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02.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-18

scMagnifier: Resolving fine-grained cell subtypes via GRN-informed perturbations and consensus clustering

作者:

by Zhenhui He, Dong Kangning Resolving fine-grained cell subtypes in single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data remains challenging, as their subtle transcriptional differences are often obscured by technical noise and data sparsity. Here, we present scMagnifier, a consensus clustering framework that leverages gene regulatory network (GRN)-informed in silico perturbations to amplify subtle transcriptional differences and uncover latent cell subpopulations. scMagnifier perturbs candidate transcription factors (TFs), propagates perturbation effects through cluster-specific GRNs to simulate post-perturbation expression profiles, and integrates clustering results across multiple perturbations into stable subtype assignments. Additionally, scMagnifier introduces regulatory perturbation consensus UMAP (rpcUMAP), a perturbation-aware visualization that provides clearer separation between cell subtypes and guides the selection of the optimal number of clusters. In both single-batch and multi-batch benchmarks, scMagnifier consistently improves the resolution and accuracy of fine-grained cell type identification. Notably, when integrated with spatial clustering methods such as STAGATE, scMagnifier is compatible with spatial transcriptomics workflows and effectively reveals tumor cell subtypes and their spatial organization in ovarian cancer.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

The Benchmark Illusion: Pruned LLMs Can Pass Multiple Choice but Fail to Answer

Compressing large language models reduces memory use and inference cost, but it can also create failures that standard benchmarks miss. A pruned model may still perform well on multiple-choice evaluations, yet fail to answer the same question in open generation. We ask what pruning changes: does it erase the correct answer, or does it make the answer harder to produce as the top output? We study this question with multilingual question answering, tracking the same questions before and after pruning. We find a benchmark illusion. Under high-sparsity pruning, especially Wanda, models often fail in greedy open generation while still selecting the correct answer under multiple-choice scoring. In these recognition-only errors, the answer is usually not gone, but demoted: it often reappears with beam search, sampling, or one in-context example. Overall, multiple-choice benchmarks can overstate the usability of compressed LLMs, creating an evaluation blind spot. Compressed models should be tested on what they can produce, not only on what they can recognize.

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

Multimodal Ordinal Modeling of Alzheimer's Disease Severity Using Structural MRI and Clinical Data

arXiv:2606.11794v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease (AD) require accurate and scalable tools for assessing disease severity, yet current clinical staging remains time-intensive and prone to variability. We propose an attention-enhanced multimodal machine learning framework with ordinal regression for automated and interpretable AD severity staging. The framework integrates T1-weighted MRI with demographic and genetic variables and compares unimodal and multimodal architectures using ordinal and non-ordinal prediction heads. Models were trained and validated using cohort-stratified splits derived from the ADNI, AIBL, and NIFD datasets. A strictly held-out test set was constructed using subjects excluded from all training, validation, preprocessing, and hyperparameter tuning procedures, with subject-level splitting employed throughout to prevent data leakage. Among unimodal approaches, the T1-weighted MRI model achieved slightly higher adjacent-stage accuracy (0.963) and agreement with clinical staging (QWK 0.444) than the tabular model (QWK 0.433). Integrating imaging, demographic, and genetic information improved overall performance. The multimodal non-ordinal baseline achieved the lowest prediction error (MAE 0.340), whereas the ordinal multimodal model achieved the highest adjacent-stage accuracy (0.970) and strongest agreement with clinical staging (QWK 0.549). These findings indicate that ordinal formulations better capture the ordered structure of the CDR scale and yield predictions more consistent with clinical staging. Explainability analyses using Grad CAM++ and SHAP demonstrated anatomically and clinically plausible model behavior, supporting transparent decision-making. Overall, attention-based multimodal learning with ordinal regression represents a robust, interpretable, and scalable approach for automated AD severity staging and AI-assisted clinical decision support.

