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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

MolGraphBench: A Benchmark of GNN Architectures for Molecular Regression Tasks

arXiv:2602.20573v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Molecules are often represented as SMILES strings, which can be readily converted to hand-crafted descriptors or fingerprints (FP) for molecular property prediction. Research has demonstrated that SMILES can be converted to molecular graphs $G = (V, E)$, with atoms as nodes $(V)$ and bonds as edges $(E)$. These molecular graphs can subsequently be used to train graph neural networks (GNN) models. Despite the recent surge in application of GNN (existing and novel architectures) for molecular property prediction, a rigorous benchmark is still lacking. We propose MolGraphBench, a comprehensive benchmark of four commonly used GNN models for molecular property prediction. Benchmarking results demonstrate graph convolutional network (GCN) and graph isomorphism networks (GIN) as the optimal GNN architectures for molecular graph regression tasks, based on absolute performance, training efficiency, transfer learning and prediction quality. The study also indicates the non-complementary nature of molecular fingerprints in the fusion (GNN-FP) framework. Furthermore, our GNN models achieved performance superior or comparable performance to current state-of-the-art GNN baselines across three datasets (GCN with RMSE of $0.518$ on B3DB, GIN-FP with RMSE of $1.022$ on FreeSolv and GIN with MAE of $63.783$ on RT datasets). Findings from this study indicate that type of GNN-layer, should be treated as a tunable hyperparameter rather than a fixed design choice to achieve superior performance.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

SOMA-SQL: Resolving Multi-Source Ambiguity in NL-to-SQL via Synthetic Log and Execution Probing

Natural language interfaces to databases aim to translate user questions into executable SQL, yet remain brittle in real-world settings where questions are underspecified and schemas are large and ambiguous. Ambiguity across user questions, database schemas, and model interpretations are central failure modes in NL2SQL, leading to misaligned intent, incorrect schema grounding, and erroneous SQL generation. Existing approaches rely on human clarification or treat ambiguity as a schema representation problem, but these do not scale nor resolve ambiguity autonomously. We propose SOMA-SQL to automatically resolve ambiguity via targeted synthetic query log and ambiguity-driven probing. SOMA-SQL constructs synthetic query log to ground schema interpretation and guide candidate SQL generation; it then executes targeted probing queries, driven by a structured ambiguity taxonomy and candidate disagreements, to produce disambiguation evidence for final SQL selection and repair. This active approach to ambiguity discovery and resolution generalizes across unseen schemas and query distributions without human-in-the-loop. Experiments on six public benchmarks demonstrate that SOMA-SQL improves execution accuracy by 13.0% on average over state-of-the-art baselines, with gains of up to 16.7% on ambiguous questions.

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

Efficiency-Performance Trade-offs in Neural Speaker Diarization via Structured Pruning and Low-Bit Quantization

Streaming speaker diarization is crucial for time-critical medical dispatch, but deploying it on resource-constrained hardware requires smaller, faster models. Using SIMSAMU, a dataset of simulated medical-dispatch conversations, we evaluate streaming behavior before compressing the segmentation model with pruning and low-bit quantization. We characterize performance across a range of streaming latency budgets and find that additional buffering is not consistently beneficial, while very low-latency operating points can substantially degrade performance. Our study shows that model compression trades performance for memory footprint, and we highlight an operating point where FP16 reduces model size by half with essentially unchanged real-time factor, at a cost of a 40\% relative DER increase against the baseline. This work characterizes the trade-offs for real-time deployment and contributes to speech technology that can enable reliable human communication in time-critical contexts.

