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

Direct Advantage Estimation for Scalable and Sample-efficient Deep Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.20411v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Direct Advantage Estimation (DAE) has been shown to improve the sample efficiency of deep reinforcement learning algorithms. However, its reliance on full environment observability limits its applicability in realistic settings, and its requirement to model transition probabilities incurs substantial computational overhead for high-dimensional observations. In the present work, we address both limitations. First, we extend the theoretical framework of DAE to partially observable domains with minimal modifications. Second, we reduce its computational complexity by introducing discrete latent dynamics models that efficiently approximate transition probabilities. We evaluate our approach on the Arcade Learning Environment and find that DAE scales effectively with function approximator capacity while retaining high sample efficiency.

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

MobileFineTuner: A Mobile-Native Framework for On-Device LLM Fine-Tuning in Real-World Embedded AI Applications

arXiv:2512.08211v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are moving from cloud-centric services toward on-device embedded AI, where models interact with private, longitudinal signals sensed from users and their physical environments. Mobile phones are a natural platform for such applications because they are continuously carried by users, connected to wearable sensors, and deeply integrated with daily mobile applications. However, practical LLM fine-tuning on commodity phones remains difficult. Existing fine-tuning frameworks are largely Python-based and server-oriented, making them hard to deploy inside mobile applications. We present MobileFineTuner, a mobile-native open-source framework for end-to-end LLM fine-tuning on commodity mobile phones. MobileFineTuner is implemented in C++ and provides a reusable training stack. To make fine-tuning feasible under mobile resource constraints, MobileFineTuner integrates a resource-aware training runtime with memory-efficient attention, activation checkpointing, gradient accumulation, parameter sharding, and energy-aware scheduling. We evaluate MobileFineTuner on real mobile phones using GPT-2, Gemma 3, and Qwen2.5 models across multiple fine-tuning tasks. The results show that MobileFineTuner reproduces standard Full-FT and LoRA fine-tuning behavior, substantially reduces memory pressure and improves executability on memory-constrained phones. We further demonstrate MobileFineTuner through a private campus health-agent application, where a local LLM is fine-tuned on user-specific wearable-sensing records to provide more personalized responses while keeping raw records on the phone. These results establish MobileFineTuner as a practical toolkit for studying and building on-device LLM fine-tuning applications in embedded AI and sensing systems.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

DynaDebate: Breaking Homogeneity in Multi-Agent Debate with Dynamic Path Generation

arXiv:2601.05746v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), which excel at collaborative decision-making and complex problem-solving. Researchers have further investigated Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) frameworks, which enhance the reasoning and collaboration capabilities of MAS through information exchange and debate among multiple agents. However, existing approaches often rely on unguided initialization, causing agents to adopt identical reasoning paths that lead to the same errors. As a result, effective debate among agents is hindered, and the final outcome frequently degenerates into simple majority voting. To solve the above problem, we introduce Dynamic Multi-Agent Debate (DynaDebate), which enhances the effectiveness of multi-agent debate through three key mechanisms: (1) Dynamic Path Generation and Allocation, which employs a dedicated Path Generation Agent to generate diverse and logical solution paths with adaptive redundancy; (2) Process-Centric Debate, which shifts the focus from surface-level outcome voting to rigorous step-by-step logic critique to ensure process correctness; (3) A Trigger-Based Verification Agent, which is activated upon disagreement and uses external tools to objectively resolve deadlocks. Experiments show that DynaDebate achieves superior or highly competitive performance across the majority of benchmarks\footnote{The code is at https://github.com/nwpuLee2021/brianstorm.}.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Accounting for Human Movement to Improve Exposure-Health Models

