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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Helical Dirac Current with Local Coupling to a Chiral Potential

arXiv:2606.17618v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We show that exact Dirac eigenstates in cylindrical confinement carry a definite helical conserved-current texture even in the zero orbital angular momentum channel l = 0. For the lowest confined mode, the Dirac current contains a nonvanishing azimuthal component together with longitudinal transport and exhibits opposite handedness in the two spin-resolved sectors. The structure also persists into the evanescent region. We further derive the channel-resolved matrix-element kernel generated by a static chiral scalar potential acting on the confined l = 0 Dirac modes. The resulting spin-selective coupling arises from the Dirac current texture and the scalar chiral potential, and yields a geometric selection rule in which diagonal channels vanish while off-diagonal conversion channels survive. The coupling strength is governed by an internal sampled-current overlap Jchi(k), defined as the integral from 0 to R of f(rho) times jphi_up(rho, k) times rho d rho. This quantity measures the spatial overlap between the chiral radial profile and the spin-up azimuthal Dirac-current density. The mechanism is fully local and texture-based, without external magnetic fields or spin-orbit coupling. Within standard Dirac theory, this work identifies the minimal static Dirac-geometric kernel underlying spin-selective response, establishing a baseline structure from which dynamical-medium, scattering, and transport formalisms can be systematically developed toward a complete description of spin-polarization phenomena such as CISS.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

RN-D: Discretized Categorical Actors for On-Policy Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2601.23075v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: On-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) remains a dominant paradigm for continuous control, yet standard implementations rely on Gaussian actors and relatively shallow MLP policies, often leading to brittle optimization when gradients are noisy, and policy updates must be conservative. In this paper, we revisit actor policy representation as a first-class design choice for on-policy RL. We study discretized categorical actors, which represent each action dimension as a distribution over discrete bins and induce a policy objective analogous to classification cross-entropy loss. Building on architectural advances from supervised learning, we further pair discretized categorical actors with regularized networks, yielding RN-D. Across diverse continuous-control benchmarks, we show that simply replacing the standard Gaussian actor with our proposed actor substantially improves performance, achieving state-of-the-art results within on-policy RL. We release our code at https://github.com/alwaysbyx/RND-RL.

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

The algebra of Krom logic programs

arXiv:2606.15719v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper investigates the algebraic structure of Krom logic programs, consisting only of facts and rules with at most one body atom. We show that sequential composition endows the class of Krom programs with a natural monoid structure and that this structure admits rich algebraic extensions to Krom seminearrings, Krom quemirings, Krom-Conway seminearrings, and Krom-Conway omegaseminearrings. Furthermore, we establish explicit generating sets and canonical decompositions, study the associated ${}^\omega$-operator, characterize the Kleene star in graph-theoretic terms, and relate finite Krom monoids to transformation monoids and finite-state automata. These results provide new connections between logic programming, algebraic automata theory, and algebraic graph theory.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Teaching Diffusion to Speculate Left-to-Right

Large language models (LLMs) achieve remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks, but their autoregressive decoding process incurs substantial inference costs due to inherently sequential token generation. Speculative decoding addresses this bottleneck by employing a lightweight draft model to propose multiple future tokens that are subsequently verified in parallel by a larger target model. Recent work has demonstrated that diffusion language models are well suited for this setting, as they can generate entire blocks of draft tokens in parallel and thereby alleviate the sequential constraints of autoregressive drafting. A subtlety of this regime is that block-diffusion drafters generate tokens bidirectionally within a block, whereas verification is performed by an autoregressive target model that evaluates tokens in a strictly left-to-right manner, leaving a gap between the symmetric training-time objective and the asymmetric verification-time reward. In this work, we offer an empirical analysis of three training-time interventions that narrow this gap: token positional weighting, a first-error focal loss that targets the position that breaks the accepted prefix within each block, and a chain loss term that substitutes a differentiable surrogate for the expected accepted length. The three interventions act along orthogonal axes (position, block-conditional first error, joint prefix) and compose additively; they are likewise orthogonal to test-time alignment mechanisms such as multi-draft self-selection, with which they can in principle be combined. Across four target models and six reasoning, code, and dialogue benchmarks, the three interventions raise accepted draft length by 21-76% per benchmark over a position-uniform baseline, without adding additional forward passes and without changing the inference pipeline or the rejection-sampling exactness contract.

