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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Confirmation that bryozoan animals were present during the Cambrian explosion

Authors: Unknown Author

Bryozoans are marine invertebrates that live in colonies and have long been considered absent from the Cambrian explosion — a rapid evolutionary event that began around 538 million years ago. Newly discovered fossils from the Cambrian period reveal that the bryozoan phylum had already diversified by this time. Fossils of two forms of bryozoans show evidence of soft tissue still preserved inside their mineralized skeletons.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Show the Signal, Hide the Noise: Spectral Forcing for Pixel-Space Diffusion

Pixel-space diffusion models are trained on full-bandwidth noisy images, yet the useful signal available to the denoiser is strongly frequency dependent. Under rectified-flow diffusion and natural-image power-law spectra, the per-band data-to-noise contour $k^{*}(t) = (1-t)^{-2/\alpha}$ separates a signal-bearing low-frequency region from a noise-dominated high-frequency region at each time $t$. We show that this implicit coarse-to-fine structure is not merely descriptive: it induces a capacity-allocation problem. A standard pixel-space denoiser must discover the moving bandwidth boundary internally and can spend computation on frequency-time regions where the optimal prediction collapses to deterministic baselines rather than data-distribution modeling. To make this boundary explicit, we introduce Spectral Forcing, a parameter-free, time-conditional 2D-DCT low-pass operator applied to the noisy input before the patch embedder. Its cutoff expands monotonically with the diffusion time and becomes the identity at the data endpoint. Through controlled synthetic experiments, we identify the regime in which the operator is beneficial: coarse patch tokenization and data whose high-frequency content is predominantly noise rather than essential signal. On ImageNet-256 with JiT-700M/32, Spectral Forcing consistently improves both FID and Inception Score across different training epochs, demonstrating robust gains throughout training; at finer tokenization, the spectral forcing is still competitive. We further insert the unchanged operator into SenseNova-U1, a unified text-to-image model, where it improves DPG-Bench and GenEval, showing that the input-side spectral prior transfers beyond class-conditional generation. These results suggest a route to capacity-efficient pixel-space diffusion by showing the signal and hiding the noise.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Resolving Diagnostic Discordance in Group 2 Pulmonary Hypertension Through Staged Physiologic Testing: Insights From PVDOMICS

Background World Symposium on Pulmonary Hypertension (WSPH) Group 2 pulmonary hypertension (PH) is a clinically integrated phenotype attributed to left heart disease, whereas pre- versus post-capillary classification is operationalized primarily by pulmonary capillary wedge pressure (PCWP). Although current recommendations emphasize contextual interpretation and provocative testing for intermediate PCWP values, the relationship between PCWP-based classification and underlying phenotype has not been systematically evaluated. We aim to quantify phenotype-hemodynamic discordance across the PCWP spectrum and evaluate a staged physiology-guided framework incorporating inhaled nitric oxide (iNO), ventricular geometry, and provocative testing. Methods We studied 1,032 participants from the NHLBI-sponsored PVDOMICS cohort with multidisciplinary adjudicated phenotypes integrating clinical, imaging, physiologic, and hemodynamic data. Stage-specific PCWP thresholds classified pre- versus post-capillary physiology at rest, during iNO, and during provocation (fluid challenge or invasive cardiopulmonary exercise testing [iCPET]). Echocardiographic right ventricular-to-left ventricular (RV/LV) ratio was evaluated as a marker of ventricular interdependence. Restricted cubic spline and staged concordance analyses defined certainty-based PCWP ranges and incremental diagnostic yield. Results Adjudicated Group 2 phenotype was present in 37.0% of participants. Resting PCWP demonstrated good discrimination (AUC 0.86), but substantial bidirectional phenotype-hemodynamic discordance persisted across intermediate PCWP ranges. At a resting PCWP of 12 mmHg, 25% of participants classified as pre-capillary had adjudicated Group 2 PH, whereas at 18 mmHg, 35% classified as post-capillary remained discordant non-Group 2. Concordance did not approach 90% until PCWP values were 24 mmHg. Dynamic testing incrementally improved concordance within these overlap zones. Nearly half of adjudicated Group 2 PH participants (46.5%) were not identified by resting PCWP alone; incorporation of iNO and provocative testing increased cumulative Group 2 identification by 63.4% and improved sensitivity from 79.9% to 83.7%. Model discrimination improved from an AUC of 0.863 to 0.908 (likelihood-ratio P

