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01.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-15

Blood signatures of cell type-specific aging forecast disease risk and resilience

作者: 未知作者

By measuring thousands of proteins in blood samples from over 60,000 people, we built molecular ‘clocks’ to estimate how fast cells age. Our analyses show that cell types age at different rates within the same person. Accelerated aging of specific cell types is associated with increased disease risk, whereas slower aging of others is linked to protection and improved survival.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

GAE: Unleashing Physical Potential of VLM with Generalizable Action Expert

Vision-language models demonstrate strong reasoning and planning abilities, yet grounding these predictions into precise robot actions remains a central challenge. Existing Vision-Language-Action methods typically entangle reasoning and action generation, leading to limited generalization. We propose Generalizable Action Expert (GAE), a task-agnostic model that converts sparse geometric plans into dense robot actions. Our approach introduces a sparse geometric interface: the VLM predicts sparse 3D waypoints representing high-level intention, while GAE maps these waypoints together with real-time point cloud observations to continuous action trajectories. GAE is pretrained on a large-scale pointcloud-trajectory dataset comprising 150k trajectories from both simulation and real-world robots. To further improve efficiency and generalization, we introduce an Action Pre-training, Pointcloud Fine-tuning (APPF) scheme that decouples learning action dynamics from geometry grounding. After pretraining, GAE is frozen and reused across downstream tasks, requiring only lightweight fine-tuning of the VLM to produce the sparse interface. Experiments show that our method achieves strong performance and generalization across diverse visual domains, camera viewpoints, and natural language instructions.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

FedRot-LoRA: Mitigating Rotational Misalignment in Federated LoRA

arXiv:2602.23638v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated LoRA provides a communication-efficient mechanism for fine-tuning large language models on decentralized data. In practice, however, a discrepancy between the factor-wise averaging used to preserve low rank and the mathematically correct aggregation of local updates can cause significant aggregation error and unstable training. We argue that a major source of this problem is rotational misalignment, arising from the rotational invariance of low-rank factorizations – semantically equivalent updates can be represented in different latent subspaces across clients since $(B_i R_i)(R_i^\top A_i) = B_i A_i$. When such misaligned factors are averaged directly, they interfere destructively and degrade the global update. To address this issue, we propose FedRot-LoRA, a federated LoRA framework that aligns client updates via orthogonal transformations prior to aggregation. This alignment preserves the semantic update while reducing cross-client subspace mismatch, without increasing communication cost or restricting model expressivity. We provide a convergence analysis that examines the aggregation error induced by factor-wise averaging and shows how rotational alignment yields a tighter upper bound on this error. Extensive experiments on natural language understanding and generative tasks demonstrate that FedRot-LoRA consistently outperforms existing federated LoRA baselines across a range of heterogeneity levels and LoRA ranks.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Cloze: An Open Research Platform for Studying Human-AI Conversations in Mental Health Contexts

Cloze is an open-source web platform for conducting controlled, monitored studies of human-AI conversation in mental health research contexts. Consumer large language model (LLM) products such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are built for individual productivity, and offer researchers little experimental control, inconsistent data export, and no shared safety scaffolding that holds across providers. Cloze gives research teams a single environment in which they configure which models participants converse with, how the AI is instructed, how conversations are scheduled over time, and which safety constraints apply unconditionally, while every message is captured with full provenance (model version, prompt configuration, timing). The platform currently supports OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and locally hosted open-weight models served through Ollama behind a unified interface, and runs in the cloud or fully on premises so that participant data need never leave an institution. Cloze is research infrastructure for building an evidence base on human-AI interaction in mental health contexts. It is not a therapeutic product.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

