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02.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Phylogenetic tree inference using generative models

Accurate inference of phylogenetic trees is fundamental to evolutionary biology, yet existing methods rely on complex pipelines involving multiple sequence alignment, explicit evolutionary models, and computationally intensive tree search procedures. Here, we present BetaInfer, a generative framework that reformulates phylogenetic tree inference as a sequence transduction problem. BetaInfer leverages hybrid transformer-based architectures to directly map sets of unaligned sequences to phylogenetic trees represented in Newick format. Trained on large-scale simulated evolutionary data with known ground truth, BetaInfer learns to capture complex evolutionary signals directly from sequence data. Ensemble-based generation of multiple candidate trees further improves robustness, reducing reconstruction error by over 30% relative to single predictions. Across extensive evaluations on both simulated and empirical datasets, BetaInfer achieves competitive performance relative to state-of-the-art phylogenetic pipelines, matching, and in some cases exceeding, the accuracy of established likelihood-based and distance-based methods under a wide range of conditions. Interpretability analyses reveal that BetaInfer leverages internal pairwise-distance computations to synthesize evolutionary relationships into an integrated, global representation that supports direct tree generation. Together, these results demonstrate that generative models can serve as a viable and scalable alternative to standard phylogenetic pipelines.

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

Quantized Evolution Strategies: High-precision Fine-tuning of Quantized LLMs at Low-precision Cost

arXiv:2602.03120v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) is essential for deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) on memory-constrained devices, yet it renders models static and difficult to fine-tune. Standard fine-tuning paradigms, including Reinforcement Learning (RL), fundamentally rely on backpropagation and continuous weights to compute gradients. Thus they cannot be used on quantized models, where the parameter space is discrete and non-differentiable. While Evolution Strategies (ES) offer a backpropagation-free alternative, optimization of the quantized parameters can still fail due to vanishing or inaccurate gradient estimation. This paper introduces Quantized Evolution Strategies (QES), an optimization paradigm that performs full-parameter fine-tuning directly in the quantized space. QES is based on two innovations: (1) it integrates accumulated error feedback to preserve high-precision weight updating signals, and (2) it utilizes a stateless seed replay to reduce memory usage to low-precision inference levels. QES significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art zeroth-order fine-tuning methods on a variety of tasks, making direct fine-tuning for quantized models possible. It therefore opens up the possibility for scaling up LLMs entirely in the quantized space. The source code is available at https://github.com/dibbla/Quantized-Evolution-Strategies .

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Minimum Distance Summaries for Robust Neural Posterior Estimation

arXiv:2602.09161v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Simulation-based inference (SBI) enables amortized Bayesian inference by first training a neural posterior estimator (NPE) on prior-simulator pairs, typically through low-dimensional summary statistics, which can then be cheaply reused for fast inference by querying it on new test observations. Because NPE is estimated under the training data distribution, it is susceptible to misspecification when observations deviate from the training distribution. Many robust SBI approaches address this by modifying NPE training or introducing error models, coupling robustness to the inference network and compromising amortization and modularity. We introduce minimum-distance summaries, a plug-in robust NPE method that adapts queried test-time summaries independently of the pretrained NPE. Leveraging the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) as a distance between observed data and a summary-conditional predictive distribution, the adapted summary inherits strong robustness properties from the MMD. We demonstrate that the algorithm can be implemented efficiently with random Fourier feature approximations, yielding a lightweight, model-free test-time adaptation procedure. We provide theoretical guarantees for the robustness of our algorithm and empirically evaluate it on a range of synthetic and real-world tasks, demonstrating substantial robustness gains with minimal additional overhead.

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

Few-shot Class-variable Incremental Audio Classification via Prototype Adaptation and Pseudo Class-variable Training

arXiv:2606.08898v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In the task of few-shot class-incremental audio classification, the number of classes is assumed to always increase without considering the possibility of decrease. However, the number of classes generally increases or decreases in practice. In this paper, we investigate a problem of Few-shot Class-variable Incremental Audio Classification (FCIAC), in which the number of classes increases or decreases. We propose a FCIAC method using prototype adaptation and pseudo class-variable training. The model in our method consists of an encoder and a classifier. The classifier is initialized by a class-variable prototype adaptation network, whose structure dynamically changes with the change of classes. In addition, we design a pseudo class-variable training strategy to enhance the model's adaptability to changing classes. Experiments on three public datasets show that our method exceeds previous methods in average accuracy. The code is at: https://github.com/cgq2971-afk/FCIAC.

