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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Query-Efficient Video Adversarial Attack with Stylized Logo on Service Computing

In service computing, video classification has become fundamental to many intelligent applications. While Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have demonstrated excellent performance in recognizing video content, recent studies have shown that DNNs are highly vulnerable to adversarial examples. Thus, understanding adversarial attacks can better respond to emergency situations. In order to improve attack performance, many style-transfer-based attacks and patch-based attacks have been proposed. However, the global perturbation of the former will bring unnatural global colors, while the latter is difficult to achieve success in targeted attacks due to the limited perturbation space. Moreover, compared to a plethora of methods targeting image classifiers, video adversarial attacks remain relatively underexplored. Therefore, to generate adversarial examples with a low budget and to provide them with a higher verisimilitude, we propose a novel black-box video attack framework, called Stylized Logo Attack (SLA). SLA is conducted through three stages. The first stage involves building a style reference set for logos, which can not only make the generated examples more natural, but also carry more target class features in targeted attacks. Then, Reinforcement Learning is employed to determine the style reference and position parameters of the logo within the video, which ensures that the stylized logo is placed in the video with optimal attributes. Finally, perturbations are optimized in a step-by-step manner so as to improve the fooling rate. Experimental results indicate that SLA can achieve better performance than state-of-the-art methods and still maintain good deception effects when facing various defense methods. We believe SLA can raise awareness among the security community about the reliability and security of video classification systems and serve as a memorandum of possible attack methods.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Disentangling Confounders from Pathology in Long-COVID Trajectory Prediction for Women: An Interpretable Large-Language-Model Approach

Objective. Post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC, "Long COVID") dispropor- tionately affects women, in whom hallmark symptoms–insomnia, fatigue, palpitations, cogni- tive difficulty–overlap with comorbidities and hormonal transitions such as menopause. This diagnostic overlap is a confounding problem: models that forecast future symptom severity risk attributing baseline physiological noise to viral pathology. We ask whether an interpretable, causally disentangled language model can separate true pathological signal from such con- founders while remaining competitive with strong predictors of future PASC severity

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis using a Multimodal Approach with 3D MRI and PET

arXiv:2606.20037v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Alzheimer's disease (AD) is an irreversible neurodegenerative disorder and a leading cause of death worldwide. Early diagnosis plays an important part especially at the Mild Cognitive Impairment stage, where timely intervention can help slow its progression before it advances to AD. Neuroimaging data, like Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scans, can help detect brain changes early by providing structural and functional brain changes related to the disease. Yet, many multimodal models still fuse MRI and PET with static concatenation and apply identical computation to all subjects, which limits robustness to patient/site heterogeneity and can waste computation. To address these limitations, we present the first study of combining 3D convolutional feature extractors with three fusion strategies - concatenation, Gated Multimodal Unit (GMU), and gated self-attention - and a sparsely gated Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) classifier that performs input-adaptive routing, activating only the most informative experts per case. Finally, we utilize Grad-CAM to visualize disease-related regions, ensuring model interpretability. Experiments are performed across three binary classification tasks (NC vs. MCI, MCI vs. AD, and NC vs. AD). Results show that GMU achieves accuracies of 80.46 % (NC vs. MCI) and 95.47 % (NC vs. AD), while gated self-attention attains 82.08 % on MCI vs. AD. Ablations show that removing the MoE consistently degrades accuracy across all tasks. These findings underscore the value of input-adaptive, multimodal modeling for AD diagnosis by leveraging the complementary nature of MRI and PET.