TSA: Temporal Slot Activation for Persistent Object-Centric Video Representation

Unsupervised video object-centric learning aims to decompose dynamic scenes into temporally persistent entity representations. Existing recurrent video slot-attention methods propagate a fixed set of slots across frames, but typically assume unconditional slot propagation: every slot is updated and decoded at every frame, regardless of whether its corresponding object is visible. We show that this design violates a basic lifecycle requirement for persistent slots: when an object is absent or fully occluded, its slot should preserve its previous state and avoid explaining unrelated visible content. Instead, unconditional propagation creates two failure pathways: update-induced state drift, where current-frame evidence overwrites the absent object's representation, and decoder-induced reconstruction interference, where the inactive slot remains coupled to reconstruction through decoder attention. We propose Temporal Slot Activation (TSA), a mechanism that learns a per-slot, per-frame activation score $\alpha_{k,t} \in (0, 1)$ without visibility supervision. TSA uses this activation as a shared latent control variable for slot lifecycle modeling. When a slot is inactive, TSA anchors its state to the previous slot via activation-gated updating and suppresses its decoder participation through an activation-dependent additive bias on attention logits before softmax normalization. This jointly reduces state drift and reconstruction-driven interference. To improve decisions under partial occlusion and gradual reappearance, TSA further conditions activation prediction on a per-slot temporal memory produced by a Temporal Context Encoder. We evaluate TSA on MOVi-C/E, YT-VIS, and OVIS benchmarks using both standard and tracking-based metrics (FG-ARI, mBO, IDF1, HOTA). TSA consistently improves object decomposition and temporal identity preservation, with large gains on long, heavily occluded videos.

06.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Space-time duality approach to (inhomogeneous) integrable quenches

arXiv:2606.20445v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Characterising the universal aspects of non-equilibrium quantum many-body dynamics is one of the key goals of this century's physics research. Progress, however, is hindered by the lack of general theoretical frameworks for studying interacting quantum matter far from equilibrium. A recent breakthrough has been the realization that several key non-equilibrium quantities, such as the rate of growth of entanglement or the fluctuations of conserved charges within finite subsystems, can be related to equilibrium properties through a space-time duality that effectively exchanges the roles of space and time. This observation effectively enables the study of non-equilibrium phenomena using tools and concepts borrowed from equilibrium statistical mechanics and thermodynamics. A first proof of principle of this framework, dubbed space-time duality approach (SDA), was provided by interacting integrable systems, where thermodynamic properties can often be characterized exactly, while dynamical quantities typically remain beyond analytical reach. Subsequent developments, however, revealed that the SDA suffered from an intrinsic ambiguity, restricting its applicability to homogeneous quenches and to charge fluctuations arising from symmetric initial states. Here we resolve this ambiguity from first principles and derive closed-form predictions for entanglement growth and charge fluctuations after general quantum quenches. We benchmark our results against the exact analytical solution of the Rule 54 quantum cellular automaton and extensive TEBD simulations of the XXZ chain. Moreover we show that, when specialised to the entanglement entropy, our framework naturally reproduces the predictions of the quasiparticle picture.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Ultrastrongly coupled open systems and fine grained time

arXiv:2606.16634v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the dynamics of a d-level quantum system coupled to a bosonic reservoir when the coupling constant is large. It is known that in the limit of infinite coupling strength, the system undergoes an instantaneous nonselective measurement, resulting in the immediate decoherence in the measurement basis, followed by a unitary Zeno dynamics. Here we resolve this dynamical process by introducing a fine grained scaling regime of short times proportional to the inverse coupling. We provide a rigorous derivation of the open system dynamics in this regime of ultrastrong coupling and demonstrate how decoherence unfolds continuously in the new time scale. We show that Markovian dynamics which are not given by semigroups arise naturally, in contrast to what happens in the weak coupling theory.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Mask-Proof: An LLM-based Automated Data Curation Pipeline on Mathematical Proofs