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

Large Fluctuations in Open Quantum Systems

arXiv:2606.11822v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study statistics of atypical measurement outcomes in the steady states of driven open quantum systems. In equilibrium, the probability distribution over the phase space, as encoded in, e.g., the Wigner function, is analytic in the phase-space coordinates. We show that this property is generically lost in driven dissipative systems: their {\it large-deviation function} develops lines and surfaces across which its derivatives are discontinuous. As an illustrative example, we consider a parametrically driven Kerr oscillator coupled linearly and/or nonlinearly to a dissipative bath. Rare fluctuations in the amplitude and phase of the induced oscillations are governed by semiclassical instanton trajectories of the corresponding Keldysh-Lindblad action. We demonstrate that a given fluctuation can be realized through multiple distinct instanton trajectories. The competition between these trajectories leads to abrupt switching of the dominant instanton and, consequently, to non-analytic features in the large-deviation function.

07.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-13

Contribution of nosocomial transmission to <i>Klebsiella pneumoniae</i> neonatal sepsis in Africa and South Asia: An observational study of infection clusters inferred from pathogen genomics and temporal data

by Erkison Ewomazino Odih, Jabir A. Abdulahi, Anne V. Amulele, Matthew Bates, Eva Heinz, Weiming Hu, Kajal Jain, Rindidzani Magobo, Courtney P. Olwagen, John M. Tembo, Tolbert Sonda, Jonathan Strysko, Caroline C. Tigoi, Kyle Bittinger, Jennifer Cornick, Ebenezer Foster-Nyarko, Wilson Gumbi, Steven M. Jones, Chileshe L. Musyani, Carolyn M. McGann, Ahmed M. Moustafa, Patrick Musicha, James C. L. Mwansa, Moreka L. Ndumba, Thomas D. Stanton, Donwilliams O. Omuoyo, Oliver Pearse, Laura T. Phillips, Paul J. Planet, Charlene M. C. Rodrigues, Fatou Secka, Kirsty Sands, Erin Theiller, Allan M. Zuza, Sulagna Basu, Grace J. Chan, Kenneth C. Iregbu, Jean-Baptiste Mazarati, Semaria Solomon Alemayehu, Timothy R. Walsh, Rabaab Zahra, Angela Dramowski, Sombo Fwoloshi, Appiah-Korang Labi, Lola Madrid, Noah Obeng-Nkrumah, David Ojok, Boaz D. Wadugu, Andrew C. Whitelaw, Anudita Bhargava, Atul Jindal, Ramesh K. Agarwal, Alexander M. Aiken, James A. Berkley, Susan E. Coffin, Nicholas A. Feasey, Nelesh P. Govender, Davidson H. Hamer, Shabir A. Madhi, Mari Jeeva Sankar, Kelly L. Wyres, Kathryn E. Holt Background Klebsiella pneumoniae is the leading cause of sepsis among neonates in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Africa and Asia, contributing substantially to the overall burden of antimicrobial-resistant infections and mortality among neonates globally. Pathogen sequencing has been used to investigate case clusters and confirm nosocomial transmission in a small number of neonatal units. Here we utilise pathogen sequence data to estimate the fraction of K. pneumoniae neonatal sepsis attributable to nosocomial transmission in African and South Asian countries. Methods and findings We estimated the proportion of invasive K. pneumoniae disease involved in nosocomial transmission clusters in a given neonatal unit, using single-linkage clustering based on pairwise temporal and genetic distances estimated from bacterial whole-genome sequences aggregated from 10 contributing studies. Analysing 1,523 K. pneumoniae isolates from 27 units in 13 countries in Africa and South Asia between 2013 and 2023, we inferred 156 nosocomial transmission clusters, ranging from 2 to 188 neonates each (83 of the clusters comprised ≥3 cases). Overall, we estimated that 1,035 neonatal infections (68.0%) were part of nosocomial transmission clusters. Excluding the first infection in each cluster as a potential index case, we estimate at least 879 (57.7%) infections were acquired via nosocomial transmission. Sensitivity analyses showed that results were robust to the choice of genetic distance estimation methods and thresholds used to define clusters, and cluster estimates were stable over temporal distance thresholds ranging from 2 to 8 weeks. Isolates were mostly extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL) producers (90.9%) and included 172 multi-locus sequence types (STs). Fourteen STs, including several globally recognised multidrug-resistant lineages, were associated with transmission clusters at multiple units, and these were collectively responsible for two-thirds of all infections. Carriage of carbapenemase genes (adjusted odds ratio, aOR = 2.08 [95% confidence interval, CI: 1.04, 4.14]; p = 0.04) and ESBL genes (aOR = 2.48 [95% CI: 1.26, 4.90]; p = 0.006) were significantly positively associated with transmission in a logistic regression model with site as a covariate. Limitations of this study include the lack of sufficient clinical data to allow high-resolution investigation of transmission dynamics and lack of facility-level data to investigate contributors to the observed differences in transmission burden across sites. Conclusions Nosocomial transmission contributes to a substantial proportion of K. pneumoniae sepsis in neonatal care units in Africa and South Asia. Reducing transmission within these settings through improved infection prevention and control and other measures could substantially reduce the neonatal sepsis burden. A high burden of transmission clusters is associated with the same drug-resistant lineages that are recognised as high-risk clones associated with hospital outbreaks in high-income countries, indicating global connectivity of the antimicrobial-resistant pathogen population.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Leave-One-Out-, Bootstrap- and Cross-Conformal Anomaly Detectors

