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

Bayesian Networks with Latent Time Embedding for Stage-Aware Causal Modeling of Alzheimer's Disease Progression

arXiv:2606.15784v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Alzheimer's disease (AD) progression is often described through the amyloid-tau-neurodegeneration, or AT(N), cascade. However, most longitudinal models represent this cascade either as a fixed sequence of biomarkers or as a black-box forecasting task. This makes it difficult to determine when biologically guided biomarker relationships influence future regional pathology. In this study, we introduce Bayesian Networks with Latent Time Embedding (BN-LTE), a Bayesian structural framework for stage-aware modeling of AD progression. BN-LTE estimates disease pseudotime from baseline biomarker profiles and constrains directed dependencies according to biologically plausible AT(N) ordering. Posterior spline-varying structural equations are then used to link initial multimodal measurements with future annualized regional tau-PET change. Across repeated subject-disjoint evaluations using ADNI data, BN-LTE shows strong spatial reconstruction of tau progression compared with the included forecasting baselines. Beyond spatial reconstruction, BN-LTE recovers posterior stage-varying AT(N)-constrained effects and identifies a mid-pseudotime window of amyloid sensitivity. This window is supported by model-implied g-formula contrasts, root-adjusted AIPW, mechanism-sensitive ablations, and robustness analyses across spline and prior specifications. Overall, these findings position BN-LTE as a Bayesian structural framework for forecasting tau progression while examining stage-dependent AT(N)-cascade mechanisms in observational longitudinal neuroimaging data. Our code is available at https://github.com/danleneurocom/BN-LTE.

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

Surrogate-Assisted Framework for SI-Compliant Interconnect Design Optimization Using the Earth Mover's Distance

arXiv:2606.15234v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work presents a deterministic, machine-assisted framework for SI-compliant PCB design based on the Earth Mover's Distance (EMD). In contrast to conventional surrogate-based optimization methods that rely on iterative black-box search procedures, the proposed approach follows an interpretable, sequential evaluation strategy. Neural surrogate models are first used to efficiently predict waveform describing features from topology-dependent design parameters. A decision tree then acts as a physically motivated quality gate that identifies SI-compliant waveforms according to predefined SI criteria. Within the resulting valid solution space, the Earth Mover's Distance is employed as a similarity metric to rank candidate designs according to their proximity to an ideal reference signal. This enables not only the deterministic identification of admissible parameter regions but also a transparent prioritization of physically superior solutions without inverse modeling or stochastic search procedures. The methodology is demonstrated using a large-scale set of simulated DDR3 fly-by waveforms. By combining surrogate prediction, interpretable classification, and EMD-based waveform evaluation, the framework provides an explainable and computationally efficient alternative to conventional optimization strategies for supporting PCB development with AI-based methods.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

InTrain: Intrinsic Trainability for Zero-Cost Neural Architecture Search

Training-free neural architecture search promises efficient discovery of high-performance networks without costly training. However, existing zero-cost proxies rely on fragmented heuristics that fail to capture the fundamental question: what makes an architecture trainable? This paper introduces Intrinsic Trainability (InTrain), a unified theoretical proxy that formalizes trainability as an architectural invariant emerging from two synergistic components: geometric capacity and optimization resilience. We operationalize intrinsic trainability through analysis of neural information processing. Geometric capacity is quantified via the participation ratio of activation covariance eigenspectrum, capturing the effective dimensionality of representation manifolds. Optimization resilience is measured through cumulative gradient health, assessing the robustness of backpropagation across network depth. InTrain synthesizes these dimensions through a scale-invariant multiplicative coupling, which we hypothesize is essential for capturing their synergistic, non-additive relationship. Extensive experiments on standard NAS benchmarks and search spaces demonstrate that InTrain achieves ranking correlations on par with state-of-the-art ensemble-based proxies and outperforms other single-metric methods.