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

Reliable Error Estimation for PINNs: Lower and Upper A Posteriori Bounds

arXiv:2606.12050v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) combine machine learning with physical laws to solve differential equations. While existing results provide rigorous a posteriori upper bounds for PINN prediction errors, complete certification also requires complementary lower information in order to obtain computable two-sided error enclosures. In this paper, we derive computable a posteriori lower bounds for PINN errors in ordinary differential equations on suitable certified state-space domains under a localized strong monotonicity condition. We combine these estimates with complementary localized upper bounds under a one-sided Lipschitz condition, which is weaker than the global Lipschitz assumption used in previous work and can yield sharper upper error bands. The resulting bounds depend only on the neural-network approximation, the ODE residual, and local monotonicity and growth constants, and therefore do not require access to the exact solution. For linear time-invariant and time-varying systems, we further derive explicit formulas in terms of the minimal and maximal eigenvalues of the symmetric part of the system matrix. We also discuss the distinction between soft and hard enforcement of initial conditions in PINNs and explain why exact enforcement can make the scalar lower certificate uninformative. To recover nontrivial lower information in the linear setting, we use a signed-residual finite-probe certificate based on coordinate unit vectors. We also formulate a certificate-informed training strategy in which the propagated upper certificate is used as an auxiliary regularizer, while lower certificates remain post-training diagnostics. Altogether, the proposed framework provides rigorous and practically computable error certificates for PINN approximations of ODEs, while making explicit the domains and model classes for which the assumptions can be verified.

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

MIRAGE: Auditing Anti-Muslim Bias in Frontier LLMs Across Reasoning, Agentic, and Time-Coupled Conditions

arXiv:2606.16562v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Five years after the discovery of persistent anti-Muslim bias in large language models, most evaluations remain confined to single-turn prompt completion, a setting that no longer reflects how frontier LLMs are deployed. We introduce MIRAGE (Muslim-Identity Reasoning and Agentic Generation Evaluation), a benchmark of 1{,}200 prompts spanning three deployment-realistic conditions: direct completion, chain-of-thought reasoning, and simulated agentic decision-making across content moderation, lending triage, refugee claim summarization, and hiring screens. Across six frontier models, we find that (i) chain-of-thought reasoning amplifies rather than suppresses Muslim-violence associations by 12–34\% relative to direct completion, (ii) agentic decisions exhibit a 9–22 percentage-point asymmetry between Muslim and matched non-Muslim cases on identical evidence, and (iii) bias is sharply time-coupled to retrieved news context, increasing 18–27\% under recent-conflict retrieval. Existing prompt-based mitigations transfer poorly across our three conditions, suppressing direct-completion bias while leaving agentic asymmetry largely intact. We release MIRAGE and an open evaluation harness to support targeted mitigation research.

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

AFFORDANCE20Q: Evaluating Affordance Reasoning from Physical Properties

arXiv:2606.14240v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Affordance reasoning, the inference of an object's action possibilities from its physical properties (e.g., shape and material), is fundamental to human physical understanding and increasingly critical for Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing affordance benchmarks largely expose explicit object identities in the evaluation setup, allowing models to rely on memorized object-affordance mappings rather than reasoning over physical properties. To address this gap, we introduce Affordance20Q, a novel affordance reasoning benchmark formulated as a 20-Questions game without exposing the object's identity. In each game, the model identifies a hidden object's affordance from a candidate set by asking yes/no questions about its physical properties. Affordance20Q comprises 1,009 games over 454 objects and 59 affordances, all manually filtered, refined, and annotated. We conduct comprehensive experiments with 15 state-of-the-art LLMs and find a substantial gap (~20 points) compared to human performance. A KL-based information-gain (IG) analysis further shows that models fail to ask discriminating questions as the game progresses. To close the gap, we develop KB-Anchored Rule Induction (KARI), a pipeline based on LLMs that generates affordance rules grounded in evidence from knowledge bases (KBs). KARI improves open-source LLMs by up to 15.2 points, while the limited coverage of KBs hinders further gains. We release all our code and data at https://github.com/1171-jpg/Affordance20Q.git

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Sinkhorn-CPD: Robust point cloud registration via unbalanced entropic optimal transport

Coherent Point Drift (CPD) is widely used for rigid point cloud registration because of its soft correspondences and closed-form parameter updates. However, CPD's target-side marginal constraint forces every observation, including outliers, to receive exactly unit probability mass. This assumption degrades registration accuracy under heavy outliers and partial overlap. Optimal transport (OT) methods can handle missing mass through unbalanced formulations, but require hand-tuned annealing schedules. In this paper, we propose Sinkhorn-CPD, which replaces CPD's target-side marginal constraint with dual Kullback-Leibler penalties, allowing the algorithm to discard outliers on both sides. The resulting formulation is a fully unbalanced entropic optimal transport problem, which can be efficiently solved by generalized Sinkhorn iterations. Moreover, Sinkhorn-CPD preserves the closed-form Procrustes and variance updates of CPD. In our method, the variance sigma^2 plays the role of the entropic regularization parameter, which induces an automatic annealing schedule from diffuse to sharp correspondences without manual temperature tuning. Experiments on synthetic, cross-category, and scan-to-CAD benchmarks show that Sinkhorn-CPD achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, with strong robustness to outliers and partial overlap.