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

The Reward Was in Your Data All Along: Correcting Flow Matching with Discriminator-Guided RL

Score- and flow-matching models often rely on preference-based reinforcement learning for two purposes: aligning with subjective preferences and, surprisingly, recovering properties such as visual realism and coherent object structure that matching-based training is intended to learn from the data itself. We argue that this reflects a structural mismatch. Matching losses measure $\ell_2$ regression error on the velocity or score field under training-time marginals, a proxy poorly aligned with the visual and semantic properties that determine sample quality at inference. Given a reward aligned with these properties, RL sidesteps the mismatch by evaluating the model on its own samples and following the reward landscape directly. The challenge is to obtain such a reward without relying on human preferences, which are expensive and conflate data realism with annotator inclinations. We propose Discriminator-Guided RL (DRL). DRL trains a discriminator to separate data from base-model samples in a pretrained representation space and uses its logit as the reward in KL-regularized RL. The pretrained space restricts the discriminator to perceptually meaningful directions, and the logit estimates the log-likelihood ratio between data and model, which is the optimal reward for targeting the data distribution. Across SiT, JiT, REPA, and RAE, DRL reduces guidance-free FID (e.g., $9.38 \to 2.62$ on SiT) and semantic-space FD (e.g., $88.2 \to 19.3$ on DINOv3 for SiT), with consistent gains across all backbones, and improves human-preference rewards without training on them. It also yields a better Pareto frontier between preference reward and image fidelity under subsequent preference-based post-training, increasing alignment while reducing low-level artifacts such as oversaturation and excessive brightness.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Simultaneous Estimation of Partial-Transpose Moments with Active Memory Independent of the Moment Order

arXiv:2606.14204v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the simultaneous estimation of partial-transpose moments $p_j(\rho_{AB})=\mathrm{Tr}[(\rho_{AB}^{T_B})^j]$, $j=2,\ldots,K$, of an unknown bipartite $n$-qubit state from independent copies under an explicit active-memory constraint. We give a sequential qubit-reuse realization of the partial-transpose permutation that uses at most $2n+1$ active qubits, independent of $K$, and estimates all moments $p_2,\ldots,p_K$ to uniform additive error $\epsilon$ with total copy complexity $O(K\log K/\epsilon^2)$. We also prove two converse bounds. First, any uniformly accurate simultaneous estimator requires $\Omega(K/\epsilon^2)$ copies in the worst case. Second, the same scaling holds on an explicit isospectral two-qubit negative-partial-transpose (NPT) family whose ordinary moments are constant while the partial-transpose moments vary. These results characterize the copy complexity of the partial-transpose moment hierarchy up to a logarithmic factor and extend simultaneous nonlinear-functional estimation from ordinary state powers to partial-transpose spectral data under active quantum memory independent of the target moment order.

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

APCyc: Property-Informed Design of Cyclic Peptides via Automated Cyclization

arXiv:2606.12991v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cyclic peptides represent a promising class of therapeutic compounds in modern drug discovery, often offering improved stability and binding affinity. However, the de novo design of cyclic peptides remains challenging because methods must identify pocket-adaptive cyclization patterns and linkage sites while simultaneously controlling drug-relevant properties. This challenge is particularly pronounced for recent generative models trained predominantly on linear peptide data, which may fail to capture cyclization-specific constraints. To address the limitation, we introduce APCyc, a target-aware de novo cyclic peptide generation framework that explicitly models cyclization and jointly optimizes multiple essential physicochemical properties. By using an expanded residue vocabulary and explicitly encoding cyclization-site and linkage-type information, APCyc learns cyclization-aware representations and leverages Bayesian posterior guidance to steer sampling toward cyclic peptides satisfying multiple property objectives. Experimental results demonstrate that our model learns target-dependent cyclization preferences, and enables effective and controllable multi-property optimization for cyclic peptide design. The source code of this paper is available at https://github.com/HKUSTGZ-ML4Health-Lab/APCyc.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Dissipation-induced superradiance in matter coupled to a self-interacting cavity

