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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Dealing with locality in QAOA

arXiv:2606.14447v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Shallow-depth QAOA on sparse, high-diameter MaxCut instances faces a locality bottleneck: at depth \(p\), local observables can depend only on a bounded neighborhood of the circuit interaction graph. We propose a transport-augmented QAOA that keeps the MaxCut cost Hamiltonian unchanged but enriches the mixer with optimized, unweighted shortcut couplings (scheduled \(XX+YY\)) to collapse the effective interaction-graph diameter. Using exact finite-depth support recursions, we relate optimal shortcut placement to bounded-diameter graph augmentation, and show in benchmarks that (unlike ma-QAOA) performance becomes effectively size-invariant once the diameter is reduced. For bipartite families (base diameter 4), reducing the interaction path to \(d=1\) raises the ensemble-averaged approximation ratio from 0.7378 (ma-QAOA) to 0.9767 at \(p=1\) (\(\sigma=0.0251\), nine system sizes); on random trees (base diameter 10), at \(p=2\) it improves from 0.9226 to 0.9997 (\(\sigma=0.0001\)).

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

Gastroendoscopy View Synthesis: A New Real Dataset and Evaluation

Novel view synthesis (NVS) is an active research topic in computer vision, owing to the success of neural radiance field (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) methods. While NVS opens the door to potential applications in gastroendoscopy, such as extending the field of view of endoscopic images and enabling digital twins for 3D archiving and endoscopist manipulation training, the dataset is insufficient to evaluate NVS for gastroendoscopy. In this paper, we present the first real gastroscopy dataset for NVS, namely the GastroNVS dataset, which contains a set of gastroscopic images, camera poses, and a point cloud for real gastroendoscopy inspection. To assess the suitability of the GastroNVS dataset, we evaluate several 3DGS methods and discuss the challenges for future development. The dataset is available on request from our project page.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

High Demand, Low Possession: Dilemmas and Strategies for Research Capability Cultivation in Clinical Medicine Postgraduates

Most previous studies have examined medical postgraduate research training from a single dimension, lacking a full-chain analysis that integrates capability demand, actual possession, obstacles, and output. Consequently, the measurement of capability gaps and the analysis of underlying training model deficiencies remain insufficient. To address this gap, we administered a self-designed multidimensional questionnaire to 86 clinical medicine postgraduates at a medical school, covering research cognition, interest, capability demand and possession, participation pathways, difficulties, and outputs. The aim was to systematically characterize the current situation, identify problems, and propose optimization strategies. Over 90% of participants expressed interest in research, yet only 1.16% self-rated as very knowledgeable. The largest demand-possess gap was for writing and publication (86.05% vs. 16.28%), followed by independent research capability (75.58% vs. 11.63%). A total of 59.30% cited lack of foundational knowledge, making experiments very difficult, as the greatest challenge, and 66.28% had no research achievements. The primary source of research topics was supervisor assignment (54.65%), with only 4.65% choosing topics independently. No statistically significant differences were found across grades or training types (P > 0.05). These findings reveal a structural high demand, low possession gap in medical postgraduate research training, with early research experience deficit and a passive research model as key constraining factors. Accordingly, an integrated bachelor-postgraduate progressive research competency training system is proposed.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Silent Failures in Physics-Informed Neural Networks: Parameter Poisoning and the Limits of Loss-Based Validation

