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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Variable-Width Transformers

Scaling model size, specifically depth and width, has driven significant progress in transformer-based language models. However, most architectures maintain a constant width across all layers, allocating a fixed parameter and computation budget evenly despite different layers potentially playing distinct computational roles. In this work, we empirically investigate nonuniform capacity allocation across network depth by proposing a $\times$-shaped >

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

Grammar-Constrained Decoding Can Jailbreak LLMs into Generating Malicious Code

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for code generation, raising concerns that they may be misused to produce malicious code. Meanwhile, Grammar-Constrained Decoding (GCD) has been widely adopted to improve the reliability of LLM-generated code by enforcing syntactic validity. In this paper, we reveal a counterintuitive risk: this reliability-oriented technique can itself become an attack surface. We uncover a new jailbreak attack, termed CodeSpear, that exploits GCD to induce LLMs into generating malicious code. Our experiments show that simply applying a benign code grammar constraint can effectively jailbreak LLMs. To address this vulnerability, we propose CodeShield, a safety alignment approach that robustly preserves safe behavior even under attacker-controlled grammar constraints. CodeShield aligns the model in the code modality by teaching it to generate honeypot code under GCD. Such code is semantically harmless, so it does not implement the malicious request, and structurally diverse, so it is difficult to suppress through grammar tightening. At the same time, CodeShield still preserves natural-language refusals when natural language is available. Experiments on 10 popular LLMs across 4 benchmarks show that CodeSpear outperforms representative jailbreak baselines and increases the attack success rate by more than 30 percentage points on average. CodeShield also restores safety under CodeSpear while preserving benign utility. Our findings reveal a fundamental risk of GCD and call for greater attention to its potential security implications.

03.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Zero-shot design of drug-binding proteins via neural iterative selection−expansion

作者:

The design of proteins that bind to small molecules has been challenging because it requires simultaneous optimization of the protein sequence, protein structure and ligand conformation1–7. Current deep-learning algorithms have struggled to navigate this landscape, precluding the zero-shot design of binders. Here we show that by combining two neural networks in an iterative design algorithm, small-molecule binding proteins can be created from scratch with high accuracy. We trained a graph neural network—ligand-aware sequence engineering message-passing neural network (LASErMPNN)—to design compatible protein sequences for an input protein backbone and docked ligand. We paired  LASErMPNN with a structure predictor that models a three-dimensional protein–ligand complex for an input protein sequence and ligand identity. The closed-loop iteration of these reciprocal networks optimized sequence–structure–ligand compatibility, and outperformed a comparable design loop using a physics-based energy function. We used our strategy, termed neural iterative selection–expansion (NISE), to design proteins that, using different folds, specifically bind to two chemically distinct small-molecule drugs, exatecan and apixaban, with success rates of 100% and 83%, respectively. The tightest NISE binders had nanomolar-to-picomolar affinities, surpassing those of the next-leading method by 70-fold for exatecan and nearly 10,000-fold for apixaban. LASErMPNN then suggested two amino-acid substitutions that improved the affinity of the tightest exatecan binder by 100-fold without any experimental input. The optimized binder protected the labile lactone ring of exatecan from hydrolysis for days. Our work describes a general recipe for using neural networks to automate the design of small-molecule binding proteins for applications in drug delivery, sensing and catalysis.  By pairing two neural networks in an iterative optimization algorithm, small-molecule binding proteins can be designed from scratch with high accuracy, affinity and success rates, showing promise for applications in drug delivery and sequestration.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Stochastic Schrödinger Diffusion Models for Pure-State Ensemble Generation

arXiv:2605.03573v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Quantum machine learning increasingly relies on pure-state representations, motivating generative models that sample directly in quantum representation space rather than perturbing classical inputs and re-encoding. We introduce Stochastic Schrödinger Diffusion Models (SSDMs), a score-based generative framework that defines diffusion, scores, and reverse-time sampling intrinsically on the complex projective manifold $\mathbb{CP}^{d-1}$ under the Fubini–Study metric. SSDMs combine a Riemannian Ornstein–Uhlenbeck forward diffusion with a stochastic Schrödinger realization, and learn reverse-time dynamics driven by the Riemannian score. Our central technical contribution is a local-time learning objective that exploits the local Euclidean OU limit of intrinsic manifold diffusions in Fubini-Study normal coordinates to obtain an analytic teacher score, bypassing the intractable transition densities that limit existing Riemannian score-based models. Across synthetic, physics-inspired (TFIM, XXZ), and quantum feature-state benchmarks up to $14$ qubits, SSDMs match target pure-state ensembles by orders of magnitude on MMD and observable statistics over both ambient Euclidean and matched Riemannian score-based baselines, and improve representation-level diagnostics for downstream quantum kernel methods.

