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01.
Science (Express) 2026-06-02

Another red alert for American science | Science

作者: 未知作者

Although research has bipartisan support in the US Congress, and trust in science is above 75% across the country, the Trump administration seems as determined as ever to mortally wound the nation’s scientific enterprise. After the scientific community persuaded Congress to restore most of the president’s draconian cuts to research funding last year, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), under Russell Vought, has found new ways to circumvent the will of Congress and starve American science. At the beginning of this year, OMB dragged its feet in releasing instructions to federal agencies for how to distribute the funding appropriated by Congress, leading to lags in dispersal. Now, OMB has proposed revising the rules that govern how federal dollars are spent. The changes would inevitably lead to unlegislated reductions in funding and damage US leadership in science, both in academia and industry.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

When Multiple Scripts Matter: Evaluating ASR in Clinical Settings

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) in non-English clinical settings is challenged by multiscript variability, where the same term may appear in multiple valid orthographic forms. Conventional string-matching evaluation metrics often underestimate ASR performance by treating orthographic variants as errors. To address this issue, we introduce MultiClin, a clinical ASR benchmark designed to evaluate robustness to multiscript variability. Experiments across diverse ASR models show that multiscript-aware evaluation provides a fairer assessment of recognition quality than conventional single-reference evaluation. We further investigate the impact of script consistency during training and find that inconsistent script mappings increase orthographic uncertainty and hinder model convergence, with a balanced 50% mapping ratio producing the highest entropy. In contrast, script unification consistently yields the best ASR performance. Our dataset and code are publicly available at: https://github.com/aitrics-ronaldo/Interspeech_MultiClin.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Positional Encoding in the Context of Memristor-Based Analog Computation for Automatic Speech Recognition

arXiv:2606.13379v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Memristors provide a new chance for resource-efficient computation of neural models for natural language processing by enabling analog execution of vector-matrix-multiplication. Yet, computations on these devices are currently subject to larger distortion, both in weight programming and execution. In this work, we identify large output values of transformed positional encodings to cause major degradation within analog-to-digital conversion (ADC) as part of memristor-based computation. By adjusting the proportion of weight and precision bits of the ADC of specific memristor layers, we reduce the degradation of the execution by ~50% relative, while keeping the estimated energy consumption stable. Additionally, we investigate scenarios where the ADC cannot be modified. In that case the degradation can be reduced by ~30% relative after removing encoding-related linear transformations.

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

Sample from What You See: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Diffusion Bridge with Observation-Embedded Stochastic Differential Equation

arXiv:2512.07212v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Imitation learning with diffusion models has advanced robotic control by capturing the multi-modal action distributions. However, existing methods typically treat observations only as high-level conditions to the denoising network, rather than integrating them into the stochastic dynamics of the diffusion process itself. As a result, the sampling is forced to begin from random noise, weakening the coupling between perception and control and often yielding suboptimal performance. We propose BridgePolicy, a generative visuomotor policy that directly integrates observations into the stochastic dynamics via a diffusion-bridge formulation. By constructing an observation-informed trajectory, BridgePolicy enables sampling to start from a rich and informative prior rather than random noise, substantially improving precision and reliability in control. A key difficulty is that diffusion bridge normally connects distributions of matched dimensionality, while robotic observations are heterogeneous and not naturally aligned with actions. To overcome this, we introduce a semantic aligner to unify the visual and state inputs and align the observations with action representations, making diffusion bridge applicable to heterogeneous robot data. Extensive experiments across 52 simulation tasks on three benchmarks and 5 real-world tasks demonstrate that BridgePolicy consistently outperforms state-of-the-art generative policies. Our code is available at https://jianghcsr.github.io/BridgePolicy_page/.

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

MA-SBI: Misspecification-Aware Simulation-Based Inference via Side-Channel Guidance

