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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Scalar Quantum Fields: Theory Space and its Geometry

Authors:
Viola Gattus↗Peter Millington↗

arXiv:2606.12580v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scalar fields provide perhaps the simplest playground in which to develop our understanding of quantum field theory. In this lecture, we consider what it means to write down a scalar quantum field theory and how we can give geometrical interpretations to the space of such theories: the theory space.

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02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Non-Hermitian Crystalline Braid Topology from Hermitian Projection: A Zero-Mode Resonance Mechanism

Authors:
Stefan {\DJ}or{\dj}evi\'c↗Vladimir Juri\v{c}i\'c↗

arXiv:2606.06626v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Non-Hermitian topological phases are typically engineered through gain and loss, nonreciprocity, or interaction with an environment. Here we show that they can instead emerge purely by projecting a fully Hermitian, topologically trivial parent lattice onto an embedded subsystem. The mechanism is general: when a zero mode of the eliminated degrees of freedom couples to the retained subsystem, the embedding self-energy develops a pole, the zero-frequency description becomes singular, and topology is carried by the finite-frequency projected Green's function. We realize the mechanism exactly in a trivial nearest-neighbor square lattice with an embedded one-dimensional zig-zag brane. In the periodic transverse geometry, the parity of the eliminated complement selects the outcome: even sectors reduce to a regular Schur complement and yield conventional SSH-type descendants, whereas odd sectors host a sublattice-imbalance zero mode and follow the resonant route. There, the complex bands braid through isolated finite-frequency exceptional points (EPs), while a parity symmetry inherited from the embedding, together with $\mathrm{TRS}^{\dagger}$, induces conjugated pseudo-Hermiticity and quantizes the complex Berry phase. The stable bulk invariant of the nondegenerate phases is this quantized complex Berry phase; adjacent sectors are separated by parity-paired exceptional points whose half-integer vorticities encode the local exchange of complex-energy strands.The absence of the non-Hermitian skin effect ensures that the invariant is defined directly on the ordinary Brillouin zone. A topolectrical implementation of the projected response predicts momentum-resolved transmission minima at the exceptional-point transition frequencies together with a characteristic low-frequency resonant admittance, providing an experimentally testable signature of the mechanism.

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04.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Calibrated Uncertainty Quantification for Patient-Level AML Drug Sensitivity Prediction Using Split Conformal Prediction

Authors:
Shokrzadeh↗A. J↗

Accurate prediction of ex vivo drug sensitivity in acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patients from transcriptomic data is a critical challenge for precision oncology. Existing computational approaches have explored uncertainty quantification in cancer drug response prediction primarily using cell line data, while patient-level AML models typically rely on heuristic confidence measures rather than statistically calibrated uncertainty estimates. Here, we present a framework applying split conformal prediction to patient-level AML drug response modeling using the BeatAML 2.0 cohort. We trained Elastic Net and XGBoost regressors on bulk RNA-seq gene expression profiles from 318 AML patients, analyzing 34,764 patient-drug observations across 122 compounds. Baseline models achieved median Pearson R values of 0.291 (Elastic Net) and 0.281 (XGBoost) across 122 drugs. Wrapping these models with split conformal prediction yielded well-calibrated prediction intervals across three confidence levels: empirical coverages of 81.4%, 90.7%, and 95.5% against nominal targets of 80%, 90%, and 95%, respectively. Analysis of prediction interval widths revealed substantial drug-class-specific uncertainty patterns, with HDAC and BCL-2 inhibitors exhibiting markedly higher uncertainty than MDM2 inhibitors, suggesting a potential association between transcriptomic predictability and drug mechanism of action, although several drug classes were represented by only a small number of compounds. Predictive uncertainty was not significantly associated with ELN2017 molecular risk classification (Kruskal-Wallis p=0.395) or NPM1 mutation status (p=0.788). These results demonstrate that statistically valid uncertainty quantification can be achieved for patient-level AML drug response prediction despite substantial biological heterogeneity. to the best of our knowledge, no published study has applied split conformal prediction to patient-level ex vivo drug sensitivity prediction in the BeatAML cohort, providing a principled alternative to heuristic confidence scoring approaches. Keywords: Acute myeloid leukemia (AML); Ex vivo drug sensitivity; Conformal prediction; Uncertainty quantification; Precision oncology; BeatAML; Transcriptomic biomarkers; Machine learning.

