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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

A Hybrid LSMC-PDE Method for Bermudan Option Pricing under the Gatheral Double Mean-Reverting Model

arXiv:2606.11237v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study Bermudan option pricing under the Gatheral Double Mean-Reverting (GDMR) stochastic volatility model. The model features a variance process together with a stochastic long-run mean variance process and allows Constant Elasticity of Variance (CEV)-type exponents in the diffusion coefficients. This model is attractive since it provides a flexible specification for volatility dynamics. However, the pricing of early-exercise derivatives under the GDMR model remains largely unexplored in the literature. To address this challenge, we adapt a Hybrid Least-Squares Monte Carlo-Partial Differential Equation (LSMC-PDE) framework to the GDMR model and provide a detailed model-specific implementation. Conditioning on simulated variance paths, the pricing problem reduces to a one-dimensional problem in the asset price, which is solved by a Fourier-based approach, while the remaining dependence on the variance variables is approximated by least-squares regression. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that the Hybrid LSMC-PDE approach yields accurate pricing estimates and often lower pricing errors than plain LSMC, particularly for low and moderate numbers of simulation paths, showing the benefit of using the model structure in early-exercise option pricing.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

An Introduction to the Foundations and Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics

arXiv:2603.09818v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This article surveys a selection of key conceptual and interpretational developments in quantum mechanics, tracing the theory from its foundational postulates to contemporary discussions of measurement, nonlocality, and the emergence of classicality. Beginning with the structure of Hilbert space and the postulates governing state evolution and measurement, the epistemic stance of the Copenhagen interpretation and its modern reformulations are examined. The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen argument, Bell's theorem, and Hardy's paradox are then discussed as probes of locality and realism, alongside the deterministic but explicitly nonlocal de Broglie-Bohm theory. The measurement problem and the implications of contextuality are analyzed in relation to objective collapse models, which introduce new physical dynamics to account for definite outcomes. Finally, the role of decoherence in the suppression of interference and the emergence of classical behavior is explored, together with the interpretational frameworks of many-worlds and consistent histories. This material aims to provide a coherent introductory overview of how several of the most prominent interpretations address the central concern of what quantum mechanics tells us about the nature of physical reality.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Phase Transitions in Attention: A Bayesian Theory of Copy Head Emergence

arXiv:2606.12058v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Attention is the key mechanism underlying in-context learning in transformers, and attention patterns have been observed empirically to emerge abruptly during training. We present a Bayesian theory of feature learning in attention; we then focus on how the copy subcircuit in the first layer of an induction head is learned by analyzing a single-layer softmax attention network trained on a copy task. We derive a closed-form posterior over the attention matrix and reduce it to a low-dimensional order parameter space. This reduction reveals a phase transition in the amount of training data, which we verify using both Bayesian sampling and standard training with Adam. We contrast our results with linear attention and find that softmax attention exhibits a first-order phase transition while in linear attention an initial second-order phase transition is followed by a smooth, continuous evolution toward the structured attention pattern (crossover). Our work provides a first-principles theoretical account of the abrupt emergence of the copy subcircuit, reminiscent of the one observed in training large language models.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

OmniLoc: A Geometry-Aware Foundation Model for Anchor-Free UE Localization Across Diverse Indoor Environments

arXiv:2606.11490v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Indoor localization from wireless measurements remains challenging in large-scale deployments due to substantial variation in building geometry, the set of detectable access points (APs), and the heterogeneity of received signals. Existing learning-based methods often perform well only in limited settings and degrade under environmental shifts, making robust anchor-free localization across diverse indoor environments notoriously difficult. In this paper, we present OmniLoc, an environment-interactive foundation model for anchor-free user equipment localization across diverse indoor environments. To the best of our knowledge, OmniLoc is the first foundation-model-based approach built directly on wireless measurements for this task. OmniLoc is built on three key designs. First, a unified input tokenization module converts heterogeneous wireless measurements into a common representation that is more amenable to learning. Second, a geometry-aware Transformer performs AP-aware feature extraction by emphasizing dominant APs while aggregating complementary evidence from supporting APs. Third, a geometry-aware location estimation module conditions regression on geometric embeddings to produce geometrically consistent location predictions. We evaluate OmniLoc on both a large-scale in-house dataset and a public benchmark dataset. Results show that OmniLoc significantly outperforms existing methods, consistently improves existing backbones when its design components are integrated, and demonstrates strong generalization in cross-environment evaluations.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Holo-World: Unified Camera, Object and Weather Control for Video World Model

