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

Encoding parameters by measurement: Forgetting can be better in quantum metrology

arXiv:2512.10541v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce quantum parameter estimation with the encoding being via a quantum measurement. We quantify the precision for estimating parameters characterizing a general two-outcome qubit measurement, considering two cases: when the outcomes of the encoding measurement are recorded and when the same are ignored. We find that in a large variety of such estimation scenarios, forgetting the outcomes yields higher precision. We derive a necessary criterion under which remembering the measurement outcomes provides better precision in comparison to the outcome-forgotten strategy. Furthermore, we establish a necessary and sufficient criterion for the simultaneous estimation of multiple parameters encoded by an arbitrary quantum process, including those involving measurements, using qubit probes, and find when the quantum Cramér$-$Rao bound is valid and achievable. For simultaneous estimation of two parameters characterizing the measurement, we find that the achievable quantum Cramér$-$Rao bound can be a valid precision bound only when the measurement direction depends on the parameters of interest.

03.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

GeroEngine: Generative single-cell aging trajectories reveal a bidirectionally traversable identity core and direction-specific inflammatory remodeling

作者:

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) maps aging tissues at high resolution but is destructive, preventing longitudinal tracking; dropout and zero-inflation artifacts, amplified by shift-invariant linear simulations, confound age-associated variability. We developed GeroEngine, a technical-artifact-aware framework combining VAE-based trajectory simulation, LOPO cross-validation, linear baselines, reverse traversal, and reverse-directed network inference. In microglia and HSCs, the VAE reduced technical-artifact carryover while preserving trajectory heterogeneity and improving alignment to artifact-reduced reference manifolds. Consensus GeroTargets and GeroRegulators defined tissue-specific GeroNetworks organized into three pillars: lineage/replication identity collapse, a sex-dimorphic endocrine/stress core, and inflammatory remodeling. Forward and reverse simulations aligned to the common young[->]old aging axis revealed a sign-coherent, direction-specific program: identity/replication targets were bidirectionally recovered, whereas MHC/NF-{kappa}B inflammatory programs were preferentially forward-recovered. These results support identity collapse as a deep traversable core of aging and nominate upstream homeostatic restoration over downstream inflammatory suppression.

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

SciDef: Datasets and Tools for Automated Definition Extraction from Scientific Literature with LLMs

Scientific concepts are often defined inconsistently across papers, making it difficult to compare findings, reuse terminology, and build reliable downstream resources. We present SciDef, a resource suite for scientific definition extraction. The suite contains DefExtra, a benchmark of 268 human-validated author-stated definitions from 75 academic papers; DefSim, 60 human-labeled definition-pair similarity judgments; and an open LLM-based pipeline for PDF preprocessing, chunking, definition extraction, prompt optimization, and evaluation. We validate the resources by benchmarking 16 language models across prompting strategies and chunking schemes. The strongest set-level configuration achieves a score of 0.397, while the highest-coverage configuration matches at least one prediction to 86.4% of gold definitions but over-generates candidate definitions. We further show that an NLI-based matching metric agrees strongly with human DefSim judgments. These results position SciDef as a reusable benchmark and tooling layer for definition-centric literature analysis, while highlighting relevance-aware filtering as the key bottleneck for fully automatic definition extraction. Code & datasets are available at https://github.com/Media-Bias-Group/SciDef.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

The Quantum Transition State

arXiv:2606.10266v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The transition state – the critical configuration separating reactants from products – is the central organizing concept of chemical reaction rate theory, yet for nearly a century it has been thought to have no exact quantum counterpart: the recrossing-free, one-way flux through a transition state appears to demand simultaneous knowledge of position and momentum, in conflict with the uncertainty principle. We show this obstruction is illusory and construct the quantum transition state directly from the exact quantum flow. Its stable and unstable invariant manifolds intersect in a unique bounded trajectory – the quantum transition-state trajectory – anchoring a moving dividing surface that each reactive characteristic crosses exactly once, yielding a one-way flux of the standard quantum probability current. The geometric framework underlying classical transition-state theory thus survives intact in exact quantum mechanics, in a fundamentally quantum form.