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

Protein-Based Fish Species Identification: Dataset, Models, and Insights from Native Bangladeshi Fish

arXiv:2606.18302v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Correct identification of fish species is highly significant for food security, economic development, and climate resilience in Bangladesh. Protein sequences directly reflect functional and evolutionary constraints which are important for species authentication and biodiversity monitoring. Yet there exists no benchmark for native Bangladeshi fish species identification from protein sequence. In this study, we addressed this gap by introducing the first curated dataset for nine native Bangladeshi fish species of 2845 high quality protein sequences. We also established the first protein sequence classification baseline for this domain through a systematic benchmarking of seven architectural paradigms. Moreover, we propose a realistic deployable novel hybrid architecture of MotifCNN and Transformer with Terminal-Aware Positional-Encoding (MotifCNN-Transformer+TA-PE). Our novel architecture achieves 79.80% accuracy with macro-F1 of 0.80. The highest 83.04% accuracy is achieved by finetuned protein language model ProtBERT that has 420M parameters and requires dual 16GB GPUs for inference. According to McNemar's test, ProtBERT's 3.24% accuracy gain over our MotifCNN-Transformer+TA-PE is statistically insignificant (p = 0.1120). Our novel architecture beats it among six of the nine classes in per class identification. Also our MotifCNN-Transformer+TA-PE is approximately 5x faster, 42x smaller, and supports 16x larger batch size than ProtBERT and has GPU free inference, making it more practical for deployment in resources constrained areas such as rural Bangladesh. Beyond this, our foundational work shows effects of phylogenetic relationships on sequence similarity and establishes pathways for fisheries management, food authentication and biodiversity conservation in South Asia's protein dependent economy.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Compute Efficiency and Serial Runtime Tradeoffs for Stochastic Momentum Methods

arXiv:2606.19179v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Stochastic momentum methods such as heavy ball (HB), Nesterov momentum, and variants of Accelerated SGD (ASGD) [Kidambi et al., 2018] are widely used in modern training, but their stochastic benefits depend on two distinct quantities: serial runtime, the number of iterations needed to reach a target accuracy, and compute efficiency (CE), the inverse total gradient-query or FLOP cost. Larger batches reduce serial runtime without hurting CE only when the contraction gap grows linearly with batch size. We study stochastic HB and ASGD for consistent linear regression with Gaussian covariates and prove finite-dimensional, discrete-time lower bounds on their batch-size tradeoffs. Our first result shows that HB does not improve the CE frontier over SGD for arbitrary spectra; rather, it preserves SGD-level CE over a larger batch-size window, allowing larger batches to reduce serial runtime until HB reaches its deterministic accelerated scale. This window can be a factor $\sqrt{\kappa}$ larger than the SGD critical batch size. For ASGD, the picture is more spectrum-dependent: for rapidly decaying power-law spectra, ASGD improves small-batch CE over HB/SGD, but as batch size grows it trades this CE advantage for improved serial runtime. Synthetic linear-regression experiments verify these qualitative regimes, including near-overlap of ASGD and HB for slowly decaying spectra and the predicted CE–serial tradeoff for rapidly decaying spectra.

06.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Machine Learning-Guided Discovery of Bacterial-Selective Membrane-Active Compounds Reveals Mechanistic Bias in Antibiotic Training Datasets

The rise of antibiotic resistance necessitates the discovery of antibacterial compounds with novel mechanisms of action (MoAs). Recent machine learning approaches have shown promise in antibacterial compound discovery, but often identify derivatives of known antibiotic classes rather than mechanistically novel compounds. Previous approaches applied Tanimoto similarity filters at the end of screening pipelines, but this method has substantial drawbacks: Tanimoto similarity can be misleading in chemical space, and post-hoc filtering does not influence what activity models learn to prioritize. Here, we present a machine learning pipeline that addresses chemical novelty upfront by employing an XGBoost-based MoA classifier to explicitly prioritize compounds predicted to have mechanisms distinct from known antibiotic classes, combined with graph neural networks for antibacterial activity and toxicity prediction. Applied to the Zinc20 database, our approach successfully identified non-toxic antibacterial compounds structurally distinct from known antibiotics. Notably, the majority of these hits exhibited membrane-targeting activity with selectivity for bacterial cells over mammalian cells, suggesting potential for next-generation membrane-active antibiotics. However, we did not identify compounds with novel protein targets. Systematic analysis revealed that this limitation stems from mechanistic bias in training data rather than model architecture. Specifically, our activity model learned to preferentially score compounds similar to specific groups in the training data, thus overrepresenting certain MoA classes including membrane-active compounds. Even substantial model architecture and training data enhancements did not overcome this constraint. Our findings demonstrate that the primary bottleneck for discovering mechanistically novel antibiotics is the scarcity of diverse, mechanistically-annotated training data. This work provides both a methodological framework for mechanism-aware screening and critical insights into data requirements for genuinely novel antibiotic discovery.