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

M-CTX: Exact and Scalable Spatial Context Retrieval for Trajectory Analytics

arXiv:2606.15244v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern trajectory predictors increasingly condition on external spatial context, such as map geometry, signed distance fields (SDFs), and nearby moving agents. While this context improves prediction quality, constructing it for every training anchor has become a hidden systems bottleneck. In a representative maritime AIS pipeline, spatial context construction requires roughly 17 CPU-days for a 5.48M-anchor corpus, dominating the cost of the downstream predictor. We present M-CTX, an exact and scalable spatial context-retrieval framework for trajectory analytics. M-CTX recasts context construction as an ingest-once, query-many spatial database workload and replaces three brute-force stages – OSM range retrieval, SDF computation, and moving-vessel neighbour lookup – with composable, index-backed operators. Its learned range-index backend, BR-LZ, provides recall-complete MBR-overlap range retrieval and reduces candidate amplification by 1.1x–2.7x relative to global-expansion one-curve baselines. Across four maritime regions, eight baseline systems, synthetic workloads with up to 40M spatial features, and 10^7-record AIS streams, M-CTX reproduces the reference context exactly. On the 5.48M-anchor corpus, it reduces context construction from about 17 CPU-days to 1.8 hours, a measured 226x end-to-end speed-up. An optional storage mode further compresses SDF context by 64x with only a 0.04 m ADE change. These results establish exact spatial context retrieval as a first-class database problem in modern trajectory analytics. Code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/mark000071/M-CTX-Traj.

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

BusterX++: Towards Unified Cross-Modal AI-Generated Content Detection and Explanation with MLLM

The rapid advancement of generative AI has substantially improved image and video synthesis, amplifying the risk of multimodal visual misinformation. Recent MLLMs have shown promise for transparent AI-generated content detection through reasoning and explanation, yet existing approaches largely treat image and video forensics as isolated tasks, leaving cross-modal synergies underexplored. To address this, we present BusterX++, a unified MLLM for joint image and video detection with interpretable reasoning. We also introduce GenBuster-Bench++, a meticulously curated, difficulty-aligned benchmark containing balanced image and video samples spanning recent generation models and diverse real-world scenarios. Using this controlled setting, we revisit the widely adopted $SFT \rightarrow RL$ post-training paradigm. Notably, our findings demonstrate that a single-stage, pure RL strategy driven strictly by sparse outcome rewards consistently matches or surpasses a strong SFT+RL baseline across both unified and single-modality settings. Our key insight reveals that SFT imposes lower policy entropy, which restricts the policy search space and dampens exploratory freedom. In contrast, single-stage pure RL maintains higher policy entropy throughout training, effectively unlocking the spontaneous emergence of cross-modal capability transfer between image and video forensics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BusterX++ achieves state-of-the-art performance, highlighting the powerful potential of RL for unified cross-modal visual reasoning.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Machine-learning-based multipoint optimization of fluidic injection parameters for improving nozzle performance

arXiv:2409.12707v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fluidic injection offers a promising solution to improve the performance of the overexpanded single expansion ramp nozzles (SERNs) during vehicle acceleration. However, determining the injection parameters that yield the best overall performance across multiple nozzle operating conditions remains a challenge. The gradient-based optimization method requires gradients of injection parameters at each design point, which can lead to high computational costs when using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. This paper uses a pretrained neural network to replace CFD during optimization, enabling quick calculation of the nozzle flow field at multiple design points. Considering the physical characteristics of the nozzle flow field, a prior-based prediction strategy is adopted to enhance the model's accuracy. In addition, the neural network's back-propagation algorithm computes gradients quickly by running the computation only once, thereby greatly reducing gradient computation time compared to the finite difference method. As a test case, the average nozzle thrust coefficient of an SERN at seven design points is optimized, resulting in a 1.14\% improvement. The time cost is greatly reduced compared with traditional optimization methods, even when the time required to establish the training database is included.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Identification of environmental factors and growth stages in the prediction of fibre yield and fibre quality traits in rain-grown cotton

