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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

PolyFlow: Safe and Efficient Polytope-Constrained Flow Matching with Constraint Embedding and Projection-free Update

arXiv:2606.13400v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While flow-based generative models have demonstrated strong performance across a wide range of domains, deploying them in safety-critical physical systems remains challenging due to strict constraint requirements. Existing approaches typically enforce safety through post-hoc corrections, which incur substantial computational overhead and may distort the learned distribution. We propose PolyFlow, a polytope-constrained flow matching framework that embeds constraints directly into the model and flow dynamics. PolyFlow introduces a discrete-time flow formulation and a projection-free architecture, which eliminate the discretization error and guarantee strict satisfaction of arbitrary polyhedral constraints, without the need for expensive iterative solvers. Experimental results show that PolyFlow achieves zero constraint violation while maintaining high distributional fidelity across a range of planning and control tasks. Compared to state-of-the-art constrained generation baselines, PolyFlow significantly reduces inference latency and demonstrates a favorable trade-off between safety, efficiency, and generative quality. Code is available on https://github.com/MJianM/PolyFlow.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Climatic Drivers of Malaria risk in Children Under Five: A Large-Scale Analysis of individual-level data for 350,000 children in 26 Sub-Saharan African Countries

Background Malaria risk is influenced by climatic conditions, and children under five are particularly vulnerable due to their limited acquired immunity. We investigate the association between climatic factors and malaria risk in 350,000 children aged 5-59 months in sub-Saharan Africa over 18 years. Methods We included children aged 5-59 months with malaria tests from Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) in 26 sub-Saharan African countries between 2006 and 2023. We linked these data to high-resolution climate exposures: temperature, precipitation, soil moisture, actual evapotranspiration and specific humidity. We fitted a mixed-effect logistic regression model incorporating Distributed Lag Non-linear Models (DLNM) over 1-6 month lag window for each exposure, controlling for seasonality and long-term trends. We examined effect modification by maternal education, household wealth, residential type, water source, sanitation facility, child age and sex, use of insecticide-treated bed nets (ITNs), and the age of the household head. Results Malaria prevalence was 19.5%. Malaria risk was highest at 24 degrees (OR: 1.45, 95% CI: [1.36, 1.54]), followed by a decline at higher temperatures. This elevated risk was mainly driven by short-term exposures (1-2 months). Precipitation increased risk up to 59 ~ 120 mm (1.10, [1.07, 1.12]), after which heavier rainfall reduced risk, particularly at short- to medium-term lags (1-4 months). Soil moisture was associated with increasing risk up to ~80 mm (1.11, [1.08, 1.14]), with a plateau at higher levels. Evapotranspiration showed a strong, near-linear positive association with malaria risk. Higher specific humidity levels (>14 g/kg) presented a lower risk, reaching a 45% reduction at 17 g/kg (0.55, [0.49, 0.61]), with the strongest protective effects at short-term lags (1-2 months). Elevated malaria risk at low and moderate average temperatures was particularly evident among children who did not sleep under an ITN net. Conclusion Malaria risk in children under five is strongly shaped by climatic factors, with complex and delayed associations. The findings provide evidence to guide targeted interventions and early-warning strategies for vulnerable populations.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Quantitative Gait Categorization in Parkinson's Disease with and without Freezing of Gait

Background: Freezing of gait (FOG) is a disabling and often underrecognized feature of Parkinsons disease (PD). Objective gait analysis may improve characterization of this motor symptom. Objective: To compare quantitative 3D gait parameters in PD with FOG (PDF) and PD without FOG (PDNF) in a routine clinical cohort. Methods: We retrospectively analyzed a sequential sample of 180 patients with PD referred for motion analysis between 2020 and 2024. All patients underwent 3D motion capture in the off-medication state. Eighteen gait outcomes spanning pace, rhythm, postural control, variability, and asymmetry domains were derived from steady-state walking tasks. FOG status was determined using physician documentation and Movement Disorder Society Unified Parkinsons Disease Rating Scale (MDS-UPDRS) items. Group differences between PDF (n=99) and PDNF (n=81) were evaluated using independent samples t-tests, with outcomes adjusted for disease duration and corrected for multiple comparisons. A secondary analysis among PDF compared those in Hoehn and Yahr (H&Y) stage [≥]III to those in H&Y [≤]II. Results: PDF had longer disease duration, higher OFF MDS-UPDRS III scores, and higher Hoehn and Yahr stage than PDNF but were similar in age and sex. After adjusting for disease duration and multiplicity, PDF demonstrated reduced step length, stride length, and forward velocity, and greater cadence variability, while most postural control, and asymmetry measures were comparable between groups. Among PDF, advanced H&Y stage was associated with impaired pace and rhythm, similar to previous reports among PD in general. Conclusion: In this large, sequential, clinically referred cohort, FOG was associated with more advanced PD and specific impairments in pace and gait variability. These findings support comprehensive 3D gait analysis as an objective tool to better delineate FOG-related gait abnormalities and identify features that may predict FOG, informing targeted interventions.