arXiv:2606.15258v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly capable of mathematical problem solving and can even assist with research-level proofs, yet we still lack a scalable and reproducible way to measure step-level reasoning in long proofs across diverse sources. This evaluation gap limits trustworthy AI assistance in proof-certified scientific progress. Existing evaluations often emphasize final answers or rely on costly expert grading, while end-to-end proof generation remains open-ended and hard to verify automatically. We introduce Mask-Proof, a pipeline that turns real proofs into automatically checkable masked-step tasks. It masks key formula steps, provides the necessary surrounding context, and evaluates model reconstructions with an LLM-based equivalence judge using repeated votes for stability. The resulting Mask-ProofBench contains 292 curated problems across diverse research areas. Experiments with 17 models show that reasoning-enhanced models outperform standard models by 12% to 27%. Our evaluator achieves 96.8% agreement with expert annotators, enabling faithful, reproducible, and comparable measurement of step-level mathematical reasoning. Benchmark, annotations, and code are available at https://github.com/weating/Mask-Proof.

09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Eyring-Kramers asymptotics for infinite-dimensional stochastic gradient systems

arXiv:2606.16083v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study small-noise asymptotics for a class of reversible stochastic evolution equations in infinite dimensions. The dynamics are of the form \[ dX_t=-A\nabla F(X_t)\,dt+\sqrt{2\beta^{-1}A}\,dW_t, \] where $F$ is a regular multi-well potential, $A$ is a selfadjoint mobility operator, $W$ is a cylindrical Brownian motion and $\beta\gg 1$ is the inverse noise strength. The invariant measure is a Gibbs perturbation of a Gaussian reference measure, and the resulting framework covers, in particular, the stochastic Allen-Cahn and stochastic Cahn-Hilliard equations on bounded intervals. In the double-well case, we derive a sharp asymptotic formula for the first nonzero eigenvalue of the generator. This gives an infinite-dimensional Eyring-Kramers law for the spectral gap, with exponential rate determined by the communication height and leading prefactor determined by the local quadratic behavior at the relevant minima and saddle points. Our approach provides a general strategy for lifting finite-dimensional Eyring-Kramers analysis to infinite-dimensional stochastic gradient systems.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Geometric and Quantum Kernel Methods for Predicting Skeletal Muscle Outcomes in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

arXiv:2601.00921v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) affects hundreds of millions of people worldwide, and skeletal-muscle dysfunction is clinically important. Quantum machine learning is increasingly explored for biomedical prediction, but its value in small biomarker cohorts requires benchmarking against strong classical baselines. We analysed a cigarette-smoke COPD cohort of 213 animals with blood and bronchoalveolar-lavage biomarkers to predict tibialis anterior muscle weight, muscle quality, and force. We developed a kernel-geometric quantum hybrid method in which synthetic symmetric positive definite (SPD) references are mapped through a reproducing kernel Hilbert space, compressed using train-only random projection, normalised, and supplied to low-dimensional quantum regression circuits. We benchmarked this approach against classical ridge/kernel models, SPD relational representations, and quantum-kernel regression (QKR). All methods were evaluated using condition-stratified repeated cross-validation. The largest numerical improvement was observed for muscle weight, where the proposed method had the numerically lowest mean root mean squared error (RMSE), approximately 1.8% below the best classical comparator; paired fold-level testing did not establish statistically significant superiority after Holm adjustment, but the endpoint is biologically meaningful. The method also had the numerically lowest mean RMSE for muscle quality. For force, biomarker-only Ridge performed best, suggesting a more linear endpoint structure.

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

SwiftCTS: Fast Cross-Design Prediction and Pareto Optimization of Clock Tree Metrics via Few-Shot Calibration

