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02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Operator Calculus for Population-Based Optimization: A Mean-Field Convergence Theory

arXiv:2606.14289v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Population-based and distributional optimization methods, from evolution strategies and consensus-based optimization to covariance-matrix adaptation and stochastic gradient methods viewed as distributional dynamics, are widely used for nonconvex or black-box problems, yet their convergence analyses remain fragmented across algorithm-specific techniques. We introduce an operator calculus in which a broad class of such methods, after choosing an appropriate state space and, where necessary, augmenting the state by memory or strategy variables, is described as a composition of three elementary operators (mutation, selection, and recombination) acting on probability measures. Under explicit stability and regularity conditions, the composite operator admits a pre-generator whose continuous-time limit is a transport-reaction-jump (TRJ) PDE that preserves the operator splitting. On this foundation we establish a modular Lyapunov principle. If a state-space Lyapunov function both dissipates under the full generator and controls the relevant search-space gauges, then the state-space Lyapunov functional and the induced search errors decay exponentially. The additive generator structure allows dissipation estimates to be assembled operator by operator, providing a toolkit for certifying convergence of composite mean-field algorithms.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

How Low Can You Go? Active Learning for Sparse Model Discovery in the Ultra-Low-Data Limit

arXiv:2606.12182v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Identifying the governing equations of complex dynamical systems remains a fundamental challenge across science and engineering. While early approaches relied on empirical data and heuristics, modern data-driven methods offer greater flexibility and fewer assumptions. However, data acquisition in real-world settings is often expensive. This work addresses this challenge by introducing an active learning strategy for dynamics discovery in the ultra-low data limit. Rather than sampling randomly, our method iteratively prioritizes regions that are most informative for model identification. This approach builds on Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamics (SINDy), and utilizes an ensemble extension, E-SINDy, to estimate epistemic uncertainty and guide the sampling for both ordinary and partial differential equations (ODEs/PDEs). For ODEs, an exhaustive analysis is conducted on the Lorenz system across varying data budgets and noise levels. For PDEs, two systems with contrasting dynamical characteristics are examined: the Burgers' equation, where a sharp shock front creates a distinction between informative and uninformative regions, and the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation, which presents a more spatially complex sampling landscape. Across all scenarios, the proposed method accurately identifies the governing dynamics with significantly fewer data samples than random sampling.

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

HeRo-Q: A General Framework for Stable Low Bit Quantization via Hessian Conditioning

arXiv:2601.21626v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Post Training Quantization (PTQ), a mainstream model compression technique, often leads to the paradoxical 'low error, high loss' phenomenon because it focuses solely on minimizing quantization error. The root cause lies in the Hessian matrix of the LLM loss landscape: a few high curvature directions are extremely sensitive to perturbations. To address this, we propose the Hessian Robust Quantization (HeRo Q) algorithm, which applies a lightweight, learnable rotation-compression matrix to the weight space prior to quantization. This joint framework reshapes the loss landscape by reducing the largest Hessian eigenvalue and reducing its max eigenvalue, thereby significantly enhancing robustness to quantization noise. HeRo-Q requires no architectural modifications, incurs negligible computational overhead, and integrates seamlessly into existing PTQ pipelines. Experiments on Llama and Qwen models show that HeRo Q consistently outperforms state of the art methods including GPTQ, AWQ, and SpinQuant not only achieving superior performance under standard W4A8 settings, but also excelling in the highly challenging W3A16 ultra low bit regime, where it boosts GSM8K accuracy on Llama3 8B to 70.15\% and effectively avoids the logical collapse commonly seen in aggressive quantization.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

UltraEP: Unleash MoE Training and Inference on Rack-Scale Nodes with Near-Optimal Load Balancing

arXiv:2606.04101v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large-scale expert parallelism (EP) is becoming pivotal for training and serving frontier MoE models, but it also amplifies device-level expert load imbalance into compute stragglers, token all-to-all bottlenecks, and activation-memory spikes. Existing balancers redistribute experts periodically based on historical load, which becomes unreliable for production deployments with non-stationary load patterns. We present UltraEP, the first exact-load, real-time balancer for large-EP MoE training and serving prefill on rack-scale nodes (RSNs). Leveraging the extended scale-up connectivity among dozens of GPUs within RSNs, UltraEP rebalances every microbatch and layer on critical paths, which requires nontrivial co-design of plan solving and expert replication communication to minimize exposed overhead. To this end, UltraEP eagerly reacts to post-gating load with an efficient quota-driven planner, and executes the resulting irregular expert-state transfers with RSN-native persistent tile streaming and relay-based fan-out mitigation. We evaluate UltraEP in a multi-RSN deployment of up to 256 GPUs, using cutting-edge MoE models from 106B to 671B parameters. Averaged across training and serving, UltraEP achieves 94.3% of the force-balanced ideal throughput, delivering 1.49$\times$ improvement over no-balancing, while reducing the final inter-rank imbalance from 1.30$-$4.01 to 1.01$-$1.04.