Video world models are moving toward preserving an observed world under controllable camera and object motion while allowing its environmental state to change. Yet these controls remain isolated, and weather generation typically relies on a source video or reconstructed scene that already specifies future structure. We study a first-frame-anchored source-to-state setting, where the model starts from a single image and follows explicit camera and object controls and an optional weather instruction, then generates a video that either preserves the source world or transfers it to a target weather state. To address these challenges, we first build HoloStateData, a state video dataset that turns diverse videos into unified control samples for camera, object, and weather supervision. Second, we introduce Holo-World, a unified controllable video world model that jointly controls scene from a single image. Its Unified Scene Adapter factorizes world preservation and weather transfer into distinct parameter subspaces, using rendered background, geometry buffers, and object controls to maintain controlled scene structure while modeling weather-dependent appearance and particle effects. Additionally, Scene-Weather Decomposed CFG guides scene and weather residuals separately, strengthening target weather effects without over-amplifying the full condition. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that Holo-World maintains precise camera and object control with consistent scene structure while transferring scenes into diverse target weather state, outperforming video-to-video weather editing baselines on weather-state generation. Our project page is available at \url{https://xiangchenyin.github.io/Holo-World/}.

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

MemNovo: Look Back at the Spectrum for Balanced De Novo Peptide Sequencing from Mass Spectrometry

arXiv:2606.11868v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: De novo peptide sequencing from tandem mass spectrometry is pivotal in proteomics, enabling identification of novel peptides without reference databases. While recent Transformer-based encoder-decoder models have achieved remarkable performance, we uncover a critical pathology in their inference dynamics. Through comprehensive feature scaling experiments, we demonstrate that existing auto-regressive peptide decoders tend to over-rely on generated-sequence priors while progressively under-utilizing fine-grained physical evidence from the input mass spectrum. This phenomenon leads to suboptimal results, where generated peptide sequences are biologically plausible yet not faithful to the input spectrum. To rectify this, we propose MemNovo, a training-free and plug-and-play mechanism that re-balances peptide and spectral contributions at inference time. MemNovo alleviates the information bottleneck by establishing a persistent spectral memory bank and injecting retrieved features directly into the final decoding stage via an ultra-conservative residual connection. Theoretical analysis confirms that this mechanism restores the mutual information between the decoder state and the raw spectrum. Extensive experiments on the Nine Species benchmark with two representative baselines, Casanovo and InstaNovo, demonstrate that MemNovo consistently improves both amino acid precision and peptide precision, achieving up to 39.1% relative improvement in peptide precision for Casanovo and up to 3.9% for InstaNovo, with negligible computational overhead.

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

Broadcast Product: Redefining Shape-aligned Element-wise Multiplication and Beyond

arXiv:2409.17502v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Broadcast operations are widely used in scientific computing libraries, yet their mathematical formulation is often implicit and inconsistently represented in machine learning literature. This problem frequently leads to invalid equations when element-wise products are written despite mismatched tensor shapes. In this paper, we formalize such operations by introducing the broadcast product $\boxdot$, which explicitly extends the Hadamard product through shape-aligned element duplication. We provide a rigorous definition of the broadcast product, analyze its algebraic properties, and show how it can be expressed using standard linear algebra. Building on this framework, we formulate least-squares problems and sketch a proof-of-concept broadcast decomposition. As a preliminary illustration, we show that the formalism enables a new family of decompositions with distinct structural properties from conventional tensor decompositions. This work establishes a mathematical foundation for broadcast-aware tensor operations, connecting practical implementations with rigorous tensor analysis.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Closing the Feedback Loop: From Experience Extraction to Insight Governance in Verbal Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.17591v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training-free verbal reinforcement learning enables LLM agents to learn from world feedback – objective signals such as dynamic task outcomes, market returns, or demand forecasts – by extracting verbal rules from experience and injecting them as context, updating the agent's behavior without parameter changes. However, in non-stationary environments these agents face a retention-forgetting dilemma: retaining stale insights causes negative transfer, while discarding them causes catastrophic forgetting when conditions recur. We identify four requirements for navigating this dilemma – outcome-driven evaluation, persistent structured evidence, non-monotonic knowledge lifecycle, and compositional governance – and show that existing methods invest heavily in experience extraction while underinvesting in insight governance. We propose a three-layer architecture – rules, evidence, and skills – connected by a feedback-driven curation loop that closes the governance gap. Rules capture distilled experience from world outcomes; evidence logs track each rule's reliability across episodes; skills govern which rules to apply, how to resolve conflicts, and when to abstain. On financial forecasting as a case study, where world feedback is naturally abundant, noisy, and non-stationary, we show that the same accumulated experience either degrades performance below the zero-shot baseline or dramatically improves accuracy and risk-adjusted returns, depending on whether the curation loop is present.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