Context Understanding how and when environmental conditions influence overall crop performance is crucial for optimising the development of genotypes to a specific breeding target environment. We focused on economically important traits of Australian rain-grown cotton including fibre yield and quality traits, which have not been investigated comprehensively. The aim of the study was to identify relevant environmental factors, and the timing and extent of their impact on rain-grown cotton production. Methods We used a data driven approach to analyse the relationship between ten climate related environmental factors across various plant growth stages and eight fibre yield and quality traits, using a large-scale field dataset of 9,283 records collected over 23 years at 4 locations, with 53 unique year-location combinations. We applied eight complementary statistical models including stepwise, penalised and Bayesian linear regression, regression-tree based ensemble methods and deep learning frameworks to (1) select the most essential environmental covariates affecting rain-grown cotton production, and (2) evaluate the predictive performance of these models. Results The environmental impacts on rain-grown cotton production were trait and growth-stage specific. Number of rainy days and solar radiation were identified as the most influential environmental factors for fibre yield traits, vapour pressure deficit at maximum daily temperature was the most influential factor for majority of fibre quality traits. However, each analysed trait was influenced by multiple environmental factors across multiple growth stages (rather than a single factor or a single growth stage). These influential covariates explained a wide range of variation in the traits, accounting for 5.8% to 68.2%. Using the best-fit random forest model, our findings revealed non-linear relationships between key environmental covariates and the traits. Conclusions Environmental factors at different rain-grown cotton growth stages are key determinants for the performance of end-of-season fibre yield and fibre quality parameters. These findings highlight the need to account for environment conditions when developing cotton varieties optimised for rain-grown production systems. Potential strategies are proposed whereby these key environmental factors can be used to increase the rate of genetic gain in rain-grown cotton production systems. Implications The results of this study will be crucial for future genetic evaluations and analyses of genotype-by-environment interaction effects in rain-grown cotton, which must account for the influence of the environment on plant performance. Furthermore, these methods can be applied to other species to identify critical growth stages and environmental factors which most influence crop performance.

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

Data-Driven Decoding of Russell's Circumplex Model of Affect

Affective computing increasingly relies on deep learning to represent emotions, yet latent spaces often remain opaque, high-dimensional black boxes. This paper investigates whether Transformers' embeddings recover the geometric regularities of Russell's circumplex model. We unify two complementary experiments testing the hypothesis that, after training models on text and speech, their resulting latent spaces encode a topology consistent with valence-arousal and reproduce human-like neighborhood relations. Specifically, we evaluate deep representations extracted from Transformer-based text (RoBERTa) and speech (wav2vec 2.0) encoders, along with a multimodal Transformer fusion architecture, across naturalistic datasets like MSP-Podcast and controlled LLM-generated stimuli. Our analysis reveals that multimodal fusion of text and audio yields perfect topological alignment with Russell's primary emotion ordering. Furthermore, in a zero-shot setting using generic text embeddings, projected fine-grained emotion terms fall close to their established human-mapped coordinates. Our contribution is a novel, data-driven framework for validating emotion models, demonstrating that Russell's circumplex structure is intrinsically encoded in the embeddings of these modalities rather than being solely an artifact of human labeling, thereby bridging the gap between psychological theory and representation learning.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

ECHOCARDIOGRAPHY ABNORMALITIES IN PREECLAMPSIA WITH SEVERE FEATURES.

