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

MR-GVNO: A Geometry-Aware Variational Physics-Informed Neural Operator for Mindlin-Reissner Plates on Irregular Domains

arXiv:2606.16624v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Plate and shell structures are widely used in engineering, making rapid response prediction under varying geometries, materials, and loads highly desirable. However, conventional finite element methods require repeated modeling and solution, resulting in high computational costs. This study proposes a geometry-aware variational neural operator for Mindlin-Reissner plate problems, termed MR-GVNO. The method uses boundary point clouds to represent irregular geometries and employs separate encoders for spatially varying material fields, pressure loads, and scalar physical parameters. A cross-attention mechanism integrates these inputs with query point information to predict transverse deflections and rotations at arbitrary locations. MR-GVNO is trained without labeled solution data using a variational physics-informed loss derived from the discretized total potential energy. It directly processes irregular point clouds and allows different physical fields to be discretized independently, avoiding interpolation onto a common grid. Numerical experiments on single-hole, double-hole, and L-shaped plates demonstrate accurate response prediction under homogeneous and heterogeneous materials and uniform and random loads. The model also achieves millisecond-level full-field inference and favorable cross-geometry generalization.

02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

On a stochastic phase-field model of cell motility with singular diffusion

arXiv:2601.05881v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study existence of solutions in the variational sense for a class of stochastic phase-field models describing moving boundary problems. The models consist of stochastic reaction-diffusion equations with singular diffusion forced by a phase-field. We investigate both the case of an independently evolving phase-field and of coupled phase-field evolution driven by a viscous Hamilton-Jacobi equation. Such systems are used in the modelling of single-cell chemotaxis, where the contour of the cell shape corresponds to a level set of the phase-field. The technical challenge lies in the singularities at zero level sets of the phase-field. For large classes of initial data, we establish global existence of probabilistically weak solutions in $L^2$-spaces with weights which compensate for the singularities.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Interpretable Factor Decomposition for Decision Intelligence in Large-Scale Financial Markets: Evidence from China's A-Share Market

arXiv:2606.12843v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present an interpretable machine learning pipeline to decompose Cross-Sectional Equity Return Predictability into auditable factor contribution. We apply an XGBoost model with TreeSHAP attribution and conduct stress testing on 3632 Chinese A-share stocks from 2009 until 2019. Using 60-month, rolling windows over 55 months of out-of-sample data, XGBoost obtains a mean AUC of 0.547 and +2.38%/month (Newey-West t = 5.94; Annualized Sharpe 2.23) long-short spread for the top vs bottom quintiles. This alpha is persistent after adjusting for the Carhart four-factor model (+2.31%/month; t = 7.48). SHAP Decomposition indicates that behavioral signals (turnover and momentum) account for 58.2% of predictive attribution compared to 10.7% for valuation ratios, on average, across 55 industry groups. Ablation analysis serves to cross-validate this ranking and provides evidence that SHAP and ablation diverge in a manner that highlights feature substitutability structure that is largely invisible to either method used in isolation.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Leveraging Energy Features for Surface Classification with Deep Learning: A Comparative Analysis Across Three Independent Datasets

arXiv:2606.18698v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The energy-based method remains a comparatively underexamined approach for surface classification in mobile robotics, despite promising results in constrained environments. This study evaluated the viability of using energy-derived features as either a standalone classification modality or as supplementary input to inertial data. A comprehensive evaluation was conducted across three publicly available datasets, comparing the performance of modern deep learning architectures including recurrent neural networks, convolutional neural networks, encoder-only transformers, and Mamba state-space models, under automated hyperparameter tuning and input sequence length optimization. The models achieved higher accuracy than previously reported values on all evaluated datasets, with the convolutional neural network yielding the highest overall performance. When relying exclusively on energy-based features, the models attained classification accuracies in the range of 85-90%, approximately 5-10% lower than those achieved when combined with inertial features (96-99%). Augmenting inertial data with energy features resulted in a consistent mean accuracy improvement of 1-2%. These findings indicate that classifiers relying solely on energy features offer sufficient accuracy for standalone deployment, while also providing a consistent gain when used in combination with other sensing modalities.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

