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

Towards Unified Song Generation and Singing Voice Conversion with Accompaniment Co-Generation

arXiv:2606.07015v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While song generation and singing voice conversion (SVC) have evolved significantly, they have long been developed isolated: the former lacks zero-shot speaker cloning, while the latter overlooks vocal-accompaniment synergy. To bridge this gap, we propose UniSinger, the first end-to-end framework unifying speaker cloning song generation and accompaniment co-generation SVC. Building on the multimodal diffusion transformer, we construct a unified speaker embedding space transferring speaker representation from SVC to song generation, endowing fine-grained cross-task timbre control. To mitigate multi-task optimization conflicts, we design a curriculum learning strategy using task-specific modality masking to guide the model to gradually master the generative mechanisms among semantic content, vocal timbre, and accompaniment. Experiments show state-of-the-art performance on both tasks and realizes complementary benefits, offering new possibilities for intelligent music production.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

An epidemiological scenario for Mass Events During the World Cup

This brief work discusses potential superspreading events that may occur during the World Cup in Mexico. The study is particularly focused on the city of Guadalajara due to a large recent outbreak in January and February and insufficient vaccine coverage prior to 2026. Keywords: Superspreading; measles outbreak; branching process; individual reproduction number; World Cup

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

DisjunctiveNet: Neural Symbolic Learning via Differentiable Convexified Optimization Layers

arXiv:2605.30456v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many learning tasks in science and engineering are characterized by sparse datasets, which limits the effectiveness of purely data-driven approaches. At the same time, these problems are often accompanied by rich domain knowledge derived from physical laws, operational requirements, and expert heuristics. Such knowledge is frequently expressed as rules involving logical propositions and linear inequalities. Existing neuro-symbolic methods typically enforce these rules approximately through soft penalties, assume input-independent rules when designing specialized architectures, or rely on non-differentiable post-processing at inference time to achieve hard constraint satisfaction. While recent advances in differentiable optimization layers enable end-to-end feasibility enforcement within neural networks, extending these approaches to logical or mixed-integer rules remains challenging due to inherent nonconvexity. In this work, we propose a unified end-to-end framework for enforcing hard, input-dependent mixed integer linear constraints within neural networks. Our approach represents rules as disjunctive constraints and applies hierarchical convex relaxations to obtain convex hull formulations. These relaxations yield tractable linear constraints that can be embedded as differentiable optimization layers while enabling exact rule satisfaction. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework on real-world datasets, achieving perfect rule satisfaction and strong predictive performance.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

A Comparative Study of Pretrained Transformer Models for Quranic ASR: Speech Representations, Label Formats, and Dataset Composition

arXiv:2606.19747v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quran Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) aims to convert Quranic recitation into text, enabling applications such as aided memorisation tools and Quranic search engines. However, existing ASR models often exhibit high Word Error Rates (WER) on user-recited verses and lack full coverage of the Quranic corpus. This paper presents a systematic empirical study of domain-specific fine-tuning of pretrained Transformer-based models for Quranic ASR, using advanced speech feature extraction methods: Wav2Vec2.0, HuBERT, and XLS-R. These models apply self-supervised learning by masking portions of input audio and using Transformer architectures to learn context-aware speech features. The pretrained models are fine-tuned on a filtered Quranic dataset exceeding 870 hours of professional and user recitations. Through comprehensive ablation studies across feature extractors, output label formats, training strategies, and clip durations, we identify the key factors that affect transcription accuracy in this domain. Our best-performing configuration achieves a WER of 0.08 on the EveryAyah subset and 0.11 on the combined EveryAyah+Tarteel setting, representing roughly a five-percentage-point gain over the Citrinet baseline (WER = 0.163) while reducing combined-model training time from 140 hours to 40 hours. Arabic text without diacritics yields the best fine-tuning results, and Wav2Vec2-XLSR-53 provides the strongest overall representation. Future work includes improving dataset quality and developing phoneme-aware models to extract deeper speech feature representations for Tajweed-sensitive applications.