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

The 1/4-phenomenon of placement probabilities of tilings in the Aztec diamond

arXiv:2512.08377v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We consider domino tilings of the Aztec diamond. Using the Domino Shuffling algorithm introduced by Elkies, Kuperberg, Larsen, and Propp in arXiv:math/9201305, we are able to generate domino tilings uniformly at random. In this paper, we investigate the probability of finding a domino at a specific position in such a random tiling. We prove that this placement probability is always equal to $1/4$ plus a rational function, whose shape depends on the location of the domino, multiplied by a position-independent factor that involves only the size of the diamond. This result leads to significantly more compact explicit counting formulas compared to previous findings. As a direct application, we derive explicit counting formulas for the domino tilings of Aztec diamonds with $2\times 2$-square holes at arbitrary positions.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Learning Patterns and Abstractions from Perceptual Sequences

作者:

arXiv:2503.10973v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Cognition swiftly breaks high-dimensional sensory streams into familiar parts and uncovers their relations. Why do structures emerge, and how do they enable learning, generalization, and prediction? What computational principles underlie this core aspect of perception and intelligence? A sensory stream, simplified, is a one-dimensional sequence. In learning such sequences, we naturally segment them into parts – a process known as chunking. In the first project, I investigated factors influencing chunking in a serial reaction time task and showed that humans adapt to underlying chunks while balancing speed and accuracy. Building on this, I developed models that learn chunks and parse sequences chunk by chunk. Normatively, I proposed chunking as a rational strategy for discovering recurring patterns and nested hierarchies, enabling efficient sequence factorization. Learned chunks serve as reusable primitives for transfer, composition, and mental simulation – letting the model compose the new from the known. I demonstrated this model's ability to learn hierarchies in single and multi-dimensional sequences and highlighted its utility for unsupervised pattern discovery. The second part moves from concrete to abstract sequences. I taxonomized abstract motifs and examined their role in sequence memory. Behavioral evidence suggests that humans exploit pattern redundancies for compression and transfer. I proposed a non-parametric hierarchical variable model that learns both chunks and abstract variables, uncovering invariant symbolic patterns. I showed its similarity to human learning and compared it to large language models. Taken together, this thesis suggests that chunking and abstraction as simple computational principles enable structured knowledge acquisition in hierarchically organized sequences, from simple to complex, concrete to abstract.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Helical Dirac Current with Local Coupling to a Chiral Potential

arXiv:2606.17618v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We show that exact Dirac eigenstates in cylindrical confinement carry a definite helical conserved-current texture even in the zero orbital angular momentum channel l = 0. For the lowest confined mode, the Dirac current contains a nonvanishing azimuthal component together with longitudinal transport and exhibits opposite handedness in the two spin-resolved sectors. The structure also persists into the evanescent region. We further derive the channel-resolved matrix-element kernel generated by a static chiral scalar potential acting on the confined l = 0 Dirac modes. The resulting spin-selective coupling arises from the Dirac current texture and the scalar chiral potential, and yields a geometric selection rule in which diagonal channels vanish while off-diagonal conversion channels survive. The coupling strength is governed by an internal sampled-current overlap Jchi(k), defined as the integral from 0 to R of f(rho) times jphi_up(rho, k) times rho d rho. This quantity measures the spatial overlap between the chiral radial profile and the spin-up azimuthal Dirac-current density. The mechanism is fully local and texture-based, without external magnetic fields or spin-orbit coupling. Within standard Dirac theory, this work identifies the minimal static Dirac-geometric kernel underlying spin-selective response, establishing a baseline structure from which dynamical-medium, scattering, and transport formalisms can be systematically developed toward a complete description of spin-polarization phenomena such as CISS.