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

m2sv: A Scalable Benchmark for Map-to-Street-View Spatial Reasoning

Vision–language models (VLMs) achieve strong performance on many multimodal benchmarks but remain brittle on spatial reasoning tasks that require aligning abstract overhead representations with egocentric views. We introduce m2sv, a scalable benchmark for map-to-street-view spatial reasoning that asks models to infer camera viewing direction by aligning a north-up overhead map with a Street View image captured at the same real-world intersection. We release m2sv-20k, a geographically diverse benchmark with controlled ambiguity, along with m2sv-sft-11k, a curated set of structured reasoning traces for supervised fine-tuning. Despite strong performance on existing multimodal benchmarks, the best evaluated VLM achieves only 65.2% accuracy on m2sv, below human annotators who reach 72.0% on average (and 95% for an expert) with strong inter-annotator agreement ($\kappa$ up to 0.76). While supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning yield consistent gains, cross-benchmark evaluations reveal limited transfer. Beyond aggregate accuracy, we systematically analyze difficulty in map-to-street-view reasoning using both structural signals and human effort, and conduct an extensive failure analysis of adapted open models. Our findings highlight persistent gaps in geometric alignment, evidence aggregation, and reasoning consistency, motivating future work on grounded spatial reasoning across viewpoints.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

BrainG3N: A Dual-Purpose Tokenizer for Controllable 3D Brain MRI Generation

arXiv:2606.19651v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Three-dimensional (3D) brain MRI is central to clinical neurology and neuro-oncology, where generative models could augment under-represented cohorts, simulate disease trajectories, and support privacy-preserving data sharing. Latent diffusion has been the go-to solution for modeling imaging data, but it places two competing demands on the tokenizer: encoder embeddings must retain the clinical information that downstream tasks act on, and the decoder must reconstruct anatomically faithful volumes. Existing reconstruction-driven tokenizers achieve the second at the expense of the first. To address this, we introduce a fully volumetric masked-autoencoder (MAE) based tokenizer for 3D brain MRI latent diffusion, decoupling encoder and decoder: a frozen 3D MAE encoder produces clinically informative embeddings, while a dedicated CNN decoder reconstructs voxels from a linear projection of those embeddings. We pretrain the encoder on 35,309 volumes from 18 public cohorts spanning four modalities, ten disease categories, and 200+ acquisition sites, and demonstrate its dual utility in two settings. First, on a 23-task linear-probing benchmark, the encoder outperforms or matches SOTA models (i.e., BrainIAC, BrainSegFounder, and MedicalNet) on 21 of 23 tasks. Second, a conditional diffusion transformer (DiT) trained on these clinically informative embeddings supports both conditional generation across six variables and patient-specific longitudinal forecasting. Together these results establish a single 3D brain-MRI embedding space capable of both downstream clinical tasks and controllable generation.

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

EffiNav: Fusing Depth and Vision-Language for Efficient Object Goal Navigation

arXiv:2606.18634v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: To locate a target object while exploring the unknown environment is a fundamental capability for autonomous agents, with applications ranging from search-and-rescue to field robots. A simplified version of such task is Object Goal Navigation (ObjNav). In ObjNav, successful arrival at the target object provides a basic measure of performance; however, the efficiency of the navigation trajectory is equally important, as it indicates how intelligently the agent explores and how much time remains for subsequent tasks. In unknown environments, the key to efficient navigation lies in deciding where to explore next. While many prior works aim to address this core challenge and achieved promising performance in certain settings, recent training-based models and non-training frameworks still suffer from generalization and efficiency issues respectively, which in the worst cases can lead to excessive exploration of already-visited areas or redundant back-and-forth motion. We evaluate EffiNav on two widely used simulation benchmarks Habitat Matterport 3D (HM3D) and Open-Vocabulary Object goal Navigation (OVON), and further validate its effectiveness on physical robots in real-world settings. We conduct failure analysis on massive simulation episodes. With minimal modification, we also extend EffiNav to a memory-augmented ObjNav task on the GOAT-BENCH dataset, demonstrating its adaptability beyond standard ObjNav settings. Across two standard metrics–Success Rate (SR) and Success weighted by Path Length (SPL), EffiNav matches or outperforms recent baselines, reflecting its efficiency, robustness, and practical applicability. Recognizing the different emphases of the two datasets, the performances reveals this framework is more balanced and generalizable for efficient ObjNav.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Output Vector Editing for Memorization Mitigation in Large Language Models