Background. Current exposure-health models rely on averaged, residential-based environmental exposures, failing to account for human movement. This aggregation can lead to exposure misclassification and biased exposure-response estimates, potentially distorting our understanding of the true health effects of environmental conditions. We developed exposure disaggregation regression models that explicitly account for human movement when linking environmental exposures to health outcomes. Methods. By weighting pixel-level exposures according to distance from home as a simple proxy for human movement, our model linked disaggregated environmental exposures to individual-level health outcomes. Weights were either fixed a priori or derived from a latent distance-decay power parameter learned from the data. We additionally evaluated model performance under a nonlinear exposure-response relationship. Model performance was assessed across multiple sample sizes (N = 1,114; 50,000; and 100,000). A simulation study examined parameter recovery using bias, empirical standard error (EmpSE), and credible interval coverage. As a case study, Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) data from Albania were used to link acute respiratory infection (ARI) outcomes among children under five to pixel-level NDVI within a 3 km buffer around DHS cluster centroids, and the proposed models were applied to these data. Results. Across all models (fixed-weight, learned-weight, and restricted cubic spline models), parameter recovery improved with increasing sample size. At N = 1,114, estimates were biased and imprecise, with incorrect effect direction for exposure-response parameters (e.g., learned-weight {beta}1 bias = - 0.79; EmpSE = 2.61; coverage = 0.88). In contrast, the models accurately recovered parameters at larger sample sizes, including the latent distance-decay parameter (bias = - 0.02; EmpSE = 0.15; coverage = 0.95 at N = 100,000), demonstrating their ability to reliably learn movement-based exposure weights when sufficient data were available. Conclusion. Instead of relying on arbitrarily-sized buffers, this statistical framework provides a novel method for studying environmental exposure-health relationships whilst accounting for human movement. With sufficiently large sample sizes, it can accurately estimate the influence of disaggregated environmental exposures on individual-level health and help address exposure misclassification arising from residential-only metrics. This methodological framework remains scalable, interpretable, and adaptable to other exposures and outcomes, offering a foundation for future work that integrates richer mobility-informed exposure-health research.

05.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-16

<b>Engineered heart muscle passes early clinical milestone</b>

Engineered heart muscle allografts derived from induced pluripotent stem cells show promising early outcomes in patients with treatment-refractory advanced heart failure with reduced left ventricular ejection fraction, in support of further clinical investigation. Engineered heart muscle allografts derived from induced pluripotent stem cells show promising early outcomes in patients with treatment-refractory advanced heart failure with reduced left ventricular ejection fraction, in support of further clinical investigation.

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

CMDS-AD: Cross-Modal Dual-Stream Decoupling for Few-Shot Anomaly Detection

Few-shot anomaly detection remains challenging due to limited training data. Multi-modal anomaly detection (MAD) offers a viable solution, leveraging 3D geometric cues to enrich 2D RGB representations and compensate for this scarcity. However, existing MAD methods apply spatially uniform feature processing, conflating stable macroscopic structures with high-frequency localized defect signals, exacerbating cross-modal misalignment and inflating false-positive rates. To overcome this, we present CMDS-AD, a Cross-Modal Dual-Stream Anomaly Detection framework. A LoRA-guided diffusion model generates diverse RGB samples to mitigate extreme data scarcity. For 3D normal augmentation, we employ a pre-trained diffusion model as a normal estimator. Crucially, this estimator inherently acts as a non-linear low-pass filter, directly extracting low-frequency normal representations from RGB inputs. This establishes an auxiliary estimated stream of purely low-frequency information, anchoring robust structural templates and assisting the uncompressed real stream, containing coupled high- and low-frequency components, to precisely isolate micro-defects. A Coordinate-Aware Hierarchical Feature Mapper adaptively aligns cross-modal semantics, while a multiplicative scoring mechanism filters modality-specific noise. Under the extreme 1-shot setting, CMDS-AD achieves absolute performance gains of 5.7% (I-AUROC) and 2.0% (AUPRO) on MVTec 3D-AD, alongside 7.7% and 5.6% improvements on EyeCandies, establishing a new state-of-the-art.

