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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Block algebra for morphing circuits

作者:

arXiv:2606.12724v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Morphing circuits are a new paradigm for quantum error correction that relaxes hardware requirements. We present four constructions for CNOT-based CSS morphing circuits with explicit qubit connectivity degrees. All four constructions are specified in block algebra notation, with entries in algebras generated by permutation matrices. The first three are obtained by rewriting existing surface- and color-code morphing circuits; the fourth is a new three-round construction modeled on the 6.6.6 color code. The surface-code construction recovers the morphing circuit of Ref. [ST25] for two-block group algebra codes. Numerical search then instantiates these permutation matrices using regular representations of finite groups. [ST25] M. H. Shaw and B. M. Terhal, Phys. Rev. Lett. 134(9), 090602 (2025).

02.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-13

ProtAff: Protein Binding Affinity Prediction via LoRA-Finetuned ESM-2

Predicting the binding affinity of protein–protein interactions remains a central challenge in computational biology. Structure prediction models such as AlphaFold3 (AF3) and Boltz-2 can produce high-quality docking poses, and their confidence scores indicate structure quality, but these same scores fail to rank binding affinity among confirmed binders. Here we present ProtAff, a sequence-only affinity prediction model built on ESM-2 (650M parameters) with low-rank adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning and a cross-attention module. ProtAff is trained using a margin ranking loss on 362,567 affinity measurements spanning 20 heterogeneous data sources, and we removed all training samples whose target sequence exceeds 50% similarity to the test target EGFR. On the AdaptyvBio EGFR benchmark (N = 55), ProtAff achieves a Spearman correlation coefficient {rho} = 0.413, outperforming the best AF3 metric ({rho} = 0.054), the best Boltz-2 metric ({rho} = -0.046), and ML-based predictors MINT ({rho} = 0.242) and CrossAffinity ({rho} = 0.216). Applied to the AdaptyvBio Nipah virus binder design competition, a pipeline incorporating ProtAff for affinity ranking produced a design with KD = 0.132 nM (2 of 5 designs confirmed binding), a 2.8-fold improvement over the competition winner. On a cross-target discrimination benchmark of 91 VHH-antigen crystal structures, ProtAff underperforms structural methods for distinguishing cognate from non-cognate pairings, indicating that sequence-based affinity models are effective for within-target ranking but not for cross-target specificity.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Flow-Corrected Thompson Sampling for Non-Stationary Contextual Bandits

arXiv:2606.23933v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study non-stationary linear contextual bandits where the reward model drifts over time, rendering classical contextual bandit algorithms brittle because historical data becomes systematically biased. We propose Flow-Corrected Thompson Sampling (fcTS), a Bayesian method that reuses experience by transporting past rewards to the present using an explicit drift model and incorporating each transported observation with a confidence weight that reflects transport reliability. This yields a unified template that specializes in (i) linear parameter drift via online slope estimation and reward correction, (ii) periodic variation via phase-aware reuse across cycles, and (iii) recurring regime switches via changepoint detection and regime-specific posterior memory. The resulting posterior updates remain closed-form under a linear Gaussian model and can be implemented efficiently with truncated, incrementally updated sufficient statistics. Across five controlled case studies and a semi-synthetic portfolio-selection benchmark with multiple overlapping non-stationarities, fcTS outperforms standard forgetting-based baselines (discounting, sliding windows, and periodic restarts), with the largest gains in settings exhibiting recurring temporal structure. These results demonstrate that when non-stationarity is structured, correcting and reweighting historical observations can be substantially more sample-efficient than uniformly discarding them.