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

Towards Version-aware Operations and Transaction Memories for Multi-layer MeMo

作者:

MeMo proposes language models with explicit multi-layer correlation matrix memories (CMMs), where memorization, retrieval, and forgetting are architectural operations. This paper asks how such memories can reduce the need for retraining when knowledge changes. For changes expressible as MeMo memory associations, the model's accessible knowledge can be updated by editing explicit memories rather than retraining the whole model. We propose a version-aware operation layer in which high-level operations such as replace, obsolete, keep-history, rollback, and trace are compiled into MeMo-native primitive calls over sequences and tokens. The key observation is that a version-aware operation is rarely a single MeMo association. It is an ordered transaction of primitive edits, for example forgetting one sequence-token chain, memorizing another, preserving a historical chain, and recording an inverse program. The framework introduces two auxiliary CMMs: a Version CMM (V-CMM) for mapping version transitions to transaction handles, and a Transaction CMM (T-CMM) for storing reusable change contents and inverse programs. It supports both direct sequence-level edits and structured diff-level inputs, and outlines an evaluation route for update success, rollback, traceability, locality, and transaction reuse.

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

A Two-Phase Stability Study of LLM Judges and Bar Council Examiners on Thai Bar-Exam Free-Form Essays

Free-form legal essay evaluation in NLP treats expert inter-rater stability as a single ceiling number, and treats LLM-judge agreement with that ceiling as evidence of judge stability. We test both assumptions on the Thai bar examination through an identical-inputs protocol: three Bar Council-trained examiners (A, B, C) and a 26-LLM judge panel score the same 15 cross-graded answers from the same four inputs (question, official Bar Council grading regulation, gold answer, candidate answer). The headline finding is asymmetric. On 10 of 15 cells where the rubric prescribes both axes, all 29 raters converge in a tight band: panel agreement is universal. On the remaining 5 cells where the rubric does not prescribe how to grade a correct final answer that omits a decisive statutory citation, the human panel splits between two coherent readings (B/C majority at the upper rubric band, score 6-8; A minority at the lower band, score 1-2). The LLM judge population does not split symmetrically: 22 of 26 LLMs score in or near B/C's contested band, 3 sit in the regulation-silent middle gap, and only 1 (GPT-5.4 Nano) approaches A's band without consistently scoring within it. Zero LLMs in our 26-judge panel reproduce the minority human reading on the contested cells. The B/C-direction cluster spans every model size, vendor, and price tier we tested. An instrumented three-LLM anchor sub-panel (Claude 4.6 Opus, Gemini 3.1 Pro, GPT-5.4 Pro) carries determinism probes, input ablations, and bootstrap CIs, and reaches anchor panel $\alpha = 0.77$ on the 15 cells against human-panel $\alpha = 0.36$. The high LLM-panel $\alpha$ reflects systematic convergence on the majority reading rather than balanced reproduction of both readings; a benchmark that selects its LLM judge by maximising agreement with a human reference panel will inherit this asymmetry by construction.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

TRAP: Benchmark for Task-completion and Resistance to Active Privacy-extraction

arXiv:2606.18996v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agents are increasingly deployed in document-intensive workflows where sensitive private information is not an edge case but a routine input, e.g., an agent booking a flight needs passport numbers. In such settings, the agent must use private information to complete tasks accurately while never exposing it in its responses, because it cannot verify who is actually at the keyboard. These two obligations are in fundamental tension. A model capable enough to use private information for task completion can, by the same capability, be induced to reveal it. To evaluate the trade-off of task accuracy and privacy leakage, we introduce Task-completion and Resistance to Active Privacy-extraction (TRAP). Each scenario includes a document containing private information, a task query that requires the agent to invoke the correct tool using private fields, and an attack query that attempts to elicit the same information in natural language. Evaluating 22 models spanning frontier proprietary and open-source models at multiple scales, we find that all model families exhibit non-trivial leakage, and that instruction-following ability correlates with leakage rate. Existing prompt-based defenses reduce leakage but at significant cost to task accuracy. Prompt optimization fails to escape this trade-off. We demonstrate that this failure is not incidental. For any softmax-based model, no soft-constraint defense, e.g., prompt-based defenses, can jointly achieve high task success with zero leakage probability. Motivated by this impossibility result, we propose structural private field isolation, which replaces private fields with hash keys before they reach the model. This approach largely prevents leakage while keeping task accuracy.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Active Quantum Reservoir Engineering: Using a Qubit to Manipulate its Environment