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

Imperfect Visual Verification for Code Edition : A Case Study on TikZ

arXiv:2606.15693v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLMs have significantly advanced code generation, enabling the synthesis of functional programs. While recent systems achieve strong performance on many coding benchmarks, tasks involving programs such as TikZ that generate visual artifacts remain challenging, in particular on visual code customization. Unlike generation from scratch, customization requires localized, semantics-preserving edits: the model must locate relevant code, modify it according to the instruction, and preserve the remaining structure and rendering. Approaches based on post-hoc iterative refinement/correction where a verifier provides feedback to guide corrections, have shown promise. However, in the case of programs with a visual outcome such as in TikZ, where correctness is harder or likely impossible to formalize and evaluate automatically, deterministic verifiers do not exist. Hence, developers can only rely on imperfect verifiers. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study to answer:to what extent can iterative refinement remain effective when the verifier itself is unreliable?} We use TikZ as a focused case study that isolates the core difficulties of the problem (weak code structure, fine-grained visual semantics, and difficult feature localization) in a controlled and challenging setting. We define visual code customization as an iterative editing problem with an imperfect oracle, and introduce a framework for analyzing such iterative refinements. We conduct a large-scale study and evaluate multiple LLM-based and tool-augmented visual verifiers within iterative refinement pipelines, and perform extensive manual annotation of refinement trajectories to assess verifier behavior and feedback quality. Our findings show that even imperfect verifiers can determine with moderate accuracy whether visual instructions are applied to code, achieving F1-scores up to 0.815. Feedback improves iterative refinement, especially for weaker models, adding 11–20 perfect customizations for Qwen3-vl-30b-a3b-Instruct, while stronger models like Gemini-3 gain fewer improvements (+5) but benefit more from accurate verification that prevents premature acceptance. Feedback is effective only when it precisely identifies image issues, provides actionable guidance, addresses all relevant problems, and remains grounded in the original instruction.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Querying an astronomical database using large language models: the ALeRCE text-to-SQL system

arXiv:2606.18108v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop a text-to-SQL (structured query language) system based on large language models (LLMs) using in-context learning and apply it to the Automatic Learning for the Rapid Classification of Events (ALeRCE) astronomical database. ALeRCE is a community broker for the Zwicky Transient Facility and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. The system enables users to query the database in natural language (NL) and generates executable SQL queries. To develop and evaluate the system, we constructed a dataset of 110 NL/SQL pairs. We propose a step-by-step generation framework comprising four modules: schema linking, query classification, prompt decomposition, and self-correction. The performance of thirteen LLMs is evaluated using in-context learning and prompt engineering techniques. Text-to-SQL performance is assessed using the perfect-match (PM) rate for row identifiers (e.g., object identifiers) and column identifiers (i.e., column names). The proposed step-by-step framework consistently outperforms a direct-inference baseline, while the self-correction module consistently reduces execution errors. For Claude Opus 4.6, PM performance on row (column) identifiers is high for simple queries, reaching 0.97 (0.94), and decreases with query complexity to 0.44 (0.72) for medium queries and 0.59 (0.49) for hard queries. Among the thirteen evaluated models, the best-performing LLMs for the text-to-SQL task are Claude Opus 4.6, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini 3 Flash, and GPT-5.2-Codex.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Adaptive inference and function vectors in deep transformers

arXiv:2606.16694v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transformers are widely used as a general-purpose substrate for learning complex correlations between a large collection of coupled variables, but their internal mechanisms have remained mysterious. We introduce a theory of a deep transformer as a mean-field interacting system that implements distributed inference, subject to constraints on communication, locality and depth. We show that such a system can exploit internal state representations ('function vectors') to infer a latent context variable at increasingly finer scales over its layers. In an in-context regression task, the theory predicts a non-trivial relationship between non-Gaussian, hierarchical structure in the latent context variable, and transformer depth. Predictions are tested using constrained linear attention transformers and demonstrate adaptive inference in deep architectures. Feedforward blocks and depth enable transformers to implement a much richer class of in-context learning algorithms than previously described.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Demystifying Hidden-State Recurrence: Switchable Latent Reasoning with On-Policy Reinforcement Learning