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

Predicting Cognitive Load from Speech and Interaction Dynamics in Dyadic Conversations

arXiv:2606.12971v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Estimating cognitive load from speech has largely been studied in controlled laboratory settings, with limited understanding of its reliability in natural collaborative conversations. We investigate whether speech and interaction dynamics predict perceived cognitive load during dyadic conversations. We analyze audio from 53 dyads performing nine collaborative tasks and extract static acoustic, dynamic, and interaction features to train a two-head Gated Recurrent Unit encoder to predict cognitive load scores. Results show conversational interaction provides useful signals for predicting cognitive load related to time pressure, mental work, effort, and task performance. Temporal demand is associated with turn-taking dynamics such as overlap and speaker switch, while mental demand is linked to imbalanced participation between speakers. These findings highlight the importance of task structure and conversational interaction for modeling cognitive load in natural collaborative settings.

06.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Operational Tube-Sector Theory of Quantum State Distinguishability Under Generalized Symmetries

作者:

arXiv:2606.19678v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A variational principle for quantum-state distinguishability is established in many-body systems with generalized symmetries, including noninvertible cases described by fusion categories. Standard fidelity and symmetry-resolved diagnostics emerge as coarse-grained limits of a more refined operational structure. When symmetry actions terminate at entanglement cuts, distinguishability is governed by boundary tube algebras within a symmetry-constrained measurement resource theory. The physically admissible instruments are characterized by complete positivity, entanglement-cut locality, boundary-module covariance, and sequential stability. The resulting optimal measurement structure is uniquely fixed by the center of the boundary tube algebra, $\mathcal{A}_{\mathrm{phys}} = Z\!\left(\mathrm{Tube}_{\mathcal{C}}(\mathcal{M}_A)\right)$, whose primitive idempotents define tube-sector probabilities that refine fidelity-based and symmetry-resolved descriptions. The associated tube positive-operator-valued measures (POVM) are extremal and yield optimal one-shot hypothesis-testing distinguishability under symmetry constraints. The construction is universal across fusion categories and independent of microscopic realization.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

EvoLMM: Self-Evolving Large Multimodal Models with Continuous Rewards

Recent advances in large multimodal models (LMMs) have enabled impressive reasoning and perception abilities, yet most existing training pipelines still depend on human-curated data or externally verified reward models, limiting their autonomy and scalability. In this work, we strive to improve LMM reasoning capabilities in a purely unsupervised fashion (without any annotated data or reward distillation). To this end, we propose a self-evolving framework, named EvoLMM, that instantiates two cooperative agents from a single backbone model: a Proposer, which generates diverse, image-grounded questions, and a Solver, which solves them through internal consistency, where learning proceeds through a continuous self-rewarding process. This dynamic feedback encourages both the generation of informative queries and the refinement of structured reasoning without relying on ground-truth or human judgments. When using the popular Qwen2.5-VL as the base model, our EvoLMM yields consistent gains upto $\sim$3\% on multimodal math-reasoning benchmarks, including ChartQA, MathVista, and MathVision, using only raw training images. We hope our simple yet effective approach will serve as a solid baseline easing future research in self-improving LMMs in a fully-unsupervised fashion. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/EvoLMM.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

What Type of Inference is Active Inference?

arXiv:2606.04935v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Active inference casts decision-making as inference, with the Expected Free Energy (EFE) unifying goal-directed and information-seeking behavior. Recent work showed that EFE minimization can be written as Variational Free Energy (VFE) minimization on a generative model augmented with epistemic priors. We prove that the VFE of the augmented model can be rewritten as the VFE of the predictive model plus explicit entropy-correction terms, making the EFE contribution transparent. We then show that proper EFE-based planning requires combining these epistemic corrections with a planning correction that turns marginal inference into policy optimization, yielding a full variational characterization of EFE-based planning. This clarifies which corrections are needed for cross-entropy planning and for full EFE-based planning. The same entropy-corrected formulation leads to a detailed message-passing scheme for EFE-based planning together with simpler ablations. Experiments on three grid-world environments show that full EFE-based planning outperforms ablations that omit either the planning correction or the epistemic corrections.