TuneAhead: Predicting Fine-tuning Performance Before Full Training Begins

arXiv:2606.17660v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) is compute-intensive and error-prone: model performance depends sensitively on data quality and hyperparameter choices, and naïve runs can even degrade model performance. This raises a practical question:can we predict fine-tuning performance before committing to a full training run? We present TUNEAHEAD, a lightweight framework for pre-hoc prediction of fine-tuning performance. TUNEAHEAD encodes each candidate run as a meta-feature vector that combines static dataset descriptors with dynamic probe features from a short standardized probe. A predictor maps these features to performance estimates, while SHAP-based attributions provide interpretable diagnostics that reveal which specific features drive the prediction. Across 1,300+ fine-tuning runs on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, TUNEAHEAD consistently outperforms strong baselines such as Early-Stop Extrapolation and ProxyLM. On a held-out test set of 370 runs, TUNEAHEAD achieves an RMSE of 1.47 percentage points and places 95.1% of predictions within +3/-3 percentage points of the true score. These accurate continuous predictions support practical go/no-go screening policies that can reduce unnecessary full fine-tuning while retaining most promising runs.

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

IndicContextEval: A Benchmark for Evaluating Context Utilisation in Audio Large Language Models Across 8 Indic Languages

AudioLLMs enable speech recognition conditioned on textual prompts such as domain descriptions or entity lists. However, it remains unclear whether these models genuinely utilise such context or rely on parametric knowledge learned during pretraining. Existing benchmarks cannot answer this question because they evaluate transcription under fixed prompting conditions and rarely include explicit contextual inputs. We introduce IndicContextEval, a 56-hour multilingual benchmark of natural speech from 555 speakers across 8 Indian languages and 23 professional domains. We design a 7-level prompting framework that progressively introduces contextual signals, including metadata, natural-language descriptions, entity lists in English and native script, and adversarial prompts with incorrect entities. Evaluating five models reveals substantial differences in context utilisation behaviour, highlighting the need for explicit evaluation of contextual grounding in AudioLLMs.

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

From Imitation to Alignment: Human-Preference Flow Policies for Long-Horizon Sidewalk Navigation

arXiv:2606.12603v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous long-horizon sidewalk navigation is essential for micro-mobility applications such as robotic food delivery and assistive electronic wheelchairs. Unlike autonomous driving on the road, long-horizon sidewalk navigation requires precise maneuvering through unpredictable sidewalk terrains and pedestrians, with a lightweight perception stack as minimal as a single monocular RGB camera. While imitation learning (IL) from demonstrations offers a practical solution, the resulting autopilot policy often suffers from compounding errors, a lack of social compliance on sidewalks, and deficiencies in counterfactual reasoning to handle complex situations. To address these challenges, we introduce FlowPilot, a mapless navigation policy that achieves robust and efficient long-horizon navigation performance using only a monocular RGB camera. We first propose to use anchored flow matching as an action representation for policy pre-training on large-scale robot fleet data and to capture the diverse, complex, multimodal distribution of sidewalk navigation behaviors. To bridge the gap between imitation and alignment, we further design a human-in-the-loop preference learning scheme to tune the policy on a small amount of human intervention data. It strengthens the model's counterfactual reasoning and social compliance on sidewalks. We evaluate FlowPilot through extensive simulation and real-world experiments in diverse sidewalk environments. FlowPilot achieves 42% success rate and 66% route completion in simulation, while FlowPilot-HP further improves real-world robustness and social compliance, reducing IR by 40.0% and NIR by 52.1% relative to the base model.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Benchmarking Quantum Computers via Protocols, Comparing IBM's Heron vs IBM's Eagle