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

Generative models for decision-making under distributional shift

arXiv:2604.04342v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many data-driven decision problems are formulated using a nominal distribution estimated from historical data, while performance is ultimately determined by a deployment distribution that may be shifted, context-dependent, partially observed, or stress-induced. This tutorial presents modern generative models, particularly flow- and score-based methods, as mathematical tools for constructing decision-relevant distributions. From an operations research perspective, their primary value lies not in unconstrained sample synthesis but in representing and transforming distributions through transport maps, velocity fields, score fields, and guided stochastic dynamics. We present a unified framework based on pushforward maps, continuity, Fokker-Planck equations, Wasserstein geometry, and optimization in probability space. Within this framework, generative models can be used to learn nominal uncertainty, construct stressed or least-favorable distributions for robustness, and produce conditional or posterior distributions under side information and partial observation. We also highlight representative theoretical guarantees, including forward-reverse convergence for iterative flow models, first-order minimax analysis in transport-map space, and error-transfer bounds for posterior sampling with generative priors. The tutorial provides a principled introduction to using generative models for scenario generation, robust decision-making, uncertainty quantification, and related problems under distributional shift.

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

Propagating Structural Guidance: Synthesizing Fluorescein Angiography from Fundus Images and Sparse OCT Scans

Fundus fluorescein angiography (FFA) is critical for assessing retinal vascular abnormalities, but its acquisition is invasive and not always feasible. In contrast, color fundus photography (CFP) is non-invasive and widely accessible, which has motivated studies on CFP-to-FFA synthesis. However, prior works rely solely on CFP surface texture, fundamentally limiting the ability to reconstruct functional vascular information and subtle pathological changes. To address this, we propose a novel framework that synthesizes FFA from CFP with structural guidance provided by optical coherence tomography (OCT). We construct a multi-modal retinal imaging dataset with paired CFP, FFA, and OCT from 3,676 patient eyes–the first tri-modally aligned dataset in retinal imaging. To bridge the spatial gap between OCT and fundus modalities, we propose a Spatially Aligned Cross-Modal Fusion (SACMF) module that projects depth-resolved OCT features onto the fundus plane and injects them into the CFP encoder via adaptive layer normalization. Beyond feature fusion, we further introduce Token-wise Cross-Modality Alignment (TCMA), a token-level contrastive learning strategy that explicitly aligns CFP and FFA representations at corresponding spatial positions. Our method achieves superior synthesis performance compared to state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, extensive experiments demonstrate that the FFA images synthesized by our approach bring greater improvements in downstream disease diagnosis performance than existing methods, highlighting the clinical potential of our approach as a non-invasive decision-support tool in routine workflows. The code is available at https://github.com/while-plus/OCT-guide-FFA-Syn.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Pulling The REINS: Training-Free Safety Alignment of Video Diffusion Models via Representation Steering

Open-weight video diffusion models can generate photorealistic unsafe content, from violence to misinformation, yet existing defenses either require expensive safety fine-tuning that degrades general capability, or apply external filters that are trivially bypassed by adversarial prompts. We present REINS (REpresentation-space INference-time Safety steering), a training-free method that aligns video diffusion models at inference time by steering their internal representations toward safe generation. Our key finding is that safety-relevant structure is linearly encoded in the hidden-state activations of video diffusion transformers, and a single direction, discovered via Supervised PCA on binary safety labels, suffices to separate safe from unsafe generation trajectories. At inference, adding this direction to hidden states at an intermediate transformer layer redirects generation from harmful content to semantically related safe alternatives, with no weight updates, no concept enumeration, and negligible computational overhead. Through mechanistic analysis, we reveal that while safety information accumulates monotonically with transformer depth, steering effectiveness peaks at intermediate layers (~50% depth), exposing a fundamental tradeoff between information availability and downstream propagation capacity. We evaluate REINS across 9 video diffusion models, multiple parameter scales (1.3B-5B), and both text-to-video and image-to-video generation, to our knowledge, the broadest safety evaluation suite in the video generation literature.

