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

From geometry to dynamics: Learning overdamped Langevin dynamics from sparse observations with geometric constraints

arXiv:2512.23566v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: How can we learn the laws underlying the dynamics of stochastic systems when their trajectories are sampled sparsely in time? Existing methods either require temporally resolved high-frequency observations, or rely on geometric arguments that apply only to conservative systems, limiting the range of dynamics they can recover. Here, we present a new framework that reconciles these two perspectives by reformulating inference as a stochastic control problem. Our method uses geometry-driven path augmentation, guided by the geometry in the system's invariant density to reconstruct likely trajectories and infer the underlying dynamics without assuming specific parametric models. Applied to overdamped Langevin systems, our approach accurately recovers stochastic dynamics even from extremely undersampled data, outperforming existing methods in synthetic benchmarks. This work demonstrates the effectiveness of incorporating geometric inductive biases into stochastic system identification methods.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

QMFOL: Benchmarking Large Language Model Reasoning via Quantifiable Monadic First-Order Logic Test Case Generation

arXiv:2606.20227v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant progress in reasoning, particularly in deductive reasoning, which is crucial for high-stakes decision-making. As models improve, evaluation benchmarks should evolve to keep pace. However, existing benchmarks lack fine-grained control over logical complexity and struggle to balance semantic diversity with logical consistency. To address these issues, we propose QMFOL, an automated framework for generating monadic first-order logic reasoning tasks with quantifiable and controllable complexity. It constructs formal logical structures using conjunction and disjunction patterns, enabling precise control over reasoning depth, width, label types, and distractors. These structures are then translated into natural language via LLMs, with logical consistency ensured through round-trip verification using an external prover. Based on our framework, we build QMFOLBench, a benchmark comprising 2880 instances with 960 configurations across diverse logical and semantic dimensions. Evaluations on six large reasoning models (LRMs) and two LLMs show that performance degrades and computational overhead increases with rising logical complexity. Models perform better on True-labeled tasks than on False or Unknown ones, and exhibit sensitivity to semantic variation. Overall, QMFOL offers a scalable and reliable approach for constructing deductive reasoning benchmarks with controllable complexity, enabling more precise evaluation of reasoning capabilities in modern language models.

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

KAN-MLP-Mixer: A comprehensive investigation of the usage of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) for improving IMU-based Human Activity Recognition

arXiv:2605.19031v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) have demonstrated an exceptional ability to learn complex functions on clean, low-dimensional data but struggle to maintain performance on noisy and imperfect real-world datasets. In contrast, conventional multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) are far more tolerant to noise and computationally efficient. Replacing all MLP components with KANs in HAR models often degrades accuracy and computation efficiency, highlighting an open challenge: how to combine KANs' precision with MLPs' noise robustness and efficiency. To address this, we systematically explore various placements of KAN modules within deep HAR networks and propose a hybrid architecture that strategically synergizes the strengths of both paradigms, which uses a KAN-based input embedding layer, retains MLP layers for intermediate feature mixing, and introduces a specialized LarctanKAN module for final activity classification. Across eight public HAR datasets, the hybrid KAN-MLP model achieves an average macro F1 score relative improvement of 5.33\% compared pure-MLP model, significantly outperforming standalone KAN and MLP baselines. Furthermore, integrating this hybrid strategy into other state-of-the-art HAR architectures consistently boosts their performance. Our findings demonstrate that a carefully orchestrated combination of KAN, MLP, or other conventional neural components yields more robust and accurate HAR models for real-world wearable sensing environments.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Random sequential nearest-neighbor coloring on trees

arXiv:2606.24793v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a nearest-neighbor coloring process in which vertices are revealed in random order and inherit the color of the closest vertex revealed before them. This model is a discrete analogue of coloring processes previously studied by Preater (2009) and Aldous (2018) in Euclidean spaces. We focus here on regular trees and analyze the associated genealogy of color inheritance. In contrast with the Euclidean case, the genealogical graph on an infinite regular tree is not connected: it has infinitely many infinite one-ended components, each with a distinct asymptotic direction, while every vertex has only finitely many descendants. We also describe how this structure is modified in the presence of finitely many initial seeds. Finally, we study local limits of the coloring on finite regular trees as their height tends to infinity, for two natural seed configurations: two fixed seeds, and one blue seed at the root with red seeds at the leaves.

