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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

TMR-GGNN: Credit Card Fraud Detection based on Time-Aware Multi-Relational Guided Graph Neural Network

arXiv:2606.18444v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In recent years, credit card fraud detection has faced significant challenges due to highly imbalanced data, evolving fraud patterns, and complex relational structures among transaction entities. To address these issues, this research proposes a novel framework called Timeaware Multi Relational Guided Graph Neural Network (TMR GGNN). Particularly, the proposed TMR GGNN extends the encoder decoder Graph Neural Network GNN architecture by modeling heterogeneous interactions across customers, merchants, devices, and IPs over temporal windows. Subsequently, the proposed TMR GGNN approach constructs a dynamic, multi relational graph and incorporates a time aware relational attention mechanism within the encoder to adaptively weigh the transaction relevance based on temporal proximity and semantic context. Consequently, the decoder employs a contrastive learning module to distinguish between real and synthesized transaction patterns, while improving the models generalization of rare fraud cases. Additionally, to effectively manage severe class imbalances and emphasize discriminative learning, a composite loss function combining Information Noise Contrastive Estimation (InfoNCE) based contrastive loss with Focal Loss is introduced. This integration assists in improving fraud identification while mitigating false negatives.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Show, Don't Ask: Generative Visual Disambiguation for Composed Image Retrieval with Turn-Valid Coverage

Composed image retrieval (CIR) uses a reference image and a text modification to search for a target image. However, such queries often describe several possible images rather than one exact target, making the user's intent ambiguous. Recent methods address this by using conformal prediction to estimate ambiguity and by asking users clarifying text questions. However, these methods have two limitations: their coverage guarantee only holds at the first interaction, and text questions are often insufficient for resolving fine-grained visual differences such as appearance, attributes, or viewpoint. We propose CLARA, a clarification framework that resolves ambiguity by showing users a small panel of visual alternatives. Instead of answering text questions, the user simply selects the prototype image closest to the intended target. This provides a direct visual signal and avoids relying on a model to predict the user's answer. To maintain valid conformal guarantees across multiple interaction rounds, CLARA reweights calibration using the likelihood ratio induced by the user's selection. The displayed prototypes are also constrained to represent the current candidate set and are snapped to real corpus images, ensuring that generated images cannot artificially improve coverage. Experiments on open-domain and fashion benchmarks show that CLARA matches single-turn state-of-the-art retrieval performance, maintains nominal coverage across interaction rounds, and finds the intended target in fewer rounds than strong text-question baselines. Its advantage is especially clear when ambiguity involves viewpoint or fine-grained attributes, where visual clarification is more effective than textual questioning.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Versioned Late Materialization for Ultra-Long Sequence Training in Recommendation Systems at Scale