Purpose To determine the frequency of echocardiographic abnormalities in women with preeclampsia with severe features. To describe the spectrum and types of echocardiographic abnormalities associated with preeclampsia with severe features. Method This is a Prospective observational study conducted in Vani Vilas hospital attached to Bangalore Medical College and Research Institute, Bangalore from January 2023 to December 2025. 560 pregnant women diagnosed with severe preeclampsia(SPE) were included in the study. Chronic hypertension without superimposed preeclampsia, underlying cardiac diseases and previous history of peripartum cardiomyopathy were excluded from the study. Transthoracic echocardiography-TTE (2D ECHO) was done to evaluate cardiac structure and function. Echocardiographic abnormalities identified during the study were documented and analysed using descriptive statistical methods. Results Abnormalities in ECHO was noted in 23.03%. A unique finding was the documentation of elevated pulmonary artery systolic pressures (PASP) suggestive of Pulmonary Hypertension (PH) (PASP >35 mm HG) among 20.25% of the participants. It was also the commonest abnormality on ECHO. Mild PH was the commonest (15.71%), moderate PH was seen in 3.92% and severe PH in 0.71% of cases. Next most frequent abnormality was moderate to severe valvular regurgitation (10%), followed by left ventricular hypertrophy (5.53%). Diastolic dysfunction (DD) was seen in 3.92%, systolic dysfunction(SD) in 3.57%, chamber dilatation in 3.57% and LV global hypokinesia in 3.03% cases of SPE Conclusion Preeclampsia with severe features (SPE) is associated with 23.03% abnormalities on echocardiography. SPE is associated with systolic dysfunction, diastolic dysfunction, chamber dilatation, valvular regurgitation, left ventricular hypertrophy and pulmonary hypertension.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

From Observation to Intervention: A Causal Audit of Expert Importance in Mixture-of-Experts Models

Interpretability methods routinely use population-level summary statistics over observed model behaviour to license claims about the effects of targeted interventions on specific computations; in Pearl's terms, they treat rung-1 associational evidence as if it supported rung-2 interventional conclusions, a move whose validity is rarely tested. We examine one concrete instance: the use of routing statistics in Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) pruning, where utilization rates, activation norms, and routing weight distributions are treated as predictors of which experts can be removed without functional cost. A token-level interventional audit across three high-redundancy MoE architectures (OLMoE-1B-7B-0924, Qwen1.5-MoE-A2.7B, DeepSeek-V2-Lite) finds no observational metric predicts causal expert importance in any model: across all 60 metric-layer combinations effect sizes stay below Cohen's $d = 0.23$, and no metric is reliably positive under our corrected, dual-test criterion. A per-token routing weight control, run with identical $n$, rules out insufficient power, recovering a signal whose CI excludes zero at OLMoE's final MoE layer ($d = +0.231$, 95\% CI $[+0.09, +0.37]$, $p = 0.0013$). Existing pruning methods succeed in this regime not by identifying dispensable experts but because early-layer redundancy renders most selection criteria interchangeable. Our results provide an explicit counterexample to the common inferential step from population-level observational summaries to token-level interventional claims about expert importance, and illustrate how interventional audits can calibrate the evidential standards for interpretability claims.

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

RedactionBench

Large Language Models are increasingly applied to sensitive domains that require redaction of personally identifiable information (PII). While redacting PII is a data cleaning prerequisite, existing benchmarks conflate extraction mechanics with privacy semantics. A public phone number is not equivalent to a phone number in a medical record. Whether information constitutes a violation depends heavily on who holds it, why, and in what context, fundamentally differentiating redaction from simple entity recognition. Grounded in contextual integrity, we introduce RedactionBench, a manually annotated benchmark comprising 200 diverse documents across 11 domains, mostly seeded from real-world sources. We also introduce R-Score, a novel character-level metric that treats semantically similar redactions equally and nullifies shallow formatting choices, such as varying masking styles for phone numbers. Evaluations across Named Entity Recognition models, entity extraction Small Language Models, and frontier models equipped with agentic tools demonstrate that contextual redaction remains an unsolved problem. A human evaluation with over 80 users on RedactionBench reveals a stark dichotomy in privacy perceptions. Annotators show consensus with target labels for mandatory redactions (89.4 percent) and safe text preservations (94.1 percent), but fail to agree on contextual redactions (47.7 percent). This variance demonstrates the subjective nature of contextual privacy and motivates R-Score, which decouples contextual ambiguity from strict precision. We compare 35 models across families and report their performance in redacting PII. Finally, we release RedactionBench to establish a baseline for future privacy-preserving systems, hoping to inspire efficient model design and standardized evaluations.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Coherence-gated quantum devices via real-time weak measurement