05.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

Biological meaning in protein embedding space is resolution-dependent

Protein language model embeddings are increasingly used to organise biological sequences, yet how biological meaning is encoded within embedding neighbourhoods remains poorly understood. Using two independent hierarchical enzyme systems, carbohydrate-active enzymes and peptidases, we investigated how biological interpretation changes across embedding organisations aligned to different levels of biological hierarchy. Different embedding organisations give rise to distinct neighbourhood semantics. When aligned to membership-boundary resolution, embeddings robustly separated artefacts and unrelated proteins from members of the target category. However, embeddings aligned to functional-grouping resolution maintained compositional neighbourhood structure for multi-domain proteins spanning more than one functional or catalytic group. Finally, embeddings aligned to local-family resolution recovered compact family-like neighbourhoods, including families withheld from training, while weakening broader membership-boundary and functional-grouping relationships. Moreover, embeddings optimised toward the same level of biological organisation retain different biological relationships depending on optimisation trajectory employed. Together, our results show that proximity in protein embedding space has no fixed biological interpretation. Instead, biological meaning emerges across embedding resolutions through selective preservation of different forms of biological organisation.

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

Beyond Domains: Reusing Web Skills via Transferable Interaction Patterns

Large language model (LLM) web agents are usually deployed as tool callers: each turn, the model reads a fresh page observation and emits one structured tool action. When every action is a low-level primitive, horizons grow quickly and so do policy-facing LLM completions, dominating latency and cost on benchmarks such as Mind2Web and WebArena. Recent systems therefore wrap repeated interaction fragments as web skills: callable tools built from successful trajectories or induced programs, so one call can replace several primitives. However, prior skill libraries are still triggered mainly by instruction similarity or coarse site metadata, which yields low skill reuse on held-out sites and leaves much of the potential step and token reduction on the table. We present SkillMigrator, an agent that learns reusable web skills and transfers them across sites by matching layout structure rather than specific element references. Each induced skill is stored as a transferable interaction pattern (TIP): the skill paired with a structural sketch of the snapshot at induction time. At test time, SkillMigrator retrieves TIPs by layout similarity and grounds their references on the live page. The rest of the stack is standard: accessibility-snapshot observations with stable references, and fixed tool calling over primitives plus skill invocations. Compared with the state-of-the-art approaches, SkillMigrator reduces the average LLM-action count on successful trajectories by 8-10% across both WebArena and Mind2Web at matched success rate.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

COSMOS: Model-Agnostic Personalized Federated Learning with Clustered Server Models and Pseudo-Label-Only Communication

arXiv:2605.11165v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated learning (FL) in heterogeneous environments remains challenging because client models often differ in both architecture and data distribution. While recent approaches attempt to address this challenge through client clustering and knowledge distillation, simultaneously handling architectural and statistical heterogeneity remains difficult. We introduce COSMOS, a model-agnostic framework that enables server-side personalization using only pseudo-label communication. Clients train local models and predict on the public data; the server clusters clients by prediction similarity, trains a cluster-specific model for each group using its own compute, and distills the resulting models back to clients. We provide the first theoretical analysis showing that distillation from the learned cluster models can yield exponential personalization risk contraction, going beyond the convergence-to-stationarity guarantees typically provided in model-agnostic FL. Experiments across benchmarks demonstrate that COSMOS consistently outperforms all model-agnostic FL baselines while remaining competitive with state-of-the-art personalized FL methods. More broadly, our results highlight personalized server-side learning with pseudo-labels as a promising paradigm for scalable and model-agnostic federated learning in highly heterogeneous environments.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Variable-Length Tokenization via Learnable Global Merging for Diffusion Transformers

