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

Semi-Supervised Noise Adaptation: Transferring Knowledge from Noise Domain

arXiv:2606.00558v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Transfer learning aims to facilitate the learning of a target domain by transferring knowledge from a source domain. The source domain typically contains semantically meaningful samples (*e.g.*, images) to facilitate effective knowledge transfer. However, a recent study observes that the noise domain constructed from simple distributions (*e.g.*, Gaussian distributions) can serve as a surrogate source domain in the semi-supervised setting, where only a small proportion of target samples are labeled while most remain unlabeled. Based on this surprising observation, we formulate a novel problem termed *Semi-Supervised Noise Adaptation* (SSNA), which aims to leverage a synthetic noise domain to improve the generalization of the target domain. To address this problem, we first establish a generalization bound characterizing the effect of the noise domain on generalization, based on which we propose a Noise Adaptation Framework (NAF). Extensive experiments demonstrate that NAF effectively leverages the noise domain to tighten the generalization bound of the target domain, leading to improved performance. The codes are available at https://github.com/AIResearch-Group/SSNA.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

S-SPPO: Semantic-Calibrated Self-Play Preference Optimization

arXiv:2606.01561v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences is often formulated via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). However, the standard Bradley-Terry instantiation of DPO is limited in modeling common departures from transitivity in human preferences. To address this, recent work has introduced Self-Play Preference Optimization (SPPO), which iteratively refines the policy by training on self-generated win-lose pairs. Our investigation, however, reveals a critical instability in SPPO: the optimization is prone to policy degeneration when the preference oracle assigns overly confident wins to semantically indistinguishable responses. To mitigate this, we propose S-SPPO, a dual-space semantic calibration framework comprising: i) Supervision Calibration via semantic gating, which anneals win rate targets toward the maximum-entropy baseline as semantic overlap increases; and ii) Representation Calibration via latent repulsion to enforce geometric diversity to prevent manifold collapse and maintain latent diversity between chosen and rejected samples. Theoretically, we show that the calibration preserves the constant-sum game structure, facilitating convergence to a Nash Equilibrium. Empirically, S-SPPO avoids the performance degradation seen in prior methods, achieving 52.19% win rate and 47.46% length-controlled win rate on AlpacaEval 2.0 with Llama-3-8B, without using additional human-annotated preferences during training. The code will be available at https://github.com/xiwenc1/s-sppo.

03.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Improved quantum processor logical error rates via correction and detection

作者:

Performing quantum algorithms for critical problems in physics and chemistry requires substantially lower error rates than the physical error rates of present quantum computers. Achieving such low logical error rates requires quantum error correction1,2 and physical error rates below a critical threshold value3–8. We experimentally demonstrate on a trapped-ion quantum charge-coupled device (QCCD)9,10 improvements in logical error rates ranging from 11× to 800× compared with several physical circuit baselines, including quantum computation on multiple qubits. Our results hinge on two quantum error correction code constructions optimized for an ion-trap processor: a 12-qubit code encoding two qubits inspired by Knill11 and a 16-qubit tesseract colour code encoding four qubits12,13. These constructions are combined with a scalable method of error detection and post-selection to achieve reduced logical error rates. Our results show that state-of-the-art quantum devices are already able to make use of fault tolerance and error correction to strongly suppress errors in non-trivial quantum circuit computations. Experimental demonstration of quantum error-correcting codes combined with error detection and post-selection applied to a trapped-ion quantum processor shows improvements in logical error rates ranging from 11× to 800× compared with several physical circuit baselines.

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

Energy-Efficient On-Device RAG on a Mobile NPU: System Design and Benchmark on Snapdragon X Elite

