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

HAPI-EP: Towards Hybrid, Adaptive, and Predictive Digital Twins of Cardiac Electrophysiology

arXiv:2606.15637v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A digital twin (DT) of a patient-specific heart offers significant potential in personalized medicine. However, its rapid and dynamic adaptation to an individual's live data and its predictive capability after adaptation remains central challenges. We examine this challenge from its two building blocks: DT formulation where mechanistic and data-driven models show competing merits and limitations, and DT optimization strategies that are largely driven by a reconstruction objective leading to un-identifiable models. We address both bottlenecks via HAPI – an AI framework for building hybrid, adaptive, and predictive DTs with three key enablers. First, HAPI constructs a physics-integrated gray-box model in which an interpretable mechanistic backbone is augmented by a neural component that models its residual to the observed data. Second, rather than attempting to pre-encode all possible variations in a static hybrid model, HAPI enables rapid on-the-fly adaptation of the hybrid model to few-shot live data, achieved by feedforward meta-learners realizing amortized inference of both mechanistic and neural parameters of the hybrid model trained with predictive objectives. Finally, we show that this adaptivity corresponds to the construction of a conditional generative model (i.e., the hybrid DT) that endows it with theoretical identifiability and thus strong performance in predictive scenarios. We demonstrate the proof-of-concept of HAPI in cardiac electrophysiology using a hybrid monodomain model with mechanistic reaction kinetics and neural graph diffusion. Across synthetic and real-data studies, we show that HAPI's mechanistic-neural hybridization and predictive adaptation are critical for obtaining identifiable DTs with strong predictive and out-of-distribution capabilities.

02.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-01

A statistical framework for comparing epidemic forests

by Cyril Geismar, Peter J. White, Anne Cori, Thibaut Jombart Inferring who infected whom in an outbreak is essential for characterising transmission dynamics and guiding public health interventions. However, this task is challenging due to limited surveillance data and the complexity of immunological and social interactions. Instead of a single definitive transmission tree, epidemiologists often consider multiple plausible trees forming epidemic forests. Various inference methods and assumptions can yield different epidemic forests, yet no formal test exists to assess whether these differences are statistically significant. We propose such a framework using a chi-square test and permutational multivariate analysis of variance (PERMANOVA). We assessed each method’s ability to distinguish simulated epidemic forests generated under different offspring distributions. While both methods achieved perfect specificity for forests with 100+ trees, PERMANOVA consistently outperformed the chi-square test in sensitivity across all epidemic and forest sizes. Implemented in the R package mixtree, we provide the first statistical framework to robustly compare epidemic forests.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

QMaxCal: Path-Space Regularization for Open Quantum Control via Girsanov's Theorem

arXiv:2606.19947v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reliable quantum control in the presence of decoherence requires policies that combat the effect of environmental noise on the controlled dynamics. Open quantum systems under continuous monitoring generate classical measurement records whose drift depends on the noise experienced by the system; the records of two evolutions sharing the same decoherence channels differ only in this drift, so Girsanov's theorem yields a closed-form, differentiable estimator of the KL divergence between their trajectory distributions. We instantiate this estimator with two physically motivated reference measures, yielding two regularizers that both drive the system toward states where the effects of decoherence are minimal: the Wiener KL (KL_W), which is empirically more effective under certain conditions on the noise model, and the drift-variance regularizer (R_DV), which works for all noise models. Both are qualitatively distinct from existing penalties on control fluence or smoothness: they penalize the observable consequences of control on the decoherence channels rather than the control amplitude itself. The regularizers outperform unregularized gradient-based and reinforcement-learning baselines across a range of open quantum systems – including single- and multi-qubit benchmarks and a multi-qubit chain calibrated to a published snapshot of the IBM Kingston processor – along several axes of evaluation: final-state fidelity, robustness to mismatch in the assumed noise model (gains grow from +17 pp at training noise to +27 pp under 2.5x noise mismatch), and occupation of forbidden states. The regularizers reduce infidelity by up to 50%, with ~16% gains on the calibrated IBM Kingston chain.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Harness In-Context Operator Learning with Chain of Operators