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

Beyond Predefined Schemas: TRACE-KG for Context-Enriched Knowledge Graph Generation

arXiv:2604.03496v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Knowledge graph generation typically relies either on predefined ontologies or on schema-free extraction. Ontology-driven pipelines enforce consistent typing but require costly schema design and maintenance, whereas schema-free methods often produce fragmented graphs with weak global organization, especially in long technical documents with dense, context-dependent information. We propose TRACE-KG (Text-dRiven schemA for Context-Enriched Knowledge Graphs), a framework that jointly constructs a context-enriched knowledge graph and an induced schema without assuming a predefined ontology. TRACE-KG captures conditional relations through structured qualifiers and organizes entities and relations using a data-driven schema that serves as a reusable semantic scaffold while preserving full traceability to the source evidence. Experiments show that TRACE-KG produces structurally coherent, traceable knowledge graphs and offers a practical alternative to both ontology-driven and schema-free construction pipelines.

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

The Linguistics Olympiads: Towards a New Corpus for Linguistics Research?

Linguistics olympiad problems (LOPs) are a category of self-sufficient puzzles consisting of a scaled-down corpus representative of certain linguistic phenomena, from which the solver must deduce a primitive set of rules of the language and then translate a new set of elements. The linguistics olympiads (LOs) have become a worldwide phenomenon with 43 different territories taking part in the International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL) 2025. While the typology and solving strategies of LOPs have been analysed, their scientific facet and connections to academic linguistics have yet to be explored. LOPs are directly connected to many linguistic fields, e.g., linguistic typology, linguistic relativity, and linguistics fieldwork. Recently, LOPs have become a research focus as benchmarks for large language models, thus highlighting their usefulness in computational linguistics. Nevertheless, they have not yet been integrated into mainstream linguistics research. This paper attempts to open new directions of including this particular type of puzzle in academic research by offering a structured evaluation of LOPs as linguistic data sources and proposes criteria for their responsible use in academic research. Starting from a set of over 1800 LOPs, this study critically examines the potential of LOPs as a novel corpus for linguistics research by discussing their strengths and limitations as tools, as well as the areas of linguistics into which these problems could fit. This work forms the foundation for a broader initiative aimed at bridging the gap between LOs and academic linguistics, by establishing a robust theoretical framework for LOPs.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

WEQA: Wearable hEalth Question Answering with Query-Adaptive Agentic Reasoning

arXiv:2606.18147v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models are remarkably capable at medical question answering, in some cases surpassing the accuracy of general physicians. However, answering questions about wearable health data remains challenging and understudied, as these ubiquitous sensors produce continuous, high-dimensional, and longitudinal data, which is non-trivial to align with text-centric distributions in LLM pretraining. The diversity of sensor modalities and user intents cannot be effectively handled by a fixed reasoning workflow or a single pretrained foundation model. To address these challenges, we propose WEQA, a query-adaptive agent framework that unifies LLM reasoning with specialized wearable analytical and modeling tools. An LLM controller is employed to synthesize execution plans and dynamically route each query to the appropriate combination of sensor analysis and pretrained models, and perform grounded response auditing with external knowledge. We also curate a benchmark spanning four open wearable datasets comprising analytic and predictive tasks in three different health domains. Experiments show that our framework is 24% more accurate than LLM and agentic baselines, and a blinded study with 12 medical experts and 8 users shows substantial gains in usefulness and clinical soundness.

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

Random Erasing vs. Model Inversion: A Promising Defense or a False Hope?

