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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Level of Physical Activity and ApoE Status - Effects on Alzheimer's Disease and on Mortality

Background: Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD) affect over 7.2 million Americans aged 65 and older, with the APOE-4 allele representing the strongest known genetic risk factor. Physical activity (PA) has been associated with reduced dementia risk, but its interaction with APOE genotype remains poorly characterized in large, genomically informed cohorts. Methods: We conducted a retrospective cohort analysis using linked genomic, survey, and longitudinal electronic health record data from the VA Million Veteran Program (MVP). Veterans aged

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

GePBench: Evaluating Fundamental Geometric Perception for Multimodal Large Language Models

Geometric shapes play important roles in both physical world and human cognition. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made significant advancements in visual understanding, their abilities to recognize geometric shapes and their spatial relationships, which we term geometric perception, are not explicitly and systematically explored. To address this gap, we introduce GePBench, a novel benchmark specifically designed to assess the geometric perception capabilities of MLLMs. Our extensive evaluations reveal that even the current state-of-the-art MLLMs exhibit significant deficiencies in geometric perception tasks. Furthermore, we show that models trained with GePBench data demonstrate considerable improvements on a wide range of downstream tasks, highlighting the critical role of geometric perception in enabling advanced multimodal applications. Our code and datasets are available at \href{https://github.com/Changhao-Xiang/GePBench}{https://github.com/Changhao-Xiang/GePBench}.

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

Auditing Discriminatory Patterns in Mortgage Lending Through Association Rules and Fair Binning

arXiv:2606.12435v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mortgage lending in the United States exhibits persistent racial and gender disparities. We investigate whether standard data preprocessing steps, specifically attribute binning, amplify these disparities in downstream pattern mining. Using 103,481 cleaned mortgage applications from the HMDA 2023 dataset (Chicago metropolitan area), we build a three-stage pipeline: (1) a PySpark data cleaning and binning pipeline that implements both standard equal-frequency binning and the epsilon-biased fair binning algorithm from Asudeh et al. [1], (2) FP-Growth association rule mining that compares denial patterns under both binning regimes, and (3) K-Means clustering with a per-cluster disparate impact audit. Our standard binning shows 9.63% racial bias in income discretization, consistent with the 8-10% reported in prior work. Fair binning with seven race groups is infeasible at epsilon=0.03 and only succeeds at epsilon=0.08 with a Price of Fairness of 29.4%. FP-Growth reveals that high debt-to-income ratio is the dominant denial predictor (67.2% confidence, 2.81 lift), while racial bias does not appear as explicit high-support rules. However, K-Means clustering followed by a disparate impact audit flags 10 out of 45 cluster-group pairs, showing that Black applicants face significantly higher denial rates than White applicants even among financially similar groups.

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

FlowMo-WM: A World Model with Object Momentum and Hidden Ambient Drift

arXiv:2606.13817v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World models in robot learning predict future states from visual observations and actions, enabling agents to reason about the consequences of their controls. However, many action-conditioned models are evaluated in settings where motion is dominated by immediate control, whereas aquatic surface vehicles and other real-world objects continue moving under inertia and are displaced by hidden ambient drift, such as water currents or wind. We propose FlowMo-WM, an end-to-end trainable visual world model that infers object-centric motion state and a predictive long-history context associated with hidden drift from image-action histories without direct supervision of flow fields. FlowMo-WM factorizes image-action history into a short-history latent state, trained to summarize object-centric motion, and a longer-history context, trained to summarize slowly varying exogenous influences. A zero-context residual transition separates action-conditioned base dynamics from context-dependent drift effects during latent rollout. In simulated aquatic surface-vehicle environments with diverse hidden flows, disturbances, and randomized vehicle dynamics, FlowMo-WM improves long-horizon rollout accuracy over representative action-conditioned latent world models. Prediction-time context ablations, in which the inferred context is zeroed or shuffled during rollout, show that the ambient context is important for stable prediction under hidden drift, while frozen linear probes characterize information encoded in the learned factors.