CEO-Bench: Can Agents Play the Long Game?

Language model agents are becoming proficient executors at isolated, short-horizon tasks such as software engineering and customer service. Yet real-world challenges require a combination of sophisticated skills that remain largely untested in agents: (1) navigating long horizons amid uncertainty; (2) acquiring information in noisy environments; (3) adapting to a changing world; (4) orchestrating multiple moving parts toward a coherent goal. We introduce CEO-Bench, which evaluates these capabilities together by simulating a representative real-world task: operating a startup for 500 days. An agent manages pricing, marketing, budgeting, and many other aspects of a fictional company through a programmable Python interface, operating in the same environment and facing the same challenges as a human CEO. Success demands analyzing noisy, interconnected business databases, translating signals into sound strategy, and coordinating many decisions with programming. The strongest agents write sophisticated code that simulates customer cohorts to forecast future cash and mines negotiation history to uncover hidden customer preferences. Even so, most state-of-the-art models struggle in this environment. Only Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 finish above the $1M starting balance, and neither consistently turns a profit. CEO-Bench takes a first step toward measuring the intelligence required to drive sustained, adaptive progress over time.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Hölder++: Improving the Quality-Coherence Trade-off in Multimodal VAEs

arXiv:2606.13381v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing approaches for multimodal variational autoencoders (VAEs) face a trade-off between generative quality and coherence-i.e., they struggle to generate realistic and diverse samples that, at the same time, are semantically consistent across modalities. A recent work shows that using a simple approximation to Hölder pooling as an aggregation method improves coherence over the SOTA MMVAE+, despite assuming a single shared representation across all modalities. Yet, it slightly compromises sample diversity. Inspired by this insight, we propose Hölder++, a novel multimodal VAE that improves the generative quality-coherence trade-off through: (i) the first implementation of Hölder pooling without any approximation for multimodal VAEs; (ii) an extended architecture that models distinct shared and private (i.e., modality-specific) representations (Hölder+); and (iii) hierarchical inference that further enhances the disentanglement between the shared and private representations (Hölder++). Our experiments corroborate that Hölder++ consistently improves the generative quality-coherence trade-off, yields more structured latent spaces, and learns shared representations that are informative for downstream tasks.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

MolGraphBench: A Benchmark of GNN Architectures for Molecular Regression Tasks

arXiv:2602.20573v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Molecules are often represented as SMILES strings, which can be readily converted to hand-crafted descriptors or fingerprints (FP) for molecular property prediction. Research has demonstrated that SMILES can be converted to molecular graphs $G = (V, E)$, with atoms as nodes $(V)$ and bonds as edges $(E)$. These molecular graphs can subsequently be used to train graph neural networks (GNN) models. Despite the recent surge in application of GNN (existing and novel architectures) for molecular property prediction, a rigorous benchmark is still lacking. We propose MolGraphBench, a comprehensive benchmark of four commonly used GNN models for molecular property prediction. Benchmarking results demonstrate graph convolutional network (GCN) and graph isomorphism networks (GIN) as the optimal GNN architectures for molecular graph regression tasks, based on absolute performance, training efficiency, transfer learning and prediction quality. The study also indicates the non-complementary nature of molecular fingerprints in the fusion (GNN-FP) framework. Furthermore, our GNN models achieved performance superior or comparable performance to current state-of-the-art GNN baselines across three datasets (GCN with RMSE of $0.518$ on B3DB, GIN-FP with RMSE of $1.022$ on FreeSolv and GIN with MAE of $63.783$ on RT datasets). Findings from this study indicate that type of GNN-layer, should be treated as a tunable hyperparameter rather than a fixed design choice to achieve superior performance.