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

MASCOT-Android: A Curated Dataset and Automated Collection Pipeline for Android Malware Source Code Specimens

arXiv:2606.16072v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Compared with binaries and decompiled code, malware source code more directly reflects the attackers' original intent. However, the scarcity of source code and the high cost of manual review make such datasets difficult to build and maintain. We propose MASCOT-Android, a curated dataset of Android malware source code and an automated collection framework for scalable malware source code discovery on GitHub. A key finding of our work is that repository-level documentation alone provides a strong signal for malware source code collection. Our model extracts character-level TF-IDF features from 8,772 malware and 25,747 benign README documents and trains a LinearSVC classifier to distinguish malware repositories. This README-only model achieves an accuracy of 96.28\% and an FPR of 1.06\% in local evaluation. In addition, the model outputs confidence scores, allowing users to adjust the decision threshold to balance FPR and coverage, which is practical in real-world malware source code collection.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quantum gates with parametrically driven multi-qubit couplers

arXiv:2606.14522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Superconducting quantum processors could significantly profit from enhanced connectivity together with precise control of interactions and gates between qubits. Here we investigate plaquettes of four qubits that are coupled via a central tunable coupling circuit, so that not only gates between qubits connected by an edge of the plaquette can be executed but also between qubits across the diagonal. By numerically and analytically analyzing parametrically driven processes, we explore $\sqrt{iSWAP}$-gates between any pair of qubits, also across the diagonal, as well as three-qubit interactions and gates. For experimentally available circuit parameters, we for example find $\sqrt{iSWAP}$-gates with a gate time of 50 ns and 99.9\% fidelity, which is decreased to 99.4\% if two such gates are executed in parallel on disjoint qubit pairs in the plaquette. For three-qubit gates we find fidelities of 95\% fidelity at a gate time of 200 ns.

08.
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.

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

MamBOA: State-Space Architecture for Video Recognition

Fine-grained action recognition demands temporal reasoning that general-purpose architectures address through different cost-accuracy tradeoffs: 3D dense operators couple computation to the input volume, while difference-based methods approximate motion through rigid, hand-crafted subtraction of uncontextualized features - each reflecting a deliberate design choice with corresponding limitations in expressiveness or flexibility. We present MamBOA, a backbone-agnostic temporal framework built upon a novel interleaved scan structure that recasts the selective state-space recurrence (S6) as a native motion synthesizer. By interleaving consecutive feature representations extracted from a pretrained backbone into a single alternating sequence, the proposed scan structurally drives the recurrence to encode both temporal observations of each position within a shared hidden state, separated by only a single decay step - rendering the inter-frame transition an intrinsic component of the state dynamics rather than an externally computed quantity. A cascade of dedicated alignment and decoding operations then distills this joint encoding into an explicit motion representation, which a dual-path pooling mechanism adaptively aggregates by balancing attention-driven selection with uniform temporal coverage. The framework interfaces seamlessly with CNN, Transformer, and Mamba backbone families, adding only ~2.1 GFLOPs per feature pair. On Diving48, MamBOA achieves 85.02% Top-1 accuracy with an image-pretrained backbone and 86.24% with a video-pretrained backbone processing the entire video in a single forward pass - demonstrating that structurally induced state-space dynamics constitute a principled and general foundation for motion modeling.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Hybrid Ferromagnet-SNSPDs: Single photon induced order-to-disorder transition in ferromagnets coupled to thin film superconductors