arXiv:2606.16923v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Simulation-based inference (SBI) of latent parameters is often hindered by simulator misspecification, the mismatch between simulated and real-world observations caused by inherent modeling simplifications. RoPE, the recent state-of-the-art for robust SBI, addresses this through optimal transport between learned representations of real and simulated observations, but requires ground-truth parameter calibration pairs that are typically unavailable in the very settings where SBI is needed. What practitioners do have is unstructured side-information such as regime labels, instruction text, and policy bulletins. We propose Misspecification-Aware Simulation-Based Inference (MA-SBI), a calibration-free framework that turns this side-channel into a posterior correction. A learned corrector maps side-channel text to an observation-space shift applied before any pre-trained amortized posterior, requiring no retraining and no parameter ground-truth. Our main theorem bounds achievable bias reduction by the mutual information between misspecification and side-channel, with a non-vacuous constant that extends to all sub-Gaussian noise via Donsker-Varadhan. On hide-the-calibration benchmarks, MA-SBI with text alone matches the oracle posterior across 10 seeds and two backbones (TOST equivalence), while RoPE given more data does not. The two approaches are complementary: where misspecification is structural and recoverable from parameter pairs, RoPE dominates, as the theory predicts. A stochastic variant improves posterior-predictive log-likelihood on real COVID and OxCGRT epidemiological data, and correctly leaves the posterior unchanged on a well-specified cognitive-science corpus.

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

Towards Truly Multilingual ASR: Generalizing Code-Switching ASR to Unseen Language Pairs

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has become a key technology for human–AI interaction. However, code-switching ASR (CS-ASR) remains particularly challenging due to the severe scarcity of multilingual CS speech resources across diverse language pairs. Existing approaches primarily improve CS-ASR performance through synthetic CS speech generation or pair-specific fine-tuning on limited bilingual datasets. Nevertheless, these approaches face an inherent scalability limitation, as support for CS must be developed separately for language pairs whose number grows combinatorially with the number of supported languages. In this work, we investigate whether CS capabilities learned from a limited set of seen language pairs can generalize to unseen language pairs through model merging and domain generalization methods. Our experiments show that merged bilingual CS-ASR models modestly generalize to unseen language pairs, suggesting limited transfer of bilingual CS capabilities across language pairs.

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

A Prototypical Signature Approach for Writer-Independent Offline Signature Verification

Offline handwritten signature verification aims to distinguish genuine from forged signatures using static images. Since real forgeries are rarely available, negative samples are usually randomly drawn from genuine signatures of other users to create training data. However, this random selection often lacks diversity, increases redundancy, and escalates computational cost, leading to inefficient training. We propose a data-driven strategy to generate diverse, informative negative samples using prototypical signatures, which are compact, non-identifiable summaries of genuine signature features. Based on the experiments results, we conclude that (i) prototypical signatures yield more informative negative samples, improving the detection of skilled forgeries; (ii) the proposed approach is backbone-agnostic, showing robustness across architectures; and (iii) when combined with a primal-form linear SVM, it serves as an alternative to RBF-based models while significantly improving scalability and computational efficiency. Implementation of the method is available at https://github.com/kdmoura/proto_hsv.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Bridging the Morphology Gap: Adapting VLA Models to Dexterous Manipulation via Intent-Conditioned Fine-Tuning

arXiv:2606.12109v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot generalization in robotic manipulation, yet the vast majority of pre-trained pipelines remain strictly confined to low-DoF parallel grippers. Adapting these rich semantic priors to high-DoF dexterous hands introduces a severe morphology gap, direct end-to-end joint fine-tuning inherently causes catastrophic forgetting of spatial reasoning and acute action manifold collapse due to data scarcity. In this paper, we present InDex, a novel, data-efficient adaptation framework rooted in cross-morphology semantic inheritance. Rather than discarding the pre-trained 1-DoF parallel grasp output, we repurpose it as a continuous, macroscopic virtual grasp intent proxy to sequentialize the control topology. We implement a two-stage decoupled learning architecture: the first stage parameter-efficiently aligns the VLA backbone to predict continuous arm trajectories and the scalar grasp intent; the second stage freezes this spatial backbone and leverages an intent-conditioned denoising diffusion head to decode fine-grained joint articulations for multi-fingered end-effectors. Extensive simulation benchmarks across a suite of multi-stage, contact-rich dexterous manipulation tasks demonstrate that InDex effectively masters intricate skills with minimal demonstration data, substantially outperforming monolithic baselines while preserving the robust spatial generalizability of the original VLA prior.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Towards Modality-imbalanced Federated Graph Learning: A Data Synthesis-based Approach