arXiv:2505.16898v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum reservoir engineering leverages dissipative processes to achieve desired behavior, with applications ranging from entanglement generation to quantum error correction. Therein, a structured environment acts as an entropy sink for the system and no time-dependent control over the system is required. We develop a theoretical framework for active reservoir engineering, where time-dependent control over a quantum system is used to manipulate its environment. In this case, the system may act as an entropy sink for the environment. Our framwork captures the dynamical interplay between system and environment, and provides an intuitive picture of how finite-size effects and system-environment correlations allow for manipulating the environment by repeated initialization of the quantum system. We illustrate our results with two examples: a superconducting qubit coupled to an environment of two-level systems and a semiconducting quantum dot coupled to nuclear spins. In both scenarios, we find qualitative agreement with previous experimental results, illustrating how active control can unlock new functionalities in open quantum systems.

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

Assessing Predictive Models for Fairness Based on Movement Patterns

arXiv:2605.23234v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Assessing the spatial fairness of predictive models involves establishing whether they are statistically penalizing (favoring) individuals associated with certain geographical locations. Literature on this topic makes the fundamental assumption that each individual is assigned to a single geographical location (e.g., place of residence). However, fairness with respect to the set of locations where one has been, i.e., their movement patterns over different regions, also matters when fairness is considered. Consequently, we argue that it is necessary to generalize the notion of spatial fairness to also include movement patterns, leading to the novel problem of assessing predictive models for fairness relative to the movements of individuals. To deal with this problem, we propose an approach that first associates the movements of individuals to certain geographic regions, considering multiple spatial partitions with different resolutions and alignments, and then employs a suitable spatial scan statistic to assess whether a predictive model is fair based on movement patterns. In the experimental evaluation, we study the performance of our approach over thousands of synthetic unfair datasets, showing that it is effective at detecting this new type of unfairness and at retrieving the set of objects treated unfairly, while localization performance exhibits a consistent multi-resolution trade-off.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Open-Vocabulary BEV Segmentation with 3D-Aware Geometric Constraints

Bird's-eye view (BEV) perception fuses multi-camera images into a unified top-down representation for autonomous driving. Despite recent progress, state-of-the-art methods remain confined to closed-set scenarios, making them vulnerable to unpredictable real-world environments. In this work, we introduce open-vocabulary BEV segmentation (OVBS), which leverages vision-language models (VLMs) to recognize categories beyond the training set while maintaining precise BEV perception and real-time efficiency. A key challenge in OVBS lies in the 3D geometric inconsistency inherent in the ill-posed lifting of 2D VLM semantics into BEV. To address this, we propose OVBEVSeg, a geometry-aware OVBS framework that enhances efficient Gaussian splatting (GS)-based unprojection by leveraging robust 3D geometric constraints across three progressive stages: (1) 2D-to-BEV pseudo-labeling via reliable 3D projection for OV generalization; (2) joint 2D-BEV per-scene optimization with BEV structural constraints for 3D geometric consistency; and (3) 3D geometric distillation for online efficiency. On the nuScenes dataset, OVBEVSeg achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming closed-set methods by 15.3 mIoU on unseen categories. Remarkably, even with no novel-class ground-truth labels, it remains competitive with self- and semi-supervised baselines trained with up to 40% of ground-truth annotations. Furthermore, it achieves 2.5x faster inference with only 0.22x the memory consumption of projection-based methods. Project page: https://hchoi256.github.io/projects/ovbevseg/.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Driven-dissipative entanglement of distant giant atoms