arXiv:2606.17177v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The development of midwave and longwave infrared single photon detectors is crucial for their emerging applications in spectroscopy, remote sensing, exoplanet detection, and free space quantum communications. However, existing sensors need to be operated at extremely low temperatures (0.08-0.9K) to reduce dark noise and hence require the use of advanced cryogenics such as dilution refrigerators or $^3$He cryogens, significantly limiting applications. Here we propose a vortex-engineering approach based on a hybrid phase transition in a ferromagnet/superconductor bilayer to increase the operating temperature of infrared single photon detectors up to 3.75K. We show that the introduction of a ferromagnetic layer produces a local magnetic field which impedes vortex crossing in the superconductor, reducing dark noise. When a single photon is incident, the photon-induced hotspot causes an order-to-disorder transition in the ferromagnet, leading to a vortex-induced phase transition in the superconducting layer. By engineering the ferromagnet's Curie temperature to be close to the device's operating temperature, single photon sensitivity can be achieved at increased operating temperatures. We predict at midwave/longwave infrared wavelengths (3-14$\mu$m) the operating temperature can be raised to 3.25-3.75K, enabling significantly simpler cooling systems.

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

Exploring the potential of AlphaEarth and TESSERA embeddings for Fine-scale Local Climate Zone Mapping: A case study across five cities in Switzerland

arXiv:2606.20034v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding urban spatial morphology is critical for climate modeling, risk assessment, and sustainable urban design, and Local Climate Zone (LCZ) mapping provides the basic framework for this. However, many cities still use coarse ~100-m resolution LCZ records, which are unsuitable for fine-scale urban research. In this study, precomputed embeddings from TESSERA (Feng et al., 2025) and AlphaEarth (Brown et al., 2025) are compared to traditional Sentinel-1/2 (S1S2) composites in five Swiss cities to see if they can upscale coarse LCZ maps to 10-m resolution using an attention-based U-Net. Three experiments assess multi-city transferability, the impact of higher-resolution reference data, and temporal robustness to year-to-year phenology changes. We find that all datasets achieve strong performance with test data Intersection-over-Union (IoU) ranging from 0.59-0.69 and 0.77-0.82 in the first two experiments. TESSERA consistently outperforms both S1S2 and AlphaEarth across both settings As expected, we find that the transfer of embedding-based models from one year to another remains an open challenge. Overall, however, our results demonstrate the promising potential of embeddings derived from EO foundation models to reduce time consuming preprocessing, respectively, manual feature engineering tasks and to guide a universal deep learning-based LCZ mapping workflow. When combined with a simple location-aware attention U-Net architecture, the embeddings enhance regional transferability and scalability, supporting the development of comprehensive and reproducible fine-scale LCZ maps for global urban climate applications Improving reference data quality remains the strongest lever for further accuracy gains.

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

ReRAM-aware Model Finetuning addressing I-V Non-linearity and Retention Errors

arXiv:2606.17471v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Traditional CPU, GPU, and NPU architectures are increasingly limited by the von Neumann bottleneck. While In-Memory Computing (IMC) using ReRAM crossbar arrays offers a high-density, energy-efficient alternative, its practical deployment is constrained through their non-idealities. Existing hardware-aware training frameworks often require training from scratch, which is computationally prohibitive for modern large-scale models. In this work, we propose a finetuning-based hardware-aware training algorithm that enables robust DNN deployment on ReRAM with minimal training overhead. Our approach mitigates I-V non-linearity by applying a range-shrunk sinh transformation and incorporates retention errors directly into a regularization loss during the finetuning process. We evaluate our framework across models and tasks such as image classification and question-answering (QA). Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves similar accuracy on large-scale models like ResNet18 and DeiT-Tiny as the base model. In-case of ImageNet for MobileNetV3 families the technique has only less than 2% accuracy degradation. Further, applying the technique on the SQuAD v2 dataset results in only 1 point degradation of F-1 score.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

A Minimal Model of Bounded Trade-Off Screening in Multi-Attribute Choice

arXiv:2606.13201v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human decision-making often involves choosing between multi-attribute alternatives, yet classical models assume fully compensatory utility aggregation despite evidence that people reject options with poor performance on critical attributes. We propose a bounded trade-off reasoning framework in which decisions are governed by a screening process that evaluates the balance between gains and losses across attributes. The model introduces a trade-off tolerance parameter that controls acceptable imbalance and can vary across contexts. Through simulation, we show that this mechanism produces preference patterns that differ from standard utility-based models and captures context-dependent variation in trade-off behavior. These results establish bounded trade-off screening as a plausible computational mechanism for multi-attribute choice and generate testable predictions for future behavioral studies.