arXiv:2606.20382v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: MultiModal Federated Graph Learning (MM-FGL) offers a natural collaborative training paradigm, but its practical deployment is challenged by two granularities of modality imbalance. Client-level imbalance occurs when certain clients lack entire modalities, while node-level imbalance occurs when individual nodes exhibit missing visual or textual attributes. While several relevant studies exist, our investigation reveals that they predominantly target graph-agnostic or centralized scenarios, rendering them difficult to adapt directly. To address these challenges, we formalize modality-imbalanced MM-FGL as an implicit graph-aware latent semantic representation synthesis problem. This paradigm recovers missing modal semantics directly within the representation space, thereby maximizing alignment with the original data's semantic distribution and mitigating the high variance induced by missing modalities. To this end, we propose FedMGS (Federated Modality-aware Graph Synthesis), which integrates three core components. The availability-aware graph encoder prevents missing modalities from contaminating local structural propagation. The prototype-guided latent semantic synthesizer establishes cross-client semantic anchors for unavailable modalities. The reliability-calibrated semantic fusion mechanism regulates the impact of recovered latent representations prior to predictive readout. Extensive experiments on four tasks show that FedMGS consistently outperforms competitive baselines with gains up to 17.41% with best efficiency-performance tradeoff.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Querying Counterfactuals on Tissue Graphs with Supervised Disentanglement

arXiv:2606.08493v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Tissue graph counterfactuals ask how a cell's expression would change under altered spatial neighbor contexts. Such queries are central to predicting cell behavior in tissues, but lack a unified definition, with existing methods targeting specific intervention types or treating cells as i.i.d. In this work, we first formalize tissue graph counterfactuals as a class of spatial interventions that either rewire connections between cells (edge perturbation) or modify the expression of their neighbors (node perturbation). We then introduce Cellina (https://cellina.readthedocs.io) - a framework that uses supervised disentanglement to decompose a cell's intrinsic state from its spatial context, using the latter as a conditioning input for counterfactual predictions. Across benchmarks spanning over 2.5 million spatially-resolved cells in colorectal cancer and mouse brain, Cellina outperforms spatially-informed and non-spatial competitors in in-silico graph perturbations, disentanglement, and scalability. Additionally, we show that Cellina reveals biologically distinct cancer subdomains in an unsupervised manner and enables targeted neighbor perturbation simulations.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

On the Residual Scaling of Looped Transformers: Stability and Transferability

arXiv:2606.18524v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Looped (weight-tied) Transformers apply a shared residual block $N$ times ($h \leftarrow h + \varepsilon\,f(h)$, same $f$ at each step), increasing effective depth without adding parameters. Prior depth-scaling analyses prescribe $\varepsilon = 1/\!\sqrt{L}$ for depth-$L$ residual networks. We show that this is insufficient for looped architectures: weight sharing makes residual updates correlated across iterations, requiring the stronger scaling $\varepsilon = 1/N$. For multi-layer blocks ($L$ unique layers looped $N$ times), we derive a factored parameterization $\varepsilon = \lambda/(N\!\sqrt{L})$ that separates the two sources of growth: $1/N$ controls the within-layer loop correlation, and $1/\!\sqrt{L}$ controls the across-layer variance. A key consequence is that the optimal learning rate depends only on the number of unique layers $L$, not on the loop count $N$, enabling direct hyperparameter transfer from small to large $N$ without retuning. Experiments on looped Transformers confirm that $1/N$ scaling improves trainability and yields better loss than $1/\!\sqrt{N}$ scaling across loop counts.

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

Spatially Grounded Concept Bottleneck Models via Part-Factorized Attention

Concept bottleneck models (CBMs) predict a layer of human-named attributes before predicting a class, which makes their decisions auditable. On fine-grained recognition tasks the concept heads are usually free to attend anywhere in the image, so a head named for one body region can be satisfied by evidence on another. This work studies a part-factorized CBM that removes that freedom by construction. The method has three components built on a frozen DINOv3 vision transformer. A learned foreground gate, trained on DINOv3 patch features, suppresses background patches inside the part attention. A set of part queries cross-attends to patch features and each of the 312 CUB attributes is routed, through a fixed concept-to-part map, to read only from the part token its name implies. A learnable two-dimensional Gaussian prior, injected additively in log space into the attention logits, breaks the permutation symmetry among part queries; its means are initialized from the dataset-average keypoint location of each part, which requires no per-image keypoint supervision at training or test time. On CUB-200-2011 the spatial-prior model matches a fully supervised baseline (88.85% versus 88.95% top-1) while raising pointing accuracy by 16 points (52.6% versus 36.4%). Replacing bounding-box supervision with a PCA foreground target and combining it with the Gaussian prior removes all per-image supervision and reaches 88.6% top-1 at about 70% pointing accuracy. A keypoint-fraction sweep shows that 0.5% of the training set (about 27 images) suffices to initialize the prior with no measurable loss. Removing part identity entirely is the harder case: without any spatial prior, pointing accuracy collapses to $2.9\%$.