arXiv:2402.16388v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The need for uncertainty quantification in anomaly detection systems has become increasingly important. In this context, effectively controlling Type I error rates without inflating Type II error rates in these systems can build trust and reduce costs associated with false discoveries. The field of conformal anomaly detection emerges as a promising approach for providing respective statistical and finite-sample validity guarantees through model calibration. However, reliance on calibration data imposes practical limitations, especially in low-data regimes. In this work, we formally define and evaluate leave-one-out-, bootstrap-, and cross-conformal methods for conformal anomaly detection, building on methods from the field of conformal prediction. Looking beyond the classical split-conformal approach, we show that derived methods for calculating resampling-conformal $p$-values offer a practical compromise between the data efficiency of full-conformal (transductive) approaches and the computational efficiency of split-conformal (inductive) methods. We validate derived methods and quantify their improvements for a range of one-class classifiers and datasets.

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

MemBoost: A Memory-Boosted Framework for Cost-Aware LLM Inference

Large Language Models (LLMs) deliver strong performance but incur high inference cost in real-world services, especially under workloads with repeated or near-duplicate queries across users and sessions. In this work, we propose MemBoost, a memory-boosted LLM serving framework that enables a lightweight model to reuse previously generated answers and retrieve relevant supporting information for cheap inference, while selectively escalating difficult or uncertain queries to a stronger model. Unlike standard retrieval-augmented generation, which primarily grounds a single response, MemBoost is designed for interactive settings by supporting answer reuse, continual memory growth, and cost-aware routing. Experiments across multiple models under simulated workloads show that MemBoost substantially reduces expensive large-model invocations and overall inference cost, while maintaining high answer quality comparable to the strong model baseline.

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

Approximating Whittle-Matern Fields over Discretized Manifolds

arXiv:2606.13827v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Markovian Whittle-Matérn fields have been convergently approximated by discrete Gauss Markov Random Fields (GMRFs) with sparse precision matrices using a Finite Element approximation of the two-parameter family, \[ (\kappa^2 - \Delta)^{\alpha/2} u = \mathcal{W}, \;\; \kappa \in \mathbb{R}, \; \alpha \in \mathbb{N}. \] of SPDEs. Using recent developements in the analysis of Discrete Exterior Calculus (DEC), we present a different, yet closely related, convergent GMRF approximation to these Matérn fields over complete, boundaryless Riemannian manifolds discretized as well-centered simplicial complexes. This convergent method (i) is agnostic to $\alpha, \kappa$ and thus allows a universal approximation scheme for the precision and covariance matrices of the entire $(\alpha, \kappa)$-family of GMRFs, so they may be inferred rather than guessed. (ii) inherently models pointwise and piecewise-smoothed measurements of a random field and approximates both equally well (iii) is computationally independent of the interpolants used - it suffers no overhead if one convergent interpolant were replaced with another suitable interpolant over the same mesh. Furthermore, we show that, on discretizations that are well-connected in a precise sense, and volume-concentrated, the precision matrices are spectral functions of a graph-laplacian. We provide a low rank approximator to the family of such Matérn GMRFs and mention a use case: reducing the number of measurements needed to model the GMRF by compressed-sensing.