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

Localizing Anchoring Pathways in Language Models

Authors:
Hillary N. Owusu↗Sarah Wiegreffe↗Naomi H. Feldman↗

Irrelevant numbers in a prompt can shift language model judgments, producing anchoring effects in numerical reasoning. We study where this anchor-sensitive signal is carried inside language models using a controlled multiple-choice setup with shared answer options. We define a logit-difference metric comparing the correct answer option with the answer option corresponding to the anchor, and validate that it tracks behavioral anchoring. Using attribution-based circuit localization on 7B–8B Qwen and Llama base and instruction-tuned models, we find that edge-level methods recover this signal more faithfully than node-level methods. Low- and high-anchor circuits transfer strongly within a model, suggesting shared pathway structure across anchor direction. However, sparse transfer across base and instruction-tuned variants is less reliable, indicating that post-training changes which pathways matter most. Overall, our results provide a mechanistic account of how anchoring-related decision signals are carried inside language models.

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

Zero-source LLM Hallucination Detection with Human-like Criteria Probing

Authors:
Jiahao Yang↗Shuhai Zhang↗Hailong Kang↗Feng Liu↗Qi Chen↗Mingkui Tan↗

Large language models (LLMs) often hallucinate by generating factually incorrect or unfaithful content, posing significant risks to their safe use. Detecting such hallucinations is particularly challenging under the zero-source constraint, where no model internals or external references are available, and detection must rely solely on the textual query-answer pair. In this paper, we propose Human-like Criteria Probing for Hallucination Detection (HCPD), a paradigm that emulates the multi-faceted reasoning of human evaluators. Its core is a Human-like Criteria Probing (HCP) mechanism, in which a LLM agent adaptively decomposes its judgment into a weighted set of interpretable criteria and aggregates criterion-specific scores into a final truthfulness measure. To achieve this adaptive capability, we introduce a reward-based alignment scheme using only weak supervision from semantic consistency. At inference, we employ a multi-sampling aggregation strategy to ensure robust decisions while preserving full interpretability. We further provide theoretical analysis supporting the reliability of our approach. Extensive experiments show that HCPD consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, offering an effective and explainable solution for zero-source hallucination detection. Code is available at https://github.com/TRISKEL10N/HCPD.

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07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Sample Path Properties of the Fractional Wiener–Weierstrass Bridge II

Authors:
Alexander Schied↗Zhenyuan Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.11994v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fractional Wiener–Weierstrass bridges are a class of Gaussian processes obtained by replacing trigonometric functions in the construction of classical Weierstrass functions by fractional Brownian bridges. A number of their sample path properties were derived in Schied–Zhang (2024,2026). The analysis in these papers left several open questions, most of which are addressed here. Specifically, we prove that, in the regime in which the Weierstrass mechanism dominates the underlying fractional Brownian bridge, the limiting $b$-adic variation coefficient has an absolutely continuous distribution and is therefore genuinely random. At the critical point between the two roughness regimes, we establish the power-variation formula and the critical $\Phi$-variation limit conjectured in Schied–Zhang (2024). Finally, we derive the Hausdorff dimension for the graphs of the sample paths by proving a conjecture from Schied–Zhang (2026) for the missing high-Hurst case.

