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01.
Science (Express) 2026-04-23

Structural N- and O-glycans revealed by high-resolution cryo-EM analysis of tubular mastigonemes | Science

作者: 未知作者

The chemical complexity and non-templated biosynthesis of glycans have posed significant challenges for establishing sequence-structure relationships. Here we report cryo-EM structures of tubular mastigonemes from a golden alga species, Ochromonas danica , in which a large number of N- and O-glycans are resolved at 1.8-2.2 Å resolution. Beyond high-mannose and complex N-glycans, we identify a non-canonical N-glycan on the Ala- Asn -Asp (A N D) motif. The surface spikes comprise dense O-glycans coating PSXX tetrapeptide repeats, with two glycans linked on trihydroxylated proline and one on serine per repeat. In addition to various types of sugars and their covalent modifiers, water molecules (>10% of resolved volume) and cations are clearly resolved and mediate the structural assembly. Our study establishes a framework for investigating glycan folding in high-order biological assemblies.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

VeriGeo: Controllable Geometry Question Generation with Numerical and Analytical Verification

arXiv:2606.14176v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Geometry problem generation is useful for AI-assisted education and multimodal mathematical reasoning, but reliable synthesis remains difficult because the problem statement, diagram, constraints, and solution should be mutually consistent. Existing methods often trade off controllability and reliability: seed-based rewriting is flexible but weakly verifiable, whereas diagram-first construction improves validity but is less suited to arbitrary user-specified constraints. We introduce VeriGeo, a controllable geometry generation framework grounded in executable reasoning traces. Given user constraints such as target concepts and difficulty, an Author agent generates a problem and diagram, and a Solver agent produces a proof-aligned solution. Both agents use a shared action sequence that connects natural language, diagrams, geometric constraints, and proof steps into a verifiable representation. A three-stage pipeline checks numerical consistency, analytical realizability, and global consistency, using verification-guided reflection to repair recoverable failures and reject unrecoverable ones. Across five LLM backbones, raw generations frequently fail these checks, while VeriGeo repairs a substantial fraction of the invalid attempts. Supervised fine-tuning on 8.7k examples generated by VeriGeo achieves the best reported GeoQA performance among end-to-end multimodal LLM-based solvers, and obtains strong results on PGPS9K and MathVista-GPS, demonstrating the effectiveness of verified synthetic data for improving multimodal geometry reasoning.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Automated Airways Characterization and Assessment of Cystic Fibrosis from CT Imaging

Background Advancements in medical imaging have enabled non-invasive diagnosis and staging of cystic fibrosis (CF) using CT scans, revealing dilated airways, an increased number of visible airways, and airway generation splits in these patients. However, manual characterization of airways remains time-consuming and challenging due to the numerous structural changes, thereby limiting clinical feasibility. This study aims to develop an automated algorithm to characterize airways from segmented lung CT scans and apply this to a retrospective population. This approach reduces the time required to analyze images and obtain disease-staging results. Methods This framework consists of two stages. The first stage extracts and skeletonizes the airway tree from lung CTs, while the second stage measures lung features, including airway volumes, branch counts, generation splits, diameters, and cross-sectional areas. This permits comprehensive characterization for use in clinical assessment. Results The airways analysis was performed on 169 CT volumes ranging in age from 6 to 18 years of age, revealing substantial differences in detected airway branches, generation splits, and normalized airway volume between the control and CF groups. The framework also measures airway diameters and cross-sectional areas, revealing an increase in the number of small airways in cystic fibrosis patients, due to early bronchiectasis. These findings align with previous research and demonstrate the framework's ability to accurately quantify airway changes in patients with CF. Discussion The framework extracts entire airway trees, facilitating measurements of volume, branch count, diameters, and cross-sectional areas, which change with CF severity and/or treatment. However, partial lung atelectasis can limit the accuracy of airway detection in moderate-to-severe cases. Funding NIA U54 AG054345 and NIA R21 AG07857501