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

Information Leakage Detection through Approximate Bayes-optimal Prediction

arXiv:2401.14283v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In today's data-driven world, the proliferation of publicly available information raises security concerns due to the information leakage (IL) problem. IL involves unintentionally exposing sensitive information to unauthorized parties via observable system information. Conventional statistical approaches rely on estimating mutual information (MI) between observable and secret information for detecting ILs, face challenges of the curse of dimensionality, convergence, computational complexity, and MI misestimation. Though effective, emerging supervised machine learning based approaches to detect ILs are limited to binary system sensitive information and lack a comprehensive framework. To address these limitations, we establish a theoretical framework using statistical learning theory and information theory to quantify and detect IL accurately. Using automated machine learning, we demonstrate that MI can be accurately estimated by approximating the typically unknown Bayes predictor's log-loss and accuracy. Based on this, we show how MI can effectively be estimated to detect ILs. Our method performs superior to state-of-the-art baselines in an empirical study considering synthetic and real-world OpenSSL TLS server datasets.

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

Calibrating Generative Models to Feature Distributions with MMD Finetuning

arXiv:2606.19496v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative models can produce individually plausible samples while deviating substantially from a target set in the distribution of key features. For example, a model pretrained on broad drug-like chemical space may generate molecules whose molecular features differ from those of a therapeutic class of interest, such as known antibiotics. Correcting such distributional miscalibration is challenging: direct finetuning on the target set can overfit and does not control which features are matched. To fill this gap, we introduce kernel Calibrating Generative Models (kCGM). kCGM minimizes a maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) between generated and target feature distributions using an unbiased score-function estimator, with KL regularization to remain close to the pretrained model. On a target set of 174 antibiotics, direct finetuning sacrifices chemical validity for feature-distribution matching, whereas kCGM improves target feature matching while increasing validity. We further demonstrate kCGM in protein and DNA generation tasks, showing it can adapt autoregressive, continuous-space diffusion, and discrete diffusion models using only feature-level supervision. Code is available at https://github.com/smithhenryd/cgm.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

DeepInflation: an AI agent for research and model discovery of inflation

arXiv:2601.14288v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present DeepInflation, an AI agent designed for research and model discovery in inflationary cosmology. Built upon a multi-agent architecture, DeepInflation integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) with a symbolic regression (SR) engine and a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) knowledge base. This framework enables the agent to automatically explore and verify the vast landscape of inflationary potentials while grounding its outputs in established theoretical literature. We demonstrate that DeepInflation can successfully discover simple and viable single-field slow-roll inflationary potentials consistent with the latest observations (with the ACT DR6 results taken as an example) or any given $n_s$ and $r$, and provide accurate theoretical context for obscure inflationary scenarios. DeepInflation serves as a prototype for a new generation of autonomous scientific discovery engines in cosmology, which enables researchers and non-experts alike to explore the inflationary landscape using natural language. This agent is available at https://github.com/pengzy-cosmo/DeepInflation.

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

From Imitation to Alignment: Human-Preference Flow Policies for Long-Horizon Sidewalk Navigation

arXiv:2606.12603v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous long-horizon sidewalk navigation is essential for micro-mobility applications such as robotic food delivery and assistive electronic wheelchairs. Unlike autonomous driving on the road, long-horizon sidewalk navigation requires precise maneuvering through unpredictable sidewalk terrains and pedestrians, with a lightweight perception stack as minimal as a single monocular RGB camera. While imitation learning (IL) from demonstrations offers a practical solution, the resulting autopilot policy often suffers from compounding errors, a lack of social compliance on sidewalks, and deficiencies in counterfactual reasoning to handle complex situations. To address these challenges, we introduce FlowPilot, a mapless navigation policy that achieves robust and efficient long-horizon navigation performance using only a monocular RGB camera. We first propose to use anchored flow matching as an action representation for policy pre-training on large-scale robot fleet data and to capture the diverse, complex, multimodal distribution of sidewalk navigation behaviors. To bridge the gap between imitation and alignment, we further design a human-in-the-loop preference learning scheme to tune the policy on a small amount of human intervention data. It strengthens the model's counterfactual reasoning and social compliance on sidewalks. We evaluate FlowPilot through extensive simulation and real-world experiments in diverse sidewalk environments. FlowPilot achieves 42% success rate and 66% route completion in simulation, while FlowPilot-HP further improves real-world robustness and social compliance, reducing IR by 40.0% and NIR by 52.1% relative to the base model.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