arXiv:2604.18662v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Single-photon routers in cavity and circuit QED direct photons by the qubit's energy eigenstate – a projective decision that destroys coherence. We propose a different primitive: coherence-gated routing, where the decision depends on the magnitude of the qubit's quantum coherence, estimated in real time from simultaneous weak measurements of $\sigma_x$ and $\sigma_z$. A photon is accepted if the coherence score $S(T) = \sqrt{\langle\sigma_x\rangle_c^2 + \langle\sigma_y\rangle_c^2}$, extracted from the conditional density matrix via the stochastic master equation, exceeds a tunable threshold $S_{\mathrm{th}}$. Certifying coherence at emission enables two applications conventional heralded sources cannot: (i) a quantum random number generator with min-entropy bounded by Bloch-sphere geometry, $H_\infty \geq -\log_2\!\bigl(\frac{1+\sqrt{1-S_{\mathrm{th}}^2}}{2}\bigr)$, and (ii) a phase-tracked photon source whose two-node coherence certification bounds the matter-matter entanglement fidelity after Bell-state measurement. The estimator is itself a security primitive. Benchmarking seven configurations, we find that underestimating detector efficiency ($\eta_{\mathrm{a}} < \eta_{\mathrm{true}}$) both stabilizes the numerics and suppresses overcertification. We trace this via a purity-monotonicity result, identify a geometric loophole amplifying purity undercertification into coherence overcertification by an order of magnitude ($\sim$40$\times$), and prove two complementary tail bounds: an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck comparison giving $4.5\%$ raw overcertification (empirical $3.7\%$ from $10^6$ trajectories) and an exponential supermartingale establishing structural exponential decay.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Surveying GenAI-based Automation in Printed Circuit Board Design and Test

arXiv:2606.17074v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is increasingly used for applications in the hardware and software domains. It purports to reduce the manual effort involved in the development and testing of complex systems before release. Within the hardware space, most tasks have focused on design automation of integrated circuits, particularly with hardware description languages. However, other types of hardware also exist! In this survey, we instead examine how GenAI has been and is being across the printed circuit board (PCB) design life cycle. This includes everything from supply chains, system specification, circuit design, layout and optimisation, validation and test, and PCB assembly and distribution. Through this lens we present a taxonomy of discovered works, categorising them according to their intent and contributions. This survey also identifies key technical challenges that GenAI faces in this space, such as domain-specific data scarcity and limited support for integration with existing PCB tools. Finally, future research directions are discussed: our survey shows that there are many opportunities remaining when considering how GenAI may be integrated into various tasks in PCB design and test.

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

MAD: Manifold Attracted Diffusion

arXiv:2509.24710v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Score-based diffusion models are a highly effective method for generating samples from a distribution of images. We consider scenarios where the training data comes from a noisy version of the target distribution, and present an efficiently implementable modification of the inference procedure to generate noiseless samples. Our approach is motivated by the manifold hypothesis, according to which meaningful data is concentrated around some low-dimensional manifold of a high-dimensional ambient space. The central idea is that noise manifests as low magnitude variation in off-manifold directions in contrast to the relevant variation of the desired distribution which is mostly confined to on-manifold directions. We introduce the notion of an extended score and show that, in a simplified setting, it can be used to reduce small variations to zero, while leaving large variations mostly unchanged. We describe how its approximation can be computed efficiently from an approximation to the standard score and demonstrate its efficacy on toy problems, synthetic data, and real data.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

On-Device Neural Architecture Search

arXiv:2606.24900v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper proposes a new approach to near-sensor computing, in which a lightweight Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is performed directly on the deployment device to find the best tiny neural architecture for analyzing the real-time data acquired through sensors. This new adaptation capability can be particularly useful in the case of human-machine interfaces for which the neural network analyzing the biometrical data can be re-designed each time the user changes, after a guided data collection procedure, fighting the typical data variations between individuals on a new level. To implement the proposed approach a new NAS has been designed and then validated on the Italian Sign Language dataset (ISL), a collection of surface electromyography (sEMG) signals of the signs of the Italian alphabet, using several embedded systems. Moreover, further validation on the Case Western Reserve University dataset (CWRU), a benchmark for intelligent fault diagnosis, is presented to suggest another possible application of the proposed approach. When run on a Raspberry Pi 4, the proposed NAS performs beyond the state of the art proposing a tiny neural architecture having 0.63 times less RAM occupancy and 5.96 percentage points of more accuracy in the case of the ISL dataset; and 0.44 times less RAM occupancy and 0.2 percentage points of more accuracy in the case of the CWRU dataset.