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

A New Definition of Quantum Superposition

arXiv:2606.15607v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The usual description of the superposition of two (pure quantum) states is ambiguous, since the binary operation of summation in a Hilbert space does not pass down to the quotient projective space. Even though Dirac noted this as early as 1930, it is often asserted that the superposition is a binary operation acting on two states with a value that is a unique state. The goal for this note is to motivate a rigorous, geometrical definition of the superposition of states in the setting of complex projective space, which has been argued elsewhere to be the natural geometric phase space for quantum theory. The upshot is that the new definition of the superposition of two pure states, viewed as two distinct points in the projective space, is the unique (complex) line on which those two points lie. Finally, a comparison is given between superposition and expansion in an orthonormal basis.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Stepwise Token Selection for Efficient Multimodal Large Language Models

In multimodal large language models (MLLMs), inference cost is largely dominated by the visual token prefix rather than the language backbone, making token reduction a key factor for improving efficiency. Existing approaches typically assign independent importance scores to visual tokens and retain a fixed number of top-ranked tokens, implicitly assuming token independence and a uniform compression ratio across inputs. In this work, we reformulate visual token pruning as a sequential decision-making process. Specifically, we introduce a pointer-style selection mechanism that iteratively chooses informative tokens, conditioning each decision on previously selected ones, and dynamically determines when to stop via a learned termination action. This enables joint optimization of both the selected subset and its size. To enable end-to-end training under standard language modeling objectives, we design a differentiable relaxation based on a variance-preserving noise interpolation scheme, allowing gradients to propagate through the discrete selection process. Extensive experiments on LLaVA-v1.5-7B and Qwen2.5-VL-7B demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms fixed-ratio baselines across different compression levels. Under aggressive pruning that removes 88.9% of visual tokens, our method preserves 94.6% of the original accuracy while achieving a 1.88x speed-up in prefill latency.

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

Convex Approximation of Two-Layer ReLU Networks for Hidden State Differential Privacy

arXiv:2407.04884v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The hidden state threat model of differential privacy (DP) assumes that the adversary has access only to the final trained machine learning (ML) model, without seeing intermediate states during training. However, the current privacy analyses under this model are restricted to convex optimization problems, reducing their applicability to multi-layer neural networks, which are essential in modern deep learning applications. Notably, the most successful applications of the hidden state privacy analyses in classification tasks have only been for logistic regression models. We demonstrate that it is possible to privately train convex problems with privacy-utility trade-offs comparable to those of 2-layer ReLU networks trained with DP stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD). This is achieved through a stochastic approximation of a dual formulation of the ReLU minimization problem, resulting in a strongly convex problem. This enables the use of existing hidden state privacy analyses and provides accurate privacy bounds also for the noisy cyclic mini-batch gradient descent (NoisyCGD) method with fixed disjoint mini-batches. Empirical results on benchmark classification tasks demonstrate that NoisyCGD can achieve privacy-utility trade-offs on par with DP-SGD applied to 2-layer ReLU networks.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