arXiv:2606.11348v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Clock Tree Synthesis (CTS) is a computationally expensive stage in the physical design flow, requiring iterative EDA tool invocations to navigate a vast configuration space for optimal power, wirelength, and timing skew. Existing machine learning approaches require computationally expensive retraining or fine-tuning cycles to adapt to unseen macro architectures and are architecturally mismatched to the millions of evaluations demanded by exhaustive combinatorial search. We present SwiftCTS, a physics-informed surrogate framework that addresses both limitations simultaneously. By coupling lightweight, physics-grounded statistical features with gradient-boosted ensembles, SwiftCTS trains in under five seconds on a CPU and delivers sub-millisecond inference without GPU support. To handle out-of-distribution (OOD) designs without retraining or fine-tuning, we introduce a K-shot multiplicative calibration mechanism that anchors predictions to just one or two physical reference runs, reducing power prediction error from 24.5\% to 3.3\% and wirelength error from 56.6\% to under 1\% on unseen macros. Integrating this engine with an evolutionary optimizer, SwiftCTS evaluates 100,000 CTS configurations in under ten seconds, yielding Pareto-optimal frontiers that are physically validated within the OpenROAD flow. Closed-loop validation confirms prediction errors below 0.5\% for power and wirelength, and timing skew predictions within five picoseconds on an OOD benchmark, consistently outperforming default tool heuristics across all target metrics. Code publicly available at: \href{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SwiftCTS-7E6E}{https://github.com/BarsatKhadka/SwiftCTS}

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

OpenMedQ: Broad Open Pretraining for Medical Vision-Language Models

We present OpenMedQ, a medical vision-language model pretrained on the broadest fully-open medical mix to date: 14 datasets totaling ~3.35M pretraining samples spanning pathology, radiology, microscopy, and text-only clinical QA. OpenMedQ reaches state-of-the-art BLEU-1 on PathVQA (75.9), beating Med-PaLM M variants up to 562B parameters (~80x larger), and matches the best reported VQA-MED BLEU-1 (64.5). Its vision encoder, transferred to 8 unseen medical classification benchmarks under an identical downstream recipe, obtains the highest average macro-F1 (0.757) among BiomedCLIP (0.745), PMC-CLIP (0.745), PubMedCLIP (0.746), and a from-scratch baseline (0.616). We release our code and an interactive demo is publicly available as a reproducible baseline for the community.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Reaffirming a Challenge to Bohmian Mechanics

arXiv:2509.06584v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In our recent work, we reported the first measurement of the speed of tunnelling particles using a coupled waveguide system. The measured speed is operationally defined through a comparison of two orthogonal motions in a coupled waveguide system, is compatible with the standard definition of dwell time and with the Büttiker-Landauer tunnelling time, and does not presuppose a trajectory picture. Here we respond to objections raised in comments, referee reports, preprints, and articles. We distinguish two questions that are often conflated: whether Bohmian mechanics reproduces the measured density, and whether the standard guiding equation assigns the correct state of motion to the particles. The first point follows under the usual quantum equilibrium assumptions. The second is a separate physical assumption, since the standard guiding equation does not follow from the Schrödinger equation alone. We argue that, in the evanescent regime, the state of motion assigned by the standard guiding equation is in disagreement with the measured speed. To make the distinction explicit, we also present a bidirectional Bohmian model that reproduces the same stationary density while assigning finite speeds compatible with the speed inferred in the evanescent regime.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Multi-Turn Reflective Masking Elicits Reasoning in Mask Diffusion Models

While reasoning on autoregressive (AR) models is often performed by chain-of-thought reasoning and reflection, their refinement of previous outputs still relies on fully sequential generation, even when only local edits are needed. In contrast, the masking mechanism in Mask Diffusion Models (MDMs) naturally supports explicit local edits on previous outputs, allowing selective refinement without discarding previous answers and generating another from scratch. While this property more closely aligns with how humans correct mistakes by iterative local refinement, existing MDMs do not support multi-turn masking and denoising. We propose Reflective Masking (RM), which elicits such an intrinsic reasoning capability in MDMs via lightweight post-training. RM provides a native test-time scaling, where an MDM iteratively revisits and revises its prior outputs based on evolving context. To exploit insights from previous turns like AR reasoning, we further introduce History Reference, a parameter-free mechanism that leverages intermediate denoising states during revision. Our approach requires no architectural changes and is easily applicable to existing MDMs. Across diverse tasks and modalities, including text generation, Sudoku, and image editing, Reflective Masking consistently outperforms standard masking-based baselines and demonstrates strong generality, positioning RM as a fundamental primitive for reasoning on MDMs.