Model Inversion (MI) attacks pose a significant privacy threat by reconstructing private training data from machine learning models. While existing defenses primarily concentrate on model-centric approaches, the impact of data on MI robustness remains largely unexplored. In this work, we explore Random Erasing (RE), a technique traditionally used for improving model generalization under occlusion, and uncover its surprising effectiveness as a defense against MI attacks. Specifically, our novel feature space analysis shows that models trained with RE-images introduce a significant discrepancy between the features of MI-reconstructed images and those of the private data. At the same time, features of private images remain distinct from other classes and well-separated from different classification regions. These effects collectively degrade MI reconstruction quality and attack accuracy while maintaining reasonable natural accuracy. Furthermore, we explore two critical properties of RE including Partial Erasure and Random Location. Partial Erasure prevents the model from observing entire objects during training. We find this has a significant impact on MI, which aims to reconstruct the entire objects. Random Location of erasure plays a crucial role in achieving a strong privacy-utility trade-off. Our findings highlight RE as a simple yet effective defense mechanism that can be easily integrated with existing privacy-preserving techniques. Extensive experiments across 37 setups demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in the privacy-utility trade-off. The results consistently demonstrate the superiority of our defense over existing methods across different MI attacks, network architectures, and attack configurations. For the first time, we achieve a significant degradation in attack accuracy without a decrease in utility for some configurations.

09.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

Beyond the canonical: The role of post-transcriptional regulation in drug-target interaction prediction

by Md Istiaq Ansari, Khandakar Tanvir Ahmed, Debby D. Wang, Kirill Medvedev, Wei Zhang Protein isoforms produced from the same gene through post-transcriptional regulatory mechanisms, such as alternative splicing, can substantially alter protein structure and function, including drug-binding properties. However, most existing drug-target interaction (DTI) and drug-target affinity (DTA) prediction models rely exclusively on a single representative protein sequence per gene, typically the canonical or longest isoform, thereby overlooking the functional diversity introduced by alternative isoforms. This assumption can introduce bias, limit generalizability, and compromise the biological validity of model predictions. In this study, we systematically investigate the impact of protein isoform variation on DTI prediction accuracy. Our results show that substituting the canonical sequence with an alternative isoform often leads to substantial declines in predictive performance. Structural and binding affinity analyses further reveal that these discrepancies are frequently associated with changes in predicted binding-site configurations, which we further examine through controlled perturbations of binding-site residues. These experiments suggest that even subtle alterations in binding regions can lead to inconsistent DTI predictions. Overall, our findings uncover a critical limitation in current DTI modeling frameworks and underscore the importance of incorporating isoform-specific information to better reflect biological reality and improve therapeutic relevance. The codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/compbiolabucf/DTIVariant.

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

CombEval: A Framework for Evaluating Combinatorial Counting in Large Language Models

We present CombEval, a dynamic benchmark for evaluating combinatorial counting in large language models. CombEval represents each problem as a typed Cofola specification over entities, combinatorial objects, object dependencies, and constraints, enabling controlled generation of natural-language counting problems with exact solver-verified answers. Unlike static collections, CombEval supports systematic variation of object type, entity scale, constraint count, and reasoning depth. We evaluate 11 LLMs under direct and code-augmented settings and find that models remain brittle on ordered objects, indistinguishable elements, relatively positional constraints, and nested object dependencies. Error analysis further identifies failures in constraint interpretation and counting principles. CombEval provides a diagnostic testbed for studying when and why LLMs fail at combinatorial reasoning. The code and generated benchmark suites are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/YuxuZhou-CN/combination-problem-generation}.

11.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Amylo-Pipe: an integrated web server for mechanistic and kinetic prediction of protein and peptide aggregation