10.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

pykarambola: Minkowski tensor morphometry of 3D structures

Three-dimensional biological morphologies encode functional and physiological state, yet the directional, orientational, and topological properties of these shapes are rarely captured by morphometric tools available for bioimage analysis. Minkowski tensors are mathematically rigorous tensor-valued measures that encode surface curvature and directionality for objects of arbitrary topology, with tensor eigensystems that directly quantify elongation axes and anisotropy. A C++ implementation, karambola, computes Minkowski tensors for triangulated surfaces but is inaccessible within Python-based bioimage workflows. Here we present pykarambola, a pip installable Python package that accepts NumPy arrays and standard mesh formats and returns Minkowski tensors, including derived anisotropy and orientation quantities. A high-level label-image API converts 3D integer arrays into per-object Minkowski tensors in a single call, making pykarambola directly compatible with the output of widely used segmentation tools. An optional Cython extension accelerates graph-traversal steps of mesh initialization for large-scale analyses. Benchmarked on 1,584 adrenal gland meshes, pykarambola reproduces all 121 C++ karambola output features to near-floating-point agreement and, in the pure-Python build, is 2.8x faster at 28^3 and 1.5x faster at 64^3 voxel resolution, with speedups primarily attributable to karambola's sequential per-object file I/O. pykarambola is freely available as an open-source software package.

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

QPILOTS: Efficient Test-Time Q-Steering for Flow Policies

arXiv:2606.14801v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Flow-matching and diffusion policies are expressive action generators, but optimizing them with temporal-difference reinforcement learning (RL) remains difficult. Effective policy extraction requires exploiting the critic's action gradient, yet directly backpropagating this signal through a multi-step denoising process can be numerically unstable. Existing methods work around this either by discarding gradient information, distilling the policy into a simpler one-step actor, or repeatedly fine-tuning the denoising policy as the critic improves. We propose QPILOTS, a method that leaves the original policy unmodified and steers the denoising process at inference time. At each denoising step, instead of evaluating the critic on the noisy intermediate action where critic predictions are unreliable, we first project that intermediate state to an estimate of the final clean action and compute the critic gradient there. We introduce two variants: QPILOTS-U uses a fast single-point approximation, while QPILOTS-M draws differentiable posterior samples via a learned auxiliary network. On a standard offline-to-online RL benchmark, QPILOTS achieves the best aggregate performance, reaching an average success rate of 90% across 50 tasks. We also apply QPILOTS to steer a large, frozen, pretrained Vision-Language Action (VLA) foundation model, outperforming or matching prior inference-time approaches across six manipulation tasks in simulation.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

RQUL-UIE: Revitalizing Quality-Unstable Labels for Underwater Image Enhancement via In-Dataset Self-Supervision

Underwater Image Enhancement (UIE) is essential for mitigating degradations caused by water medium. Although learning-based methods have advanced significantly, most rely on paired datasets with unstable label quality, which bottlenecks model performance. This paper proposes a diffusion-based, in-dataset self-supervised learning strategy designed to exploit the quality distribution of training labels. Specifically, we evaluate label quality via semantic perception embeddings from a pre-trained diffusion model in a training-free manner. These quality scores are subsequently quantized into noise-level indices, guiding a multi-step denoising process for level-wise supervision. This mechanism prevents low-quality labels from degrading the model while maximizing their utility during training. Furthermore, a Fourier-based refinement network is incorporated to explicitly reconstruct high-frequency components. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms SOTA approaches in restoration quality. The code and pre-trained model will be available once accepted in link.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Shrinkage priors for Bayesian Substitute Confounders

arXiv:2606.18535v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-cause observational studies contain information about unmeasured confounding through the dependence structure among causes. However, literal imputation of the unobserved confounder is often more complex than learning a lower-dimensional substitute score that preserves the shared assignment variation needed for stable causal adjustment. The deconfounder (Wang and Blei, 2019) and related substitute confounder methods exploit this idea, but flexible assignment models can fit the joint distribution of the causes while producing scores that over-encode the treatment vector, collapse overlap, or capture single-cause variation. We develop a Bayesian factor assignment framework for learning sparse substitute confounders that retain coarse multi-cause dependence with shrinkage priors. The theory is stated at the level of posterior concentration, factor score contraction, and overlap-preserving assignment geometry and therefore does not rely on a particular shrinkage prior. Under these conditions, the proposed regression-adjusted estimators are consistent for mean potential outcomes when the corresponding latent variable identification assumptions hold. Shrinkage priors provide a natural tool for latent structural learning: they favour low-dimensional factors supported by multiple causes, discourage effectively single-cause factors, and induce an ordering of the latent factors through progressive shrinkage. Synthetic experiments illustrate the roles of signal strength, outcome validity, and geometry-aware regularization. In an Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) baseline analysis, sparse substitute scores recover much of the adjustment obtained by directly conditioning on invasive cerebrospinal-fluid biomarkers, while collapse diagnostics identify when fitted factors reduce to individual observed measurements.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

