tokens, but also improves accuracy across difficulty levels. Building on MSC, we propose Sufficiency-guided Continuous Adaptive Reasoning (SuCo), a two-stage training framework for autonomous reasoning control along a continuous spectrum. In stage 1, MSC-Aligned Fine-Tuning (MFT) constructs MSC data using problem-adaptive sufficiency thresholds that naturally scale with question difficulty, then fine-tunes the model to internalize concise yet sufficient reasoning patterns. In stage 2, Sufficiency-Aware Policy Optimization (SAPO) further optimizes the model through reinforcement learning with dynamic complexity tracking and sufficiency-aware rewards that penalize both over- and under-thinking. Extensive experiments across mathematics, code, and science benchmarks show that SuCo consistently achieves improvements in both accuracy and reasoning efficiency.

15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

The Geometry of Allostery: A Laplacian Minor Hierarchy for Many-Body Protein Communication

Quantifying how cooperative, many-body relationships drive allostery in protein networks remains a major challenge. To address this, we develop the Laplacian minor hierarchy, a mathematical framework that characterizes the geometric invariants of a protein network. Lower-order minors yield standard metrics including the partition function and effective distances, whereas higher-order minors define novel topological measures: cooperation indices, each bounded between zero and one, that characterize pathway correlations at increasing levels of complexity, the third-order minor determines whether allosteric pathways are correlated or uncorrelated, and the fourth-order minor quantifies how distinct pathways communicate through intermediary residues. We apply this framework to analyze the evolutionary adaptation of the PSD95pdz3 domain from Class I to Class II ligand specificity via mutations G330T and H372A. The cooperation index demonstrates a distinct evolutionary hierarchy: the G330T mutation establishes distributed pathway couplings that the H372A mutation subsequently exploits, whereas H372A alone produces minimal global changes. Furthermore, the fourth-order analysis identifies His317 as a critical intermediary node bridging the class-switching (330-372) and class-bridging (330-400) allosteric pathways. These results demonstrate that allosteric dependencies emerge only when mutations accumulate in specific combinations, with a hierarchical organization of pathways structured around position 330 and intermediary nodes His317 and Phe400. Rather than predicting allosteric mechanisms, this framework provides a mechanistic explanation for why and how allostery emerges during protein evolution.

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

GridVQA-X: A Framework for Evaluating Multimodal Explainability Methods

With the increasing development of Vision-Language Models, it becomes imperative that their predictions are readily explainable to relevant stakeholders. However, the field of explainability has not kept pace with the multimodal surge. While recent Multimodal Explainable AI (MxAI) methods generate explanations to attribute the interaction between different modalities, current evaluation protocols lack the ground truth required to distinguish between true cross-modal reasoning (e.g., spatial composition) and shallow cross-modal shortcuts (e.g., Bag-of-Words attribute matching). It remains unknown whether MxAI methods faithfully capture synergistic interactions or merely hallucinate reasoning on models acting as simple feature detectors. In this paper, we introduce GridVQA-X, the first diagnostic framework specifically designed to evaluate cross-modal explainability. Unlike natural datasets, GridVQA-X leverages a closed-world synthesis logic to generate unique, mathematically guaranteed explanations. We utilize this controlled environment to train paired ground-truth models on identical architectures: $M_{pure}$, which learns robust spatial-relational reasoning and $M_{spur}$, which is structurally forced to rely on cross-modal shortcuts. This behavioral divergence creates a rigorous testbed: a faithful explainer must report distinct reasoning pathways for each model. Our findings reveal that widely used methods fail to distinguish between models relying on genuine spatial-relational reasoning and those exploiting cross-modal shortcuts, highlighting a critical gap in capturing true cross-modal synergy and misrepresenting how multimodal models actually make decisions.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

RLPR: Radar-to-LiDAR Place Recognition via Two-Stage Asymmetric Cross-Modal Alignment for Autonomous Driving

All-weather autonomy is critical for autonomous driving, which necessitates reliable localization across diverse scenarios. While LiDAR place recognition is widely deployed for this task, its performance degrades in adverse weather. Conversely, radar-based methods, though weather-resilient, are hindered by the general unavailability of radar maps. To bridge this gap, radar-to-LiDAR place recognition, which localizes radar scans within existing LiDAR maps, has garnered increasing interest. However, extracting discriminative and generalizable features shared between modalities remains challenging, compounded by the scarcity of large-scale paired training data and the signal heterogeneity across radar types. In this work, we propose RLPR, a robust radar-to-LiDAR place recognition framework compatible with single-chip, scanning, and 4D radars. We first design a dual-stream network to extract structural features that abstract away from sensor-specific signal properties (e.g., Doppler or RCS). Subsequently, motivated by our task-specific asymmetry observation between radar and LiDAR, we introduce a two-stage asymmetric cross-modal alignment (TACMA) strategy, which leverages the pre-trained radar branch as a discriminative anchor to guide the alignment process. Experiments on four datasets demonstrate that RLPR achieves state-of-the-art recognition accuracy with strong zero-shot generalization capabilities.