arXiv:2606.20076v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) have become dominant in visual synthesis, but their quality-compute trade-off is largely constrained by the tokenizer's fixed compression ratio. Variable-length tokenizers (VLTs) promise adaptive compression by varying token counts, allowing diffusion models to flexibly balance quality and compute. However, conventional VLTs modulate length by truncating ordered token sequences, which makes token semantics depend on token position and breaks representational alignment across lengths. This leads to a cross-length shift in the latent distribution that hinders a single variable-length diffusion model from operating effectively. To address this, we propose a novel variable-length tokenizer that modulates length by merging tokens. We show that encouraging similar tokens to merge enables direct cross-length representation alignment when the diffusion transformer operates according to the merging pattern. Since conventional merging methods are data-dependent, making the merging pattern inaccessible during generation, we introduce learnable global merging, which is data-independent, to ensure compatibility with diffusion transformers. On ImageNet 256$\times$256 generation, our merging-based variable-length tokenizer integrated with a diffusion transformer achieves a superior gFID-compute trade-off compared to prior VLT methods. Code is available at [this https URL](https://github.com/movinghoon/lgm)

09.
Science (Express) 2026-05-07

TranscriptFormer: A generative cell atlas across 1.5 billion years of evolution | Science

Authors: Unknown Author

Single-cell transcriptomics is revolutionizing our understanding of cellular diversity, yet comparing transcriptional programs across the tree of life remains challenging. We developed TranscriptFormer, a family of generative foundation models trained on up to 112 million cells spanning 1.53 billion years of evolution across 12 species. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on cell type classification, even for species separated over 685 million years of evolution, and zero-shot disease state identification in human cells. Developmental trajectories, phylogenetic relationships and cellular hierarchies emerge naturally in TranscriptFormer’s representations without any explicit training on these annotations. This work establishes a powerful framework for quantitative single-cell analysis and comparative cellular biology, thus demonstrating that universal principles of cellular organization can be learned and predicted across the tree of life.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Unitary Designs from Doped Matchgate Circuits

arXiv:2606.23800v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Matchgate circuits realize free-fermion dynamics: they are efficiently classically simulable, yet cannot on their own generate the generic randomness required for universal computation or unitary design formation. We study a controlled route beyond this integrable limit by doping matchgate circuits with non-Gaussian gates-physically, the injection of fermionic interactions into an otherwise free system. Using the matchgate commutant framework, we obtain analytic control over unitary $2$-design formation. For globally scrambled dynamics, the design problem maps exactly onto a classical birth-death Markov chain with an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck continuum limit, recasting the emergence of quantum randomness in terms of spectral gaps and mixing times and yielding rigorous bounds on the number of non-Gaussian gates needed for approximate $2$-designs. These bounds hold for a broad class of parity-preserving non-Gaussian gates, independently of microscopic details, with numerics indicating that the same mechanism governs higher-order designs. Used as local building blocks in a glued-circuit architecture, they yield approximate parity-preserving $2$-designs in polylogarithmic depth with a sparse non-Gaussian gate count, with implications for Page-like entanglement growth and fermionic classical-shadow protocols. Finally, locality reshapes this picture: in local brickwork dynamics, design formation is diffusion-limited and far slower. Our results establish doped matchgate circuits as a controlled, analytically tractable route from free fermions to interaction-generated quantum designs.

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

Redesign Mixture-of-Experts Routers with Manifold Power Iteration

Router is the cornerstone component to the Mixture-of-Experts models. Serving as expert proxies, the rows of the router matrix compute their similarity to the MoE inputs to determine which subset of experts is activated. Ideally, each router row is designed to encode the expert matrix into this representative vector, such that its dot-product with token can better reflect token-expert affinity. However, there exists no design principles to enforce this condensation. In this paper, we propose to align each router row with the principal singular direction of the associated expert, as this direction provides the most expressive mathematical description of a matrix. Based on this principle, we propose a router redesign with Manifold Power Iteration (MPI). Specifically, it introduces a "Power-then-Retract" paradigm, where a power iteration step is performed on the router weights, followed by a retraction to impose a norm constraint to ensure both efficiency and stability. Theoretically, we show that MPI drives router rows to converge toward the principal singular directions of associated experts. Empirically, we pretrain MoE model across scales from 1B to 11B parameters to confirm that this alignment facilitates more effective MoE models.