14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Characterizing metric-space-valued processes: separating classes and weak invariance principles for measure-theoretic inference

arXiv:2606.13084v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This article investigates stochastic processes taking values in metric spaces that lack a topological vector space structure, a regime characterized by intricate interplay between topological, geometric, and temporal dependence structures. It is formally established that spaces admitting an isometric Hilbertian embedding constitute a strict subclass within the much broader class of metric spaces possessing the ball property. While traditional kernel methods are susceptible to geometric distortion when the underlying space cannot be isometrically embedded into a Hilbert space, we bypass such limitations by exploiting a fundamental structural property inherent to this broader class; namely, that Borel probability measures are uniquely determined by their values on balls. These separating classes provide the foundation for the subsequently introduced measure-theoretic inference methodology. We derive uniform convergence of a family of time-dependent random measures, alongside weak invariance principles for the corresponding nonstationary random fields. This framework explicitly exposes how dependence and geometric complexity influence sample path regularity. Furthermore, because the rapid decay of small-ball probabilities can prohibit the existence of limiting distributions for supremum-based discrepancy measures, we develop $L^p$-based alternatives. By directly leveraging the introduced convergence results, this approach circumvents the need for higher-order $U$-process formulations. Finally, for spaces that do admit an isometric Hilbertian embedding, and where $U$-processes naturally arise, we establish limit theory for both degenerate and nondegenerate multi-parameter $U$-processes, and demonstrate that local discrepancy tests maintain asymptotic stability under dynamic parameter regimes.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Coulomb crystallization of xenon highly charged ions in a laser-cooled Ca+ matrix

arXiv:2512.12266v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We report on the sympathetic cooling and Coulomb crystallization of xenon highly charged ions (HCIs) with laser-cooled Ca$^+$ ions. The HCIs are produced in a compact electron beam ion trap, then charge selected, decelerated, and finally injected into a cryogenic linear Paul trap. There, they are captured into $^{40}$Ca$^+$ Coulomb crystals, and co-crystallized within them, causing dark voids in their fluorescence images. Fine control over the number of trapped ions and HCIs allows us to realize mixed-species crystals with arbitrary ordering patterns. By investigating Xe$^{q+}$–Ca$^+$ strings, we confirm the HCI charge states, measure their lifetime and characterize the mixed-species motional modes. Our system effectively combines the established quantum control toolbox for Ca$^+$ with the rich set of atomic properties of Xe highly charged ions, providing a resourceful platform for optical frequency metrology, searches for signatures of new physics, and quantum information science.

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

Scaling Generative Foundation Models for Chest Radiography with Rectified Flow Transformers

arXiv:2606.19460v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce the first generative foundation model for chest radiograph synthesis trained from scratch at the billion-parameter scale. Existing radiographic AI models often suffer from poor generalisation across patient subpopulations, institutions, and acquisition settings, resulting in limited real-world clinical utility. Controlled, high-fidelity synthesis of chest radiographs is a promising path toward diversifying clinical datasets and evaluating the robustness of diagnostic models. Therefore, we present the largest specialist generative foundation model for chest radiographs to date, with over 1.3B parameters, trained for 1.6T tokens on a curated, heterogeneous dataset comprising 1.2M radiographs and clinical expert-guided metadata. Our model supports controllable radiograph generation and editing across multiple demographic subgroups, acquisition views, and a dozen pathologies. Moreover, we significantly advance the state of the art in radiograph synthesis fidelity, producing images that are indistinguishable from real radiographs to clinical experts.

17.
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.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Bridging Information Asymmetry: A Hierarchical Framework for Blind Face Restoration with Reduced Uncertainty

Blind face restoration remains a persistent challenge due to the inherent ill-posedness of reconstructing holistic structures from severely constrained observations. Current generative paradigms, while capable of synthesizing realistic facial details, remain limited by the under-constrained nature of blind restoration, where severely degraded inputs can be mapped to plausible yet identity-inconsistent outputs. To address this issue, we present Pref-Restore, a hierarchical framework for BFR with reduced restoration uncertainty. Our design is organized around three complementary principles: (1) Semantic Information Augmentation, where an auto-regressive semantic branch converts image and text cues into structured tokens that provide a stable high-level anchor; (2) Texture-level Fidelity Alignment, where the diffusion generator is trained under this anchor to recover identity-relevant details; and (3) Fidelity-constrained Preference Optimization, where a face-aware reward refines the diffusion trajectory while controlling the quality–fidelity trade-off. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks show that Pref-Restore achieves state-of-the-art performance, with stronger identity-sensitive fidelity and lower restoration uncertainty across repeated sampling. Systematic ablations further attribute these gains to the proposed hierarchical design, showing the necessity of staged training, the robustness and quality dependence of the text pathway, and the benefit of fidelity-constrained preference optimization.

