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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

MentisOculi: Revealing the Limits of Reasoning with Mental Imagery

Frontier models are transitioning from multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that merely ingest visual information to unified multimodal models (UMMs) capable of native interleaved generation. This shift has sparked interest in using intermediate visualizations as a reasoning aid, akin to human mental imagery. Central to this idea is the ability to form, maintain, and manipulate visual representations in a goal-oriented manner. To evaluate and probe this capability, we develop MentisOculi, a procedural, stratified suite of multi-step reasoning problems amenable to visual solution, tuned to challenge frontier models. Evaluating visual strategies ranging from latent tokens to explicit generated imagery, we find they generally fail to improve performance. Analysis of UMMs specifically exposes a critical limitation: While they possess the textual reasoning capacity to solve a task and can sometimes generate correct visuals, they suffer from compounding generation errors and fail to leverage even ground-truth visualizations. Our findings suggest that despite their inherent appeal, visual thoughts do not yet benefit model reasoning. MentisOculi establishes the necessary foundation to analyze and close this gap across diverse model families.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Depth-Width tradeoffs in Algorithmic Reasoning of Graph Tasks with Transformers

Transformers have revolutionized the field of machine learning. In particular, they can be used to solve complex algorithmic problems, including graph-based tasks. In such algorithmic tasks a key question is what is the minimal size of a transformer that can implement the task. Recent work has begun to explore this problem for graph-based tasks, showing that for sub-linear embedding dimension (i.e., model width) logarithmic depth suffices. However, an open question, which we address here, is what happens if width is allowed to grow linearly, while depth is kept fixed. Here we analyze this setting, and provide the surprising result that with linear width, constant depth suffices for solving a host of graph-based problems. This suggests that a moderate increase in width can allow much shallower models, which are advantageous in terms of inference and train time. For other problems, we show that quadratic width is required. Our results demonstrate the complex and intriguing landscape of transformer implementations of graph-based algorithms. We empirically investigate these trade-offs between the relative powers of depth and width and find tasks where wider models have the same accuracy as deep models, while having much faster train and inference time due to parallelizable hardware.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Near-Optimal Stochastic Linear Bandits with Delay

arXiv:2606.16656v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study stochastic linear bandits with delayed feedback under several delay models and establish near-optimal regret guarantees. Our results identify when delayed linear bandits exhibit the same qualitative behavior as multi-armed bandits (MAB), and when the linear structure creates fundamentally new challenges. Specifically, (1) for loss-independent delays, where the delay does not depend on the realized loss (but potentially depends on the arm), we show that delays incur only an additive regret penalty. Under stochastic delays, this penalty scales with the expected delay, while under adversarial delays, it scales with the maximum number of outstanding observations. Notably, both delay penalties are dimension-free, improving upon the state-of-the-art results; (2) for loss-dependent delays, we show that linear bandits are substantially harder than MAB: unlike in MAB, we prove matching (up to log factors) upper and lower bounds in linear bandits, whose delay penalty depends on the square root of the dimension. (3) for the delay-as-payoff model, a special case of loss-dependent delay, we show that the optimal MAB guarantee, which depends only on the delay of the optimal arm, is also unattainable in linear bandits. Together, these results provide a sharp characterization of how delayed feedback interacts with linear generalization.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Power Partitions and Hayman Functions

arXiv:2602.18575v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We prove, within the probabilistic framework of Khinchin families, that the generating function $P_k$ of partitions into $k$-th powers is strongly Gaussian in the sense of Báez-Duarte, and even further that it is a Hayman function. Thus the Hardy–Ramanujan asymptotic formula for the number $p_k(n)$ of partitions of $n$ into $k$-th powers which reads \[ p_k(n) \sim \frac{\alpha_k}{n^{(3k+1)/(2k+2)}} \exp\!\Big(\beta_k\, n^{1/(k+1)}\Big), \qquad n\to\infty, \] where $\alpha_k$ and~$\beta_k$ are explicit constants depending only on $k$, follows directly from Hayman's asymptotic formula for strongly Gaussian power series. The proof of strong Gaussianity of $P_k$ combines a Gaussianity criterion for Khinchin families with certain bounds of Tenenbaum, Wu and Li on the generating function; the asymptotic formula is recovered by computing asymptotic approximations of the mean and variance of the associated family. Analogous results are presented for the generating function $Q_k$ of partitions into distinct $k$-th powers.