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

How Much Capacity Does EEG Denoising Need? Ultra-Compact Networks reveal Benchmark Saturation and Metric-Utility Gap

arXiv:2606.08594v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deep learning EEG denoising architectures have scaled from tens of thousands to tens of millions of parameters, yet no prior study has isolated model capacity as the experimental variable or tested whether reconstruction metrics predict downstream neural-signal utility. We address both gaps by fixing architecture, loss, data split, and training recipe while sweeping only channel width from 1.05K to 40.26K parameters in a minimal depthwise-separable convolutional U-Net. Models were evaluated on the EEGDenoiseNet benchmark, cross-dataset BCI transfer tests, controlled baseline retraining, and downstream motor-imagery classification with five decoder families across all nine BCI Competition IV-2a subjects. Reconstruction performance saturated by 3-6.5K parameters, with post-elbow gains of at most 0.015 correlation coefficient per log10-parameter unit. An 8.46M-parameter baseline retrained under the same pipeline matched the 40.26K compact variant on EOG–a 200x parameter gap yielding no advantage–while a Patch-Transformer control reproduced the same diminishing-return shape. Downstream evaluation exposed a classifier-dependent metric-utility gap: reconstruction-optimized denoising significantly degraded CSP+LDA classification across all nine subjects and three artifact types (best denoised accuracy 0.547 vs. 0.612 noisy baseline; Bonferroni p=0.0488), persisting on naturally recorded trials (Delta=-0.047; BH-FDR q=0.0049). End-to-end neural decoders showed variable or neutral effects. Standard EEG denoising benchmarks are saturated far below current model capacity, and reconstruction metrics do not predict BCI utility. Ultra-compact models at 33-46 KB and 1.27-2.61M FLOPs/segment are practical for edge deployment. These findings argue for capacity-controlled evaluation, harder task-aware benchmarks, and mandatory downstream validation.

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

Landmark-free Assessment of Lower-limb Alignment with Implicit Neural Shape Functions from Knee Radiographs

Radiographic assessment of lower-limb alignment (LLA) is important for predicting joint health and surgical outcomes in total knee arthroplasty. Traditional measurement methods are manual and time-consuming, while recent machine learning approaches typically rely on locating a fixed set of anatomical landmarks. This dependence limits flexibility and may require re-annotation when clinical definitions change. To address this, we propose an automated workflow using Implicit Neural Shape Functions (INSF). Rather than relying on explicit landmark coordinates, we encode the anatomy into a compact latent space and regress clinical alignment measurements directly from these latent codes. This architecture allows for rapid extendability to new tasks without altering the backbone representation. We trained our method on an internal dataset of 566 knee radiographs, each annotated with the outline of the femur and tibia. We evaluated it on both an internal test dataset of 50 patients and a separate external set of 402 preoperative cases from the MRKR dataset. Manual clinical measurements are available for these data, and the MRKR measurements will be made publicly accessible. Performance was comparable to state-of-the-art landmark-based methods and manual agreement, while offering a flexible shape representation that can be extended to additional measurement tasks.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Nonlinear cascaded quantum network with giant emitters

arXiv:2404.09829v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Chiral quantum optics is central to developing scalable quantum networks, yet existing approaches rely predominantly on linear single-photon regimes. It remains unclear how to generate directional multiphotons. Here we show that giant emitters coupled to nonlinear quantum optical baths enable tunable directional correlated photons, revealing a mechanism for multiphoton directional emission. We demonstrate that the propagation phases of correlated photons, together with the coupling phases of giant emitters, can generate destructive interference in one direction while enhancing emission in the opposite direction, making directionality fully tunable. Building on this mechanism, we introduce a nonlinear cascaded quantum network paradigm mediated by correlated flying qubits, providing a configurable building block enabling distinct many-body applications beyond linear unidirectional setups. These results reveal a rich landscape for engineering multiphoton propagation and correlations through interference in giant emitter-nonlinear bath architectures, offering pathways for quantum networks and strongly correlated light-matter platforms.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Hybrid Classical-Quantum Variational Autoencoder for Neural Topic Modeling