GenAutoML: An Agentic Framework for Dynamic Architecture Generation and Optimization in Time-Series Analysis

arXiv:2606.05860v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Designing neural architectures for time-series forecasting and anomaly detection remains a resource-intensive task that often requires substantial domain expertise. Traditional Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) systems typically rely on static, predefined search spaces, limiting their ability to adapt to diverse data characteristics. We present GenAutoML, an agentic framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) as neural architects to bridge natural-language requirements and executable PyTorch implementations. The framework incorporates a Sandboxed Reflection Loop for autonomous code refinement and a Signature-Aware Runtime that enforces architectural consistency and execution safety. To improve robustness under non-stationary conditions, we further introduce a Dynamic Reversible Instance Normalization (Dyn-RevIN) wrapper. Experiments on the ETTh1, ETTm1, and Weather benchmarks demonstrate that GenAutoML can dynamically generate task-specific neural architectures tailored to dataset characteristics. Among the generated models, WaveInterferenceNet achieves inference latency below 0.01 ms per sample while maintaining competitive predictive performance. By emphasizing computational efficiency, architectural adaptability, and stable optimization behavior, GenAutoML enables the creation of ultra-lightweight neural networks suitable for resource-constrained and latency-sensitive Edge AI deployments.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

LaTtE-Flow: Layerwise Timestep-Expert Flow-based Transformer

Recent advances in multimodal foundation models unifying image understanding and generation have opened exciting avenues for tackling a wide range of vision-language tasks within a single framework. Despite progress, existing unified models typically require extensive pretraining and struggle to achieve the same level of performance compared to models dedicated to each task. Additionally, many of these models suffer from slow image generation speeds, limiting their practical deployment in real-time or resource-constrained settings. In this work, we propose Layerwise Timestep-Expert Flow-based Transformer (LaTtE-Flow), a novel and efficient architecture that unifies image understanding and generation within a single multimodal model. LaTtE-Flow builds upon powerful pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to inherit strong multimodal understanding capabilities, and extends them with a novel Layerwise Timestep Experts flow-based architecture for efficient image generation. LaTtE-Flow distributes the flow-matching process across specialized groups of Transformer layers, each responsible for a distinct subset of timesteps. This design significantly improves sampling efficiency by activating only a small subset of layers at each sampling timestep. To further enhance performance, we propose a Timestep-Conditioned Residual Attention mechanism for efficient information reuse across layers. Experiments demonstrate that LaTtE-Flow achieves strong performance on multimodal understanding tasks, while achieving competitive image generation quality with around 6x faster inference speed compared to recent unified multimodal models.

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

FeedEval: Pedagogically Aligned Evaluation of LLM-Generated Essay Feedback

Going beyond the prediction of numerical scores, recent research in automated essay scoring has increasingly emphasized the generation of high-quality feedback that provides justification and actionable guidance. To mitigate the high cost of expert annotation, prior work has commonly relied on LLM-generated feedback to train essay assessment models. However, such feedback is often incorporated without explicit quality validation, resulting in the propagation of noise in downstream applications. To address this limitation, we propose FeedEval, an LLM-based framework for evaluating LLM-generated essay feedback along three pedagogically grounded dimensions: specificity, helpfulness, and validity. FeedEval employs dimension-specialized LLM evaluators trained on datasets curated in this study to assess multiple feedback candidates and select high-quality feedback for downstream use. Experiments on the ASAP++ benchmark show that FeedEval closely aligns with human expert judgments and that essay scoring models trained with FeedEval-filtered high-quality feedback achieve superior scoring performance. Furthermore, revision experiments using small LLMs show that the high-quality feedback identified by FeedEval leads to more effective essay revisions. We release our code and curated datasets at: https://github.com/BBeeChu/FeedEval.git.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

NSVQ: Mitigating Codebook Collapse by Stabilizing Encoder Drift in Vector Quantization