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

IsabeLLM: Automated Theorem Proving Applied to Formally Verifying Consensus

arXiv:2606.18098v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have led AI for Theorem Proving to become a promising means of formally verifying computer systems. Whilst formal verification is traditionally reserved for safety-critical systems due to the required amount of expertise and effort, AI can help to automate a large amount of this workload and make it far more accessible. Blockchain-based systems are becoming increasingly popular and are frequently targeted by malicious actors, often resulting in huge financial losses, highlighting the need to better verify these systems and mitigate vulnerabilities. Arguably the most important component of these systems is the consensus protocol, which allows nodes to agree on decisions in a potentially adversarial environment. In this paper, we improve upon IsabeLLM, the automated theorem proving tool in Isabelle. Namely, we implement a Retrieval-Augmented Generation framework, Error tracing and counterexample generation for improved context supplied to the Large Language Model. Compatibility with the latest version of Isabelle and Sledgehammer is also implemented for improved efficiency. We compare the performance of the two versions of IsabeLLM in their ability to complete the verification of Bitcoin's Proof of Work consensus.

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

Exploring Academic Influence of Algorithms by Co-occurrence Network Based on Full-text of Academic Papers

Algorithms have become central to scientific research in the era of artificial intelligence (AI). Although algorithm mentions in papers are often used to indicate popularity and influence, existing studies usually evaluate individual algorithms in isolation and pay limited attention to the collective influence formed through their interconnections. This study constructs large-scale algorithm co-occurrence networks in natural language processing (NLP) based on the full text of academic papers and investigates algorithm influence from a network perspective. Using deep learning models, we extract algorithm entities and build overall, cumulative, and annual co-occurrence networks. We analyze their structural characteristics and apply multiple centrality measures to assess the group influence of algorithms across the whole field and over time. The results show that algorithm networks display typical features of complex networks, with increasingly dense connections developing over approximately two decades. Classic, high-performing algorithms and those located at the intersections of different research periods tend to have high popularity, control, centrality, and balanced influence. When the influence of an algorithm declines, it usually loses its core network position first, followed by weaker associations with other algorithms. This study is the first large-scale analysis of algorithm co-occurrence networks. Covering more than four decades of academic publications, it provides a temporal and structural view of algorithm influence and offers a foundation for future research on networks linking algorithms, scholars, and tasks.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

From Small to Large: A Graph Convolutional Network Approach for Solving Assortment Optimization Problems

arXiv:2507.10834v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Assortment optimization seeks to select a subset of substitutable products, subject to constraints, to maximize expected revenue. The problem is NP-hard due to its combinatorial and nonlinear nature and arises frequently in industries such as e-commerce, where platforms must solve thousands of such problems each minute. We propose a graph convolutional network (GCN) framework to efficiently solve constrained assortment optimization problems. Our approach constructs a graph representation of the problem, trains a GCN to learn the mapping from problem parameters to optimal assortments, and develops three inference policies based on the GCN's output. Owing to the GCN's ability to generalize across instance sizes, patterns learned from small-scale samples can be transferred to large-scale problems. Theoretical results are established to show the expressive power of the proposed GCN, and explain the underlying mechanism of the size generalization ability. Numerical experiments show that a GCN trained on instances with 20 products achieves over 85% of the optimal revenue on problems with up to 2,000 products within seconds, outperforming existing heuristics in both accuracy and efficiency. We further extend the framework to settings with an unknown choice model using transaction data and demonstrate similar performance and scalability.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

A Stabilized Path-Space Approach to Diffusion-Based Posterior Sampling

arXiv:2606.12710v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion models provide expressive data-driven priors for Bayesian inverse problems, but many diffusion posterior samplers rely on heuristic guidance approximations that can fail for nonlinear operators and multimodal posteriors. In this work, we develop a stabilized path-space framework for diffusion-based posterior sampling. Starting from a base diffusion process whose terminal marginal represents the prior, we define a likelihood-weighted target measure on trajectories and cast posterior sampling as learning a controlled stochastic process whose path measure matches this target. This formulation connects diffusion posterior sampling to stochastic optimal control while preserving the Bayesian structure needed for uncertainty quantification. We introduce a time reparameterization that makes the path-space control problem well posed by removing the bias induced by the unknown initial value function, without auxiliary training. We then learn the control via a trust-region path-space optimization method with log-variance objectives. The path-space perspective also unifies our learned control approach with existing guidance-based samplers, quantifies the sampling error induced by approximate controls, and yields importance sampling corrections for asymptotically exact posterior expectations. We evaluate the proposed framework on a suite of benchmark inverse problems with analytically characterized or high-quality reference posteriors, enabling principled assessment of sampling accuracy and uncertainty quantification. These experiments provide insight into the behavior of diffusion-based posterior samplers and demonstrate improved accuracy and robustness over leading approaches.