arXiv:2604.24806v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern Deep Learning Recommendation Models (DLRMs) follow scaling laws with sequence length, driving the frontier toward ultra-long User Interaction History (UIH). However, the industry-standard "Fat Row" paradigm, which pre-materializes these sequences into every training example, creates a storage and I/O wall where data infrastructure usage exceeds GPU training capacity due to data redundancy that is amplified in multi-tenant environments where models with vastly different sequence length requirements share a union dataset. We present a versioned late materialization paradigm that eliminates this redundancy by storing UIH once in a normalized, immutable tier and reconstructing sequences just-in-time during training via lightweight versioned pointers. The system ensures Online-to-Offline (O2O) consistency through a bifurcated protocol that prevents future leakage across both streaming and batch training, while a read-optimized immutable storage layer provides multi-dimensional projection pushdown for heterogeneous model tenants. Disaggregated data preprocessing with pipelined I/O prefetching and data-affinity optimizations masks the latency of training-time sequence reconstruction, keeping training throughput compute-bound by GPUs. Deployed on production DLRMs, the system reduces training data infrastructure resource usage while enabling aggressive sequence length scaling that delivers significant model quality gains, serving as the foundational data infrastructure for modern recommendation model architectures, including HSTU and ULTRA-HSTU.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Closing the Feedback Loop: From Experience Extraction to Insight Governance in Verbal Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.17591v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training-free verbal reinforcement learning enables LLM agents to learn from world feedback – objective signals such as dynamic task outcomes, market returns, or demand forecasts – by extracting verbal rules from experience and injecting them as context, updating the agent's behavior without parameter changes. However, in non-stationary environments these agents face a retention-forgetting dilemma: retaining stale insights causes negative transfer, while discarding them causes catastrophic forgetting when conditions recur. We identify four requirements for navigating this dilemma – outcome-driven evaluation, persistent structured evidence, non-monotonic knowledge lifecycle, and compositional governance – and show that existing methods invest heavily in experience extraction while underinvesting in insight governance. We propose a three-layer architecture – rules, evidence, and skills – connected by a feedback-driven curation loop that closes the governance gap. Rules capture distilled experience from world outcomes; evidence logs track each rule's reliability across episodes; skills govern which rules to apply, how to resolve conflicts, and when to abstain. On financial forecasting as a case study, where world feedback is naturally abundant, noisy, and non-stationary, we show that the same accumulated experience either degrades performance below the zero-shot baseline or dramatically improves accuracy and risk-adjusted returns, depending on whether the curation loop is present.

05.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

A high-quality chromosome-scale reference genome assembly for Asparagus racemosus var. CIM-Shakti (Shatavari), a medicinal plant of Ayurvedic importance

Asparagus racemosus Wild., commonly known as Shatavari, is an important medicinal plant in Ayurveda and is valued for its steroidal saponins, particularly shatavarin compounds, which contribute to its adaptogenic, galactagogue, immunomodulatory, and therapeutic properties. Despite its medicinal and economic importance, genomic resources for this species have remained limited, restricting molecular breeding, pathway discovery, and comparative evolutionary studies within Asparagaceae. Here, we report a high quality chromosome scale reference genome assembly of A. racemosus var. CIM Shakti generated using PacBio HiFi long read sequencing and Omni C chromatin conformation scaffolding. The pseudo haploid assembly spans 817 Mb across 53 scaffolds, with a scaffold N50 of 98.50 Mb, L50 of 5, and a largest scaffold of 113.80 Mb. Ten major chromosome scale pseudomolecules were resolved, corresponding to the haploid chromosome complement of A. racemosus. The assembly showed high gene space completeness, with BUSCO completeness of 99.8% against the Eukaryota dataset and 98.0% against the Embryophyta dataset. BlobToolKit profiling further supported assembly quality, with GC content of approximately 39 to 40% and no major evidence of contamination. EDTA based repeat annotation identified 580.93 Mb of interspersed repetitive elements, accounting for 71.06% of the 817.57 Mb genome assembly. The repeat landscape was dominated by LTR retrotransposons, particularly Gypsy elements, which accounted for 25.01% of the assembly, followed by unclassified LTR elements at 26.58% and Copia elements at 4.84%. Structural and functional annotation identified 29,199 protein coding genes represented by 29,199 transcript models, 138,433 exons, and 125,201 CDS features. The annotation was structurally robust, with an average gene length of 4,605.1 bp, 4.74 exons per transcript, and 97.80% of transcripts containing multiple exons. The CIM Shakti reference genome provides a foundational genomic resource for investigating steroidal saponin biosynthesis, sex chromosome evolution, repeat driven genome expansion, and comparative genomics in Asparagaceae. This assembly will support future studies on medicinal trait improvement, conservation genomics, and genomics assisted breeding of climate resilient Shatavari cultivars.