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

Towards Fast and Effective Long Video Understanding of Multimodal Large Language Models via Adaptive Quasi-Gaussian Sampling

Long video understanding remains a daunting challenge for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) due to the excessive computation and memory footprint. Thus, keyframe selection is often adopted to mitigate this shortcoming, which however still suffers from low flexibility and high noise due to its hard sampling principle. In this paper, we define video frame selection as a problem of Quasi-Gaussian Sampling, and propose an adaptive and training-free approach termed AdaQ. Inspired by the $3$-$\sigma$ rule of Gaussian distribution, the objective of AdaQ is to achieve the optimal $3$-$\sigma$ interval for different examples, i.e., a smaller $3$-$\sigma$ interval for the local query and a larger one for the global query, thereby facilitating robust and adaptive frame sampling. To validate AdaQ, we apply it to four MLLMs with three embedding models. The extensive experimental results not only show its obvious performance gains over the default MLLMs and the SOTA keyframe selection methods, e.g., helping Qwen3-VL-8B outperform GPT4o by 15.8\% on average by using only 64 frames, but also confirm its superior robustness and high efficiency for long-video understanding, e.g., only 1 hyper-parameter needs to be set. Our code project is given at \href{https://github.com/Zkayovo-xmu/AdaQ}{https://github.com/Zkayovo-xmu/AdaQ}.

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

FORTIS: Benchmarking Over-Privilege in Agent Skills

arXiv:2605.09163v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language model agents increasingly operate through an intermediate skill layer that mediates between user intent and concrete task execution. This layer is widely treated as an organizational abstraction, but we argue it is also a privilege boundary that current models routinely exceed. We present FORTIS, a benchmark that evaluates over-privilege in agent skills across two stages: whether a model selects the minimally sufficient skill from a large overlapping library, and whether it executes that skill without expanding into broader tools or actions than the skill permits. Across ten frontier models and three domains, we find that over-privileged behavior is the norm rather than the exception. Models consistently reach for higher-privilege skills and tools than the task requires, failing at both stages at rates that remain high even for the strongest available models. Failure is especially severe under the ordinary conditions of real user interaction: incomplete specification, convenience framing, and proximity to skill boundaries. None of these requires adversarial construction. The results indicate that the skill layer, far from containing agent behavior, is itself a primary source of privilege escalation in current systems.

07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Averaging principles for nonautonomous multiscale McKean-Vlasov stochastic systems

arXiv:2606.12820v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper investigates a class of nonautonomous multiscale McKean-Vlasov stochastic systems. By leveraging the nonautonomous Poisson equation, we rigorously establish both strong and weak averaging principles, accompanied by explicit convergence rates. Notably, the coefficients of the averaging equations derived in the general case retain dependence on the scaling parameter $\varepsilon$. However, under the additional assumptions that the fast-scale coefficients are either asymptotically convergent or time-periodic, we demonstrate that the slow component converges, in the strong or weak sense, to averaging equations with coefficients independent of $\varepsilon$.

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

Dimension-Free Approximate Tensorization of Quantum Hypercontractivity for Qudit Depolarizing Semigroups

arXiv:2606.17729v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove almost tensorization for hypercontractivity and logarithmic-Sobolev constants for a class of reversible quantum Markov semigroups satisfying the positive off-diagonal scaling (PODS) property. This class includes qubit examples and generalized depolarizing semigroups with respect to full-rank states in arbitrary finite dimensions. For any such semigroup $(\Phi_t)_{t\ge 0}$ and every tensor power $n$, we show that the log-Sobolev constant of the product semigroup $\Phi_t^{\otimes n}$ is at least $2/(3\ln 2)$, approximately 0.96, times the log-Sobolev constant of the single-site semigroup $\Phi_t$, independently of $n$ and the local dimension $d$. The proof first establishes exact tensorization of the $(q,2)$-hypercontractive inequality for integer $q$, in particular $q=3$, and then extends the estimate to all real $q>2$ by complex interpolation; the standard implication from hypercontractivity to logarithmic-Sobolev inequalities yields the stated almost tensorization result. As an application of the same method, we also obtain sharp $(q,2)$-hypercontractivity estimates for qubit depolarizing channels.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Learning a Maximum Entropy Model for Visual Textures using Diffusion