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

Redirecting the Flow: Image Customization through Attention Distribution Shift

Subject-driven image customization aims to generate images that not only follow textual instructions but also preserve the identity of a given reference subject. Existing approaches, including test-time fine-tuning, encoder-based methods, and token competition in shared attention spaces, suffer from limited efficiency, misalignment between extracted reference features and the generative process, and interference from irrelevant information. To address these limitations, we formulate the customization task as a distribution shift induced by incorporating reference images into text-to-image generation, and derive a Conditional Attention Distribution Shift formulation grounded in maximum entropy theory. Building on this formulation, we propose CustomShift, a dual-branch architecture based on Stable Diffusion 3. The Reference-Alignment Branch leverages self-attention between reference images and subject names to achieve layer-wise alignment with latent representations, while the Cross-Guidance Branch integrates textual and reference cues to guide generation. Experiments on the DreamBooth and Custom101 benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving a better balance between semantic fidelity and subject consistency.

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

Scaling Adaptive Depth with Norm-Agnostic Residual Networks

arXiv:2606.16112v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Residual architectures are ubiquitous in deep learning, but they suffer from a subtle structural limitation: the norm of the residual stream can grow rapidly with depth. As a result, updates from later layers become small relative to the accumulated residual state. This reduces their impact on the representation and limits the benefits of scaling models in depth. To address this, we introduce NAG, a norm-agnostic residual architecture that separates magnitude from directional information in the residual stream, preserving meaningful layer contributions throughout depth and preventing later updates from being systematically suppressed by residual-norm growth. Importantly, NAG introduces only a negligible number of additional parameters and relies on simple operations that are easily kernel-fusible, preserving training efficiency in practice. We show that this architecture outperforms baseline Transformers, with gains that increase substantially as depth grows, enabling effective training of much deeper models. The norm-agnostic formulation also leads to an interpretable Mixture-of-Depths (MoD) mechanism that adaptively skips both attention and MLP layers. Beyond serving as a post-training accuracy-compute tradeoff, this mechanism can be used as a pretraining-time scaling strategy: under iso-FLOP training, compute saved by reducing per-token forward-pass cost can be reinvested into training on more tokens while keeping the total parameter count and KV-cache budget fixed. In our experiments, moderate Mixture-of-Depths rates of approximately 20%-25% match full-depth baseline performance under equal training compute while substantially reducing the number of executed layer parameters and forward-pass FLOPs. These results identify sparsity in depth as a new scaling axis for fixed-compute training, enabling very deep yet FLOP-efficient models.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

From Isolation to Entanglement: When Do Interpretability Methods Identify and Disentangle Known Concepts?

A goal of interpretability is to recover disentangled representations of latent concepts (features) from the activations of neural networks. The quality of features is typically evaluated in isolation, and under implicit independence assumptions that may not hold in practice. Thus, it is unclear to what extent common featurization methods such as sparse autoencoders (SAEs) and probes disentangle one concept from another. We propose a multi-concept evaluation setting using concepts including sentiment, domain, voice, and tense. We evaluate how well featurizers produce disentangled representations of each concept, observing that features are typically sensitive to only one concept, but also that concepts are distributed across many features. Then, we steer these features, measuring whether each concept is independently manipulable, and whether features interact. Even in idealized settings, steering a feature often affects many concepts, despite a near absence of interaction effects. These results suggest that correlational metrics are insufficient to establish steering selectivity, and that demonstrating that two features operate in separate spaces is insufficient to claim that they will be selective for one concept. These results underscore the importance of multi-concept evaluations in interpretability research.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Decomposing Prediction Mechanisms for In-Context Recall

arXiv:2507.01414v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a new family of toy problems that combine features of linear-regression-style continuous in-context learning (ICL) with discrete associative recall. We pretrain transformer models on sample traces from this toy, specifically symbolically-labeled interleaved state observations from randomly drawn linear deterministic dynamical systems. We study if the transformer models can recall the state of a sequence previously seen in its context when prompted to do so with the corresponding in-context label. Taking a closer look at this task, it becomes clear that the model must perform two functions: (1) identify which system's state should be recalled and apply that system to its last seen state, and (2) continuing to apply the correct system to predict the subsequent states. Training dynamics reveal that the first capability emerges well into a model's training. Surprisingly, the second capability, of continuing the prediction of a resumed sequence, develops much earlier. Via out-of-distribution experiments, and a mechanistic analysis on model weights via edge pruning, we find that next-token prediction for this toy problem involves at least two separate mechanisms. One mechanism uses the discrete symbolic labels to do the associative recall required to predict the start of a resumption of a previously seen sequence. The second mechanism, which is largely agnostic to the discrete symbolic labels, performs a "Bayesian-style" prediction based on the previous token and the context. These two mechanisms have different learning dynamics. To confirm that this multi-mechanism (manifesting as separate phase transitions) phenomenon is not just an artifact of our toy setting, we used OLMo training checkpoints on an ICL translation task to see a similar phenomenon: a decisive gap in the emergence of first-task-token performance vs second-task-token performance.