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08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

A Model-Driven Approach for Developing Families of Reinforcement Learning Environments

Authors:
Xiaoran Liu↗Istvan David↗

arXiv:2606.20324v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Virtual training environments are software-intensive systems in which reinforcement learning (RL) agents learn, adapt, and demonstrate meaningful behavior. Virtual training environments offer a safe and cost-efficient alternative to training agents in real-world settings. However, to converge, most realistic RL problems require training in multiple, mostly similar but slightly different environments - i.e., families of environment variants. The typical development process of environment families is a labor-intensive and error-prone manual endeavor that does not scale well. To alleviate these issues, in this paper, we propose a model-driven approach for developing families of RL training environments. To obtain the family of environments, we develop an approach and prototype tool. In our approach, a hybrid genetic algorithm - a combination of population-based global search and heuristic local search - generates environment families. Mutations and constraints are expressed as model transformations and are operationalized into a search process by a state-of-the-art model transformation engine. We demonstrate the soundness of our approach in a wildfire mitigation scenario and curriculum learning - a particular learning paradigm that relies on environment families.

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

Robust and Interpretable Adaptation of Equivariant Materials Foundation Models via Sparsity-promoting Fine-tuning

Authors:
Youngwoo Cho↗Seunghoon Yi↗Wooil Yang↗Sungmo Kang↗Young-woo Son↗Jaegul Choo↗Joonseok Lee↗Soo Kyung Kim↗Hongkee Yoon↗

arXiv:2606.18691v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pre-trained materials foundation models, or machine learning interatomic potentials, leverage general physicochemical knowledge to effectively approximate potential energy surfaces. However, they often require domain-specific calibration due to physicochemical diversity as well as mismatches between practical computational settings and those used in constructing the pre-training data. To address this, we propose a sparsity-promoting fine-tuning method that selectively updates model parameters by exploiting the structural properties of E(3)-equivariant materials foundation models. On energy and force prediction tasks across molecular and crystalline benchmarks, our method matches or surpasses full fine-tuning and equivariant low-rank adaptation while updating only $\sim$3~\% of parameters, and in some cases as little as $\sim$0.5~\%. Beyond energy and force calibration, we further demonstrate task generalizability by applying our method to magnetic moment prediction and magnetism-aware total energy modeling. Finally, analysis of sparsity patterns reveals physically interpretable signatures, such as enhanced $d$-orbital contributions in transition metal systems. Overall, our results establish sparsity-promoting fine-tuning as a flexible and interpretable method for domain specialization of equivariant materials foundation models.

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10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

GEN-Guard: Correcting Generalization Failures for Deployable Federated Surgical AI

Authors:
Julia Alekseenko↗Pietro Mascagni↗AISafeChole Consortium↗Nicolas Padoy↗

Federated Learning (FL) in surgical video AI enables collaborative model training without sharing sensitive data. However, standard evaluation practices - selecting the "best" global model based only on validation data from participating hospitals - can lead to suboptimal deployment choices. We identify this critical failure mode as performance leakage, where the selected model overfits internal federation data and fails to generalize to unseen institutions. We propose GEN-Guard, a practical post-hoc framework to detect and correct generalization failures in federated surgical AI. It integrates Generalization Detection via Client-Blocked Evaluation (CBE), which validates performance on isolated client distributions to prevent performance leakage, and Generalization Correction through Disagreement-Aware Distillation (DAD), which learns adaptive feature-level corrections for cross-institutional robustness. Both components operate after standard FL convergence while providing robust support for zero-shot adaptation to unseen environments. We first quantify the severity of performance leakage, observing Model Selection Failures (MSFs) exceeding 80% under standard evaluation. GEN-Guard is evaluated on two multi-center clinical challenges: surgical phase recognition in laparoscopic cholecystectomy and polyp segmentation in colonoscopy. Across both datasets, GEN-Guard consistently corrects these failures, improving in-federation F1 scores by up to 2 points, unseen-institution performance by up to 3 points, and worst-case institutional performance by 3-9 points. Performance leakage represents a systematic and previously under-recognized risk in federated surgical AI. GEN-Guard provides a practical solution for detecting and correcting such failures. By improving cross-institutional robustness and zero-shot generalization, it strengthens the reliability of FL for real-world surgical deployment.