Visual textures – spatially homogeneous image regions containing repeated elements (e.g. a field of grass, the bark of a tree) – are ubiquitous in visual scenes and provide important cues for recognizing and analyzing materials and objects. A number of existing texture models extract essential statistics from a single texture image, and can then generate high-quality samples that are visually similar to the original by matching these statistics. However, their statistics are either hand-designed or based on a network pretrained for another purpose (e.g., object recognition). Here, we develop the first principled method for unsupervised learning of a set of statistics that are used to constrain a maximum entropy probability model. We leverage methods developed for generative diffusion models to derive training and sampling procedures, and compare these to the traditional method of sampling via matching the statistics. Despite the compactness of our trained model (512 statistics), it generates texture images whose quality is as good as or better than the current state-of-the-art model (~177k statistics). A more direct comparison of the two models, obtained by synthesizing images that are indistinguishable for one model but maximally different for the other, reveals their relative strengths and weaknesses. Finally, we show that unlike previous statistical texture models, a straight trajectory in the representation space of our model generates homogeneous texture samples that interpolate smoothly between the features of the two end points.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Beyond Weights and Gradients: A Taxonomy of Federated Learning Messages

arXiv:2606.16891v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated Learning is rapidly evolving beyond the exchange of traditional model weights and gradients, yet existing definitions fail to capture the full scope of modern payloads like synthetic data and federated analytics. This paper addresses the gap by proposing a formal mathematical definition of a federated message that accounts for both utility and privacy. We introduce a taxonomy that organizes these exchanges into three categories: model structures, statistical summaries, and data-conditioned representations. By evaluating these groups based on computational demands, communication costs, and privacy risks, we provide a clearer understanding of the trade-offs involved in decentralized training. Our review of 202 recent publications highlights a significant shift since 2021 toward diverse messaging paradigms, signaling a move away from standard deep learning updates toward more specialized information sharing. This framework provides a structured path for future research to optimize federated systems for varying hardware and security requirements.

11.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

On the packing dimension of projected measures

arXiv:2604.18222v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the packing dimension of Borel measures under orthogonal projections. We give a necessary and sufficient condition such that typical projections of Borel probability measures have full packing dimension and derive general lower bounds in the complementary case. Our approach shows that the Assouad dimension of the support influences the behavior of projected measures.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

TLA-Prover: Verifiable TLA+ Specification Synthesis via Preference-Optimized Low-Rank Adaptation

arXiv:2606.06133v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: TLA+ is a formal specification language for verifying distributed systems and safety-critical protocols. Large language models (LLMs) frequently produce TLA+ specifications that fail the TLC model checker for semantic reasons. Across 25 LLMs, the best public baseline is 26.6% syntactic parse and 8.6% semantic model-check. We present TLA-Prover, a 20-billion-parameter model for TLA+ specification synthesis. Training combines supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on verified examples with repair-based group-relative policy optimization (GRPO). In the GRPO stage, the model learns to fix its own rejected specifications. We also train a direct preference optimization (DPO) variant from the same SFT checkpoint as an ablation. TLC provides the reward signal directly, with no learned reward model. Four tiers grade each output: Bronze (parses), Silver (no warnings), Gold (passes TLC), and Diamond. To reach Diamond, the model's correctness property is automatically altered in a small way; TLC must then detect a violation. If TLC still passes, the property was always-true and contributes nothing; the output fails Diamond. TLA-Prover reaches 9/30 (i.e. pass@1 = 30%) at both Gold and Diamond on a held-out 30-problem benchmark. This is roughly 3.5x the 8.6% untuned baseline. The DPO variant reaches 20% at Diamond. Gold and Diamond coincide at every checkpoint; this prevents the trivial-property failure mode.