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Calibrated Helstrom geometry on the Bloch ball via Connes spectral distance

arXiv:2606.13824v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We show that the equal-prior Helstrom trace-distance geometry of qubit states is recovered from Connes spectral distance in a finite scalar-qubit-scalar model. The two scalar reference sectors couple isotropically to the qubit block through identity Dirac links, so that the full Bloch ball, including mixed states, inherits its standard chordal trace-distance geometry from the finite spectral metric. The scalar-sector distances serve a distinct calibration role: they determine the individual link lengths, satisfy a Pythagorean consistency relation, and reconstruct the middle-sector scale.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Energy-Modulated Time-Asymmetric Spontaneous Collapse: Forward-Backward Dynamics from Stochastic Ito Reversal and Bright Solitons

arXiv:2606.06452v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present a rigorous theoretical framework for symmetry breaking and quantum irreversibility arising from stochastic Ito field reversal within a cubic-quintic nonlinear Schrodinger equation (CQ-NLSE) formalism. Starting from three physically motivated considerations, forward and backward nonlinear stochastic differential equations are derived via the Ito calculus. Kinematic time-reversal is shown to be fundamentally incompatible with the Ito stochastic structure, yielding the universal asymmetry-coupling parameter of 2/3. An energy-driven collapse operator proportional to the product of noise strength, local probability density, and excitation energy squared is introduced, amplifying the collapse in high-density, high-excitation regions. Exactly bright soliton solutions are obtained for a quasi-one-dimensional BEC of attractive Li-7 atoms, with forward and backward amplitude ratio of 1.870. Heat map analysis of the parameter planes reveals that the forward collapse operator grows monotonically in time while the backward counterpart decays, achieving a ratio approximately 1030, sharply distinguishing this framework from conventional symmetric collapse models.

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

Schrödinger's Navigator: Imagining an Ensemble of Futures for Zero-Shot Object Navigation

Zero-shot object navigation (ZSON) requires robots to find target objects in unseen environments without task-specific fine-tuning or pre-built maps, a key capability for general-purpose service robots. Yet methods that perform well in simulation often degrade in cluttered real-world scenes with severe occlusion and latent hazards, where large unseen regions make single-scene inference brittle and unsafe. We propose Schrödinger's Navigator, a belief-aware framework that reasons at inference time over multiple trajectory-conditioned imagined 3D futures. Given candidate paths, a trajectory-conditioned 3D world model predicts hypothetical observations and maintains a superposition of plausible scene realizations rather than committing to one map. An adaptive occluder-aware sampler directs imagination to uncertainty-critical regions, while a Future-Aware Value Map (FAVM) aggregates imagined futures for robust, proactive action selection. Experiments in simulation and on a physical Go2 quadruped show that Schrödinger's Navigator outperforms strong ZSON baselines, improving hidden-target discovery and risk-aware waypoint selection in occlusion-heavy navigation scenarios. These results highlight imagined 3D futures as a scalable and generalizable strategy for zero-shot navigation in uncertain real-world environments.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Fabless Quantum Chip Design and Commercial Production

arXiv:2606.17956v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper proposes a fabless quantum-chip design and production architecture for superconducting quantum computing, centered on the SPICE-Q multiphysics simulation framework. The proposed ecosystem connects process-certified quantum PDKs, parameterized device cells, traceable model cards, SPICE-Q physical modeling languages, unified Q-EDA flows, foundry sign-off rules, cryogenic test feedback, and reusable quantum IP. In this model, design firms do not merely outsource fabrication; they prepare verified tape-outs under standardized process constraints and calibrated physical models. Its economic value lies in reducing repetitive device debugging, process exploration, and low-level layout effort, while its feasibility depends on PDK maturity, foundry yield, cryogenic test throughput, model-prediction accuracy, data-feedback mechanisms, and IP licensing boundaries. We argue that superconducting quantum chips can move from the current largely vertically integrated development model toward a fabless-foundry ecosystem only when hardware design is supported by standardized, verifiable, and reusable software and process interfaces. The required pillars are certified PDKs, PCell-based parameterized design, SPICE-Q cross-physics simulation, end-to-end Q-EDA automation, and a tradable quantum-IP market. By adapting lessons from the classical semiconductor industry to quantum hardware, this framework defines a path toward scalable, manufacturable, and commercially reusable superconducting quantum-chip design.