arXiv:2606.14526v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Light-matter interactions are often modeled via the Dicke model, namely, by two-level systems coupled to a cavity mode. Alas, the threshold for superradiance is often experimentally inaccessible or hindered by light's diamagnetic term. Here, within the Dicke setting, we consider self-interacting light in a cavity, modeled by a photonic Kerr nonlinearity. We show that negative Kerr nonlinearity gives rise to a low-threshold superradiant phase with spin inversion. While unstable in a closed system, cavity dissipation stabilizes this lit phase, opening avenues for lasing and bath-engineered phases.

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

Structural Role Injection in Handlebars-Templated LLM Prompts: Triple-Brace Interpolation, Delimiter Family, and the Limits of HTML Auto-Escaping

Large language model applications build prompts from templates, and Handlebars is a widely used templating engine and the default prompt-template format in Microsoft Semantic Kernel. Its double-brace {{x}} expression HTML-escapes the interpolated value and is documented as the safe default; its triple-brace {{{x}}} expression inserts the value raw. We show that this choice silently governs an application's exposure to structural role injection, where attacker-controlled data carries chat role delimiters that forge a higher-privilege turn. A model-free analysis establishes the mechanism: Handlebars escaping rewrites angle brackets but not square brackets, colons, or Markdown hashes, so it neutralises ChatML, Llama-3, and XML role delimiters (survival rate 0.00) while leaving Llama-2 [INST], legacy Human:/Assistant:, and Markdown ### delimiters intact (survival rate 1.00 for the last two). We then run 5760 trials across seven delimiter families, two attack objectives, and four models (GPT-3.5 Turbo, GPT-4o mini, GPT-4.1 mini, Claude Haiku 4.5) at a combined API cost of 1.63 USD. GPT-3.5 Turbo follows the task-hijack instruction in 97% of raw and 91% of escaped trials, with the escaping protection concentrated in the angle-bracket families and absent for the colon- and Markdown-based families; the harder secret-exfiltration objective, which does not saturate, exposes the same family interaction more cleanly. Claude Haiku 4.5 resists both objectives almost entirely. The escaped default protects only the delimiter schemes whose characters HTML escaping happens to cover, gives no protection for the rest, and cannot substitute for a structural separation of instruction and data.

09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Hua-Chen New Theory of Economic Optimization

arXiv:2504.19134v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Between 1957-1985, Chinese mathematician Loo-Keng Hua pioneered economic optimization theory through three key contributions: establishing economic stability's fundamental theorem, proving the uniqueness of equilibrium solutions in economic systems, and developing a consumption-integrated model 50 days before his death. Since 1988, Mu-Fa Chen has been working on Hua's theory. He introduced stochastics, namely Markov chains, to economic optimization theory. He updated and developed Hua's model and came up with a new model (Chen's model) which has become the starting point of a new economic optimization theory. Chen's theory can be applied to economic stability test, bankruptcy prediction, product ranking and classification, economic prediction and adjustment, economic structure optimization. Chen's theory can also provide efficient algorithms that are programmable and intelligent. {Stochastics} is the cornerstone of Chen's theory. There is no overlap between Chen's theory, and the existing mathematical economy theory and the economics developments that were awarded Nobel Prizes in Economics between 1969 and 2024. The distinguished features of Chen's theory from the existing theories are quantitative, calculable, predictable, optimizable, programmable and can be intelligent. This survey provides a theoretical overview of the newly published monograph [5rw24]. Specifically, the invariant of the economic structure matrix, also known as the Chen's invariant, was first published in this survey.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Exploiting Search in Symbolic Numeric Planning with Patterns