17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Deep numerical schemes for systems of Ergodic BSDEs with applications to regime-switching forward utilities

arXiv:2606.24271v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we introduce two neural-network-based numerical schemes for solving systems of coupled ergodic Backward Stochastic Differential Equations (eBSDEs), motivated by the approximation of optimal strategies within the framework of forward utilities in a regime-switching stochastic factor model. Our approach builds on the representation of such models through systems of eBSDEs introduced in [HLT20]. We first establish a link between the solution of the system of ergodic BSDEs and that of an associated multidimensional BSDE with random terminal time, given by the hitting time of the positive recurrent stochastic factor. Building on this representation, we introduce a locally additive deep learning scheme obtained by minimizing aggregated local error terms. We then present a new Deep Galerkin Method (DGM) inspired algorithm that minimizes the residual of the associated ergodic PDE system, relying on a representation of the ergodic cost. Finally, we apply this framework to regime-switching forward utilities in a stochastic factor model. We first derive a general consistency SPDE that characterizes regime-switching forward utilities and retrieve their representation with systems of ergodic BSDEs in the homothetic case. Numerical experiments demonstrate the performance of the proposed methods, with a particular focus on the impact on forward preferences of taking into account regime switches.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Maximal global device-independent randomness from projective measurements in every dimension

arXiv:2606.21369v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Device-independent random number generation (DIQRNG) is the most secure form of generating private randomness using quantum physical processes. Its strength lies in producing numbers that are impossible to predict by any eavesdropper restricted by the laws of quantum theory. Moreover, security is proven solely from observed measurement statistics, without the need to characterise or trust the devices used in random number generation. Implementing DIQRNG is, however, costly, as it requires high-quality entangled systems. It is therefore important to make the best use of available resources. In this work, we show that using projective measurements – which are most readily implementable experimentally – one can certify $2\log(d)$ bits of device-independent randomness from a bipartite system of local dimension $d$ for every $d \ge 2$, thus reaching the theoretically maximum possible rate of DIQRNG. We provide explicit protocols reaching $2\log(d)$ bits based on mutually unbiased bases. Furthermore, we compute numerical bounds on the rate for the case of imperfect implementations, showing that our protocols are robust to experimental noise.

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

Mean-Field Parallel Decoding for Discrete Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2606.15805v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Discrete diffusion language models enable parallel token generation, offering a pathway to low-latency decoding. However, selecting tokens independently by marginal confidence limits effective parallelism: tokens that appear reliable in isolation can form incompatible configurations when several positions are updated at once. We introduce a training-free decoding framework that coordinates these parallel updates. At each forward pass, the method assigns a commit score to each masked position and refines these scores using pairwise interactions derived from the model's predictive distributions. A variational relaxation yields a simple fixed-point update that suppresses conflicting simultaneous commitments within a single forward pass. This mechanism allows the decoder to commit more tokens in parallel while maintaining competitive generation quality. The method is lightweight, requires no auxiliary model or retraining, and drops into existing diffusion decoding pipelines without modification. Experiments on reasoning and code-generation benchmarks show consistent improvements in the quality-latency trade-off.

