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

Low-Rank Tensor Completion Based on Fractional Regularization with Ky Fan p-k Norm

This paper addresses low-rank tensor completion (LRTC) by proposing a novel nonconvex surrogate, namely the ratio of the tensor nuclear norm to the tensor Ky Fan p-k norm (TNPK), to accurately approximate the tensor tubal rank. The TNPK possesses appealing properties, including scale invariance, parameter flexibility, and the existence of closed-form solutions under specific choices of p and k. With specific parameter settings of p and k, it reduces to the ratio of the tensor nuclear norm to the tensor Ky Fan k norm (TNK) or the ratio of the tensor nuclear norm to the tensor Frobenius norm (TNF). We construct a LRTC model and, under the tensor null space property (NSP), prove that low-rank tensors are local minimizers of the proposed model. Moreover, we derive the proximal operator of the Ky Fan p-k inverse-norm and further develop an efficient alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm with guaranteed subsequential convergence under mild conditions. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets validate the superior performance of our method against state-of-the-art competitors.

02.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

VrySure: A Multi-Task AI Scientific Fraud Detection Platform for Identifying Manipulated and AI-Generated Biomedical Research Images

Integrity of scientific data is critical in biomedical research, where images often serve as primary evidence for experimental observations and conclusions. Advances in image-editing technologies and generative artificial intelligence (AI) have increased the accessibility and realism of visual manipulation, making detection through manual review increasingly challenging. To empower our laboratory researchers to continuously monitor and uphold scientific rigor and data integrity, and serve the global scientific community, we developed VrySure, an easy-to-deploy, AI-driven multi-task platform for automated image-integrity screening in biomedical research. VrySure integrates four detection modules: cross-image transformation detection, within-image copy-move detection, splicing detection in blot and gel images, and AI-generated image detection. The system identifies potentially manipulated images and, when possible, localizes suspicious regions using bounding-box outputs to support downstream verification. To support development and evaluation, we constructed task-specific datasets by combining public biomedical image resources, curated manipulated examples, and synthetic images generated by multiple generative AI systems. We evaluated VrySure using region-level F1 score, recall, precision, false negative rate (FNR), and false discovery rate (FDR) across multiple manipulation categories and compared its performance with two commonly used commercial image-integrity screening platforms under a predefined benchmark protocol. Under the tested conditions, VrySure achieved a higher F1 score and recall, lower FNR, and maintained a low FDR for within-image copy-move detection, splicing detection, and AI-generated image detection, while showing comparable performance in transformation detection. Beyond automated screening, VrySure is designed to support source-data comparison and evidence-based assessment in scientific integrity investigations. By integrating multiple detection capabilities into a unified and scalable workflow, VrySure provides a practical framework to improve the efficiency and consistency of image-integrity screening in biomedical research.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

TxBench-PP: Analyzing AI Agent Performance on Small-Molecule Preclinical Pharmacology

arXiv:2606.19245v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) agents promise to accelerate drug discovery by compressing interpretation and decision-making loops, but practical deployment requires trusted evaluation on realistic program decisions. We introduce TherapeuticsBench Preclinical Pharmacology (TxBench-PP), a verifiable benchmark for small-molecule preclinical pharmacology and the first focused slice of a broader TherapeuticsBench effort across drug-discovery stages and therapeutic modalities. TxBench-PP tests whether agents can recover accurate conclusions from real-world assay data rather than memorized facts from literature. The benchmark contains 100 evaluations indexed by program stage, assay type, and task structure, spanning mechanism-of-action (MoA) and pharmacodynamic (PD) reasoning, compound-target engagement, causal target validation, developability and safety, and translational efficacy. Agents receive realistic workflow snapshots, inspect files in a coding environment, and return structured answers graded deterministically. Across 16 model-harness configurations, comprising 11 models and 4,800 trajectories, no system reliably recovered preclinical pharmacology decisions. The strongest configuration, Claude Opus 4.8 / Pi, passed 59.3\% of endpoint attempts (178/300; 95\% CI, 51.1-67.6), followed by GPT-5.5 / Pi at 55.3\% (166/300; 47.0-63.6).