Vector quantization is central to modern generative modeling pipelines, but large-codebook VQ models often suffer from codebook collapse. We identify encoder drift as a key driver of this failure: as the encoder moves the latent distribution, sparsely updated code vectors can lag behind, lose assignments, and increase quantization error, creating a feedback loop through the straight-through estimator. We propose NSVQ, a non-stationary-aware VQ training strategy that combines a dense non-stationary embedding loss, codebook replacement, and stage-wise encoder freezing. NSVQ first helps the codebook track encoder drift during early training, then freezes the encoder to consolidate the codebook under a fixed latent geometry, and finally reintroduces adversarial refinement. Experiments on ImageNet-1k show that NSVQ improves reconstruction quality while maintaining full codebook utilization. On ImageNet-1k at 128$\times$128 with 65,536 codes, NSVQ reduces rFID from 2.39 to 2.10 compared with SimVQ, while both methods maintain 100\% utilization. Additional latent diffusion experiments show that NSVQ also improves downstream ImageNet generation FID.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

RAMEN: Resolution-Adjustable Multimodal Encoder for Earth Observation

Earth observation (EO) data spans a wide range of spatial, spectral, and temporal resolutions, from high-resolution optical imagery to low resolution multispectral products or radar time series. While recent foundation models have improved multimodal integration for learning meaningful representations, they often expect fixed input resolutions or are based on sensor-specific encoders limiting generalization across heterogeneous EO modalities. To overcome these limitations we introduce RAMEN, a resolution-adjustable multimodal encoder that learns a shared visual representation across EO data in a fully sensor-agnostic manner. RAMEN treats the modality and spatial and temporal resolutions as key input data features, enabling coherent analysis across modalities within a unified latent space. Its main methodological contribution is to define spatial resolution as a controllable output parameter, giving users direct control over the desired level of detail at inference and allowing explicit trade-offs between spatial precision and computational cost. We train a single, unified transformer encoder reconstructing masked multimodal EO data drawn from diverse sources, ensuring generalization across sensors and resolutions. Once pretrained, RAMEN transfers effectively to both known and unseen sensor configurations and outperforms larger state-of-the-art models on the community-standard PANGAEA benchmark, containing various multi-sensor and multi-resolution downstream tasks. Our code and pretrained model are available at https://github.com/nicolashoudre/RAMEN.

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

On the Memorization Behavior of LLMs in Generative Recommendation: Observations, Implications, and Training Strategies

arXiv:2606.17276v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative recommendation (GR) has emerged as a promising direction for recommender systems. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly adopted for GR, as their rich pretrained knowledge is expected to help them generalize beyond common user behavior patterns that traditional memorization-oriented baselines can capture. However, existing LLM-based GR works largely ignore LLMs' well-known tendency to memorize, which, if present in LLMs fine-tuned for GR, would restrict their utilization of pretrained knowledge. In this work, we investigate this concern by examining one-hop memorization, where a model recommends items that are direct successors of items in the training data. We show that LLMs do this more than non-LLM-based GR models-in fact, the vast majority of their gains over GR baselines are actually on users whose target items can be predicted through one-hop memorization. We intuit that improving performance on the remaining users requires LLMs to learn richer item-item relations beyond one-hop transitions. To achieve this, we propose IIRG, a novel training strategy that teaches LLMs to capture: (1) collaborative relations derived from item co-occurrences across multiple hops in user sequences, and (2) semantic relations among items with similar themes, both of which can serve as useful recommendation signals. We show that IIRG significantly improves over LLMs trained solely with standard next-item prediction, with especially large gains for users whose test items are not covered by train-time one-hop transitions.

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

ITNet: A Learnable Integral Transform That Subsumes Convolution, Attention, and Recurrence

arXiv:2606.19538v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Convolutional networks, recurrent networks, and transformers each encode different inductive biases – locality, sequential memory, and content-dependent pairwise interaction – and have remained mathematically distinct since their inception. We show that this fragmentation reflects not a fundamental diversity in how signals should be processed, but rather incomplete views of a single underlying mathematical object: a learnable integral transform. We introduce the Integral Transform Network (ITNet), a unified architecture built around a learnable kernel that depends jointly on positions and features. This kernel is implemented as a small neural network, specifically an MLP, that models pairwise interactions, enabling the model to adapt its behavior from data. We show that convolution, self-attention (including multi-head), and autoregressive recurrence (including LSTM, GRU, S4, and Mamba) arise as special cases under appropriate parameterizations, and that ITNet is a universal approximator of continuous operators. To make this practical, we develop tiled kernel fusion, importance-weighted Monte Carlo integration, and learned low-rank factorization, enabling efficient and scalable computation. A single ITNet architecture with a shared operator and lightweight modality-specific encoders matches or exceeds specialized baselines on ImageNet-1K , GLUE, ModelNet40, VQA\,v2 and NLVR2. The results demonstrate that a single learned interaction mechanism can recover the behavior of all three architectural families from data.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Digital self-efficacy as a potential intermediary between vision impairment and daily internet use among older adults: A cross-sectional analysis of HINTS 2024