COVID-19 containment policies and hyperglycemia in pregnancy: correlation with the Stringency Index in a nationwide Belgian cohort

Background During the COVID-19 pandemic, gestational diabetes (GD) prevalence showed variable changes across regions, with most reporting increases and others decreases; however, its association with perinatal outcomes in Belgium remains unknown. We aimed to compare the prevalence of hyperglycemia in pregnancy (HIP) in 2020 versus 2019 and examined the correlation between HIP prevalence and pandemic-related restrictions measured by the Stringency Index (SI) and evaluate neonatal weight percentiles changes. Methods: We included all singleton live births in Belgium in 2019 and 2020 from Belgian birth registry data. We compared monthly proportions of HIP prevalence and Small for gestational age (SGA) and Large for gestional age (LGA) newborns in 2019 and 2020. Crude and adjusted odds ratios (ORs, aORs) were estimated with logistic and multinomial regression. The Spearman correlation coefficient was used to assess the correlation between the monthly average SI and the monthly aORs of HIP. Results: For deliveries from January to June 2020, no significant differences in HIP prevalence were observed compared with 2019. From July to December 2020, there was a significant increase in HIP, with peaks in July (GD screening in April) (aOR 1.41, 1.26-1.58) and November (GD screening in August) (aOR 1.33, 95% CI 1.18-1.49). There was no significant change in neonatal weight percentiles. The Spearman correlation coefficient between the SI and HIP aORs was 0.86 (p = 0.02). Conclusion During the pandemic, we observed an increase in the prevalence of HIP, compared to 2019, without a measurable impact on LGA or SGA newborns. The aOR of HIP in a given month was strongly correlated with the corresponding SI.

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

Moderating Illicit Online Image Promotion for Unsafe User-Generated Content Games Using Large Vision-Language Models

Online user generated content games (UGCGs) are increasingly popular among children and adolescents for social interaction and more creative online entertainment. However, they pose a heightened risk of exposure to explicit content, raising growing concerns for the online safety of children and adolescents. Despite these concerns, few studies have addressed the issue of illicit image-based promotions of unsafe UGCGs on social media, which can inadvertently attract young users. This challenge arises from the difficulty of obtaining comprehensive training data for UGCG images and the unique nature of these images, which differ from traditional unsafe content. In this work, we take the first step towards studying the threat of illicit promotions of unsafe UGCGs. We collect a real-world dataset comprising 2,924 images that display diverse sexually explicit and violent content used to promote UGCGs by their game creators. Our in-depth studies reveal a new understanding of this problem and the urgent need for automatically flagging illicit UGCG promotions. We additionally create a cutting-edge system, UGCG-Guard, designed to aid social media platforms in effectively identifying images used for illicit UGCG promotions. This system leverages recently introduced large vision-language models (VLMs) and employs a novel conditional prompting strategy for zero-shot domain adaptation, along with chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning for contextual identification. UGCG-Guard achieves outstanding results, with an accuracy rate of 94% in detecting these images used for the illicit promotion of such games in real-world scenarios.