09.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-21

U = U for all: Advancing equity in HIV prevention

by Thiago S. Torres, Paula M. Luz Suppression of HIV with antiretrovirals eliminates HIV transmission risk, summarized as Undetectable = Untransmittable (U = U). However, U = U literacy remains unevenly understood and shared, and stigmas persist. Equitable and accurate awareness of U = U requires culturally tailored interventions, improved provider education, and supportive policy environments beyond biomedical evidence alone. Suppression of HIV with antiretrovirals eliminates HIV transmission risk, summarized as Undetectable = Untransmittable (U=U). However, U=U literacy remains unevenly understood and shared, and stigmas persist. In this Perspective, Thiago Torres and Paula Luz outline what is needed to improve equity and accuracy in global awareness and education of U=U.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Latent Geometric Chords for Query-Efficient Decision-Based Adversarial Attacks

While decision-based black-box adversarial attacks present a severe security threat, current methodologies suffer from fundamental limitations. Pixel-wise attacks frequently introduce unnatural, high-frequency visual artifacts, while latent-space frameworks are confined by the limited search space of low-dimensional manifolds and inherent reconstruction flaws. To resolve these limitations, we propose Latent Geometric Chords (LGC) for Query-Efficient Decision-Based Adversarial Attacks alongside a variant, LGC-H. At its core, LGC navigates decision boundaries by executing a curvature-aware geometric search within a compressed semantic manifold. To guarantee high visual fidelity and circumvent dimensionality bottlenecks, we introduce a Residual-based Adversarial Generation (RAG) mechanism. RAG isolates semantic perturbations as geometric chords and superimposes them directly onto the original source image. RAG substantially resolves baseline reconstruction flaws and effectively doubles the permissible search space dimensions. Experimental results demonstrate that LGC achieves robust cross-dataset transferability and substantially outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Notably, our method, LGC, minimizes perturbation magnitudes while achieving state-of-the-art visual fidelity–with a Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) exceeding 0.99 and a Learned Perceptual Image Patch Similarity (LPIPS) below 0.01 at 5000 queries–and sustaining high attack success rates under stringent perceptual constraints, successfully compromising adversarially trained robust models. The source code is available at: https://github.com/eihmuekhine/Latent-Geometric-Chords.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

FALCON: Transforming Cyber Threat Intelligence into Deployable IDS Rules with Self-Reflection

Signature-based Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) detect malicious activity by matching network or host events against predefined rules. Security analysts manually develop these rules from Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI). As threats evolve, this manual pipeline faces two bottlenecks. Before authoring a new rule, an analyst must reconcile the incoming CTI with the existing rule base and determine whether to create, update, or retire one. This process is challenging due to the representational differences between the CTI and Rule formats. This gap limits the effectiveness of keyword- and embedding-based search, making rule reconciliation cognitively demanding and, in turn, contributing to "rule bloat". Second, automated verification of a new rule is inherently difficult as zero-day threats lack ground truth from simulated testing. Hence, standard metrics cannot prove that a rule semantically adheres to the CTI, and the use of LLMs leads to non-deterministic behavior. To address these challenges, we introduce FALCON, an agentic framework for CTI-grounded rule retrieval, generation, and validation. At its core, a novel CTI-Rule semantic scorer, quantifies the functional alignment between a CTI and a rule; the same signal drives a retriever that surfaces relevant deployed rules and a ground-truth-free validator that scores generated ones. Around it, a generation pipeline produces deployable rules from CTI in real time and refines them through self-reflective syntactic, semantic, and performance validators. Across network (Snort) and host-based (YARA) platforms on a purpose-built CTI-Rule dataset, FALCON attains a mean relevance of 0.72 (approx), with 84% inter-rater agreement among cybersecurity analysts, underscoring the promise of real-time security automation.