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

LLMs are Bayesian, In Expectation, Not in Realization

arXiv:2507.11768v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Bayesian accounts of in-context learning face a direct objection: exact posterior predictives for exchangeable data are invariant to task-preserving order, yet transformers change next-token probabilities when the same examples are serialized differently. We show this objection targets a structural invariant rather than the quantity scoring online prediction. For any Bayesian reference, excess prequential code length is exactly cumulative predictive KL. For unordered support sets that must be serialized, the expected regret of a single admissible ordering decomposes into that of the order-averaged predictor plus an order-averaging gain. Exchangeability violations are therefore not binary refutations; they are priced by log loss. We instantiate the theory with KT/Dirichlet finite-alphabet prediction and coarsened Bayesian linear-regression (BLR) predictive distributions. On Qwen2.5-7B/14B, floored candidate distributions at support $256$ have one-step excess code lengths of $0.020/0.011$ bits for Bernoulli and $0.039/0.022$ bits for four-way categorical prediction, with candidate mass above $0.999$; coarsened BLR continuations increasingly match the posterior-predictive digit distribution as support grows. A frequentist plug-in baseline sharpens the reading: the predictive distributions sit closer to the Bayesian posterior predictive than to the maximum-likelihood plug-in, by a margin largest at small support, where the plug-in is degenerate, and vanishing as the references converge. Position interventions and a from-scratch ablation localize order sensitivity to the positional encoding, activation patching tests causal use of decoded sufficient statistics, and permutation mixtures quantify the downstream log-loss cost of arbitrary orderings. Transformers need not realize exchangeable posterior predictives for every serialization to be Bayes-competitive prequential predictors.

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

Structure-Semantic Co-optimized Latent Diffusion Model for Fast Visual Anagram Synthesis

Visual anagram is an intriguing form of art creation wherein a single image presents different conceptual interpretations under transformations such as flipping or rotation. Recent work has achieved visual anagram synthesis by leveraging pretrained text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models, yet still suffers from several key limitations including computational inefficiency, suboptimal aesthetic quality, and weak semantic fidelity and expressiveness. This work focuses on generating visual anagrams with substantially improved visual quality at minimal computational cost, thereby advancing intelligent creation of illusionary digital art. To increase image resolution while reducing time overhead, we adapt the cutting-edge parallel denoising algorithm from pixel-based T2I model to the adversarially distilled latent-based one, and accordingly propose a structure-semantic co-optimization (S2CO) framework to counteract the consequent visual degradation. As the core of our approach, S2CO framework comprises three key innovations: (\romannumeral1) null-text structure alignment optimization; (\romannumeral2) semantic enhancement optimization; (\romannumeral3) attention-guided noise fusion. Building upon these components, our method dubbed S2CO-Anagram is able to generate higher-resolution anagram images with noticeably superior visual harmony and semantic faithfulness than related SOTA approaches, all while achieving substantially faster inference speed. Code will be publicly available.

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

Co-Scraper: query-aware DOM Pruning and Reusable Scraper Synthesis for Lightweight Web Data Extraction

arXiv:2606.14821v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The abundant and heterogeneous nature of web content necessitates automated information extraction, and generating scrapers that can be reused across similar web pages offers an effective solution for scalable data extraction. In this work, we propose Co-Scraper, a two-stage framework capable of handling the hierarchical complexity of long HTML documents. By integrating a query-aware DOM pruning mechanism with stable extraction strategy induction, Co-Scraper can effectively transforms web content into executable programmatic wrappers using a fine-tuned Qwen3-8B model. On the test set of SWDE, Co-Scraper achieves state-of-the-art performance with an F1 score of 94.78% and a reuse success rate of 90.39%. This framework significantly enhances the accuracy and resilience of data extraction, providing a highly efficient approach for web data acquisition tasks.

07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

A Unified Approach to Beta Moments, Combinatorial Identities, and Random Walks

arXiv:2605.05420v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The study of random walks has increasingly been popular across diverse disciplines such as statistics, mathematics, quantum physics, where they are used to model paths consisting of successive random steps in a mathematical space. A fundamental quantity of interest is the probability that a simple symmetric random walk returns to the origin after 2n steps. In this paper, we develop a unified probabilistic approach that connects the return probabilities in arbitrary dimensions with moment representations. Using this framework, we provide probabilistic proofs of several combinatorial identities involving beta and gamma functions, and derive new combinatorial identities in general dimensions.