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines are compute-intensive, combining embedding, retrieval, reranking, and large language model (LLM) generation. Running them entirely on-device benefits privacy, latency, and offline use, but the energy cost of CPU inference is a major barrier. We present what is, to our knowledge, the first end-to-end RAG pipeline that runs all neural stages – embedding, reranking, and LLM generation – on the Qualcomm Hexagon NPU of the Snapdragon X Elite. Profiling on a Dell XPS 13 laptop, we compare NPU-accelerated RAG against CPU and OpenCL/Adreno GPU baselines on indexing and query workloads. On indexing, the NPU achieves 9.1x higher embedding throughput and 12.3x less system energy. On a 120-query Wikipedia-passage benchmark, it delivers 18.1x faster LLM prefilling, 4.0x lower end-to-end query latency, and 4.0x less system energy than the CPU baseline; the same workload on the integrated GPU is 1.7x slower than CPU and uses 6.5x more energy than the NPU. A GPT-4.1 LLM-as-judge evaluation finds NPU answer quality on par with CPU and GPU within evaluator noise (mean 9.32 vs. 8.95 vs. 9.03 on a 1-10 rubric), with 86.7% of queries scoring identically across all three backends. On the Snapdragon X Elite / Hexagon class of laptop SoC, the NPU thus enables practical, energy-efficient on-device RAG without quality regression – a sustainable path toward green edge intelligence that we expect to generalize to comparable mobile NPUs (Apple Neural Engine, Intel NPU, MediaTek APU) as their software stacks mature.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Modality Forcing for Scalable Spatial Generation

Text-to-image (T2I) models contain rich spatial priors. Synthesizing photorealistic, cluttered scenes requires an understanding of geometry, including perspective and relative scale. Prior works adapt T2I models to leverage this prior for depth prediction, but they require dense depth data and involve complex recipes. We propose Modality Forcing, a simple, scalable post-training recipe for joint image-depth generation using a single DiT trained on sparse depth data. Modality Forcing enables conditional and joint generation of image and depth in any permutation by assigning separate noise levels per modality. Per-modality decoders let us train on sparse, real-world depth and achieve strong, generalizable depth prediction. We further show that Modality Forcing inherits the scalability of T2I pre-training: by training a set of T2I models from scratch (370M to 3.3B parameters), we find that larger models trained on more image data produce more accurate depth. Our strongest model is competitive with state-of-the-art monocular depth estimators and reduces AbsRel by 57% relative to existing joint image-depth generative models. These results provide strong evidence that image generation is a scalable pre-training objective for spatial perception. https://modality-forcing.github.io/

06.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-21

Machine learning evaluation of gene expression-based ALS subtypes across brain and blood tissues

The clinical and molecular heterogeneity observed in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) presents a challenge for diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment. RNA sequencing of post-mortem brain samples from ALS patients has identified several subtypes with distinct molecular signatures. We sought to evaluate these subtypes across diverse tissues and datasets and assess the feasibility of supervised machine learning models for sample classification. Unsupervised clustering and pathway analysis were performed to confirm the presence of ALS subtypes in motor cortex samples. Three machine learning strategies were then used to create models based on post-mortem motor cortex expression data of 112 people with ALS from the London Neurodegenerative Diseases Brain Bank. These models were subsequently improved through feature selection and evaluated in independent cohorts from motor cortex (n = 257, NYGC ALS Consortium) and blood (n = 96, Macquarie University Neurodegenerative Disease Biobank) samples. Multi-class linear discriminant analysis (LDA) models were then used for subtype classification. Clustering of ALS post-mortem motor cortex samples confirmed the presence of three subtypes: neuroinflammation (ALS-Neu), extracellular matrix organisation and muscle contraction (ALS-OxA), and synaptic and neuropeptide signalling (ALS-SNs). Among all machine learning strategies, random forests produced the most accurate and stable models for binary classification (~93% accuracy across the three subtypes). After feature selection, random forest models were able to classify samples from an independent post-mortem motor cortex cohort in their respective subtypes (AUC of ~0.98 across the three subtypes). When these models were evaluated in blood using LDA, we found consistent clustering patterns, with samples aligning in the same subtype regions of the post-mortem motor cortex samples, with ALS-SNs being the subtype in which samples were classified with the highest confidence (LDA class probability ~86%). Moreover, classification for this subtype improved when blood samples were collected closer to death. Our findings support the presence of three gene expression-based ALS subtypes in motor cortex samples and the utility of machine learning strategies for subtype classification. We also observed that the subtypes identified in the brain partially match those in the blood, with samples from the late stages of the disease more likely to be correctly predicted into the ALS-SNs cluster. This suggests a longitudinal effect in subtype identification that requires further investigation.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Trap-Quenched Matter-Wave Optics for Dual Species Lensing