Latent chain-of-thought compresses reasoning by replacing visible reasoning traces with continuous hidden-state recurrence, but existing formulations are difficult to optimize with standard on-policy reinforcement learning (RL) and hard to interpret causally. Our key insight is that a single pair of explicit boundary tokens can address both issues at once: discrete entry and exit anchors make the latent block compatible with standard on-policy RL, and the same anchors offer a natural foothold for mechanistic analysis. Motivated by this, we propose SWITCH, a switchable latent reasoning framework. The model emits to enter latent mode and to exit. Because the boundaries are ordinary discrete tokens, the GRPO policy ratio is well-defined at every decision point. The same anchors also expose the latent steps to direct probing and causal intervention. We train the model with a visible-to-latent curriculum and a Switch-GRPO objective that propagates gradients through recurrent latent computation. SWITCH consistently outperforms prior hidden-state-recurrence latent reasoning approaches at similar scale. Mechanistic analysis through the boundary tokens further reveals three findings: (i) is a sharply localised, learned switching policy rather than a stylistic artefact; (ii) the latent step it opens performs problem-specific, causally important computation rather than acting as an inert placeholder; and (iii) that computation is concentrated at a single hidden-state transition on entry. Together, these results show that hidden-state-recurrence latent reasoning is both RL-trainable and open to direct mechanistic analysis, including of how on-policy RL itself improves the model from the inside.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Understanding LLMs in Title-Abstract Screening: From Disagreements to Recommendations

arXiv:2606.17588v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Several studies have examined the use of large language models (LLMs) for title-abstract screening in systematic reviews (SRs), reporting mixed accuracy. However, questions of reliability remain largely unaddressed. In this study, we go beyond quantitative LLM-human agreement metrics and qualitatively investigate how and why LLMs fail. We also propose actionable recommendations. We analyzed disagreements between LLMs and researchers across six software engineering SRs and over 1,000 primary study papers. For each SR, papers were screened independently by human experts and LLMs in zero-shot mode, resulting in Kappa values ranging from 0.52 to 0.77. Qualitative analysis suggests that human-LLM disagreement results from recurring, identifiable causes, such as boundary ambiguity in key terms, keyword overemphasization, and incorrect topic inference. Based on these findings, we propose recommendations such as validating semantic understanding before deployment, running multiple LLMs, and focusing validation efforts on borderline cases. Future studies are needed to validate the impact of our recommendations, and community efforts are needed to develop normative guidelines on LLM usage in SRs.

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

Spokes: Optimizing for Diverse Pretraining Data Selection

Diversity plays a critical role in data selection, improving performance under fixed data budgets by reducing redundancy and repetition. However, optimizing for diversity is inherently challenging, as it is a set-level property that depends on interactions between data points rather than individual examples. As a result, existing approaches typically rely on proxies or approximations, which often fail to ensure sufficiently diverse subsets. In this work, we directly optimize diversity by introducing a probabilistic diversification framework based on the G-Vendi score, optimized via exponentiated gradient descent. Our method produces subsets that are substantially more diverse than those obtained via random sampling, achieving a +489 increase in G-Vendi score on a 500k-sample subset. We evaluate our approach on FineWeb and DCLM, where it consistently outperforms existing methods. Notably, SPOKES (diversity-only) improves average downstream performance by +0.4 and +0.5 points over random sampling on DCLM and FineWeb, respectively. More importantly, jointly optimizing for both quality and diversity yields the strongest results: SPOKES achieves gains of +1.5 and +1.4 points on DCLM and FineWeb, outperforming all baselines, including semantic deduplication and quality filtering.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Nonlocal Bayesian Modeling of Continuous Spatio-Temporal Dynamics