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

AI-Automation Tooling in Computer Engineering Education: Mixed-Methods TAM/UTAUT Evidence for a General Acceptance Attitude

Authors:

arXiv:2606.12424v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As generative AI and low-code workflow platforms become routine in software practice, a key educational question is whether the next generation of computer engineers will accept these tools as useful, usable, and worthy of sustained engagement. This paper reports a mixed-methods, cross-sectional study of undergraduate computer engineering students' acceptance of AI automation tooling, instantiated through the open-source platform n8n across three identically scripted workshops in Thailand (n = 103). A 12-item, five-point Likert instrument mapped to six TAM/UTAUT constructs - Performance Expectancy (PE), Effort Expectancy (EE), Behavioral Intention (BI), Self-Efficacy (SE), Hedonic Motivation (HM), and Output Quality (OQ) - was complemented by inductive thematic analysis of open-ended feedback. Analyses combined ordinal reliability estimation, bootstrap confidence intervals, non-parametric tests, multiple-comparison-controlled correlations, polychoric dimensionality diagnostics, a common-method-bias check, and between-session comparisons. Acceptance was favorable across all six constructs with large effect sizes, with PE emerging as the strongest construct and HM as the weakest. Dimensionality diagnostics further revealed that canonical TAM/UTAUT sub-facets collapsed into a single general acceptance factor in this short-form post-workshop context, a finding with important methodological and theoretical implications. Qualitative themes converged with the quantitative profile regarding usefulness and enthusiasm but diverged on output quality, revealing a small yet articulate reliability-skeptical minority. The findings support the curricular adoption of AI automation tooling in undergraduate computing education and identify three theory-grounded instructional levers: instruction-sequencing scaffolds, self-efficacy supports, and trust-calibration interventions.

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

Learning Hybrid Biophysical Neuron Models with Neural ODEs

arXiv:2606.16693v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Biophysical neuron models link measurements of neural activity to underlying cellular mechanisms. Yet, a central challenge is that the kinetics of many ion channels are poorly characterized, and practical simplifications – omitting channels or reducing morphological detail – introduce systematic gaps between model and biology. Bridging these gaps requires approaches that can flexibly discover unmodeled dynamics while preserving mechanistic interpretability. Here, we introduce a hybrid modeling framework that embeds neural ordinary differential equations into conductance-based biophysical models to capture unknown currents or mis-specified channel kinetics. By parameterizing the neural ODE in terms of voltage-dependent steady-state and time-constant functions, we recover interpretable gating dynamics directly from voltage recordings without assuming a functional form. We show that the hybrid model fits the gating kinetics of 2400 ion channel models and recovers unknown gating dynamics from single current-clamp recordings, generalizing to out-of-distribution stimulus regimes under realistic inputs and parameter misspecification. We also use our method to reduce a multicompartment model of a cortical neuron into a single-compartment hybrid model with a learned axial current, yielding up to an order of magnitude lower computational cost. Together, our results establish a plug-and-play framework for selectively replacing unknown components of conductance-based models with neural ODEs while preserving their mechanistic structure.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

ForecastBench-Sim: A Simulated-World Forecasting Benchmark

Forecasting benchmarks for general-purpose AI systems usually inherit the constraints of the real world: outcomes resolve slowly, tail events are rare, and counterfactual questions are difficult to score. We introduce ForecastBench-Sim, a simulated-world forecasting benchmark built on game rollouts from Freeciv, a turn-based strategy game modelled on the Civilization series. Forecasters receive a fixed world report (a structured snapshot of the current game state) and answer questions about hidden future states; the benchmark then continues the simulation and scores forecasts. Because the world is simulated, the same setup can generate continuous or binary forecasting questions at arbitrary time horizons, paired intervention worlds for conditional or causal questions, and resolved examples of rare or disruptive outcomes. We describe the benchmark pipeline, question families, scoring protocol, and release artifacts, and report validation slices from model evaluations and an anonymized human pilot. ForecastBench-Sim is intended to complement real-world forecasting benchmarks by providing controlled, immediately resolvable tasks for studying probabilistic reasoning under dynamic world states.