Background: Older adults with vision impairment often experience barriers to using digital technology. The indirect associations between vision impairment and digital access and skills via digital self-efficacy and frustration among older adults remain largely unknown. Objective: This study aimed to 1) explore factors associated with digital access, skills, self-efficacy, and frustration among older adults with vision impairment; 2) examine associations between vision impairment and digital access, skills, self-efficacy, and frustration among older adults; and 3) examine whether digital self-efficacy and frustration may help explain associations between vision impairment and digital access and skills among older adults. Methods: This was a cross-sectional study using nationally representative data from the Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS) 2024. Respondents aged 60 and older were included. Vision impairment was assessed using a self-reported item. Outcomes included self-reported digital access, skills, self-efficacy, and frustration. Survey-weighted multivariable logistic regression and generalized structural equation modeling were conducted, adjusting for age, sex, race/ethnicity, education, and the number of comorbidities. Results: Among 3,149 older adults (mean [SD] age, 70.7 [10.0] years; 45.6% female), 7.1% (n=223) reported vision impairment. Among older adults with vision impairment, 65.6% (95% CI, 53.5% to 75.9%) used the internet daily, and 79.5% (95% CI, 66.8% to 88.2%) used a smartphone in the past 12 months. In multivariable logistic regression analyses among older adults with vision impairment, older age was associated with lower odds of daily internet use (OR, 0.84; 95% CI, 0.79 to 0.90), smartphone use (OR, 0.85; 95% CI, 0.75 to 0.97), wearable device use (OR, 0.88; 95% CI, 0.79 to 0.97), and using the internet to send a message to a healthcare provider (OR, 0.87; 95% CI, 0.80 to 0.93). Older adults who self-identified as racial and ethnic minority groups (e.g., Black/African American, Hispanic) had lower odds of daily internet use (OR, 0.15; 95% CI, 0.05 to 0.50) and using the internet to send a message to a healthcare provider (OR, 0.17; 95% CI, 0.04 to 0.73) compared with Non-Hispanic White older adults. Vision impairment was associated with lower odds of daily internet use (OR, 0.60; 95% CI, 0.37 to 0.99) and digital self-efficacy (OR, 0.53; 95% CI, 0.32 to 0.86). Digital self-efficacy was associated with higher odds of daily internet use (OR, 2.95; 95% CI, 2.04 to 4.26). Generalized structural equation modeling identified an indirect association between vision impairment and daily internet use via digital self-efficacy (coefficient, -0.68; 95% CI, -1.24 to -0.12). Conclusions: Findings suggest that reduced digital self-efficacy may help explain the observed association between vision impairment and daily internet use among older adults. Interventions targeting digital self-efficacy, including accessible interface designs, personalized coaching, and peer support, may help bridge the digital divide among older adults with vision impairment.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Device assessed 24-hour movement behaviour and cardiovascular disease mortality amongst cancer survivors.