arXiv:2606.14313v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-world spatio-temporal forecasting must handle irregular time points, spatially sparse observations, and the need for uncertainty quantification. This setting is often further compounded by nonlocal interactions (long-range spatial coupling). Modeling continuous-space, continuous-time nonlocal dynamics naturally leads to infinite-dimensional integro-differential equations (IDEs), making principled Bayesian inference intractable. We propose the NonLocal Bayesian Spatio-Temporal model (NLBST), a hierarchical Bayesian framework for continuous spatio-temporal fields that learns explicit nonlocal coupling while retaining tractable inference. NLBST represents the latent field via a coordinate-based spatial basis expansion and models the coefficient process with a continuous-time ODE whose learnable linear operator corresponds to a Galerkin reduction of a nonlocal IDE; a Neural ODE residual captures additional nonlinear dynamics. A linear-Gaussian observation model enables Kalman-style sequential updates under missing and irregular observations, while the spatial basis representation enables inductive prediction at unmeasured locations without retraining. Global parameters are learned via variational inference, and uncertainty is handled through a Bayesian hierarchy. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate strong forecasting and spatial generalization with well-calibrated uncertainty, yielding substantial gains over baselines in strongly nonlocal and partially observed regimes.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Physics-Distilled Neural Network enabled by Large Language Models for Manufacturing Process-Property Predictive Modeling

arXiv:2606.11605v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predicting process-property relationships in manufacturing is often challenged by high experimental costs and the limited interpretability of complex 'black-box' models. This paper proposes a novel knowledge distillation framework designed to achieve high-accuracy predictions in data-scarce scenarios. The framework integrates analytical physics priors, which are systematically extracted from scientific literature via Large Language Models, into a privileged teacher model. We employ a Graph-Masked Attention layer to capture the complex physical dependencies among input variables showing strict setpoints or a combination of static and high-frequency temporal signatures. This privileged knowledge is distilled into a lightweight student predictor for inference. The feasibility and robustness of the framework are evaluated through a comprehensive experiment across five diverse manufacturing processes. To ensure statistical reliability, given the small dataset sizes, a repeated K-fold cross-validation technique is employed to quantify model stability and generalization. Results indicate that the proposed framework consistently achieves high predictive accuracy across all evaluated domains. Most importantly, the architecture demonstrates significant fault tolerance by maintaining robust predictive performance even in scenarios where LLM-derived analytical priors are suboptimal or incomplete. Furthermore, the student predictor achieves an inference frequency exceeding 6000 Hz, which facilitates real-time edge deployment on standard industrial hardware. This work provides a scalable solution for bridging the gap between theoretical physics and real-time industrial monitoring in data-limited environments.

14.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-13

Contribution of nosocomial transmission to <i>Klebsiella pneumoniae</i> neonatal sepsis in Africa and South Asia: An observational study of infection clusters inferred from pathogen genomics and temporal data