arXiv:2606.12318v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural operators approximate mappings between function spaces, but often generalize poorly to other operators and usually require fine-tuning or retraining. In-Context Operator Networks (ICON) addresses this issue by prompting the model with numerical context so that the model learns specific operators from prompts and adapt to different operators without fine-tuning. However, ICON may still fail to generalize to out-of-distribution (OOD) operator tasks. Inpired by the success of harness engineering of Large Language models (LLMs), we introduce Chain of Operators (CHOP), a framework that harness a frozen ICON to OOD operator tasks without updating its parameters. Specifically, CHOP constructs a chain of operators consisting of explicit elementary transformations and the frozen ICON. Experiments on a scalar conservation law and a mean-field control problem show that CHOP reduces relative inference error over direct ICON evaluation, while each operator in the chain remains interpretable and in closed form. A chain constructed on one PDE family further generalizes to a different family, indicating shared mechanisms across harness systems.

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

AUTOGATE: Automated Clock Gating via Toggling-Aware LLM-based RTL Rewriting

arXiv:2606.17461v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fine-grain clock gating (FGCG) is among the most effective techniques for reducing dynamic power, yet current FGCG optimization flows remain largely manual. Recent LLM-based RTL optimization approaches remain limited by two key drawbacks: (1) the inability to process long waveform traces spanning millions of cycles, and (2) the difficulty of scaling optimization to large hierarchical codebases while preserving correctness. In this work, we present AUTOGATE, the first agentic framework for industry-grade RTL power optimization, enabling workload-aware clock-gating optimization across large hierarchical codebases. AUTOGATE introduces a Machine Learning (ML)-LLM co-design that bridges waveform-level analysis and RTL rewriting. Specifically, we design an ML-based clustering algorithm that distills raw toggling traces into compact, structured representations that guide LLM-based RTL rewriting. This enables accurate identification and application of clock-gating opportunities without requiring LLMs to directly process raw waveform data. To enhance scalability, AUTOGATE employs a hierarchical multi-agent architecture that decomposes large designs into independently optimizable modules, enabling coordinated optimization across deep design hierarchies. We evaluate AUTOGATE on a diverse set of designs ranging from small RTL designs to large industrial-grade codebases. Experimental results show that AUTOGATE consistently reduces dynamic power relative to baselines. Across the small-design suite, AUTOGATE reduces dynamic power by 49.31% on average. On industry-scale designs, it achieves 19.34% and 7.96% dynamic power reductions on NVDLA and BlackParrot, respectively, and up to 6.86% on highly optimized proprietary production designs.

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

Characterizing Narrative Content in Web-scale LLM Pretraining Data

The narrative composition of web-scale LLM pretraining corpora remains largely unexplored even though narrative is a fundamental mode of human communication. We present the first fine-grained study of narrative features in Dolma, a 3-trillion-token open pretraining corpus. Drawing on narrative theory, we design a framework spanning three core narrative elements (agency, setting, and events) operationalized as 11 interpretable dimensions. After sampling and annotating a diverse set of 400 passages, we finetune and validate NarraBERT, a RoBERTa-based model for fine-grained narrative prediction. We apply NarraBERT to 3M passages, resulting in a new dataset, NarraDolma. We find (i) narrative structure is measurable at scale across extremely heterogeneous data, (ii) we uncover a continuous, multidimensional narrative structure underlying web text, and (iii) narrative qualities are unequally distributed across pretraining sources and topics in ways that current curation practices neither measure nor account for. Our framework, dataset, and analyses provide a foundation for understanding how narrative qualities are distributed in LLM pretraining data and for studying how data composition affects narrative reasoning tasks. We publicly release NarraDolma and NarraBERT.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Why Tree-Style Branching Matters for Thought Advantage Estimation in GRPO