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

A Cycle Walk for Sampling Measures on Spanning Forests for Redistricting

arXiv:2509.08629v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce the Cycle Walk, a new Markov chain Monte Carlo method for sampling distributions on balanced graph partitions, motivated by applications in political redistricting. The method operates on spanning forests and combines two types of updates: local "cycle" moves within districts and global moves that exchange population between adjacent districts while preserving balance constraints. This construction enables efficient Metropolis–Hastings correction while allowing proposals at multiple spatial scales. We show that the Cycle Walk naturally interpolates between existing approaches based on local updates and a class of global update methods derived from recombination (RECOM). Through a range of numerical experiments on synthetic graphs and real-world precinct data, we demonstrate that the Cycle Walk exhibits improved empirical convergence diagnostics for distributions that place weaker weight on spanning-tree counts, a regime that is challenging for existing methods. In particular, the algorithm remains effective when incorporating alternative compactness measures that more closely reflect policy-relevant criteria. These results suggest that the Cycle Walk provides a flexible and computationally efficient framework for sampling from a broader class of redistricting distributions than previously accessible with MCMC techniques.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Modeling light-matter coupled systems with neural quantum states

arXiv:2606.14352v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in cold atom manipulation enable the study of many-body systems where short-range interactions between neighboring atoms coexist with long-range interactions mediated by photons. Such a combination of interactions makes a theoretical approach challenging beyond mean-field methods. In this work, we develop a neural quantum state based approach to study these systems numerically. We introduce a neural-network architecture capable of handling hybrid Hilbert spaces with large local bosonic dimensions in strongly interacting spin-photon systems. We benchmark this approach on a model of a two-dimensional lattice of Rydberg atoms coupled to a photon mode. The superradiant ground states found in the large spin-photon coupling regime allow us to demonstrate the efficiency of the method in the presence of high photon occupation. Furthermore, the ability to capture spin-spin and spin-photon correlations leads us to observe quantitative deviations in the ground state phase boundaries with respect to mean-field theory. The method extends to other systems with a similar hybrid Hilbert space structure, such as spin-phonon systems, and provides a scalable framework for investigating their ground state properties.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

MB-Loc: Multi-planar Bird's-eye-view Localization in outdoor LiDAR scenes

Global LiDAR localization is a fundamental task for autonomous navigation systems. Recent methods perform Scene Coordinate Regression (SCR) and achieve superior accuracy over Absolute Pose Regression (APR) solutions by predicting dense 3D world coordinates. However, SCR approaches introduce two major bottlenecks: severe computational inefficiency from processing raw 3D geometries and significant performance degradation under varying sensor viewpoints. To address these limitations, we present MB-Loc, a lightweight and viewpoint-robust SCR framework. Instead of relying on heavy 3D convolutions, we project the input LiDAR scan into a 2.5D Multi-planar Bird's-Eye View (BEV) representation. By slicing the point-cloud along the Z-axis and mapping signed depths into discrete 2D planes, MB-Loc retains essential 3D geometric structures while exploiting the computational tractability of standard 2D CNNs. To handle the inherent sparsity of outdoor LiDAR, we introduce a KL-regularized latent bottleneck that explicitly models spatial uncertainty without injecting stochastic noise. Finally, to ensure rotation robustness, we apply 3D spatial augmentations prior to planar projection, forcing the network to implicitly learn viewpoint-invariant features. We perform extensive experiments on the publicly available NCLT dataset and demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the current state-of-the-art. Operating at real-time inference speeds, MB-Loc significantly outperforms traditional 3D-SCR architectures in computational efficiency.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Learning Augmented Exact Exponential Algorithms

arXiv:2606.18807v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The field of learning-augmented algorithms has demonstrated that machine-learned predictions can bypass worst-case lower bounds across a wide range of problems. So far, however, the focus has been almost exclusively on polynomial-time algorithms, where predictions improve competitive ratios, approximation guarantees, or running times. In this paper, we raise the question of whether predictions can push the frontier of exact exponential-time algorithms for NP-hard problems. We answer this question affirmatively by proposing a general approach that augments an entire family of state-of-the-art exact algorithms for a variety of subset selection problems. We show that a noisy predictor that is only marginally better than random guessing suffices to provably reduce the search space, and that the resulting runtime speedup scales smoothly with the prediction quality. Importantly, our algorithms require only pairwise independence of predictions or, alternatively, do not require the knowledge of the predictor's accuracy - both strictly weaker and more realistic settings than typically assumed.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Genetically Proxied Interleukin-6 Inhibition and Cancer Risk: A Multi-Ancestry Drug-Target Mendelian Randomization Study of Hepatocellular Carcinoma and Colorectal Cancer