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

Frame-Conditioned Moral Computation in LLaMA 3.1-8B-Instruct: A Mechanistic Interpretability Audit of Ethical Reasoning

arXiv:2606.15507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Behavioral audits of Large Language Models on moral prompts measure what the model says, not the internal computation producing it. We use Transluce, an AI-driven mechanistic-interpretability platform, to examine LLaMA 3.1-8B-Instruct on 54 moral prompts in four batteries: 17 dilemmas, policy, and meta-ethical questions (B1); 6 role-playing scenarios (B3); and a controlled trolley contrast varying the switching mechanism with people fixed (B4, 15 prompts) or identity attributes with mechanism fixed (B5, 16 prompts). Two complementary metric families, five cluster-level metrics and a six-metric neuron-level panel, converge on a Situational Anchor Effect: domain-specific representations dominate the top of the activation list across every battery. The model's ethics-labeled capacity stays essentially constant; its salience (rank, priority, top-of-list presence) is highly sensitive to the interpretive frame the prompt selects. The B4-vs-B5 contrast confirms the model attends to whichever surface feature varies: aggregate ethics metrics are indistinguishable, but the dominant non-ethics distractor mirrors the design. A multi-temperature audit identifies a candidate ethics neuron (L16/N3837) stable across temperatures; a cross-model behavioral proxy on two frontier models yields preliminary evidence of divergence in self-reported moral focus, consistent with an Alignment Wrapper in which RLHF re-orders surface text without removing underlying domain-first frames. We unify these as Frame-Conditioned Moral Computation: the prompt's surface vocabulary selects a feature manifold, and the moral conclusion is downstream of that selection. Behavioral alignment must be supplemented by Mechanistic Alignment: a research program asking whether ethics-related features can be shown causally privileged under controlled frame variation, not merely loud in the explanation.

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

Critically Engaged Pragmatism: Scientific Norm and Social, Pragmatist Epistemology for AI Science Evaluation Tools

arXiv:2601.09753v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI science evaluation tools aim to assess research credibility. As with traditional metrics such as impact factors, their edicts can be decontextualised and repurposed in problematic ways. To address this, I propose Critically-Engaged Pragmatism as a scientific norm enjoining scientific communities to scrutinise the purposes and purpose-specific reliability of AI science evaluation tools. To foster Critically Engaged Pragmatism, creators of AI science evaluation tools should transparently and fully report design, training, and benchmarking details to facilitate assessments of purpose-specific reliability, liability to different types of error, and bias. What count as best practices for the transparent reporting of AI science evaluation tools should be updated as new forms of error, bias, and gamesmanship are discovered. Under this framework, AI science evaluation tools are not objective arbiters of scientific credibility. Rather, they are the object of critical discursive practices that ultimately ground the credibility of scientific communities.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Scalable and Interpretable Representation Alignment with Ordinal Similarity

arXiv:2606.16379v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating representation similarity is fundamental to representation learning. However, existing metrics suffer from significant limitations: they lack interpretability due to shifting baselines, lack robustness to outliers, and are computationally intractable for large datasets, forcing reliance on heuristic approximations. To address this, we develop an ordinal-similarity framework, instantiated by the Triplet (TSI) and Quadruplet (QSI) Similarity Indices, which measure alignment by quantifying the consistency of ordinal relationships. We theoretically demonstrate this formulation is inherently interpretable, robust to outliers, and computationally efficient. Finally, we establish a formal equivalence between TSI and local neighborhood alignment, measured by Mutual Nearest Neighbors. Empirically, we validate these properties and show that ordinal similarity offers a scalable approach to measuring alignment, enabling practitioners to better understand and design representations.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