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) trains Chain-of-Thought reasoning with verifiable rewards, but estimating thought-level advantages without value functions often suffers from high variance. Although tree-style branching is used in practice to reduce variance, it lacks a theoretical explanation of why it works and whether it is important or potentially necessary. We study thought-level advantage estimation in GRPO from a variance perspective under a minimal tree-style setting where multiple continuations are sampled for each thought. Using the multivariate delta method, we reveal a sampling-dimension asymmetry. Increasing sampled thoughts ($K$) leaves a strictly positive estimation-variance floor, whereas increasing continuations per thought ($M$) drives the leading-order estimation variance to zero at rate $1/M$. This implies that, within the fixed-temperature GRPO-style estimator without value models studied here, accurate thought-level advantage estimation cannot be achieved by scaling thought sampling alone, making continuation-level branching a principled and potentially necessary mechanism rather than a heuristic. Experiments further provide empirical evidence for its effectiveness and potential necessity, demonstrating improved optimization stability, training efficiency, and final performance not only in math but also across vision domains and under different model architectures and sizes.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Three multimodal large language models fail at clinically actionable breast pathology in three different directions

Background. Breast cancer treatment depends on histopathological features, such as grade and receptor-defined subtype; however, specialist pathologist access is constrained when the workforce is limited. Commercial multimodal large language models (MLLMs) accept hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) image tiles through paid interfaces without local hardware or fine-tuning. However, prior pathology evaluations addressed only coarse tasks. Whether they reach treatment-determining accuracy and whether vendors agree remain unclear. Methods. We aimed to evaluate three vendor-designated flagship MLLMs (Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 2.5 Pro, GPT-5.5) in 427 invasive breast cancer cases. Each case went to all three with identical H&E tiles and prompts, and the subtype was inferred in the second call. The reference was an institutional sign-out report of an immunohistochemistry-derived subtype. We calculated the concordance, sensitivity, specificity, Cohen's kappa, and pairwise McNemar and Bowker tests. Findings. Claude ranked highest by raw histologic-type concordance but lowest by kappa, classifying all 23 lobular and seven micropapillary carcinomas as invasive breast carcinoma of no special type. The models anchored the Nottingham grade to three modal grades. None of the models reliably identified human epidermal growth factor receptor 2-positive disease. The failure direction was vendor-specific: Claude and GPT-5.5 were under-detected, whereas Gemini was over-called. Twelve prompt variants (4,056 calls) did not recover sensitivity. Interpretation. No current commercial MLLM reaches deployment-ready accuracy for any treatment-determining feature of breast pathology. As each vendor fails in its own fixed direction, changing vendors alters the type of error rather than removing it; therefore, the value of these models is assistive rather than autonomous. At USD 0.20-0.50 per case, they may serve as supervised draft generators that leave the diagnosis with the pathologist.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Optimizing Incomplete, Large-Scale and Sparse Multi-Graph Matching in Bioimaging

Multi-graph matching is a fundamental problem in computer vision. Our work is motivated by a challenging application in bioimaging, where dozens or even hundreds of 3D microscopy images of worms must be brought into correspondence. Existing datasets do not cover this large-scale regime, and virtually all existing methods are inapplicable because they assume a complete or dense problem setting. To support further research, our first contribution is a new large-scale dataset based on problem instances from bioimaging. Our second contribution is a comprehensive analysis of the two main multi-graph matching paradigms: direct and permutation synchronization-based formulations. We argue, in part by proof, that practical large-scale methods must explicitly address problem sparsity and incompleteness. Since standard permutation synchronization approaches fail in this setting, we further introduce a sparse permutation synchronization paradigm. Our final contribution is GREEDA, a general method for sparse and incomplete problems that can be instantiated across cost orders and paradigms. While our paper focuses on objective functions up to quadratic order, GREEDA is inherently generalizable to arbitrary orders. On larger, sparse instances, GREEDA outperforms competing methods in both objective value and runtime. For example, for moderately-sized problems based on 30 worm images GREEDA produces a high-quality solution within 2 minutes, whereas competitors require at least half an hour and yield far worse results. On smaller dense problems, GREEDA remains on par with leading methods while being an order of magnitude faster.