arXiv:2603.04377v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As quantum computing hardware rapidly advances, objectively evaluating the capabilities and error rates of new processors remains a critical challenge for the field. A clear and realistic understanding of current quantum performance is essential for guiding research priorities and driving meaningful progress. In this work, we apply and extend a protocol-based benchmarking methodology (Meirom, Mor, Weinstein Arxiv 2505.12441) that utilizes well-defined \underline{quantumness} thresholds. By evaluating performance at protocol level rather than the gate level, this approach provides a transparent and intuitive assessment of whether specific quantum processors, or isolated sub-chips within them, can demonstrate a practical quantum advantage. To illustrate the utility of this method, we compare two generations of IBM quantum computers: the older Eagle architecture and the newer Heron architecture. Our findings reveal the genuine operational strengths and limitations of these devices, demonstrating substantial performance improvements in the newer Heron generation. This work was made possible by IBM Quantum policies that enable independent and objective assessment of its quantum computers and sub-chips. We strongly encourage other companies to emulate the independent qubit availability and the fair pricing that allow researchers to perform such assessments.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Effects of Resveratrol as an Adjunct to a Low-Calorie Diet in Postmenopausal Women with Obesity and Knee Osteoarthritis

Background. Obesity is a modifiable risk factor for osteoarthritis and may contribute to pain, functional impairment, inflammation, and cartilage degradation. Resveratrol has potential anti-inflammatory and chondroprotective effects, but its efficacy as an adjunct to dietary intervention remains unclear. Objective. This study evaluated whether resveratrol supplementation provides additional benefits when combined with a low-calorie diet in postmenopausal women with obesity and knee osteoarthritis. Methods. A total of 97 postmenopausal women with obesity and knee osteoarthritis were included in this randomized controlled clinical study. Participants received either a 10-day low-calorie diet alone or the same diet combined with 150 mg/day trans-resveratrol. Anthropometric parameters, body composition, biochemical markers, pain intensity, functional status, and urinary CTX-II were assessed at baseline and follow-up. Results. Both interventions were associated with reductions in body weight, BMI, waist and hip circumferences, fat mass, glucose, HOMA-IR, lipid parameters, hsCRP, VAS, WOMAC, LAI, and urinary CTX-II. Compared with diet alone, resveratrol supplementation did not provide additional benefits for anthropometric parameters, glucose metabolism, lipid profile, or WOMAC score. However, the resveratrol group showed a greater reduction in hsCRP and urinary CTX-II. The obesity class did not modify the treatment effect. Conclusion. A short-term low-calorie diet improved metabolic, inflammatory, and osteoarthritis-related parameters in postmenopausal women with obesity and knee osteoarthritis. The addition of resveratrol did not enhance weight loss or improve most metabolic outcomes but was associated with greater reductions in hsCRP and urinary CTX-II. These findings suggest a potential anti-inflammatory and cartilage-related effect of resveratrol, which requires confirmation in longer randomized trials.

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

Towards Pareto-Optimal Tool-Integrated Agents with Pareto Ranking Policy Optimization

Recent advances in tool-integrated language agents have significantly improved their ability to solve complex reasoning tasks. However, existing alignment methods predominantly focus on maximizing task accuracy, while overlooking auxiliary objectives such as tool-use efficiency, which are essential for practical deployment. To address this gap, we introduce ParetoPO, a two-stage multi-objective optimization framework for aligning tool-using large language models (LLMs) under competing objectives. In the first stage, ParetoPO leverages hypervolume-guided dynamic scalarization to adapt reward weights based on global Pareto frontier progress. In the second stage, it replaces scalarized learning signals with Pareto-ranking-based advantage computation, promoting nondominated trajectories through dominance-aware credit assignment. This design enables fine-grained, action-level optimization across multiple conflicting objectives. Experimental results on mathematic reasoning and multi-hop QA tasks show that ParetoPO consistently discovers policies with superior accuracy-efficiency trade-offs compared to static and heuristic baselines.

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

PAWS: Preference Learning with Advantage-Weighted Segments

arXiv:2606.11982v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) learns policies from human trajectory-level comparisons, avoiding explicit reward design and expert demonstrations. Existing methods typically train utility functions on trajectory or segment-level preferences while relying on per-step utility estimates during policy optimization. This training and inference mismatch induces a distribution shift that severely degrades temporal credit assignment and limits policy learning. We analyze this issue and propose PAWS, a segment-based preference learning method that performs policy updates directly using segment-level advantage functions. By aligning utility training with policy optimization, PAWS preserves trajectory-level preference information and avoids unreliable per-step learning signals. Experiments on simulated robotic manipulation and locomotion tasks demonstrate that PAWS consistently outperforms existing PbRL approaches, highlighting the importance of distribution-consistent preference learning.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Temporal Validation Changes the Apparent Public-Health Utility of Under-Five Mortality Prediction in Bangladesh: A Four-Round DHS Machine-Learning Study