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

Multi-Modal Attention for Automated Disaster Damage Assessment Using Remote Sensing Imagery and Deep Learning

Timely and accurate disaster damage assessment is crucial for effective emergency response, resource allocation, and recovery. Traditional methods, which often rely on manual inspections or sparse data, are typically slow and error-prone. This paper introduces a novel framework leveraging remote sensing imagery and deep learning to automate building damage classification. Using pre- and post-disaster satellite imagery, our model categorizes buildings into four damage levels: no damage, minor damage, major damage, and destroyed. The core innovation is a multi-modal attention mechanism that fuses bi-temporal features to explicitly detect and assess structural changes. We employ a lightweight ConvNeXT-Tiny backbone to ensure efficient processing without compromising performance. Key contributions include: (1) a cross-attention module for multi-modal data fusion, (2) an optimized preprocessing pipeline for large-scale datasets, and (3) robust data augmentation techniques. Experiments on a large-scale disaster dataset demonstrate an overall classification accuracy of 94.90%. The model effectively discriminates between damage categories and remains resilient to incomplete data. This system significantly improves assessment speed and accuracy, aiding emergency responders in prioritizing interventions. This work advances automated disaster damage detection by integrating multi-temporal imagery with deep learning, offering a scalable solution for real-time response.

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

Sticky CIR process with potential: invariant measure and exact sampling

Authors:

arXiv:2605.13648v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the sticky Cox–Ingersoll–Ross (CIR) process in one dimension, a diffusion on $[0,\infty)$ with a sticky boundary condition at the origin, arising as the marginal process in a sparse Bayesian inference framework based on Hadamard–Langevin dynamics. For the parameter range $\delta\in(1,2)$, in which the origin is accessible but not absorbing, we prove well-posedness of the process and uniqueness of its invariant measure, which is a mixture of a point mass at zero and a weighted gamma-type density on the interior. We derive an explicit Green's function for the resolvent in terms of confluent hypergeometric functions, and use this to construct an exact sampler for the invariant measure in the zero-potential case. For a non-trivial potential $G$, we establish existence and uniqueness of the tilted invariant measure via a Girsanov change of measure, and develop two sampling algorithms: a Metropolis–Hastings corrected sampler that targets the invariant measure exactly, and a cheaper, biased unadjusted Langevin algorithm (ULA) for a boundary-clamped variant of which we prove a first-order expansion of the stationary bias with an explicit constant: the leading error is a rank-one transfer of mass $K_\star h|\log h| $ onto the atom, so the total-variation bias is of exact order $h|\log h | $ – independent of $\delta$ – whenever the potential has nonzero boundary drift. Numerical experiments confirm the predicted behaviour: the Metropolis–Hastings sampler achieves the target invariant measure at all step sizes, while the ULA bias follows the proven first-order law, including its constant.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Maestro Order: A Model-Agnostic Orchestration Harness

Authors:

arXiv:2606.23983v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A single forward pass of a capable model is a fast, fluent, and unreliable problem-solver: it is right often enough to be useful and wrong often enough to be dangerous; in language models, such confident errors are known as hallucinations. We present Maestro Order, a model-agnostic orchestration harness that turns unreliable solvers into reliable problem-solving systems by composing them according to four structural primitives (decompose, ensemble, verify, and recurse) and a budget-aware controller that decides where to spend compute. The harness treats any model as a black-box base solver behind a uniform interface, layers a verifier ensemble whose discrimination is measured online, and allocates verification and voting to the stages with the highest marginal reliability per unit cost. We give the architecture, the message and state schema, the controller algorithm, and the engineering that makes it deterministic, observable, and fault-tolerant. We then specify an evaluation methodology (reliability at fixed cost, coverage, calibration, and ablations) and report results from a faithful Monte Carlo simulation of the harness over a parameterized solver/verifier model. The simulation reproduces the predicted laws quantitatively: verification amplifies reliability geometrically (e.g. $0.55\to0.98$ with two gates, $\to0.999$ with four), voting helps only above chance and is limited by shared errors, and a budget-aware controller reaches a target reliability at a small fraction of the cost of voting alone by selecting the cheapest mechanism for each regime. We close with failure modes (verifier gaming, correlated errors, and decomposition error compounding) and concrete guidance: build robust checkers, diversify solvers, and let the controller put compute where the information is.