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

Variance Reduction for Non-Log-Concave Sampling with Applications to Inverse Problems

arXiv:2606.16257v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sampling from high-dimensional, non-log-concave distributions with unnormalized densities is a fundamental challenge in machine learning, particularly when the exact gradient of the potential is unavailable and must be approximated via stochastic gradients that exhibit high variance under a fixed budget of gradient computations per iteration. Although variance reduction techniques such as SGD with momentum, STORM, and PAGE have demonstrated improved convergence properties in non-convex optimization, their implications for sampling from non-log-concave distributions remain largely unexplored. In this work, we develop the first unified analysis of these estimators for sampling from non-log-concave distributions. We establish improved non-asymptotic convergence rates in $\varepsilon$-relative Fisher information and, under a Poincaré inequality assumption, in squared total variation distance, and further prove weak convergence to the target distribution. We extend our analysis to solving inverse problems with score-based generative priors. We empirically validate our theory and demonstrate that, under a fixed gradient computations per iteration, variance-reduction techniques consistently improve sample quality in two standard imaging applications.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

A Framework for Directed Hypergraph Signal Processing via tensor t-SVD

arXiv:2606.25112v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce Directed Hypergraph Signal Processing (DHGSP), a unified framework that extends graph signal processing to accommodate both higher-order (polyadic) and asymmetric (directional) relationships simultaneously. Using the tensor singular value decomposition (t-SVD) within the t-product algebra, we define a novel adjacency tensor for directed hypergraphs, a topologically faithful shift operator, and a lossless Directed Hypergraph Fourier Transform (t-DHGFT). Experiments on real traffic networks demonstrate that DHGSP outperforms matrix-based (graph and digraph) and undirected tensor-based (hypergraph) baselines in denoising tasks.

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

Toward quantum-noise-limited interferometric measurements of optical nonlinearity in vacuum

arXiv:2602.10896v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Quantum Electrodynamics predicts that the vacuum must behave as a nonlinear optical medium: the vacuum optical index should increase when it is stressed by intense electromagnetic fields. The DeLLight (Deflection of Light by Light) project aims to measure it by using intense and ultra-short laser pulses. The experiment uses a Sagnac interferometer to amplify the tiny deflection signal of a low-intensity probe pulse crossing the vacuum refractive-index gradient produced by an external high-intensity pump pulse. The measurement of the amplified signal by a CCD camera requires a high spatial resolution, which is limited by the ultimate quantum noise of the CCD. However, interferometric phase noise induced by the mechanical vibrations of the interferometer is also amplified and degrades spatial resolution. To overcome this, we propose a new method named High-Frequency Phase Noise Suppression (HFPNS), based on the addition of a delayed replica (5 ns) of the probe pulse. The delayed pulse, which is not affected by the pump but is subject to the same vibration noise, enables offline subtraction of correlated phase noise. In this work, we present an experimental proof-of-concept on a prototype interferometer operating with a limited amplification factor ($\mathcal{A}\simeq25$), about 10 times smaller than the required value of the final experiment. We have succeeded in reducing phase noise by a factor of 40, resulting in a residual noise level 2.3 times higher than the expected quantum noise. The residual noise is linked to delay-line instabilities and incident beam pointing fluctuations present during these tests. This result validates HFPNS as a robust method for future quantum-noise-limited interferometric measurements of vacuum optical nonlinearity, though additional stabilization and higher interferometric amplification are still needed.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

SPARX: Secure and Privacy-Aware Approximate CNN Acceleration with Edge RISC-V SoC