Protein aggregation is central to amyloid-related disorders and remains a major developability challenge for protein therapeutics. Over the past two decades, significant advances have been made to predict aggregation-prone regions (APRs) and estimate aggregation propensity in proteins and peptides. In contrast, the prediction of aggregation kinetics has received relatively less attention due to the limited availability and heterogeneity of experimental data. Consequently, aggregation propensities from APR prediction algorithms were widely accepted as a means to predict relative changes in the aggregation kinetics of proteins and mutants. Previous studies have demonstrated, using large-scale datasets, that aggregation propensity shows a weak or inconsistent correlation with aggregation kinetics. In the present study, we have integrated complementary state-of-the-art mechanistic and kinetic prediction tools for protein aggregation into a unified, user-friendly web framework entitled "Amylo-Pipe". Amylo-Pipe also implements practical features that are especially useful for protein engineering, such as gatekeeper-residue mutational scanning to support the design of aggregation-resistant variants. By consolidating multiple prediction tasks in a single interface, Amylo-Pipe enables a more comprehensive assessment of aggregation behavior than APR-only workflows. The web server is freely accessible at: https://web.iitm.ac.in/bioinfo2/amylopipe/.

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

Dolph2Vec: Self-Supervised Representations of Dolphin Vocalizations

arXiv:2606.12503v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-supervised learning (SSL) has opened new opportunities in bioacoustics by enabling scalable modeling of animal vocalizations without the need for expensive manual annotation. However, current SSL models in this domain prioritize broad generalization across species and are not optimized for uncovering the fine-grained structure of individual communication systems. In this work, we collect and release a novel dataset of over five years of longitudinal recordings, from five known dolphins in a semi-naturalistic marine environment, an unprecedented resource for studying dolphin communication. We adapt the Wav2Vec2.0 Baevski et al. (2020) architecture to this domain and introduce Dolph2Vec, the first large-scale, species-specific SSL model trained exclusively on this data. We benchmark our model on two biologically relevant tasks: signature whistle classification and whistle detection. Dolph2Vec significantly outperforms general-purpose baselines in both tasks. Beyond performance, we show that learned embeddings and codebook structure capture interpretable acoustic units aligned with dolphin whistle categories and possibly sub-whistle structure, enabling fine-grained analysis of communication patterns. Our findings demonstrate how SSL can serve as both a model and a scientific tool to explore hypotheses in animal communication research.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Contrastive Geometric Learning Unlocks Unified Structure- and Ligand-Based Drug Design

arXiv:2601.09693v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Structure-based and ligand-based computational drug design have traditionally relied on disjoint data sources and modeling assumptions, limiting their joint use at scale. In this work, we introduce Contrastive Geometric Learning for Unified Computational Drug Design (ConGLUDe), a single contrastive geometric model that unifies structure- and ligand-based training. ConGLUDe couples a geometric protein encoder that produces whole-protein representations and implicit embeddings of predicted binding sites with a fast ligand encoder, removing the need for predefined pockets. By aligning ligands with both global protein representations and multiple candidate binding sites through contrastive learning, ConGLUDe supports ligand-conditioned pocket prediction in addition to virtual screening and target fishing, while being trained jointly on protein-ligand complexes and large-scale bioactivity data. Across diverse benchmarks, ConGLUDe achieves competitive zero-shot virtual screening performance, substantially outperforms existing methods on a challenging target fishing task, and demonstrates state-of-the-art ligand-conditioned pocket selection. These results highlight the advantages of unified structure-ligand training and position ConGLUDe as a step toward general-purpose foundation models for drug discovery.

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

Delta-Based Target Reformulation for Short-Term Electricity Load Forecasting Using LSTM and Transformer Models

作者:

arXiv:2606.17692v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate short-term electricity load forecasting is critical for the reliable and economic operation of modern power systems, under non-stationarity arising from weather variability, calendar effects, and evolving consumption patterns. While deep learning models such as LSTMs and Transformers show promising performance, most existing studies focus on direct absolute load prediction without explicitly addressing target non-stationarity. Motivated by classical time-series differencing techniques in ARIMA models, this paper investigates a delta-based target reformulation for short-term electricity load forecasting using deep learning. Instead of directly predicting absolute load values, the proposed formulation trains models to predict the change in load between consecutive time steps, with final forecasts reconstructed using the last observed load. This aims to stabilize the learning target and reduce forecasting difficulty. Using multi-year, hourly real-world electricity load data from India, augmented with meteorological variables from the NASA POWER project and calendar features, this study evaluates LSTM and Transformer models under both formulations, benchmarking them against LightGBM. Experiments are conducted for hour-ahead and day-ahead horizons, assessing performance via Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE). Results show that delta-based reformulation consistently improves forecasting accuracy for hour-ahead prediction across all evaluated models, yielding MAPE reductions of over 50% compared to absolute formulations. For day-ahead forecasting, delta targets specifically benefit deep sequence models (LSTM and Transformer), while LightGBM remains competitive under the absolute formulation. These findings indicate that while delta reformulation is a powerful inductive bias for neural networks, its efficacy is model- and horizon-dependent.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