Large language models memorize and reproduce sequences from their training data, creating privacy, copyright, and security risks. Existing neuron-level mitigation methods equate editing with zeroing out neuron activations, but the activation only controls whether a neuron engages; the output vector is what writes to the residual stream and, through superposition, encodes multiple features. We propose output vector editing, a constrained-optimization weight edit that locates a small set of MLP neurons responsible for a memorized continuation and minimally modifies their output vectors to introduce a distractor in vocabulary space, redirecting their residual-stream contributions while leaving activations unchanged. Evaluating on four models from 360M to 7B parameters (SmolLM-360M, OLMo-1B, OLMo-7B, Llama2-7B), we center on OLMo-7B (whose open weights and pretraining corpus enable systematic mining) and mine 6831 memorized sequences, achieving up to 87.9% suppression. The 2.7$\times$ gap over zero ablation on the same located neurons shows the suppression comes from the output-vector edit, not localization alone. Four edit modes span a spectrum from aggressive suppression to minimal redirection; in ensemble they cover 96.5% of memorized sequences, while our recommended single-mode configuration reaches 81.5% with no catastrophic locality failures. We further identify a mechanistic boundary at ${\sim}14%$ of sequences unreachable by MLP-only editing; while these failures are not attention-driven overall, ablating the top contributing attention heads recovers 60–64% of them, with stronger recovery on continuations that copy tokens from the prefix, positioning attention as a complementary fallback rather than a primary mechanism. Edit mode ordering and the success-locality trade-off transfer across all four models, with success rates scaling with model size rather than family.

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

Neural-Parameterized Cellular Automata for Wildfire Spread

arXiv:2606.11676v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional wildfire models rely on rigid, low-dimensional parameters and static fuel maps, frequently underpredicting fire spread. To address this weakness, we introduce a hybrid deep-learning parameterized Probabilistic Cellular Automata (CA) framework implemented in JAX. Our approach employs a Multi-Scale Convolutional Neural Network to dynamically generate spatially varying parameters that govern fire-spread probability, wind alignment, and slope influence. This hybrid design captures complex, nonlinear environmental interactions while preserving the physical interpretability of the underlying three-state CA. The JAX implementation enables hardware acceleration and gradient-based parameter calibration. Evaluated on six large-scale wildfires in the western United States, the model maintains IoU > 0.6 over 72-hour forecast horizons after a 10-day data assimilation window during which the model is fitted incrementally to observed perimeters; the resulting forecast is a conditional projection of fire growth under the suppression regime already ncoded in those observations.

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

Stringalign: Moving beyond summary statistics with a transparent Unicode-aware tool for evaluating automatic transcription models

Comparing text strings is crucial when evaluating and understanding the performance of various text processing tasks such as document recognition and audio transcription. With an increasingly complex landscape of AI-based handwritten text recognition (HTR), optical character recognition (OCR) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) models, there is a need for tools that facilitate evaluation in a flexible and reproducible way. This paper presents Stringalign, a Python library designed to simplify the evaluation process for automatic transcription projects and facilitate transparent evaluation. Stringalign's tools to examine and visualise both the rate of errors and the types of errors a model makes, give insights into possible improvements and help inform model selection for a particular task. Widely used string comparison metrics, such as the character and word error rates (CER and WER), although useful, can be ambiguous due to varying definitions of what constitutes a character and a word. Stringalign addresses this challenge by ensuring all preprocessing (i.e. normalisation and tokenisation) is transparent and easily replicable, and by providing tools to move beyond summary statistics and analyse common model errors. Moreover, Stringalign adheres to FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles for research software while staying lightweight and easy to adapt into researchers existing workflows. In this paper, we discuss challenges with character and word level string comparisons and show through examples that where existing tools can yield opaque and sometimes confusing results, Stringalign provides an easy-to-use and unambiguous alternative.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