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

ParseFixer: An Agentic Framework for Document Parsing via Selective Multimodal Correction

In this report, we present our third-place solution for the DataMFM Challenge Track 1: Document Parsing. This track requires models to recover structured Markdown documents from document page images while preserving textual content and document structure. To address the complementary requirements of accurate content recovery and faithful structure reconstruction, we propose ParseFixer, an agentic framework for backbone parsing and selective correction. ParseFixer consists of two key modules: Full-Page Backbone Parsing (FBP) and Agentic Selective Correction (ASC). FBP produces stable initial Markdown outputs with MinerU2.5 Pro, while ASC detects high-value parsing failures and repairs them through a verify-and-rollback correction process. By placing selective multimodal correction after open-source backbone parsing, ParseFixer improves the recovery of key document elements without rewriting reliable backbone predictions. On the test set, our final system achieves an overall score of 61.78 and ranks third in Track 1, demonstrating its effectiveness for accurate document parsing. Our code will be released at: https://github.com/iLearn-Lab/CVPRW26-ParseFixer.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Fisher geometry reshapes the effect of incompatibility in multiparameter quantum estimation

arXiv:2606.11343v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multiparameter quantum estimation faces two fundamental obstacles: sloppiness, i.e., anisotropy of the quantum Fisher information matrix (QFIM) that renders some parameter directions insensitive, and incompatibility, the non-commutativity of optimal measurements for different parameters. The trade-off bound $C_T$ captures their joint impact on precision, but it has remained unclear how the distribution of incompatibility across parameter planes affects its overall cost. Here we separate the total amount of incompatibility from its location. We introduce a dimensionless quantity $G_n^{(F)}$ that measures the alignment between the incompatibility distribution and the eigenvalues of the QFIM, and show how the Frobenius scale of the incompatibility contribution factorizes. We obtain a bound and prove the incompatibility cost lies between this bound and a rank-dependent multiple thereof. We also prove that at fixed sloppiness, or equivalently fixed Fisher volume, concentrating incompatibility into a single parameter plane reduces the optimized trade-off cost because the Fisher geometry can then be reshaped to allocate more Fisher area to that plane. A qutrit $SU(2)$ encoding numerically confirms that states with larger incompatibility strength can nevertheless incur a smaller cost if the matching factor $G$ is sufficiently small. Our results establish that the distribution of incompatibility relative to the Fisher eigenbasis is a central diagnostic for multiparameter estimation, beyond the total incompatibility strength.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

MDForge: Agentic Molecular Dynamics Pipeline Design under Sparse Simulator Feedback

Molecular dynamics (MD) is the canonical in-silico method for atomistic molecular science, simulating molecular behavior from first-principle physics. Designing an MD pipeline for a new system requires substantial expert knowledge: running it on even one molecule is expensive, ruling out trial-and-error. We automate this expert pipeline-design process with an LLM agent. Unlike existing MD agents that orchestrate a predefined tool set, we treat pipeline design as open-ended code generation in which the agent's behavior is reshaped online by verbal reward. Specifically, we build MDForge, an LLM agent whose in-context update rule densifies the sparse reward via a multi-agent debate among physics experts. On three SAMPL host-guest binding free-energy benchmarks, MDForge automatically designs MD pipelines competitive with human experts. Deployed on a library of unseen candidate guests, its CB[7] pipeline discovers a novel binder that wet-lab competition NMR confirms is a high-affinity, picomolar CB[7] binder. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/Zehong-Wang/MDForge.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