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

Fixed-Parameter Tractability of Private Synthetic Data Generation

arXiv:2606.11283v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the problem of generating synthetic data under differential privacy. We establish fixed-parameter tractability (FPT) for this problem where the parameter is the treewidth of the query family's incidence graph. Our algorithms attain optimal error rates across all regimes and are realized by two different approaches: the first is based on linear programming (LP) and the FPT of the separation problem for the LP dual; the second is based on a subsampled private multiplicative weights method, where we obtain FPT for sampling from Gibbs distributions. Both approaches are unified by a dynamic programming framework over a tree decomposition.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Do Large Language Models Have Emotions?

arXiv:2606.14742v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Do LLMs have emotions? A recent paper from Anthropic reports finding internal representations of emotion concepts in Claude Sonnet 4.5, concluding that the LLM has 'functional emotions.' We evaluate this claim against what is known about how emotions actually function in biological systems. We argue that emotions serve two core functions: the context-sensitive interpretation of situations, and the reorganization of processing across multiple systems in response to those interpretations. The Anthropic findings offer partial support for the first function, though the consistent, discrete emotional representations identified in Claude sit uneasily with affective neuroscience findings that human emotion is characterized by variable rather than uniform neural signatures. On the second function, the evidence is mixed: Claude's representations modulate output without producing the dynamic reorganization of attention, decision speed, and motivational state that defines emotion in biological systems. We close by proposing what it would take for an LLM to have emotions.

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

GrapNet: A Programmable Dynamic-Architecture Neural Graph Substrate

作者:

arXiv:2606.18923v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Programmability is a missing first-class interface in fixed-tensor neural networks: editing a relation, freezing a subgraph, auditing a local function, or changing the execution backend should be an operation on the neural program rather than ad-hoc parameter surgery. GrapNet studies this graph-as-network setting. The graph is the architecture and executable program, not an input data graph. Each compute node owns its next-layer child references and a trainable allocation vector aligned with those references; deleting a relation physically removes both the child reference and the corresponding allocation coordinate. Structural rules and execution policies live outside the node core, so the same child-owned graph can be grown, frozen, structurally edited, grouped into trainable family blocks, routed by attention over active relations, or lowered to dense snapshots after topology stabilizes. GrapNet composes with conventional modules through a vector-valued parent interface: dense layers, CNN encoders, ResNet feature extractors, attention blocks, and transformer representations can all feed one sensory GrapNode per coordinate. The evaluation is organized as a programmability stress suite rather than as a new replay benchmark. In a matched ten-seed Split Fashion-MNIST study, a plastic GrapNet+ER head reaches 63.16 percent seen-class accuracy versus 51.08 percent for a parameter-larger dense MLP+ER under the same seen-class loss and replay memory, with paired delta 12.08 points and p=1.3e-5. On Split CIFAR-10 with a frozen ImageNet ResNet-18 encoder, the same substrate improves the online head over MLP-256 by 3.81 points, with p=0.0026. These results support GrapNet as an editable neural graph substrate whose core value is structural programmability with faithful execution views.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Architecture-Aware Reinforcement Learning Makes Sliding-Window Attention Competitive in Math Reasoning

arXiv:2606.11634v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rapid progress of reasoning and agentic large language models (LLMs) has increased the demand for long-context inference, but self-attention (SA) scales quadratically with context length. To address this, we study SWARR (Sliding-Window Attention with Reinforced Adaptation for Math Reasoning), a practical recipe for adapting SWA models to mathematical reasoning. SWARR has two stages: (1) efficient conversion from a pretrained SA model to SWA with supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which avoids pretraining a new base model, and (2) policy adaptation with reinforcement learning (RL). We find that SWA still underperforms SA after SFT, and we hypothesize that this gap is caused in part by a data-architecture mismatch: most SFT data are prepared for SA models and may contain long-range dependencies that are difficult for SWA to model. Because on-policy RL optimizes self-generated trajectories under the SWA constraint, it can adapt trajectories to better match SWA. Experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that this recipe substantially narrows the gap between SWA and SA, recovering much of the accuracy lost during SWA conversion while preserving the efficiency benefits of linear-complexity attention. Our central contribution is the empirical finding that RL changes the conclusion one would draw from conversion and SFT alone about SWA's viability for math reasoning.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