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

Retell, Reward, Repeat: Reinforcement Learning for Narrative Theory-Informed Story Retelling

Counterfactual story retelling exposes LLM shortcomings in constrained narrative solution spaces where they can no longer rely on recalling memorised training data. Ground-truth-based post-training, such as SFT, fails to teach LLMs how to generate logical and rational narrative events. In this paper, we introduce Retell, Reward, Repeat (RRR), an RL-based pipeline synthesising Structuralist Narratology with scalar narrativity to teach storytelling structure. We extend the TimeTravel dataset with human-annotated stages of narrative equilibrium to evaluate reward models. By using d-RLAIF, RRR derives training signals from the narrativity of textual features without the need for reference outputs. Evaluations demonstrate that RRR-trained LLMs outperform few-shot and SFT baselines in logic, rationality, and completeness, with output quality additionally validated by blind human preference. Relying on a small, query-only dataset, RRR provides a linguistically grounded, cost-effective post-training mechanism for storytelling–a domain currently lacking effective post-training methods. RRR highlights the continued relevance of integrating established linguistic theories into contemporary NLP.

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

Fermionic Hamiltonian engineering with local control

arXiv:2606.17158v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum simulators enable the exploration of complex quantum phenomena in condensed-matter systems by reproducing their dynamics on controllable quantum devices. However, experimental constraints often restrict the class of Hamiltonians that can be realized natively. Hamiltonian engineering addresses this limitation by expanding the set of accessible target Hamiltonians from a fixed system Hamiltonian defined by the hardware. We introduce a new framework for fermionic Hamiltonian engineering based on conjugating free evolution under the system Hamiltonian with sequences of experimentally feasible local fermionic unitaries. The required sequences and free-evolution times are obtained efficiently via a linear program. By interleaving system evolution with these local unitaries, our method realizes effective time evolution under a broad class of target Hamiltonians, with intrinsic robustness to finite-pulse-time errors. In particular, we demonstrate that arbitrary complex tunnelling coefficients can be realized, constrained only by the connectivity of the underlying system Hamiltonian. We illustrate this capability by engineering the dynamics of the non-interacting Harper-Hofstadter model on a 1088-mode lattice and an interacting Fermi-Hubbard chain with complex tunnelling coefficients. By construction, our approach avoids the continuous energy absorption inherent to Floquet engineering.

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

RAIL: Rethinking Auditory Intelligence in Large Audio-Language Models with a CHC-Grounded Benchmark

arXiv:2606.11260v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Humans process rich auditory environments through tightly integrated cognitive capabilities such as audio perception, audio reasoning, and memory. Despite recent progress in large audio-language models (LALMs) across speech understanding and multimodal audio reasoning, current evaluation paradigms remain largely task- or modality-centric, focusing on end performance while overlooking underlying auditory cognitive behaviours. This reveals a fundamental gap between how auditory cognition is understood in humans and how it is evaluated in LALMs, particularly in the lack of frameworks that operationalise cognitive principles beyond task-level metrics to systematically capture model behaviour. In this work, we introduce RAIL, a human-centric evaluation paradigm grounded in the Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) cognitive framework. RAIL formalises auditory cognition into five core capabilities and develop them into structured evaluation tasks that probe how models process, retain, and integrate auditory information. We further construct a cognitively grounded benchmark with principled data curation and human-aligned evaluation protocols. Evaluating 26 state-of-the-art LALMs, we find that current models exhibit highly uneven performance across cognitive abilities. RAIL establishes a new evaluation paradigm that moves beyond task-centric benchmarking toward cognitively grounded assessment of auditory intelligence.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

CORA: Analyzing and bridging thinking-answer gap in Multimodal RLVR via Consistency-Oriented Reasoning Alignment