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

A saturation-absorption rubidium magnetometer with multilevel optical Bloch-equation modeling for intermediate-to-high fields

Authors:
Mayand Dangi↗Prateek Rajan Gupta↗Joseph Kasti↗Nivedan Vishwanath↗Michael Zepp↗David Smith↗Benedikt Geiger↗Jennifer T. Choy↗

arXiv:2601.09115v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present SASHMAG (Saturated Absorption Spectroscopy High-field MAGnetometer), an atomic sensor designed for precision magnetic-field measurements in the intermediate-to-high field regime ($>0.2\,T$) using Rubidium-87 ($^{87}Rb$). The sensor operates in the hyperfine Paschen-Back regime, where the hyperfine and Zeeman interactions decouple, and utilizes counter-propagating pump-probe configuration in Faraday geometry to resolve isolated, Doppler-free Zeeman transitions. To interpret the resulting spectra in this strongly field-dependent regime, we developed a comprehensive multilevel optical Bloch-equation model solved explicitly in the uncoupled $\ket{m_I, m_J}$ basis, capturing state mixing and nonlinear saturation dynamics. This model reproduces measured spectra at sub-Doppler resolution and is consistent with analytical expectations for power broadening and thermal Doppler scaling. Magnetic field estimation is performed using a physics-constrained optimization routine that infers the magnetic field by minimizing the residual between experimentally extracted line centers and calculated transition frequencies from the field-dependent Hamiltonian. We demonstrate magnetic field retrieval from $0.2\,T$ to $0.4\,T$ with a precision of $\pm 0.0017 \,T$). Furthermore, the validated simulation establishes a foundation for generating synthetic training datasets, paving the way for autonomous, Machine Learning-enhanced magnetometry in applications ranging from MRI to fusion reactors.

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12.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Structure of the pre-initiation complex explains CMGE biogenesis

Authors:
Thomas Pühringer↗

When cells enter S phase, bidirectional DNA replication is initiated through the kinase-regulated recruitment of three activators (Cdc45, GINS and Pol ε) to a duplex-DNA-loaded double hexamer of minichromosome maintenance (MCM) ATPases. Together, these proteins form two CMGE helicases that establish divergent replication forks as they become separated1. Here, to gain an understanding of CMGE biogenesis, we reconstituted the pre-initiation complex with purified yeast proteins. The cryo-electron-microscopy structure shows a set of firing factors caught in the act of assembling two symmetrical CMGEs. We show how stepwise complex formation reshapes MCM in preparation for DNA opening, and we explain how ATP promotes firing-factor ejection and CMGE maturation. We find that although Sld2 facilitates the recruitment of GINS to MCM, as expected, it also aids the efficient separation of the CMGE dimer, and is essential for the ejection of the lagging strand from MCM. These findings have direct implications for our understanding of the metazoan Sld2 orthologue, RECQL4, and point to a replication-fork establishment mechanism that is conserved across eukaryotes. Cryo-electron microscopy and biochemical reconstitution experiments in yeast provide insight into the assembly of the CMGE complex, a helicase that establishes bidirectional DNA replication in eukaryotic cells, and elucidate the role of the firing factor Sld2.

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

Contextual Bandits for Maximizing Stimulated Word-of-Mouth Rewards

Authors:
Ahmed Sayeed Faruk↗Elena Zheleva↗

arXiv:2606.15146v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Stimulated word-of-mouth is a strategy that promotes information sharing through prompts or incentives. Optimizing stimulated word-of-mouth through social networks requires identifying and targeting connected users who are most susceptible to spillover, a phenomenon where the influence of recommendations extends beyond the immediate audience to impact their connected users. The probability of spillover varies across individuals, and their connections, leading to heterogeneity. Understanding and accurately estimating the spillover probabilities among users in social networks is crucial for improving the effectiveness of stimulated word-of-mouth. To address this, we present a novel contextual multi-armed bandit framework that learns individual spillover probabilities and ranks connected users to maximize rewards from stimulated word-of-mouth. Experiments on real-world network datasets demonstrate that accounting for spillover heterogeneity enhances the targeting precision of top-$k$ connected users, boosting rewards and outperforming baseline methods that do not learn individual spillover effects.