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

The AI Legal Specialist: A Juridically Autonomous Professional Profile for AI Governance

arXiv:2606.12415v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid global expansion of artificial intelligence regulation has generated, across multiple jurisdictions, a demand for legal expertise dedicated to AI that the market has addressed in a fragmented manner. Data protection officers extend their remit beyond data protection law; privacy lawyers reposition themselves toward AI; compliance officers add AI chapters to their existing manuals. This paper argues that none of these adaptive responses adequately covers the professional space opened by the emerging global AI regulatory landscape, of which the EU Artificial Intelligence Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689) is the most comprehensive instance, alongside the Council of Europe Framework Convention on AI, the United States executive and sectoral framework, and analogous initiatives in the United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil, China, Japan, Singapore, and beyond. A distinct professional profile is required: the AI Legal Specialist, conceived as a jurist – understood broadly to encompass any professional with advanced legal training – operating at the intersection of legal interpretation and AI governance. The profile is juridically autonomous: it derives its existence from the structure of regulatory obligations generated wherever AI is subject to substantive regulation, rather than from any technical standard or the extension of adjacent roles. The paper provides a juridically grounded definition of the profile, argues for its autonomy from adjacent figures and international standards, proposes a reference competence architecture aligned with the European e-Competence Framework (e-CF, EN 16234-1) as a methodological choice, and articulates the conditions for its operational measurement through key performance indicators. The contribution is intended as a foundation for international standardization of the profile and as a reference for practice, curricula, and adoption across jurisdictions.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Integrated Marketing Attribution: A Bayesian Framework for Privacy-Safe Granular Measurement Anchored in MMM

arXiv:2606.16878v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retail marketing measurement increasingly requires granular campaign-level insights without relying on user-level tracking. However, the two dominant approaches, Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) and Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA), often produce fragmented insights. MMM is privacy-safe and robust for channel-level planning but is too coarse for campaign optimization, while MTA provides granular attribution but has become less reliable under increasing privacy restrictions. We propose Integrated Marketing Attribution (IMA), a unified framework that combines MMM with channel specific Bayesian attribution models to derive campaign-level effects from aggregated data. By leveraging MMM-informed priors, IMA delivers granular, privacy-safe attribution while preserving consistency with MMM.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

MARS: Efficient, Adaptive Co-Scheduling for Heterogeneous Agentic Systems

arXiv:2604.26963v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as the execution core of autonomous agents rather than as standalone text generators. Agentic workloads induce a temporal shift from single-turn inference to multi-turn LLM-tool loops, and a spatial shift from chat-scale, GPU-only execution to repository-scale, GPU-CPU co-located execution. Consequently, coordinating heterogeneous resource demands of agentic execution has emerged as a critical system challenge. We design and implement MARS, an efficient and adaptive co-scheduling system that globally coordinates heterogeneous agentic workloads under coupled GPU-CPU resource pressure. By establishing holistic visibility across GPU inference and CPU tool execution via a unified information stream, an external control plane in MARS decouples admission from execution to prevent heterogeneous resource oversubscription. An internal agent-centric scheduler further minimizes the end-to-end critical path by prioritizing latency-sensitive continuations and adaptively retaining KV cache state only when warm resumption yields a latency benefit. Our evaluations show that MARS reduces end-to-end latency by up to 5.94x while maintaining nearly maximal system throughput. We further integrate MARS as the serving backend for the OpenHands coding agent framework, demonstrating its real-world effectiveness by accelerating end-to-end task completion time by up to 1.87x. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/Afterglow231/MARS_preview .

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Reassessing High-Performing LLMs on Polish Medical Exams: True Competence or Bias-Driven Performance?