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

Reload-Mamba: Hierarchical Anti-Dilution State-Space Modeling for Multi-Class Semantic Segmentation

Mamba-based state space models offer linear-time long-range modeling for high-resolution dense prediction, but sequential state-space propagation can attenuate boundary-sensitive and detail-sensitive responses that are critical in multi-class semantic segmentation. We propose Reload-Mamba, a semantic segmentation framework that addresses this propagation-induced response dilution through three segmentation-specific designs: (i) a boundary-supervised local detail prior that is explicitly trained with ground-truth boundary masks to identify regions requiring response restoration; (ii) a class-uncertainty-aware Reload Gate that incorporates per-pixel class entropy from a pre-reload auxiliary head as an additional gating signal, a formulation that is informative only under multi-class dense prediction; and (iii) a hierarchical multi-level Reload mechanism that applies anti-dilution refinement at three decoder levels and fuses the restored representations top-down. Built upon a ConvNeXt-Tiny encoder with a multi-scale decoder and four-directional Mamba scanning with pixel-wise directional attention, Reload-Mamba achieves 47.9% single-scale (48.9% multi-scale) mIoU on ADE20K and 83.2% single-scale mIoU on Cityscapes. With ResNet-101 + COCO pre-training under the standard DeepLab-style protocol, Reload-Mamba reaches 87.8% mIoU on PASCAL VOC 2012 val. Controlled ablations show that each of the three segmentation-specific designs contributes beyond a direct port of the prior anti-dilution architecture proposed for binarization, cumulatively improving over the direct-port baseline by +2.2 mIoU on ADE20K.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Composed Object Retrieval: Object-level Retrieval via Composed Expressions

Retrieving fine-grained visual content based on user intent remains a challenge in multimodal systems. Although current Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) methods combine reference images with retrieval texts, they are constrained to image-level matching and cannot localize specific objects. To this end, we propose Composed Object Retrieval (COR), a new object-level retrieval task that retrieves target object(s) from candidate objects in a target image and grounds the retrieved result with pixel-level masks. Given a reference object, its mask, a target image, and a retrieval text describing the desired modification, COR requires models to perform composed visual-textual reasoning rather than relying on explicit category names. This setting introduces several challenges, including fine-grained compositional matching, negative-object filtering under visually similar distractors, and flexible single- or multi-object retrieval. We construct COR125K, the first large-scale COR benchmark, containing 125,541 retrieval triplets across 408 categories with base/novel splits for evaluating category-level generalization. We also present CORE, a unified end-to-end model that integrates reference region encoding, adaptive vision-text interaction, and region-level contrastive learning to align composed representations with target objects while suppressing background and distractors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CORE significantly outperforms existing CIR-based pipelines and strong baselines in both base and novel categories, establishing a simple and effective foundation for fine-grained object-level multimodal retrieval. Code will be released publicly at https://github.com/wangtong627/COR.

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

VoidPadding: Let [VOID] Handle Padding in Masked Diffusion Language Models so that [EOS] Can Focus on Semantic Termination

MDLMs generate text by denoising a preallocated masked response canvas, making response-length modeling central to instruction tuning. Existing MDLMs often inherit the autoregressive convention of using repeated \texttt{[EOS]} tokens for padding during instruction tuning, giving \texttt{[EOS]} a dual role as both a semantic terminator and a padding token. We show that this dual role is a root cause of \texttt{[EOS]} overflow under large-block decoding. To decouple these roles, we propose VoidPadding, which introduces \texttt{[VOID]} for padding and reserves \texttt{[EOS]} for termination. During inference, the learned \texttt{[EOS]} signal enables early stopping, while the learned \texttt{[VOID]} signal guides adaptive response canvas expansion. On Dream-7B-Instruct, VoidPadding improves the block-size-averaged four-task mean across mathematical reasoning and code generation benchmarks by \(+17.84\) points over the original model and \(+6.95\) points over RainbowPadding, while reducing decoding NFE by 55.7\% on average. Code is available at https://github.com/Haru-LCY/VoidPadding.