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

TS-Memory: Plug-and-Play Memory for Time Series Foundation Models

arXiv:2602.11550v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) achieve strong zero-shot forecasting through large-scale pre-training, but adapting them to downstream domains under distribution shift remains challenging. Existing solutions face a trade-off: Parametric Adaptation can cause catastrophic forgetting and requires costly multi-domain maintenance, while Non-Parametric Retrieval improves forecasts but incurs high inference latency due to datastore search. We propose Parametric Memory Distillation and implement it as TS-Memory, a lightweight memory adapter that augments frozen TSFMs. TS-Memory is trained in two stages. First, we construct an offline, retrieval-leakage-safe kNN teacher that synthesizes confidence-aware quantile targets from retrieved futures. Second, we distill this retrieval-induced distributional correction into a lightweight memory adapter via confidence-gated supervision. During inference, TS-Memory fuses memory and backbone predictions with constant-time overhead, enabling retrieval-free deployment. Experiments across diverse TSFMs and benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements in both point and probabilistic forecasting over representative adaptation methods, with efficiency comparable to the frozen backbone. Code: https://github.com/sisuolv/TS-Memory.

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

Diagnosing and Repairing Shape-Prior Shortcuts in Long-Range Single-Shot Fringe Projection Profilometry

arXiv:2606.17093v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning-based single-shot fringe projection profilometry (FPP) has been studied mostly at close range. The long-range regime (standoff beyond 1 m) remains largely unaddressed: inverse-square intensity falloff lowers fringe signal-to-noise ratio and degrades physical ground truth, the single-shot problem is ill-posed because fringe-order information is absent from one image, and these architectures have not been studied mechanistically. We present a diagnose-repair-verify study using mechanistic interpretability (MI) and conformal uncertainty quantification (UQ) as convergent diagnostics: they agree on one physical failure locus, driving and verifying an architectural repair. On a photorealistic synthetic benchmark (15,600 fringe images, 50 objects at 1.5-2.1 m), a best UNet baseline reaches 14.54 mm object mean absolute error (MAE). Three probes (linear probing, Grad-CAM, flat-plane out-of-distribution test) converge: the baseline solves the task via object-boundary shape priors rather than fringe-phase decoding. We repair this with PhiCalNet, which outputs wrapped phase rather than depth and applies a fixed differentiable calibration layer mapping phase to depth, removing the shape-prior solution from the hypothesis space architecturally rather than by a loss penalty. A physics-informed loss that enforces the same physics as a soft penalty on a depth-regressing network yields no measurable gain, isolating the architecture as the operative factor. PhiCalNet reduces object MAE 3.3x to 4.46 mm; the residual is carried by 0.103% of pixels at the +/-pi wrap discontinuity. Pixel-wise conformal UQ confirms the diagnosis: rejecting the top 5% of object pixels by snapshot disagreement cuts PhiCalNet RMSE by 64% (20.6->7.4 mm) versus 3.5% for the baseline. MI and UQ converge on the same failure locus.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Strong-field control of the $Z$-boson resonance in $e^+e^-$ collisions

arXiv:2606.09394v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Resonant $Z$-boson production is a cornerstone of precision electroweak physics, with its vacuum line shape set by the $Z$ mass, width, and collision kinematics. We show that a strong laser field can significantly alter this picture. By treating the field nonperturbatively, we find that laser dressing of the incoming fermions alters the effective collision kinematics and opens laser-photon exchange channels, including multiphoton processes, in $e^{+}e^{-}$ collisions. As a result, the $Z$-resonance profile develops distinct intensity-dependent regimes, evolving from the vacuum limit to saturation at intermediate field strengths and to an approximately quadratic enhancement at higher intensities. Additionally, the polarization composition of the produced $Z$ bosons is redistributed. In particular, at high intensities the laser-induced contribution can compensate the intrinsic chiral asymmetry of the electroweak interaction, leading to nearly parity-balanced $Z$-boson production. Our results identify that strong classical fields can dynamically control electroweak resonance phenomena, opening a bridge between strong-field QED and high-energy collider physics.