arXiv:2606.25151v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) embed governing equations in their loss function, enabling mesh-free solutions to partial differential equations. Low training loss is treated as evidence that the learned solution is physically correct. This paper shows that assumption breaks down when encoded physics are incorrect. By perturbing PDE parameters before training, a setting we describe as physics parameter poisoning or parameter misspecification, we produce models that train to low loss but give incorrect answers; we treat the perturbation schedule as sensitivity analysis rather than only as a security threat, and none of our claims requires an adversary. Achieving low residual loss does not discriminate accurate from inaccurate solutions: poisoned models reach losses at or below the clean baseline yet differ by large margins, so driving the residual down is not evidence of physical accuracy. Across three PDE systems (Burgers equation, Navier-Stokes cavity, and convection-diffusion), poisoned models match or beat the clean-model training loss while their solutions differ by up to 71% in the fixed sweep and up to 128% under adversarial search; at Cavity Re=400 the poisoned loss falls below the clean baseline. We define a detection difficulty ratio R (solution error divided by training loss) to summarize how invisible the corruption is, though cross-PDE comparison is complicated by differences in loss scale. We test six candidate defenses, none of which reliably detects corruption across all regimes. We propose a post-hoc defense: sweeping the PDE residual loss across parameter values without retraining. The loss minimum recovers the true training parameter without external data, and generalizes across all three PDE systems. The effect holds across five network architectures (8.7K to 133K parameters), is bidirectional, and is confirmed across multiple random seeds.

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

Can LLM Agents Infer World Models? Evidence from Agentic Automata Learning

We propose agentic automata learning to evaluate the extent to which tool-calling LLM agents can uncover hidden environments through interaction. In our setup, an agent should uncover a hidden deterministic finite automaton (DFA) by interacting with an oracle through (1) membership queries ("Does this string belong to the target language?") and (2) equivalence queries ("Is this the target DFA?"). This yields a scalable testbed with controlled task complexity, measurable interaction efficiency, and strong baselines (classic automata-learning algorithms). Evaluating state-of-the-art LLMs, we find that performance drops sharply as DFA size increases. Reasoning models are markedly stronger than non-reasoning models, yet trajectory analyses reveal recurring failures in query planning, evidence integration, and hypothesis construction. Overall, our results show that current LLM agents can sometimes perform non-trivial interactive discovery, but remain far less robust and efficient than classic algorithms for the task.

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

A Formal Framework for Declarative Agentic AI in Business Process Analysis

arXiv:2606.15291v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic AI opens new opportunities for automating Business Process (BP), enabling autonomous decision-making and dynamic adaptation. However, realising this potential requires BP entities and their interactions to be defined with formal precision. This paper presents a formal framework for Agentic BP analysis through the AGO methodology. AGO captures the modelling perspective in terms of who is acting (Agents), why it is carried out (Goals), and what the relevant entities are (Objects). Grounded in set theory and mathematical logic, we formally define the AGO entity types and their interactions, organising all definitions into a BP Knowledge Base (BPKB). The resulting BPKB supports structured querying, incremental updates, and automatic generation of BP workflows, while ensuring soundness and completeness of the derived paths.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Shattering the Autoregressive Curse: Dynamic Epistemic Entropy Orchestrated Erasable Reinforcement Learning for LLMs

arXiv:2606.17735v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Although reinforcement learning (RL) has expanded the cognitive boundaries of large language models (LLMs), it often remains vulnerable to the autoregressive curse in long-horizon logical reasoning: small epistemic perturbations introduced early in generation can propagate irreversibly along the Markov decision process flow, triggering cascading failures that drive the reasoning trajectory toward collapse. To overcome this autoregressive cascade, in which a single early mistake can compromise all subsequent reasoning steps, we propose dynamic epistemic entropy orchestrated erasable reinforcement learning ($E^3RL$). $E^3RL$ eliminates reliance on external signals by grounding the model's endogenous local autoregressive cross-entropy as an intrinsic coordinate of epistemic uncertainty. By introducing segment-level adaptive dynamic thresholds and advantage allocation, $E^3RL$ enables the model to precisely excise localized logical defects while reusing historical key-value (KV) cache streams, thereby endowing the reasoning process with a self-healing capability. We train $E^3RL$ on the DeepMath-103k dataset. Experimental results show that $E^3RL$ reshapes the exploration efficiency of long-sequence reasoning and improves sample efficiency while maintaining linear memory overhead. On mathematical reasoning benchmarks such as AIME, $E^3RL$ achieves substantial performance gains, with the 4B and 8B parameter models surpassing previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) results by 5.349\% and 6.514\%, respectively. These findings suggest that $E^3RL$ shatters the autoregressive curse in long-sequence reasoning and establishes a theoretical and systems-level foundation for the next generation of self-healing artificial general intelligence (AGI).