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

Latent-Conditioned Parameterized Quantum Circuits as Universal Approximators for Distributions over Quantum States

arXiv:2605.28690v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Many applications in quantum simulation, quantum chemistry, and quantum machine learning require not a single quantum state but an ensemble of states characterizing the heterogeneity of a target system. Preparing such ensembles state-by-state is prohibitive in both variational and fault-tolerant settings, thereby motivating a generative modeling approach. We introduce latent-conditioned parameterized quantum circuits (LPQCs), a hybrid quantum-classical framework in which classical neural networks map a latent variable sampled from a prior distribution to the parameters of a parameterized quantum circuit. We prove that LPQCs are universal approximators for probability measures over density operators in the 1-Wasserstein distance, extending classical universal approximation theorems to the quantum-distribution setting. We additionally introduce a multimodal latent prior and a mixture-of-experts circuit architecture, and show empirically that the latent-conditioned parameterization alleviates the barren plateau problem during optimization, a behavior for which we provide rigorous partial guarantees. Numerical experiments validate the framework on a synthetic multi-cluster ensemble of mixed quantum states and on a QM9-derived ensemble of 3-D molecular structures. In these tasks, LPQC outperforms recent quantum generative baselines and matches the generation quality of a classical neural-network baseline, while requiring an output dimension that grows only linearly with the number of qubits rather than exponentially. By leveraging classical expressivity in the latent space, LPQCs offer a tractable route to quantum generative modeling.

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

Cyclic Denoising Reveals Ultrastable Memories in Diffusion Models

We introduce cyclic denoising – repeated forward and reverse diffusion at controlled noise amplitudes – as an extraction attack for image diffusion models. Inspired by random organization in disordered solids, cyclic denoising exposes regions of the learned distribution that are largely inaccessible to standard sampling. The dynamics drive samples toward attractors with a broad stability spectrum. The deepest attractors are ultrastable: they regenerate after near-total corruption and persist through thousands of noising-denoising cycles. Many of these attractors correspond to memorized training images, including stock photographs, brand watermarks, and web-crawl artifacts. The attack requires only sampler-level control, with no gradients, weight inspection, prompts, captions, or prior knowledge of the training data. Unlike generate-and-filter attacks, which rely on large-scale prompted generation and post-hoc similarity or membership-inference filtering, our main protocol is fully unconditioned. We demonstrate the phenomenon in Stable Diffusion v1.4 and in a pixel-space DDPM, showing consistent behavior across latent- and pixel-space diffusion models. Across noise amplitudes, we observe a yielding-like transition: low-amplitude cycling produces trivial absorbing fixed points or limit cycles, while larger amplitudes induce rearrangements, basin hopping, and long-lived trapping in structured memorized attractor basins. We also observe hierarchical partial absorption, prompt-stabilized basins, and cross-initial-condition universality of the recovered attractor set. Our results therefore show that cyclic denoising is both a physics-inspired probe of generative landscapes and a practical tool for memorization auditing, with implications for privacy, copyright compliance, and model fingerprinting.

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

Towards Efficient Large Language Reasoning Models via Extreme-Ratio Chain-of-Thought Compression

arXiv:2602.08324v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning successfully enhances the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet it incurs substantial computational overhead for inference. Existing CoT compression methods often suffer from a critical loss of logical fidelity at high compression ratios, resulting in significant performance degradation. To achieve high-fidelity, fast reasoning, we propose a novel EXTreme-RAtio Chain-of-Thought Compression framework, termed Extra-CoT, which aggressively reduces the token budget while preserving answer accuracy. To generate reliable, high-fidelity supervision, we first train a dedicated semantically-preserved compressor on mathematical CoT data with fine-grained annotations. An LLM is then fine-tuned on these compressed pairs via a mixed-ratio supervised fine-tuning (SFT), teaching it to follow a spectrum of compression budgets and providing a stable initialization for reinforcement learning (RL). We further propose Constrained and Hierarchical Ratio Policy Optimization (CHRPO) to explicitly incentivize question-solving ability under lower budgets by a hierarchical reward. Experiments on three mathematical reasoning benchmarks show the superiority of Extra-CoT. For example, on MATH-500 using Qwen3-1.7B, Extra-CoT achieves over 73\% token reduction with an accuracy improvement of 0.6\%, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Our source codes have been released at https://github.com/Mwie1024/Extra-CoT.