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

Quantum iterative approach to the Traveling Salesman Problem

arXiv:2606.11843v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is a classical NP-hard problem in combinatorial optimization, where determining the shortest route among a set of cities becomes computationally prohibitive as the problem size increases. This work explores quantum computing as an alternative approach to address this complexity. Unlike existing methods that primarily rely on quantum annealing, we propose a quantum iterative framework integrating Quantum Phase Estimation (QPE) and Grover's search algorithm. Route costs are encoded as quantum phases, enabling QPE to efficiently evaluate them, while Amplitude Amplification, implemented via the Grover-Long algorithm, iteratively refines the solution space toward the optimal route. A proof-of-concept case study on a small-scale TSP instance demonstrates the feasibility of this approach and its potential for scaling to larger optimization problems. Furthermore, under an expectation-based analysis, the algorithm exhibits an expected computational complexity of $O(\frac{m^2\log_2(m)\log_2(1/\epsilon)}{\sqrt{\epsilon}})$ which depends on the error tolerance parameter $\epsilon$. This estimation omits the initialization term, which we expect future refinements to render subdominant to Phase Estimation.

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

CrossMaps: Confidence-Aware Open-Vocabulary Semantic Mapping for Rover Navigation

arXiv:2606.16935v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rovers rely on perception to maintain spatial maps that encode both objects and sensor quality (e.g., range reliability, lighting artifacts, data density), guiding data fusion, embedding updates, and navigation under partial observability. To study these coupled perception-navigation processes, we present CrossMaps, a real-time confidence-aware open-vocabulary semantic mapping pipeline that constructs language-queryable maps from RGB-D data. Building on VLMaps-style approaches, CrossMaps integrates multi-scale CLIP embeddings with confidence-aware fusion and a dual-memory architecture consisting of Short-Term Memory (STM) and Long-Term Memory (LTM). The STM aggregates noisy visual observations using geometric, semantic, and temporal confidence cues, while confident and coherent cells are promoted to the LTM as persistent semantic landmarks. Designed for deployment with a Jetson Orin-powered UGV alongside SLAM, CrossMaps runs in real time and produces semantic heatmaps that can be queried with natural language to guide rover navigation.

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

SpatialWorld: Benchmarking Interactive Spatial Reasoning of Multimodal Agents in Real-World Tasks

Spatial reasoning is a foundational capability for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to perceive and operate within the physical world. However, existing benchmarks predominantly rely on passive evaluation (e.g., static VQA) or simulator-specific pipelines, failing to assess general interactive spatial understanding. We introduce SpatialWorld, a unified benchmark designed specifically for evaluating the interactive spatial understanding of multimodal agents in complex real-world tasks. Integrating eight heterogeneous simulation backends under a shared, simulator-agnostic protocol, SpatialWorld features 760 human-annotated tasks across diverse domains (e.g., household routines, travel, social collaboration). Agents must solve tasks under vision-only partial observability, actively gathering egocentric visual evidence and expressing decisions via a unified, text-based action interface native to MLLMs. For reliable evaluation, each task includes a human-validated initial state, a reference trajectory, and a terminal-state verifier. Evaluating 15 advanced agents reveals that robust spatial task solving remains challenging: the strongest model, GPT-5, achieves an average task success rate (TSR) of only 17.4%, while the leading open-source model, Qwen-3.5, reaches 14.1%. Further analysis exposes a clear mismatch between task success and execution efficiency, alongside substantial domain-specific performance variations. These bottlenecks in active exploration and long-horizon planning position SpatialWorld as a rigorous testbed for future spatial agents.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Histologically validated diffusion MRI signatures of neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration in Alzheimer disease