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14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Steering Where to Listen: Instruction-Based Activation Steering Redirects Temporal Attention in Large Audio-Language Models

Authors:
Tsung-En Lin↗Hung-Yi Lee↗

arXiv:2606.11400v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) excel at audio understanding but expose little about where in an audio signal they attend. We introduce instruction-based vector steering, which constructs a steering vector by contrasting activations from differently instructed prompts while keeping the audio fixed. Through a systematic probe of LALM attention, we find that - unlike standard prompting or audio-based steering - this intervention significantly redistributes the temporal attention allocated to audio tokens, concentrating it on acoustically relevant regions. We then show that this attention shift is behaviorally meaningful: in a controlled three-event setting, reading out the temporal position of maximal steering-induced attention change recovers the location of a queried sound event without any training, attaining 60.87% and 68.72% overlap with ground-truth intervals on Qwen2-Audio and Audio Flamingo 3, far above direct prompting (31.84%, 46.75%) and random baselines (27.74%). Our results characterize a mechanistic property of instruction-based steering in LALMs and provide a training-free probe for the latent temporal structure these models encode.

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15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Clinically Aligned Geometry Constraints for Robust IVUS Vessel Boundary Segmentation

Authors:
Yunshu Chen↗Litao Yang↗Giuseppe Di Giovanni↗Jordan Tan↗Deval Mehta↗Andrew Lin↗Derek Chew↗Masasi Fujino↗Julie Butters↗Stephen Nicholls↗Zongyuan Ge↗Kyung Hoon Cho↗…

Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) lumen and external elastic membrane (EEM) segmentation is important for quantitative coronary plaque burden assessment. Errors in lumen or EEM delineation directly propagate to plaque area, plaque burden and geometric measurements. However, standard methods prioritising overlap scores often suffer from boundary drift and topology errors, leading to inaccurate clinical measurements. We present GeoCat, a geometry-consistent network that processes 5-frame IVUS clips using dual Cartesian-polar encoders with cross-domain attention and temporal fusion. A differentiable geometry consistency loss directly supervises clinically relevant descriptors including diameters, orientations, and cross-sectional areas. The model is trained on 12,242 annotated frames from 146 patients acquired with two commercial IVUS systems. We evaluate performance using both segmentation accuracy and plaque-relevant clinical metrics, including Dice/IoU, boundary measures(95HD (mm), ASSD), topology violation rate, and clinical geometry errors (dmax/dmin, angles, and areas). On our dataset, GeoCat achieves a Dice of 0.93, reduces 95HD to 0.14 mm, and lowers topology violations to 1.0%. Importantly, it significantly improves geometric fidelity, yielding diameter errors of 0.13-0.16 mm and angular errors of ~8 degrees, supporting reliable plaque burden quantification.