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has successfully elicited the reasoning capabilities of large language models, motivating its extension to multimodal scenarios. Existing methods primarily focus on improving the visual coverage of reasoning traces and mitigating visual hallucinations, but underestimate the semantic inconsistency between the reasoning process and the final answer. In this paper, we delve into thinking-answer inconsistency in RLVR for large vision-language models (LVLMs), showing thorough analyses of rollouts collected throughout Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) training process and post-RLVR evaluation outputs that this issue persists during training and remains present during inference. Motivated by the analysis, we propose Consistency-Oriented Reasoning Alignment (CORA), which introduces thinking-answer semantic consistency into RLVR through a lightweight plug-and-play consistency reward model, and further incorporates Hybrid Reward Advantage Splitting (HRAS) to stably coordinate task and consistency optimization. Extensive experiments across representative multimodal reasoning benchmarks and mainstream LVLMs show that CORA improves task performance while effectively mitigating thinking-answer inconsistency, leading to more faithful reasoning traces.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Can LLM Coding Agents Reason About Time Series?

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being used for automated decision-making systems in finance, healthcare, or environmental monitoring. Time series data are ubiquitous in these fields, yet hard to process automatically. Can time series be analyzed by LLM agents? We examine three approaches: providing the agent with raw numerical data, using the LLM as a coding agent, or a combination of both. In the coding agent setup, the model iteratively queries the data using Python code. Using two time series understanding benchmarks, we show that agents with code access can outperform models processing raw data by up to 10%. However, even the best performing agent still answers about 22-34% of the questions incorrectly. To get insights into models' strategies and reasoning gaps, we analyze the model outputs with a strong LLM judge. Our analysis reveals that coding agents can select appropriate statistical tests, but often miss important nuances. Meanwhile, models with access to raw data can reach the right conclusions using back-of-the-envelope calculations.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Reliability-Calibrated Edge-IoT Early Fault Warning for Rotating Machinery with a Physics-Guided Tiny-Mamba Transformer

arXiv:2601.21293v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) systems increasingly rely on distributed vibration sensing to support predictive maintenance of rotating machinery. In practical deployments, however, raw signal upload is costly and alarm decisions must be made locally under limited computation, changing operating conditions, and strict nuisance-alarm budgets. This paper presents a reliability-calibrated edge-IoT early-warning framework, in which a compact Physics-Guided Tiny-Mamba Transformer (PG-TMT) acts as the representation module and an extreme value theory (EVT) layer converts streaming anomaly scores into event-level alarm episodes. PG-TMT combines a depthwise-separable convolutional stem, a Tiny-Mamba state-space branch, and a lightweight local Transformer to capture transient, long-horizon, and multichannel degradation cues under batch-size-one inference. To improve auditability, temporal attention is projected to the frequency domain and softly aligned with analytical bearing fault-order bands. EVT calibration, dual-threshold hysteresis, and trimmed-tail fitting provide controllable false-alarm intensity even when healthy calibration data are imperfect. Experiments on CWRU, Paderborn, XJTU-SY, and an industrial pilot demonstrate that the proposed framework improves PR-AUC, reduces detection delay under a controlled nuisance-alarm budget, and remains robust to structured interference, metadata uncertainty, compound fault mixtures, and domain transfer. With a sub-1 MB footprint and Jetson p99 latency below 7 ms, the framework supports calibrated and interpretable early warnings for IIoT predictive maintenance.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Understanding helpfulness and harmless tension in reward models

Reward models are a key component of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), aligning language models toward both helpful and harmless behaviour. However, the internal mechanisms underlying these objectives and their conflicts remain poorly understood. We study alignment tension in reward models trained under helpfulness-only, harmlessness-only, and mixed-objective settings. We find that mixed-objective models often underperform single-objective models, indicating interference between objectives. Using activation-based methods, we identify neurons associated with each objective and study their functional roles via targeted ablations. We find that these neurons causally support their corresponding objectives while often negatively affecting the opposing one. We find that a substantial proportion of neurons are shared between helpfulness and harmlessness, and that these shared neurons exert a disproportionate influence on model behaviour, contributing to alignment tension. Additionally, our results provide insights and mechanistic interpretation into how alignment objectives are represented in reward models and why multi-objective alignment remains challenging, motivating future work on disentangled and controllable alignment methods.