作者:

Neural topic models enable scalable semantic discovery, but their integration with quantum hardware remains largely unexplored. We present a proof-of-concept hybrid classical-quantum variational autoencoder (VAE) for topic modeling, embedding parameterized quantum circuits within the VAE inference network while retaining a classical topic-word decoder. To address the resource constraints of quantum hardware, we propose a modified Gaussian Softmax posterior that decouples latent space dimensionality from the number of topics to be extracted, enabling the model to operate with a low-resource 10-qubit quantum device. On the AgNews dataset, the hybrid VAE outperforms state-of-the-art neural topic models (NTMs), reaching a $C_v$ coherence score of 0.71 and an NPMI score of 0.20 while preserving high topic diversity. For comparison, we also construct a fully classical variant, which also outperforms state-of-the-art models on AgNews and exhibits clear class separation in the latent space. These results demonstrate that hybrid VAEs are computationally viable even on NISQ-era devices and represent a promising direction for quantum-enhanced topic modeling.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Immunologically Optimized Zmp1 Peptides Reveal a Translational Serological Biomarker Platform for Tuberculosis Diagnosis Across Disease Manifestations

Tuberculosis (TB) diagnosis remains challenging, particularly for extrapulmonary TB (EPTB), where invasive sampling, low bacillary burden, and suboptimal sensitivity of nucleic acid-based tests in peripheral specimens hinder timely detection. Here, we report an immunology-driven strategy for biomarker discovery and development of a peptide-based serological assay targeting Mycobacterium tuberculosis zinc metalloprotease-1 (Zmp1). Leveraging fundamental principles of adaptive immunity that antigenic regions containing overlapping B-cell and CD4 T-helper cell epitopes would preferentially generate high antibody titers through linked recognition and cognate T-cell help, we used an immunoinformatics pipeline to identify two nested immunodominant peptide regions within Zmp1 (Mtb-Zp-NT and Mtb-Zp-CT) enriched for overlapping B- and T-cell epitopes. The diagnostic potential of these peptides was evaluated through ELISA-based serological assays. A blinded pilot study (N=137) demonstrated a clear discrimination between active TB and TB-recovered individuals. The assay was subsequently validated in an expanded cohort (N=875) by screening 6,086 individuals, which identified 457 TB-positive cases. The cohort included pulmonary TB (PTB), EPTB, TB-recovered individuals, household contacts, non-specific infections, and healthy controls. Receiver operating characteristic analyses, supported by DeLong and bootstrap comparisons, revealed superior diagnostic performance of the peptide-based assays relative to full-length Zmp1. Mtb-Zp-CT exhibited the highest accuracy (AUC=0.93; specificity >90%), while Mtb-Zp-NT also demonstrated strong discriminatory power (AUC{approx}0.89). These findings establish that the immunologically optimized Zmp1 peptides are highly promising serological biomarkers for TB and EPTB. More broadly, they demonstrate how mechanistically informed epitope selection can accelerate translation of pathogen-specific immune signatures into sensitive, minimally invasive, and potentially point-of-care diagnostic platforms for resource-limited settings.