arXiv:2602.03957v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Background: Under-five mortality in Bangladesh remains uneven despite national progress. DHS-based prediction models may guide targeted follow-up, but only if validation reflects future use. We examined how validation design changes apparent prediction performance. Methods: Four BDHS rounds (2011-2022; 33,962 children; 1,290 deaths) were analysed with a 26-feature pipeline and three model classes under four validation regimes, including cross-survey temporal validation (train 2011+2014, calibrate 2017, test 2022). A 32-unit ELU multilayer perceptron was selected via genetic-algorithm neural architecture search. AUROC used 2,000 bootstrap resamples; screening utility used sensitivity, PPV, and number needed to screen (NNS) at fixed capacity. Results: Validation regime altered public-health interpretation more than model class. NAS MLP AUROC ranged from 0.669 (2022-only random) to 0.775 (pooled random), with temporal AUROC 0.730. At the top-10% temporal threshold, NAS identified 152/355 deaths in 2022 (sensitivity 42.8%, PPV 13.2%, NNS 7.6). NNS across designs ranged from 5.6 to 11.0. Conclusions: Validation-regime choice changed screening workload and apparent policy value more than architecture. Temporal validation supports defensible estimates of follow-up and referral demand; DHS child-mortality studies should report sensitivity, PPV, and NNS before programmatic use.

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

Quantifying and Auditing LLM Evaluation via Positive–Unlabeled Learning

arXiv:2606.19057v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as judges for scalable evaluation, yet such LLM–as–a–Judge systems exhibit systematic biases that are decoupled from semantic quality, most notably verbosity bias. Meanwhile, human supervision is costly and typically selective, yielding reliable positive judgments but leaving most outputs unlabelled and potentially mixed in quality. We formulate LLM evaluation under selective human supervision as a positive–unlabelled learning problem and propose a geometric auditing framework based on Partial Optimal Transport. By aligning a small set of human–verified positives with a reliable subset of unlabelled outputs in a fixed embedding space, our method identifies human–consistent preferences and corrects biased judges without retraining. Experiments demonstrate improved alignment with human preferences, increased robustness to presentation biases, and interpretable confidence estimates, offering a scalable and statistically grounded alternative to existing LLM–as–a–judge pipelines.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Mining Architectural Quality Under Agentic AI Adoption: A Causal Study of Java Repositories

arXiv:2606.13298v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI coding tools are now used by a majority of developers, and agentic use of these tools has popularized the practice colloquially called "vibe coding". Yet causal evidence on their effect on software architecture is scarce. Prior causal work has measured code-level outcomes (complexity, static analysis warnings); whether such degradation propagates to architecture-level outcomes remains unknown. We mine 151 open-source Java repositories, 74 with detectable agentic AI adoption (identified via configuration files and Co-Authored-By commit trailers) and 77 propensity-matched controls, across a 13-month per-repository window yielding 1,811 monthly Arcan snapshots. We estimate the causal effect of adoption on architectural smell density (ASD) with a staggered difference-in-differences design and the Borusyak imputation estimator, applying a causal design recently used for code-level metrics to the architecture level. Total smell counts are essentially unchanged (+1.1%, p = 0.82) while lines of code grow +12.8% (p = 0.003); the resulting 6.7% ASD decline (p = 0.004) is therefore a denominator effect rather than an architectural improvement. Per-type estimates and robustness checks (wild cluster bootstrap, Lee bounds, stale-observation sensitivity) corroborate the pattern; pre-trends are flat (Wald p = 0.90), consistent with parallel trends. Density-normalized outcomes can mislead when treatment affects system size: raw counts and explicit decomposition are required for causal mining studies of AI tool adoption. The complete replication package, including the curated 151-repository monthly panel, is publicly available.