arXiv:2606.13375v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum interconnects distribute entanglement via controlled light-matter interactions for quantum computing and sensing applications. Many entanglement generation schemes use coherent, reversible interactions that require precisely calibrated pulses to execute. In contrast, driven-dissipative protocols use a continuous-wave drive in the presence of correlated dissipation to stabilize entanglement in protected (dark) states. However, the same dissipation that generates the entanglement also limits its utility once the stabilization protocol ends. Here, we engineer a superconducting system of two giant artificial atoms coupled sequentially to a waveguide, with tunable individual and correlated dissipation enabled by interference between coupling points. Continuously driving the atoms through the waveguide exploits correlated dissipation to generate remote entanglement. We then tune the qubit frequencies in situ to suppress individual dissipation and thereby preserve the entanglement, achieving a Bell-state fidelity F = 0.89 +/- 0.02. This demonstration indicates that the driven dissipation of giant atoms is a viable approach for distributing entanglement across quantum networks.

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

RC-GeoCP: Geometric Consensus for Radar-Camera Collaborative Perception

Collaborative perception (CP) enhances scene understanding through multi-agent information sharing. While LiDAR-centric systems offer precise geometry, high costs and performance degradation in adverse weather necessitate multi-modal alternatives. Despite dense visual semantics and robust spatial measurements, the synergy between cameras and 4D radar remains underexplored in collaborative settings. This work introduces RC-GeoCP, the first framework to explore the fusion of 4D radar and images in CP. To resolve misalignment caused by depth ambiguity and spatial dispersion across agents, RC-GeoCP establishes a radar-anchored geometric consensus. Specifically, Geometric Structure Rectification (GSR) aligns visual semantics with geometry derived from radar to generate spatially grounded, geometry-consistent representations. Uncertainty-Aware Communication (UAC) formulates selective transmission as a conditional entropy reduction process to prioritize informative features based on inter-agent disagreement. Finally, the Consensus-Driven Assembler (CDA) aggregates multi-agent information via shared geometric anchors to form a globally coherent representation. We establish the first unified radar-camera CP benchmark on V2X-Radar and V2X-R, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance with significantly reduced communication overhead. Code will be released soon.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Entropy-Gated Latent Recursion

arXiv:2606.16620v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inference-time scaling has become the dominant lever for improving language-model reasoning, but existing methods derive rollout diversity from a single source: stochastic token-level sampling. We argue that this single-axis sampling space is fundamentally limiting, and identify a second, fully deterministic and complementary axis: the layer span $L$ at which a frozen model's top decoder layers are recursively re-applied at high-uncertainty tokens. Different choices of $L$ produce distinct rollouts that solve different subsets of problems, with no stochasticity. We instantiate this axis through Entropy-Gated Latent Recursion (EGLR), a training-free decoding procedure that re-applies the top-$L$ layers for at most $K_{\max}$ iterations until the next-token distribution converges. Combined with $T$ temperature samples, EGLR turns a single-axis stochastic rollout pool into an $L\times T$ Cartesian sampling space at almost the same per-rollout cost. We characterize this space across $8$ instruction-tuned models and $6$ math reasoning benchmarks, and show that the $L$-axis is genuinely complementary to temperature: on MATH-500 with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct, the joint $L\times T$ oracle reaches $91.6\%$, $+8.2$ percentage points beyond the temperature-only oracle ($83.4\%$) and $+10.4$ points beyond the layer-only oracle ($81.2\%$), confirming that the two axes capture genuinely complementary problems. The expanded rollout pool provides richer per-prompt candidates for any downstream procedure that consumes rollouts, including self-consistency, best-of-$N$ with verifiers, and group-relative RL training (GRPO), opening a new direction for inference-time scaling that does not rely on stochastic noise.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Resource theory of interactive quantum instruments

arXiv:2603.27676v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum instruments describe both the classical outcome and the updated quantum state in a measurement process. To do this in a non-trivial way, instruments must have the capability to interact coherently with the state that they measure. Here, we develop a resource theory for instruments. We consider a relevant quantifier of the separation between interactive and non-interactive instruments and show that it admits three distinct operational interpretations in terms of quantum information tasks. These concern (i) the preservation of maximally entangled states after a local measurement, (ii) the average ability to preserve random states after measurement, and (iii) the ability to recover the classical information generated from measuring half of a maximally entangled state. We also introduce a natural set of allowed operations and show that the third task fully characterises the resource content of instruments. Our general framework reproduces as special cases established resource theories for channels and measurements.