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

Through the PRISM: Preference Representation in Intermediate States of Video Diffusion Models

Evaluating video generation with clean, pixel-based reward models disconnects evaluation from the noisy diffusion process and incurs massive VAE decoding costs. In this paper, we challenge this paradigm by asking a fundamental question: Can a powerful video generator inherently discriminate preferences directly from noisy latents? To answer this, we introduce PRISM (Preference Representation in Intermediate States of Diffusion Models). PRISM employs a lightweight Query-based Aggregation head with a frozen video diffusion backbone to decode preference signals from noisy latents. Surprisingly, PRISM not only achieves SOTA preference accuracy but also unlocks strong noise-robustness, which enables early-stage Best-of-$N$ sampling. This allows for filtering suboptimal candidates at the very beginning of denoising, drastically reducing computation while boosting video quality. We also reveal a strong positive correlation between a backbone's generative performance and its inherent evaluative power, enabling self-improving video backbones.

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

StaminaBench: Stress-Testing Coding Agents over 100 Interaction Turns

arXiv:2606.19613v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce StaminaBench, a benchmark that measures the stamina of coding agents: how many consecutive interaction turns (change requests) they can handle before failing. Unlike the prevailing fraction-of-tasks-solved metric, this matches real vibe-coding where sessions run dozens or hundreds of turns. In StaminaBench, agents implement a REST API server and modify it across a tunable number of procedurally generated follow-up change requests - 100 in our experiments, resulting in codebases of up to 6,000 lines. Tests are generated fully programmatically without LLM involvement, ensuring reproducibility and reliability; change sequences are drawn from either a hardcoded or LLM-driven sampler, both constrained to a structured action space to ensure changes are valid. The agent and the server run in an isolated environment and communicate with the benchmark through HTTP, making testing fully black-box and language-agnostic. We evaluate six agent harnesses paired with seven open-source LLMs across 20 scenarios of 100 turns each and find that: (1) all the tested models fail within 5-6 turns, confirming that vibe-coding-style programming without thorough testing produces bugs; (2) passing test feedback back to the agent and allowing it to retry improves passed turn count by up to 12x; and (3) a good harness is required for strong performance: stronger models exhibit up to a 6x gap between their best and worst harness, while weaker models fail with any harness. We release the benchmark and the generated tasks to enable further research into multi-turn coding agent behavior. Benchmark code and data: github.com/amazon-science/StaminaBench.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Evaluating Large Language Models Abilities for Addressee, Turn-change, and Next Speaker Prediction in Meetings

We investigate turn-taking in multimodal multi-party conversations using large language models (LLMs). We construct an evaluation framework for three tasks: addressee detection, turn-change prediction, and next speaker prediction. We compare supervised models trained for these tasks, text-based LLMs, multimodal LLMs (MM-LLMs), and human subjects. Experiments on the AMI corpus showed that LLMs outperformed supervised models and humans in next speaker prediction, despite not being trained on the target domain and without access to audio or visual information. An MM-LLM performed better than text-based LLMs on addressee detection and turn-change prediction but remained below human performance, indicating difficulty leveraging raw audio-visual signals. Ablation analyses revealed that conversational context was critical, particularly for next speaker prediction. We observed that human and LLM prediction patterns were similar, and intervals with frequent turn changes were difficult for both.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Hellinger Multimodal Variational Autoencoders

arXiv:2601.06572v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal variational autoencoders (VAEs) are widely used for weakly supervised generative learning with multiple modalities. Predominant methods aggregate unimodal inference distributions using either a product of experts (PoE), a mixture of experts (MoE), or their combinations to approximate the joint posterior. In this work, we revisit multimodal inference through the lens of probabilistic opinion pooling, an optimization-based approach. We start from Hölder pooling with $\alpha=0.5$, which corresponds to the unique symmetric member of the $\alpha-divergence$ family, and derive a moment-matching approximation, termed Hellinger. We then leverage such an approximation to propose HELVAE, a multimodal VAE that avoids sub-sampling, yielding an efficient yet effective model that: (i) learns more expressive latent representations as additional modalities are observed; and (ii) empirically achieves better trade-offs between generative coherence and quality, outperforming state-of-the-art multimodal VAE models.