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

Temporal Validation Changes the Apparent Public-Health Utility of Under-Five Mortality Prediction in Bangladesh: A Four-Round DHS Machine-Learning Study

arXiv:2602.03957v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Background: Under-five mortality in Bangladesh remains uneven despite national progress. DHS-based prediction models may guide targeted follow-up, but only if validation reflects future use. We examined how validation design changes apparent prediction performance. Methods: Four BDHS rounds (2011-2022; 33,962 children; 1,290 deaths) were analysed with a 26-feature pipeline and three model classes under four validation regimes, including cross-survey temporal validation (train 2011+2014, calibrate 2017, test 2022). A 32-unit ELU multilayer perceptron was selected via genetic-algorithm neural architecture search. AUROC used 2,000 bootstrap resamples; screening utility used sensitivity, PPV, and number needed to screen (NNS) at fixed capacity. Results: Validation regime altered public-health interpretation more than model class. NAS MLP AUROC ranged from 0.669 (2022-only random) to 0.775 (pooled random), with temporal AUROC 0.730. At the top-10% temporal threshold, NAS identified 152/355 deaths in 2022 (sensitivity 42.8%, PPV 13.2%, NNS 7.6). NNS across designs ranged from 5.6 to 11.0. Conclusions: Validation-regime choice changed screening workload and apparent policy value more than architecture. Temporal validation supports defensible estimates of follow-up and referral demand; DHS child-mortality studies should report sensitivity, PPV, and NNS before programmatic use.

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

Optimal Transport for Machine Learners

arXiv:2505.06589v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern machine learning repeatedly manipulates probability measures: empirical datasets, generated samples, latent distributions, class-conditional laws, particle systems, weights of wide networks and attention patterns. Optimal transport is useful in this setting because it compares such objects by asking how mass should move. It therefore combines a statistically meaningful notion of discrepancy with a geometry of interpolation, dual certificates and variational dynamics. This makes OT a common language for losses, generative modeling, domain adaptation, robust learning, barycenters, gradient flows and mean-field descriptions of learning algorithms. This book presents the main OT techniques with these machine-learning uses in mind. It starts from finite assignment and the Monge map viewpoint, passes to Kantorovich couplings and dual potentials, and then explains the algorithmic ideas that make transport usable: linear programming, semi-discrete cells, Sinkhorn scaling and low-dimensional projections. The same objects are then reused as a geometry of measures, giving Wasserstein distances, barycenters, gradient flows, dynamic formulations and Gaussian/Bures formulas. The final chapters emphasize the variants most relevant to modern ML: divergences and adversarial losses, entropic and unbalanced relaxations, robust or spectral ground geometries, Gromov and quantum extensions, and transport-based views of generative models, mean-field networks and attention dynamics. The goal is to keep the mathematics explicit while exposing the computational and geometric intuitions needed to turn OT into a working toolbox for machine learners.

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

CellNet – Localizing Cells using Sparse and Noisy Point Annotations

Counting living cells is an important step in many biological research workflows. Our collaborators at the Wellcome Sanger Institute study vital genes in humans via large scale saturation genome editing screening, which requires repeatedly counting cells a great number of times. Computer Vision based automation is crucial for high throughput and resource efficiency. In this work, we develop a regression-based deep learning computer vision algorithm to detect and count cells in phase-contrast microscopy images. To reduce annotation effort, which in practice often becomes a bottleneck, we focus on counting cells only using sparse point annotations, which are fast and easy to acquire. By comparison to state-of-the-art 0-shot methods, we show that regression-based counting is a promising alternative in low data regimes. Through developing methods to automatically count living cells in microscopy images, we contribute to valuable research on the human genome. The code is available at https://github.com/beijn/cellnet.

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

Fusing Transferred Priors and Physics-based Decomposition for Underwater Image Enhancement

The underwater images are captured within diverse water-medium conditions, leading to complex degradation, including color bias, low contrast, and blur effect. Recently, learning-based methods have demonstrated their potential for underwater image enhancement (UIE). However, most of the previous work focus on the training strategy or network design to make the enhanced result aligned well with the labels in datasets, ignoring that the labels are selected from the enhanced results of previous UIE methods and these pseudo-labels are noisy. Consequently, the performance of their models is not satisfactory to a certain extent. However, collecting the true labels of the underwater images is challenging. In this work, we propose a transfer learning-based UIE that does not require underwater images to have paired noisy or true labels for learning. Instead, the UIE task is first divided into global color correction, haze removal, and background noise suppression following the underwater physics. Then multiple types of prior from other vision tasks are leveraged as cross-domain supervision in each step. In this way, a novel UIE is available via transfer learning, and the physics-aligned UIE decomposition provides theoretical soundness. Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our proposal based on physics and priors fusion achieves SOTA performance in the UIE task and effectively boosts downstream vision tasks, significantly outperforming benchmark methods. Project repo: https://github.com/Haru2022/P2-UIE.