Large language models (LLMs) in medicine are mainly evaluated using multiple-choice question answering (MCQA), which can overestimate real clinical ability due to guessing strategies and answer biases. To address these limitations, we introduce an expanded and more challenging benchmark based on Polish medical exams, adding over 15,000 questions, two new domains, and four structural modifications that reduce MCQA-specific artifacts and better test reasoning. We evaluate 21 LLMs and show that evaluation design strongly affects results. Under our harder setup, the best model (Qwen3.5-122B) drops by 28.4 and 31 pp on English and Polish exams, respectively. Despite low evidence of data contamination, standard MCQA scores do not reliably reflect true medical competence. To facilitate further research, we make our benchmark publicly available.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Learning-Based Decision Making for Combustion Phasing Control in Multi-Fuel CI Engines with Latent Fuel Reactivity Estimation

arXiv:2606.18393v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-fuel compression-ignition engines offer fuel flexibility but introduce uncertain, time-varying fuel reactivity, represented by cetane number (CN), which complicates cycle-to-cycle combustion-phasing control. This work formulates CA50 regulation under latent CN variation as a partially observable sequential decision problem and systematically evaluates controllers with increasing temporal and representational capacity, including LinUCB, history-augmented contextual bandits, observation-only DDPG, recurrent DDPG, and a proposed GRU-guided RL framework. A Gaussian-process surrogate trained on experimental multi-fuel engine data provides a controlled and reproducible evaluation environment. Results show that myopic and fixed-history bandit methods degrade under CN variation, observation-only RL suffers from latent-state aliasing, and generic recurrence is insufficient when CN evolves rapidly. The proposed framework learns a compact GRU-based representation of fuel reactivity from combustion history and conditions both actor and critic on this estimated signal rather than oracle CN. By training the policy on the same imperfect fuel-reactivity information available at deployment, the controller avoids train-deploy inconsistency in conventional online estimate-then-control pipelines. Across unseen CN trajectories, the policy achieves stable CA50 regulation with mean absolute tracking error below 0.25{\deg} CA at the training setpoint, while producing smooth, physically consistent SOI and glow-plug-power actuation. These results show that combustion control under latent, continuously evolving fuel dynamics requires more than standalone estimation or generic recurrence. By aligning fuel-reactivity inference with control policy learning, the proposed framework enables reactivity-aware decision-making using the same estimated state available during deployment.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Hormonal Contraceptives Drive Genital Lipid Metabolism Reprogramming and Susceptibility to HIV Infection

Heterosexual genital HIV transmission is a major driver of new infections, particularly in women, making them disproportionately vulnerable to HIV acquisition. Previous studies have associated injectable hormonal contraceptives (HC) with increasing susceptibility to HIV. Yet, the underlying molecular mechanism remains incompletely understood. Given the structural and signaling role of lipids in the female genital tract, cervicovaginal lipidomic profiling has the potential to reveal the mechanistic interplay among HC, lipidome, and HIV susceptibility in the female genital tract. We conducted untargeted cervicovaginal lipidomics study in a cohort of high-risk, HIV-negative, Kenyan sex workers who were using injectable depot medroxyprogesterone acetate (DMPA), oral contraceptive pill (OCP), or no hormonal contraception (NH). Genital lipids were quantitatively analyzed using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) and bioinformatics platforms. A total of 1045 lipid species were identified in the cervicovaginal lavage samples. Injectable DMPA significantly downregulated major structural and signaling membrane lipids, including phospholipids, ceramides, sphingomyelins, and glycosphingolipids (p

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

Price of metric universality in vector quantization is at most 0.11 bit

arXiv:2602.05790v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fast computation of a matrix product $W^\top X$ is a workhorse of modern LLMs. To make their deployment more efficient, a popular approach is that of using a low-precision approximation $\widehat W$ in place of true $W$ (``weight-only quantization''). Information theory demonstrates that an optimal algorithm for reducing precision of $W$ depends on the (second order) statistics of $X$ and requires a careful alignment of vector quantization codebook with PCA directions of $X$ (a process known as ``waterfilling allocation''). Dependence of the codebook on statistics of $X$, however, is highly impractical. This paper proves that there exist a universal codebook that is simultaneously near-optimal for all possible statistics of $X$, in the sense of being at least as good as an $X$-adapted waterfilling codebook with rate reduced by 0.11 bit per dimension in the case when $W$ is Gaussian. Such universal codebook would be an ideal candidate for the low-precision storage format, a topic of active modern research, but alas the existence proof is non-constructive. Equivalently, our result shows existence of a net in $\mathbb{R}^n$ that is a nearly-optimal covering of a sphere simultaneously with respect to all Hilbert norms.