Edge-AI systems increasingly require real-time CNN inference under strict energy, performance, security, and privacy constraints. Approximate computing improves hardware efficiency by exploiting the error resilience of neural network workloads; however, most approximate CNN accelerators do not jointly consider secure, privacy-aware edge deployment. This paper presents SPARX, a Secure and Privacy-Aware Approximate CNN Acceleration framework integrated within a heterogeneous RV32IMC RISC-V System-on-Chip (SoC). SPARX combines a custom RISC-V instruction extension, an approximate logarithmic CNN acceleration unit, a lightweight differential-noise-based privacy engine, and a challenge-response authentication mechanism. To guide arithmetic selection, an approximation-aware decision framework is introduced that uses the Approximation Severity Index (ASI), Approximation Efficiency (AE), Quality of Approximation (QoA), Approximation Figure-of-Merit (AFOM), and Hardware Acceleration Efficiency (HAE). Evaluation across 11 state-of-the-art approximate MAC architectures identifies the Iterative Logarithmic Multiplier (ILM) as the most suitable design, achieving 51.7% area reduction, 81.5% power reduction, and 2.13x throughput improvement compared with an accurate radix-4 Booth MAC, while only reducing ResNet-20/CIFAR-10 accuracy by 2.82 percentage points. FPGA implementation on a Xilinx VC707 platform achieves 58.4 GOPS/W energy efficiency at 250 MHz, while 28-nm CMOS physical implementation validates ASIC feasibility

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Efficient and simple Gibbs state preparation of the 2D toric code via duality to classical Ising chains

arXiv:2508.00126v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce the notion of polynomial-depth duality transformations, which relates two sets of operator algebras through a conjugation by a poly-depth quantum circuit, and make use of this to construct efficient Gibbs samplers for a variety of interesting quantum Hamiltonians as they are poly-depth dual to classical Hamiltonians. This is for example the case for the 2D toric code, which is demonstrated to be poly-depth dual to two decoupled classical Ising spin chains for any system size, and we give evidence that such dualities hold for a wide class of stabilizer Hamiltonians. Additionally, we extend the above notion of duality to Lindbladians in order to show that mixing times and other quantities such as the spectral gap or the modified logarithmic Sobolev inequality are preserved under duality.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Tuning without Peeking: Provable Generalization Bounds and Robust LLM Post-Training

Gradient-based optimization is the workhorse of deep learning, offering efficient and scalable training via backpropagation. However, exposing gradients during training can leak sensitive information about the underlying data, raising privacy and security concerns such as susceptibility to data poisoning attacks. In contrast, black-box optimization methods, which treat the model as an opaque function, relying solely on function evaluations to guide optimization, offer a promising alternative in scenarios where data access is restricted, adversarial risks are high, or overfitting is a concern. This paper introduces BBoxER, an evolutionary black-box method for LLM post-training that induces an information bottleneck via implicit compression of the training data. Leveraging the tractability of information flow, we provide non-vacuous generalization bounds and strong theoretical guarantees for robustness to data poisoning attacks and extraction attacks, while ensuring privacy by design. In experiments with LLMs, we demonstrate empirically that black-box optimization methods-despite the scalability and computational challenges inherent to black-box approaches-are able to learn, showing how a few iterations of BBoxER improve performance, generalize well on a benchmark of reasoning datasets, and are robust to membership inference attacks. This positions BBoxER as an attractive add-on on top of gradient-based optimization, offering suitability for deployment in restricted environments while also providing non-vacuous generalization guarantees.