12.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

Simulation-based Bayesian deep learning enables uncertainty-aware tumor fraction estimation in cell-free DNA

Background: Estimating tumor fraction from whole-genome cell-free DNA sequencing is critical for liquid biopsy, but is hampered by weak signals and baseline noise at low tumor fractions. Existing computational methods often require matched controls or large labeled datasets for training and lack uncertainty quantification. To address these gaps, we developed purNPE, a Bayesian deep-learning framework trained without labeled cancer cell-free DNA samples. Specifically, purNPE leverages a two-part generative model: one component simulates diverse tumor copy-number profiles based on evolutionary genealogies, while a second, data-driven component learns and replicates realistic sequencing background patterns from cancer-free cell-free DNA. By training a Neural Posterior Estimator on synthetic tumor profiles augmented with learned noise, purNPE performs amortized inference in milliseconds without needing a reference sample set at inference. Results: In a real-world pan-cancer cohort, purNPE achieved comparable performance with existing methods against orthogonal mutant-allele-fraction validation (MAE = 0.066). In silico and semi-synthetic experiments suggested analytical sensitivity around 1% tumor fraction under the evaluated conditions and showed strong classification accuracy in low tumor fractions (AUC = 0.98 for TF [≤] 3% versus controls). Conclusions: This work provides a framework for using simulation-based inference to derive calibrated, uncertainty-aware TF estimates, offering a potential alternative to traditional data-dependent methods.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Entity-Aware Generation of Synthetic Clinical Progress Notes for Prostate Cancer using Large Language Model

Objectives: This study investigates large language models (LLMs) for clinical entity projection across substantial textual transformation. Specifically, we evaluate whether entities annotated in Spanish prostate cancer case reports can be preserved and explicitly projected when the source narratives are transformed into hospital-style clinical progress notes. Entity projection is treated as a generation-driven task, allowing paraphrase, condensation and narrative reorganisation, providing that clinically relevant entities remain recoverable as structured annotations. Methods: A corpus of 109 Spanish prostate cancer case reports was annotated using a silver-standard pipeline combining Spanish biomedical named-entity recognition with rule-based prostate-specific antigen (PSA) and Gleason extractors. The resulting silver-standard annotations were validated on a subset of generated notes against a gold-standard consensus produced by medical experts in prostate cancer. Four LLMs were evaluated for note generation and entity projection: GPT-5.4 Nano, Qwen 3.5:35B-A3B, GLM5 and Claude Sonnet 4.6. Entity-to-Entity (E2E) generation used XML-annotated cases as RAG-supported input, whereas Text-to-Entity (T2E) generation required models to generate and annotate notes directly from plain text cases. Zero-shot and few-shot prompting were tested. Projection quality was measured using precision, recall and F1-score, and complemented by LLM-as-a-judge evaluation using Kimi K2.6. Results: E2E consistently outperformed T2E, indicating that explicit entity-enriched in- put substantially facilitates entity preservation and localisation. GLM5 achieved the best E2E zero-shot result (F1 = 0.915), followed by Claude Sonnet 4.6 (F1 = 0.896). In T2E, few-shot prompting improved performance, with Claude Sonnet 4.6 reaching the highest score (F1 =0.718). Age, Gleason, Disease, Procedure, Duration and negation-related entities were robustly projected, whereas PSA and Dose showed less stable behaviour. Conclusion: LLMs can generate clinically plausible synthetic prostate cancer evolution notes while preserving a substantial proportion of source entities, particularly when explicit semantic annotations are provided as input. However, the lower and more variable performance observed in T2E highlights the difficulty of jointly generating clinical narratives and projecting entities without source-side information, especially for numerical and measure-related entities.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Entanglement-Rank Duality in Quadratic Phase Quantum States