A Fixed-Point Neural Operator for Size- and Functional-Transferable Hamiltonian Prediction

arXiv:2606.14498v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predicting the Kohn-Sham Hamiltonian with machine learning can accelerate density functional theory while retaining access to molecular orbitals, energy levels, and electronic-structure observables that energy-only surrogates cannot resolve. Yet element-wise agreement with the converged Hamiltonian, an implicit fixed point of the self-consistent field iteration, does not determine the occupied subspace that governs orbital energies and densities. Here we present HamEvo, a neural operator that learns the single-step self-consistent update and returns the converged Hamiltonian as its fixed point. HamEvo is pre-trained on intermediate self-consistent trajectories and calibrated at equilibrium with density-matrix supervision. Across benchmarks from MD17 to drug-like QMugs, HamEvo lowers Hamiltonian errors by 35-49% over direct-regression and deep-equilibrium baselines, and predicts QMugs HOMO and LUMO energies with mean absolute errors of 0.036 and 0.053 eV, near the 1 kcal/mol chemical-accuracy scale. Few-shot fine-tuning with only 20 reference conformations extends HamEvo to molecules of up to 122 atoms, well beyond the size range covered by pre-training. With thermal molecular-dynamics sampling, HamEvo captures temperature-dependent HOMO-LUMO gap renormalization beyond the harmonic approximation. Inference is up to 242 times faster than conventional DFT.

11.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

RetroMol: Parsing a shared encoding from natural products and their biosynthetic gene clusters

Natural products such as polyketides and nonribosomal peptides (NRPs) are important sources of bioactive compounds, including many antibiotics. Many of them are assembled by modular enzyme complexes and further modified and diversified by tailoring reactions encoded by biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs). Although natural products and their coding BGCs describe different data modalities of the same biochemical process, a unified language to jointly describe their biochemistry is lacking. Here we introduce a sequence-based representation of the core biosynthesis of modular natural products, which we call primary sequences, that bridges chemical structures and BGCs. We also present RetroMol, an algorithm that parses either natural product structures or their encoding BGCs into their primary sequences of natural product building blocks. RetroMol allows for similarity scoring between natural products and BGCs, enabling the retrieval of compounds, BGCs, and a combination of the two, based on their biosynthetic similarity. This can, for instance, be used to retrieve biosynthetically similar but structurally dissimilar compounds, or link natural products to candidate coding BGCs in large experimental datasets. We demonstrate the latter by rediscovering the nocardichelin B BGC as a proof of principle. We also exemplify the utility of biosynthetic similarity by showing various pairs of biosynthetically similar compounds with low structural similarity. Together, these results establish primary sequences as a shared biosynthetic encoding for natural product comparison and BGC prioritization.

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

Benchmarking Action Spaces in Reinforcement Learning for Vision-based Robotic Manipulation

arXiv:2606.18594v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In real-world reinforcement learning (RL), the choice of action space can play a key role in shaping motion smoothness, safety, and overall task performance. In this study, we evaluate pose increment, pose velocity, joint position increment, and joint velocity across two vision-based manipulation tasks: object picking and pushing. We train policies in simulation and deploy them to the real world using sim-to-real transfer. We find that action-space representation indeed significantly affects sim-to-real performance. In particular, we find that the joint velocity action space is best for the vision-based picking and pushing tasks in terms of smoothness and final task performance. We also provide practical guidance for RL practitioners in choosing action spaces for both simulation and real-world experiments.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