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

Reinforcement Twinning for Hybrid Control of Flapping-Wing Drones

arXiv:2505.18201v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Controlling flapping-wing drones requires controllers that handle time-varying, nonlinear, underactuated dynamics from incomplete, noisy sensor data. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly reinforcement learning (RL), have opened new perspectives for addressing such complex control problems through data-driven policy optimization from interaction with the environment. Yet purely data-driven methods are sample-inefficient, demanding extensive, sometimes unsafe exploration, especially without guiding physical models. This motivates hybrid AI-physics frameworks. This article proposes a hybrid model-free/model-based flight-control approach using the reinforcement twinning algorithm. The model-based (MB) component uses an adjoint formulation and an adaptive digital twin continuously identified from live trajectories; the model-free (MF) component uses RL. The two agents share knowledge via transfer learning, imitation learning, and shared experience between the real environment and the digital twin, coordinated by a policy referee that selects which agent acts in reality based on digital-twin performance and a real-to-virtual consistency ratio. The framework is evaluated for the longitudinal control of a flapping-wing drone, modelled as a nonlinear time-varying system driven by quasi-steady aerodynamic forces. The hybrid strategy is tested under three adaptive-model initializations: (1) offline identification from existing data, (2) random initialization with fully online identification, and (3) offline pre-training with biased parameters followed by online adaptation. In all cases, the hybrid framework improves performance, robustness, and sample efficiency over purely model-free and purely model-based approaches.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Tensor network compression using fluid dynamics as a testbed: Analytical foundations in one dimension

arXiv:2606.17064v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: High performance computers produce extreme-scale data sets that require sampling or compression if they are to be used to their full potential. Existing data compression techniques typically exploit features such as sparsity in the data, homogeneity in the data, or {\it a priori} knowledge of what subsets of data are of most interest. Fluid dynamics data in general do not exhibit these features and so are attractive test beds for generic compression techniques that are objective, robust, and tuneable with respect to information lost due to compression. Presented here is a method based on tensor networks, specifically matrix product states or tensor trains, that meets these requirements. The method is demonstrated for compression in one-dimension and is extensible to higher dimensionality. Lossless compression is demonstrated for random Fourier series for sufficiently high bond dimension of the tensor network, with the memory required to store the tensor network scaling directly proportional to the bond dimension. The lossy compression exhibited at lower bond dimension can be well within the relative error of many fluid simulations. The compression algorithm is tested for the time evolution of Burger's equation with excellent results. We additionally demonstrate the capability to perform computations in the compressed form through a tensor network periodic convolution that can be orders of magnitude faster than using fast Fourier transforms and the convolution theorem. In addition to being an attractive method for working with data sets generated by existing computers, the tensor network methods utilised are directly translatable to the emerging paradigm of quantum computing.

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

Agents-K1: Towards Agent-native Knowledge Orchestration

arXiv:2606.13669v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current LLM-based research agents have advanced through agent orchestration, yet largely overlook scientific knowledge orchestration. Existing works often reduce papers to abstracts, surface mentions, and flat \texttt{cites} edges, omitting key entities, claims, evidence, mechanisms, and method lineages essential for scientific reasoning. To this end, we introduce Agents-K1, an end-to-end knowledge orchestration pipeline that converts raw documents into agent-native scientific knowledge graphs. Agents-K1 integrates three components under a unifying theoretical foundation: a multimodal parser whose five-module schema captures entities, multimodal evidence, citations, and typed inter-entity relations across the full paper rather than abstracts alone; a 4B information-extraction backbone trained with GRPO under a rule-based reward; and a graphanything CLI, a tri-source agent interface that unifies web search, multimodal graph retrieval, and cross-document traversal. On top of this, we process 2.46 million scientific papers across six subjects to produce Scholar-KG, of which we release a one-million-paper subset, and the full Scholar-KG is accessible via the SCP link below. The same pipeline can be extended to general-domain corpora and to schema-conformant data synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Agents-K1 achieves superior performance in scientific information extraction, knowledge graph construction, and multi-hop scientific reasoning.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

NRITYAM: Language Models Meet Art and Heritage of Dance

Language models have become essential tools in shaping modern workflows. However, their global effectiveness hinges on a nuanced understanding of local socio-cultural contexts. To address this gap, we present NRITYAM, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating the cultural comprehension capabilities of language models in the context of global dance traditions. NRITYAM comprises 9,260 carefully curated question-answer pairs spanning 12 languages, making it the largest dataset dedicated to evaluating cultural knowledge in dance. The dataset has been developed from the ground up through close collaboration with native dance artists and native speakers of the languages, who authored and validated culturally relevant questions specific to their regions. We evaluate a broad set of models, including large language models, small language models, multimodal large language models, and small multimodal language models. As a multilingual and multicultural benchmark, NRITYAM sets a new standard for evaluating the ability of AI systems to understand and reason about traditional performing arts. Detailed dataset samples are available at~\url{https://github.com/niladrighosh03/NRITYAM}.