SAIGuard: Communication-State Simulation for Proactive Defense of LLM Multi-Agent Systems

arXiv:2606.12474v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) solve complex tasks through inter-agent collaboration, but their communication-driven nature also allows security risks to spread across agents and trigger system-wide failures. Existing MAS defenses mainly follow a reactive paradigm after execution by detecting and isolating harmful agents, which may cause irreversible damage and degrade collaborative utility. To address this, we propose a proactive defense framework for MAS security, namely a Simulation-aware Interception Guard (SAIGuard). SAIGuard performs communication-state simulation over the MAS interaction graph, estimates the impact of incoming messages on local agent states and the global MAS state, and detects risky messages via reconstruction deviations from benign communication patterns. Instead of isolating agents, SAIGuard sanitizes or regenerates suspicious messages before it propagation into system. Experiments across diverse topologies and attack scenarios show that SAIGuard reduces attack success rates while maintaining MAS utility, outperforming reactive defenses.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Exploring Variational Entanglement Hamiltonians

arXiv:2505.10530v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent advances in analog and digital quantum-simulation platforms have enabled exploration of the spectrum of entanglement Hamiltonians via variational algorithms. In this work we analyze the convergence properties of the variationally obtained solutions and compare them to numerically exact calculations in quantum critical systems. We demonstrate that interpreting the cost functional as an integral permits the deployment of iterative quadrature schemes, thereby reducing the required number of measurements by more than an order of magnitude even in the presence of noise. We further show that a modified ansatz captures deviations from the Bisognano-Wichmann form in lattice models, improves convergence, improves trainability and provides a cost-function-level diagnostic for quantum phase transitions. Finally, we establish that a low cost value does not by itself guarantee convergence in trace distance. Nevertheless, it faithfully reproduces degeneracies and spectral gaps, which are essential for applications to topological phases.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

"We don't complain; it's just part of being a woman": frequency, knowledge, and sociocultural beliefs about dysmenorrhoea in a South African university cohort

Introduction Dysmenorrhoea is highly prevalent globally and interferes with engagement in education, work, social participation, and quality of life. Although evidence suggests that sociocultural beliefs influence how menstrual pain is understood and managed, relatively little research has explored dysmenorrhoea-related knowledge and beliefs within South Africa. This study aimed to (1) determine the frequency of dysmenorrhoea, (2) assess dysmenorrhoea-related knowledge and compare knowledge between menstruating and non-menstruating individuals, and (3) explore commonly held generational, cultural, and religious beliefs related to dysmenorrhoea in a South African university cohort. Methods We analysed data collected as part of a cross-sectional survey conducted among staff and students at a South African university. Participants completed demographic questions, items assessing dysmenorrhoea-related knowledge, and an adapted Working Ability, Location, Intensity, Days of Pain, Dysmenorrhoea (WaLIDD) questionnaire. Participants were also invited to provide free-text responses describing generational, cultural, and religious beliefs about dysmenorrhoea. Quantitative data were analysed descriptively and compared between menstruating and non-menstruating participants. Free-text responses were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Results A total of 863 participants completed the survey, including 578 current or past menstruators. The frequency (95%CI) of dysmenorrhoea was 75.4% (71.7-78.9). Most participants were classified as having moderate (53%) or severe (31%) dysmenorrhoea on the WaLIDD scale. Awareness of dysmenorrhoea was higher among participants who had menstruated than among those who had never menstruated (80.4% vs 55.3%, p