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

Artemis: Anatomy-Resolved inTervention for Eliminating Multimodal NeuroImage confounderS

arXiv:2606.18287v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal neuroimaging, integrating functional connectivity from fMRI and structural connectivity from DTI, enables non-invasive analysis of brain networks using graph neural networks. However, demographic factors such as age and sex systematically confound the relationship between brain connectivity and clinical outcomes, causing GNNs to exploit spurious shortcuts rather than learning causally invariant representations. While recent causal GNN methods introduce causality at the graph-modeling level, their causal mechanisms remain domain-agnostic without accounting for the real-world confounders inherent in clinical neuroimaging data. Moreover, brain networks are constructed from atlas-based parcellations where each region exhibits distinct sensitivity to demographic factors, necessitating region-aware adjustment. We propose Artemis, a region-level causal framework that bridges this gap with causal intervention at each brain region independently by learning region-specific confounder representations with lightweight parameters. Our adjustment comprehensively utilized the multimodal functional and structural features for graph reasoning as a plug-in module compatible with arbitrary GNN backbones. Experiments on three benchmarks, ADNI for disease diagnosis, OASIS for dementia staging, and HCP for sex classification, demonstrate consistent improvements over representative GNN-based baselines. Multiple supporting experiments further demonstrate statistical significance and neuroscientific interpretability.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Point Cloud Upsampling through Patch-based Frequency Superposition

In recent years, neural networks have become the dominant models in most point cloud upsampling methods. Although these approaches are achieving good results, they do have drawbacks, such as a lack of interpretability and data dependency. Moreover, they have to be trained on a dataset that is similar to the test data in order to perform well. To avoid these disadvantages, we propose Point Cloud Upsampling through Patch-based Frequency Superposition (PUtPFS), an optimization-based approach that selects subsets of points and estimates the surface of this set through superpositioning spatial frequencies. Then, new points are placed on this surface. By successively selecting points in the least dense regions of the point cloud, a uniform upsampling can be reached. With this method, we surpass the current best upsampling results in the commonly considered point-to-surface distance. Furthermore, we achieve the best Chamfer and Hausdorff distance among the optimization-based approaches. As an additional advantage, our method does not need any training data and is mathematically interpretable.

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

Minimalist Genetic Programming

arXiv:2606.10237v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Genetic programming (GP) is based on two important insights. First, that any learning task can fundamentally be posed as a program induction problem, where the goal is to construct a symbolic hierarchical model that is expressed as a syntax tree. Second, to pose this task as a search problem, and use evolution to locate the desired model. Since it was proposed, GP has produced notable results in a wide range of tasks and problem domains. This work presents an alternative view by modifying the second core insight of GP, posing the problem as a syntactic derivation task instead. In particular, this paper presents Minimalist Genetic Programming (MGP), an algorithm that like GP is biologically inspired, but instead of evolution it takes inspiration from the Minimalist Program to human language, in which syntax is understood as an optimal solution to the problem of linking two other mental systems. In minimalism, the core computational process is a binary set formation operator called $MERGE$, than can be used to incrementally construct complex syntactic structures using a simple Markovian process. MGP is able to discover the core building blocks of the symbolic expressions, and to incrementally combined them using $MERGE$. The proposed system is benchmarked on symbolic regression tasks that are known to be difficult to solve with standard GP systems because of the propensity for bloat. Results show that when a proper lexicon of atomic syntactic objects are chosen, MGP is able to consistently produce the exact ground truth model on a set of symbolic regression tasks where standard GP struggles to do the same. The insights provided by minimalism are shown to be relevant to the problem of program induction, and should be explored further based on the potential exhibited by MGP in this work.