arXiv:2606.16329v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we present a procedure for numeric planning based on Symbolic Pattern Planning (SPP). Given a numeric planning problem $\Pi$, a pattern $\prec$ is a sequence of actions used to define a formula encoding the subsequences of $\prec$ executable from a starting state $S$. Cardellini, Giunchiglia, and Maratea (2024a) follow the Planning as Satisfiability approach by defining, at each step $n \ge 0$, a formula $\Pi^\prec_n$ in which $(i)$ the pattern $\prec$ is computed only for $n=0$ in the initial state $I$ of $\Pi$, and then exploited at each step $n$, $(ii)$ the starting state $S$ is set to $I$, and $(iii)$ the set $G$ of goals is required to hold in the last state that can be reached by one of the subsequences of $\prec$ concatenated $n$ times. The procedure begins with $n=0$, terminates as soon as $\Pi^\prec_n$ is satisfiable, and otherwise proceeds by incrementing $n$. In this paper, possibly at each step, $(i)$ we symbolically search for an intermediate state $P$ reachable from $I$, closer to a goal state, $(ii)$ dynamically recompute the pattern $\prec_h$ – to be used in the next step – in $P$, $(iii)$ refine the pattern $\prec_g$ used to reach $P$, and $(iv)$ start the new search from the state $S$ which can be either the initial state $I$ or the last computed intermediate state $P$, exploiting the computed patterns $\prec_g$ and $\prec_h$ to define the pattern $\prec$ to be used in the search. In particular, at each step, we define a formula $\Pi^{\prec}_{S,P}$ encoding the existence of a state $P'$ closer than $P$ to a goal state, with $P'$ reachable from the starting state $S$ when using the pattern $\prec$. We present different techniques for producing such formulas, each corresponding to a different strategy for exploring the search space. We prove their correctness and completeness, the latter under certain conditions.

11.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Real-order moments, tail representations, and logarithmic means

arXiv:2606.14019v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper develops a unified framework for the study of real-order moments of arbitrary random variables. General integral representations are established in terms of cumulative distribution functions and survival functions, covering continuous, discrete, and mixed distributions supported on the whole real line. These formulas extend the classical tail-integral identities for nonnegative random variables and provide a common treatment of positive, fractional, and negative moments. For discrete distributions, explicit series representations are derived in terms of cumulative probabilities, yielding simple criteria for the existence of moments. Applications are presented for the zeta and Skellam distributions, illustrating how tail behavior determines moment finiteness and how moments can be represented geometrically through cumulative distribution functions. In addition, a representation for logarithmic moments is obtained, linking logarithmic means, Laplace transforms, and the classical Frullani identity. The results provide a unified perspective on moment representations and establish useful connections between tail probabilities, distribution functions, Laplace transforms, and moment existence.

12.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Mitochondria directly interact with the nuclear pore complex

Mitochondria regulate cellular processes through direct and indirect interactions with other organelles. A well-studied example has been contact with the endoplasmic reticulum at mitochondrial-associated endoplasmic reticulum membranes1, which control pathways including redox and calcium homeostasis2,3. Recent studies have also reported direct mitochondria–nuclear membrane contacts in cancer cells and yeast that promote pro-survival signalling4,5. Here we identify direct interactions between mitochondria and nuclear pores. Using two unbiased proteomic screens, GST pulldown and BioID, we found that VDAC1 was the top mitochondrial candidate that interacts with the filamentous nuclear pore protein RANBP2. In vitro RANBP2 CRISPR knockout, RANBP2 truncation or site-directed mutagenesis of RANBP2–VDAC1 interacting amino acids resulted in reduced mitochondria–nucleus proximity and decreased nuclear ATP and phosphocreatine levels. This was accompanied by a decline in the levels of the nuclear phosphoproteome and downregulation of pathways involved in histone modification, cellular differentiation and transcriptional regulation in vitro. Moreover, deletion of the RANBP2 C-terminal domain in vivo in mice resulted in embryonic lethality due to cardiac and neural crest differentiation defects. Collectively, these results describe a mechanism by which mitochondria directly interact with the nuclear pore complex, a phenomenon critical for regulation of nuclear energetics and cellular differentiation. Undoubtedly, additional roles of this interaction remain to be revealed. Mitochondria interact directly with the nuclear pore complex via VDAC1–RANBP2 binding to sustain nuclear ATP levels.