arXiv:2606.14577v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dual-species atom interferometry in space promises precise tests of the Universality of Free Fall (UFF), with a sensitivity that grows quadratically with the extended interrogation time accessible in weightlessness. These tests demand exquisite control over the expansion energies of both condensed sources as well as over their differential center-of-mass dynamics. We propose a trap-quenched collimation technique featuring in-trap excitations of collective modes compatible with state-of-the-art atom-chip setups. Using NASA's Cold Atom Laboratory aboard the International Space Station, we demonstrate it on a single-species $^{87}$Rb condensate. By controlling the center-of-mass release dynamics we observe free expansion times up to 700 ms and measure a two-dimensional expansion energy of $k_B \cdot 78\pm 9 \;\mathrm{pK}$ in the imaging plane. A detailed model of the magnetically-induced dynamics indicates that this corresponds to a two-dimensional expansion energy of about $k_B \cdot 15^{+12}_{-5}\; \mathrm{pK}$ along two of the condensate's eigenaxes. Finally, we theoretically study this trap-quenched collimation scheme for a $^{41}$K-$^{87}$Rb mixture, predicting a simultaneous collimation that meets the expansion energy requirements for a state-of-the-art UFF test at the $10^{-15}$ accuracy level.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Bootstrapped Monitoring: Leveraging Transparent Reasoning to Oversee Stronger AI Agents

arXiv:2606.11998v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trusted monitoring is a cornerstone of AI control. However, as frontier models grow more capable, the increasing capabilities gap between trusted and untrusted models may render trusted models unreliable monitors. We introduce bootstrapped monitoring, a protocol that addresses this by inserting a stronger, intermediate untrusted model with transparent chain-of-thought reasoning into the oversight chain. The untrusted monitor ($U_m$) evaluates the agent's actions, while a weaker trusted model ($T$) oversees $U_m$'s reasoning to detect collusion. We evaluate bootstrapped monitoring on multi-turn software engineering tasks (BashArena) across multiple agents and monitors. Bootstrapped monitoring substantially improves catch rates over trusted-only monitoring, even when the untrusted monitor actively colludes with the agent, provided we have access to its raw chain-of-thought. Our results suggest that bootstrapped monitoring can extend the useful lifetime of trusted models in control as AI capabilities advance.

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

SAGE: Stochastic Prompt Optimization via Agent-Guided Exploration

Context engineering has emerged as a primary lever for improving AI systems without parameter updates. Recent work showing that textual gradients do not function as real gradients motivates treating automatic prompt optimization (APO) as black-box search. We introduce SPO (Stochastic Prompt Optimization), a framework for stochastic search over prompt space, and compare three strategies of increasing sophistication: error-informed random search, a genetic algorithm with evolutionary operators, and SAGE (SPO via Agent-Guided Exploration), a multi-agent pipeline with diagnostic code execution. Across three benchmarks, no single strategy dominates; effectiveness depends on the interaction of landscape structure with error type. We further deploy SAGE on a mental-health chatbot under a continuous optimization paradigm, where it compounds eight cycles of individually-noisy A/B tests into a statistically robust gain in next-day retention. We argue that coupling qualitative diagnosis with quantitative validation is what makes agentic optimization effective for open-ended task-oriented dialogue.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Cross-Layer Discrete Concept Discovery for Interpreting Language Models

Interpreting language models remains challenging due to the existence of residual stream, which linearly mixes and duplicates features across adjacent layers, causing single-layer analyses to miss this cross-layer structure. Cross-layer sparse autoencoders (SAEs) address layer mixing but operate in continuous space, where concepts split across many neurons without clear boundaries. We introduce Cross-Layer Vector Quantized-Variational Autoencoder (CLVQ-VAE), a novel framework which maps representations from a lower layer to a higher layer through a discrete vector-quantization bottleneck, collapsing duplicated residual-stream features into compact, interpretable concept vectors. Our approach combines top-k temperature-based sampling with exponential moving average (EMA) codebook updates, providing controlled exploration of the discrete latent space while maintaining codebook diversity. Across both encoder- and decoder-based models on ERASER-Movie, Jigsaw, and AGNews, CLVQ-VAE outperforms clustering, single-layer vector quantized-variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE), and sparse autoencoder (SAE) baselines across three evaluation axes: removing identified concepts drops model accuracy by up to 93%, LLM judges rank our concepts first in 66.7% of comparisons, and human annotators recover model predictions from our visualizations with 78% accuracy versus 54% for clustering.