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

Adaptive Activation Steering for Efficient LLM Reasoning via Closed-Loop PID Control

Reasoning LLMs trained with long chain-of-thought often overthink: they spend tokens on redundant reflection and transitions that inflate cost without improving accuracy. Static activation steering (e.g.\ SEAL) suppresses such content with a fixed vector, but applies the same strength regardless of how redundant the current chunk actually is. We describe PID-steering, a training-free, decoding-time method that modulates the steering strength with a PID controller driven by a lightweight chunk-level redundancy classifier. On a subset of GSM8K with DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B, the method improves accuracy from 85.7\% to 89.6\% (+3.9 pp) while cutting average output length from 1026 to 790 tokens ($-$23\%). We report it as a small-scale proof of concept rather than a benchmark result.

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

Beyond the Linear Separability Ceiling: Aligning Representations in VLMs

A challenge in advancing Visual-Language Models (VLMs) is determining whether their failures on abstract reasoning tasks, such as Bongard problems, stem from flawed perception or faulty top-down reasoning. To disentangle these factors, we introduce a diagnostic framework centered on the Linear Separability Ceiling (LSC), the performance achievable by a linear classifier on a VLM's raw visual embeddings. Applying this framework to state-of-the-art VLMs, we uncover a pervasive ''alignment gap'', where most models fail to generatively outperform the linear separability of their representations. We find that the few models surpassing this ceiling do so via two mechanisms: by further refining visual representations into a more linearly separable format or by executing non-linear decision logic. We demonstrate that this bottleneck is not a fundamental limitation but a solvable visual alignment issue. Our method augments standard next-token prediction with a contrastive objective to restructure the visual manifold into a more one-dimensionally linear geometry, improving image-to-image comparison and enabling models to significantly surpass the LSC on abstract compositional reasoning tasks.

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

Time Series Causal Discovery via Context-Conditioned and Causality-Augmented Pretraining

arXiv:2605.26759v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Causal discovery from time series is critical for many real-world applications, such as tracing the root causes of anomalies. Existing approaches typically rely on dataset-specific optimization, making it difficult to transfer their causal discovery capabilities to new time series governed by diverse causal mechanisms. In this paper, we propose PTCD, a novel Pretraining framework for Time-series Causal Discovery, which improves cross-task generalization through context-conditioned modeling and transferable causal augmentation. To model complex temporal causal dependencies, PTCD employs a dual-scale iterative attention mechanism to capture window-level causal relationships, and a Gaussian mixture with a context-level routing mechanism to handle heterogeneous exogenous distributions. To further address distribution shifts across causal graphs, PTCD adopts a pretraining paradigm on synthetic datasets that integrates intervention-based learning and a causal mixup strategy, promoting stable causal discovery and stronger generalization. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world out-of-distribution (OOD) datasets demonstrate that PTCD excels in both causal discovery and root cause identification.

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

A fairness-aware extension of Stochastic Multicriteria Acceptability Analysis for ranking

arXiv:2606.17756v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fairness has become a central concern in ranking problems involving individuals or social groups, particularly under the Responsible Artificial Intelligence agenda. In Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis, Stochastic Multicriteria Acceptability Analysis (SMAA) provides a robust framework for handling uncertainty and incomplete preference information, but it does not explicitly address fairness in the resulting rankings. This paper proposes SMAA-Fair, a fairness-aware extension of SMAA for ranking problems. The approach reweights the simulated rankings generated by SMAA according to their level of group fairness, so that fairer rankings contribute more strongly to the acceptability indices and central weights vector. The framework is independent of the aggregation model and can incorporate different fairness metrics. In this study, Statistical Parity, normalized discounted Kullback–Leibler divergence (rKL) and normalized discounted cumulative Kullback–Leibler divergence (nDKL) are adopted. Rankings are derived from the fairness-adjusted acceptability matrix using expected ranking and maximum acceptability ranking. We also derive the central weight according to the degree of fairness in the obtained rankings. Numerical experiments with synthetic and real data show that SMAA-Fair improves the representation of protected groups among favourable ranking positions, while preserving robustness to preference uncertainty.