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Stochastic Reaction Networks Within Interacting Compartments with Content-Dependent Fragmentation

arXiv:2511.10223v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Stochastic reaction networks with mass-action kinetics provide a useful framework for understanding processes – biochemical and otherwise – in homogeneous environments. However, cellular reactions are often compartmentalized, either at the cell level or within cells, and hence non-homogeneous. We investigate a model of compartmentalization in which the rate of fragmentation of a compartment depends on the abundance of some designated species inside that compartment. The particular model of study is part of a general framework for compartmentalized chemistry with dynamic compartments that was proposed in (Duso and Zechner, PNAS, 2020). This paper builds on (Anderson and Howells, Bull. Math. Biol., 2023) where the special case where the compartment dynamics do not depend on their contents was studied mathematically. In particular, we demonstrate that the explosivity characterization from (Anderson and Howells, Bull. Math. Biol., 2023) fails in this setting and provide new sufficient conditions for non-explosivity and positive recurrence, under the assumption that the underlying CRN admits a linear Lyapunov function. These results extend the theoretical foundation for modeling content-mediated compartment dynamics, with implications for systems such as cell division and intracellular transport.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Rotation-Invariant Spherical Watermarking via Third-Order SO(3) Representation Coupling

Reliable watermarking of panoramic imagery is fundamentally challenged by arbitrary 3D rotations. As panoramas are defined on the sphere, they naturally transform under the action of $SO(3)$, rendering conventional planar representations and augmentation-based robustness strategies inadequate and devoid of theoretical guarantees. To address this, we formulate panoramas as spherical signals and leverage $SO(3)$ representation theory to derive provably rotation-invariant descriptors. While spherical harmonic coefficients transform equivariantly under rotations, the natural invariant constructions are typically limited to zeroth-order statistics which eliminate directional information and severely constrain embedding capacity. In this work, we introduce a principled third-order invariant construction by coupling higher-order $SO(3)$ irreducible representations via tensor products and projecting onto the trivial representation. This yields a spherical invariant bispectrum that preserves phase information while remaining strictly rotation-invariant. Leveraging this property, we embed watermarks into higher-order spherical harmonic coefficients and recover them from invariant bispectral scalars, enabling reliable extraction under arbitrary 3D rotations. We provide a theoretical proof of $SO(3)$ invariance for it and demonstrate experimentally its near-perfect robustness to continuous rotations while maintaining high visual fidelity.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Maternal-Fetal immune networks and viral signatures in the healthy amniotic cavity

The intrauterine environment has traditionally been viewed as a privileged site protected by the placental barrier. However, emerging evidence suggests that early in utero microbial exposure may prime the developing fetal immune system. Here, using target-enriched metagenomics and high-dimensional proteomics, we characterized the intra-amniotic viral landscape and immune networks in 114 healthy pregnancies including both normal and anomalous fetuses. We identify a sparse yet heterogeneous human viral signature in 26% of samples, predominantly composed of Herpesviridae, Polyomaviridae, and Picornaviridae. Although viral reads abundance was associated with fetal abnormalities, viral detection generally did not induce overt inflammatory activation, supporting a state of immune homeostasis within the amniotic cavity. Instead, viral presence was associated with subtle and selective immune modulation, including altered inducible antimicrobial peptide expression (HBD-2 and HBD-3), coupled with an attenuation of regulatory cytokines. Our results further reveal that the amniotic immune environment is primarily governed by gestational age, transitioning from a Th1-predominant "alert" phase to innate-readiness preceding parturition. These findings suggest that fragments of viral genetic material within the amniotic cavity may contribute to fetal immune instruction without triggering overt inflammation, providing a foundational framework for understanding how "silent" viral-exposure during gestation influences the developmental origins of neonatal immunity.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Social networks and their association with quality of life among older adults in rural Burkina Faso