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

BLISS: A Lightweight Bilevel Influence Scoring Method for Data Selection in Language Model Pretraining

arXiv:2510.06048v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Effective data selection is essential for pretraining large language models (LLMs), enhancing efficiency and improving generalization to downstream tasks. However, existing approaches often require leveraging external pretrained models, making it difficult to disentangle the effects of data selection from those of the external pretrained models. In addition, they often overlook the long-term impact of selected data if the model is trained to convergence, primarily due to the prohibitive cost of full-scale LLM pretraining. In this paper, we introduce BLISS (BileveL Influence Scoring method for data Selection): a lightweight data selection method that operates entirely from scratch, without relying on any external pretrained oracle models, while explicitly accounting for the long-term impact of selected data. BLISS leverages a small proxy model as a surrogate for the LLM and employs a score model to estimate the long-term influence of training samples if the proxy model is trained to convergence. We formulate data selection as a bilevel optimization problem, where the upper-level objective optimizes the score model to assign importance weights to training samples, ensuring that minimizing the lower-level objective (i.e., training the proxy model over the weighted training loss until convergence) leads to best validation performance. Once optimized, the trained score model predicts influence scores for the dataset, enabling efficient selection of high-quality samples for LLM pretraining. We validate BLISS by pretraining 410M/1B/2.8B Pythia and LLaMA-0.5B models on selected subsets of the C4 dataset. Notably, under the 1B model setting, BLISS achieves $1.7\times$ speedup in reaching the same performance as the state-of-the-art method, demonstrating superior performance across multiple downstream tasks.

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

Maestro Order: A Model-Agnostic Orchestration Harness

作者:

arXiv:2606.23983v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A single forward pass of a capable model is a fast, fluent, and unreliable problem-solver: it is right often enough to be useful and wrong often enough to be dangerous; in language models, such confident errors are known as hallucinations. We present Maestro Order, a model-agnostic orchestration harness that turns unreliable solvers into reliable problem-solving systems by composing them according to four structural primitives (decompose, ensemble, verify, and recurse) and a budget-aware controller that decides where to spend compute. The harness treats any model as a black-box base solver behind a uniform interface, layers a verifier ensemble whose discrimination is measured online, and allocates verification and voting to the stages with the highest marginal reliability per unit cost. We give the architecture, the message and state schema, the controller algorithm, and the engineering that makes it deterministic, observable, and fault-tolerant. We then specify an evaluation methodology (reliability at fixed cost, coverage, calibration, and ablations) and report results from a faithful Monte Carlo simulation of the harness over a parameterized solver/verifier model. The simulation reproduces the predicted laws quantitatively: verification amplifies reliability geometrically (e.g. $0.55\to0.98$ with two gates, $\to0.999$ with four), voting helps only above chance and is limited by shared errors, and a budget-aware controller reaches a target reliability at a small fraction of the cost of voting alone by selecting the cheapest mechanism for each regime. We close with failure modes (verifier gaming, correlated errors, and decomposition error compounding) and concrete guidance: build robust checkers, diversify solvers, and let the controller put compute where the information is.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Complete Relational Description of Spin in a Quantum Background

arXiv:2606.15873v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The standard description of the state of a spin in quantum mechanics presupposes externally fixed directions – a classical background. Can a spin be fully described instead in relation to other quantum mechanical systems? Poulin suggested twenty years ago group averaging over rotations the joint state of a fundamental spin and a reference spin with large angular momentum which, however, yields a classical bit in a probabilistic mixture. We revisit this idea and show that when the quantum reference system is augmented to two large spins, the standard quantum mechanical description of a spin is recovered in the limit of large quantum numbers for the reference system.