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

Forecasting what Matters: Decision-Focused RL for Controlled EV Charging with Unknown Departure Times

arXiv:2606.19199v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The recent growth of EV adoption poses challenges for power systems, including increased peak demand and potential grid instability. Smart control of EV charging – e.g., based on reinforcement learning (RL) – can alleviate these issues by learning temporal and contextual patterns from historical data. Yet, in real-world scenarios, key features, such as departure time, often are unavailable. This, in turn, makes it harder for an RL agent to learn and execute an effective charging policy. To mitigate this uncertainty, a trained forecaster can approximate the unknown features from available data. However, since these forecasting models are typically trained for accuracy (rather than their impact on a downstream agent's decision quality), their errors may propagate and hinder the overall performance of a controller that is using the forecasts. To avoid this, we propose a decision-focused RL (DF-RL) framework in which the forecaster is trained end-to-end, i.e., with feedback from the charging policy actions taken by the RL agent. Such joint training of both the forecaster and controller ultimately results in higher-quality actions: our proposed DF-RL method yields superior charging decisions compared to other baselines, achieving up to a 14% improvement in total reward and a 55% reduction of unsupplied energy (i.e., charging that failed to happen because the EV already left), relative to the RL method without departure time forecasting.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Optimal Decoding of Small Codes by Density Matrix Propagation

arXiv:2606.14455v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate and efficient decoding is a crucial component for achieving fault-tolerant quantum computing. Realistic circuit-level noise introduces temporal correlations and degeneracy, making optimal (maximum-likelihood) decoding computationally intractable in general. As a result, practical decoders rely on heuristic approximations, and it is generally difficult to quantify how suboptimal they are, as this strongly depends on the code and noise model considered. In this work, we study the accuracy of practical decoding algorithms under circuit-level noise by comparing them against a maximum likelihood decoding benchmark. Our approach propagates the density matrix through the full memory experiment and computes the optimal decoding decision for each syndrome history. We introduce pruning techniques with rigorous bounds, allowing us to access larger numbers of syndrome-extraction rounds. We apply this framework to small instances of the repetition code and a cellular automaton code, and benchmark minimum-weight perfect matching (MWPM), belief propagation with ordered statistics decoding (BP+OSD), Tesseract, and Planar decoders against optimal decoding. While standard decoders remain close to optimal for the repetition code, we find significant deviations for the cellular automaton code, with BP+OSD deteriorating already in experimentally relevant noise regimes. Moreover, the pruning method developed here highlights that, at low physical error rates, only a narrow fraction of syndrome histories contributes significantly to the logical error rate.

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

Improving Detection of Rare Nodes in Hierarchical Multi-Label Learning

arXiv:2602.08986v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In hierarchical multi-label classification, a persistent challenge is enabling model predictions to reach deeper levels of the hierarchy for more detailed or fine-grained classifications. This difficulty partly arises from the natural rarity of certain classes (or hierarchical nodes) and the hierarchical constraint that ensures child nodes are almost always less frequent than their parents. To address this, we propose a weighted loss objective for neural networks that combines node-wise imbalance weighting with focal weighting components, the latter leveraging modern quantification of ensemble uncertainties. By emphasizing rare nodes rather than rare observations (data points), and focusing on uncertain nodes for each model output distribution during training, we observe improvements in recall by up to a factor of five on benchmark datasets, along with statistically significant gains in $F_{1}$ score. We also show our approach aids convolutional networks on challenging tasks, as in situations with suboptimal encoders or limited data.

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

ATOM-Bench: A Real-World Benchmark for Atomic Skills and Compositional Generalization in Manipulation Policies