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

The Shrinking Lifespan of LLMs in Science

arXiv:2604.07530v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Scaling laws describe how language model capabilities grow with compute and data, but say nothing about how long a model matters once released. We introduce time-to-peak and lifespan as measures of model obsolescence and use them to characterize the scientific adoption trajectories of 62 LLMs across more than 108k citing papers (2019-2025), separating active adoption from background citation to recover per-model trajectories that citation counts cannot resolve. We find that a model's longevity is shaped more by when it was released than by its characteristics: release year predicts time-to-peak and lifespan more strongly than architecture, openness, or scale. LLM adoption follows an inverted-U curve (rising after release, peaking, and then declining), but this pattern is rapidly compressing. Each successive release year is associated with a 27% shorter time-to-peak and a 23% shorter lifespan ($p < 0.001$), robust to minimum-age thresholds and controls for model size. These adoption-side dynamics are invisible to scaling laws and suggest that specialization on any single model may be a depreciating investment, with costs falling on reproducibility and migration.

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

Credibility-Weighted Pricing of Autonomous Vehicle Liability Under Operational Design Domain Shift

作者:

arXiv:2606.17451v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automated Driving System deployments create a foundational ratemaking challenge: sparse experience, shifting operational design domains, and non-stationary risk across software releases. We propose a hierarchical Bayesian credibility framework pooling across cities, software versions, and territories via a learned ODD-similarity kernel, nesting Buhlmann-Straub as a limiting case. Demonstrated on 648 verified-engaged Waymo crashes across four U.S. metros from the NHTSA Standing General Order database against 116 million matched miles, city-aggregate credibility weights are moderate (0.12-0.46), partial pooling decisively outperforms no pooling, and a power analysis shows the learned kernel's advantage becomes detectable at approximately twelve deployed cities.

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

Dual-State Slot Attention: Decoupling Appearance and Identity for Video Object-Centric Learning

Unsupervised video object-centric learning aims to decompose dynamic scenes into persistent, object-level representations without supervision. However, existing slot-based methods struggle to maintain stable object identity in challenging settings such as rapid motion and partial occlusion. First, they typically encode both the per-frame appearance of an object and its identity across frames in a single slot vector, creating an objective conflict that leads to slot swapping: reconstruction requires sensitivity to transient visual changes, whereas temporal consistency requires invariance to them. Second, the token renormalization used in Slot Attention can amplify weakly attending slots, allowing them to absorb tokens from other objects and destabilize slot-to-object correspondence. We propose Dual-State Slot Attention (DSSA), a fully self-supervised framework that addresses these limitations by separating appearance from identity and by reducing spurious updates from weakly matching slots. DSSA decomposes each slot into a local state for per-frame appearance and an identity state for temporally stable object information, thereby aligning reconstruction and temporal consistency with separate representations. The identity state is updated through a learned recurrent transition that acts as a temporal filter on the local state, while competition-modulated aggregation (CMA) down-weights updates from weakly matching slots and prevents them from absorbing tokens from other objects. Experiments on MOVi-C, MOVi-D, and YouTube-VIS demonstrate that DSSA consistently improves segmentation quality and temporal consistency over prior methods, while also yielding stronger downstream object recognition and video dynamics prediction. Code and models will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

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

From Democracies to Autocracies: How AI Systems Enable Authoritarianism by Design

arXiv:2606.17286v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI-enabled authoritarianism is not confined to autocracies. In this paper, we provide greater transparency by investigating and mapping the lifecycles of six AI systems deployed in different political regimes, ranging from the US to China. By drawing on an extensive range of sources (academic publications, investigative research reports, third-party evaluations, media interviews, government procurement notices), we conduct a systematic, qualitative comparison across systems to identify the critical technical and operational features that enable authoritarianism within their respective political contexts. We find that enabling features include the centralization and co-optation of administrative data for law enforcement and political punishment, regulatory gaps that fail to deter misuse, weak user compliance that nullifies human oversight mechanisms, and the encoding of protected group traits that identify members of vulnerable populations. We find that these features are present across systems deployed in autocratic and democratic regimes, albeit in varying configurations. We also find that both centralized and fragmented AI systems can contribute to authoritarianism by exploiting governance gaps: centralized systems directed by executive authorities, particularly within security and military institutions, are often not subjected to formal oversight mechanisms, while fragmented systems diffuse accountability between stakeholders, paving the way for entrenchment. These findings reveal that AI-enabled authoritarianism is distributed, resulting from design and operational choices made by developers, administrators, and users alike. We conclude with recommendations for developers and policymakers to mitigate these risks.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Graphical Causal Reasoning for Root Cause Analysis in Cloud Networks