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

T2S: A Rehearsal-Based Approach for Extraction-Resistant Model Watermarking

arXiv:2606.11698v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model watermarking safeguards AI model intellectual property by embedding distinctive knowledge that induces unique behavioral signatures. The primary technical challenge lies in ensuring watermark robustness against various post-processing attacks on the watermarked model. Model extraction attacks emerge as the most severe threat, where adversaries exploit prediction outputs to train surrogate models that illegally replicate the original model's functionality. In this work, we propose a rehearsal-based watermark embedding framework to enhance the robustness of model watermarks against model extraction attacks. By simulating the extraction process, our method leverages the loss of a simulated stolen model on a trigger set as a training signal to fine-tune the watermark knowledge within the target model. This fine-tuning step encourages the watermark to be embedded in a way that boosts transferability, thereby increasing its chances of persisting and remaining detectable in stolen models. Comprehensive experiments conducted under diverse settings demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves the robustness of model watermarks against both model extraction and subsequent watermark removal attacks.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

GraphWorld: Long-Horizon Planning with World Models for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

End-to-end autonomous driving has made significant progress by unifying perception, prediction, and planning within a single learning framework, achieving strong performance in short-horizon decision making. However, most existing E2E-AD methods remain confined to short-horizon planning and lack the ability to model long-term temporal dependencies, which severely limits their generalization and security in complex and highly interactive driving scenarios. In this work, we propose GraphWorld, an E2E-AD framework that explicitly enhances long-horizon planning through latent world modeling. We introduce an Ego-Centric Interaction Graph, which adaptively models critical neighboring agents based on spatial proximity, and propagates relational context to planning queries via cross-node cross-attention. We present a World-State-Conditioned Planning that learns ego-centric latent world representations by modeling interactions between an ego vehicle and surrounding agents. This latent world state captures key interaction dynamics and safety-relevant semantics, and serves as a conditioning signal to guide long-horizon, safety-aware trajectory planning. Extensive experiments on Bench2Drive, NAVSIMv1/2, and nuScenes demonstrate that GraphWorld significantly reduces collision rates and improves long-horizon planning performance, validating its effectiveness in complex driving environments.

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

Through-Foliage Surface-Temperature Reconstruction for Early Wildfire Detection

We present a method to reconstruct surface temperatures through forest vegetation by combining signal processing and machine learning, enabling fully automated aerial wildfire monitoring with drones for early fire detection. Synthetic aperture (SA) sensing reduces canopy occlusion but introduces thermal blur. To overcome this, we train a visual state space model to recover subtle thermal signals of partially occluded soil and fire hotspots from blurred data. To address limited real-world training data, we generate realistic surface temperature simulations using a latent diffusion model, temperature augmentation, and procedural thermal forest modeling. On simulated datasets, our method reduces RMSE by 2-2.5 versus conventional thermal and uncorrected SA imaging; in field experiments on hotspots, RMSE improved by 12.8-fold and 2.6-fold, respectively. Our approach also generalizes to other thermal signals, including human signatures, capturing morphology and extent – critical where simple thresholding fails – while conventional imaging struggles with partial occlusion.

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

RubricsTree: Scalable and Evolving Open-Ended Evaluation of Personal Health Agents across Health Memory and Medical Skills