by Erkison Ewomazino Odih, Jabir A. Abdulahi, Anne V. Amulele, Matthew Bates, Eva Heinz, Weiming Hu, Kajal Jain, Rindidzani Magobo, Courtney P. Olwagen, John M. Tembo, Tolbert Sonda, Jonathan Strysko, Caroline C. Tigoi, Kyle Bittinger, Jennifer Cornick, Ebenezer Foster-Nyarko, Wilson Gumbi, Steven M. Jones, Chileshe L. Musyani, Carolyn M. McGann, Ahmed M. Moustafa, Patrick Musicha, James C. L. Mwansa, Moreka L. Ndumba, Thomas D. Stanton, Donwilliams O. Omuoyo, Oliver Pearse, Laura T. Phillips, Paul J. Planet, Charlene M. C. Rodrigues, Fatou Secka, Kirsty Sands, Erin Theiller, Allan M. Zuza, Sulagna Basu, Grace J. Chan, Kenneth C. Iregbu, Jean-Baptiste Mazarati, Semaria Solomon Alemayehu, Timothy R. Walsh, Rabaab Zahra, Angela Dramowski, Sombo Fwoloshi, Appiah-Korang Labi, Lola Madrid, Noah Obeng-Nkrumah, David Ojok, Boaz D. Wadugu, Andrew C. Whitelaw, Anudita Bhargava, Atul Jindal, Ramesh K. Agarwal, Alexander M. Aiken, James A. Berkley, Susan E. Coffin, Nicholas A. Feasey, Nelesh P. Govender, Davidson H. Hamer, Shabir A. Madhi, Mari Jeeva Sankar, Kelly L. Wyres, Kathryn E. Holt Background Klebsiella pneumoniae is the leading cause of sepsis among neonates in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Africa and Asia, contributing substantially to the overall burden of antimicrobial-resistant infections and mortality among neonates globally. Pathogen sequencing has been used to investigate case clusters and confirm nosocomial transmission in a small number of neonatal units. Here we utilise pathogen sequence data to estimate the fraction of K. pneumoniae neonatal sepsis attributable to nosocomial transmission in African and South Asian countries. Methods and findings We estimated the proportion of invasive K. pneumoniae disease involved in nosocomial transmission clusters in a given neonatal unit, using single-linkage clustering based on pairwise temporal and genetic distances estimated from bacterial whole-genome sequences aggregated from 10 contributing studies. Analysing 1,523 K. pneumoniae isolates from 27 units in 13 countries in Africa and South Asia between 2013 and 2023, we inferred 156 nosocomial transmission clusters, ranging from 2 to 188 neonates each (83 of the clusters comprised ≥3 cases). Overall, we estimated that 1,035 neonatal infections (68.0%) were part of nosocomial transmission clusters. Excluding the first infection in each cluster as a potential index case, we estimate at least 879 (57.7%) infections were acquired via nosocomial transmission. Sensitivity analyses showed that results were robust to the choice of genetic distance estimation methods and thresholds used to define clusters, and cluster estimates were stable over temporal distance thresholds ranging from 2 to 8 weeks. Isolates were mostly extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL) producers (90.9%) and included 172 multi-locus sequence types (STs). Fourteen STs, including several globally recognised multidrug-resistant lineages, were associated with transmission clusters at multiple units, and these were collectively responsible for two-thirds of all infections. Carriage of carbapenemase genes (adjusted odds ratio, aOR = 2.08 [95% confidence interval, CI: 1.04, 4.14]; p = 0.04) and ESBL genes (aOR = 2.48 [95% CI: 1.26, 4.90]; p = 0.006) were significantly positively associated with transmission in a logistic regression model with site as a covariate. Limitations of this study include the lack of sufficient clinical data to allow high-resolution investigation of transmission dynamics and lack of facility-level data to investigate contributors to the observed differences in transmission burden across sites. Conclusions Nosocomial transmission contributes to a substantial proportion of K. pneumoniae sepsis in neonatal care units in Africa and South Asia. Reducing transmission within these settings through improved infection prevention and control and other measures could substantially reduce the neonatal sepsis burden. A high burden of transmission clusters is associated with the same drug-resistant lineages that are recognised as high-risk clones associated with hospital outbreaks in high-income countries, indicating global connectivity of the antimicrobial-resistant pathogen population.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