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

Two-Layer Linear Auto-Regressive Models Estimate Latent States

arXiv:2606.12691v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Auto-regressive models have emerged as powerful tools for sequential data, from language to video. Understanding how and why these models learn latent representations remains an open theoretical question. In this work, we demonstrate that when trained by empirical risk minimization on data from partially observed linear dynamical systems, two-layer linear auto-regressive models naturally learn to approximate Kalman filtering. In particular, we show that the learned hidden representation coincides, up to a similarity transformation, with the state estimates produced by the optimal (Kalman) filter, even though the model has no explicit knowledge of the underlying dynamics or state. The result follows from three main insights. First, we establish that the Kalman filter is well approximated by an auto-regressive model with bounded truncation error. Second, we show that despite non-convexity, the two-layer optimization landscape is benign, i.e., all stationary points are either strict saddles or global minima. Finally, as our main contributions, we provide finite-sample guarantees on prediction error, parameter estimation error, and latent state recovery. Numerical simulations support the theoretical results and demonstrate that the latent representations of auto-regressive models recover state estimates.

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

Geometric Erasure by Contrastive Velocity Matching in Rectified Flows

arXiv:2606.00140v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While the rapid adoption of multimodal generative models offers immense potential, it has also increased the risks of harmful content synthesis, deepfakes, and copyright infringements. To address these challenges, concept erasure has emerged as a prospective safeguard. However, as the field gradually transitions from U-Net-based diffusion models to Rectified Flow Transformers, erasure research has struggled to keep pace. In this work, we introduce GEM, a simple but highly effective erasure framework for Rectified Flow models. As part of our contribution, we establish a principled bridge between trajectory-based unlearning grounded in Generative Flow Networks and classic teacher-guided erasure: we translate trajectory-based signals into a teacher-guided flow-matching setup that unifies the strengths of both paradigms. Concretely, a teacher provides complementary attraction and repulsion signals that we combine into a single geometric guidance objective, yielding targeted suppression of unwanted concepts while preserving benign generation.

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

Fully Geometric Multi-Hop Reasoning on Knowledge Graphs with Transitive Relations

arXiv:2505.12369v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-hop logical reasoning on knowledge graphs requires faithfully mapping the logical semantics to latent space. Current geometric embedding methods show to be useful on this task by mapping entities to geometric regions and logical operations to latent transformations. While a geometric embedding can provide a direct interpretability framework for query answering, current methods have only leveraged the geometric construction of entities, failing to map logical operations to pure geometric transformations and, instead, using neural components to learn these operations. On the other hand, purely neural-based methods outperform geometric methods, but they lack interpretability in the latent space. We introduce GeometrE, a geometric embedding method for multi-hop reasoning, that maps every logical operation to a purely geometric operation in the latent space. Additionally, we introduce a transitive loss function and show that, unlike existing methods, it can preserve the logical rule for all a,b,c: r(a,b) and r(b,c) -> r(a,c). Our experiments show that GeometrE outperforms current state-of-the-art geometric methods and remains competitive with existing neural-based methods on standard benchmark datasets.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Tabular Foundation Models for Clinical Survival Analysis via Survival-Aware Adaptation