21.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Lignin to adipic acid in a high-yield chemical and biological redox process

Viable manufacturing pathways to produce bio-based chemicals from renewable feedstocks, such as lignin derived from plant biomass, are needed to decarbonize the chemicals manufacturing sector. Converting the recalcitrant lignin polymer to valuable bioproducts remains a longstanding challenge in biorefining, with the highest reported single-product yield from lignin currently around 20 wt% (refs. 1–4). Most existing lignin depolymerization strategies target aryl–ether bond cleavage, which can produce aromatic monomers in yields of only about 30 wt%, and still as complex mixtures with C–C-linked dimers and oligomers5,6. The recalcitrance of these C–C linkages between aromatic moieties fundamentally limits single-product yields from lignin, prompting the development of strategies to efficiently cleave these C–C bonds3,7–9. Here we show how reductive processing of lignin from poplar accesses a hydrocarbon mixture of alkyl-aromatic monomers and oligomers that is privileged for oxidative conversion to monomeric aromatic carboxylic acids, comprising mostly benzoic acid and phthalic acid isomers in up to 73 wt% monomer yields, using a Co/Mn/Br catalyst. The soil bacterium Pseudomonas putida KT2440 was engineered to convert this mixture of aromatic carboxylic acids to muconolactone, a precursor to bio-based nylons, enabling final adipic acid yields up to 26 wt% (gram adipic acid per gram lignin) with a maximum theoretical yield of 57 wt%. This pairing of reductive and oxidative steps with lignin resembles processes in petrochemical refining and shows how lignin may be converted into a single, valuable bioproduct in high yields. A chemical and biological redox process that resembles processes in petrochemical refining is used to convert lignin from poplar into a single, valuable bioproduct, adipic acid, in high yields.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Efficient Stochastic Optimisation via Sequential Monte Carlo

arXiv:2601.22003v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The problem of optimising functions with intractable gradients frequently arises in machine learning and statistics, ranging from maximum marginal likelihood estimation procedures to fine-tuning of generative models. Stochastic approximation methods for this class of problems typically require inner sampling loops to obtain (biased) stochastic gradient estimates, which rapidly becomes computationally expensive. In this work, we develop sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) samplers for optimisation of functions with intractable gradients. Our approach replaces expensive inner sampling methods with efficient SMC approximations, which can result in significant computational gains. We establish convergence results for the basic recursions defined by our methodology which SMC samplers approximate. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the reward-tuning of energy-based models within various settings.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

FlowBank: Query-Adaptive Agentic Workflows Optimization through Precompute-and-Reuse

Large Language Model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems are increasingly powerful, but current agentic workflow optimization paradigms make an unsatisfying trade-off. Task-level methods spend substantial offline compute yet deploy only a single workflow, leaving complementary candidates unused, while query-level methods synthesize a new workflow per query at substantial inference cost. Our motivating analysis shows these paradigms are more complementary than competing: workflows discovered during offline search often solve different subsets of queries, and many queries handled by expensive query-level generation can already be solved by cheaper precomputed workflows. This suggests a different objective: rather than searching for one universally best workflow or regenerating one per instance, we should build a compact bank of reusable, complementary workflows and select among them adaptively at inference time. Doing so requires solving three coupled problems: generating complementary rather than redundant candidates, compressing them into a small deployable portfolio, and assigning each query to the right workflow under a performance-cost trade-off. To this end, we present FlowBank, a three-stage framework for portfolio-based agentic workflow optimization. Diversifying proposes DiverseFlow to steer search toward under-covered queries and produce a high-coverage candidate pool. Curating proposes CuraFlow to compress this pool into a compact portfolio with minimal redundancy. Matching casts deployment as edge-value prediction on a query-workflow bipartite graph and routes each incoming query to the portfolio member with the best predicted utility. Across five benchmarks, FlowBank achieves the highest average score among the evaluated methods while remaining cost-competitive, improving over the strongest automated and handcrafted baselines by 4.26% and 14.92% relative, respectively.