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

MGUP: A Momentum-Gradient Alignment Update Policy for Stochastic Optimization

Authors:
Da Chang↗Ganzhao Yuan↗

arXiv:2606.17526v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient optimization is essential for training large language models. Although intra-layer selective updates have been explored, a general mechanism that enables fine-grained control while ensuring convergence guarantees is still lacking. To bridge this gap, we propose MGUP, a novel mechanism for selective updates. MGUP augments standard momentum-based optimizers by applying larger step-sizes to a selected fixed proportion of parameters in each iteration, while applying smaller, non-zero step-sizes to the rest. As a nearly {plug-and-play} module, MGUP seamlessly integrates with optimizers such as AdamW, Lion, and Muon. This yields powerful variants such as MGUP-AdamW, MGUP-Lion, and MGUP-Muon. Under standard assumptions, we provide theoretical convergence guarantees for MGUP-AdamW (without weight decay) in stochastic optimization. Extensive experiments across diverse tasks, including MAE pretraining, LLM pretraining, and downstream fine-tuning, demonstrate that our MGUP-enhanced optimizers achieve superior or more stable performance compared to their original base optimizers. We offer a principled, versatile, and theoretically grounded strategy for efficient intra-layer selective updates, accelerating and stabilizing the training of large-scale models. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/MaeChd/MGUP.

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

Who Should Lead Decoding Now? Tracking Reliable Trajectories for Ensembling Masked Diffusion Language Models

Authors:
Heecheol Yun↗Joonhyung Park↗Joowon Kim↗Eunho Yang↗

Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) have emerged as a distinct paradigm for sequence generation. As MDLMs become diverse in capabilities and knowledge coverage, an important question is how to combine their knowledge. Toward this, we first investigate the unique decoding dynamics of MDLMs. We find that successful generations exhibit stable confidence dynamics over answer-relevant positions, while unreliable trajectories can often be corrected by injecting promising intermediate states from other models. Guided by this observation, we propose $TIE$ ($T$rajectory-based $I$terative $E$nsembling), a knowledge fusion framework in which MDLMs iteratively identify reliable decoding trajectories and relay them across models. TIE tracks confidence dynamics over answer-relevant positions to determine which model currently follows a more reliable trajectory and selectively transfers partially denoised sequences across models. As the model on the more promising trajectory often changes across denoising steps, TIE allows different models to contribute complementary strengths at different stages of generation. Strong performance across diverse reasoning tasks, along with our analyses, suggests that TIE offers a practical approach to the underexplored problem of MDLM ensembling.

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18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Generalizing GNNs with Tokenized Mixture of Experts

Authors:
Xiaoguang Guo↗Zehong Wang↗Jiazheng Li↗Shawn Spitzel↗Qi Yang↗Kaize Ding↗Jundong Li↗Chuxu Zhang↗

arXiv:2602.09258v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deployed graph neural networks (GNNs) are frozen at deployment yet must fit clean data, generalize under distribution shifts, and remain stable to perturbations. We show that static inference induces a fundamental tradeoff: improving stability requires reducing reliance on shift-sensitive features, leaving an irreducible worst-case generalization floor. Instance-conditional routing can break this ceiling, but is fragile because shifts can mislead routing and perturbations can make routing fluctuate. We capture these effects via two decompositions separating coverage vs selection, and base sensitivity vs fluctuation amplification. Based on these insights, we propose STEM-GNN, a pretrain-then-finetune framework with a mixture-of-experts encoder for diverse computation paths, a vector-quantized token interface to stabilize encoder-to-head signals, and a Lipschitz-regularized head to bound output amplification. Across nine node, link, and graph benchmarks, STEM-GNN achieves a stronger three-way balance, improving robustness to degree/homophily shifts and to feature/edge corruptions while remaining competitive on clean graphs.

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19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Metastability for the Curie-Weiss-Potts model with unbounded random interactions

Authors:
Johan L. A. Dubbeldam↗Vicente Lenz Burnier↗Elena Pulvirenti↗Martin Slowik↗

arXiv:2505.11260v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We analyse the metastable behaviour of the disordered Curie–Weiss–Potts (DCWP) model subject to a Glauber dynamics. The model is a randomly disordered version of the mean-field $q$-spin Potts model (CWP), where the interaction coefficients between spins are general independent random variables. These random variables are chosen to have fixed mean (for simplicity taken to be $1$) and well defined cumulant generating function, with a fixed distribution not depending on the number of particles. The system evolves as a discrete-time Markov chain with single spin flip Metropolis dynamics at finite inverse temperature $\beta$. We provide a comparison of the metastable behaviour of the CWP and DCWP models, when $N \to \infty$. First, we establish the metastability of the CWP model and, using this result, prove metastability for the DCWP model (with high probability). We then determine the ratio between the metastable transition time for the DCWP model and the corresponding time for the CWP model. Specifically, we derive the asymptotic tail behavior and moments of this ratio. Our proof combines the potential-theoretic approach to metastability with concentration of measure techniques, the latter adapted to our specific context.