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

SA4Depth: Consistent Pose-Depth Scale Alignment for Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation

Self-supervised depth estimation from monocular sequences relies on the joint learning of a depth and a pose network. Despite abundant research done to improve the depth network, efforts on the pose remain limited. In this context, even when depth is estimated up to scale, we highlight the importance of the alignment between the scene scales estimated by the pose and depth nets. Then, we introduce SA4Depth, an approach to improve this alignment and boost the depth predictions while keeping the inference time unchanged. Our proposed method uses the depth estimated during training to reproject learnable visual features across consecutive frames and refine the pose estimates by reducing feature alignment residuals. With our method, the estimated scene scales by the separate depth and pose networks are aligned, and the prediction scale consistency is improved across different sequences. Our differentiable refinement integrates seamlessly into existing self-supervised pipelines and substantially improves their depth estimates. We demonstrate this with extensive experiments both outdoors and indoors on KITTI, Cityscapes, and NYUv2. Additionally, results on KITTI Odometry confirm the effectiveness of our pose refinement. Our code is available at https://github.com/Runningchauncey/SA4Depth .

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Entanglement improves coordination in distributed systems

arXiv:2602.04588v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Coordination in distributed systems is often hampered by communication latency, which degrades performance. Quantum entanglement offers fundamentally stronger correlations than classically achievable without communication. Crucially, these correlations manifest instantaneously upon measurement, irrespective of the physical distance separating the systems. We investigate the application of shared entanglement to a dual-work optimization problem in a distributed system comprising two servers. The system must process both a continuously available, preemptible baseline task and incoming customer requests arriving in pairs. System performance is characterized by the trade-off between baseline task throughput and customer waiting time. We present a rigorous analytical model demonstrating that when the baseline task throughput function is strictly convex, rewarding longer uninterrupted processing periods, entanglement-assisted routing strategies achieve Pareto-superior performance compared to optimal communication-free classical strategies. We prove this advantage through queueing-theoretic analysis, non-local game formulation, and computational certification of classical bounds. Our results identify distributed scheduling and coordination as a novel application domain for near-term entanglement-based quantum networks.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Logical qubits with erasure conversion using metastable neutral atoms

arXiv:2506.13724v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Implementing large-scale quantum algorithms with practical advantage will require fault-tolerance achieved through quantum error correction, but the associated overhead is prohibitive. This overhead can be reduced by engineering physical qubits with fewer errors, and by shaping the residual errors to be more easily correctable. In this work, we demonstrate quantum error correcting codes and logical qubit circuits in a metastable ytterbium-171 nuclear spin qubit with a noise bias towards erasure errors. These errors can be located separately from any syndrome information diagnosing the error, and we demonstrate adaptive circuit execution based on erasure information. We show that dephasing errors on the qubit during coherent transport can be strongly suppressed, and implement entangling gates that maintain a high fidelity in the presence of gate beam inhomogeneity or pointing errors. Furthermore, we demonstrate logical qubit encoding in the [[4, 2, 2]] code, with error correction during decoding based on mid-circuit erasure measurements despite the fact that the code is too small to correct any Pauli errors. Finally, we demonstrate logical qubit teleportation between multiple code blocks with conditionally selected ancillas based on mid-circuit erasure checks, a key part of leakage-robust error correction schemes using neutral atoms.

22.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-15

Fung-AI: An AI/ML-driven pipeline for antifungal peptide discovery

by Daniel S. Berman, Libby M. Lewis, Tom D. Curtis, Olivia N. Tiburzi, Daniel F. Q. Smith, Arturo Casadevall, Laura J. Dunphy Emerging fungal pathogens represent a concerning threat to both global health and food security. In this study, we aimed to address our rising vulnerability to fungal pathogens through the development of the Fung-AI pipeline: an AI/ML-driven approach for antifungal discovery. A generative adversarial network (GAN) was trained to generate novel candidate antifungal peptide sequences. Next, in silico antifungal and hemolytic classifiers were built to further prioritize AI-generated peptides for experimental validation. From a pool of ~10,000 candidates, thirteen peptides were selected for testing over two-stages of experimentation. Five peptides were found to display mild antifungal activity against the wheat pathogen, Fusarium graminearum, with minimal inhibitory concentrations (MICs) ranging from 250 µg/mL to 500 µg/mL. Four of the five peptides also showed activity against the human pathogen, Candida albicans (MIC: 500 µg/mL). Two of our AI-generated antifungal peptides additionally demonstrated low cytotoxicity in HepG2 human liver carcinoma cells (LC50 > 704.2 µg/mL) indicating that they may be useful as scaffolds for future optimization for therapeutic applications. None of our peptides were found to considerably inhibit the emerging pathogen C. auris, suggesting the need for pathogen-specific down-selection of candidate peptides. Overall, we present a proof-of-principle, generative-AI-based approach for the rapid design of de novo antifungal peptides.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