15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

In silico characterization of lysis and host-recognition modules in Staphylococcus aureus bacteriophage genomes

Background/aim: Antimicrobial resistance in methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) requires precision non-antibiotic therapeutics, yet phage lytic efficacy is poorly predicted by phenotypic assays, as shown by paradoxical biofilm responses. This study characterized the genomic architecture of lytic S. aureus bacteriophages, focusing on the conservation of the lysis module and the variability of host-recognition modules, to provide a rational basis for phage candidate selection. Materials and methods: Twenty-two complete S. aureus phage genomes were retrieved from NCBI GenBank. Genomic features were extracted with custom Biopython scripts. Lysis (endolysin, holin) and host-recognition (tail fiber/receptor-binding protein) modules were annotated and validated by InterPro domain analysis, with disrupted endolysins resolved by tBLASTn. Phylogeny was reconstructed from large terminase subunit (TerL) sequences using maximum likelihood. Results: Genome size spanned three classes, from 17.5 to 148.6 kb. The LysK-type endolysin (CHAP, Amidase, SH3b) was highly conserved, whereas tail fiber/RBP genes were detected in only 14 of 22 phages. Domain analysis reclassified two proteins annotated as endolysins as virion-associated peptidoglycan hydrolases, and identified two independent mechanisms, HNH endonuclease insertion and intron splitting, that interrupt lysis-module genes and confound automated annotation. Maximum likelihood analysis recovered a strongly supported, highly conserved core clade with EW and SA13 as divergent lineages. Conclusion: Lysis modules are conserved whereas host-recognition modules are variable, indicating that host recognition rather than the lytic enzyme is the principal determinant of host range and the more rational target for phage selection and engineering.

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

Mitigating scalability challenges in LUT-based neural networks via pruning optimisations

arXiv:2407.02362v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern deep neural networks heavily rely on a large number of multiply-accumulate operations, which constitute the predominant computational cost. To address this, Look-Up Table (LUT)-based matrix multiplications have emerged as a promising alternative for reducing the computational cost and time of the multiply-accumulate operations in a neural network. However, the LUT-based neural network still faces the scalability challenge due to the inherent limitations of LUT-based matrix multiplication. To mitigate these scalability limitations, this paper proposes a scalable and energy-efficient LUT-based approximate matrix multiplication unit (LUT-MU) constituting the basic component of the neural networks by integrating a pruning strategy on the MADDNESS algorithm, a LUT-based matrix multiplication methodology. With increasing problem size and precision demands in matrix multiplication, our proposed LUT-MU architecture effectively constrains resource expansion. The case study shows that deploying our LUT-MU in neural network architectures, including fully connected layers (MNIST) and ResNets (CIFAR-10, ImageNet)-on XCZU7EV and XCZU19EG FPGAs, produces up to $1.6 \times$ throughput improvement and $4.2 \times$ energy efficiency gains over mainstream CUDA-based network implementations, and $1.8\times$ energy efficiency compared to leading quantised neural network implementations, with moderate impact on accuracy. Compared to original MADDNESS-based neural networks, our LUT-MU shows $1.3$ to $2.6\times$ resource savings based on various resolution configuration settings of MADDNESS.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

ScoreGate: Adaptive Chunk Selection for Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Dual-Score Statistical Fusion

Fixed-cardinality retrieval injects a constant top-K chunks into the generator regardless of query complexity, causing over-retrieval for narrow queries and under-retrieval for compositional ones. We describe ScoreGate, a lightweight score-space decision mechanism that controls retrieval cardinality at inference time using two scores already produced by the standard pipeline: bi-encoder similarity s_i and cross-encoder reranker score r_i, with no additional model inference calls required. Its core insight is that cross-encoder affirmation can rescue semantically relevant chunks that bi-encoder retrieval ranks poorly due to vocabulary mismatch – a failure mode unaddressed by fixed-K or single-score thresholding. On MS MARCO (200 dev queries), ScoreGate achieves MRR@10 = 0.401 with 35% fewer retained chunks than Standard Top-K. On an internal benchmark (n=300, Fleiss' kappa=0.87), ScoreGate observed zero false positives (95% CI [96.4%, 100%]) at 97.77-99.34% recall, with 34.8% fewer tokens per query and only 31ms added latency. Results on both MS MARCO and real-world production traffic suggest that adaptive retrieval cardinality can improve retrieval efficiency without degrading retrieval quality.