A non-asymptotic bound on the TV distance between a Wishart matrix and an appropriately scaled GOE matrix

arXiv:2606.16018v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this note, we prove a non-asymptotic version of a theorem by Bubeck, Ding, Eldan, and Rácz, showing that a Wishart matrix is close in total variation to an affine transformation of a GOE matrix. The proof mirrors the proof given by Bubeck et al., with some changes made to make it non-asymptotic.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Certifiable Safe RLHF: Semantic Grounding and Fixed Penalty Constraint Optimization for Safer LLM Alignment

arXiv:2510.03520v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Ensuring safety is a foundational requirement for large language models (LLMs). Achieving an appropriate balance between enhancing the utility of model outputs and mitigating their potential for harm is a complex and persistent challenge. Contemporary approaches frequently formalize this problem within the framework of Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) and employ established CMDP optimization techniques. However, these methods exhibit two notable limitations. First, their reliance on reward and cost functions renders performance highly sensitive to the underlying scoring mechanism, which must capture semantic meaning rather than being triggered by superficial keywords. Second, CMDP-based training entails tuning dual-variable, a process that is both computationally expensive and does not provide any provable safety guarantee for a fixed dual variable that can be exploitable through adversarial jailbreaks. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Certifiable Safe-RLHF (CS-RLHF) that introduces a cost model trained on a large-scale corpus to assign semantically grounded safety scores. In contrast to the lagrangian-based approach, CS-RLHF adopts a rectified penalty-based formulation. This design draws on the theory of exact penalty functions in constrained optimization, wherein constraint satisfaction is enforced directly through a suitably chosen penalty term. With an appropriately scaled penalty, feasibility of the safety constraints can be guaranteed at the optimizer, eliminating the need for dual-variable updates. Empirical evaluation demonstrates that CS-RLHF outperforms state-of-the-art LLM model responses rendering at-least 5 times efficient against nominal and jail-breaking prompts

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Secondary terms for first moments of Selmer groups of twists of elliptic curves over global function fields

作者:

arXiv:2606.14274v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Let $E$ be a non-isotrivial elliptic curve over a global function field $\mathbb{F}_q(t)$ of characteristic coprime to $2$ and $3$. Under some explicit conditions, we determine the secondary terms for the first moments of prime Selmer groups of cyclic prime twist families of $E$ over $\mathbb{F}_q(t)$.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Triangular Consistency as a Universal Constraint for Learning Optical Flow

arXiv:2606.19938v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose triangular consistency as a first-principled constraint for optical flow, which is agnostic to network architecture, supervision type, and dataset, and applies to both image-pair and multi-frame settings. This simple but powerful constraint is to compose two flows to induce a third flow and enforce consistency among the three. The composed flows may arise from (i) image pairs, yielding cycle consistency; (ii) multiple video frames, producing longer-range motion through temporal chaining; or (iii) image pairs combined with controlled synthetic transformations, which becomes data augmentation. This triangular consistency introduces negligible computational overhead and requires no additional annotations. Since it is derived directly from the geometry of optical flow, it does not rely on model-specific assumptions and serves as a ``universal'' plug-and-play component for optical flow training. Experiments show consistent improvement across supervised, unsupervised, and transfer learning settings.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

TerraMind: Large-Scale Generative Multimodality for Earth Observation

arXiv:2504.11171v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present TerraMind, the first any-to-any generative, multimodal foundation model for Earth observation (EO). Unlike other multimodal models, TerraMind is pretrained on dual-scale representations combining both token-level and pixel-level data across modalities. On a token level, TerraMind encodes high-level contextual information to learn cross-modal relationships, while on a pixel level, TerraMind leverages fine-grained representations to capture critical spatial nuances. We pretrained TerraMind on nine geospatial modalities of a global, large-scale dataset. In this paper, we demonstrate that (i) TerraMind's dual-scale early fusion approach unlocks a range of zero-shot and few-shot applications for Earth observation, (ii) TerraMind introduces "Thinking-in-Modalities" (TiM) – the capability of generating additional artificial data during finetuning and inference to improve the model output – and (iii) TerraMind achieves beyond state-of-the-art performance in community-standard benchmarks for EO like PANGAEA. The pretraining dataset, the model weights, and our code are open-sourced under a permissive license.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Calibrated Triage, Not Autonomy: Confidence Estimation for Medical Vision-Language Models