AgentSpec: Understanding Embodied Agent Scaffolds Through Controlled Composition

LLM agents are increasingly built not as single model calls, but as scaffolded systems that combine reasoning, memory, reflection, action execution, and learning. While such scaffolds often improve performance, they are often embedded in tightly coupled pipelines, making it difficult to isolate component contributions, compare alternative designs, or understand how module interactions shape agent behavior. We introduce AgentSpec, a modular specification framework that represents embodied agents as typed compositions of reusable policy components with standardized interfaces. AgentSpec standardizes the interfaces among perception, memory, reasoning, reflection, action, and optional learning, enabling components to be swapped and recombined under controlled conditions. We instantiate this framework across DeliveryBench, ALFRED, MiniGrid, and RoboTHOR, and analyze reasoning, memory, reflection, and reinforcement-learning modules across model backbones. Our results show that agent performance is governed by scaffold compatibility and interaction effects rather than isolated module strength. In particular, structured multi-granularity memory improves long-horizon state tracking, reasoning and memory interact non-uniformly across environments, reflection trades off correction and cost, and RL-trained policies compose best when optimized with deployment-time scaffold structure. AgentSpec provides a controlled foundation for studying, comparing, and designing composable LLM agents. Our code, baselines and interactive playground are publicly available at https://agentspec-embodied.github.io.

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

E2Vec: Feature Embedding with Temporal Information for Analyzing Student Actions in E-Book Systems

Digital textbook (e-book) systems record student interactions with textbooks as a sequence of events called EventStream data. In the past, researchers extracted meaningful features from EventStream, and utilized them as inputs for downstream tasks such as grade prediction and modeling of student behavior. Previous research evaluated models that mainly used statistical-based features derived from EventStream logs, such as the number of operation types or access frequencies. While these features are useful for providing certain insights, they lack temporal information that captures fine-grained differences in learning behaviors among different students. This study proposes E2Vec, a novel feature representation method based on word embeddings. The proposed method regards operation logs and their time intervals for each student as a string sequence of characters and generates a student vector of learning activity features that incorporates time information. We applied fastText to generate an embedding vector for each of 305 students in a dataset from two years of computer science courses. Then, we investigated the effectiveness of E2Vec in an at-risk detection task, demonstrating potential for generalizability and performance.

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

Scale-Invariant Neural Network Optimization: Norm Geometry and Heavy-Tailed Noise

arXiv:2605.18528v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A growing lesson from neural network optimization is that optimizer design should respect how the model is parametrized. The layerwise input-output structure of neural networks motivates scale-invariant optimizers, such as Muon and Scion, whose updates also support hyperparameter transfer. At the same time, stochastic gradient noise in deep learning is often far from sub-Gaussian and may exhibit heavy tails. These observations have shaped recent algorithmic principles for training neural networks, yet their joint theoretical consequences are underexplored. In particular, it remains unclear what dimension dependence is unavoidable for gradient-based methods given the problem class is defined by input-output norm and under heavy-tailed noise, and whether higher-order smoothness can accelerate training. We study these questions through nonconvex smooth stochastic optimization over $\mathbb R^{m\times n}$ equipped with general norms and under $p^\mathrm{th}$-moment heavy-tailed noise, where the goal is to achieve an $\epsilon$-stationary point in the dual norm. Our first contribution is a dimension-dependent lower bound: when $\frac{\max\{m,n\}}{(\min\{m,n\})^2}$ is large enough, any gradient-based method requires $\Omega(\min\{m, n\}\epsilon^{-\frac{3p-2}{p-1}})$ oracles for the problem class defined by the spectral norm, which is a common input-output norm. We prove that a scale-invariant Scion method with the spectral norm can achieve the matching upper bound of $O(\min\{m, n\}\epsilon^{-\frac{3p-2}{p-1}})$. To exploit higher-order smoothness, we propose a transported Scion method and improve the bound to $O(\min\{m, n\}\epsilon^{-\frac{5p-3}{2p-2}})$ when the Hessian is Lipschitz. Finally, we incorporate heuristics into our transported method and evaluate it across multiple architectures and model sizes, demonstrating its flexibility and compatibility with neural network training.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Estimating Tail Risks in Language Model Output Distributions