Background: Cancer survivors face elevated risks of mortality from cardiovascular disease (CVD). The potential importance of physical activity (PA) and other behaviours across the 24-hour day (e.g. sedentary behaviour (SB) and sleep) for CVD-mortality risk is not well understood in this at-risk population. Objectives: To assess the importance of 24-hour movement behaviour, using a compositional approach, for mitigating CVD-mortality amongst cancer survivors. Methods: Participants with a prior cancer diagnosis were drawn from the UK Biobank accelerometry sub-study (n=6,158). Accelerometer-derived movement (moderate-to-vigorous PA (MVPA), vigorous PA (VPA), moderate PA (MPA), light PA (LPA), SB, sleep) was examined in relation to CVD-mortality, identified from health record linkage data (using Fine-Gray Cox proportional-hazards models adjusted for demographic, health, lifestyle covariates). Results: Median follow-up was 8.0 years (Q1-Q3: 7.4-8.5), with n=500 (8.2%) deaths (CVD-deaths: n=118). Greater MVPA, in place of any other behaviour, was inversely associated with CVD-mortality with e.g. 10% lower hazard if MVPA theoretically replaced 7 minutes (mins)/day SB (Hazard ratio (HR): 0.91, (95% Confidence Interval: 0.86-0.95)), 9 mins/day LPA (HR: 0.90, 0.83-0.97), or 11 mins/day sleep (HR: 0.90, 0.83-0.97). The VPA component of MVPA proved critical, requiring only ~1-2 additional mins/day for equivalent hazard reduction. Sleep duration, was also inversely associated with CVD-mortality. A 10% lower hazard required replacing 29 mins/day of SB with sleep (HR: 0.90, 0.84-0.96); no other behavioural replacement amongst SB, sleep or LPA could provide an equivalent risk reduction. Conclusions: Among cancer survivors, the most potent reduction in CVD-mortality followed theoretically reallocating time to higher intensity movement.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

DiffAttn: Diffusion-Based Drivers' Visual Attention Prediction with LLM-Enhanced Semantic Reasoning

Drivers' visual attention provides critical cues for anticipating latent hazards and directly shapes decision-making and control maneuvers, where its absence can compromise traffic safety. To emulate drivers' perception patterns and advance visual attention prediction for intelligent vehicles, we propose DiffAttn, a diffusion-based framework that formulates this task as a conditional diffusion-denoising process, enabling more accurate modeling of drivers' attention. To capture both local and global scene features, we adopt Swin Transformer as encoder and design a decoder that combines a Feature Fusion Pyramid for cross-layer interaction with dense, multi-scale conditional diffusion to jointly enhance denoising learning and model fine-grained local and global scene contexts. Additionally, a large language model (LLM) layer is incorporated to enhance top-down semantic reasoning and improve sensitivity to safety-critical cues. Extensive experiments on four public datasets demonstrate that DiffAttn achieves state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance, surpassing most video-based, top-down-feature-driven, and LLM-enhanced baselines. Our framework further supports interpretable driver-centric scene understanding and has the potential to improve in-cabin human-machine interaction, risk perception, and drivers' state measurement in intelligent vehicles.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Dango: A Strictly L1-Only Large Language Model for Studying Second Language Acquisition

We introduce Dango, a 1.8B-parameter large language model designed for controlled studies of L1-to-L2 (Japanese-to-English) transfer in second language acquisition (SLA). While previous studies have explored SLA in language models, they have predominantly relied on smaller or non-decoder models, limiting their ability to generate open-ended text and reducing their suitability as practical L2 simulators. We identify a key challenge when scaling models to this size: L2 contamination within the "monolingual" pretraining corpus used for L1 acquisition. To address this, we propose a filtering method to reduce premature exposure to English while preserving realistic, minimal exposure. We then fine-tune the model on LLM-generated L2-learning lessons to simulate the L2 acquisition process. Our evaluations confirm that Dango develops human-like L2 production patterns, outperforming both unfiltered and standard multilingual baselines. We release the model, data, and code to facilitate reproducible computational SLA research and learner-facing applications.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