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

Model Stealing Through the Lens of Model Multiplicity

Authors:
Eliott Baltz↗Satoshi Hara↗Ulrich A\"ivodji↗

arXiv:2606.15493v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model stealing attacks, where adversaries create high-fidelity surrogate models, are a significant threat to the intellectual property of machine learning services. Conventional wisdom suggests these surrogates could provide adversaries with economic leverage comparable to the original service providers. This paper challenges this assumption by evaluating model stealing attacks beyond mere fidelity to the target model. Because query-based extraction provides only partial supervision of the target's input-output behavior, the surrogate is not uniquely identified: many near-optimal surrogates can achieve comparable fidelity while differing in deployment-relevant properties. Instead of performing a classic learning-based model stealing attack, we compute the Rashomon Set (i.e., the set of almost-equally-accurate models) of surrogate models, and evaluate its diversity using multiplicity metrics (ambiguity, discrepancy, and Rashomon Capacity) and group fairness metrics. Across tabular, medical imaging, and NLP tasks, our experiments on real-world datasets reveal that despite exhibiting similar fidelity to the target model, surrogate models can display significant variances in other critical performance metrics. These findings cast doubt on the presumed equivalence between high-fidelity surrogates and the target model in practical deployment scenarios.

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21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Generative Modeling on Metric Graphs via Neural Optimal Transport

Authors:
Alessandro Micheli↗Yueqi Cao↗Anthea Monod↗Samir Bhatt↗

arXiv:2606.16273v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce, to our knowledge, the first deep generative modeling framework for probability distributions continuously supported on compact metric graphs. Given source and target measures on a metric graph, our method embeds the graph into a smooth ambient space, solves an entropic Kantorovich problem via a neural semidual parameterization, and projects generated samples back onto the original graph. We study two embedded geometries: an extrinsic Euclidean realization and the intrinsic tropical Abel–Jacobi embedding into the Jacobian torus. In both cases, the resulting generator is graph-supported by construction. We prove that, in the joint limit of increasing neural expressivity, the learned generator converges weakly to a valid transport coupling between the original graph measures. Empirically, across a range of geometrically distinct graphs, our method matches or improves upon heuristic transport baselines based on discrete graph OT, while scaling more favorably. Finally, we demonstrate scalability on real-world urban mobility data by training our model on one million Uber pickup locations in Manhattan, New York City.

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22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Let LLMs Judge Each Other: Multi-Agent Peer-Reviewed Reasoning for Medical Question Answering

Authors:
Zaifu Zhan↗Shuang Zhou↗Rui Zhang↗

Objective: To enhance the accuracy, interpretability, and robustness of large language models (LLMs) in medical question answering (MedQA). Method: We designed a multi-agent peer-reviewed reasoning method in which multiple LLM agents independently generate chain-of-thought reasoning with candidate answers, then act as peer reviewers to evaluate each other's reasoning for factual correctness and logical soundness. The highest-rated reasoning chain is selected to produce the final answer. Experiments were conducted with five state-of-the-art LLMs (Llama-3.1-8B, Qwen2.5-7B, Phi-4, DeepSeek-LLM-7B, GPT-oss-20B) on three benchmark datasets: HeadQA, MedQA-USMLE, and PubMedQA. Performance was compared against single-model chain-of-thought reasoning and chain-of-thought-based majority voting. Results: Peer-reviewed reasoning consistently outperformed both baselines. The best model combination achieved an average accuracy of 0.820 across datasets, exceeding the strongest single model (0.777) and majority voting ensembles (up to 0.789). The method also scaled effectively with more participating models, while peer assessments reliably distinguished high- from low-quality reasoning chains. Conclusion: The proposed multi-agent peer-reviewed reasoning method enables LLMs to act as both solvers and evaluators, yielding superior performance in MedQA. By emphasizing reasoning quality rather than answer agreement alone, this approach improves accuracy, interpretability, and robustness, offering a promising direction for trustworthy biomedical AI systems.