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

Differential Privacy of Gaussian Process Posterior Sampling

arXiv:2606.17995v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the privacy of releasing posterior sample paths from a Gaussian process (GP) when the entire training set including covariates and responses is private. Unlike standard differential-privacy (DP) mechanisms that add external noise, posterior sampling is random by construction. We show that this intrinsic randomness yields DP guarantees by deriving explicit Rényi-DP bounds for GP posterior sample-path release. The bounds separate posterior-mean leakage from data-dependent posterior-covariance leakage showing that meaningful privacy depends sharply on effective ridge regularisation. We apply membership-inference attacks to show that empirical leakage follows the predicted dependence on regularisation, posterior variance and the number of released posterior sample-paths. Utility experiments on downstream posterior-sampling tasks identify noisy-observation regimes where privacy-compatible regularisation preserves useful decisions with modest utility loss. When stronger privacy is needed, the intrinsic guarantee can be sharpened by adding calibrated GP noise, providing an explicit additional privacy knob.

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

Learning Hybrid Biophysical Neuron Models with Neural ODEs

arXiv:2606.16693v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Biophysical neuron models link measurements of neural activity to underlying cellular mechanisms. Yet, a central challenge is that the kinetics of many ion channels are poorly characterized, and practical simplifications – omitting channels or reducing morphological detail – introduce systematic gaps between model and biology. Bridging these gaps requires approaches that can flexibly discover unmodeled dynamics while preserving mechanistic interpretability. Here, we introduce a hybrid modeling framework that embeds neural ordinary differential equations into conductance-based biophysical models to capture unknown currents or mis-specified channel kinetics. By parameterizing the neural ODE in terms of voltage-dependent steady-state and time-constant functions, we recover interpretable gating dynamics directly from voltage recordings without assuming a functional form. We show that the hybrid model fits the gating kinetics of 2400 ion channel models and recovers unknown gating dynamics from single current-clamp recordings, generalizing to out-of-distribution stimulus regimes under realistic inputs and parameter misspecification. We also use our method to reduce a multicompartment model of a cortical neuron into a single-compartment hybrid model with a learned axial current, yielding up to an order of magnitude lower computational cost. Together, our results establish a plug-and-play framework for selectively replacing unknown components of conductance-based models with neural ODEs while preserving their mechanistic structure.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

DRAG-Compatible Leakage Suppression in Landau–Zener Control via Isoprobability Twins

arXiv:2506.19572v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Analytically solvable models – particularly the Landau-Majorana-Stückelberg-Zener (LMSZ) and Allen-Eberly-Hioe (AEH) models – underpin many quantum-gate implementations and population-transfer protocols. However, their canonical pulse shapes are incompatible with modern leakage-suppression techniques and some systems. Most notably, the constant Rabi envelope of the LMSZ pulse prevents many leakage-suppression approaches, which require smoothness. We address both limitations by developing the concept of isoprobability twin models: distinct pairs of Rabi frequency $\Omega(t)$ and detuning $\Delta(t)$ that yield identical post-pulse transition probabilities based on the Delos-Thorson transformation. In this work, we formalise the method by experimentally demonstrating the equivalence of multiple LMSZ and AEH twin models on IBM's ibm_kyiv processor. Finally, we show a staggering leakage reduction by more than 3 orders of magnitude using a custom DRAG implementation of a cosine LMSZ isoprobability model.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Scaling Learning-based AEB with Massive Unlabeled Data

arXiv:2606.18864v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper studies how to scale learning-based automatic emergency braking (AEB) with massive unlabeled fleet data under production constraints. Our approach is based on meta-feedback semi-supervised learning (MF-SSL), where a teacher generates pseudo labels for unlabeled driving data and is updated using a small labeled anchor set as safety-critical feedback. In production, anchor ambiguity and labeled-unlabeled mismatch can amplify systematic pseudo-label errors, leading to spurious triggers. We propose a stabilized MF-SSL framework with (i) Noise-Aware Decoupling, which removes ambiguity-prone anchors from the teacher's supervised update path, and (ii) kinematics-gated pseudo-labeling with a teacher conflict penalty to suppress mismatch-induced risk hallucinations on unlabeled data while maintaining broad coverage. Extensive experiments show consistent gains as unlabeled data scale from 1M to 1B windows, improving safety while keeping comfort stable. The 1B-trained student model is deployed to hundreds of thousands of vehicles and validated over \$10^9$ km of driving, achieving a positive-to-false activation ratio exceeding 100:1 and a 35% improvement in accident-free driving mileage over a production rule-only baseline.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Navigating User Behavior toward Personalized Multimodal Generation