The Latent Color Subspace: Emergent Order in High-Dimensional Chaos

Text-to-image generation models have advanced rapidly, yet achieving fine-grained control over generated images remains difficult, largely due to limited understanding of how semantic information is encoded. We develop an interpretation of the color representation in the Variational Autoencoder latent space of FLUX.1 [Dev], revealing a structure reflecting Hue, Saturation, and Lightness. We verify our Latent Color Subspace (LCS) interpretation by demonstrating that it can both predict and explicitly control color, introducing a fully training-free method in FLUX based solely on closed-form latent-space manipulation. Code is available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/LCS.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Arbitrary control over multimode wave propagation for machine learning

arXiv:2402.17750v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Controlled multimode wave propagation can enable more space-efficient photonic processors than architectures based on discrete components connected by single-mode waveguides. Instead of defining discrete elements, one can sculpt the continuous substrate of a photonic processor to perform computations through multimode interference in two dimensions. Here we designed and demonstrated a device with a refractive index that can be rapidly reprogrammed across space, allowing arbitrary control of wave propagation. The device, a two-dimensional programmable waveguide, uses parallel electro-optic modulation of the refractive index of a slab waveguide with about $10^4$ programmable spatial degrees of freedom. We implemented neural network inference on benchmark tasks with up to $49$-dimensional vectors in a single pass, without digital pre-processing or post-processing. Theoretical and numerical analyses further indicated that two-dimensional programmable waveguides may offer not only a constant-factor reduction in device area but also a scaling benefit, with the area required growing as $N^{1.5}$ rather than $N^2$.

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

A Gradient Perspective on RLVR Stability and Winner Advantage Policy Optimization

arXiv:2606.16154v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) improves language-model reasoning, but GRPO-style optimization remains prone to collapse. We analyse this instability through token-level gradient dynamics, deriving a taxonomy that predicts how updates affect next-token probabilities and entropy. The taxonomy shows that stability depends jointly on the advantage sign and token distribution under the current policy. Motivated by this finding, we propose Winner Advantage Policy Optimization (WAPO), a simple online clipped policy-gradient objective that updates only on positive-advantage completions. Across mathematical reasoning and multi-hop QA benchmarks, WAPO improves training stability and matches or outperforms baselines across multiple model families. Full code can be found at https://github.com/layer6ai-labs/wapo.

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

OR-Action: Multi-Role Video Understanding with Fine-Grained Actions

Fine-grained understanding of operating room (OR) activity could enable workflow-aware assistance, yet remains difficult due to clutter, occlusions, and limited sensing. The prevailing approach to model this environment is scene graphs as an interpretable representation of OR interactions. Converting their frame-wise relational predictions into temporally extended, fine-grained actions however, is challenging without explicit temporal modeling. To enable a principled temporal evaluation of current OR understanding methods, we introduce the first action-centric benchmark built on a publicly available ego-exocentric OR dataset by defining a fine-grained, multi-role action taxonomy and generating dense action segments via distillation from ground-truth scene graph state changes. Experiments on this benchmark show that current scene graph prediction methods struggle to model temporal structure, even when adding explicit modeling through Graph Neural Networks. We therefore introduce a vision-only temporal model that outperforms graph-based methods significantly when using all available egocentric video as input. Building on this model we also introduce a novel multi- to single-view feature alignment strategy that improves single-view performance on multi-role action recognition, mitigating the need for extensive egocentric video capture. Benchmark and code will be released upon acceptance.

25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Killed resolvents and measure-valued stopping gains for reflected optimal stopping with max-type rewards

arXiv:2606.17517v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study an infinite-horizon optimal stopping problem for a normally reflected two-dimensional diffusion in the positive quadrant with nonsmooth max-type reward \(G(x_1,x_2)=x_1\vee \alpha x_2\). The paper develops a conditional measure-theoretic framework for the associated reflected obstacle problem. The main innovation is to show that the stopping gain \(\Gamma=c+rG-\mathcal LG\) is a signed measure, not a function: the kink of \(G\) generates an explicit negative surface measure on \(\Delta=\{x_1=\alpha x_2\}\). We then prove that the correct potential representation uses the resolvent of the reflected diffusion killed on first entry into the stopping set, rather than the unrestricted reflected resolvent. Under explicit monotonicity, regularity, and measure-superharmonicity assumptions, we derive an epigraph representation, a continuation-side boundary-trace condition, and a candidate verification theorem. The framework clarifies hidden regularity and uniqueness assumptions in multidimensional nonsmooth optimal stopping.