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

Beyond Scalar Distances: Semantic Attribute Gradients from Frozen MLLMs for Visual Embeddings

Vision encoders for retrieval are typically trained with class-label supervision: each training pair reduces to a scalar that uniformly pushes the embedding apart or pulls it together, as if every visual attribute either differed or matched. A multimodal large language model (MLLM), shown the same pair, can articulate those attributes and use them to predict whether the images share a class. We propose SAGA, a framework that turns this language-grounded, attribute-aware perception into a training signal for the encoder itself. Specifically, we use Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to reward the MLLM for correct predictions on the vision encoder's tokens. Since correct predictions require those tokens to expose the specific attributes that differ or match between the pair, the gradient pushes the encoder to encode them, replacing the uniform pair-level scalar with attribute-resolved supervision. An auxiliary attention-distillation loss anchors the encoder's embedding to tokens the MLLM attended to, and a standard metric-learning loss shapes the embedding geometry for nearest-neighbour retrieval. The MLLM is frozen throughout and discarded at inference, matching the deployment cost of a metric-learning baseline. SAGA improves Recall@1 by 3 to 6 points over state-of-the-art baselines on CUB-200-2011, Cars-196, FGVC-Aircraft, and iNaturalist Aves on zero-shot image retrieval.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Sparse Configuration Interaction for the Electronic Schrödinger Equation Revisited: Complete Basis Set Limit Complexity and Quantum-Encoding Impact

arXiv:2606.20385v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this article we revisit regularity results for eigenfunctions in the discrete spectrum of the electronic Schrödinger equation and study their consequences for approximation complexity. In particular, for the convergence to the complete basis set limit, it can be shown that the curse of dimensionality in the leading algebraic exponent can be mitigated. That is, for general sparse grid constructions, the main term of the convergence rate with respect to the number of degrees of freedom is independent of the number of electrons. These insights indicate potential benefits for classical numerical solvers of the electronic Schrödinger equation and also for quantum-computing approaches through new qubit-efficient wavefunction encodings.

11.
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.

12.
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.

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

FUSER: Feed-Forward MUltiview 3D Registration Transformer and SE(3)$^N$ Diffusion Refinement

Registration of multiview point clouds conventionally relies on extensive pairwise matching to build a pose graph for global synchronization, which is computationally expensive and inherently ill-posed without holistic geometric constraints. This paper proposes FUSER, the first feed-forward multiview registration transformer that jointly processes all scans in a unified, compact latent space to directly predict global poses without any pairwise estimation. To maintain tractability, FUSER encodes each scan into low-resolution superpoint features via a sparse 3D CNN that preserves absolute translation cues, and performs efficient intra- and inter-scan reasoning through a Geometric Alternating Attention module. Particularly, we transfer 2D attention priors from off-the-shelf foundation models to enhance 3D feature interaction and geometric consistency. Building upon FUSER, we further introduce FUSER-DF, an SE(3)$^N$ diffusion refinement framework to correct FUSER's estimates via denoising in the joint SE(3)$^N$ space. FUSER acts as a surrogate multiview registration model to construct the denoiser, and a prior-conditioned SE(3)$^N$ variational lower bound is derived for denoising supervision. Extensive experiments on 3DMatch, ScanNet and ArkitScenes demonstrate that our approach achieves the superior registration accuracy and outstanding computational efficiency.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Classical representation of the dynamics of quantum spin chains