09.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Benchmarking attention-based methods for vision transformers' interpretability in retinal fundus imaging

Deep learning models based on Vision Transformers (ViTs) have shown strong performance in retinal fundus imaging, but their interpretability remains poorly understood. In particular, attention-based attribution methods are widely used to explain ViT predictions, despite limited evaluation of their faithfulness and biological relevance in medical imaging. Here, we systematically benchmark four attention-based interpretability methods for RETFound, a retinal ViT-based foundation model, that we previously fine-tuned to predict 17 retinal vascular phenotypes from UK Biobank fundus images1. We compare raw attention, attention rollout, gradient-weighted attention rollout, and Chefer's hybrid relevance-based method using both qualitative visualisation and quantitative evaluation frameworks. To assess attribution faithfulness, we perform perturbation-based deletion and insertion experiments, quantifying changes in model predictions as highly attended image regions are progressively removed or restored. To evaluate biological specificity, we run structure-aware analyses combining attribution maps with vessel segmentation and artery-vein labels through the Relative ratio of Attention Intensity (RAI) metric. Across models, attribution maps differed substantially depending on the selected interpretability method, highlighting the need for rigorous quantitative evaluation. Among the evaluated approaches, gradient-weighted attention rollout consistently achieved the strongest perturbation performance and produced attribution maps most closely aligned with the anatomical definition of the predicted retinal traits. Furthermore, vessel-type specific models systematically concentrate attention on the corresponding vascular structures despite being trained using only a single scalar value per image as supervision. These findings demonstrate that attention-based attribution methods capture biologically meaningful vascular representations, while also revealing method-dependent variability in attribution behaviour. This work provides a quantitative framework for evaluating interpretability methods in medical imaging with annotated segmentation and contributes toward more transparent and biologically grounded medical AI systems.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Overhead Wildlife Locator (OWL): Benchmarking Weakly Supervised Learning for Aerial Wildlife Surveys

Automated aerial wildlife surveys increasingly rely on deep learning, yet standard object detectors require bounding-box annotations, reported to be up to seven times slower and three times more expensive to produce than point-level labels. To address this bottleneck, we introduce the Overhead Wildlife Locator (OWL), a weakly supervised density-estimation framework with three variants: OWL-C, a fully convolutional model for high-throughput screening; OWL-T, a Swin-augmented hybrid for heterogeneous, cluttered scenes; and OWL-D, built on a frozen DINOv3 ViT-H+/16 encoder with a DPT-style fusion decoder. We benchmark all three against POLO, YOLOv11n, and YOLOv11l across five public aerial datasets, from sparse fixed-wing savanna surveys to dense UAV paddock imagery, and against the published HerdNet baseline on its native Delplanque split. OWL-D sets a new state of the art on Delplanque (0.934 AP vs. HerdNet's 0.840) and records the highest AP on four of the five datasets. Performance is regime-dependent: on the extreme-density SheepCounter UAV dataset the hybrid OWL-T leads (0.978 AP) and the convolutional variants attain the lowest counting error, whereas the foundation-based OWL-D degrades, indicating which variant suits which survey type. We further validate operational readiness on the Alaska Department of Fish and Game's 2022 Central Arctic Caribou census: under cross-herd and cross-temporal transfer, OWL-C fine-tuned on the 2017 Porcupine Caribou Herd split attains F1 = 0.965 on a held-out patch test set, with a signed count error of +3.1% aggregated across the released test patches. We release the OWL code, model weights, and the annotated Porcupine Caribou Herd 2017 (PCH) and Central Arctic Herd 2022 (CAH) patches, the first open patch-level datasets for large-scale caribou aerial surveys, at https://github.com/microsoft/MegaDetector-Overhead.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Wigner's Phase Space Current for Variable Beam Splitters – Phase Space Rotations and Newtonian Trajectories