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

ChiKhaPo: A Large-Scale Multilingual Benchmark for Evaluating Lexical Comprehension and Generation in Large Language Models

Existing benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) are largely restricted to high- or mid-resource languages, and often evaluate performance on higher-order tasks in reasoning and generation. However, plenty of evidence points to the fact that LLMs lack basic linguistic competence in the vast majority of the world's 3800+ written languages. We introduce ChiKhaPo, consisting of 8 subtasks of varying difficulty designed to evaluate the lexical comprehension and generation abilities of generative models. ChiKhaPo draws on existing lexicons, monolingual data, and bitext, and provides coverage for 2700+ languages for 2 subtasks, surpassing any existing benchmark in terms of language coverage. We further show that 6 SOTA models struggle on our benchmark, and discuss the factors contributing to performance scores, including language family, language resourcedness, task, and comprehension versus generation directions. With ChiKhaPo, we hope to enable and encourage the massively multilingual benchmarking of LLMs.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Complexity of detecting large coefficients in the Pauli basis

arXiv:2606.19545v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the problem of deciding, given a mechanism to prepare a quantum state $\rho$ and a value $\varepsilon > 0$, whether there is some non-identity Pauli matrix $P$ such that $|Tr(P \rho)| \geq \varepsilon$. We consider that the state $\rho$ is described as the result of tracing out some of the qubits of a pure state prepared by a circuit $C$, and we assume the promise that either there is a Pauli matrix satisfying the stated condition or, instead, that for all non-identity Pauli matrices $P$ it is the case that $|Tr(P\rho)|\leq \varepsilon/2$. The problem is in $QCMA$, and we prove that if it belongs to $BQP$ then $NP \subseteq BQP$. The result is obtained through a reduction from the minimum-weight code problem, and it holds even when $\rho$ is assumed to be a pure state (i.e. when no qubits are discarded) and $\varepsilon$ is constant. This resolves an open question regarding the existence of efficient tomographic procedures to find the largest coefficients of a quantum state in the Pauli basis: namely, they do not exist under the standard hypothesis $NP \nsubseteq BQP$.

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

Machine Unlearning for the XGBoost Model with Network Intrusion Datasets

arXiv:2606.19220v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine Unlearning (MU) has emerged as an important technique for removing specific data points from trained models without requiring full retraining. However, most existing MU research focuses on deep learning and image data, leaving a gap in the domain of network intrusion detection, which relies heavily on tabular data. This work introduces XGBoost-Forget, an unlearning approach for the XGBoost model, to address this gap. The approach is evaluated on two tabular Network Intrusion (NI) datasets, IoT-23 and GeNIS, using multiple metrics to assess model performance, unlearning efficiency, and forgetting quality. The results show that XGBoost-Forget maintains predictive performance close to the original model while providing significantly faster unlearning, demonstrating its potential for MU in tabular NI settings.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

External Experience Serving in Production LLM Systems: A Deployment-Oriented Study of Quality-Cost Trade-offs

Production LLM systems accumulate reusable operational experience, but the practical deployment issue is not merely whether such experience can help. It is how different serving strategies trade off quality against online cost under realistic constraints. Injecting external experience can improve task quality, yet it also increases prompt burden, latency, and serving pressure. We study external experience serving as a deployment-oriented quality-cost trade-off problem. We evaluate this question in a real production moderation setting, with tool-use and GPQA as supporting contrast tasks that expose different output-cost regimes. We compare no-experience baselines, random experience controls, global prompt injection, and retrieval-based selective injection, and analyze both task quality and serving cost. The results show that, once experience becomes case-dependent, selective retrieval provides a stronger operating point than unconditional global injection. They further show that retrieval quality matters more than simply increasing Top-$K$, and that the same serving policy can exhibit substantially different cost-benefit profiles across short-output and decode-heavy regimes. These findings suggest that external experience is best treated as a selective, cost-aware serving decision rather than as a universal add-on. Overall, in the settings studied here, external experience pays off only when both the serving interface and the task-specific cost structure make its quality gains worth the online cost.