The LLM-empowered personal health agents with user health (sensor) metrics have offered a promising pathway to alleviate global disparities in healthcare access. However, large-scale clinical deployment remains constrained by an open-ended evaluation bottleneck: physician annotation is reliable but costly and unscalable, while LLM-as-a-judge evaluators are scalable but subjective, inconsistent, and sometimes clinically misaligned. We introduce RubricsTree, a scalable evaluation framework with an expert-aligned hierarchical taxonomy of over 100 atomic, clinically-verifiable Boolean rubrics, evolving from the insights of 4,000 real user queries through an iterative human-in-the-loop curation protocol with an expertise panel led by an experienced physician. A context-aware adaptive router activates only the relevant auto-weighted rubric subset per query, providing the throughput needed for scalable evaluation with expert-aligned quality. Through a systematic meta-evaluation, we show that RubricsTree (i) substantially exceeds a strong large-scale evaluation baseline in expert alignment on challenging open-ended queries; (ii) reliably penalizes contextually degraded responses; and (iii) when used as structured instructions, text feedback, or training rewards for performance optimization, yields up to ~66% relative gains on HealthBench for Gemini, GPT, and Qwen model families. RubricsTree thus provides a scalable, auditable, and evolving evaluation infrastructure required for the continuous optimization of product-level personal healthcare AI.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Temporal Difference Learning for Diffusion Models

Diffusion models are typically trained with objectives that focus on local denoising targets at individual time steps (or adjacent pairs), which do not enforce consistency between predictions along the denoising trajectory. This lack of cross-time consistency can degrade performance, especially for few-step samplers. We introduce a temporal difference (TD) objective that penalizes inconsistency of the model's multi-step progress along the denoising path. By reformulating the diffusion process as a Markov reward process and casting denoising as a policy evaluation problem in reinforcement learning, we derive a unified TD approach that applies to both discrete- and continuous-time diffusion formulations. We further propose a principled sample-based reweighting method that stabilizes training. Empirically, we show that using our TD training can significantly improve sample quality measured by FID, with stronger advantages when the number of sampling steps is small, highlighting its practical utility under low-computation-budget scenarios. We provide ablation studies to justify our design choices, including pairwise loss reweighting, regularization weight, and one-step stride. Overall, our TD approach can be a general drop-in that enforces cross-time consistency and improves generation quality across different diffusion generative models.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Quantum algorithm for dephasing of coupled systems: decoupling and IQP duality

arXiv:2601.06298v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Noise and decoherence are ubiquitous in the dynamics of quantum systems coupled to an external environment. In the regime where environmental correlations decay rapidly, the evolution of a subsytem is well described by a Lindblad quantum master equation. In this work, we introduce a quantum algorithm for simulating unital Lindbladian dynamics by sampling unitary quantum channels without extra ancillas. Using ancillary qubits we show that this algorithm allows approximating general Lindbladians as well. For interacting dephasing Lindbladians coupling two subsystems, we develop a decoupling scheme that reduces the circuit complexity of the simulation. This is achieved by sampling from a time-correlated probability distribution - determined by the evolution of one subsystem, which specifies the stochastic circuit implemented on the complementary subsystem. We demonstrate our approach by studying a model of bosons coupled to fermions via dephasing, which naturally arises from anharmonic effects in an electron-phonon system coupled to a bath. Our method enables tracing out the bosonic degrees of freedom, reducing part of the dynamics to sampling an IQP circuit. The sampled bitstrings then define a corresponding fermionic problem, which in the non-interacting case can be solved efficiently classically. We comment on the computational complexity of this class of dissipative problems, using the known fact that sampling from IQP circuits is believed to be difficult classically.

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

Mechanical Field Networks: Structured Neural Dynamics for Multivariate Systems

作者:

arXiv:2606.11251v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many multivariate dynamical systems are observed only through trajectories, leaving the mechanisms governing their joint dynamics hidden. Existing approaches can impose interpretable dynamics or learn flexible state transitions, yet the resulting interaction structure is typically either specified in advance or left implicit within the learned dynamics. We introduce MF-Net, a recurrent dynamical model that represents all variables in a shared field state and updates this state through a learned relation law. Each variable carries a field component, and these components evolve jointly through a learnable mechanical transition. Here, mechanical refers to the relation-to-motion organization of the transition, where learned relations shape state-dependent flows, field responses, and motion tendencies that move the field state forward. The resulting structure is part of the rollout itself: learned relations influence how the field moves, and the same internal quantities support both forecasting and structural readout. Across known-law interaction systems, chaotic benchmarks, real neural recordings, and ecological time series, MF-Net achieves competitive short- and medium-horizon forecasting while retaining inspectable structural readout. On the 40-dimensional Lorenz–96 testbed, MF-Net achieves an eight-step $R^2$ of $0.798\pm0.018$; across five seeds, its learned relation matrix recovers the local coupling support with a local/nonlocal strength ratio of $19.80\pm1.00$ and Precision@$K$ of $1.000\pm0.000$. MF-Net provides a structure-readable dynamical modeling framework in which learned relations are trained through forward evolution and, on real data, interpreted as functional predictive couplings under appropriate observational limits.