Background: Interleukin-6 (IL-6) signalling drives chronic inflammation and is therapeutically targeted by tocilizumab, an approved IL-6 receptor inhibitor. Whether genetically proxied lifelong IL-6 inhibition causally influences the risk of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) or colorectal cancer (CRC) remains unanswered. Prior single-variant estimates from pooled observational data are methodologically limited and may reflect confounding. Methods: A two-sample drug-target Mendelian randomization (MR) study was conducted. Four independent cis-acting protein quantitative trait loci (pQTL) variants within the IL6 and IL6R gene loci (rs2228145, rs4129267, rs7529229, rs1800795) were selected as genetic instruments , with F-statistics ranging from 32.3 to 120.5, confirming instrument strength. Outcome data were obtained from four independent genome-wide association studies: HCC from BioBank Japan (BBJ; 1,866 cases, 195,745 controls), HCC from FinnGen Release 10 (674 cases, 218,118 controls), CRC from a European meta-analysis (19,948 cases, 12,124 controls), and CRC from BBJ (7,062 cases, 195,745 controls). Causal estimates were derived using inverse variance weighted (IVW) regression as the primary method, with MR-Egger and weighted median analyses as sensitivity methods. Cochran Q statistics assessed heterogeneity and MR-Egger intercept testing assessed directional pleiotropy. Results: Genetically proxied IL-6 inhibition showed no significant causal effect on HCC risk in East Asian populations (IVW odds ratio [OR] 0.997, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.903 to 1.101, p=0.953) or European populations (IVW OR 0.984, 95% CI 0.802 to 1.208, p=0.880). Similarly, no causal effect was observed on CRC risk in European populations (IVW OR 1.015, 95% CI 0.957 to 1.075, p=0.623) or East Asian populations (IVW OR 0.999, 95% CI 0.948 to 1.052, p=0.971). Sensitivity analyses confirmed the absence of directional pleiotropy and heterogeneity across all four analyses. Leave-one-out analyses demonstrated that no single instrument drove the null findings. Conclusions: Genetically proxied IL-6 receptor inhibition, modelling the therapeutic effect of tocilizumab, showed no causal effect on HCC or CRC risk across four independent cohorts and two ancestries. These findings do not support a role for IL-6 pathway inhibition in the prevention of these cancers and provide reassuring genetic safety evidence regarding cancer risk in patients receiving tocilizumab. Larger HCC-specific GWAS are needed to definitively evaluate modest effects in this cancer type.

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

tap: A File-Based Protocol for Heterogeneous LLM Agent Collaboration

作者:

arXiv:2606.14445v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing multi-agent software development systems have proposed many forms of agent collaboration, including role-based collaboration and automated code review. However, many systems assume a common runtime, a central conversation server, or the same API family. Under these assumptions, LLM agents from different vendors cannot easily exchange messages directly from their own execution environments while dividing development and review work on a shared codebase. This paper presents tap, a file-based collaboration protocol that allows Claude (Anthropic) and Codex (OpenAI) to collaborate on one codebase without shared memory or an identical runtime. The core of tap is a file-first design that preserves markdown files with metadata as original messages, combines a file inspection path (file communication, Tier 1) with real-time notification paths for Claude and Codex (real-time communication, Tier 2), and isolates work through separate git worktrees. Even if real-time notification fails or a receiver restarts, the message file remains available and the same content can be inspected again. In a 27-day, 37-generation self-applied operation where tap was used to develop and review itself, we collected 209 tap-related pull requests and 717 operational artifacts. An analysis of 375 review artifacts showed that the share of reviews recording at least one defect or requested change was 69.8% for heterogeneous model pairs and 53.1% for homogeneous model pairs. These results show that tap, which combines file-based message preservation with real-time notification, operates in a real production repository, and that combining heterogeneous models and execution environments can broaden review perspectives. tap is distributed as the open-source npm package @hua-labs/tap (v0.5.2).