Noninvasive neuroinflammation measurement remains a major barrier for Alzheimer disease (AD) therapeutics. We present generalized diffusion basis spectrum imaging (g-DBSI), a diffusion MRI framework that decomposes the tissue signal into biologically interpretable microstructural compartments. In postmortem Knight ADRC brains, g-DBSI-derived restricted isotropic fraction (RIF) and restricted anisotropic fraction (RAF) mapped cellularity and neurofilament density, while their ratio (RIF/RAF) tracked inflammatory cell density and peri-plaque amyloid-beta with higher specificity and regional consistency than RIF alone. In 112 living Knight ADRC participants stratified by PET amyloid, g-DBSI metrics showed amyloid-dependent trajectories: in low-amyloid individuals, RIF and RAF rose together with amyloid, consistent with early neuropil expansion and glial elaboration, whereas in high-amyloid individuals, RIF/RAF increased, and RAF declined, indicating established neuroinflammatory remodeling and neurofilament loss. CSF proteomics linked RIF/RAF to glia-enriched immune and vascular pathways, supporting g-DBSI as a clinically compatible MRI biomarker of neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration in AD.

15.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-05

A multiscale, Bayesian inference approach to augment mechanistic models of cell signaling with machine-learning predictions of binding affinity

by Holly A. Huber, Stacey D. Finley Computational models in systems biology are often underdetermined—that is, there is little data relative to the complexity and size of the model. This lack of data is primarily due to limits in our ability to observe specific biological systems and restricts the utility of computational models. To reduce this uncertainty, recent methods have explored augmenting parameter inference of systems biology models with predictions from machine learning models. Such approaches expand the pool of data that is applicable for the inference problem. Here, we explore augmenting the parameter inference of intracellular signaling models. We choose to investigate signaling because experimental measurements of the variables of interest, protein dynamics, are still quite limited. To investigate, we propose a novel, multiscale, Bayesian inference approach that augments traditional signaling data with predictions of binding affinity. These predictions are generated using a machine learning pipeline with measurements of amino acid sequence, from the Universal Protein Resource, or protein structure, from the Protein Data Bank, as inputs. We find that we can successfully integrate these measurements into the inference problem using our novel framework. Excitingly, this integration significantly improves the parameter estimates of signaling models. We demonstrate that how much this improvement impacts predictions of signaling depends on the sensitivity of the prediction to perturbations in the parameter values. Overall, the framework we establish here improves the parameter inference of intracellular signaling models by successfully bridging data on protein sequence and structure with systems-level signaling.

16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Optimal Impulse Control for Cyber Risk Management

arXiv:2410.17706v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We explore an optimal impulse control problem wherein an electronic device owner strategically calibrates protection levels against cyber attacks. Utilizing epidemiological compartment models, we qualitatively characterize the dynamics of cyber attacks within the network. We determine the optimal protective measures against effective hacking by formulating and solving a stochastic control problem with optimal switching. We demonstrate that the value function for the cluster owner constitutes a viscosity solution to a system of coupled variational inequalities associated with a fully coupled reflected backward stochastic differential equation (BSDE). Furthermore, we devise a comprehensive algorithm alongside a verification procedure to ascertain the optimal timing for network protection across various cyber attack scenarios. Our findings are illustrated through numerical approximations employing deep Galerkin methods for partial differential equations (PDEs). We visualize the optimal protection strategies in the context of two distinct attack scenarios: (1) a constant cyber attack, (2) an exogenous cyber attack strategy modeled with a Poisson process.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

The Optimal Rate Function in Covariant Quantum State Tomography

arXiv:2606.16948v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The problem of quantum tomography is to estimate an unknown quantum state $\rho$ from a measurement of $n$ copies of $\rho$. One can ask which tomography protocol, i.e.\ which choice of multi-copy measurement, gives the best possible estimate of $\rho$. To do so, we characterize tomography protocols by their rate function, which governs the exponential rate at which a protocol assigns probability to a particular estimate $\sigma$ of the true state $\rho$. This rate function is a quantum mechanical generalization of the classical relative entropy between the true state and its estimate, and depends on the choice of protocol. It is bounded by the quantum relative entropy, and we show that this bound is sharp: for any $\rho$ and $\sigma$ we construct a family of protocols whose rate functions converge to the quantum relative entropy $D(\sigma\|\rho)$. We consider the family of covariant tomography protocols; these are the basis independent state estimation schemes that assume no prior information about $\rho$ and $\sigma$. Keyl described a specific tomography protocol based on Schur sampling, and conjectured that among all covariant tomography protocols it has the largest possible rate function for all $\sigma$ and $\rho$. We prove this conjecture. The resulting rate function is an annealed version of quantum relative entropy, due to the cost of learning the eigenbasis in covariant quantum state tomography.