arXiv:2606.16826v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generalist manipulation policies are increasingly presented as foundation models for robotic control, but their real-world generalization remains difficult to diagnose. A policy may succeed on demonstrated tasks while still failing to execute fine-grained atomic skills or recombine learned skills in new task structures. We introduce ATOM-Bench, a real-world benchmark for evaluating both atomic skills and compositional generalization in manipulation policies. ATOM-Bench factorizes tabletop manipulation into motor atoms and instruction atoms, and contains 30 atomic tasks and 24 held-out compositional tasks across paired single-arm and dual-arm robot tracks. We collect 3,000 human demonstrations for atomic fine-tuning and release both the demonstration data and evaluation rollout data to support reproducible real-world evaluation. Policies are fine-tuned on atomic tasks and evaluated on both atomic skill acquisition and held-out compositional tasks. We further introduce Atomic Score (AS) and Compositional Failure Share (CFS) to distinguish failures caused by weak atomic skills from failures caused by limited compositional reuse. Through 2,700 physical rollouts on five representative manipulation policies, we find that current policies can acquire simple instruction-grounding skills, but still struggle with fine-grained motor atoms, counting, and logical filtering. More importantly, strong atomic performance does not reliably transfer to held-out compositional tasks. ATOM-Bench provides a diagnostic testbed for studying whether failures arise from weak motor execution, poor instruction grounding, or limited compositional reuse.

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

FactoryLLM: A Safe and Open-Source AI Playground for Evaluating LLMs in Smart Factories

arXiv:2606.14119v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fault diagnostics and recovery in smart factories is challenging because critical information is dispersed across manuals of multiple machines which are interconnected through the manufacturing process. Large Language Models (LLMs) can provide a promising approach. In this paper, we propose FactoryLLM, a safe and open-source AI playground designed for evaluating different LLM-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) models by analysing documents from multiple machines across the manufacturing process. FactoryLLM enables the user to configure the LLM, and assess performance when reasoning over multiple documents, through a dual evaluation setup using both RAGAS and NVIDIA's LLM-as-a-Judge metrics. FactoryLLM is safe because it allows users to run local or open-source LLMs without sharing sensitive industrial data, providing a controlled environment for experimentation. We demonstrate the efficacy of FactoryLLM through a case study which involves an Autonomous Intelligent Vehicle and its Mobile Planner software, evaluating three LLMs across 30 maintenance queries derived from approximately 600 pages of cross-machine documentation. The results suggest that FactoryLLM is effective in cross-machine document reasoning: every model achieved a groundedness score above 0.88. The full code and documentation for community to test FactoryLLM with their manufacturing specific scenarios are publicly available.

17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Mixing times of one-sided $k$-transposition shuffles

arXiv:2112.05085v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study mixing times of the one-sided $k$-transposition shuffle. We prove that this shuffle mixes relatively slowly, even for $k$ big. Using the recent ``lifting eigenvectors'' technique of Dieker and Saliola and applying the $\ell^2$ bound, we prove different mixing behaviors and explore the occurrence of cutoff depending on $k$.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

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

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

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

MP3: Multi-Period Pattern Pre-training forSpatio-Temporal Forecasting

arXiv:2606.13119v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spatio-Temporal forecasting is crucial in diverse fields, such as transportation, climate, and energy. Urban spatio-temporal data exhibits temporal mirage: similar short-window inputs have divergent future trends, and vice versa. Existing spatio-temporal graph neural networks (STGNNs) cannot effectively identify such mirages. We argue that the core reason lies in the short-window inputs that have incomplete period observation, heterogeneous global spatial correlation, and cross-period superposition causality. To bridge this gap, we develop a novel Multi- Period Pattern Pre-training (MP3), a plug-and-play pre-training plugin for distinguishing temporal mirages. MP3 presents two core innovations: (1) The multi-period pattern learning is designed to learn multi-period patterns from long time series. Specifically, multi-period temporal modeling leverages edge convolution to identify different multi-period patterns. Multi-period spatial modeling uses a bottleneck project and a global memory bank to capture heterogeneous global spatial relations efficiently. Cross-period pattern interaction employs a causality-enhanced Transformer to capture dependencies across different period patterns. (2) This plugin can seamlessly integrate into existing STGNN backbones to strengthen their forecasting performance. The experiment on five STGNN baselines across five real-world datasets (including a large-scale dataset CA) verify the effectiveness, superior scalability and strong adaptability of MP3, which brings consistent and robust performance improvements across all evaluated baselines. On average, MP3 reduces the MAE 4.7% and the RMSE 5.0%. The code can be available at https://github.com/YAN-outlook/MP3.