19.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-01

Prenatal exposure to asthma medications and risk of neurodevelopmental disorders and educational difficulties: A systematic review and meta-analysis

by Lama A. Shakhshir, Alexia Karain, Jill P. Pell, Claire E. Hastie, Scott M. Nelson, Michael Fleming Background Since asthma exacerbations during pregnancy risk maternal and fetal health, continued medication is important. However, some studies have reported adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes following prenatal exposure to asthma medication. Therefore, this systematic review aimed to collate the existing evidence on the associations between prenatal exposure to asthma medication and neurodevelopmental and educational outcomes. Methods and findings A systematic review was conducted in accordance with PRISMA guidelines and the PECO framework. PubMed, Medline and Embase databases were searched for studies investigating prenatal exposure to one or more asthma medication and neurodevelopmental or educational outcomes published, in English, between January 2003 and September 2024, and updated in November 2025. Studies of asthma medication used for other indications were excluded. Study quality was assessed using the Newcastle-Ottawa scale. Random-effects meta-analyses were conducted where appropriate and heterogeneity was evaluated using Cochran’s Q and I2 tests.Of 16,824 studies identified by the initial search, seven were eligible for inclusion. All investigated beta-2-adrenergic agonists (B2AA), with one including B2AA as mono- and polytherapy—and one study also investigated inhaled corticosteroids (ICS) exposure. Two reported associations with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and one with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). An updated search identified one additional eligible study, which examined both ADHD and ASD, as well as other neurodevelopmental disorders. The included eight studies (n = 3,867,170 participants) comprised cohort (n = 5) and case-control (n = 3) designs and reported inconsistent results. Meta-analysis of three studies (n = 1,380,871) indicated significant associations with ASD for exposure to B2AA both preconception (aOR 1.34, 95% CI [1.19,1.52]) and during pregnancy (aOR 1.29, 95% CI [1.16,1.42]). Heterogeneity was low, with no evidence of significant publication bias. Limitations of the included studies comprised residual confounding and exposure misclassification. Additionally, studies included in the meta-analysis were few in number and did not adequately distinguish between medication effects and underlying maternal asthma. Conclusion Meta-analysis suggested an association between prenatal exposure to B2AA and ASD. An association with ADHD, reported in a single study, requires corroboration. To date, based on our search strategy, no association has been reported with communication skills, motor skills, problem-solving and personal-social skills, or cerebral palsy.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Age-related changes in acoustic cue use for speech-in-speech perception

Acoustic cues such as pitch and spatial location allow listeners to attend to a target speaker and ignore competing talkers, aiding speech recognition in background noise. Diminished ability to utilize acoustic cues for speech stream segregation may thus contribute to older adults' challenges hearing in noise. Adults aged 18-74 completed a speech-in-speech identification task with three conditions containing 1) only pitch cues (fundamental frequency), 2) only spatial cues (interaural time differences; ITDs), and 3) both pitch and spatial cues for segregating a target talker from competing talkers. Hearing thresholds at standard and extended high frequencies (EHFs), auditory brainstem responses (ABRs), and digit span scores were acquired to examine the influence of sensory and cognitive factors on use of each acoustic cue for speech-in-speech recognition. Significant differences were observed between cue condition scores indicating that use of the available cue(s) drove performance. ABR metrics were not a significant predictor but digit span scores significantly predicted scores on all three cue conditions. Working memory abilities therefore set a baseline for participants' speech-in-speech recognition regardless of the acoustic content. Hearing thresholds at standard frequencies significantly predicted scores on the Pitch condition. EHF hearing thresholds better predicted Spatial and Both Cue condition performance, suggesting that EHF thresholds represent auditory processing important for coding ITDs. Age group analysis revealed that older adults (aged 40+) performed significantly more poorly on all cue conditions of the speech-in-speech recognition task relative to younger adults. Age-related changes in auditory sensory processing may therefore impair older adults' speech-in-noise perception by reducing their ability to use acoustic cues for segregating target and competing speech.