APT: Atomic Physical Transitions for Causal Video-Language Understanding

Physical events are not understood by their names alone, but by the causal state changes that compose them. A clip-level label such as "bounce" can be correct while hiding the process that makes the event physically valid, from support loss and contact onset to rebound and settling. To make this hidden process explicit, we introduce Atomic Physical Transitions (APTs): minimal, temporally localized state changes that bind a visible cue to an active physical mechanism and before/after dynamical regimes. An APT chain represents a video as an ordered causal transition sequence rather than a single aggregate event label: event labels tell what happened; APT chains explain why it happened. To make APTs learnable by VLMs, we construct mixed-source APT data from human annotations and simulator ground truth, covering 14 transition types across contact, gravity, friction, and rotation/stability, with 27,303 timed instances over 1,246 trials. Using this data, we find that current VLMs miss transition-level physics, with zero-shot recall at most 14% and errors dominated by missed transitions. Direct fine-tuning on APT chains improves transition detection but causes event-level forgetting, indicating that the model learns a specialized answer format rather than a reusable physical representation. We therefore propose APT-Tune, a parameter-efficient recipe that teaches VLMs to use causal transitions without forgetting how to answer video questions. It combines image-pad-aware supervision, format-conditional co-training, and mechanism-conditioned domain-to-type decoding to make APT learning format-robust and physically grounded. With only 11 M LoRA parameters on Qwen3-VL-2B, APT-Tune substantially improves APT recall while also improving event-level video transfer. These results show that APTs are not a new answer format, but a human-aligned causal supervision signal for physical video understanding.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Examining the Usage of Generative AI Models in Student Learning Activities for Software Programming

arXiv:2511.13271v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The rise of Generative AI (GenAI) tools like ChatGPT has created new opportunities and challenges for computing education. Existing research has primarily focused on GenAI's ability to complete educational tasks and its impact on student performance, often overlooking its effects on knowledge gains. In this study, we investigate how GenAI assistance compares to conventional online resources in supporting knowledge gains across different proficiency levels. We conducted a controlled user experiment with 24 undergraduate students of two different levels of programming experience (beginner, intermediate) to examine how students interact with ChatGPT while solving programming tasks. We analyzed task performance, conceptual understanding, and interaction behaviors. Our findings reveal that generating complete solutions with GenAI significantly improves task performance, especially for beginners, but does not consistently result in knowledge gains. Importantly, usage strategies differ by experience: beginners tend to rely heavily on GenAI toward task completion often without knowledge gain in the process, while intermediates adopt more selective approaches. We find that both over-reliance and minimal use result in weaker knowledge gains overall. Based on our results, we call on students and educators to adopt GenAI as a learning rather than a problem solving tool. Our study highlights the urgent need for guidance when integrating GenAI into programming education to foster deeper understanding.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Evaluating LLM Personalization via Semantic Constraint Verification

Current evaluation paradigms for Large Language Model (LLM) personalization rely heavily on brittle surface-matching metrics or computationally expensive LLM-as-a-judge protocols, both of which lack interpretability. To address these limitations, we introduce Natural Language Inference Constraint Verification (NLICV), a scalable, semantically invariant framework that maps sentence meanings to truth-condition sets to verify personalization constraints via a Natural Language Inference (NLI) model. Moving beyond binary scoring, NLICV categorizes LLM behaviors into four distinct modes: personalization, generalization, sycophancy, and failure. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NLICV aligns closely with human annotations while drastically reducing the latency and token costs associated with LLM judges (up to 2100 inference speedup). Finally, through an ablation-based procedure, NLICV pinpoints the exact sentences driving the constraint verification, yielding faithful, understandable evidence for its evaluations.