16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

On The Effectiveness-Fluency Trade-Off In LLM Conditioning: A Systematic Study

Controlling the output of Large Language Models (LLMs) is a central challenge for their reliable deployment, yet a clear understanding of the involved trade-offs remains elusive. Current approaches to conditioning are often evaluated with a narrow focus on their effectiveness at injecting or removing a target concept, neglecting generation quality. We systematically investigate a range of conditioning methods in both injection and removal scenarios. We find that efficient steering methods frequently achieve conditioning at a steep cost to fluency. Furthermore, we identify a critical yet previously overlooked interaction with the training paradigm: activation steering methods are far less effective on instruction-tuned models than on their base counterparts. Simple prompting and full-fledged supervised fine-tuning, on the other hand, are viable options for concept injection, but are not as good at concept removal. Finally, cheaply computed textual metrics highly correlate to costly LLM-as-judge scores, and provide insights on the behavior of conditioning methods.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Polyp-D2ATL: Deep Domain-Adaptive Transfer Learning for Colorectal Polyp Classification under Label Distribution Shift

Early and highly accurate prediction of colorectal polyps, as an important sign of one of the most dangerous types of cancer, will result in saving more lives. Despite the advancements in colorectal polyp classification, many challenges remain in obtaining an automated polyp prediction system that is able to diagnose the difficult-to-predict polyps accompanied by different features in real scenarios, where the model can handle imbalanced data, label distribution shift, and cross-modality generalization successfully. In this study, we propose Polyp-D2ATL, a novel framework accompanied by a specific training strategy, which mitigates these limitations and effectively predicts the different classes of polyps belonging to the NICE classification. Our extensive experiments on the PICCOLO validation and test sets demonstrate that the proposed Polyp-D2ATL significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art models across various reliable metrics, achieving an accuracy of 82.38%, a Macro-F1 of 77.49%, and a specificity of 87.47% on the validation set, alongside consistent improvements on the held-out test set which demonstrates the generalization capacity and clinical applicability of the proposed approach.

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

Dealing with Annotator Disagreement in Hate Speech Classification

Hate speech detection is a crucial task, especially on social media where harmful content can spread quickly. Collecting social media content (tweets etc.) to train machine learning models is easy, but detecting and categorizing hate speech can be difficult due to the inherently subjective nature. This subjectivity leads to frequent disagreement among annotators, particularly for subtle or borderline content. Traditional approaches either discard non-consensus samples or force a ''gold standard'' through expert adjudication, ignoring valuable information about uncertainty and diverse human perspectives. We examine the largely overlooked problem of annotator disagreement in hate speech classification and evaluate a range of aggregation methods, including majority voting, ordinal strategies (minimum, maximum, and mean), and analyze their impact across binary, 4-class, and 6-class classification tasks. In addition, we leverage annotators' perceived hate speech strength scores to explore regression-based and hybrid modeling approaches. Among others, we show that filtering non-consensus samples results in over-optimistic results and that the perceived strength provides a complementary signal that enhance classification performance. Finally, we establish new state-of-the-art results for hate speech detection in Turkish tweets, and demonstrate that annotator disagreement, when properly modeled, is a valuable resource for building more robust and reliable systems.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Evaluating the Interpretability of Sparse Autoencoders with Concept Annotations

arXiv:2606.24716v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are increasingly used to extract interpretable concepts from vision and vision language models, yet existing evaluation methods largely rely on proxy metrics or qualitative inspection rather than measuring semantic correspondence. We present a human-grounded evaluation framework that quantifies alignment between SAE latents and human-annotated concepts, without requiring user studies, and validate this matching through targeted attribute perturbations. To enable this intervention-style evaluation in vision, we construct synCUB and synCOCO, synthetic benchmarks of paired images that differ in exactly one attribute. We introduce Fully-Binary Matching Pursuit (FBMP), a coalition-based matching procedure that supports many-to-one mappings between SAE latents and annotated concepts, and consistently outperforms one-to-one baselines. For functional validation, we propose a Targeted Attribute Perturbation Alignment Score (TAPAScore), which tests whether matched concepts respond selectively and in the expected direction under targeted image-level attribute perturbations. Under sanity checks, our matching and TAPAScore are the only evaluated metrics that reliably distinguish trained SAEs from untrained ones. Across SAEs trained on CLIP and DINOv2 embeddings, we find that increased overcompleteness can reduce perturbation alignment, indicating a reduction in interpretability. Our evaluation framework suggests that moderate dictionary sizes provide the best trade-off, yielding the most interpretable SAEs. Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/JonasKlotz/sae-concept-eval.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Toward Generalist Autonomous Research via Hypothesis-Tree Refinement