arXiv:2606.24334v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Beam splitters allow us to superpose two continuous single mode quantum systems. To study the behaviour of beam splitters' strongly mode mixing dynamics we consider variable beam splitters acting on Wigner's phase space distribution, W , the evolution of which is governed by the continuity-equation {\partial \tau} W = - {\nabla} J. We derive the form of the corresponding Wigner current, J. J's form allows us to use a classical trajectories-approach to analyze the influence of the two modes on each other. We show that the dynamics for variable beam splitters amounts to a rotation confined within the plane of the two positions together with the same simultaneous rotation confined within the plane of the two momenta. In this way explicit and very transparent expressions for the rotated Wigner distributions and Wigner currents can be given in terms of classical trajectories. This helps us to gain deeper insights and perform geometrical analyses of the mixing of modes at beam splitters.

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

ARIADNE: Agnostic Routing for Inference-time Adapter DyNamic sElection

arXiv:2606.19079v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The increasing deployment of parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has led to model ecosystems in which a single backbone is paired with many task-specialized adapters. In this setting, inference-time queries often arrive without task labels, requiring the system to automatically select the most appropriate adapter from a growing and heterogeneous adapter pool. Existing routing methods either depend on access to adapter internals, such as weight decompositions or gradient-based statistics, or require additional router training, which limits scalability and portability as new adapters are added. We introduce ARIADNE, a training-free, adapter-agnostic routing framework for dynamic adapter selection at inference time. ARIADNE represents each adapter through a set of centroids computed from embeddings of its training set, capturing the data distribution associated with that adapter. Given an unlabeled input, it selects an adapter by measuring proximity to these centroids in latent space. Because routing is performed entirely in the input embedding space, ARIADNE is compatible with arbitrary PEFT methods and requires no modification to the adapters or training procedures. Primarily evaluated with Llama 3.2 1B Instruct on 23 diverse NLP tasks, ARIADNE recovers 97.44% of the upper bound performance. Scaling to 44 tasks, it achieves 89.7% average selection accuracy, without additional training or access to adapter internals.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Free energy of non-convex multi-species spin glasses with centered Ising spins

arXiv:2606.16636v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We identify the limit free energy of all multi-species spin glasses with centered $\pm 1$ spins. The result was previously known only under a convexity assumption on the covariance function of the Hamiltonian. We also obtain a one-species reduction of the formula for balanced multi-species models.

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

Cycle-Consistent Neural Explanation of Formal Verification Certificates

arXiv:2606.24414v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Formal verification produces machine-checkable certificates that attest to the satisfaction or violation of temporal properties, yet these certificates remain opaque to non-specialist stakeholders. We propose a cycle-consistent neural architecture that generates faithful natural language explanations of verification certificates. A forward network NN1 maps certificates to explanations, and an inverse network NN2 reconstructs certificates from explanations; a symbolic verifier closes the loop, providing a differentiable faithfulness proxy. A pointer-generator mechanism ensures lexical grounding by copying state names directly from the certificate. We evaluate on 420 test certificates spanning six verification methods (bounded proof, k-induction, inductive invariant, lasso, reachability, witness pair) in both YES and NO verdict variants, drawn from a financial compliance domain with 207 named states. Our trained architecture, combined with a hybrid inference-time routing strategy, achieves 90.0% cycle-verified soundness, surpassing a multi- LLM few-shot baseline (76.1% for the best of 16 LLM combinations across four frontier models) by 13.9 percentage points. The neural model wins on 10 of 12 verdict/kind categories, with three categories reaching 100% soundness. The architecture offers 860x faster inference (185 ms vs. 160 s per certificate for the full multi-LLM baseline), offline operation, deterministic outputs, and zero per-inference cost. These results demonstrate that trained specialization outperforms general-purpose LLM prompting for structured certificate explanation, while eliminating the deployment constraints of cloud-based inference.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Soft-Prompt Tuning for Fair and Efficient LLM Benchmark Evaluation