arXiv:2606.12006v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predicting time-to-event outcomes such as mortality is a fundamental task in clinical decision-making, commonly addressed through survival analysis. While classical statistical and deep learning approaches have been widely studied, they typically require task-specific training and sufficient labeled data. Recent advances in tabular foundation models offer a new paradigm by learning general-purpose representations for structured data. However, their applicability to censored time-to-event prediction in clinical settings remains underexplored, as typical applications are restricted to discrete classification rather than survival analysis tasks. In this work, we propose a lightweight adaptation approach for applying tabular foundation models to clinical survival analysis by directly training a survival-aware head on top of the pretrained representations. We study representative architectures, including TabPFN, TabDPT, and TabICL, and adapt them using a multi-task logistic regression (MTLR) head to model right-censored time-to-event outcomes. We evaluate this approach on a diverse set of public survival benchmarks and two large-scale ICU cohorts, MIMIC-IV and eICU. Our results show that this transfer learning approach achieves competitive or superior performance compared to strong baselines. On MIMIC-IV, TabDPT-FT-MTLR reaches a C-index of 0.856, corresponding to a relative improvement of +1.4% over the best non-FM baseline (DeepSurv, 0.844) and +6.7% over the best zero-shot model (0.802). On eICU, TabICL-FT-MTLR achieves 0.797, yielding gains of +1.7% (DeepSurv, 0.784) and +6.4% (0.749), respectively. These findings highlight the importance of combining pretrained tabular representations with survival-aware objectives and suggest that tabular foundation models provide a practical and effective alternative for clinical survival prediction.

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

Beyond Rebalancing: Benchmarking Binary Classifiers Under Class Imbalance Without Rebalancing Techniques

arXiv:2509.07605v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Class imbalance poses a significant challenge to supervised classification, particularly in critical domains like medical diagnostics and anomaly detection where minority class instances are rare. While numerous studies have explored rebalancing techniques to address this issue, less attention has been given to evaluating the performance of binary classifiers under imbalance when no such techniques are applied. Therefore, the goal of this study is to assess the performance of binary classifiers "as-is", without performing any explicit rebalancing. Specifically, we systematically evaluate the robustness of a diverse set of binary classifiers across both real-world and synthetic datasets, under progressively reduced minority class sizes, using one-shot and few-shot scenarios as baselines. Our approach also explores varying data complexities through synthetic decision boundary generation to simulate real-world conditions. In addition to standard classifiers, we include experiments using undersampling, oversampling strategies, and one-class classification (OCC) methods to examine their behavior under severe imbalance. The results confirm that classification becomes more difficult as data complexity increases and the minority class size decreases. While traditional classifiers deteriorate under extreme imbalance, advanced models like TabPFN and boosting-based ensembles retain relatively higher performance and better generalization compared to traditional classifiers. Visual interpretability and evaluation metrics further validate these findings. Our work offers valuable guidance on model selection for imbalanced learning, providing insights into classifier robustness without dependence on explicit rebalancing techniques.

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

ENPIRE: Agentic Robot Policy Self-Improvement in the Real World

arXiv:2606.19980v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Achieving dexterous robotic manipulation in the real world heavily relies on human supervision and algorithm engineering, which becomes a central bottleneck in the pursuit of general physical intelligence. Although emerging coding agents can generate code to automate algorithm search, their successes remain largely confined in digital environments. We conjecture that the missing abstraction to automate robotics research is a repeatable feedback loop for real-world policy improvement: reset the scene, execute a policy, verify the outcome, and refine the next iteration. To bridge this gap, we introduce ENPIRE, a harness framework for coding agents that instantiates this physical feedback routine with four core modules: an Environment module (EN) for automatic reset and verification, a Policy Improvement module (PI) that launches policy refinement, a Rollout module (R) to evaluate policies with one or multiple physical robots operating in parallel, and an Evolution module (E) in which coding agents analyze logs, consult literature, improve training infrastructure and algorithm code to address failure modes. This closed-loop system transforms real-world manipulation learning into a controllable optimization procedure, minimizing human effort while allowing fair ablations across training recipe and agent variants. Powered by ENPIRE, frontier coding agents can autonomously train a policy to achieve a 99% success rate on challenging, dexterous manipulation tasks, such as organizing a pin box, fastening a zip tie, and tool use, a process that further accelerates when we dispatch an agent team on a robot fleet. Our results suggest a practical and scalable path toward deploying coding agents to autonomously advancing robotics in the physical world.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Valid Inference with Synthetic Data via Task Exchangeability