A vision-language model can answer a question about a medical image fluently and confidently while barely using the image, leaning instead on language priors. In medicine this is the failure that matters most, because the answer looks trustworthy and is not, and the only protection is a confidence score reliable enough to tell the system when to abstain. We ask a deployment question rather than an accuracy one: how much imaging work a model can safely handle alone, and which confidence signal makes that possible. We evaluate seven confidence estimators across five open-weight LVLMs and three medical visual-question-answering datasets spanning broad clinical imaging, radiology, and pathology, with every probe trained only on natural images and applied without adaptation. Recast as bounded selective prediction (automate a case only when confidence clears a threshold, defer the rest), the comparison is cautionary. The standard metrics are poor guides: discrimination barely separates the methods, and the weak calibration of a cheap self-report is cheaply removed by off-domain temperature scaling without changing deployable yield. What distinguishes a usable estimator is the high-confidence region a clinician acts on: the weakest baselines are confidently wrong on 41 to 45 percent of their errors against 1 to 4 percent for the best probe, and no estimator is reliably best across domains or models. Safe handoff is governed at two levels: base-model competence sets a ceiling, so a well-calibrated score recovers roughly a third of radiology cases at a 20 percent error tolerance but almost none of pathology; the confidence layer then decides how much of that ceiling is reachable. The usable role today is calibrated triage, not autonomy: automate the cases a calibrated score marks safe, route the rest to a clinician. We release all outputs, correctness judgments, and confidence scores, with code.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Anti-causal domain generalization: Leveraging unlabeled data

arXiv:2602.17187v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The problem of domain generalization concerns learning predictive models that are robust to distribution shifts when deployed in new, previously unseen environments. Existing methods typically require labeled data from multiple training environments, limiting their applicability when labeled data are scarce. In this work, we study domain generalization in an anti-causal setting, where the outcome causes the observed covariates. Under this structure, environment perturbations that affect the covariates do not propagate to the outcome, which motivates regularizing the model's sensitivity to these perturbations. Crucially, estimating these perturbation directions does not require labels, enabling us to leverage unlabeled data from multiple environments. We propose two methods that penalize the model's sensitivity to variations in the mean and covariance of the covariates across environments, respectively, and prove that these methods have worst-case optimality guarantees under certain classes of environments. Finally, we demonstrate the empirical performance of our approach on a controlled physical system and a physiological signal dataset.

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

Beyond the Golden Teacher: Enhancing Graph Learning through LLM-GNN Co-teaching

arXiv:2606.11583v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Text-attributed graphs (TAGs) underlie real-world applications such as citation networks, social media, and e-commerce. Few-shot graph learning on TAGs is hard: with only a handful of labels per class and the rest of the graph unannotated, neither GNNs nor LLMs can learn well on their own. GNNs read topology and fail on cold nodes; LLMs read text and fail on text-ambiguous nodes. Existing LLM-GNN methods all follow the same recipe: designate one model as the golden teacher and use its outputs (e.g., features or pseudo-labels) to supervise the other. We argue this golden-teacher assumption breaks under sparse supervision: neither model is golden, and treating either as such transfers its blind spots into the student. We therefore ask: can we avoid designating either model as the golden teacher, and still perform effective graph learning? We answer with LLM-GNN Co-Teaching, a bidirectional co-teaching framework in which neither model is fixed as teacher. The GNN and LLM exchange their most confident pseudo-labels under an architecture-specific small-loss criterion, and both update every round. Supervision is then mined from the trajectory: whenever a node moves from cross-model contradiction at round t to cross-model agreement at round t+1, the LLM's two answers on the same input form a preference pair (old contradicting self < new peer-endorsed self) for DPO training. We call this Round-based Pseudo-Label Preference Optimization (RPL-PO). On six benchmarks, LLM-GNN Co-Teaching consistently outperforms GNN-as-Judge and all prior methods, with absolute 3-shot gains of 7.86% on Cora and 7.73% on ogbn-arxiv; improvements carry over to 5-shot and to zero-shot cross-dataset transfer. Error-structure analysis further shows that abandoning the golden-teacher assumption substantially improves the LLM's graph learning capability on challenging samples.