On the $d$-rigidity phase transition in random graphs

作者:

arXiv:2605.25711v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study generic $d$-dimensional rigidity in sparse random graphs. Our main result is that for every $d\ge 2$, the Erdős–Rényi random graph $G\sim G(n,c/n)$ undergoes a $d$-rigidity phase transition at the known, explicit, $d$-orientability threshold $c_d$: If $cc_d$, then $G$ is a.a.s. not independent in the generic $d$-rigidity matroid, and we give a sharp asymptotic estimate for its rank. In addition, the $d$-rigidity closure of $G$ has a giant clique of linear size, which contains all but at most $o(n)$ vertices of the $((d+1)+d)$-core of the graph. More generally, we compute, up to a $1+o(1)$ factor, the generic $d$-rigidity rank of random graphs with a given degree distribution. For example, we show that the uniform $n$-vertex $k$-regular graph a.a.s. has rank $\min(k/2,d)n+o(n).$ Our approach is to estimate the rigidity rank of a random graph from its Galton–Watson local weak limit, using a parameter that we call local flexibility.

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Predicting Mergeability of Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning Updates

arXiv:2606.19549v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) makes it cheap to train many domain- and task-specific language model adapters, but whether two adapters can be merged is usually discovered only after both have been fully trained and evaluated. This late feedback is costly: adapters that are strong in isolation can interfere destructively once their updates are combined. We ask whether this outcome can be anticipated. We formalize adapter mergeability as the degree to which an adapter preserves its single-task utility after merging, and show that it can be forecast from signals measured in the first few percent of training – chiefly how the low-rank updates and their gradients align across tasks and how much they disturb shared representations. We package these signals into MergeProbe, a lightweight predictor that estimates pairwise and set-level retention and turns the estimate into a concrete decision: merge directly, reweight, prune, or route. On MERGE-PEFT, a five-domain benchmark spanning math, code, science, instruction following, and safety, MergeProbe attains the best average and worst-case retention among strong interference-aware merge baselines while adding far less deployment overhead than full task routing. This turns LoRA merging from a post-hoc engineering step into an anticipatory measurement problem.

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

A Hybrid GNN-FEM Framework for Phase-Field Fracture Simulation. Physics-Preserving Hybridization for Generalizable Surrogate Modeling

arXiv:2606.19378v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scientific machine learning (SciML) has emerged as a promising approach for accelerating simulations of complex physical systems, yet achieving physically consistent and generalizable predictions for nonlinear, history-dependent problems remains a central challenge. In this study, we propose a hybrid GNN–FEM framework for efficient and generalizable phase-field fracture modeling. While phase-field approaches provide a robust variational framework for simulating complex crack evolution, their high computational cost limits practical applications because they require solving coupled, nonlinear, and history-dependent systems within an incremental finite element procedure. To address this challenge, a graph neural network surrogate is integrated into the conventional staggered scheme, replacing the phase-field update at each load increment while retaining the FEM-based displacement solver to enforce mechanical equilibrium and boundary conditions. By preserving the incremental solution structure, the framework remains consistent with history-dependent fracture evolution without requiring the surrogate to approximate the full solution trajectory. This selective surrogate strategy emphasizes the identification of a physically meaningful and incrementally structured learning target, rather than relying on brute-force data generation to learn the full fracture process. The proposed framework achieves strong generalization across varying geometries, loading conditions, material properties, and discretizations through dimensionless feature design, a graph-based formulation on mesh-based domains, and a physics-informed loss derived from the governing phase-field equation. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the hybrid approach reduces computational cost while maintaining accuracy compared with conventional FEM, and exhibits robust predictive performance across diverse problem settings.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Picosecond Schrödinger cat states for ultrafast optical quantum processing