18.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Revealing competitive interfacial reactions in high-energy Li–S batteries

作者:

Charge transfer at solid–liquid interfaces plays a critical role in various energy-storage systems1, particularly under dynamically varying reactant concentrations. Deciphering these intricate reaction pathways remains a substantial challenge, notably in lithium–sulfur (Li–S) batteries, in which achieving high energy density requires efficient conversion of highly concentrated lithium polysulfides (LiPSs)2,3. However, the mechanisms governing lithium sulfide (Li2S) deposition and dissolution under lean electrolyte conditions remain poorly understood. Here, using in situ liquid-cell electron microscopy, we directly visualize concentration-driven phase segregation at the electrode–electrolyte interface. Within these high-concentration interfacial layers (HCILs), competitive surface and solution dictate the charge-transfer dynamics and ultimately govern Li2S deposition at different phase boundaries. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations reveal that the aggregation of LiPSs alters molecular geometry, electronic properties and orbital hybridization, collectively facilitating charge transfer through highly concentrated LiPSs clusters. Guided by these insights, we design optimized electrodes that balance interfacial reaction pathways, enabling fast charging (4 C, 26.8 mA cm−2) and achieving high energy densities exceeding 400 Wh kg−1. These findings provide mechanistic understanding of interfacial reactions under practical working conditions and offer a design strategy to advance Li–S batteries. Visualization of concentration-driven phase segregation within high-concentration interfacial layers in the context of high-energy lithium–sulfur batteries using liquid-cell electrochemical transmission electron microscopy reveals competitive interfacial reactions under lean electrolyte conditions at different phase boundaries.

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

PseudoBench: Measuring How Agentic Auto-Research Fuels Pseudoscience

As Large Language Model based agents enter autonomous scientific research, their ability to resist pseudoscience becomes increasingly important. Otherwise, such systems may rapidly generate plausible yet misleading studies that contaminate academic literature and erode trust in science. We present PseudoBench, an adversarial benchmark for evaluating whether agentic auto-research systems can identify and resist pseudoscientific narratives. PseudoBench contains 200 curated pseudoscientific claim-evidence pairs across five domains and evaluates agents through an end-to-end research pipeline from experiments to writing. Testing seven state-of-the-art agents, we find that current systems readily produce persuasive reports that align with pseudoscientific premises with near-zero refusal rates and the highest resistance of only 27.4%. Stronger agents risk packaging pseudoscience in more sophisticated scientific language, increasing its apparent credibility. These findings reveal an alarming capacity to fuel pseudoscience, calling for scientific alignment before widespread deployment.

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

A Multimodal Approach to Alzheimer's Diagnosis: Geometric Insights from Cube Copying and Cognitive Assessments

arXiv:2512.16184v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Early and accessible detection of Alzheimer's disease (AD) remains a critical clinical challenge, and cube-copying tasks offer a simple yet informative assessment of visuospatial function. This work proposes a multimodal framework that converts hand-drawn cube sketches into graph-structured representations capturing geometric and topological properties, and integrates these features with demographic information and neuropsychological test (NPT) scores for AD classification. Cube drawings are modeled as graphs with node features encoding spatial coordinates, local graphlet-based topology, and angular geometry, which are processed using graph neural networks and fused with age, education, and NPT features in a late-fusion model. Experimental results show that graph-based representations provide a strong unimodal baseline and substantially outperform pixel-based convolutional models, while multimodal integration further improves balanced classification performance and discriminative ability. SHAP-based interpretability analysis identifies specific graphlet motifs associated with corner integrity and edge continuity as key predictors, closely aligning with clinical observations of distorted cube drawings in AD. Together, these findings establish graph-based analysis of cube-copying behavior as an interpretable, non-invasive, and scalable framework for Alzheimer's disease screening.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Localizing Anchoring Pathways in Language Models

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.

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

MolSight: Molecular Property Prediction with Images

Every molecule ever synthesised can be drawn as a 2D skeletal diagram, yet in modern property prediction this universally available representation has received less focus in favour of molecular graphs, 3D conformers, or billion-parameter language models, each imposing its own computational and data-engineering overhead. We present $MolSight$, the first systematic large-scale study of vision-based Molecular Property Prediction (MPP). Using 10 vision architectures, 7 pre-training strategies, and $2\,M$ molecule images, we evaluate performance across 10 downstream tasks spanning physical-property regression, drug-discovery classification, and quantum-chemistry prediction. To account for the wide variation in structural complexity across pre-training molecules, we further propose a $chemistry-informed curriculum$: five structural complexity descriptors partition the corpus into five tiers of increasing chemical difficulty, consistently outperforming non-curriculum baselines. We show that a single rendered bond-line image, processed by a vision encoder, is sufficient for competitive molecular property prediction, i.e. $chemical insight from sight alone$. The best curriculum-trained configuration achieves the top result on $5 of 10$ benchmarks and top two on $all 10$, at $$80$\times$ lower$$ FLOPs than the nearest multi-modal competitor.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis using a Multimodal Approach with 3D MRI and PET