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

Text-Vision Co-Instructed Image Editing

Existing image editing methods can be generally categorized into textual instruction-based and visual prompt-based ones. Textual instructions are semantically expressive, but are limited by the coarse granularity of spatial control of the editing results. In contrast, visual prompts such as drag and point can provide precise spatial guidance, but are limited by the inherent ambiguity in semantic intent. To unify the strength of textual and visual prompts, we present Text-Vision Co-Instructed Image Editing, which jointly models textual instructions as semantic intent and sparse visual instructions as spatial guidance, aiming to achieve precise and intent-faithful image manipulation. To this end, we first construct a textual-visual instruction paired dataset with more than 23K samples derived from dynamic videos, enabling aligned supervision for cross-modal instruction. We then propose TV-Edit, a Textual-Visual instruction unified Editing framework to contextualize drag or point-based visual instructions with image-text semantics and lift them into semantic-aware control representations for pretrained editing backbones. By integrating semantic intent and spatial constraints, TV-Edit leads to more precise spatial control, less instruction ambiguity, and stronger structural consistency than text-only or drag-based alternatives. Finally, we establish TV-Edit-Bench, a deliberately designed benchmark to evaluate semantic faithfulness, spatial alignment, and visual consistency with ground-truth references and controlled textual-visual variations for reliable assessment. Our experiments across multiple editing backbones demonstrate that TV-Edit consistently yields more precise and intent-faithful edits, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art instruction-based and drag-based baselines.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Exponential Convengence of DLRA for SDEs

arXiv:2606.15843v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study dynamical orthogonal (DO) approximations of stochastic differential equations and investigate their long-time behaviour. The DO formulation represents the solution by a low-rank decomposition and leads to a coupled system consisting of an evolution equation on the Stiefel manifold and a reduced stochastic process. We establish the well-posedness of the strong DO system and derive quantitative error estimates between the original stochastic differential equation and its low-rank approximation in the Wasserstein distance. Our main contribution is the analysis of invariant probability measures for the DO dynamics. Under suitable dissipativity, Lipschitz continuity, and non-degeneracy assumptions on the coefficients, we prove the existence of an invariant probability measure for the strong DO system. The proof combines uniform moment estimates, a Krylov–Bogoliubov argument for an associated frozen system, and a Kakutani-Fan-Glicksberg fixed-point theorem to recover the self-consistent dynamics. We further show that the induced low-rank process admits an invariant probability measure and discuss the structure of invariant measures through several illustrative examples. These results provide a rigorous foundation for the use of dynamical low-rank approximations in the approximation of long-time statistical properties of stochastic dynamical systems.

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

OR-Action: Multi-Role Video Understanding with Fine-Grained Actions

Fine-grained understanding of operating room (OR) activity could enable workflow-aware assistance, yet remains difficult due to clutter, occlusions, and limited sensing. The prevailing approach to model this environment is scene graphs as an interpretable representation of OR interactions. Converting their frame-wise relational predictions into temporally extended, fine-grained actions however, is challenging without explicit temporal modeling. To enable a principled temporal evaluation of current OR understanding methods, we introduce the first action-centric benchmark built on a publicly available ego-exocentric OR dataset by defining a fine-grained, multi-role action taxonomy and generating dense action segments via distillation from ground-truth scene graph state changes. Experiments on this benchmark show that current scene graph prediction methods struggle to model temporal structure, even when adding explicit modeling through Graph Neural Networks. We therefore introduce a vision-only temporal model that outperforms graph-based methods significantly when using all available egocentric video as input. Building on this model we also introduce a novel multi- to single-view feature alignment strategy that improves single-view performance on multi-role action recognition, mitigating the need for extensive egocentric video capture. Benchmark and code will be released upon acceptance.

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

Interactor: Agentic RL oriented Iterative Creation for Ad Description Generation in Sponsored Search

This paper focuses on automatically generating informative ad descriptions in sponsored search. Unlike ad titles which are usually optimized to attract user click feedbacks, ad descriptions have a longer text span and possess the potential of incorporating world knowledge to address user search intents while presenting the fine-grained selling points of the ads. We propose Interactor, a multi-turn iterative creation framework optimized with agentic RL for ad description generation. The generation model acts as a policy that interacts with a customized environment consisting of multiple generative reward models. Given initial generations by the policy, the customized GenRMs evaluate multi-dimensional qualities including knowledge capacity and landing page consistency, providing both binary signals and reasoning feedbacks. The policy then iteratively refines the descriptions based on such feedbacks to ensure continuous improvement. Experiments on industrial datasets show that the Interactor framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in generating knowledge-rich and faithful ad descriptions. Since May 2026, it has been deployed online in a leading search ads system, contributing to both ad revenue and user experience.