arXiv:2604.22167v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Language models are increasingly capable and are being rapidly deployed on a population-level scale. As a result, the safety of these models is increasingly high-stakes. Fortunately, advances in alignment have significantly reduced the likelihood of harmful model outputs. However, when models are queried billions of times in a day, even rare worst-case behaviors will occur. Current safety evaluations focus on capturing the distribution of inputs that yield harmful outputs. These evaluations disregard the probabilistic nature of models and their tail output behavior. To measure this tail risk, we propose a method to efficiently estimate the probability of harmful outputs for any input query. Instead of naive brute-force sampling from the target model, where harmful outputs could be rare, we operationalize importance sampling by creating unsafe versions of the target model. These unsafe versions enable sample-efficient estimation by making harmful outputs more probable. On benchmarks measuring misuse and misalignment, these estimates match brute-force Monte Carlo estimates using 10-20x fewer samples. For example, we can estimate probability of harmful outputs on the order of 10^-4 with just 500 samples. Additionally, we find that these harmfulness estimates can reveal the sensitivity of models to perturbations in model input and predict deployment risks. Our work demonstrates that accurate rare-event estimation is both critical and feasible for safety evaluations. Code is available at https://github.com/rangell/LMTailRisk

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

GroupToM-Bench: Benchmarking Group Theory of Mind and Nonlinear Social Emergence in MLLMs

True general intelligence requires not only a model of the physical world but also a social world model: the capacity to infer how individual mental states interact and crystallize into group-level outcomes. Despite notable progress in individual-level Theory of Mind (ToM) reasoning, existing multimodal large language models fail at this broader task. Collective behavior emerges non-linearly from social tensions, conformity dynamics, and structural constraints, meaning it cannot be recovered by merely summing individual intentions. We present GroupToM-Bench, the first multimodal benchmark for group-level ToM, built around a causal chain spanning micro-level BDI states (belief, desire, intention), meso-level group tension and structural constraints, and macro-level outcome prediction and mechanistic attribution. To probe this full arc, we develop a seven-level cognitive audit framework. Experiments reveal a gap between current models and human baselines, highlighting a failure to process social structures and non-linear collective dynamics.

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

What sentiment analysis can't see: Measuring whether customers were helped, and what went wrong, across 70,000 support conversations

Most companies read their customer support data at scale using sentiment analysis, which measures how customers sound rather than whether they were satisfied with the result. We tested a richer alternative on 70,450 support conversations from a leading online fundraising platform: alongside tone, we used GPT-5.4 to estimate each customer's satisfaction and to flag whether they reported a concrete problem, then validated all three readings against the 1-to-5 ratings customers left on the conversations they rated. The satisfaction estimate tracked those ratings far better than sentiment did, correlating at 0.47 against 0.36 and flagging unhappy customers with far fewer false alarms. The structured read also sees what sentiment cannot: tone and satisfaction disagree in 44% of conversations, a single "Neutral" label hides everything from quietly satisfied customers to ones who quietly gave up, and the largest group of all is "tolerated friction," customers who are satisfied but still reporting a fixable problem, a standing issue that no sentiment-based dashboard can surface. The broader finding is that LLM-based annotation can capture far more than the tonality of a customer's language, offering strong potential for new business metrics grounded instead in the customer's state (whether they were satisfied) and the cause of their problem extracted directly from the raw textual data of interactions and feedback.

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

The Winner Takes It All

arXiv:2606.16885v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The winner-takes-all (WTA) process takes place on an arbitrary graph. There is an agent on each vertex of the graph, and active agents at neighboring vertices play games. In each game, a randomly chosen agent wins, while the loser is eliminated from subsequent games. The games are played at random times; each game finishes instantaneously, and the games cease when each active agent has only losers among its neighbors. On the one-dimensional lattice, the fraction of winners in the final state is $e^{-1}$, and we also determine the fractions $w_j$ of winners who won $j=0, 1, 2$ games. For the WTA process on a segment, we determine statistics of the total number of winners (the average, the variance, and all higher cumulants), the probabilities of reaching the final state with the minimum or maximum number of winners, and establish the behavior near the boundaries. For infinite regular trees with vertices of degree $d$, i.e., Bethe lattices with coordination number $d$, the fraction of winners is $(2/d)^{d/(d-2)}$.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Provably Efficient Regularized Online RLHF with Generalized Bilinear Preferences