3D Ising criticality with Platonic lattice superconducting qubits

arXiv:2606.16854v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The three-dimensional (3D) Ising model is a foundational model in statistical physics and critical phenomena, yet its analytical intractability has long impeded the precise determination of universal critical exponents. While high-precision estimates have been obtained through classical numerical methods and conformal bootstrap techniques, a direct quantum simulation of the 3D Ising criticality remains challenging, requiring nontrivial connectivity, sufficient system size, and high spectral resolution. In this work, assisted by the state-operator correspondence of conformal field theory, we perform a digital quantum simulation of the 3D Ising critical exponents using a multiply-connected 9-qubit superconducting quantum processor with a Platonic lattice geometry. Employing an extended variational quantum eigensolver equipped with a phase-based loss function, we variationally prepare the low-energy eigenstates of the transverse-field Ising model on a cubic Platonic lattice encoded in an 8-qubit register. The four lowest eigenenergies are extracted via Fourier-transform analysis and high-precision numerical fitting, agreeing with the exact diagonalization values up to +/- 0.001. The resulting scaling dimension Delta_epsilon = 1.5850 and critical exponent nu = 0.7067 match well with theory.

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

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

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

20.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Building user-driven climate adaptation products

Climate adaptation products have traditionally been developed using a supply-driven model reliant on available climate information, leading to usability gaps1–4. To better meet user needs, the climate services field has recognized a need to shift towards a demand-driven model emphasizing co-production, that is, user-driven, scientifically informed products created through shared knowledge practices1–5. However, co-production can be challenging, especially for researchers unfamiliar with the approach or for digital and software-based products with complex user needs2,5–8. User-centred design, from the human–computer interaction field, offers a process that could complement co-production approaches to product development, yet its potential remains underexplored2. Here we show how user-centred design can be integrated into, and strengthen, co-production approaches for building user-driven climate adaptation products. Through a systematic review of the co-production and user-centred design literature, we identify key processes, mechanisms and best practices for both approaches. Our findings offer practical guidance for researchers and propose an integrated approach for developing climate adaptation products that are useful, usable and used. A systematic review and analysis shows how user-centred design can be integrated into, and strengthen, co-production approaches for building user-driven climate adaptation products.

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

Decoupled Motion Representation Learning for Moving Infrared Small Target Detection

Infrared small target detection in dynamic scenes remains challenging due to the highly coupled motions among targets, imaging platforms, and dynamic backgrounds. Existing multi-frame methods usually perform implicit temporal modeling, where coherent background dynamics dominate motion correspondence learning, leading to an inherent trade-off between detection and false alarms. In this work, we observe that background motions exhibit strong global coherence, whereas small targets mainly correspond to sparse local motion anomalies. Moreover, many false-alarm responses maintain high consistency with globally coherent motion patterns, indicating that they mainly originate from coherent background dynamics rather than genuine target motions. Based on these observations, we propose a decoupled motion representation learning framework for moving infrared small target detection. Specifically, an explicit motion branch is introduced to model globally coherent motion dynamics using pretrained optical flow priors, together with a structure-preserving self-supervised adaptation strategy for infrared motion correspondence learning. Meanwhile, an implicit motion branch based on deformable feature alignment is designed to capture target-sensitive local motion anomalies under coherent motion guidance. Furthermore, a coherent-motion-guided local anomaly reasoning module is proposed to identify and suppress coherent-motion-induced false responses during localized motion modeling. Extensive experiments on two challenging infrared small target detection benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches, particularly in dynamic scenes with complex motions, while maintaining favorable inference efficiency.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