arXiv:2606.24002v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Non-Gaussian states are essential resources for universal, fault-tolerant optical quantum computing, but their generation rate remains limited by low heralding probabilities and operation in nanosecond temporal modes. Here, we demonstrate multi-photon generalized photon subtraction in picosecond optical wave packets, establishing the state-generation capability required for high-rate operation by addressing the temporal-mode bottleneck that has constrained the achievable rate. Two interfering ultrashort squeezed vacua are heralded by photon-number-resolving detection with a high-speed transition-edge sensor and characterized by pulsed homodyne detection matched to 10-ps temporal modes at a 5-MHz pump repetition rate. We reconstruct Wigner functions without loss correction that exhibit up to four distinct negative regions for four-photon heralding, together with an effective cat-state amplitude of $\alpha_{\mathrm{eff}} = 1.69$. This amplitude approaches the range of practical relevance for fault-tolerant cat-code architectures and for adaptive breeding toward logical-qubit generation, while the picosecond temporal mode establishes a platform compatible with high-rate, scalable time-multiplexed photonic architectures.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Seeing Roads Through Words: A Language-Guided Framework for RGB-T Driving Scene Segmentation

Robust semantic segmentation of road scenes under adverse illumination, lighting, and shadow conditions remain a core challenge for autonomous driving applications. RGB-Thermal fusion is a standard approach, yet existing methods apply static fusion strategies uniformly across all conditions, allowing modality-specific noise to propagate throughout the network. Hence, we propose CLARITY that dynamically adapts its fusion strategy to the detected scene condition. Guided by vision-language model (VLM) priors, the network learns to modulate each modality's contribution based on the illumination state while leveraging object embeddings for segmentation, rather than applying a fixed fusion policy. We further introduce two mechanisms - one which preserves valid dark-object semantics that prior noise-suppression methods incorrectly discard, and a hierarchical decoder that enforces structural consistency across scales to sharpen boundaries on thin objects. Experiments on the MFNet dataset demonstrate that CLARITY establishes a new state-of-the-art (SOTA), achieving 62.3% mIoU and 77.5% mAcc.

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

Malliavin Calculus for the stochastic Cahn-Hilliard equation driven by fractional noise

arXiv:2601.10490v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The stochastic partial differential equation analyzed in this work is the Cahn-Hilliard equation perturbed by an additive fractional white noise (fractional in time and white in space). We work in the case of one spatial dimension and apply Malliavin calculus to investigate the existence of a density for the stochastic solution $u$. In particular, we show that $u$ admits continuous paths almost surely and construct a localizing sequence through which we prove that its Malliavin derivative exists locally, and that its law is absolutely continuous with respect to the Lebesgue measure on $\bf R$, establishing thus that a density exists. A key contribution of this work is the analysis of the stochastic integral appearing in the mild formulation: we derive sharp estimates for the expectation of the $p$-th power ($p \geq 2$) of the $L^{\infty}(D)$-norm of this stochastic integral as well as for the integral involving the $L^{\infty}(D)$-norm of the operator associated with the kernel appearing in the integral representation of the fractional noise, all of which are essential for this study.

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

Global Convergence of Gradient Descent for Score Matching in Gaussian Mixtures via Reverse Fisher Divergence

arXiv:2606.19876v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The score matching problem is a central training objective in modern generative modeling, diffusion models, fitting unnormalized statistical models, and inverse problems. A standard approach is to minimize the forward Fisher divergence, where the expectation is taken with respect to the teacher distribution. However, recent results show that even in simple Gaussian mixture model settings, this objective can lead to undesirable and initialization-dependent convergence behavior. In this paper, we study an alternative objective: the reverse Fisher divergence, where the expectation is taken with respect to the student distribution. We analyze gradient descent (GD) for fitting Gaussian mixture models and show that this change in the objective leads to significantly better optimization properties. First, when the teacher distribution is a single Gaussian and the student is a Gaussian mixture model with fixed weights and identity covariances, we prove the global convergence of GD from arbitrary initializations. Second, we extend the analysis to the case where the teacher is also a Gaussian mixture model and prove global convergence guarantees under a global random initialization scheme and a $\widetilde{\Omega}(1)$-separation assumption on the target means. In particular, with high probability, each student component converges near its closest teacher component, and we provide conditions under which the student distribution converges in total variation distance. Our proofs rely on a new Lyapunov-based analysis of the gradient descent dynamics, showing that the reverse Fisher divergence has a much more favorable optimization landscape than the forward Fisher divergence.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Running the Gauntlet: Re-evaluating the Capabilities of Agents Beyond Familiar Environments