10.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Pillbox: A Leakage-Aware Foundation-Model Predictor and Lineage-Ceiling Diagnostic for Cancer Drug Response

We present Pillbox, a predictor whose pipeline is audited against the six Asiaee leakage modes with the one residual pathway shown by per-fold ablation to be non-load-bearing on hard splits. Our model combines CpGPT methylation embeddings, CLAMP drug embeddings, and per-fold-fit gene-expression principal components which are fused by Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM)-conditioned graph attention on the STRING v12 protein-protein interaction graph. Then we alpha-ensemble the model against a histogram-based gradient boosting regressor baseline. On GDSC GSE68379 (987 cell lines, 375 drugs) across seeds 42, 7, and 123, the ensemble reaches test R-Squared of 0.78, 0.77, and 0.76 on random, histology-blind, and site-blind splits respectively, with cell-aware lifts above the drug-mean floor of +0.054, +0.060, and +0.037. As a quantitative diagnostic for feature-stack saturation we propose the cross-architecture residual correlation, calibrated against a same-architecture-different-initialization control. On histology-blind splits the cross-architecture value of 0.939 falls short of the same-architecture ceiling of 0.974 by approximately 0.03 in residual correlation, a gap we interpret as the headroom available to architecture choice on top of the current foundation-model representation and consistent with the long-established observation that tissue lineage dominates cell-line drug response. We integrated curated mutation, methylation, and drug-target-expression channels, but these do not improve prediction once foundation-model embeddings are in place. Cross-screen validation against PRISM matches the GDSC-to-PRISM measurement reproducibility ceiling within 0.01 Spearman.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Image-based deep learning for emergency electrocardiogram classification

Automated electrocardiogram analysis has advanced largely through digital waveforms, yet many emergency-care workflows rely on ECGs available only as printed tracings, scanned reports, PDFs or mobile photographs. We developed an image-based deep learning system for emergency ECG classification and evaluated it in InCor-EMG, an expert-adjudicated dataset of 18,519 emergency ECGs spanning 12 ECG categories, with labels from 19 cardiologists. On the held-out test set, the final ConvNeXt ensemble achieved a macro F1-score of 0.807 (95% CI, 0.788-0.825), compared with 0.820 (95% CI, 0.805-0.832) for annotating cardiologists, and higher F1-scores than Mortara Veritas in most evaluated categories. Performance was associated more strongly with inter-reader agreement than with training sample size and remained informative across scanned and photographed ECGs, with supportive performance in model-enriched temporal and heterogeneous public-image evaluations. These findings support ECG image classification when digital waveforms are unavailable.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Did Models Learn Sufficiently? Attribution-Guided Training via Subset-Selected Counterfactual Augmentation

In current visual model training, models often rely on only limited sufficient causes for their predictions, which makes them sensitive to distribution shifts or the absence of key features. Attribution methods can accurately identify a model's critical regions. However, masking these areas to create counterfactuals often causes the model to misclassify the target, while humans can still easily recognize it. This divergence highlights that the model's learned dependencies may not be sufficiently causal. To address this issue, we propose Subset-Selected Counterfactual Augmentation (SS-CA), which integrates counterfactual explanations directly into the training process for targeted intervention. Building on the subset-selection-based LIMA attribution method, we develop Counterfactual LIMA to identify minimal spatial region sets whose removal can selectively alter model predictions. Leveraging these attributions, we introduce a data augmentation strategy that replaces the identified regions with natural background, and we train the model jointly on both augmented and original samples to mitigate incomplete causal learning. Extensive experiments across multiple ImageNet variants show that SS-CA improves generalization on in-distribution (ID) test data and achieves superior performance on out-of-distribution (OOD) benchmarks such as ImageNet-R and ImageNet-S. Under perturbations including noise, models trained with SS-CA also exhibit enhanced generalization, demonstrating that our approach effectively uses interpretability insights to correct model deficiencies and improve both performance and robustness.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Sorries Are Not the Hard Part: An Expert-Review Case Study of a Semi-Autonomous Formalization

arXiv:2606.13925v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models can often close proof gaps in interactive theorem provers, but a verified theorem is not the same thing as a reusable library contribution. We study this distinction through a detailed case study: a semi-autonomous formalization of Grothendieck's vanishing theorem. The initial version compiles with no sorries, but an expert review found serious problems in definitions, theorem generality, file organization, and the API. We then ran a review-driven refactor and compression process and obtained a second expert review. The before-and-after comparison shows a sharp split: agents adapted well to local, mechanically checkable feedback, but remained weak at choosing definitions and designing APIs. We argue that autoformalization should be evaluated not only by closed sorries, but by whether the resulting formalization survives expert review.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Data Scale, Not Latency, Shapes Cross-Lingual Encoder Transfer in Streaming ASR