arXiv:2605.05167v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Absolutely maximally entangled (AME) states are fundamental resources in quantum information theory, yet their construction and certification remain a nontrivial problem. Within the family of quadratic phase quantum states, defined by symmetric matrices $P$ over finite fields $\mathbb{F}_{p^m}$, we show that the Rank-Purity Duality $\operatorname{Tr}(\rho_S^2) = |\mathbb{F}|^{-\operatorname{rk}_{\mathbb{F}}(P_{S,\bar{S}})}$ follows from additive character orthogonality and holds over all $\mathbb{F}_{p^m}$, yielding a polynomial-time AME certification criterion. For square-free dimensions $d = p_1\cdots p_r$, the Chinese Remainder Theorem induces a prime-field factorisation. This implies additivity of Rényi-2 entropy and yields sharp obstruction criteria that rule out cases such as $\operatorname{AME}(4,6)$ and constrain the open case $\operatorname{AME}(8,6)$. As a proof of concept, we construct an explicit $\operatorname{AME}(17,10001)$ state, certified across all $65{,}535$ bipartitions, demonstrating that the framework scales to large systems and previously inaccessible local dimensions.

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

Findings of the MAGMaR 2026 Shared Task

This overview paper presents the results of the shared task for the second workshop on Multimodal Augmented Generation via Multimodal Retrieval (MAGMaR). In this shared task participants submitted systems focused on either (i) video retrieval or (ii) grounded generation of articles given retrieved videos. Teams could submit to either task. For the retrieval task, we had 2 participating teams that submitted a total of 17 systems – all of which beat a baseline derived from the winner of last year's shared task. On the generation side, we had 4 teams submit 16 systems. All teams had at least one generated report that was labeled the best by a human annotator.

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

Invariant Graph Representations for Continuous-Time Dynamic Graphs Under Distribution Shifts

arXiv:2405.19062v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continuous-Time Dynamic Graphs (CTDGs) enable fine-grained modeling of evolving relational systems. However, most existing CTDG representation learning methods are tailored to in-distribution settings and exhibit limited robustness under out-of-distribution (OOD) shifts. Although recent causal approaches learn invariant representations via interventions, they are primarily designed for static or discrete-time graphs and become computationally prohibitive for CTDGs due to the combinatorial explosion of structural and temporal variations. To address these challenges, we propose CIR, a framework grounded in a novel structural causal model termed the ICCM. To avoid exhaustive interventions, we leverage the Normalized Weighted Geometric Mean (NWGM) to efficiently approximate interventional predictions. We further instantiate ICCM within a practical deep learning architecture that jointly captures invariant structural and temporal patterns through dedicated subgraph extractors, and maintains an environment memory bank to model distributional shifts across evolving contexts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CIR consistently outperforms existing methods under diverse OOD scenarios.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

No Certificate, No Categorical Speech Act: A Brouwerian Assertibility Constraint for Public Reason

arXiv:2603.03971v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Generative AI can convert uncertainty into authoritative-seeming verdicts, intensifying the hypersuasive force of automated speech and displacing the justificatory work on which democratic epistemic agency depends. As a corrective, I propose a Brouwer-inspired assertibility constraint for responsible AI: in high-stakes domains, systems may assert or deny claims only if they can provide a publicly inspectable and contestable certificate of entitlement; otherwise they must return Undetermined. This constraint yields a three-status interface semantics (Asserted, Denied, Undetermined) in which statuses mark entitlement to categorical speech rather than truth values of the underlying world-claim. The semantics cleanly separates internal entitlement from public standing while connecting them via the certificate as a boundary object. It also produces a time-indexed entitlement profile that is stable under numerical refinement yet revisable as the public record changes. I operationalize the constraint through decision-layer gating of threshold and argmax decisions, using internal witnesses (e.g., sound bounds or separation margins where available, and contestable surrogates otherwise) and an output contract with reason-coded abstentions. A design lemma shows that any total, certificate-sound binary interface yields witnessed decidability of the deployed predicate on its declared scope, so Undetermined is not a tunable reject option but a mandatory status whenever no adequate forcing witness is available. By making outputs answerable to challengeable warrants rather than confidence alone, the paper aims to preserve epistemic agency against the persuasive pull of automated speech in public justification.

18.
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.