arXiv:2602.23116v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider the problem of regularized best-response max-regret minimization in online RLHF under general preferences and bandit feedback. While various regularizers are utilized to robustify alignment, known polylogarithmic regret guarantees remain heavily specific to KL. To investigate whether such fast rates extend beyond KL, we adopt the Generalized Bilinear Preference Model (GBPM) – capturing intransitive preferences over $d$-dimensional item-wise features via a rank-$2r$ skew-symmetric matrix – to isolate the impact of generic regularization. Crucially, under GBPM, we prove that the dual gap of any greedy policy is bounded by the squared estimation error, derived using only strong convexity and skew-symmetry. Under a feature coverage assumption, we establish a generic polylogarithmic regret of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\eta d^4 C_{\min}^{-1} (\log T)^2 \wedge d^2 C_{\min}^{-1/2} \sqrt{T})$ with Greedy Sampling, and a dimension-wise improved regret (for well-conditioned arm-sets) of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(C_{\min}^{-2} \sqrt{\eta r T} \wedge r^{1/3} C_{\min}^{-4/3} T^{2/3})$ with Explore-Then-Commit, where $\eta^{-1}$ is the regularization coefficient, $T$ is the time horizon, and $C_{\min}$ is an arm-set dependent quantity. This demonstrates that ``fast'' regrets are not KL-specific, but rather a fundamental consequence of generic strongly convex geometry.

22.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-22

Differences in tuberculosis prevalence by sex in low- and middle-income countries over 1993–2025: A systematic review and meta-analysis

by Nicole A. Swartwood, Nanki Singh, Seyed Alireza Mortazavi, Melike Hazal Can, Hening Cui, Do Kyung Ryuk, Peter MacPherson, Katherine C. Horton, Nicolas A. Menzies Background Global and national initiatives to combat tuberculosis (TB) have expanded over recent years. Despite this, the TB burden remains high in some population groups, with men recognized as having elevated TB risks. Summary measures of sex differences in TB prevalence were last estimated in 2016. Since then, many additional prevalence surveys have been conducted, including in the highest TB burden countries. We conducted a systematic review of sex-stratified TB prevalence survey data published over 1993–2025, to provide updated estimates of male-to-female (M:F) TB prevalence ratios and determine whether sex-related disparities in TB burden have closed over time. Methods and findings We identified surveys reporting community-representative, sex-stratified estimates of pulmonary TB prevalence in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), including surveys from an earlier review (covering January 1993–March 2016) and a new systematic review (covering 1st December 2015–13th October 2025). This review was prospectively registered with PROSPERO (CRD42024503853) and included searches of PubMed, Embase, Global Health, the Cochrane Library, Africa Index Medicus, LILACS, and SciELO. We extracted data on bacteriologically confirmed and smear-positive TB prevalence among adults (aged ≥ 15 years), stratified by sex. Risk of bias was evaluated using eight criteria specific to prevalence surveys. We fit multi-level Bayesian regression models with study- and country-level random effects to estimate the M:F ratio of TB prevalence (male prevalence divided by female prevalence), overall and for key subgroups. In meta-regression analyses, we estimated how prevalence ratios varied over time and according to known TB risk factors and TB case definitions.We identified 10,124 publications and extracted data from 100 eligible studies representing 102 unique prevalence surveys and 4,658,310 participants (45.6% male) in 33 LMICs. TB prevalence was higher in men than women in 90/102 of the included surveys, with a pooled M:F prevalence ratio of 2.02 (95% credible interval (CrI): 1.71, 2.34) for bacteriologically confirmed TB and 2.38 (95% CrI: 1.91, 2.90) for smear-positive TB. Time trend analyses showed a 2.0% (95% CrI: −0.2, 4.5%) average annual change in the M:F ratio of bacteriologically confirmed TB over the study period. The M:F prevalence ratio was estimated to be higher for countries with greater excess HIV prevalence among men, and countries with greater gender equity (as measured by the United Nation’s Gender Development Index). The estimated M:F prevalence ratio was also higher for surveys that did not restrict testing to individuals reporting TB symptoms. Study limitations include heterogeneity in survey methods and definitions, as well as limited data from the Americas, Eastern Mediterranean, and Europe WHO world regions and post-COVID-19 period. Conclusions Men in LMICs consistently experience TB at a higher prevalence than women. Time trend estimates are uncertain, but consistent with widening sex differences in TB prevalence over the last three decades, despite efforts to address the risk factors underlying this excess TB burden.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