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

Experience Makes Skillful: Enabling Generalizable Medical Agent Reasoning via Self-Evolving Skill Memory

Medical agent systems are increasingly expected to support interactive clinical decision making rather than only static question answering. In such settings, effective agents must reuse prior experience across evolving cases, yet existing memory mechanisms often retain raw historical traces that are redundant, noisy, and difficult to govern. More importantly, they rarely distinguish which memories are truly useful for future reasoning. This limits their ability to accumulate compact and reliable experience for long-horizon clinical reasoning. To close this gap, we propose SkeMex, a post-deployment self-evolution framework that improves medical agents through a skill-based memory without updating model weights. SkeMex distills informative interaction trajectories into structured skills that encode reusable procedural knowledge, and organizes them into a multi-branch repository spanning general, task-specific, and action-level experience. To determine which memories should be reused and retained, SkeMex estimates context-dependent utility from environment feedback and uses it to guide value-aware retrieval and repository governance. A closed-loop ``Read–Write–Assess–Govern" lifecycle further supports continual evolution by writing new skills, updating utilities, promoting useful memories, and removing harmful entries. Experiments across diverse clinical tasks show that SkeMex consistently outperforms representative memory-based agents in both offline and online settings. It also generalizes across model backbones and supports transferable skill memory. All data and code will be released publicly.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

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

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

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Toward Simultaneously Optimal Regret in U-Calibration

arXiv:2606.18527v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: U-calibration studies online forecasting algorithms whose predictions can be consumed by any unknown downstream agent, guaranteeing sublinear regret simultaneously for all proper loss functions. Existing U-calibration algorithms achieve worst-case optimal $O(\sqrt{T})$ regret for every bounded proper loss, but they fail to adapt to easier losses: as we show, even for smooth losses such as squared loss, they incur $\Omega(\sqrt{T})$ regret instead of the optimal $O(\log T)$ regret. In this work, we show that this limitation is not inherent. Specifically, we design a single forecast algorithm that simultaneously achieves $\tilde O(\sqrt{T})$ regret for every bounded proper loss and $O(\log T)$ regret for every bounded smooth proper loss. More generally, our algorithm also attains logarithmic regret for losses that are smooth relative to the log-barrier, which include several non-Lipschitz examples. Our approach is based on a novel variant of Follow-the-Perturbed-Leader (FTPL) in which perturbations are applied directly in the prediction space using self-concordant noise. The resulting analysis also departs substantially from prior FTPL analyses due to the complex nature of this noise and may be of independent interest.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

A Stabilized Path-Space Approach to Diffusion-Based Posterior Sampling

arXiv:2606.12710v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion models provide expressive data-driven priors for Bayesian inverse problems, but many diffusion posterior samplers rely on heuristic guidance approximations that can fail for nonlinear operators and multimodal posteriors. In this work, we develop a stabilized path-space framework for diffusion-based posterior sampling. Starting from a base diffusion process whose terminal marginal represents the prior, we define a likelihood-weighted target measure on trajectories and cast posterior sampling as learning a controlled stochastic process whose path measure matches this target. This formulation connects diffusion posterior sampling to stochastic optimal control while preserving the Bayesian structure needed for uncertainty quantification. We introduce a time reparameterization that makes the path-space control problem well posed by removing the bias induced by the unknown initial value function, without auxiliary training. We then learn the control via a trust-region path-space optimization method with log-variance objectives. The path-space perspective also unifies our learned control approach with existing guidance-based samplers, quantifies the sampling error induced by approximate controls, and yields importance sampling corrections for asymptotically exact posterior expectations. We evaluate the proposed framework on a suite of benchmark inverse problems with analytically characterized or high-quality reference posteriors, enabling principled assessment of sampling accuracy and uncertainty quantification. These experiments provide insight into the behavior of diffusion-based posterior samplers and demonstrate improved accuracy and robustness over leading approaches.