12.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

Generative design of antigen-specific T-cell receptor sequences with a conditional diffusion model

T cell receptor (TCR)-based immunotherapy holds immense potential for treating cancers and infectious diseases, where highly antigen-specific TCR recognition is crucial for adaptive immunity against tumors and pathogens. Engineering or de novo generation of the complementarity-determining region 3 (CDR3) loops of TCRs using artificial intelligence offers a powerful alternative to designing reactive TCRs rather than laborious experimental screening. However, current in silico approaches are constrained by weak conditional guidance, limited flexibility, and a lack of rigorous functional validation. To address these limitations, we introduce TCRDiff, a generative diffusion framework for designing antigen-specific TCRs conditioned on peptide-MHC (pMHC) targets and germline-encoded variable genes. By leveraging pre-trained knowledge from massive T-cell repertoires and TCR-pMHC recognition data, TCRDiff generates CDR3{beta} sequences with state-of-the-art fidelity to native binding TCRs through a denoising diffusion process. Furthermore, incorporating the interface geometry features generated TCR-pMHC complexes with superior structural plausibility. As a proof of concept, we deployed TCRDiff in a systematic pipeline to design candidate TCRs for immunotherapy. In vitro activation assays validated that TCRDiff-generated TCRs specifically recognize the MAGE-A3 epitope with minimized off-target cross-reactivity. Together, TCRDiff establishes a powerful, validated computational paradigm to accelerate the development of TCR-based immunotherapies.

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

Randomized Midpoint Method for Log-Concave Sampling under Constraints

arXiv:2405.15379v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we study the problem of sampling from log-concave distributions supported on convex and compact sets, with a particular focus on the randomized midpoint discretization of both overdamped and kinetic Langevin diffusions in constrained domains. We revisit the proximal framework for handling constraints through projection operators and develop a more general formulation that encompasses Euclidean, Bregman, and Gauge projections. The resulting smooth approximation allows a unified and tractable analysis of Langevin algorithms and their variants under constraints. Within this framework, we establish convergence guarantees in Wasserstein-$q$ $(q\geqslant 1)$ distances between the smooth surrogate and the target distribution. We further derive complementary lower bounds, showing that the results are near-optimal in order. Building upon this tight approximation analysis, we obtain new convergence guarantees for the randomized midpoint Langevin algorithms and refined bounds for both vanilla and kinetic Langevin Monte Carlo methods under constraints, thereby advancing the theoretical understanding of constrained diffusion-based sampling.

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

Minimisation of Quasar-Convex Functions Using Random Zeroth-Order Oracles

arXiv:2505.02281v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper explores the performance of a random Gaussian smoothing zeroth-order (ZO) scheme for minimising quasar-convex (QC) and strongly quasar-convex (SQC) functions in both unconstrained and constrained settings. For the unconstrained problem, we establish the ZO algorithm's convergence to a global minimum along with its complexity when applied to both QC and SQC functions. For the constrained problem, we introduce the new notion of proximal-quasar-convexity and prove analogous results to the unconstrained case. Specifically, we derive complexity bounds and prove convergence of the algorithm to a neighbourhood of a global minimum whose size can be controlled under a variance reduction scheme. Beyond the theoretical guarantees, we demonstrate the practical implications of our results on several machine learning problems where quasar-convexity naturally arises, including linear dynamical system identification and generalised linear models.

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

Towards More General Control of Diffusion Models Using Jeffrey Guidance

A key strength of diffusion models lies in their flexibility, since their outputs can be controlled at sampling time through guidance. However, beyond simple cases such as conditional sampling, the target distribution is often left implicit, defined only through a sampling rule or a heuristic energy function. To address this, we propose Jeffrey guidance, a principled framework that extends diffusion-model control to applications beyond what standard guidance can express. It leverages Jeffrey's rule of conditioning to update marginal distributions towards a prescribed target, preserving the conditional structure and minimally perturbing the joint distribution. We first demonstrate Jeffrey guidance by targeting a prescribed embedding distribution. With Inception embeddings as the target, this leads to substantial reductions in FID on both CIFAR-10 and FFHQ. We further apply Jeffrey guidance to fairness on CelebA-HQ, updating an unconditional diffusion model to enforce independence between attributes.