21.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Robust semi-supervised scRNA-seq integration from virtual adversarial learning

Single-cell RNA sequencing integration methods that rely solely on transcriptomic data often struggle to preserve fine-grained distinctions between closely related cell subtypes. As a result, cell populations that are separable in the raw data may become over-mixed after integration, reducing biological resolution and interpretability. Incorporating marker gene information can potentially address these issues; however, the variability and complexity of available marker sets limit their effective application. To address this, we introduce scCRAFT+, a semi-supervised integration model that innovatively incorporates marker gene information through Virtual Adversarial Training (VAT). By jointly optimizing marker-derived supervision and transcriptome-wide representations, VAT enforces local prediction smoothness among transcriptionally similar cells, improving robustness to noisy marker annotations while enhancing both integration quality and cell type auto-annotation. This targeted approach significantly enhances annotation accuracy and robustness, particularly when faced with incomplete or incorrect marker gene sets. Benchmarking shows that scCRAFT+ achieves consistently stronger performance than current unsupervised and supervised integration approaches, resulting in improved integration quality and biologically meaningful sub-cell type auto-annotations.

22.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

DynamicDemiLog: A Single Sketch for Ultrafast Similarity, Frequency, and Cardinality Estimation

Probabilistic cardinality estimators (HyperLogLog), similarity sketches (MinHash), and frequency estimators (Count-Min Sketch) are fundamental approximate data structures that each target one primary problem. We present DynamicDemiLog (DDL), a sketch that unifies cardinality estimation, set similarity, containment, element frequency and composition in one tiny data structure built from a single pass over the input stream. Using an inverted index over 200,687 RefSeq sketches (159,567 organisms), DDL performs all-to-all sketch similarity comparison of the full database in 30 seconds (128 threads, indexed) - over 375x faster per query than Mash's brute-force all-to-all comparison of 91,282 sketches, or 31x faster without the index, at double the sketch resolution. DDL extends the LogLog register with a mantissa: each register stores a floating-point-encoded hash value consisting of an integer exponent (the leading-zero count) and a fractional mantissa (the sub-leading-zero bits), rather than the integer leading-zero count alone. This preserves enough hash information for meaningful register-by-register comparison - a property that standard 6-bit registers lack - while improving on LogLog's cardinality estimation machinery, including DynamicLogLog's early exit mask for high-throughput streaming. With a default 10 mantissa bits (16-bit registers, 2,048 buckets, 4 KB), DDL achieves a per-register false-match rate of 0.018% on unrelated random same-size sets (compared to 17.0% for LL6, a basic HyperLogLog implementation), enabling Weighted Kmer Identity (WKID), Average Nucleotide Identity (ANI), containment, and completeness estimation from register comparison alone. A 16-bit per-register observation counter provides element frequency information at trivial additional computation cost, and an additional byte tracks element composition (GC content, for biological data). Furthermore, DDL's high-specificity registers enable an inverted index structure (DDLIndex) that answers similarity queries against a database of N sketches in O(B + M) time, where M is the number of matching index entries, compared to O(NxB) for pairwise comparison.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Gradual Fine-Tuning for Flow Matching Models

arXiv:2601.22495v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fine-tuning flow matching models is a central challenge in settings with limited data, evolving distributions, or computational constraints. While recent work has produced significant advances, particularly in the area of reward-based fine-tuning, current methods fail to demonstrate both theoretical correctness as well as strong empirical results in terms of stability, efficiency, and diversity preservation. In this work, we propose Gradual Fine-Tuning (GFT), a simple yet principled annealing-based framework for fine-tuning flow generative models when only samples from the target distribution are available. For stochastic flows, GFT defines a temperature-controlled sequence of intermediate objectives that smoothly interpolate between the pretrained and target drifts, provably approaching the true target as the temperature approaches zero. We analytically demonstrate that sample generation after GFT can be made substantially more efficient with the use of arbitrary (e.g., optimal transport) couplings, as well as by utilizing few-step inference methods. Empirically, GFT significantly improves convergence stability, while maintaining or improving generation quality, training speed, and generation diversity compared to other fine-tuning methods. Our results position GFT as a simple yet theoretically grounded and practically effective alternative for scalable adaptation of flow matching models under distribution shift.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Home-based binocular serious games in virtual reality to treat visual acuity and stereovision in residual amblyopia: AMBER study