20.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

Adhesion and polarity-driven morphogenesis: Mechanisms and constraints in tissue formation

by Yoshiyuki T. Nakamura, Chikara Furusawa, Kunihiko Kaneko Embryonic development in multicellular organisms exhibits diverse morphogenetic patterns, which can generally be categorized into fundamental types such as monolayer and multilayer spheres, as well as cell masses. Furthermore, we identify two distinct processes for the formation of spherical structures. These basic patterns are thought to be governed by the microscopic properties of intercellular adhesion. However, the specific mechanisms linking the microscopic factors to the emergence of distinct macroscopic morphogenetic patterns remain poorly understood. In this study, we explore how different morphogenetic patterns arise by employing a computational model that incorporates intercellular adhesion and polarity. Our results demonstrate that all fundamental morphogenetic patterns can be generated through the interplay of two key parameters: the polarity strength of the cell and the regulation of polarity via mechanical signals. Furthermore, analytical considerations reveal key mechanisms underlying the formation of these patterns. These findings highlight the critical role of physical constraints in morphogenesis and suggest potential applications to the design of artificial tissues and organoids.

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

Concrete Subspace Learning based Interference Elimination for Multi-task Model Fusion

arXiv:2312.06173v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Merging models fine-tuned from a common, extensively pre-trained large model but specialized for different tasks has been demonstrated as a cheap and scalable strategy to construct a multi-task model that performs well across diverse tasks. Recent research, exemplified by task arithmetic, highlights that this multi-task model can be derived through arithmetic operations on task vectors. Nevertheless, current merging techniques frequently resolve potential conflicts among parameters from task-specific models by evaluating individual attributes, such as the parameters' magnitude or sign, overlooking their collective impact on the overall functionality of the model. In this work, we propose the CONtinuous relaxation of disCRETE (Concrete) subspace learning method to identify a common low-dimensional subspace and utilize its shared information to track the interference problem without sacrificing much performance. Specifically, we model the problem as a bi-level optimization problem and introduce a meta-learning framework to find the Concrete subspace mask through gradient-based techniques. At the upper level, we focus on learning a shared Concrete mask to identify the subspace, while at the inner level, model merging is performed to maximize the performance of the merged model. We conduct extensive experiments on both vision domain and language domain, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/tanganke/subspace_fusion

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

REPRODUCIBILITY OF 7T MRI MEASUREMENTS OF THE SUSCEPTIBILITY AND VOLUME OF HIPPOCAMPAL SUBFIELDS

PURPOSE: The UK7T travelling head dataset was used to characterise the reproducibility of 7T measurements of the susceptibility of the hippocampal subfields, focusing on the Cornu Ammonis (CA1, CA2 and CA3), dentate gyrus (DG), subiculum (SUB), tail of the hippocampus (TAIL) and entorhinal cortex (ERC). METHODS: Susceptibility maps were created from whole-brain 3D single-echo GRE data (TE=20 ms; 0.7 mm isotropic resolution) using Multi-Scale Dipole Inversion. Automatic Segmentation of Hippocampal Subfields (ASHS) was applied to high resolution T1- and T2-weighted images for segmentation. The mean magnetic susceptibility and volume of hippocampal subfields was evaluated in 50 data sets, comprising 5 repeat acquisitions on 10 healthy participants (age 32 + or -6 years; 3 female). RESULTS: Averaging over subjects, susceptibility values spanned an 18ppb range over the hippocampus (ranging from -13.3ppb in DG to 4.7ppb in ERC). Susceptibility values in the larger hippocampal subfields showed a consistent pattern of variation across subjects, being generally more positive in ERC and SUB than in CA1 and more positive in CA1 than in DG and TAIL. The standard deviation of subfield susceptibilities over subjects ranged from 8.2ppb in the TAIL to 1.7ppb in CA1, and the average standard deviation across repeated measurements, which ranges from 1.7 to 4 ppb, was less than half of the inter-participant standard deviation in all subfields. Susceptibility values in the smaller subfields (CA2 and CA3) were more variable, but ICC(2,k) values for all subfields were >0.82. CONCLUSION: The reported data characterises the variation and reproducibility of hippocampal subfield susceptibility measurements at 7T.