arXiv:2606.24196v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern AIGC pipelines deliver high-fidelity images and videos but presuppose a well-formed creation instruction, while end users rarely articulate visual details, leaving generators misaligned with user demand. We study personalized content generation, which turns a user's interaction history into an executable instruction for downstream synthesis, and identify two obstacles: behavior must be encoded in a form legible to language reasoning, and the model must acquire instruction-writing skill absent from both pretraining and behavior data. We propose NaviGen, which represents each item with a dual identifier coupling a collaborative code and a textual code as a behavioral substrate and a semantic bridge in one token stream. On this representation, a two-stage SFT+RL pipeline first distills preference reasoning and instruction writing from evolutionarily searched supervision, then aligns generation with user intent through hierarchical and self-consistent rewards. Experiments across product, game, and short-video domains show that NaviGen improves personalized image and video generation, strengthens next-item prediction, and yields more specific, relevant, and visually generatable instructions. Our code is anonymously released at: https://github.com/iLearn-Lab/NaviGen.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

A Probabilistic Framework for LLM-Based Model Discovery

arXiv:2602.18266v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Automated methods for discovering mechanistic simulator models from observational data offer a promising path toward accelerating scientific progress. Such methods often take the form of agentic-style iterative workflows that repeatedly propose and revise candidate models by imitating human discovery processes. However, existing LLM-based approaches typically implement such workflows via hand-crafted heuristic procedures, without an explicit probabilistic formulation. We recast model discovery as probabilistic inference, i.e., as sampling from an unknown distribution over mechanistic models capable of explaining the data. This perspective provides a unified way to reason about model proposal, refinement, and selection within a single inference framework. As a concrete instantiation of this view, we introduce ModelSMC, an algorithm based on Sequential Monte Carlo sampling. ModelSMC represents candidate models as particles which are iteratively proposed and refined by an LLM, and weighted using likelihood-based criteria. Experiments on real-world scientific systems illustrate that this formulation discovers models with interpretable mechanisms and improves posterior predictive checks. More broadly, this perspective provides a probabilistic lens for understanding and developing LLM-based approaches to model discovery.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Recover Semantics First, Generate Better: Improved Latent Modeling for 3D MRI Reconstruction and Cross-Contrast Synthesis

Multi-contrast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provides complementary information for clinical diagnosis. However, acquiring all MRI sequences is often time-consuming and costly. Recent generative models perform cross-contrast synthesis to address this issue by inferring absent contrasts from the available ones. Nevertheless, synthesizing 3D MRI presents significant challenges. Due to the massive volume sizes, operating directly in the pixel space is computationally prohibitive; therefore, a common approach is to first compress the 3D volumes into a latent space and subsequently train generative models in that space. We observe that existing compression architectures face several critical issues: they under-preserve long-range anatomical coherence, discard clinically meaningful semantics, and rely on optimization objectives that lead to over-smoothed reconstructions. Ultimately, these shortcomings compromise the performance of subsequent generative models. In this work, we propose a semantics-first latent modeling framework for 3D MRI reconstruction and cross-contrast synthesis. Specifically, we introduce a Latent Harmonization Encoder (LHE) to capture global anatomical dependencies, ensuring coherent volumetric representations. To mitigate semantic degradation during latent compression, we further design a Semantic Recovery Block (SRB) that injects high-level priors from a self-supervised semantic teacher, enhancing contrast-aware separability in the latent space. Additionally, we propose an Anatomy-aware Frequency Loss (AFL) to adaptively preserve diagnostically relevant high-frequency structures. Extensive experiments on two public multi-contrast MRI datasets demonstrate consistent improvements in reconstruction fidelity and cross-contrast synthesis quality. Our code is available at https://github.com/script-Yang/RSF.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