From Digital to Physical: Digital Agents as Autonomous Coaches for Physical Intelligence

arXiv:2601.21570v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The field of Embodied AI is witnessing a rapid evolution toward general-purpose robotic systems, fueled by high-fidelity simulation and large-scale data collection. However, this scaling capability remains severely bottlenecked by a reliance on labor-intensive manual oversight from intricate reward shaping to hyperparameter tuning across heterogeneous backends. Inspired by LLMs' success in software automation and science discovery, we introduce \textsc{EmboCoach-Bench}, a benchmark evaluating the capacity of LLM agents to autonomously engineer embodied policies. Spanning 32 expert-curated RL and IL tasks, our framework posits executable code as the universal interface. We move beyond static generation to assess a dynamic closed-loop workflow, where agents leverage environment feedback to iteratively draft, debug, and optimize solutions, spanning improvements from physics-informed reward design to policy architectures such as diffusion policies. Extensive evaluations yield three critical insights: (1) autonomous agents can qualitatively surpass human-engineered baselines by 26.5\% in average success rate; (2) agentic workflow with environment feedback effectively strengthens policy development and substantially narrows the performance gap between open-source and proprietary models; and (3) agents exhibit self-correction capabilities for pathological engineering cases, successfully resurrecting task performance from near-total failures through iterative simulation-in-the-loop debugging. Ultimately, this work establishes a foundation for self-evolving embodied intelligence, accelerating the paradigm shift from labor-intensive manual tuning to scalable, autonomous engineering in embodied AI field.

23.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Robust semi-supervised scRNA-seq integration from virtual adversarial learning

Single-cell RNA sequencing integration methods that rely solely on transcriptomic data often struggle to preserve fine-grained distinctions between closely related cell subtypes. As a result, cell populations that are separable in the raw data may become over-mixed after integration, reducing biological resolution and interpretability. Incorporating marker gene information can potentially address these issues; however, the variability and complexity of available marker sets limit their effective application. To address this, we introduce scCRAFT+, a semi-supervised integration model that innovatively incorporates marker gene information through Virtual Adversarial Training (VAT). By jointly optimizing marker-derived supervision and transcriptome-wide representations, VAT enforces local prediction smoothness among transcriptionally similar cells, improving robustness to noisy marker annotations while enhancing both integration quality and cell type auto-annotation. This targeted approach significantly enhances annotation accuracy and robustness, particularly when faced with incomplete or incorrect marker gene sets. Benchmarking shows that scCRAFT+ achieves consistently stronger performance than current unsupervised and supervised integration approaches, resulting in improved integration quality and biologically meaningful sub-cell type auto-annotations.

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

Gaussian DP for Reporting Differential Privacy Guarantees in Machine Learning

arXiv:2503.10945v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Current practices for reporting differential privacy (DP) guarantees for machine learning (ML) algorithms such as DP-SGD provide an incomplete and potentially misleading picture. For instance, if only a single $(\varepsilon, \delta)$ is known about a mechanism, standard analyses show that there could exist highly accurate inference attacks against training data records, when, upon a more careful analysis, such accurate attacks do not exist for most practical mechanisms. In this position paper, we argue that using _non-asymptotic_ Gaussian Differential Privacy (GDP) as the primary means of communicating DP guarantees in ML avoids these potential downsides. Using two recent developments in the DP literature: (i) open-source numerical accountants capable of computing the privacy profile and $f$-DP curves of DP-SGD to arbitrary accuracy, and (ii) a decision-theoretic metric over DP representations, we show how to provide non-asymptotic bounds on GDP using numerical accountants, and show that GDP can capture the entire privacy profile of DP-SGD and related algorithms with virtually no error, as quantified by the metric. To support our claims, we investigate the privacy profiles of state-of-the-art DP large-scale image classification, and the TopDown algorithm for the U.S. Decennial Census, observing that GDP fits their profiles remarkably well in all cases. We conclude with a discussion on the strengths and weaknesses of this approach, and discuss which other privacy mechanisms could benefit from GDP.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Low-Burden LLM-Based Preference Learning: Personalizing Assistive Robots from Natural Language Feedback for Users with Paralysis

arXiv:2604.01463v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Physically Assistive Robots require personalized behaviors to ensure user safety and comfort. However, traditional preference learning methods, like exhaustive pairwise comparisons, cause substantial physical and cognitive fatigue for users with severe motor impairments. To solve this, we propose a low-burden, offline framework that translates unstructured natural language feedback directly into deterministic robotic control policies. To safely bridge the gap between ambiguous human speech and robotic code, our pipeline uses Large Language Models (LLMs) grounded in the Occupational Therapy Practice Framework. This clinical reasoning decodes subjective user reactions into explicit physical and psychological needs, which are then mapped into transparent decision trees. Before deployment, an automated "LLM-as-a-Judge" verifies the code's structural safety. We validated this system in a simulated meal preparation study with 10 adults with paralysis. Results show our natural language approach significantly reduces user workload compared to traditional baselines. Additionally, occupational therapists confirmed the generated policies are safe and accurately reflect user preferences.