16.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-08

HydraMPP: A lightweight library for distributed massive parallel processing in Python - threading at scale.

We now exist in the era of massive datasets from genomics, large language models, and all the known knowledge of humanity right at our fingertips. Much of this data is becoming more accessible; however, processing such data remains an ongoing issue across systems including high performance computing (HPC) infrastructures. Massively parallel computing (MPP) has solved this using a divide and conquer approach by splitting workloads across independent nodes (i.e., central processing units (CPU) allowing for higher scaling of data). The main engine for this in python is Ray; however, it has many issues including a large code space, security issues, debugging opacity, and memory management issues. Here, we present HydraMPP, a lightweight, ease of use and utilization, with high auditability, and with SLURM ergonomics.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

BLUEmed: Retrieval-Augmented Multi-Agent Debate for Clinical Error Detection

Terminology substitution errors in clinical notes, where one medical term is replaced by a linguistically valid but clinically different term, pose a persistent challenge for automated error detection in healthcare. We introduce BLUEmed, a multi-agent debate framework augmented with hybrid Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) that combines evidence-grounded reasoning with multi-perspective verification for clinical error detection. BLUEmed decomposes each clinical note into focused sub-queries, retrieves source-partitioned evidence through dense, sparse, and online retrieval, and assigns two domain expert agents distinct knowledge bases to produce independent analyses; when the experts disagree, a structured counter-argumentation round and cross-source adjudication resolve the conflict, followed by a cascading safety layer that filters common false-positive patterns. We evaluate BLUEmed on a clinical terminology substitution detection benchmark under both zero-shot and few-shot prompting with multiple backbone models spanning proprietary and open-source families. Experimental results show that BLUEmed achieves the best accuracy (69.13%), ROC-AUC (74.45%), and PR-AUC (72.44%) under few-shot prompting, outperforming both single-agent RAG and debate-only baselines. Further analyses across six backbone models and two prompting strategies confirm that retrieval augmentation and structured debate are complementary, and that the framework benefits most from models with sufficient instruction-following and clinical language understanding.

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

When Poison Fails After Retrieval: Revisiting Corpus Poisoning under Chunking and Reranking Pipelines

arXiv:2606.11265v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are vulnerable to corpus poisoning attacks that manipulate downstream model outputs through malicious knowledge injection. Existing studies mainly evaluate poisoning under simplified retrieval settings, overlooking practical RAG pipelines involving document chunking, dense retrieval, reranking, and grounded generation. In this paper, we revisit corpus poisoning under realistic multi-stage retrieval pipelines and show that many existing attacks substantially degrade after reranking despite achieving high retrieval-stage relevance. We identify retrieval granularity mismatch as a key reason for this failure: document-level adversarial signals are often fragmented during chunking, while rerankers favor locally coherent and answer-bearing passages rather than globally optimized semantic similarity. Based on this observation, we propose Chunk-aware and Rerank-Consistent Poisoning (CRCP), a poisoning framework that jointly optimizes retrieval relevance, reranker consistency, and chunk-boundary robustness. CRCP explicitly models chunking transformations during optimization to generate locally self-contained adversarial passages that remain effective under varying chunking configurations. Experiments on standard RAG benchmarks with multiple retrievers and rerankers show that existing poisoning methods are highly sensitive to chunk size and reranking strategies, whereas CRCP achieves substantially higher attack success rates and stronger robustness across realistic retrieval pipelines. Our findings highlight an important realism gap in current RAG security evaluation and suggest that poisoning in modern RAG systems should be studied as a multi-stage retrieval consistency problem rather than a retrieval-only problem.