21.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

DNA-binding specificity recognition from predicted homologous protein-DNA structures

Predicting protein DNA-binding specificity is essential for understanding gene regulation and disease mechanisms. Existing deep learning methods typically infer specificity from a single protein-DNA complex structure, which limits their ability to capture the diverse geometric patterns underlying protein-DNA recognition. Homologous protein-DNA interfaces provide complementary structural evidence and richer geometric features related to interatomic interactions. To address the limited diversity and coverage of experimentally determined complexes, we constructed a large-scale library of predicted homologous protein-DNA complex structures. Building on this resource, we propose HomoDSP, a template-retrieval-based framework for accurate DNA-binding specificity prediction. Benchmark evaluations and validation on newly released JASPAR 2026 samples indicate that HomoDSP outperforms existing methods in both accuracy and generalization, with particularly substantial gains on high-error samples. Moreover, this performance is largely retained when AlphaFold3-predicted complex structures are used as input. Template- and residue-level interpretability analyses suggest that HomoDSP improves prediction by focusing on DNA-affinity residues across multiple homologous templates. Finally, universal Protein Binding Microarrays evaluations on AI-designed DNA-binding proteins show that HomoDSP rescues a baseline failure mode in which the baseline method produces incorrect predictions because of training-set bias. Together, these results support the use of homologous template interfaces as informative structural priors for decoding protein DNA-binding specificity.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Generalized Schrödinger Bridge on Graphs

arXiv:2602.04675v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Transportation on graphs is a fundamental challenge across many domains, where decisions must respect topological and operational constraints. Despite the need for actionable policies, existing graph-transport methods lack this expressivity. They rely on restrictive assumptions, fail to generalize across sparse topologies, and scale poorly with graph size and time horizon. To address these issues, we introduce Generalized Schrödinger Bridge on Graphs (GSBoG), a novel scalable data-driven framework for learning executable controlled continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) policies on arbitrary graphs under state cost augmented dynamics. Notably, GSBoG learns trajectory-level policies, avoiding dense global solvers and thereby enhancing scalability. This is achieved via a likelihood optimization approach, satisfying the endpoint marginals, while simultaneously optimizing intermediate behavior under state-dependent running costs. Extensive experimentation on challenging real-world graph topologies shows that GSBoG reliably learns accurate, topology-respecting policies while optimizing application-specific intermediate state costs, highlighting its broad applicability and paving new avenues for cost-aware dynamical transport on general graphs.

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

A Critical Look at Targeted Instruction Selection: Disentangling What Matters (and What Doesn't)

arXiv:2602.14696v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Instruction fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) often involves selecting a subset of instruction training data from a large candidate pool, using a small query set from the target task. Despite growing interest, the literature on targeted instruction selection remains fragmented and opaque: methods vary widely in selection budgets, often omit zero-shot baselines, and frequently entangle the contributions of key components. As a result, practitioners lack actionable guidance on selecting instructions for their target tasks. In this work, we aim to bring clarity to this landscape by disentangling and systematically analyzing the two core ingredients: data representation and selection algorithms. Our framework enables controlled comparisons across models, tasks, and budgets. We find that only gradient-based data representations choose subsets whose similarity to the query consistently predicts performance across datasets, models, and candidate pools. While no single method dominates, gradient-based representations paired with greedy round-robin selection often perform best on average at low budgets, but these gains diminish at larger budgets. Finally, we unify several existing selection algorithms as forms of approximate distance minimization between the selected subset and the query set, and support this view with new generalization bounds. More broadly, our findings provide critical insights and a foundation for more principled data selection in LLM fine-tuning. The code is available at https://github.com/dcml-lab/targeted-instruction-selection.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Tensor-Network Algorithm for Many-Body Trace Norms

arXiv:2606.11882v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trace norms are fundamental to quantum information theory, yet in many-body systems their evaluation remains a major computational bottleneck, as it generally requires diagonalizing exponentially large operators. Here, we overcome this bottleneck by introducing a controlled tensor-network algorithm for estimating the trace norm of matrix product operators without full diagonalization. The key idea is to combine Zolotarev's rational approximation to the sign function with a variational formulation solved using a density-matrix-renormalization-group-like algorithm. The resulting approximation is systematically improvable, with its accuracy controlled by the rational approximation parameters and the spectral weight near zero. Beyond the reach of exact diagonalization, we demonstrate controlled trace-norm calculations for entanglement negativity, quantum fidelity and quantum Fisher information, achieving substantially improved accuracy over polynomial-based Lanczos approaches. Our results establish trace-norm-based quantities as practical tensor-network observables, opening a route toward tensor-network studies of quantum information in mixed states.