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arXiv:2606.24169v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Adapting a streaming speech recognition model to a new language requires choosing between two plausible warm starts: a multilingual (ML) encoder or an English-only (EN) encoder. The common intuition is that the multilingual encoder should help most at low data, but it is unclear how long that advantage persists, whether tight streaming latency amplifies it, and whether it survives deployment quantization. We answer these questions with a controlled sweep of a 0.6 B-parameter cache-aware FastConformer transducer across eight European languages, up to five target-language data scales (100 h to 2500 h), three streaming tiers plus offline decoding, and up to four public test sets. The main result is that multilingual initialization is a data-limited advantage, not a latency-limited one. On FLEURS at 160 ms, the mean EN-ML word error rate (WER) gap falls from +4.21 percentage points (pp) at 100 h to +0.20 pp at 2500 h; a power-law fit summarizes this decay, with each doubling of target-language data roughly halving the remaining advantage. Across the three streaming tiers, the across-language mean EN-ML gap is approximately stable at each scale from 100 to 1000 h, and is near zero by 2500 h. Finally, 4-bit weight-only encoder quantization at the matched 560 ms streaming tier reduces the encoder footprint by about 3x, with an average FLEURS WER increase of about 0.5 pp. The resulting guideline is simple: use multilingual initialization in low-data regimes, treat the choice as effectively irrelevant at large data, and make latency and quantization decisions independently.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Root-Selecting Fixed-Point Inversion for Rectified Flows via Trajectory Straightness

Finding the initial noise that generates a given data sample, known as inversion, is a key component for downstream applications such as training-free image editing. Existing fixed-point inversion methods improve inversion accuracy by formulating each inversion step as a fixed-point problem, but they lack a principled mechanism for selecting among multiple fixed-point solutions that can arise in practice. We observe that different selections induce different inversion trajectories, leading to substantial variation in reconstruction and editing quality. For rectified flows, we further find that this variation is closely associated with trajectory straightness, motivating straightness as a principled selection criterion. We propose SelFix, a fixed-point inversion method that selects fixed-point solutions inducing straighter inverse trajectories while retaining convergence to an exact inverse root under standard local assumptions. Experiments on FLUX.1-dev and PIE-Bench show that SelFix improves fixed-point inversion, achieving stronger real-image reconstruction and better source-preserving prompt-based editing than prior inversion baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/seminkim/selfix.

16.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Molecular glue degraders of HuR suppress BRAF-mutant colorectal cancer

作者:

BRAF gain-of-function mutations, particularly BRAF(V600E), affect roughly 10% of all patients with colorectal cancer (CRC), and portend poor prognosis with limited therapeutic interventions. BRAF inhibitors such as encorafenib are ineffective due to MAPK pathway reactivation driven by BRAF dimerization. Combined inhibition of BRAF and EGFR, although approved therapies, results in short survival benefits and frequent treatment resistance and relapse1–3. Here, through rational chemical library design coupled with parallel proteomic screening, we identified dHuR as a molecular glue degrader of human antigen R (HuR), an RNA-binding protein that drives tumour growth, invasion and therapy resistance. dHuR binds to the CRBN ubiquitin ligase to create a unique benzofuran-tethered composite surface to recruit HuR as a neosubstrate by engaging its β-hairpin G-loop degron, as revealed by the cryo-electron microscopy structure of the ternary complex. dHuR abrogated BRAF expression by inducing its exon 18 skipping, and demonstrated superior suppression of BRAF-mutant CRC tumours including those gaining resistance to BRAF inhibitors. Finally, we performed kinome library CRISPR screening and revealed that inactivation of EGFR or MEK enhanced dHuR cytotoxicity, thus establishing a combinatorial strategy to treat patients with refractory BRAF-mutant CRC. Molecular glue degraders of the RNA-binding protein HuR have therapeutic potential for BRAF-mutant cancers.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