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

MineExplorer: Evaluating Open-World Exploration of MLLM Agents in Minecraft

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong capabilities in perception, reasoning, and action generation. However, their ability to sustain exploration in dynamic open worlds remains unclear. Existing embodied and game-based benchmarks often compress interaction into short-horizon tasks or entangle success with domain-specific game mechanics. In this paper, we introduce MineExplorer benchmark for evaluating open-world exploration capabilities of MLLM agents in Minecraft. We first filter atomic tasks whose solutions rely heavily on Minecraft-specific knowledge to better reflect general open-world reasoning. Then we organize the benchmark around a ReAct-style capability formulation and compose atomic tasks into implicit multi-hop tasks. To further construct reliable instances, MineExplorer uses a multi-agent synthesis workflow that jointly designs task graphs, sandbox scenes, and rule-based milestone evaluators. Human evaluation shows that the multi-agent synthesis workflow produces significantly more reliable instances than a single-agent baseline. Experiments with advanced MLLM agents show that open-world exploration remains challenging, as strong models can handle many single-hop tasks but degrade sharply when hidden prerequisites must be coordinated over longer trajectories. Further analysis finds that task difficulty tracks agent completion, and larger models or thinking modes do not consistently translate into better performance. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Jometeorie/MineExplorer.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Graphical conditional generative modeling for digital twin modeling

arXiv:2606.16219v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Digital twin modeling, including control and data assimilation under model uncertainty, often faces an open-ended fidelity problem: adding variables, data streams, and time scales can indefinitely increase model complexity, ultimately producing systems that are difficult to maintain, validate, interpret, and use for stress or safety testing. As an alternative, one can seek parsimonious stochastic surrogate models built only on the variables needed to describe the relevant quantities of interest. We introduce a framework for discovering such variables from observational data by identifying which candidate inputs influence the full conditional law of a target quantity, rather than only its conditional mean. This distinction is essential in stochastic, coarse-grained, or partially observed systems, where dependencies may appear through changes in variability, tail behavior, multimodality, or uncertainty rather than through deterministic functional relationships. The framework couples conditional generative modeling, which learns the conditional distribution of the target given candidate inputs, with Gaussian-process-based analysis of variance (through kernel mode decomposition), which enables iterative pruning of non-influential inputs and interpretable structure discovery. In control settings, the resulting surrogate can be interpreted as a learned Markov decision process: the method identifies not only a transition model, but also the state, action, and memory variables needed to make the learned dynamics effectively Markovian. Across examples involving stochastic dynamical systems, missing variables, PDE control, reinforcement learning, and economic data, the discovered structures yield interpretable stochastic surrogates whose downstream performance is comparable to models trained on the full variable set.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Structure-Aware Text Recognition for Ancient Greek Critical Editions

Recent advances in visual language models (VLMs) have transformed end-to-end document understanding. However, their ability to interpret the complex layout semantics of historical scholarly texts remains limited. This paper investigates structure-aware text recognition for Ancient Greek critical editions, which have dense reference hierarchies and extensive marginal annotations. We introduce two novel resources: (i) a large-scale synthetic corpus of 185,000 page images generated from TEI/XML sources with controlled typographic and layout variation, and (ii) a curated benchmark of real scanned editions spanning more than a century of editorial and typographic practices. Using these datasets, we evaluate three state-of-the-art VLMs under both zero-shot and fine-tuning regimes. Our experiments reveal substantial limitations in current VLM architectures when confronted with highly structured historical documents. In zero-shot settings, most models significantly underperform compared to established off-the-shelf software. Nevertheless, the Qwen3VL-8B model achieves state-of-the-art performance, reaching a median Character Error Rate of 1.0\% on real scans. These results highlight both the current shortcomings and the future potential of VLMs for structure-aware recognition of complex scholarly documents.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Creative Collision: Directorial Persona Steering and Competition in Large Language Models