Objective: This study aimed to identify the types of social networks present among older adults in a rural, low-income country setting and describe their association with quality of life (QoL). Methods: A population-representative, cross-sectional survey was conducted in 60 villages around Nouna in Burkina Faso from July to August 2021. Data were collected from resident adults aged 40 years and older. Variables captured were sociodemographic status; social network characteristics (using the Practitioner Assessment of Network Typology (PANT)); quality of life (using the EuroHIS-8 tool); presence of non-communicable diseases, mental health conditions, and disability. Additionally, social networks were broadly categorised as aggregated integrated and aggregated less-integrated groups. Social network types and the groups were described separately, and a multivariable linear regression model was used to understand the association between social network types and QoL, adjusted for sociodemographic and morbidity factors. Results: Among the 2390 respondents, median age was 55 yrs (IQR: 47-64 yrs) and 55.8% were female. Locally Integrated (35.4%) or Family Dependent (30.3%) were the most common PANT social network types, followed by a mixed group (having characteristics of two or more social network types) (30.5%). Private Restricted (2.1%), Locally Self-Contained (1.2%), and Wider Community-Focussed (0.4%) types were uncommon. Adults with aggregated integrated network groups (36.1%) and aggregated less-integrated group (36.0%) were near equal, while others were non-aggregable. Although Wider Community-Focused type showed a significantly better QoL ({beta}= 8.69, 95%CI: 4.10 to 13.27), the association between social networks and QoL were subdued when controlled for morbidity factors, and hence no significant associations were observed between other types or the aggregated groups. Conclusion: Although having integrated social networks lead to a better QoL, morbidity has a greater effect on the QoL among older adults in Nouna and hence, investing more on improving the physical and mental health needs appears more beneficial.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

DCP-Prune: Ultra-Low Token Pruning with Distribution Consistency Preservation

Recent vision token pruning methods effectively preserve model performance under moderate token budgets but become unstable under ultra-low token budget. Our analysis shows that as the pruning budget decreases, accuracy degradation is often accompanied by larger feature distribution shifts. Critically, the degree of this distribution shift strongly correlates with performance degradation. To better characterize this phenomenon, we introduce a lightweight distribution consistency metric to estimate the distribution shift between retained and full tokens. Motivated by these observations, we propose a two-stage pruning framework consisting of Anchor-Context Graph Recovery (ACGR) and Text-Aware Token Cluster Selection (TATCS). Specifically, ACGR transfers contextual information before token removal, while TATCS dynamically re-selects representative tokens when severe distribution shift is detected. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior and more stable performance under ultra-low token budget. Notably, it retains 92.1% of the upper-bound average performance on LLaVA-1.5-7B with only 16 visual tokens.

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

Rethinking the Trust Region in LLM Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) serving as the de facto standard algorithm. Despite its ubiquity, we argue that the core ratio clipping mechanism in PPO is structurally ill-suited for the large vocabularies inherent to LLMs. PPO constrains policy updates based on the probability ratio of sampled tokens, which serves as a noisy single-sample Monte Carlo estimate of the true policy divergence. This creates a sub-optimal learning dynamic: updates to low-probability tokens are aggressively over-penalized, while potentially catastrophic shifts in high-probability tokens are under-constrained, leading to training inefficiency and instability. To address this, we propose Divergence Proximal Policy Optimization (DPPO), which substitutes heuristic clipping with a more principled constraint based on a direct estimate of policy divergence (e.g., Total Variation or KL). To avoid huge memory footprint, we introduce the efficient Binary and Top-K approximations to capture the essential divergence with negligible overhead. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that DPPO achieves superior training stability and efficiency compared to existing methods, offering a more robust foundation for RL-based LLM fine-tuning. Our code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/Stable-RL.