arXiv:2606.13629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: There is a proliferation of work arguing for the use of synthetic data in scientific research. For example, social scientists are arguing for the use of LLM-generated "silicon samples" in pilot studies; AI evaluations increasingly rely on "LLM-as-a-judge" outputs; and proteomics research is accelerated by generative models that produce synthetic protein structures. These developments raise an intriguing possibility: synthetic data may help researchers ask more questions, run more studies, and accelerate discovery. But they also raise a fundamental concern: synthetic data can be biased, noisy, and misspecified. In this work, we propose statistical principles for using synthetic data in scientific research with provable validity guarantees. The key insight is a new technical condition that we call task exchangeability. Informally, this is a requirement that the researcher can identify historical tasks, for which real data is available, such that their current task of interest is exchangeable with the historical tasks in an appropriate mathematical sense. We develop methods for valid inference under task exchangeability, together with extensions that provide guarantees even beyond exchangeability. We demonstrate the framework on public opinion surveys with silicon samples and AI evaluation with autoraters.

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

From ASR to ASP: Evaluating Prompt Attack Vulnerabilities Against Open-Source LLMs

Recent studies demonstrate that Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to attacks that generate harmful or sensitive outputs. As open-source LLMs are increasingly adopted in high-impact applications such as finance, law, and healthcare, systematically investigating their security risks is becoming increasingly important towards trustworthy LLM era. This paper comprehensively studies effective prompt injection attacks against 14 widely used open-source and three closed-source LLMs on five attack benchmarks. Moreover, existing evaluation metrics mostly only consider the attack success rate, overlooking uncertainty in model responses. Our proposed Attack Success Probability (ASP) additionally captures uncertain behaviors for evaluation, where the model may initially refuse a harmful request but subsequently provide harmful guidance or vice versa, reflecting inconsistency and ambiguity in attack feasibility. By systematically analyzing the effectiveness of prompt injection attacks, we propose a straightforward and effective hypnotism attack; results show that this attack causes aligned language models, including Stablelm2, Mistral, Openchat, and Vicuna, to generate objectionable behaviors, achieving around 90% ASP. They also indicate that ignore prefix attacks can break all 14 open-source LLMs, achieving over 60% ASP on a multi-categorical dataset. We find that moderately well-known LLMs exhibit higher vulnerability to prompt injection attacks, highlighting the need to raise public awareness and prioritize efficient mitigation strategies.

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

Reroute, Don't Remove: Recoverable Visual Token Routing for Vision-Language Models

Vision-language models (VLMs) project images into hundreds to thousands of visual tokens, making decoder inference expensive in both attention computation and KV-cache memory. Existing visual-token reduction methods largely follow a rank-and-remove paradigm: they score visual tokens, keep a compact subset, and permanently discard the rest. We show that this irreversible action is fragile because visual-token importance changes across decoder depth; tokens ranked low at one stage may become relevant in later layers, especially for grounding-sensitive queries. We propose Reroute, a training-free plug-in that replaces removal with recoverable routing. At each routing stage, selected vision tokens pass through decoder blocks, while deferred tokens bypass the stage and re-enter the candidate pool at the next routing decision. Reroute reuses existing attention-score ranking rules and stage-wise schedules, preserving the theoretical TFLOPs and KV-cache budget class of the pruning method it augments. Across FastV, PDrop, and Nüwa variants on LLaVA-1.5 and Qwen backbones, reroute improves grounding under aggressive token reduction while maintaining general VQA performance. These results suggest that VLM token reduction should not be viewed only as irreversible pruning, but also as recoverable routing. The code can be found here: https://github.com/elmma/mllm-reroute/