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

Understanding helpfulness and harmless tension in reward models

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

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Q-Fold: Query-Aware Focus-Context Spatio-Temporal Folding for Long Video Understanding

Long-video understanding remains challenging for multimodal large language models, because temporally extended videos often contain thousands of frames and are therefore expensive to process exhaustively. Existing methods usually construct compact visual inputs from long videos under a limited visual budget. However, most of them still follow a frame-centric paradigm and apply similar representations to retained content regardless of its importance. This makes it difficult to preserve both high-fidelity visual evidence and broad temporal coverage. To address this issue, we propose Q-Fold, a training-free input construction framework for long-video understanding. Instead of treating isolated frames as the basic modeling unit, Q-Fold operates on contiguous temporal segments and constructs a heterogeneous Focus–Context representation under query guidance. Query-relevant segments are preserved as high-fidelity Focus Frames, while less relevant segments are folded into chronology-preserving contextual layouts. In this way, Q-Fold preserves critical visual evidence and broad temporal coverage, while better maintaining local temporal continuity within short segments. Experiments on four long-video benchmarks with multiple Video-MLLMs show that Q-Fold consistently improves performance without increasing the input budget. Notably, it achieves gains of up to 9.1 percentage points on an ultra-long video benchmark. Code will be made publicly available.

22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

On two overlooked stick-breaking constructions of the normalized inverse Gaussian process

arXiv:2606.19306v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We shed light on two alternative stick-breaking constructions of the normalized inverse Gaussian (NIG) random discrete distribution which appear to have been overlooked so far in the Bayesian nonparametric setting. The first is derived from a result in Aldous and Pitman (1998) for the conditional Brownian excursion partition, mixing over the local time at zero up to time one. The second arises as a particular case of a result in James (2013) for priors obtained by a random spatial and temporal change of the normalized generalized Gamma subordinator. Both constructions are in terms of straightforward transformations of standard random variables and can be easily generalized to provide the stick-breaking construction of any element, respectively, in a) the family of mixed Poisson-Kingman models driven by the $1/2$ stable Lévy measure and b) the family of Poisson-Gamma processes driven by the Inverse Gaussian subordinator.

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

Private Prediction via PAC Privacy

arXiv:2601.14033v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Machine learning models are increasingly served behind APIs. This renders private prediction, i.e., privatizing a model's outputs rather than its parameters, a natural privacy target: model outputs are lower-dimensional and far more stable to training-data changes than weights. While differential privacy (DP) cannot effectively exploit this as it calibrates noise to worst-case sensitivity that is intractable to bound for non-convex models, we argue that PAC privacy is a natural fit for private prediction. It is instance-based, and calibrates noise to a black-box function's empirical stability to control mutual-information (MI) leakage. The missing ingredient is efficient, adaptive composition. Serving predictions means answering a long stream of adaptively chosen queries from untrusted users; existing composition either fails under adaptivity, grows quadratically, or reverts to input-independent, DP-like noise. We close this gap with a new adversarial composition result via adaptive noise calibration and prove that MI accumulates only linearly under adaptive and adversarial querying. Experiments across modalities show that prediction stability enables high utility even at a tiny per-query budget: on CIFAR-10, we achieve 87.79% accuracy with a per-query MI budget of $2^{-32}$. This enables serving one million queries while provably bounding membership-inference success to 51.08% – the same guarantee as $(0.04, 10^{-5})$-DP. Further, in the presence of auxiliary public data, the large volume of PAC-private predictions enables us to distill a publishable model that can be queried without limit. Concretely, 210,000 private labels on an ImageNet subset distill into a student reaching 91.86% accuracy on CIFAR-10 with membership inference success bounded by 50.49%, comparable to $(0.02, 10^{-5})$-DP.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

TimeRouter: Efficient and Adaptive Routing of Time-Series Foundation Models

arXiv:2606.11625v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time-series foundation models (TSFMs) are increasingly explored as predictive experts within emerging agentic time-series systems. However, TSFMs exhibit heterogeneous inductive biases, and no single model consistently dominates across forecasting regimes, making expert selection a critical challenge. Existing systems often delegate this decision to LLM-based controllers, incurring substantial inference overhead. We present TimeRouter, an efficient routing framework that leverages empirical complementarity across a pool of pretrained TSFMs through lightweight discriminative routing, selective gating, and ensemble fallback. Concretely, TimeRouter combines a learned routing head, a selective gate, and an ensemble fallback, enabling adaptive expert selection without invoking an LLM at inference time. TimeRouter achieves state-of-the-art performance on the GIFT-EVAL leaderboard, with an LB MASE of 0.6765. Beyond benchmark performance, our ablation studies provide empirical insights into TSFM routing design, highlighting the importance of pool composition and selective gating. Taken together, these results position TimeRouter as a modular and lightweight routing layer for future agentic time-series systems built upon foundation-model pools. Our code is available at https://github.com/UConn-DSIS/TimeRouter.