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

Learning to Hear Hesitation: Continual Learning for Disfluency-Aware ASR

Despite advances in large-scale Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), disfluent speech remains challenging, as state-of-the-art systems are often optimized to omit disfluencies, leading to information loss and hallucinations. Prior work has focused on verbatim transcription and the integration of disfluency markers, but adapting models on limited datasets can lead to catastrophic forgetting of general-domain knowledge. We address this gap by leveraging continual learning (CL) with explicit disfluency tokens. We first introduce these tokens into a pretrained ASR model to establish stable token mechanisms, and then continue training on additional datasets with varying disfluency distributions. Through a detailed analysis of model dynamics during training, we identify a trade-off between marker learning and ASR performance, and a consistent cross-attention head mechanism shared across CL methods.

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

DCP-Prune: Ultra-Low Token Pruning with Distribution Consistency Preservation

Recent vision token pruning methods effectively preserve model performance under moderate token budgets but become unstable under ultra-low token budget. Our analysis shows that as the pruning budget decreases, accuracy degradation is often accompanied by larger feature distribution shifts. Critically, the degree of this distribution shift strongly correlates with performance degradation. To better characterize this phenomenon, we introduce a lightweight distribution consistency metric to estimate the distribution shift between retained and full tokens. Motivated by these observations, we propose a two-stage pruning framework consisting of Anchor-Context Graph Recovery (ACGR) and Text-Aware Token Cluster Selection (TATCS). Specifically, ACGR transfers contextual information before token removal, while TATCS dynamically re-selects representative tokens when severe distribution shift is detected. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior and more stable performance under ultra-low token budget. Notably, it retains 92.1% of the upper-bound average performance on LLaVA-1.5-7B with only 16 visual tokens.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

TivTok: Broadcasting Time-Invariant Tokens for Scalable Video Tokenization

Video tokenization is fundamental to scalable video generation, as the number of tokens directly determines the computational cost and the length of videos that can be modeled. Existing tokenizers mainly improve scalability by compressing videos into fewer tokens, but they often continue to represent persistent content, such as static backgrounds and consistent object appearances, repeatedly across frames and chunks. In this paper, we propose TivTok (Time-Invariant Tokenizer), a reuse-aware video tokenizer that makes persistent information reusable across time. TivTok represents a clip with Time-Invariant (TIV) tokens that encode information shared across frames and Time-Variant (TV) tokens that encode frame-specific residuals. To obtain this factorization, we introduce Scope-Induced Factorization (SIF), which assigns different attention scopes to the two token groups: TIV tokens attend to the full clip, whereas each TV token only accesses its corresponding frame together with the TIV tokens. In the decoder, Invariant Broadcasting (IB) reuses the same TIV tokens across frames and chunks for parallel reconstruction and long-video tokenization. Experiments show that TivTok achieves an rFVD of 12.65 on the standard $16{\times}256{\times}256$ benchmark and improves compression efficiency by 2.91$\times$ for 128-frame videos compared with the evaluated baselines, while using only 1.1\% of the tokens required by downsample-based tokenizers in our evaluation.

21.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Poisson approximation by coupling

arXiv:2605.01894v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: It is well known that a binomial $(n,p)$ can be approximated by a Poisson distribution with parameter $np$. The typical approach in undergraduate probability texts is to show a convergence result for the distribution of the binomial as $n$ goes to infinity and $np$ converges to some $\lambda$. In this note we use instead the coupling technique to show a much more general result. Moreover, we only use elementary results from probability.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Conformal Risk-Averse Decision Making with Action Conditional Guarantee