arXiv:2606.13532v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cloud-computing relies on large-scale networks which are inherently complex systems. In this paper, we present a novel approach to root cause analysis (RCA) of cloud network incidents, leveraging graph-based causal discovery techniques. Our method addresses the limitations of rule-based automation by introducing a spatiotemporal grouping strategy and an automation ontology to reduce the dimensionality of the problem. We construct a causal graph from binary time series data using bivariate Granger causality and conditional independence tests. For inference, we introduce a probabilistic method that assigns edge-specific conditional probabilities as a function of time lag, allowing for interpretable, time-aware root cause scoring via causal graph traversal. We evaluated the system using a labeled dataset of 35 production incidents from a major cloud provider. The model successfully recalled the correct root cause in 85.7% of incidents and produced an exact match in 74.3%. In production, the deployed system has been used in over 800 real-world incidents, with positive qualitative feedback from network engineers. These results highlight the practicality of a data-driven, causal approach to RCA in dynamic and large-scale operational environments.

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

Measuring Curriculum Alignment across Topical Coverage, Competency, and Cognitive Depth: A Longitudinal Framework Applied to CS2013 and CS2023

arXiv:2606.19469v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Undergraduate computer science is governed by international curricular guidelines revised about once a decade, yet programs lack a reliable, reproducible way to measure how completely they cover the current guidelines and how that coverage shifts when the guidelines are restructured. We address this with a human-in-the-loop pipeline that measures a program's coverage of an external body of knowledge, applied longitudinally to one accredited BSc in Computer Science against Computer Science Curricula 2013 (CS2013) and 2023 (CS2023). The pipeline represents the program and each guideline as structured corpora, generates candidate course-to-knowledge-unit matches by semantic retrieval, and confirms them through human judgment under an explicit coverage definition. Of seven benchmarked retrievers, a reciprocal-rank-fusion ensemble was strongest, and a reputed long-context model underperformed a small sentence model, so retriever choice must be measured. Both maps were validated by an independent second rater (Cohen's kappa 0.64 for CS2023, 0.69 for CS2013). The program covers 49.7% of CS2023 and 50.9% of CS2013 knowledge units, near-constant across a decade. Extending the same retrieve-then-confirm design to competency articulation and cognitive depth shows that the program articulates the competency for ~88% of covered units under each guideline, yet delivers it at the recommended depth for 76% of present units under CS2023 against 95% under CS2013, a gap reflecting the newer guideline's raised expectations, not the program. The longitudinal comparison separates persistent structural gaps (parallel and distributed computing, foundations of programming languages, systems fundamentals), uncovered against both guidelines and ABET, from differences that reflect the standard's evolution. The instrument is reusable and available from the authors on request.

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

Constrained hybrid modelling to predict microbial dynamics and organic matter turnover in soil systems

arXiv:2606.20329v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Soil microorganisms control organic matter cycling and largely determine how soil systems can cope with and mitigate climate change and environmental threats. Representing microbial dynamics in process-based soil models is therefore critical to predict carbon cycling in soils, albeit highly challenging to inform from data. One promising approach to improve their parametrisation is the integration of genomic data, yet modelling the complex and unknown relationship between genomes and the processes the microbes are driving is an unsolved problem. In this work, we present the first hybrid modeling framework for deriving biokinetic parameter values of a process-based soil organic matter turnover model from metagenome-inferred functional traits based on DNA sequencing data. Our model predicts biokinetic parameters of the process-based model from genomic trait data with a neural network and integrates constraints from ecological theory and literature to ensure realistic behavior, even of non-observed state variables. We evaluate our method on synthetic genomic trait datasets of varying complexity and on real data, showing that our approach improves performance over multiple baselines and learns the dynamics of unmeasurable components of the process-based model effectively, even for small training datasets.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