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

Multi-component Causal Tracing in Large Language Models

Authors:
Zirui Yan↗Dennis Wei↗Dmitriy A. Katz↗Prasanna Sattigeri↗Ali Tajer↗

Causal tracing systematically intervenes on a large language model's (LLM's) internal representations to uncover and quantify the causal pathways linking specific inputs or computations to specific metrics of interest, quantifying the LLM's behavior. Building on previous single-component or single-layer studies, this paper presents a unified framework for causally tracing multiple components simultaneously. This framework systematically identifies the subsets of components (e.g., attention heads and multi-layer perceptron neurons) most critical to a desired target performance metric (e.g., accuracy and fairness). This is achieved by incorporating flexible interventions applied to a wide range of desired metrics. To address the combinatorial complexity of the multi-component problem, an efficient algorithm is designed that leverages soft interventions and a carefully designed metric transformation, converting the combinatorial search problem into a continuous one that can be solved efficiently under proper constraints, thereby generating proper binary decisions for selecting components. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method efficiently identifies subsets of the model's components that have a high impact on the target metric, outperforming existing baseline approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZiruiYan/multi-component-causal-tracing.

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

Information bottleneck for learning the phase space of dynamics from high-dimensional experimental data

Authors:
K. Michael Martini↗Eslam Abdelaleem↗Paarth Gulati↗Ilya Nemenman↗

arXiv:2604.24662v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Identifying the dynamical state variables of a system from high-dimensional observations is a central problem across physical sciences. The challenge is that the state variables are not directly observable and must be inferred from raw high-dimensional data without supervision. Here we introduce DySIB (Dynamical Symmetric Information Bottleneck) as a method to learn low-dimensional representations of time-series data by maximizing predictive mutual information between past and future observation windows while penalizing representation complexity. This objective operates entirely in latent space and avoids reconstruction of the observations. We apply DySIB to an experimental video dataset of a physical pendulum, where the underlying state space is known. The method, with hyperparameters of the learning architecture set self-consistently by the data, recovers a two-dimensional representation that matches the dimensionality, topology, and geometry of the pendulum phase space, with the learned coordinates aligning smoothly with the canonical angle and angular velocity. These results demonstrate, on a well-characterized experimental system, that predictive information in latent space can be used to recover interpretable dynamical coordinates directly from high-dimensional data.

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25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

CLARITree: Cholesky and Lookahead Accelerations for Regression with Interpretable Piecewise Linear Trees

Authors:
Yixiao Wang↗Hayden McTavish↗Varun Babbar↗Margo Seltzer↗Cynthia Rudin↗

arXiv:2606.12840v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Regression trees are among the most interpretable yet expressive model classes in machine learning. Historically, greedy induction has been the dominant approach for constructing well-performing regression trees. While optimal methods based on dynamic programming and branch-and-bound exist, they are computationally prohibitive for general linear regression trees, despite often achieving substantially better performance than greedy approaches. Recent work has shown that specialized lookahead strategies can dramatically improve runtime while maintaining near-optimal performance, primarily in classification settings. In this work, we develop a novel algorithm for near-optimal, sparse, piecewise linear regression trees that combines a lookahead-style search strategy with efficient rank-one Cholesky updates of the Gram matrix. We demonstrate, both theoretically and empirically, that our method achieves a favorable trade-off between computational efficiency, predictive accuracy, and sparsity, and scales significantly better than the current state of the art.

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