When to Align, When to Predict: A Phase Diagram for Multimodal Learning

arXiv:2606.11190v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Cross-modal alignment (CA) and cross-modal prediction (CP) are the dominant paradigms for multimodal representation learning, yet there is no systematic understanding of when each succeeds, when each fails, and when cross-modal training helps at all – a gap that leaves practitioners, especially in scientific domains like biomedicine or astrophysics, with heterogeneous instruments and multiple levels of organization and measurement, unable to diagnose why standard methods underperform the best single modality. We develop a unified linear framework that addresses both questions. Under a spiked signal-plus-noise model with structured cross-modal nuisance correlation, we derive separation ratios for both objectives that expose complementary failure modes: alignment whitens each modality and fails when nuisance is strongly correlated across views; prediction encodes whatever is cross-predictable through a one-sided whitening, with recovery governed by source-modality quality. The resulting phase diagram partitions multimodal problems into four regimes: Both, CA only, CP only, and Neither. We present a data-driven procedure to locate real-world datasets in this diagram using a small labeled subsample, identifying the preferred objective and prediction direction before any cross-modal training. Experiments on synthetic data, stereo-vision benchmarks, image-caption pairs, and real astrophysical data validate the predictions in the nonlinear regime, including the Neither regime where cross-modal training is actively harmful. Our framework lets practitioners diagnose their multimodal problem and choose the right objective before committing to training. Code to reproduce the results is available at https://github.com/IlayMalinyak/mm_align_vs_pred.

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

Science Earth: Towards A Planet-Scale Operating System for AI-Native Scientific Discovery

arXiv:2606.01316v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scientific discovery demands intelligence, perseverance, and serendipity across vast search spaces. Today, top scientific capabilities remain siloed–one AI system for biological analysis, another for clinical reasoning, mathematical derivation, or materials simulation–and no pre-designed team can anticipate every skill a question will need. Science Earth is a planet-scale scientific runtime in which any capability–a simulation cluster, a wet-lab robot, a proof engine, a single-cell pipeline–can connect to any other, with collaboration structure emerging from the question itself. Its underlying EACN protocol lets capabilities discover one another, negotiate task ownership, and adjudicate across incompatible evidentiary standards without prior knowledge of who will meet whom. This shifts the organizing challenge from workflow design to open-ended connectivity. Two runs validate this under structurally distinct conditions. In a trans-Pacific higher-order Kuramoto synchronization study, agents identified and corrected a closure-ratio assumption in Ott-Antonsen analytic theory that fails outside the Lorentzian limit, within thirty minutes. In an eight-agent single-cell run on the 4.88M-cell Kang 2024 pan-cancer atlas, heterogeneous capabilities coupled over a 64.9-hour window with one structural external instruction, producing three new result layers and anchoring findings against an independent wet-lab study on an adjacent CCR8- TIGIT+ Treg subset. These cases are a first empirical reading, not a benchmark sweep. They show that when AI capabilities are truly connectable and coordination emerges from the problem, scientific reasoning becomes a distributed, self-correcting process–a step towards scaling AI-native discovery to the planet.

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

The Truth Stays in the Family: Enhancing Contextual Grounding via Inherited Truthful Heads in Model Lineages

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have produced many specialized multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) that share common foundational LLMs, forming distinct model lineages. It remains unclear whether a fundamental behavioral link exists between the foundational LLMs and downstream variants. We investigate this question by quantifying head-level context-truthfulness scores. Across diverse LLM and MLLM lineages, including Vicuna-, Qwen2.5-, LLaMA2-, and Mistral-based models, we find that Truth Scores are strongly preserved within model families, even after instruction tuning or multimodal adaptation. We further show that this inheritance is consistent with attention-head weight preservation, and that context-truthful heads attend to query-relevant evidence. Building on this finding, we propose TruthProbe, a soft-gating strategy that amplifies context-truthful heads while preserving other head contributions. TruthProbe improves contextual truthfulness on HaluEval and reduces multimodal hallucination on POPE and CHAIR, with base-LLM Truth Scores transferring effectively to their fine-tuned LLM and MLLM descendants. Code is available at https://github.com/miso-choi/TruthProbe.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Optimal Scheduling in a Question-Answering Forum of Knowledge Workers

arXiv:2606.19759v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As individuals turn to the Internet to find answers to questions they may have, several Question Answering (QA) forums have evolved, where users knowledgeable in certain topics can contribute their expertise to answering these requests for information. While these are currently volunteer based, we consider a future version employing knowledge workers who are experts in certain topics. In such a system, the request-answer processes forming the queuing system may utilize schedulers that assign requests in different topics to the experts in the forum, who may be able to answer them according to their expertise levels in different topics. With this model, we calculate the capacity of the system for handling the requests while keeping the system stable, and design schedulers that achieve capacity. We also investigate how collaboration between experts in answering requests can potentially increase capacity.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