The Power of Test-Time Training for Approximate Sampling

arXiv:2606.11437v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Efficiently sampling from a complex probability distribution is a fundamental problem which has become increasingly pertinent in recent years with the rise of generative AI, as sophisticated sampling procedures from LLMs have been proposed to solve challenging reasoning problems. The efficacy of such sampling algorithms is limited, however, by the relationship between the LLM and the particular sampling task at hand, which has motivated the framework of test-time training (TTT). TTT works by updating a model's weights in response to partial generations and reward feedback received at inference time, thus adapting to the particular problem. In this work, we propose a formalization for TTT as the problem of producing a sample from a given probability measure $\mu^\star$ belonging to a known class ${F}$ of distributions, given an oracle $\hat \mu$ which yields approximate density estimates for $\mu^\star$. This is closely related to the problem of reducing sampling to approximate counting studied in seminal works of Jerrum, Valiant & Vazirani (1986) and Jerrum & Sinclair (1989): namely, when ${F}$ is the class of all distributions, it coincides exactly with the aforementioned counting-to-sampling reduction. In this paper, we first show a quadratic lower bound on the query complexity of sampling from $\mu^\star$ given query access to $\hat \mu$ (for sufficiently large classes ${F}$), thus showing that the random walk approach proposed by Jerrum & Sinclair (1989) and refined by Hayes & Sinclair (2010), is optimal. This answers an open question posed by Hayes & Sinclair. We then show that this lower bound can be circumvented if the size of ${F}$ is bounded appropriately. As we discuss, this latter result can be viewed as an abstraction of TTT, and thus represents a starting point for the development of a principled theoretical framework for TTT.

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

Low-Complexity Policy Tessellations in Structured Markov Decision Processes

作者:

arXiv:2606.25593v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study optimal-policy geometry in structured Markov decision processes. While approximate dynamic programming and reinforcement learning typically approximate high-dimensional value functions, we show that optimal policies induce simpler decision tessellations. We propose boundary-based policy approximations that learn policy regions directly. A policy-loss decomposition links performance degradation to action margins and explains why errors concentrate near indifference boundaries. Inventory control and queue admission experiments show lower policy error, smaller value gaps, faster error decay, and stability than reinforcement learning baselines.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Association Between Intermittent Water Supply and Helicobacter pylori Prevalence: A Global Ecological Study

Background: Helicobacter pylori is a major global pathogen with recognized potential for waterborne transmission. Intermittent water supply affects over one billion worldwide and may promote H. pylori contamination of municipal sources. Whether water supply discontinuity contributes to population-level H. pylori burden has not been examined globally. Materials and Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional ecological analysis of 79 countries with matched utility-level water infrastructure data and country-level H. pylori prevalence estimates from a published global meta-analysis. The primary exposure was continuity of water supply (hours/day). Secondary exposures included non-revenue water percentage (NRW %), pipe breaks per utility, and operating cost coverage ratio. Unadjusted and adjusted linear regression models with heteroscedasticity-consistent standard errors were estimated, controlling for basic sanitation coverage and log-transformed population density. A sensitivity analysis used a population-based measure of water availability on demand. Results: Greater water supply continuity was independently associated with lower H. pylori prevalence in both unadjusted ({beta} = -0.987, 95% CI -1.669 to -0.305, p = 0.005) and adjusted models ({beta} = -1.125, 95% CI -1.876 to -0.375, p = 0.004). Higher NRW % and lower operating cost coverage were each associated with higher H. pylori prevalence after adjustment. Pipe breaks were not significant in regression models though the Spearman correlation was in the expected direction. Sensitivity analysis produced consistent findings. Conclusion: IWS and broader water infrastructure deterioration are associated with higher H. pylori prevalence at the country level. These findings implicate water supply continuity as a potentially relevant environmental determinant of H. pylori transmission and suggest a role for water system investment within long-term gastric cancer prevention strategies.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Cognitive and Neuroimaging Biomarker Intra-Individual Variability in Alzheimer's Disease