作者:

arXiv:2502.10502v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Since the advent of quantum mechanics, classical probability interpretations have faced significant challenges. A notable issue arises with the emergence of negative probabilities when attempting to define the joint probability of non-commutative observables. In this work, we propose a resolution to this dilemma for quantum spin chains, by introducing an exact representation of their dynamics in terms of classical continuous-time Markov chains (CTMCs). These CTMCs effectively model the creation, annihilation, and propagation of pairs of classical particles and antiparticles. The quantum dynamics then emerges by averaging over various realizations of this classical process.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

ACC: Compiling Agent Trajectories for Long-Context Training

Recent development of agents has renewed demand for long-context reasoning capacity of LLMs. However, training LLMs for this capacity requires costly long-document curation or heuristic context synthesis. We observe that agents produce massive trajectories when solving problems, invoking tools and receiving environment observations across many turns. The evidence needed to answer the original question is thus scattered throughout these turns, requiring integration of distant context segments. Nevertheless, standard agent SFT masks tool responses and only trains turn-level tool selection, creating a supervision blind spot where these scattered signals go unused. We propose Agent Context Compilation (ACC), which converts trajectories from search, software engineering, and database querying agents into long-context QA pairs that combine the original question with tool responses and environment observations gathered across multiple turns, training the model to answer directly without tool use. This makes the dependencies between the question and the evidence explicit, enabling direct supervision of long-context reasoning over distant segments without additional annotation. ACC is a simple but effective approach that can be combined with any existing long-context extension or training method, providing scalable supervised fine-tuning data. We validate ACC on long-range dependency modeling tasks through MRCR and GraphWalks, challenging benchmarks requiring cross-turn coreference resolution and graph traversal over extended contexts. Training Qwen3-30B-A3B with ACC achieves 68.3 on MRCR (+18.1) and 77.5 on GraphWalks (+7.6), results comparable to Qwen3-235B-A22B, while preserving general capabilities on GPQA, MMLU-Pro, AIME, and IFEval. Further mechanism analysis reveals that the ACC-trained model exhibits task-adaptive attention restructuring and expert specialization.

16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Asymptotic analysis of the normal inverse Gaussian cumulative distribution

arXiv:2509.05664v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Using a recently derived integral in terms of elementary functions, we derive new asymptotic expansions of the normal inverse Gaussian cumulative distribution function. One of the asymptotic representations is in terms of the normal Gaussian distribution or complementary error function.

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

HOLO-MPPI: Multi-Scenario Motion Planning via Hierarchical Policy Optimization

arXiv:2606.16480v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robots deployed in the real world must plan motions across diverse scenarios without per-scenario retuning. End-to-end reinforcement learning (RL) can generalize across scenarios but often becomes brittle under distribution shift, reward misspecification, and stochastic interactions. Model predictive path integral (MPPI) control enables strong real-time refinement without gradients, but its performance depends on a well-shaped sampling prior, while manually designing the priors does not scale to multi-scenario deployment. We present HOLO-MPPI (High-level Offline, Low-level Online MPPI), a multi-scenario motion planning framework that combines high-level policy learning with low-level stochastic optimal control. Offline, we learn a high-level policy that proposes scenario-robust plans in an abstract action space, with a learned world model for online rollout. Online, the policy serves as a data-driven prior generator that parameterizes MPPI's sampling distribution conditioned on the current observation and goal. MPPI then optimizes low-level control sequences around this prior in real time to adapt to local disturbances. We instantiate HOLO-MPPI in autonomous driving by designing an effective high-level action space and tailored model architectures. Our evaluation across diverse driving scenarios shows that HOLO-MPPI improves upon MPPI and end-to-end RL baselines while maintaining real-time control.

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

GAS-Leak-LLM: Genetic Algorithm-Based Suffix Optimization for Black-Box LLM Jailbreaking

arXiv:2606.15788v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) constitute pivotal components within the AI-dominated information technology ecosystem. To mitigate risks associated with harmful or policy-violating outputs, commercial systems employ advanced alignment strategies and multi-layered content moderation mechanisms. Despite these safeguards, recent research has demonstrated that LLMs remain vulnerable to adversarial manipulation, particularly through jailbreaking and prompt injection techniques. In this work, we propose GAS-Leak-LLM a novel jailbreaking attack based on a genetic algorithm that systematically evolves adversarial suffix to bypass safety constraints. Operating in a strict black-box setting, our method requires no access to model parameters or internals, thereby reflecting realistic threat scenarios in deployed systems. Through the iterative application of selection, mutation, and crossover heuristics, the framework systematically explores the discrete prompt space to identify high-fitness adversarial suffixes. Empirical findings reveal critical shortcomings in existing safety enforcement mechanisms and confirm the effectiveness and practical viability of the proposed attack.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