arXiv:2606.14397v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As agentic systems continue to evolve and are widely deployed in real-world scenarios, there is a growing demand to faithfully evaluate their capabilities. However, current benchmarks are typically built on popular applications with relatively simple tasks and focus on a narrow set of capabilities while overlooking broader dimensions, resulting in saturated performance on modern agents and failing to probe their limitations. To this end, we introduce GauntletBench, a web-based benchmark for evaluating agent generalisation in challenging scenarios, focusing on three underexplored capabilities (temporal perception, graphical understanding, and 3D reasoning), across five less-covered professional applications (Video Editor, Workflow Builder, 3D Modeller, Flight Analyser, and Circuit Designer), each with 20 vision-intensive tasks (100 in total). Our benchmark provides a modular pipeline that comprises an environment compatible with both open- and closed-source agent frameworks, a controlled web-based application, a well-structured task suite, and an automated evaluation engine with diverse metrics. Contrary to widespread expectations, our empirical results reveal that frontier agentic systems remain far from achieving human-level performance. Even the state-of-the-art agent achieves only a 19.1% success rate on our GauntletBench, highlighting the limitations in these overlooked capabilities and generalisation. By comparison, non-expert human annotators achieve over 80% success on our challenging yet feasible tasks, revealing the substantial gap between current agent capabilities and those required for complex real-world scenarios.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Fi-Gaussian: Frequency-Aware Implicit Gaussian Splatting for Single Image Dehazing

Single image dehazing continues to be hindered by the loss of high-frequency details and the difficulty of accurate physical scattering modeling. To address these issues, we propose Fi-Gaussian, a frequency-aware implicit Gaussian splatting network for single image dehazing. Unlike explicit rendering methods that rely on 3D point clouds, our method employs implicit Gaussian splatting to adaptively model the underlying distribution of clear images as a continuous representation in 2D feature space. The core of the network is a frequency-aware implicit Gaussian splatting module, which decouples low-frequency structural information and high-frequency texture information in the frequency domain and then performs adaptive Gaussian aggregation with complex-valued weights to recover fine details. In addition, a physics-driven scattering renormalization mechanism is introduced to estimate the transmission map and atmospheric light under the guidance of implicit Gaussian priors. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that Fi-Gaussian achieves state-of-the-art quantitative performance and produces visually superior dehazed results, validating the effectiveness of implicit Gaussian splatting for low-level vision tasks.

24.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-22

Cancer cells adopt unprecedented strategies to produce a molecule that protects them from iron-dependent death

The finding that spermine molecules in cells bind to iron to prevent it unleashing ferroptosis, a type of cell death, opens up strategies for treating tissue damage and cancer. The finding that spermine molecules in cells bind to iron to prevent it unleashing ferroptosis, a type of cell death, opens up strategies for treating tissue damage and cancer.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

RLRC: Reinforcement Learning-based Recovery for Compressed Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2506.17639v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action models (VLA) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities and strong potential in complex robotic manipulation. However, their large parameter sizes and high inference latency hinder real-world deployment, especially on resource-constrained platforms. To address this, we conduct a systematic empirical study of model compression for VLAs. Building on these insights, we present RLRC, a three-stage compression and recovery pipeline consisting of structured pruning, performance recovery via SFT and RL, and subsequent quantization. The RL stage incorporates a critic warm-up strategy and BC loss regularization to stabilize training and preserve policy behavior. RLRC achieves up to an 8 times memory reduction and 2.3 times inference speedup while maintaining the original task success rate. Extensive experiments across multiple VLA backbones show that RLRC consistently outperforms existing compression baselines, highlighting its effectiveness for on-device deployment. Project website: https://rlrc-vla.github.io