23.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

AMaNITA: an end-to-end workflow for native tRNA nanopore sequencing data analysis

Transfer RNA (tRNA) molecules serve as essential adapters during protein translation. While direct RNA sequencing (DRS) via Oxford Nanopore Technologies has emerged as a powerful platform for systematic tRNAome profiling, we currently lack a simple and robust statistical framework for nanopore tRNA data analyses. Here, we address this gap by developing AMaNITA (Abundance, Modifications, and Nanopore Intensity Toolbox Application), an end-to-end bioinformatic workflow that enables simplified, robust, and scalable analyses of nanopore native tRNA sequencing datasets. AMaNITA streamlines the entire analytical trajectory: from upstream processing (basecalling, mapping, filtering, batch effect correction) to downstream assessment of differential tRNA abundance and modification stoichiometry. The workflow generates an interactive HTML report for data exploration and analysis, allowing the user to download the source data files and resulting plots. AMaNITA can be executed using Singularity from the command line, without requiring installation of dependencies.

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

Beyond Algorithms: Conceptual Innovation in Medical Imaging AI

arXiv:2606.19270v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Artificial intelligence has driven rapid progress in medical imaging research, producing increasingly sophisticated algorithms and steady improvements on benchmark tasks. However, this algorithm-centric trajectory has also revealed a growing imbalance: while computational methods advance rapidly, the conceptual foundations that define imaging tasks, evaluation metrics, and clinical meaning sometimes remain underexamined. In this Perspective, we distinguish algorithmic innovation, which focuses on improving computational implementations and performance within a fixed problem definition, from conceptual innovation, which reframes what problems are posed, how success is measured, and why an approach is clinically relevant. We argue that prevailing incentive structures, training pathways, and publication norms disproportionately reward algorithmic novelty, particularly for early-career researchers, while at times undervaluing conceptual contributions that are essential for scientific maturation and clinical translation. Through representative examples from medical imaging AI, we show how insufficient conceptual grounding can lead to misaligned objectives, fragile generalization, and limited real-world impact. We conclude with actionable recommendations for researchers, mentors, reviewers, and journals to better recognize, support, and integrate conceptual innovation alongside algorithmic advances.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Seasonality, source type, and women's water labor: A longitudinal mixed-methods study in Kenya and Honduras

Women shoulder the majority of water collection labor globally, yet how their water collection and water-related work experiences may change over time or by water source type remains insufficiently understood. We conducted a longitudinal, mixed-methods study in rural Kenya and Honduras to understand how women's experiences collecting water and performing water-related work varied between (a) two time points, (b) improved and unimproved water source types, and (c) water source location. Data were collected in 2023 and 2024 using interviews, observation, GPS-enabled watches, and scales to measure time and distance traveled, water weight and volume carried, and calories expended. 133 women participated in data collection (66 Kenya, 67 Honduras). We compared women's experience data by time point (2023 vs. 2024), source type (improved vs. unimproved), and source location (off-premises vs. on-premises) (t-test, Mann-Whitney U test). We also mapped participants' routes and activities to show which sources were visited, when, and for what activities. In Kenya, mean water collection time, distance, and caloric expenditure were significantly lower and water volume was significantly higher in 2024 when there were unexpected rains compared to 2023 when there was a persistent drought. When comparing source types during the 2023 drought, journeys to improved sources took significantly less time and energy and covered less distance than journeys to unimproved sources. These differences were not observed during the rainy conditions of 2024 when unimproved sources were closer and more accessible. In Honduras, water collection and water work burdens did not differ significantly by time point or source type. We found women with on-premises water access to still expend considerable time and caloric expenditure engaging in water work within their household compounds. Findings from Kenya suggest that water infrastructure improvements can reduce women's water collection burdens, though benefits may depend on and vary by season and source location. Findings from Honduras show that water labor does not end once water is in the household. Rather, substantial time and energy are expended carrying out water-related work even when sources are on premises, suggesting that efforts to assess water labor need to extend beyond collection alone. To meaningfully reduce burdens and ensure improved water sources are utilized during all seasons, initiatives need to consider source location, seasonal variability, and work beyond collection. Evaluations to assess infrastructure impacts on women's labor and well-being are needed and long overdue.