LEPO: Latent Reasoning Policy Optimization for Large Language Models

arXiv:2604.17892v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recently, latent reasoning has been introduced into large language models (LLMs) to leverage rich information within a continuous space. However, without stochastic sampling, these methods inevitably collapse to deterministic inference, failing to discover diverse reasoning paths. To bridge the gap, we inject controllable stochasticity into latent reasoning via Gumbel-Softmax, restoring LLMs' exploratory capacity and enhancing their compatibility with Reinforcement Learning (RL). Building on this, we propose \underline{L}atent R\underline{e}asoning \underline{P}olicy \underline{O}ptimization~(LEPO), a novel framework that applies RL directly to continuous latent representations. Specifically, in rollout stage, LEPO maintains stochasticity to enable diverse trajectory sampling, while in optimization stage, LEPO constructs a unified gradient estimation for both latent representations and discrete tokens. Extensive experiments show that LEPO significantly outperforms existing RL methods for discrete and latent reasoning.

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

Characterizing Cultural Localization in AI-Generated Stories

The global use of artificial intelligence has increased interest in assessing the ability to generate culturally localized content, including stories. Cultural localization in stories often occurs through either templated localization – the use of cultural markers (e.g., names, locations) in a generic narrative – or holistic localization – the variation of plots, values, and themes, in addition to cultural markers. We propose a method to measure the degree to which content was generated through templated localization. Specifically, we identify the lexical tokens that distinguish stories across nationalities and measure the similarity of the narratives that remain after removing them. In stories generated by five models on 125 topics for 193 nationalities, our method is able to detect that only a small subset (9-17%) of the vocabulary accounts for the variation across nationalities and that the narratives that remain after removing them contain repeated multi-word sequences, suggesting the presence of a shared culturally-agnostic narrative template. Finally, we characterize the cultural markers for their stereotypicality and offensiveness, finding that markers from 19 countries, mostly located in the Global South, are on average offensive.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Machine Learning-based Two-Stage Graph Sparsification for the Travelling Salesman Problem

arXiv:2604.20236v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: High-performance TSP solvers such as Lin-Kernighan-Helsgaun (LKH) search within a candidate graph – a small subset of edges pre-selected for the solver – rather than over the complete graph. The two leading sparsification heuristics, $\alpha$-Nearest and POPMUSIC, each fall short of the density-coverage balance: $\alpha$-Nearest is dense with stable recall, while POPMUSIC is sparser but its recall degrades with scale. Their union closes the recall gap while remaining far below the complete graph in density, leaving room for further reduction. Existing learning-based sparsifiers score edges on the complete graph, an approach that is expensive and largely limited to Euclidean instances. We propose a two-stage method that inverts this logic. Stage~1 takes the union of $\alpha$-Nearest and POPMUSIC, achieving near-perfect recall at ${\sim}6N$ edges. Crucially, the union annotates each edge with its source provenance – whether it was endorsed by $\alpha$-Nearest, POPMUSIC, or both. Stage~2 trains a lightweight classifier on these annotated edges and prunes the lowest-scoring ones. Because dual-source edges are almost always optimal, the learning problem reduces to filtering the single-source subset – a substantially easier task than classifying all $O(N^2)$ edges from scratch. Across four distance types, five spatial distributions, and problem sizes from 50 to 500, the pipeline reduces candidate-graph density by $37$-$47\%$ while retaining ${\geq}99.69\%$ of optimal-tour edges, and matches or exceeds the coverage of recent Euclidean-only neural sparsifiers at lower density at TSP500.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Gendered pathways to adolescent mental health: An empirical assessment of a new conceptual framework

Introduction Gender norms and roles are important determinants of physical and mental health in the key period of adolescence. Yet, the gendered pathways to mental health in adolescents are not fully understood. Using a conceptual framework for global adolescent mental health that we developed based on a Delphi process, we empirically investigated the associations between six gender-related constructs and adolescent mental health. Methods We used cross-sectional Gender and Adolescence: Global Evidence (GAGE) data from Ethiopia (2020) to explore the associations between sex, gender norms, psychological competencies, gender attitudes, gender roles, with the latter two also serving as mediators, and psychological distress (GHQ-12), using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). Results The SEM model contained measurements from 1,584 adolescents, including 843 girls and 741 boys, with a median age of 13 years. Out of 14 pathways tested, we found statistically significant associations between psychological competencies and psychological distress; sex and gender attitudes; and between gender norms and psychological competencies, gender attitudes, and gender roles. Hence, the gender-related constructs were mostly associated with each other, rather than with psychological distress. Conclusion The gender-related constructs are strongly interrelated, thereby attenuating their individual effects on psychological distress. The interplay of gender-related constructs should be considered when developing interventions to promote mental health in adolescents.