23.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

OCOO-T : A SIMPLE AND SCALABLE VIRTUAL CELL MODEL FOR TRANSCRIPTIONAL PERTURBATION RESPONSE PREDICTION

Predicting single-cell transcriptional responses to genetic, chemical and cytokine perturbations is a fundamental challenge in computational biology and AI Virtual Cell (AIVC) modeling, with direct implications for drug discovery and the elucidation of gene regulatory networks. Existing approaches often rely on auxiliary cell-state encoders, hierarchical variational autoencoders, dedicated Transformer encoder-decoder modules, or gene-interaction priors to compress high-dimensional expression profiles into latent representations. While effective, these designs increase architectural complexity and may limit scalability and generalizability. This paper introduces OCOO-T, a minimalist flow-matching-based AIVC model for transcriptional perturbation response prediction. OCOO-T utilizes a vanilla Transformer stack that operates directly on continuous gene expression profiles and formulates perturbation response prediction as a continuous-time denoising process. Perturbation embeddings, dosage information, and cell-line/cell-type specificity are integrated through adaptive layer normalization and in-context tokens. Comprehensive evaluations on Tahoe100M, Replogle, and PBMC benchmarks demonstrate that OCOO-T achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse perturbations and cell types while effectively scaling to long transcriptional profiles through patching and depatching of cellular contexts. By leveraging the simplicity of Transformer-based denoising for single-cell omics, OCOO-T provides an effective and scalable framework for in-silico cellular simulation.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Zone of Proximal Policy Optimization: Teacher in Prompts, Not Gradients

Knowledge distillation transfers a teacher's competence to a small student but is brittle in the small-student regime: forcing the student to imitate logits from a much larger teacher concentrates it on the teacher's sharpest modes, hurting generalization on benchmark families beyond the training corpus. Reinforcement learning (RL) avoids logit imitation by training on the student's own rollouts. However, on questions where every rollout fails-yielding zero advantage and being silently discarded-injecting a stronger teacher's response into the policy gradient breaks the on-policy assumption and induces drift. We introduce Zone of Proximal Policy Optimization (ZPPO), inspired by Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, which keeps the teacher inside the prompt rather than the policy gradient. On hard questions, ZPPO constructs two reformulated prompts: a Binary Candidate-included Question (BCQ) pairs one correct teacher response with one incorrect student response as anonymized candidates the student must discriminate, and a Negative Candidate-included Question (NCQ) aggregates the student's wrong rollouts into a single prompt to surface their shared failure modes. A prompt replay buffer recirculates each hard question until it either graduates-the student's mean rollout accuracy on it reaches half- or is FIFO-evicted under finite capacity, amplifying BCQ and NCQ inside the student's current zone of proximal development. On the Qwen3.5 family at four student scales (0.8B-9B) with a 27B teacher, post-trained as vision-language models and evaluated on a 31-benchmark suite (16 VLM, 10 LLM, 5 Video), ZPPO outperforms off/on-policy distillation and GRPO, with the largest gains at the smallest scale.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Efficient Image-to-Image Schrödinger Bridge for CT Field of View Extension

Computed tomography (CT) is a cornerstone imaging modality for non-invasive, high-resolution visualization of internal anatomical structures. However, when the scanned object exceeds the scanner's field of view (FOV), projection data are truncated, resulting in incomplete reconstructions and pronounced artifacts near FOV boundaries. Conventional reconstruction algorithms struggle to recover accurate anatomy from such data, limiting clinical reliability. Deep learning approaches have been explored for FOV extension, with diffusion generative models representing the latest advances in image synthesis. Yet, conventional diffusion models are computationally demanding and slow at inference due to their iterative sampling process. To address these limitations, we propose an efficient CT FOV extension framework based on the image-to-image Schrödinger Bridge (I$^2$SB) diffusion model. Unlike traditional diffusion models that synthesize images from pure Gaussian noise, I$^2$SB learns a direct stochastic mapping between paired limited-FOV and extended-FOV images. This direct correspondence yields a more interpretable and traceable generative process, enhancing anatomical consistency and structural fidelity in reconstructions. I$^2$SB achieves superior quantitative performance, with root-mean-square error (RMSE) values of 49.8 HU on simulated noisy data and 152.0 HU on real data, outperforming state-of-the-art diffusion models such as conditional denoising diffusion probabilistic models (cDDPM) and patch-based diffusion methods. Moreover, its one-step inference enables reconstruction in just 0.19 s per 2D slice, representing over a 700-fold speedup compared to cDDPM (135 s) and surpassing DiffusionGAN (0.58 s), the second fastest. This combination of accuracy and efficiency indicates that I$^2$SB has potential for real-time or clinical deployment.