arXiv:2606.05551v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reliable decision making pipelines powered by machine learning models require uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods that come with explicit safety guarantees. Conformal prediction provides such UQ by wrapping ML predictions into prediction sets, and recent work by Kiyani et al. (2025b) established that these sets can be translated into optimal risk-averse decision policies – yet only inheriting marginal safety guarantees. We generalize and strengthen their results by (i) introducing action-conditional conformal prediction, which yields safety guarantees conditioned explicitly on each action taken by the decision maker, (ii) showing that action-conditional prediction sets serve as a proxy for the feasible decision space for risk-averse decision makers aiming to optimize action-conditional value-at-risk, and (iii) proposing a principled finite-sample algorithm based on pinball-loss minimization, connecting the framework of Gibbs et al. (2025) to action-conditional guarantees. Experiments on two real-world datasets confirm that our approach significantly improves action-conditional performance over conformal baselines.

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

Explainable deep learning improves human mental models of self-driving cars

arXiv:2411.18714v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Self-driving cars increasingly rely on deep neural networks to achieve human-like driving. The opacity of such black-box planners makes it challenging to accurately anticipate when they will fail, with potentially catastrophic consequences. While research into interpreting these systems has surged, most of it is confined to simulations or toy setups due to the difficulty of real-world deployment, leaving the practical utility of such techniques unknown. Here, we introduce the Concept-Wrapper Network (CW-Net), a method for faithfully explaining the behavior of machine-learning-based planners that causally grounds their reasoning in human-interpretable concepts without sacrificing performance. We deploy CW-Net on a real self-driving car and show that the resulting explanations improve the human driver's mental model of the vehicle, allowing them to better predict its behavior, particularly in surprising situations. This demonstrates that explainable deep learning integrated into self-driving cars can be both understandable and useful in a realistic deployment setting. We anticipate our method could be applied to other safety-critical systems, such as autonomous drones and robotic surgeons, as well as to other architectures, such as end-to-end learning systems and vision-language-action models. Overall, our study establishes a deployment-validated pathway to interpretability for autonomous agents, which could help make them more transparent and safe.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Timestep Rescheduling in Diffusion Inversion

Diffusion inversion, which maps images back to the Gaussian latent space of a diffusion model, is a critical task for image reconstruction and editing. While DDIM enables fast deterministic inversion, it inherently introduces deviations that accumulate into noticeable inversion errors. Existing methods often address this by solving a fixed-point problem but largely overlook how the selection of the diffusion timestep in the noise scheduler influences inversion fidelity. In this work, we reveal that the deviation scale in diffusion inversion is strongly dependent on the timestep size, and exhibits a parabolic trend, with larger errors concentrated at both small and large timesteps. Based on this finding, we propose a simple yet effective nonuniform timestep scheduler that integrates a global rescaling with a local dynamic programming based rescheduling, enabling a strategic allocation of computational effort that minimizes the overall inversion error and preserves higher inversion accuracy. Our method serves as an off-the-shelf enhancement for existing inversion techniques and requires no extra parameters or computational overhead. Through extensive experiments, we verify that integrating our scheduler consistently boosts the performance of existing inversion methods, achieving superior results in image reconstruction and editing.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers for Nonlinear Matrix Decompositions

arXiv:2512.17473v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present an algorithm based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for solving nonlinear matrix decompositions (NMD). Given an input matrix $X \in \mathbb{R}^{m \times n}$ and a factorization rank $r \ll \min(m, n)$, NMD seeks matrices $W \in \mathbb{R}^{m \times r}$ and $H \in \mathbb{R}^{r \times n}$ such that $X \approx f(WH)$, where $f$ is an element-wise nonlinear function. We evaluate our method on several representative nonlinear models: the rectified linear unit activation $f(x) = \max(0, x)$, suitable for nonnegative sparse data approximation, the component-wise square $f(x) = x^2$, applicable to probabilistic circuit representation, and the MinMax transform $f(x) = \min(b, \max(a, x))$, relevant for recommender systems. The proposed framework flexibly supports diverse loss functions, including least squares, $\ell_1$ norm, and the Kullback-Leibler divergence, and can be readily extended to other nonlinearities and metrics. We illustrate the applicability, efficiency, and adaptability of the approach on real-world datasets, highlighting its potential for a broad range of applications.