Benchmark scores often misrepresent a large language model's (LLM's) knowledge, because they rely, e.g., on the model's ability to follow specific formatting requirements. This especially penalizes base models that may know the correct answers but lack the ability – typically introduced in post-training – to structure them as instructed. To overcome this, we propose soft-prompt tuning, an efficient, fair, and architecture-agnostic model evaluation. By optimizing only 10 soft-prompt vectors (roughly 0.0006% parameters for a 7B model) over a short tuning period, we adapt models to specific benchmark formats, closing gaps in format-following and ensuring that underlying knowledge is accurately reflected in benchmark scores. This allows one to fairly compare different base models – trained with various pre-training recipes – on benchmarks without the need for full post-training. We evaluated soft-prompt tuning across 7 models and 7 datasets. The results show that (a) soft-prompt tuning saturates format-following within 80 steps (~640 samples) making it highly efficient, (b) soft-prompt tuning significantly outperforms zero- and few-shot prompting, surfacing base model knowledge that standard prompting misses, that (c) even post-trained models can benefit from soft-prompts to maximize format compliance, and that (d) soft-prompted base model performance predicts post-trained model rankings more reliably than zero- and few-shot baselines, offering a low-cost proxy for downstream model quality. Our contributions include (1) metrics which disentangle format-following and knowledge accuracy, (2) a fairer benchmarking protocol of LLM knowledge, and (3) a cost- and memory-effective recipe to identify optimal pre-training strategies early in LLM development.

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

Explainable Flood Segmentation on Sentinel-1 SAR Imagery: A Comparative Study of CNN and Transformer Architectures

Rapid and accurate flood prediction is essential for disaster response and mitigation planning. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sensors in satellites are well-suited for this purpose because they operate independently of weather and daylight conditions. Although SAR-based data enable all-weather flood monitoring, distinguishing flooded land from permanent water remains a significant challenge, particularly when flooding is defined strictly as inundated land. This study provides a comprehensive comparison of convolutional neural network (CNN) and vision transformer architectures for multi-class flood segmentation using Sentinel-1 SAR imagery, specifically trained to separate flooded land from permanent water bodies and land. Three state-of-the-art (SOTA)CNN-based models, U-Net, U-Net++, and DeepLabV3 with ResNet-34 backbone, and three SegFormer variants (b0,b1,b2) were evaluated in two benchmark datasets, the ETCI NASA dataset and SenFloods11, using scene-based data splits to ensure a realistic assessment of spatial generalization. The results demonstrate that SegFormer-b2 significantly outperforms the U-Net baseline on the ETCI dataset (higher flood IoU across all 7 test scenes in the Wilcoxon signed-rank test), while after fine-tuning on Sen1Floods11, the advantage narrows to within the range of scene variability and is concentrated in spatially fragmented flood events. The study includes both qualitative and quantitative explainability techniques to visually comprehend model decisions and systematically assess prediction reliability. Qualitative analysis reveals that SegFormer-b2 produces more spatially coherent Grad-CAM activations focused on flood-relevant features, while U-Net generates more informative uncertainty estimates along flood boundaries.

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

AFFORDANCE20Q: Evaluating Affordance Reasoning from Physical Properties

arXiv:2606.14240v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Affordance reasoning, the inference of an object's action possibilities from its physical properties (e.g., shape and material), is fundamental to human physical understanding and increasingly critical for Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing affordance benchmarks largely expose explicit object identities in the evaluation setup, allowing models to rely on memorized object-affordance mappings rather than reasoning over physical properties. To address this gap, we introduce Affordance20Q, a novel affordance reasoning benchmark formulated as a 20-Questions game without exposing the object's identity. In each game, the model identifies a hidden object's affordance from a candidate set by asking yes/no questions about its physical properties. Affordance20Q comprises 1,009 games over 454 objects and 59 affordances, all manually filtered, refined, and annotated. We conduct comprehensive experiments with 15 state-of-the-art LLMs and find a substantial gap (~20 points) compared to human performance. A KL-based information-gain (IG) analysis further shows that models fail to ask discriminating questions as the game progresses. To close the gap, we develop KB-Anchored Rule Induction (KARI), a pipeline based on LLMs that generates affordance rules grounded in evidence from knowledge bases (KBs). KARI improves open-source LLMs by up to 15.2 points, while the limited coverage of KBs hinders further gains. We release all our code and data at https://github.com/1171-jpg/Affordance20Q.git

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

''Circumstantial Determinants'': An Efficient Approach to Reaching People in Need of HIV Prevention?