Background Greater cognitive intra-individual variability (IIV) reflects increased heterogeneous performance across cognitive domains and has been linked to a higher risk of Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, it remains unclear whether cognitive IIV is linked to heterogeneous dispersion of regional AD pathology. Hence, we aimed to examine the association between cognitive IIV and AD neuroimaging biomarker IIV. Methods This study included participants with normal cognition (CN) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative. Cognitive IIV was computed as the within-person standard deviation of five domain-specific neuropsychological test z-scores. Four neuroimaging biomarker IIV metrics were similarly derived using regional amyloid-{beta} (n = 1,021), tau (n = 719), cortical thickness (n = 2,148), and combined amyloid-tau-neurodegeneration (ATN, n = 258). Associations between cognitive IIV and each biomarker IIV were evaluated using linear regression models, adjusted for relevant covariates. Results Higher cognitive IIV was associated with greater biomarker IIV across amyloid-{beta} ({beta} = 0.039, SE = 0.014, p = .006), tau ({beta} = 0.196, SE = 0.033, p < .001), cortical thinning ({beta} = 0.036, SE = 0.008, p < .001), and ATN ({beta} = 0.176, SE = 0.043, p < .001). Interaction analyses revealed that the associations of cognitive IIV with tau IIV, cortical thickness IIV, and ATN IIV were stronger in MCI than CN individuals. Significant interactions between cognitive IIV and biomarker positivity status showed that the effect with amyloid-{beta} IIV was attenuated in A- ({beta} = 0.004, SE = 0.014, p = .78) but that the effect with tau IIV remained robust even in T- individuals ({beta} = 0.088, SE = 0.022, p < .001). Conclusion Elevated cognitive IIV is associated with greater heterogeneity in cortical dispersion of AD-related pathology, particularly in prodromal AD and in the presence of abnormal pathology. As a novel measure that captures variation in topographical scattering of AD pathological burden across the cortex, AD biomarker IIV may offer research and clinical utility beyond evaluating absolute biomarker load or thresholds.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Event-Aligned Analysis of Multi-Rater Pain Assessments Using Continuous Wearable Physiology

arXiv:2606.23705v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pain is assessed differently by patients, nurses, and clinicians, yet most computational approaches assume a single ground-truth label - effectively ignoring who is doing the rating. We introduce a rater-aware, event-aligned framework that converts sparse, rater-specific pain ratings into discrete pain-change events and aligns continuous wearable physiological signals to these events, preserving rater identity throughout. Applied to multimodal wearable data collected during spine-related pain procedures, the framework identifies substantial disagreement across rater groups and provides preliminary, exploratory evidence of rater-dependent physiological differences preceding reported pain increases. These findings suggest that pain-physiology relationships may not be rater-invariant, and that aggregating assessments across raters may mask meaningful physiological patterns. A rater-aware, event-aligned perspective is therefore a promising direction for interpreting wearable data in real-world clinical pain assessment.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Evaluating LLMs on Real-World Software Performance Optimization