TAB-PO: Preference Optimization with a Token-Level Adaptive Barrier for Token-Critical Structured Generation

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is an effective and widely adopted approach for offline alignment but is poorly matched to ontology-driven structured prediction, where preferred and rejected JSON objects often differ in only a few schema-defining tokens. In this low-edit-distance regime, sequence-level DPO spreads gradient mass across non-critical serialization tokens (gradient dilution) and can reduce likelihood on rare, under-confident preferred schema tokens (token erosion). To address these limitations, we first develop a confusion-aware preference-construction strategy that augments expert-curated ambiguity patterns with empirical structured-error modes estimated from validation-set SFT predictions, synthesizing minimally perturbed, schema-valid negatives that focus preference learning on realistic ontology-level decision errors. We then introduce Token-Adaptive Barrier Preference Optimization (TAB-PO), a post-SFT objective for token-critical structured generation. TAB-PO adds a confidence-gated token-level barrier that applies supervised anchoring to under-confident schema tokens. On the public SciERC scientific information extraction task, evaluated with Llama/Qwen models from 1.5B to 70B, TAB-PO improves ontology-critical semantic-label and relational-linking metrics over SFT by 11.59% on average, wins 100% of comparisons against the strongest token-level and sequence-level DPO variants on these metrics, and surpasses leading frontier models by 14.71%, while delivering strong gains in textual grounding.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Design Methodology and Performance Trade-offs Management for Distributed and Compound AI Systems

arXiv:2606.14350v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems must typically satisfy service-level objectives including accuracy, latency, and cost. The prevailing model-centric approaches select a monolithic model at design time and apply identical computation regardless of input difficulty, cannot decompose tasks across specialized components, and have knowledge that is fixed at training time. During runtime, this can lead to performance degradation and increasing costs. Because the model is the main design variable, it determines the majority of system behavior, coupling operational objectives to a single design-time choice. Addressing these limitations requires shifting from model-centric to system-centric design. Compound AI systems realize this shift by orchestrating multiple models, algorithms, and tools as distributed AI systems through explicit control logic. The performance of such systems depends on their workflow topology, the models assigned to each task, and the parameters governing runtime behavior. We present a design methodology that organizes this space along two dimensions, workflow topology and configuration selection, and identifies eight design patterns, each consolidating techniques to address a specific limitation of monolithic deployment. We validate our methodology through three case studies. Across our case studies, Compound AI configurations approach accuracy of monolithic models within 2.5 to 4 percentage points while reducing latency by up to 60% and cost by up to 71%. We show that model selection and parameter configuration jointly determine system performance, but the resulting design space grows combinatorially, as workflows compose more patterns and components. Thus, we identify five open challenges that define a roadmap from manually configured prototypes towards systems that automatically discover and maintain SLO-compliance in Compound and Distributed AI systems.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Factor Analysing Predictive Processing: No Evidence for a General Factor Across Tasks

Background & Hypothesis: Dysfunctional predictive processing (PP), specifically the aberrant weighting of priors, is a frequently-proposed mechanism for psychosis and psychosis-like phenomena (schizotypy). Evidence for this theory mostly originates from single-task studies, which assume that all tasks load onto a single latent construct of PP performance, but the underlying factor structure of PP tasks is unknown. PP deficits in psychosis may be better described by a two-factor, hierarchical model: weakened lower-level (perceptual) priors compensated by higher-level (cognitive) priors. Study Design: This study implements a multi-paradigm approach in healthy participants to investigate latent constructs underlying PP and their relationship to schizotypy. Participants (N = 73) completed 6 tasks measuring reliance on priors across language, memory, visual, and auditory domains. A factor analysis investigated whether performance across tasks is captured by a single or two-factor model. Study Results: Although a two-factor model best described performance, factors reflected within-task correlations rather than a PP hierarchy. Cross-task PP measures were poorly correlated, suggesting that individuals' weighting of priors was task-specific. A full model including all task outcomes (not factors) significantly predicted the severity of schizotypal aberrant beliefs but no other schizotypal measures. Conclusions: These results do not evidence a single factor underpinning PP performance. It is therefore inappropriate to use results from single tasks to propose a generalised PP deficit in psychosis. Variation was also not captured by a two-factor hierarchical model of priors. Further multi-paradigm research is required to evaluate alternative models or additional variables that describe aberrant PP in psychosis.