HIV prevention and testing programmes primarily reach people who self-refer or attend routine health services. Higher-risk individuals are missed if they are healthy, under-estimate their risk of infection or under-report sexual risk-behaviours. We assess a new approach to address limitations in existing programmes by targeting HIV services on ''Circumstantial Determinants'' (CDs) of HIV risk - the social circumstances, settings, and norms associated with behaviours that increase risk of HIV acquisition. Data on potential CDs and sexual behaviour were collected in a population survey in Zimbabwe in 2018/19 (N=9141). HIV-negative individuals reporting [≥] 1 sexual risk-behaviours were defined as the 'priority population' for HIV prevention. For each sex, six circumstantial determinants were associated with being in the priority population (aOR [≥] 1.30; p [≤] 0.01). Reach and efficiency of CDs (and combinations) were calculated; ROC curve algorithms evaluated their ability to identify priority population membership; and HIV prevention condom cascades were compared between CD-defined priority population subgroups. Example findings include that targeting men at bars and beerhalls could reach 48.5% of the priority population and 25.1% of lower-risk men. These percentages increase to 77.1% and 53.7% if men with poor mental health, no religious affiliation, negative social capital, or living on agricultural estates are also targeted. Targeting women with poor mental health could reach 32.0% of the priority population and 21.3% of lower-risk women. Targeting additional circumstantial determinants increases these percentages to 54.1% and 37.5%, respectively. Cascade barriers to condom use differed between CD-defined subgroups. The Circumstantial Determinants approach demonstrates proof-of-concept potential to strengthen HIV prevention services.

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

Two-Stage Fine-Tuning of ResNet50 for High-Sensitivity Melanoma Detection on Dermoscopic Images

作者:

Melanoma is the most dangerous form of skin cancer with five-year survival rates exceeding 99% when detected early but falling sharply once the disease spreads. This paper proposes and evaluates a two-stage fine-tuning approach for ResNet50 applied to binary melanoma classification on dermoscopic images. The core challenges addressed are class imbalance and suboptimal transfer learning from single-stage fine-tuning. After stratified train/validation/test splitting, random oversampling was applied exclusively to the training set to achieve a 1:1 class balance. Stage 1 trained only the classification head with the ResNet50 base frozen, while Stage 2 fine-tuned all layers jointly at a low learning rate of 1e-5 to prevent catastrophic forgetting of learned visual features. On an independent test set of 3,826 images, the model achieved an AUC-ROC of 0.9559, accuracy of 88.34%, sensitivity of 87.56%, specificity of 89.13%, and F1-score of 88.29%. An ablation study confirms the two-stage protocol significantly outperforms single-stage fine-tuning, with sensitivity gains of over 4%. Grad-CAM visualizations demonstrate correct lesion localization. A fully deployable Streamlit detection application is provided alongside all training code.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Learning with a Single Rollout via Monte Carlo Pass@k Critic