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Optimizing resource allocation for accuracy in noisy variational quantum algorithms

arXiv:2606.20153v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For quantum algorithms to achieve their full potential, we need methodologies to optimize them, such as reaching a given output accuracy with minimal resource costs. Here, we develop such a methodology for a class of Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) algorithms. We leverage simulations of a Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) to propose a phenomenological model of such algorithms that captures the complex relationship between algorithmic accuracy, algorithmic resource costs, and the noise that exists in realistic quantum hardware. For this, we take the algorithmic resource cost to be the total number of quantum gate-operations in the algorithm; minimizing this cost typically makes the algorithm faster and more energy-efficient. We consider the subtle trade-off between quantum circuit size (small circuits are too imprecise, but large ones are too noisy), and the number of iterations of that quantum circuit for the full algorithm to sufficiently converge. Using a noise-metric-resource methodology, we identify the sweet spot (of circuit size versus iterations) that minimizes the algorithmic resource costs for a desired algorithm accuracy. It also gives the circuit size that maximizes algorithm accuracy for a fixed resource cost. Our methodology provides a practical guideline for near-term deployment of variational algorithms on realistic noisy hardware, including hardware that uses error mitigation.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Optimisation of steatotic liver disease screening algorithm for resource-poor settings using machine learning

Background The European Association for the Study of the Liver (ESAL) - Steatotic Liver Disease (SLD) screening algorithm involves two steps; initial screening with FIB-4 followed by referral for vibration-controlled transient elastography (VCTE) in patients likely to have significant fibrosis (SF). However, VCTE is not widely available in resource-limited settings. Aim To optimise the EASL SLD screening algorithm for resource-poor settings using machine learning (ML). Methods We analysed data from 964 adults aged [≥]35 years who underwent VCTE at a tertiary referral centre in Sri Lanka between November 2024 and 2025. Multiple ML models using different methods and variable combinations were trained on 80% of the dataset and tested on the remaining 20%. Best models were selected based on performance and externally validated using data from 430 patients who underwent VCTE before November 2024. Model performance was compared with the FIB-4 using confusion matrices. Results A Random Forest model incorporating age, AST, ALT, and platelet count separately, rather than using FIB-4, outperformed. The all-variable ML model showed the best predictive performance for SF, with accuracy of 77.2%, recall of 0.762, precision of 0.778, and AUC-ROC of 0.818. The variables used in the model, in descending order of feature importance, were AST, platelet count, BMI, ALT, age, diabetes mellitus, hypertension, dyslipidaemia, sex, family history, hypothyroidism, diabetes complication and smoking. External validation demonstrated 75.1% accuracy and an AUC of 0.779. When used as the first step of the SLD screening algorithm, the all-variable ML model identified 37 (17.1%) additional true positives and reduced false-negative diagnoses by 50% compared with FIB-4. Conclusions ML-based models were more effective than the FIB-4 score as the first-line screening tool for VCTE referral, substantially improving the identification of patients with significant fibrosis in this South Asian cohort.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

AfroScope: A Framework for Studying the Linguistic Landscape of Africa

Language Identification (LID), the task of determining the language of a given text, is a fundamental preprocessing step that shapes the reliability of downstream NLP applications. While recent work has expanded African LID, existing systems remain limited in both language coverage and fine-grained discrimination among closely related languages and varieties. We introduce AfroScope, a unified framework for African LID that includes AfroScope-Data, a dataset covering 640 languages, and AfroScope-Models, a suite of strong LID models with broad African language coverage. To address persistent confusions among closely related languages, we propose a hierarchical classification approach that leverages AfroScope-Mirror, a specialized embedding model for targeted disambiguation, improving macro-F1 by 1.57 points on the confusable subset compared to our best base model. We further analyze cross-lingual transfer and domain effects, showing how language-family structure, script compatibility, and domain coverage shape LID performance. We position African LID as an enabling technology for large-scale measurement of Africa's linguistic landscape in digital text, and release AfroScope-Data and AfroScope-Models online.