New bounds on private simultaneous quantum message passing

arXiv:2606.12557v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In the private simultaneous message (PSM) setting, $k$ players obtain inputs $x_i\in\{0,1\}^n$ and then each send messages to a referee, who should learn $f(x_1,...,x_k)$ but no other information about $(x_1,...,x_k)$. The PSM setting was introduced as a minimal model for secure multiparty computation and has connections to Boolean function complexity. In the quantum setting, PSM has been related to non-local quantum computation (NLQC). The communication and correlation cost of implementing PSM remains poorly understood. Here, we give new upper and lower bounds on the (quantum) PSM model. For lower bounds, we show: 1) Nečiporuk's measure lower bounds the entanglement required for $k$-player quantum PSM with perfect correctness. This leads to quadratic lower bounds for explicit functions. 2) The rank of the communication matrix of $f(x_1,x_2)$ lower bounds 2-player quantum PSM with perfect privacy but imperfect correctness. This implies a previously unknown lower bound on classical PSM with imperfect correctness. When allowing quantum communication and shared entanglement, these are the first lower bounds on quantum PSM that make use of the privacy condition. For upper bounds, we show: 1) Letting $s$ be the size of a quantum circuit computing $f$, $d_f$ be the circuit depth, $k$ the number of players, $n$ the number of bits received by each player, and $\epsilon$ a correctness parameter, we obtain $\mathsf{PSM}_k^*(f) \leq (kn +s) \cdot \log^{O(d_f)}(s/\epsilon)$. 2) The square of the Fourier 1 norm of $f$, $\Vert \hat{f}\Vert_1^2$, upper bounds the classical PSM complexity, $\mathsf{PSM}(f)\leq O(\Vert \hat{f} \Vert^2_1)$. In proving the first upper bound, we generalize existing $T$-depth based techniques for NLQC from $2$ to $k\geq 2$ parties, and consider cases where the Clifford layers are restricted to having small light cones.

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

Learning Red Agent Policy from Observations for Neurosymbolic Autonomous Cyber Agents

arXiv:2606.18223v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: With sophisticated cyber-attacks becoming increasingly prevalent, modern networks require intelligent autonomous cyber-defense agents trained via Reinforcement Learning (RL). These agents employ neurosymbolic approaches such as behavior trees with learning-enabled components (LECs) to learn, reason, adapt, and implement security rules while maintaining critical operations. However, these autonomous networks are partially observable systems, i.e., the cyber-attacker's (red agent's) actions are not observable, making it difficult for the defender to predict red actions, learn red policies, or assess the attacker's intrusion levels. To address this, we propose a Policy Learning Technique using imitation learning to learn policies for partially observable RL agents with discrete states and discrete actions. We apply this technique in an autonomous cyber environment to predict red agent's actions from network observations and defender actions. Integrated with a neurosymbolic cyber-defense agent, our method effectively handles different red policies and achieves high prediction accuracy across diverse simulated scenarios.

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

Best Arm Identification with Minimal Regret

arXiv:2409.18909v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Motivated by real-world applications that necessitate responsible experimentation, we introduce the problem of best arm identification (BAI) with minimal regret. This variant of the multi-armed bandit problem elegantly amalgamates two of its most ubiquitous objectives: regret minimization and BAI. More precisely, the agent's goal is to identify the best arm with a prescribed confidence level $\delta$, while minimizing the cumulative regret up to the stopping time. Focusing on single-parameter exponential families of distributions, we leverage information-theoretic techniques to establish an instance-dependent lower bound on the expected cumulative regret. Moreover, we present an impossibility result that underscores the tension between cumulative regret and sample complexity in fixed-confidence BAI. Complementarily, we design and analyze the Double KL-UCB algorithm, which achieves asymptotic optimality as the confidence level tends to zero. Notably, this algorithm employs two distinct confidence bounds to guide arm selection in a randomized manner. Our findings elucidate a fresh perspective on the inherent connections between regret minimization and BAI.

25.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Gene ancestries reveal diverse microbial associations during eukaryogenesis

The origin of eukaryotes remains a central enigma in biology1. Continuing debates agree on the pivotal role of a symbiosis between an alphaproteobacterium and an Asgard archaeon2,3. However, the nature, timing and contributions of other potential bacterial partners4–6 and the role of interactions with viruses7–9 remain contentious. To address these questions, we used advanced phylogenomic approaches and comprehensive datasets spanning the known diversity of cellular life and viruses. Our analysis provided a revised reconstruction of the last eukaryotic common ancestor (LECA) proteome, in which we traced the phylogenetic origin of each protein family. We found compelling evidence for multiple waves of horizontal gene transfer from diverse bacterial donors, with some likely to have preceded mitochondrial endosymbiosis. We inferred plausible traits of the major donors and their functional contributions to the LECA. Our findings support a contribution of horizontal gene transfers to shaping the proteomes of pre-LECA ancestors and suggest a facilitating role of Nucleocytoviricota viruses. Taken together, our results suggest that ancient eukaryotes may have originated within complex microbial ecosystems through a succession of diverse associations that left a footprint of horizontally transferred genes. Phylogenomic reconstruction of the proteome of the last eukaryotic common ancestor sheds light on the origin of eukaryotes, indicating an important role of horizontal transfer of genes from diverse bacterial and viral donors.