arXiv:2606.25451v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Estimating token-level advantages in reinforcement learning (RL) for language models remains challenging because scaling up episodic experience collection is expensive. The difficulty intensifies for baseline advantage estimation methods, where repeated sampling causes trajectories to diverge into substantially different reasoning prefixes. In this context, RL algorithms such as GRPO prove limited: an outcome reward is too sparse to be attributed to specific actions like intermediate steps, and comparisons across sampled traces are non-trivial because they are heterogeneous. To mitigate both the computational cost of repeated sampling and the difficulty of credit assignment, we study single-rollout proximal policy optimization (SR-PPO) featuring token-level credit assignment in RL for language models. Instead of estimating advantages by normalizing episodic returns within the candidate group, we train a calibrated token-level credit critic using Monte Carlo outcomes from one rollout per prompt. Specifically, we use the critic to predict the Pass@k success probability at the prompt prefix, which is derived from a Pass@1 attempt. This choice yields a more selective learning signal than Pass@1: it discounts easily solved prefixes while prioritizing hard ones whose success probability remains marginal. We show that as $k$ increases, Pass@k converges to a reachability indicator, reflecting whether a prefix can lead to at least one successful continuation. In an explicit state graph, the limit ($k \rightarrow \infty$) can be computed in $O(|V|+|E|)$ time, offering a promising surrogate for direct credit assignment without the need to sample contrastive traces. As an initial validation, SR-PPO exhibits stable learning dynamics, along with consistent gains in Pass@128 success rates on mathematical reasoning benchmarks such as HMMT26 and AIME24.

21.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

Structural Analysis of Prostate Cancer N-Glycans Using Graph-Based Structural Metrics

The N-linked glycans are structurally complex carbohydrate modifications that regulate protein folding, immune recognition, and cellular signaling, and their expression is extensively remodeled during cancer progression, making them promising biomarkers. In this study, prostate cancer-associated N-glycans from a range of relevant peer-reviewed studies were curated and digitized to develop a versatile computational framework that quantitatively encodes their spatial complexity across diverse biological systems. We invented two indices – the Distance & Connectivity Index (DCI) and the Position & Composition Index (PCI) – to capture the spatial information in N-glycans as layered architectures, enabling calculation of residue-level path lengths, branching structure, and compositional diversity. DCI summarizes glycan structure as both a scalar and matrix representation, while PCI does the same but also captures monosaccharide diversity, linkage heterogeneity, and cross-layer branching features. These metrics were computed with GlycoAssessor, an open-source platform that extracts information for the DCI and PCI from glycans drawn via Symbol Nomenclature for Glycans (SNFG) notation. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was applied to evaluate whether glycans from prostate cancer tissues cluster distinctly in a disease-relevant manner. Results show that the spatial information in N-glycans: (1) increased in a multi-dimensional, non-linear manner, (2) objectively segregated structural themes, (3) could function as a potential prostate cancer biomarker that is distinct from mass-to-charge ratio and relative abundance, and (4) could objectively quantify novel subtype classifications of glycans associated with disease states and progression.

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

Evaluating the Robustness of Proof Autoformalization in Lean 4

Proof autoformalization aims to translate a mathematical informal proof written in natural language into a formal proof in a formal language such as Lean~4. Several works have developed LLM-based models for proof autoformalization. However, existing evaluations have typically focused on translating well-formed informal proofs from curated datasets. We argue that a robust proof autoformalizer must remain faithful even for informal proofs that diverge from these idealized ones, and we present the first study on the robustness of proof autoformalization models. We formulate two categories of perturbations and evaluate robustness under each: a global perturbation paraphrases the informal proof in a different style, under which the formalization should remain consistent; a local perturbation alters a value, symbol, or proof step, possibly in a counterfactual way, and a robust formalization should faithfully reflect the perturbation rather than reverting to the original one or inferring a different one on its own. We build a benchmark with both perturbations on miniF2F and MATH-500, and automatically measure how stable a proof autoformalization's correctness is under global perturbations and how faithfully its output reflects local perturbations. We evaluate seven recent models, all of which are sensitive to global perturbations and mostly fail to remain faithful under local perturbations. Code and data are available via https://github.com/ucr-rai/robust-proof-autoformalization.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Artificial Intelligence-Based Detection of Airway Mucus Plugs on CT and Associations With Clinical Outcomes in COPDGene