Objectives: Amblyopia is a pediatric visual disorder traditionally treated by patching the fellow eye, though many patients retain residual amblyopia post-treatment. Increasing evidence suggests that visual plasticity allows treat-ment beyond the classical therapeutic window. AMBER evaluated the efficacy of binocular serious games in virtual reality (VR) in residual amblyopia. Methods and Analysis: The monocentric, prospective, randomized, crossover trial (reported as case series) includ-ed 14 anisometropic, strabismic, or mixed residual amblyopia patients (6-35 years; 5 children, 9 adults). Participants underwent two 2-month intervention phases: optical correction (standard care) and standard care plus VR games (2.5 h/week), each with a 2-month follow-up. Best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA), stereoacuity, and reading speed were assessed (5 timepoints) using the Sloan and Landolt charts, the Titmus, TNO, Lang II, Asteroid, and Mnread tests. Compliance and adverse events (AE) were recorded. Results: VR training improved BCVA in 10 amblyopic eyes (Landolt and Sloan), with more pronounced effects in anisometropic patients. Six patients showed improved stereoacuity (Titmus; 4x mixed, 1x anisometropic, 1x stra-bismic amblyopia), persistent only in children (1x strabismic, 1x mixed amblyopia). Four improvements were ob-served with TNO (1x), Lang II (1x), Asteroid (0x), and MNread (1x). Despite positive trends, when comparing re-sults of individual patients, between both eyes, and with standard treatment, consistency of improvements cannot be conclusively demonstrated. One non-severe AE (dizziness) was reported. Conclusions: Following individual cases, VR training improved BCVA and stereoacuity, particularly in children and patients with high compliance. However, considering the cohort as a whole, consistency of effects has to be confirmed in larger groups. Thus, the methodologically sophisticated AMBER study revealed differences in VR treatment efficacy between amblyopia types, children/adults, endpoints and tests, offering precious data for the design of meaningful future studies. It shows that neurovisual plasticity gauged by VR-games offers safe, engaging treatment options for residual amblyopia.

25.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

EditorForge: An Active-Site-Aware Framework for Inverse-Folding-Based Protein Redesign

Inverse-folding models can rapidly generate protein sequences compatible with a supplied backbone, but unconstrained redesign is poorly suited to enzyme and genome-editor-associated domains, where catalytic, substrate-proximal, and conserved structural regions must remain protected. In this paper, we present EditorForge, a modular constraint-and-audit suite for editor-domain protein redesign that wraps fixed-backbone inverse folding with explicit design masks, fixed-position enforcement, active-site-proximity auditing, active-site-shielded regeneration, and downstream structural quality control. Using full-length Moloney murine leukemia virus reverse transcriptase structure 4MH8 (MMLV RT 4MH8) as a demonstration target, EditorForge first restricted redesign to a bounded 25-position envelope while fixing 428 residues. An initial audit detected active-site-proximal failure modes despite fixed-position integrity. Later, the Active Site Shield module then removed five unsafe design positions, replaced them with lower-contact alternatives, and regenerated candidates under stricter constraints. Post Shield Audit evaluated 24 regenerated candidates, all of which satisfied the hard sequence/mask and active-site-shield constraints. For the eight candidates that were selected or returned for structure-prediction/refolding quality control. Enhanced RefoldQC found that all 8 evaluated predicted structures passed the computational structure-QC screen. That said, the selected 8 candidates passed the computational structure-QC screen, with global C RMSD values of 1.2061–1.5555~[A], active-site C RMSD values of 0.4098–1.8397~[A], mutation-neighborhood C RMSD values of 1.3155-1.6848~[A], and average pLDDT-like confidence values of 94.87-95.11. In short, EditorForge provides a reproducible triage layer that converts general inverse-folding output into constrained and editor-specific candidate sets for downstream structural and biological review on top of existing structural prediction tools.