arXiv:2606.20037v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Alzheimer's disease (AD) is an irreversible neurodegenerative disorder and a leading cause of death worldwide. Early diagnosis plays an important part especially at the Mild Cognitive Impairment stage, where timely intervention can help slow its progression before it advances to AD. Neuroimaging data, like Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scans, can help detect brain changes early by providing structural and functional brain changes related to the disease. Yet, many multimodal models still fuse MRI and PET with static concatenation and apply identical computation to all subjects, which limits robustness to patient/site heterogeneity and can waste computation. To address these limitations, we present the first study of combining 3D convolutional feature extractors with three fusion strategies - concatenation, Gated Multimodal Unit (GMU), and gated self-attention - and a sparsely gated Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) classifier that performs input-adaptive routing, activating only the most informative experts per case. Finally, we utilize Grad-CAM to visualize disease-related regions, ensuring model interpretability. Experiments are performed across three binary classification tasks (NC vs. MCI, MCI vs. AD, and NC vs. AD). Results show that GMU achieves accuracies of 80.46 % (NC vs. MCI) and 95.47 % (NC vs. AD), while gated self-attention attains 82.08 % on MCI vs. AD. Ablations show that removing the MoE consistently degrades accuracy across all tasks. These findings underscore the value of input-adaptive, multimodal modeling for AD diagnosis by leveraging the complementary nature of MRI and PET.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Characterization of Gaussian Universality Breakdown in High-Dimensional Empirical Risk Minimization

arXiv:2604.03146v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study high-dimensional convex empirical risk minimization (ERM) under general non-Gaussian data designs. By heuristically extending the Convex Gaussian Min-Max Theorem (CGMT) to non-Gaussian settings, we derive an asymptotic min-max characterization of key statistics, enabling approximation of the mean $\mu_{\hat{\theta}}$ and covariance $C_{\hat{\theta}}$ of the ERM estimator $\hat{\theta}$. Specifically, under a concentration assumption on the data matrix and standard regularity conditions on the loss and regularizer, we show that for a test covariate $x$ independent of the training data, the projection $\hat{\theta}^\top x$ approximately follows the convolution of the generally non-Gaussian distribution of $\mu_{\hat{\theta}}^\top x$ with an independent centered Gaussian variable of variance $\mathrm{tr}(C_{\hat{\theta}} \mathbb{E}[xx^\top])$. This result clarifies the scope and limits of Gaussian universality for ERMs. Additionally, we prove that any $\mathcal{C}^2$ regularizer is asymptotically equivalent to a quadratic form determined solely by its Hessian at zero and gradient at $\mu_{\hat{\theta}}$. Numerical simulations across diverse losses and models are provided to validate our theoretical predictions and qualitative insights.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

What Drives Test-Time Adaptation for CLIP? A Controlled Empirical Study from an Update Perspective

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP have become a standard backbone for open-vocabulary recognition, yet their zero-shot predictions remain vulnerable to distribution shifts encountered at deployment. Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) has recently been extended to CLIP as a lightweight solution, leading to a rapidly growing body of TTA4CLIP methods. However, empirical progress in this area has largely outpaced our understanding of what truly drives adaptation, where their gains originate, and under which shifts they remain reliable. In this paper, we take a step back from the pursuit of state-of-the-art accuracy and conduct a systematic controlled study of TTA4CLIP. We first organize existing methods into three unified paradigms according to what is updated at test time. We then introduce TTABC, an open-source TTA Benchmark for CLIP, which standardizes evaluation protocols and integrates more than 20 representative methods. Our controlled empirical analysis focuses on three key areas. First, we determine the driving factors in parameter-based methods, revealing that adaptation gains are primarily driven by test-time evidence and reliable proxies rather than heavy optimization. Second, we explore evidence utilization beyond heavy parameter tuning, showing that competitive and efficient performance can be achieved through cross- or current-sample evidence and lightweight prototype updates. Finally, we demonstrate that there is no silver bullet for TTA: no single adaptation paradigm is universally optimal, and the preferred paradigm depends on the nature of shift. We hope our benchmark and study provide a clearer understanding of the current TTA4CLIP landscape and establish a foundation for further research.