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

PACUTE: Phonology-, Affix-, and Character-level Understanding of Tokens for Filipino

Large language models (LLMs) process text as sequences of subword tokens, which can obscure the character-level and morphological structure that underlies word formation. This limitation is most acute for languages with non-concatenative morphology, where standard tokenizers systematically misalign token boundaries with morpheme boundaries. We introduce PACUTE, a diagnostic benchmark of 4,600 tasks designed to evaluate morphological understanding in Filipino, a language characterized by productive infixation, reduplication, and diacritic-driven lexical distinctions that are typically absent from written text. PACUTE includes a hierarchical diagnostic framework of six compositional levels that localizes where morphological understanding breaks down. Evaluating open-weight LLMs and frontier commercial models, we find that open-weight models perform near chance on morpheme decomposition regardless of scale. Frontier models perform much better, often recovering individual affixes under contains-match scoring, but remain far below their character-level ceilings on compositional tasks of morpheme transformations and syllabification. These results identify productive morphological composition, rather than character access alone, as the persistent bottleneck for Filipino word-structure understanding.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Solving Nonequilibrium Dynamics via Influence Matrix Bootstrap: Floquet-PXP Model

arXiv:2606.19430v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Studies of integrable systems have profoundly deepened the fundamental understanding of quantum many-body physics. While equilibrium properties such as ground states and thermodynamics can often be characterized efficiently, accurately characterizing nonequilibrium integrable dynamics remains a significant challenge. Here, we address this problem in the "Rule 201" quantum cellular automaton, an integrable Trotterization of the PXP Hamiltonian. Using the tensor-network approach of the influence matrix, we develop local conditions called generalized zipper conditions that allow exact solutions of local dynamics. We also introduce a numerical bootstrap method for solving influence matrices with finite but relatively large bond dimensions. This uncovers a rich landscape of nonequilibrium behavior exhibiting initial-state dependence. As an example, we investigate the fate of persistent oscillating dynamics under local non-integrable perturbations, and present analytical results for non-thermal relaxation constrained by conservation laws. We also obtain numerically exact results for entanglement growth across a broad class of initial states. Furthermore, from an information-theoretic perspective, we identify a refined structure of multitime correlations termed the hidden Markov order: the memory encoded in the dynamics separates into finite-length and long-range distributed components, which becomes transparent in an exact split-index matrix-product-state representation of the influence matrix. Our approach enables unified investigations of nonthermalizing and thermalizing regimes of nonequilibrium dynamics within a single analytically tractable model, and can be tested experimentally in state-of-the-art quantum simulators such as Rydberg atom arrays.

25.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-18

scMagnifier: Resolving fine-grained cell subtypes via GRN-informed perturbations and consensus clustering

作者:

by Zhenhui He, Dong Kangning Resolving fine-grained cell subtypes in single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data remains challenging, as their subtle transcriptional differences are often obscured by technical noise and data sparsity. Here, we present scMagnifier, a consensus clustering framework that leverages gene regulatory network (GRN)-informed in silico perturbations to amplify subtle transcriptional differences and uncover latent cell subpopulations. scMagnifier perturbs candidate transcription factors (TFs), propagates perturbation effects through cluster-specific GRNs to simulate post-perturbation expression profiles, and integrates clustering results across multiple perturbations into stable subtype assignments. Additionally, scMagnifier introduces regulatory perturbation consensus UMAP (rpcUMAP), a perturbation-aware visualization that provides clearer separation between cell subtypes and guides the selection of the optimal number of clusters. In both single-batch and multi-batch benchmarks, scMagnifier consistently improves the resolution and accuracy of fine-grained cell type identification. Notably, when integrated with spatial clustering methods such as STAGATE, scMagnifier is compatible with spatial transcriptomics workflows and effectively reveals tumor cell subtypes and their spatial organization in ovarian cancer.