Software performance optimization is a notoriously complex and manual task. Despite the growing use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for code refinement, we still lack benchmarks that capture how optimization actually happens in real-world codebases. Existing frameworks often oversimplify the problem by focusing on isolated functions or a single performance metric, missing the critical trade-offs between execution time and memory footprint, the inherent noise of the measurement environment, and the variability introduced by different input data and execution conditions. We address this by introducing SWE-Pro, a repository-level benchmark derived from 102 expert-written optimizations from open-source projects. Unlike previous benchmarks, SWE-Pro pairs each task with parameterized tests to evaluate runtime, peak memory, and Time-Weighted Memory Usage (TWMU) across varying input data and execution conditions under noise-aware measurement conditions. Our evaluation shows that current LLMs struggle significantly: runtime gains are negligible, and memory optimizations are nearly non-existent. This stands in sharp contrast to expert implementations, which achieve an aggregate speedup of 15.5x and peak memory reduction of 171.3x over benchmark tasks. Expert-written improvements are observed in 91.2% of tasks for runtime and 65.7% for peak memory. Our findings expose a substantial gap between current LLM capabilities and the demands of expert-level engineering.

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

Critique of Agent Model

arXiv:2606.23991v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: What is an agent? What constitutes agency? With the rise of Large Language Model (LLM) systems marketed as ``coding agents'', ``AI co-scientists'', and other ``agentic" tools that promise to drive up productivity, and at the same time, ``existential" concerns such as AI escaping human control with destructive power under a speculative ``machine agency" against humans, it has become essential to clarify where automation ends and agency begins, both for building capable systems and for understanding whether and what to fear. Drawing on Descartes' grounding of agency in independent thought, and on portrayals of autonomous beings in science fiction, we survey the current landscape of AI agents, and analyze agent architectures along five dimensions: goal, identity, decision-making, self-regulation, and learning. Specifically, we argue that genuine agency requires these structures to be internalized within the system itself rather than assembled through external scaffolding. This distinction between agentic systems, whose competence resides in engineered workflows, and agentive systems, whose capabilities (including social interaction) arise endogenously, defines the boundary between systems designed for prescribed tasks, and those capable of operating in the open world with true autonomy. Building on this analysis, we propose the Goal-Identity-Configurator (GIC) architecture for a general-purpose agent model, combining hierarchical goal decomposition, identity evolution, simulative reasoning grounded in a separately trained world model, learned self-regulation, and self-directed learning from both real and simulated experience. Furthermore, we share insight on the auditability, controllability, and safety of agentive systems that possess greater autonomy and ``agency", but remain under human oversight.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

A Spectral Phase Diagram for Binary Few-Shot Classification: Intrinsic Dimensionality, Geometric Saturation, and Representational Diagnosis

作者:

arXiv:2606.24903v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deciding when to stop collecting labeled examples is a fundamental but undertheorized problem in applied machine learning. The saturation index $S(K) = \operatorname{erank}(\widehat{\Sigma}_W^{(K)}) / K$ measures the ratio of the effective rank of the pooled within-class sample covariance to the shot count; we prove it falls below a threshold precisely when the covariance estimator is well-concentrated around the population covariance and the linear discriminant has stabilized. The index is computable in $O(d^3)$ time from support features alone, requiring no test labels or trained classifier. Evaluated across $N = 246$ doubling-pair observations from seventeen binary tasks and six datasets, sixteen of seventeen tasks have a positive within-task Spearman correlation between $S(K)$ and marginal accuracy gain (median $\rho = 0.811$). The pooled Spearman correlation is $\rho = 0.548$ ($p = 1.1 \times 10^{-20}$, $N = 246$). A three-phase diagram (exploration, transition, saturation) with mean marginal gains of $3.48\%$, $2.40\%$, and $0.82\%$ is supported by all pairwise significance tests ($p \leq 0.008$). As a binary stopping rule, the index achieves AUC $= 0.752$, providing meaningful probabilistic guidance for annotation decisions. Asymptotic effective rank and peak accuracy show no significant monotone relationship across tasks (Spearman $r_s = 0.380$, $p = 0.133$, $N = 17$). A small saturation index paired with low accuracy diagnoses representational inadequacy. All results are for binary classification with a fixed linear classifier; extensions to $N$-way settings and pretrained backbone representations are discussed as future work.