PEFT-MedSAM: Efficient Fine-Tuning of Medical Foundation Models for Explainable Skin Lesion Segmentation

Automated segmentation of skin lesions using deep learning models for dermoscopic images can be very helpful in finding melanomas earlier than they would normally be detected. However, most deep learning methods available do not perform well. The aim of this paper is to present a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method called PEFT-MedSAM for adapting the Medical Segment Anything Model (MedSAM) to automatically segment dermoscopic skin lesions. The PEFT-MedSAM method uses only the lightweight mask decoder for training the model while keeping the pre-trained image encoder and prompt encoder frozen. The experiments performed on the ISIC 2018 benchmark dataset shows that PEFT-MedSAM obtains a dice coefficient of .9411 and an intersection over union value of .8918 when compared to both a fully trained U-Net baseline (.8715 dice coefficient) and zero-shot MedSAM inference (.8997 dice coefficient). The external validation of the model using PH2 dataset shows .9467 dice coefficient with +/- .0310 standard deviation. Supportive evidence for these claims include a p-value less than .0001 for Wilcoxon signed rank tests comparing the two datasets and bootstrap-estimated 95% confidence intervals of [.9364,.9447] that represent the estimated range of possible values for the average dice coefficient obtained by repeating the test. To increase clinical trustworthiness, we used Grad-CAM explainability along with a pointing game based evaluation methodology to evaluate the CNN baseline model on the validation set. The results showed that we had an accuracy rate of 98.27% on the validation set of 519 images and confirmed that the model classified regions containing skin lesions.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

RT-VLA: Real-Time Vision-Language-Action Models via Knowledge Distillation

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong potential for end-to-end autonomous driving by jointly modeling visual perception, language reasoning, explainability and action prediction. However, their large vision-language backbones and reasoning modules introduce substantial inference latency and thereby prevent their deployment in the unforgiving reality of the road networks. We propose RT-VLA, a lightweight, distilled VLA model that transfers the driving and reasoning capabilities of the state-of-the-art SimLingo model into a compact student through multi-level supervised distillation. RT-VLA preserves language-based reasoning and supports post-hoc explanation through offline language analysis of safety-critical driving moments without adding latency to real-time control. Compared to the SimLingo teacher, RT-VLA maintains competitive closed-loop driving and language reasoning performance while reducing inference time by 44.8X in vision-only mode and 7.9X in vision+language mode. These results suggest that supervised distillation is a practical approach for building real-time, explainable VLA-style autonomous driving models.

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

CellNet – Localizing Cells using Sparse and Noisy Point Annotations

Counting living cells is an important step in many biological research workflows. Our collaborators at the Wellcome Sanger Institute study vital genes in humans via large scale saturation genome editing screening, which requires repeatedly counting cells a great number of times. Computer Vision based automation is crucial for high throughput and resource efficiency. In this work, we develop a regression-based deep learning computer vision algorithm to detect and count cells in phase-contrast microscopy images. To reduce annotation effort, which in practice often becomes a bottleneck, we focus on counting cells only using sparse point annotations, which are fast and easy to acquire. By comparison to state-of-the-art 0-shot methods, we show that regression-based counting is a promising alternative in low data regimes. Through developing methods to automatically count living cells in microscopy images, we contribute to valuable research on the human genome. The code is available at https://github.com/beijn/cellnet.