Activation steering has emerged as a powerful tool for shaping the behaviour of large language models at inference time, yet most prior work injects a single semantic direction into the residual stream. We study the richer setting in which two semantically opposing steering vectors are superimposed – a regime we call Creative Collision. Concretely, we construct directorial persona vectors for Steven Spielberg (optimistic, redemptive moral valence) and Martin Scorsese (dark, morally ambiguous) via mean-difference activation contrast on curated screenplay-derived corpora, then interpolate between them with a scalar mixing parameter $\alpha \in [0,1]$ and a steering coefficient $\lambda$. Across five evaluation axes – moral valence, generation coherence, surface style, directional dominance, and vector geometry – three principal findings emerge: (i)~Spielberg's representational signature exhibits robust directional dominance, suppressing Scorsese's moral influence across almost the entire interpolation range; (ii)~intermediate collision points paradoxically improve generation coherence relative to pure single-director steering at high $\lambda$; and (iii)~both personas localise maximally to layer~28 of a 40-layer decoder-only transformer, revealing a shared moral-tone substrate. These results illuminate the geometry of competing semantic directions in transformer residual streams and have direct implications for controllable creative generation and value-aligned narrative synthesis.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Top-Theta Attention: Sparsifying Transformers by Compensated Thresholding

We present Top-Theta (Top-$\theta$) Attention, a training-free method for sparsifying transformer attention during inference. Our key insight is that static, per-head thresholds can be calibrated to retain the desired constant number of significant elements per attention row. This approach enables content-based sparsity without retraining, and it remains robust across data domains. We further introduce compensation techniques to preserve accuracy under aggressive sparsification, establishing attention thresholding as a practical and principled alternative to top-k attention. We provide extensive evaluation on natural language processing tasks, showing that Top-$\theta$ achieves 3-10x reduction in V-cache usage and up to 10x fewer attention elements during inference while degrading no more than 1% in accuracy.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Planning under Distribution Shifts with Causal POMDPs

arXiv:2602.23545v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In the real world, planning is often challenged by distribution shifts. As such, a model of the environment obtained under one set of conditions may no longer remain valid as the distribution of states or the environment dynamics change, which in turn causes previously learned strategies to fail. In this work, we propose a theoretical framework for planning under partial observability using Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) formulated using causal knowledge. By representing shifts in the environment as interventions on this causal POMDP, the framework enables evaluating plans under hypothesized changes and actively identifying which components of the environment have been altered. We show how to maintain and update a belief over both the latent state and the underlying domain, and we prove that the value function remains piecewise linear and convex (PWLC) in this augmented belief space. Preservation of PWLC under distribution shifts has the advantage of maintaining the tractability of planning via $\alpha$-vector-based POMDP methods.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Disentangling adiposity-related and non-adiposity-related genetic pathways for type 2 diabetes

OBJECTIVE To identify circulating proteins associated with type 2 diabetes (T2D) risk through pathways not fully explained by body mass index (BMI), and to assess therapeutic actionability. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS We applied GWAS-by-subtraction within a genomic structural equation model to European ancestry summary statistics for T2D (74,124 cases, 824,006 controls) and BMI (n = 681,275), partitioning T2D liability into BMI-related and BMI-subtracted components. We then performed proteome-wide Mendelian randomization (MR) using cis-protein quantitative trait loci from four plasma proteomics cohorts: ARIC, deCODE, Fenland, and the UK Biobank Pharma Proteomics Project. Prioritized proteins passed sensitivity analyses with alternative MR methods and were supported by colocalization evidence. Tissue-resolution regulatory support was assessed using cis-eQTL colocalization across GTEx and pancreatic islet, subcutaneous adipose, and whole-blood resources. Actionability was evaluated using the druggable genome and Open Targets. RESULTS GWAS-by-subtraction attenuated the genetic correlation between BMI and BMI-subtracted T2D from 0.54 (SE 0.02) to 0.35 (SE 0.02). Proteome-wide MR prioritized 29 proteins for BMI-subtracted T2D. Thirteen showed eQTL colocalization in at least one tissue, implicating liver and intermediary metabolism (GCDH, NOTCH2), pancreatic islet biology (CTRB2, MANBA), adipose and Wnt signaling (RSPO3, GALNT3), and whole blood regulatory signals (PAM, SNUPN). Sixteen proteins were classified within druggable-genome Tiers 1-3, and five had existing Open Targets compounds. CONCLUSIONS Integrating GWAS-by-subtraction, proteome-wide MR, and colocalization nominated 29 proteins associated with T2D liability not fully explained by BMI. These findings highlight genetically supported targets for follow-up studies of T2D therapies that complement weight-centered approaches.