FoleyGenEx: Unified Video-to-Audio Generation with Multi-Modal Control, Temporal Alignment, and Semantic Precision

We present FoleyGenEx, a unified video-to-audio (VTA) framework integrating multi-modal control, frame-level temporal alignment, and fine-grained semantics, enabling synchronized, versatile audio synthesis for diverse tasks. Existing VTA methods either have multi-modal control but weak temporal alignment or strong alignment but lack reference audio conditioning and semantic precision. FoleyGenEx fills this gap via three core innovations: a conditional injection mechanism for audio-controlled VTA and Foley extension, a multi-modal dynamic masking strategy preserving training synchronization, and an adverb-based data augmentation algorithm leveraging signal processing and large language models to enhance textual supervision with nuanced semantics. Experiments on AudioCaps, VGGSound, and Greatest Hits demonstrate its competitive controllable VTA performance against existing methods. Demo samples are available at https://foleygenex.github.io/FoleyGenEx.

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

The Machine Learning Approach to Moment Closure Relations for Plasma: A Review

arXiv:2511.22486v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The requirement for large-scale global simulations of plasma is an ongoing challenge in both space and laboratory plasma physics. Any simulation based on a fluid model inherently requires a closure relation for the high order plasma moments. This review compiles and analyses the recent surge of machine learning approaches developing improved plasma closure models capable of capturing kinetic phenomena within plasma fluid models. We survey two methodological families: neural-network surrogates (from multilayer perceptrons to Fourier neural operators, the latter recently reproducing both linear and non-linear Landau damping online within a fluid solver) and equation-discovery methods such as sparse regression; and organise the studies by whether they are tested offline against reference data or online within a time-evolving solver. We outline the challenges associated with machine-learning closures, including off-diagonal pressure-tensor accuracy, generalisation beyond the training distribution, and stable integration into large-scale simulations, and the directions future research might take to address them.

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

Efficient Rationale-based Retrieval: On-policy Distillation from Generative Rerankers based on JEPA

Unlike traditional fact-based retrieval, rationale-based retrieval typically necessitates cross-encoding of query-document pairs using large language models, incurring substantial computational costs. To address this limitation, we propose Rabtriever, which independently encodes queries and documents, while providing comparable cross query-document comprehension capabilities to rerankers. We start from training a LLM-based generative reranker, which puts the document prior to the query and prompts the LLM to generate the relevance score by log probabilities. We then employ it as the teacher of an on-policy distillation framework, with Rabtriever as the student to reconstruct the teacher's contextual-aware query embedding. To achieve this effect, Rabtriever is first initialized from the teacher, with parameters frozen. The Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) paradigm is then adopted, which integrates a lightweight, trainable predictor between LLM layers and heads, projecting the query embedding into a new hidden space, with the document embedding as the latent vector. JEPA then minimizes the distribution difference between this projected embedding and the teacher embedding. To strengthen the sampling efficiency of on-policy distillation, we also add an auxiliary loss on the reverse KL of LLM logits, to reshape the student's logit distribution. Rabtriever optimizes the teacher's quadratic complexity on the document length to linear, verified both theoretically and empirically. Experiments show that Rabtriever outperforms different retriever baselines across diverse rationale-based tasks, including empathetic conversations and robotic manipulations, with minor accuracy degradation from the reranker. Rabtriever also generalizes well on traditional retrieval benchmarks such as MS MARCO and BEIR, with comparable performance to the best retriever baseline.