22.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-04

Cell differentiation can underpin the reproducibility of morphogenesis

by Dominic K. Devlin, Austen R. D. Ganley, Nobuto Takeuchi Morphogenesis of complex body shapes is reproducible despite the noise inherent in the underlying morphogenetic processes. However, how these morphogenetic processes work together to achieve this reproducibility remains unclear. Here, we ask how this reproducibility is achieved by evolving complex morphologies in a multi-scale, computational model. Each morphology consists of a population of cells on a two-dimensional grid using the Cellular Potts Model framework. Each cell contains a genome that encodes a gene regulatory network, morphogens for cell-cell signalling, and proteins that determine cell behaviours. By repeatedly simulating our model with different initial conditions under selection for shape complexity, we obtained a “zoo” of evolved morphologies. We find that these evolved, complex morphologies are reproducible in a sizeable fraction of simulations, despite no direct selection for reproducibility. We show that high reproducibility is caused by spatially segregating moving cells that “shape” morphologies from stationary cells that “maintain” morphologies during morphogenesis. Strikingly, most highly reproducible morphologies also evolved cell differentiation, where proliferative, moving progenitor cells irreversibly differentiate into non-dividing, stationary differentiated cells at tissue boundaries. These results suggest that cell differentiation observed in natural development plays a fundamental role in morphogenesis in addition to the production of specialised cell types. This previously unrecognised role of cell differentiation has major implications for our understanding of how morphologies are generated and regenerated.

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

Understanding Latent Diffusability via Fisher Geometry

arXiv:2604.02751v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion models often degrade in latent spaces, yet the formal causes remain poorly understood. We quantify latent-space diffusability via the rate of change of the Minimum Mean Squared Error (MMSE) along the diffusion trajectory. Our framework decomposes this MMSE rate into contributions from Fisher Information (FI) and Fisher Information Rate (FIR). We demonstrate that while global isometry ensures FI alignment, FIR is governed by the interplay between encoder and data geometries. Our analysis decouples diffusion degradation into four penalties: dimensional compression, tangential distortion, high-frequency encoder curvature, and intrinsic data curvature. We derive theoretical conditions for FIR preservation to ensure stable diffusability. Experiments across diverse autoencoding architectures demonstrate the implications of our theoretical bounds. We establish FI and FIR as a comprehensive analytical framework for understanding latent diffusability.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

RoboSSM: Scalable In-context Imitation Learning via State-Space Models

arXiv:2509.19658v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In-context imitation learning (ICIL) enables robots to learn tasks from prompts consisting of just a handful of demonstrations. By eliminating the need for parameter updates at deployment time, this paradigm supports few-shot adaptation to novel tasks. However, recent ICIL methods rely on Transformers, which have computational limitations and tend to underperform when handling longer prompts than those seen during training. In this work, we introduce RoboSSM, a scalable recipe for in-context imitation learning based on state-space models (SSM). Specifically, RoboSSM replaces Transformers with Longhorn – a state-of-the-art SSM that provides linear-time inference and strong extrapolation capabilities, making it well-suited for long-context prompts. Through diverse experiments on the LIBERO benchmark, we demonstrate the effectiveness of applying SSMs to ICIL, achieving improved generalization to both unseen and long-horizon tasks than Transformer-based ICIL methods by handling longer contexts at test-time. These results show for the first time that SSMs are an efficient and scalable backbone for ICIL. Our code is available at https://github.com/youngjuY/RoboSSM.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Spiking Pyramid Wavelet Transformation for High-efficient and Low-energy Image Restoration

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have garnered significant interest in computer vision due to their potential for efficiency and biological inspiration. While spiking CNN-based methods have shown promise for image restoration (IR) tasks, their performance is constrained by the inherent receptive field limitations of CNN operations. In the paper, we explore the benefits of discrete wavelet transformation and propose a spiking pyramid wavelet-based model (SPWM) for high-efficient and low-energy target. Specifically, we develop a spiking dual pyramid wavelet (SDPW) block to model long-range dependency and exploit the properties of the degradation in the wavelet domain. Experimental results on several benchmarks demonstrate that SPWM significantly lowers computational costs and energy consumption while maintaining image quality. Our method showcases the potential of SNNs in the field of IR, offering new insights for future applications of resource-limited devices.