Scientific progress depends on a repeated loop of exploration, experimentation, and abstraction. Researchers test candidate directions, interpret the evidence, and carry the resulting lessons into later attempts. We study how an AI agent can run this loop autonomously over long horizons. We introduce Arbor, a general framework for autonomous research that combines a long-lived coordinator, short-lived executors, and Hypothesis Tree Refinement (HTR), a persistent tree that links hypotheses, artifacts, evidence, and distilled insights across time. The coordinator manages global research strategy over the tree, while executors implement and test individual hypotheses in isolated worktrees. As results return, Arbor updates the tree, propagates reusable lessons, refines the search frontier, and admits verified improvements. This design turns autonomous research from a sequence of local attempts into a cumulative process in which strategy, execution, and evidence are carried across time. We evaluate Arbor under Autonomous Optimization (AO), an operational setting where an agent improves an initial research artifact through iterative experimentation without step-level human supervision. Across six real research tasks in model training, harness engineering, and data synthesis, Arbor achieves the best held-out result on all six tasks, attaining more than 2.5x the average relative held-out gain of Codex and Claude Code under the same task interface and resource budget. On MLE-Bench Lite, Arbor reaches 86.36% Any Medal with GPT-5.5, the strongest result in our comparison.

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

Scene-Adaptive Nonlinear Tone Curves for Pseudo Ground-Truth Generation in Low-Light 3D Gaussian Splatting

Low-light novel view synthesis is challenging because dark multi-view images contain noise, weak structural detail, and compressed dynamic range. Recent 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) methods address these challenges by generating pseudo ground-truth (pseudo-GT) images as supervision targets when paired normal-light references are unavailable. Existing pseudo-GT methods apply a uniform linear gain to all pixels, which clips bright regions while providing insufficient enhancement in dark regions, limiting reconstruction quality. We observe that nonlinear tone mappings, long established in 2D low-light enhancement, have not been explored for pseudo-GT generation in 3D reconstruction. Accordingly, we propose a scene-adaptive nonlinear tone-curve framework that replaces linear pseudo-GT with nonlinear alternatives. The framework introduces percentile-based normalisation for scene-agnostic curve application, a scene-adaptive offset for automatic black-level adjustment, and two complementary curves: Adaptive SoftExp (ASE), a bounded exponential curve, and Adaptive Poly3 (AP3), a data-driven cubic polynomial. The module changes only the pseudo-GT computation and leaves the 3DGS backbone unchanged. Experiments on three benchmarks covering 21 scenes show that both curves consistently outperform the linear baseline with PSNR improvements up to +4.34 dB on LOM and +3.25 dB on RealX3D. Both curves achieve similar performance despite their different mathematical forms, suggesting the improvement is curve-agnostic. Code is available at https://github.com/lvmingzhe/adaptiveToneCurve

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

Listening with Attention: Entropy-Guided Explainability for Transformer-Based Audio Models

arXiv:2606.14647v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transformer-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) models such as Whisper are highly accurate, but their predictions remain difficult to interpret. Existing explainable AI (XAI) methods often lack faithfulness and precise temporal grounding. We propose Listening with Entropy-guided Attention for Faithful explainability (LEAF-X), a model-intrinsic XAI framework for transformer-based ASR. LEAF-X combines entropy-guided attention weighting, multi-layer attention rollout, and optional causal ablations to identify low-entropy, high-impact heads and layers, producing sparse token-to-frame attributions. Unlike perturbation-based explainers or raw attention maps, LEAF-X exploits the internal structure of encoder-decoder and speech-augmented decoder-only models to generate explanations that better reflect model computation. Results show 32% improved faithfulness, 35-39% stronger locality/sparsity, and the most stable attributions, supporting more transparent and auditable ASR.