RATIONALE: Airway mucus plugging is a clinically relevant manifestation of airway pathology in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and is associated with increased mortality even in early disease; however, visual computed tomography (CT) assessment is subjective and labor intensive. OBJECTIVES: To develop an AI-based quantitative CT method for automated detection of airway mucus plugging and evaluate associations with physiologic impairment and clinical outcomes. METHODS: Inspiratory CT scans from 8,971 COPDGene Phase 1 (GOLD 0-4 and PRISm) participants were analyzed. An AI-based framework combining 3D airway segmentation discontinuities and convolutional neural network classification identified mucus plug obstructions, yielding mucus plug burden (total plug count). Associations with outcomes were evaluated using covariate-adjusted models. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS : Higher mucus plug burden was associated with lower post-bronchodilator FEV % predicted ({rho} = -0.41; P < 0.001), greater air trapping (LAA < -856 HU; {rho} = 0.33; P < 0.001), worse health status (SGRQ; {rho} = 0.31; P < 0.001), and shorter 6-minute walk distance ({rho} = -0.26; P < 0.001). Among GOLD 1-4 participants, mucus plug presence was independently associated with increased all-cause mortality (adjusted hazard ratio, 1.28; P < 0.005) and exacerbation frequency (adjusted incidence rate ratio, 1.32; P < 0.005). Plug presence was also associated with increased respiratory mortality across GOLD categories and cardiovascular mortality in GOLD 1-2. CONCLUSIONS: AI-based quantitative CT assessment of airway mucus plugging provides a scalable, reproducible measure associated with physiologic impairment and adverse outcomes in COPD, supporting its role in risk stratification and future therapeutic studies.

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

Unintended Effects of Geographic Conditioning in Large Language Models

Modern conversational AI systems frequently rely on user metadata to localize responses, yet the unintended regional biases introduced by this hidden context remain poorly understood. In this work, we evaluate location leakage: the phenomenon where a model generates geographic references despite receiving a geographically neutral user prompt. Across both creative writing and open-ended Q&A prompts, even state-of-the-art LLMs systematically favor region-specific outputs when exposed to location metadata, with leakage spiking by up to 793 times above baseline (e.g., from 0.04% to 31.7% for Llama 3.1-8B, and 21.3% and 8.8% for Qwen3-8B and Claude Sonnet 4.6, respectively). Our analysis further shows a novel structural conditioning effect: replacing the injected location with the placeholder "Unknown" still elevates leakage by up to 72 times above baseline, demonstrating that the user profile frame itself, independent of any geographic content, acts as a generative conditioning signal.

25.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

GrassSV – hybrid method to detect structural variants in high throughput DNA-seq data

by Dominik Witczak, Krzysztof Sychla, Julia Wysocka, Artur Laskowski, Wojciech Frohmberg, Marta Glowacka, Alicja Dzik, Piotr Lukasiak, Jacek Blazewicz, Aleksandra Swiercz Genetic diversity is crucial for populations to adapt and survive in dynamic environments. This diversity arises from genetic mutations, which manifest in the genome as structural variants (SVs). Several types of SVs exist, but not all are equally easy to detect. Current SV detection tools tend to specialize in certain SV types or require the use of multiple tools to obtain a comprehensive variant profile, which increases computational cost and complexity. While some methods excel at identifying breakpoints, they often struggle with accurately classifying variant types, and their precision depends strongly on data quality and sequencing technology. At present, the majority of available genomic data originates from high-quality short reads, which remain the most affordable sequencing technology. In this manuscript, we introduce GrassSV, a novel and computationally efficient method that employs a hybrid pattern-matching approach to detect all major classes of structural variants using short-read sequencing data. GrassSV integrates depth-of-coverage analysis with contig-based pattern recognition to ensure both sensitivity and precision while minimizing false positives and runtime. Its robustness was demonstrated on the human Genome in a Bottle dataset, as well as on synthetic data derived from the yeast genome, where it achieved high accuracy across all SV types at a lower computational cost compared to existing methods. This makes GrassSV a practical alternative to multi-tool pipelines typically required for comprehensive SV detection. GrassSV is available at https://github.com/Domomod/GrassSV under GPL-3.0 license and the benchmark at: https://github.com/Domomod/GrassBenchmark.