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

Hierarchical Fine-Grained Aerial Object Detection

Fine-grained aerial object detection, driven by the intrinsic granularity of real-world object categories, is crucial for advanced scene understanding in remote sensing. Existing methods largely inherit the paradigm of coarse-grained object detection, relying solely on single-label supervision and thus struggling to distinguish model-level categories with subtle structural differences. However, for each specific model (e.g., Boeing 787), structured prior knowledge such as attributes and hierarchies offers discriminative semantics across multiple granularities. Motivated by this, we present ExpertDet, a scheme that incorporates expert-informed cues to enhance fine-grained aerial object detection. Specifically, we design Vision-aware Masked Attribute Modeling (VMAM), which aligns attribute semantics with visual structures by reconstructing randomly masked attributes from visual cues, enabling the detector to capture subtle structural distinctions. We further propose Hierarchical Visual Instance Promotion (HierVIP), which builds a visual prototype tree based on hierarchical relations and imposes taxonomy-aware constraints to preserve cross-level semantic continuity while enhancing category discrimination. Moreover, we curate a new fine-grained object detection benchmark for Precise recognition of model-specific Ships and Planes from aerial imagery, PSP, covering 106 ship classes and 30 airplane models, respectively, featuring the most extensive collection of model-specific categories among existing aerial object detection datasets to date. We benchmark state-of-the-art object detection algorithms on the PSP benchmark. Extensive evaluation demonstrates that ExpertDet consistently outperforms other fine-grained competitors across hierarchy levels. The dataset, benchmark, and code are available at https://nnnnerd.github.io/PSP-Benchmark/.

25.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-23

Comparisons of core component delivery in cardiac rehabilitation programs by country income classification and decade based on the 2025 Global Audit Update: A survey study

by Gabriela Lima de Melo Ghisi, Rachael P. Carson, Karam Turk Adawi, Rongjing Ding, Warner M. Mampuya, Mariya P. Jiandani, Jimena Martinez, Monserrat Cruz Rivero, Claudia V. Anchique, Dinah L. van Schalkwijk, Jonathan Gallagher, Buket Akinci, Dion Candelaria, Jirapa Champaiboon, Daniel F. Quesada-Chaves, Tone M. Norekvål, Iwona Szadkowska, Borut Jug, Evangelia Kouidi, Marta Supervia, Won-Seok Kim, Chamila Mettananda, Lilian Mbau, Gulsim T. Aimakova, Sherry L. Grace, on behalf of the ICCPR Global Cardiac Rehabilitation Audit Update Investigators Background Cardiovascular disease (CVD) remains a leading global health burden. Cardiac rehabilitation (CR) is essential to reducing morbidity and improving patient outcomes. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, CR delivery worldwide has evolved, yet these changes have not been systematically charactemkjrized. The objective of this study was to characterize globally: (1) the delivery of core CR components, including risk factors assessed, patient education practices, and program resources; (2) differences in these elements by country income classification and relative to the initial 2016 Global CR Audit. Methods and findings A cross-sectional Audit update was conducted. Program-level data were collected from May 1st to September 1st 2025 using a REDCap survey adapted from previous Audits. Eligible respondents were leads of phase II/post-discharge CR programs providing at least an initial assessment, structured aerobic exercise, and ≥1 additional core component. ICCPR associations and local leaders supported program identification. Main outcomes were core components delivered (10 assessed), risk factors assessed (14 assessed), patient education dose (hours/patient/program), and program resources (17 assessed). Generalized linear mixed models (GLMM) tested differences by income classification and (when applicable) changes since 2016. Of 7,025 programs identified globally, 1,505 (62% median country response rate) initiated a survey from 90/113 (80%) countries with CR. The median number of core components offered was 8/program (p25, p75 = 6, 10), with upper-middle income countries offering significantly more components overall (median = 9), and also high-income countries offering more than low-income countries (8 versus 6, p