23.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

ECMME: an atlas of selection pressures on the mammalian extracellular matrix reveals contrasting evolutionary dynamics

The extracellular matrix (ECM) is a fundamental metazoan innovation that provides structural support and regulatory cues essential for multicellular life. While core matrisome components are subject to strong functional constraints, their evolutionary dynamics at the molecular level remain incompletely characterized. Here, we present a comprehensive per-residue analysis of selection pressures across 272 human core matrisome proteins using high-quality orthologous sequences from up to 228 placental mammal species. We developed an automated pipeline integrating ortholog identification, codon-aware alignments, and site-specific selection analyses with the MEME and FUBAR methods from the HyPhy suite. Results reveal pervasive strong purifying selection across the matrisome, consistent with its structural and functional indispensability. This is accompanied by episodic positive selection and rarer pervasive positive selection, with collagens exhibiting significantly elevated episodic positive selection compared to glycoproteins and proteoglycans. To facilitate community access, we developed ECMME (ECM Molecular Evolution) browser, an intuitive open-access web resource that visualizes selection metrics plotted directly onto protein topologies. ECMME allows researchers to seamlessly browse and investigate the data, providing a powerful framework for interpreting functional sites. It is available online and requires no local installation or set-up (https://izzilab-ecmme.share.connect.posit.cloud/).

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

A Quantum Algorithm for Random Number Generation

arXiv:2606.13034v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a quantum algorithm for random number generation that achieves a provable quadratic speedup over classical Markov chain mixing, building on the Diaconis-Shahshahani Fourier analysis of the top-to-random card shuffle. The algorithm integrates three quantum primitives into a unified mixing circuit: the Quantum Fourier Transform (QFT), which diagonalizes the Markov transition operator; controlled phase rotations, which encode the shuffle eigenvalue spectrum; and the Grover diffusion operator, which acts as a quantum analogue of the Aldous-Diaconis strong uniform stopping time by reflecting amplitudes about their mean at each iteration. For an n-qubit register, the mixing time is O(\sqrt{n \log n}) iterations. Extending to m qudits of local dimension d reduces this to O(\sqrt{\log_d N}) iterations, where N = d^m, compared to the classical O(n \log n) bound. The qudit formulation further reduces QFT circuit depth from O(\log^2 N) to O(\log_d^2 N) gates per layer by encoding the same N-state space using m = \log_d N subsystems instead of \log_2 N qubits. We validate both variants on IBM superconducting hardware.

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

Code Correctness Signals in LLM Hidden States: Pre-Generation Probing and Repair Geometry

arXiv:2606.14530v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models encode rich information in their hidden states. This work asks whether code correctness is legible in the hidden states of Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507, before it generates and as it repairs a failed attempt, studied on 444 LiveCodeBench tasks. It reports two findings connected by a single confound-control tool: residualization. First, the correctness of the model's first-attempt code is linearly decodable from the prompt-final hidden state, with a leakage-free held-out AUC of 0.931 +/- 0.008 across 50 outer splits. After the linear effect of prompt length is removed from each hidden state dimension, the probe still reaches 0.911 +/- 0.010, well above a prompt-length baseline of 0.754 +/- 0.014. Second, on 236 cleaned cases where the model attempts to repair a failed first attempt, the hidden state shift from the failing attempt to its repair carries a statistically detectable contrastive direction, significant on both a magnitude and a split-half test against label-shuffled nulls. This direction does not survive a conditional residualization against repair-context covariates that differ between successful and failed repairs, marking it as a correlate of repair success driven by the repair context rather than an isolated repair-comprehension feature. The probe layer is selected by nested cross-validation, and the same residualization approach that upholds the pre-generation correctness result overturns the repair-direction interpretation. The contribution is as much methodological as empirical: a diagnostic honest enough to report a negative result alongside a positive one.