On the Limits of LLM-as-Judge for Scientific Novelty Assessment

arXiv:2606.12071v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLMs are increasingly used to generate and judge scientific ideas. This makes novelty evaluation a central problem. Full idea evaluation is difficult because it often requires judging a method, its feasibility, and its empirical promise. We therefore study a cleaner upstream object: the research question (RQ). RQ generation is a prerequisite for scientific ideation, and RQs can be compared against questions pursued in real papers. We introduce RQ-Bench, a benchmark built from recent arXiv papers. For each paper, we reconstruct author-anchored RQs from its cited background, gaps, and contributions. These RQs are not the only valid questions for the same background. They are author-anchored reference points for testing novelty judgments. We evaluate model-generated RQs with standalone LLM judging, comparative LLM judging, and human expert evaluation. LLM judges consistently rate model-generated RQs as highly novel, producing a novelty mirage; in comparative evaluations, this preference becomes even stronger. Domain experts, however, reach the opposite conclusion and prefer the author-anchored reference questions. We further find that many generated RQs are narrow or source-bound, a dimension that LLM judges often miss unless explicitly tested. Overall, the contradictory novelty evaluations between LLM judges and human experts raise a serious concern about the reliability of using LLMs to assess the scientific novelty of research questions.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Auto-exploration for online reinforcement learning

arXiv:2512.06244v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The exploration-exploitation dilemma in reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental challenge to efficient RL algorithms. Existing algorithms for finite state and action discounted RL problems address this by assuming sufficient exploration over both state and action spaces. However, this yields non-implementable algorithms and sub-optimal performance. To resolve these limitations, we introduce a new class of methods with auto-exploration, or methods that automatically explore both state and action spaces. Auto-exploration can be applied in both the tabular and linear function approximation setting. Under algorithm-independent assumptions on the existence of an exploring optimal policy, both settings attain $O(\epsilon^{-2})$ sample complexity to solve to $\epsilon$ error. These complexities are novel since they avoid algorithm-dependent parameters seen in prior works, which may be arbitrarily large. The methods are also simple to implement because they are parameter-free. We achieve these results by integrating auto-exploration into policy mirror descent to avoid the (unknown) stationary distribution seen in prior art. In the tabular setting, we introduce a dynamic exploration time with a data-driven stopping time, while for linear function approximation we propose a new sampling distribution based on the discounted visitation distribution that covers a more general class of Markov chains.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

SA-VIS: Sparse frame Annotations for training Video Instance Segmentation

Recent online video instance segmentation (VIS) methods have achieved impressive results, thus becoming the preferred approach to segment instances in videos. Despite the resurgence of impressive single image models, the online (or semi-online) VIS approaches outperform single-image models (e.g., based on SAM) by using long sequences of densely annotated frames during training. However,such a training setup of VIS is expensive in the sense of compute as well as dense annotations required. In order to solve these major flaws, we argue that the effective modeling of the instances and their evolution in videos do not require densely annotated frames. To that end, we propose a simple and effective module, called Past-frames Feature Propagation (PFP) which aggregates low-dimensional features from the image encoder of multiple frames. This simple low-compute module provides tremendous learning capability in using sparse video frame labels for end-to-end training. Combined with a light-weight frame-specific Instance Queries, our Sparse frame Annotation VIS (SA-VIS) significantly improves performance over its baseline. Most interestingly, our simple design that avoids complexities effectively bridges the gap in accuracy between training on sparsely and densely annotated video sequences. This translates to a mere 0.4% drop in performance of SA-VIS when using annotations for only 1/5 of the images in the dataset. Empirically, SA-VIS shows strong improvements over the baseline on YouTube-VIS 2019/2021/2022 and Occluded VIS (OVIS) and an over 1% improvement in AP on the state-of-the-art in a limited annotations scenario.