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

MeEvo: Metacognitive Evolution Combined with Natural Evolution for Automatic Heuristic Design

arXiv:2606.14202v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced Automatic Heuristic Design (AHD) by enabling heuristic generation through reasoning and code synthesis. Existing LLM-based AHD architectures mainly follow two paradigms: Natural Evolution, which uses crossover and mutation to explore heuristic programs, and Metacognitive Evolution, which refines reasoning through reflection. However, Natural Evolution discards reasoning traces, weakening knowledge inheritance and exploitation, while Metacognitive Evolution lacks population-level recombination, limiting exploration and increasing the risk of premature convergence. These limitations reduce search efficiency, stability, and solution quality on complex problems. To address this gap, we propose MeEvo, a dual-layer AHD framework that cyclically couples Natural Evolution and Metacognitive Evolution. Natural Evolution explores heuristic code while recording reasoning traces, fitness values, and errors into a shared history; Metacognitive Evolution then reflects on this history to generate improved heuristics that re-enter the parent pool for the next cycle. This design enables population-driven exploration and reflection-driven refinement to reinforce each other. Experiments on five optimization problems with two LLM backbones show that MeEvo achieves stronger and more stable performance than existing LLM-based AHD architectures, especially on complex constrained tasks.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

MapAgent: An Industrial-Grade Agentic Framework for City-scale Lane-level Map Generation

arXiv:2606.04513v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Lane-level maps are critical infrastructure for autonomous driving and lane-level navigation, yet constructing and maintaining standardized lane networks for hundreds of cities remains highly labor-intensive. Recent end-to-end vectorized mapping methods can predict lane geometry and topology directly from sensor data, but they typically treat mapping specifications and traffic regulations as implicit, dataset-dependent supervision. Moreover, in complex scenes (e.g., worn or missing markings and occlusions), correct lane configurations are often under-determined by visual evidence alone, making specification violations a major source of human post-editing. We propose MapAgent, an industrial-grade agentic architecture that augments a vectorization backbone for specification-compliant lane-map production. Rather than merely adding an agent loop to map prediction, MapAgent couples backbone perception with explicit specification verification, constraint-aware reasoning, and deterministic map editing under a bounded, verification-driven Judge-Planner-Worker loop. A vision-language Judge diagnoses errors by jointly inspecting visual evidence and draft vectors, while a tool-calling Planner generates minimal corrective edits with post-edit re-validation. To remain scalable for city-scale production, MapAgent is selectively triggered only on tiles with low backbone confidence, adding modest overhead while preserving throughput. Experiments on real-world datasets show consistent gains over strong production baselines, especially in complex and long-tail scenarios. Additionally, MapAgent has been integrated into Baidu Maps, supporting lane-level map generation for over 360 cities nationwide and elevating the overall production automation to over 95%, demonstrating MapAgent's practicality and effectiveness for large-scale lane-level map generation.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

G-Long: Graph-Enhanced Memory Management for Efficient Long-Term Dialogue Agents

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced open-domain dialogue systems, maintaining long-term consistency remains a challenge due to inherent limitations in long-context reasoning and the inefficiency of processing extensive raw text. Existing approaches typically rely on either unstructured memory storage, which is prone to information loss, or computationally expensive LLMs that incur high latency. To address these limitations, we propose G-Long, a graph-enhanced framework that utilizes a fine-tuned small Language Model (sLM) for structured triplet extraction and associative retrieval, significantly reducing operational costs. Furthermore, we introduce the novel attention-aware importance scoring mechanism that leverages the intrinsic cross-attention signals of a T5 summarizer to identify salient memories. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that G-Long achieves state-of-the-art performance in both response generation and memory retrieval, yielding performance gains of up to 9.8% in response quality on MSC and 40.8% in retrieval recall on LME, while significantly minimizing computational overhead.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Multi-Adapter PPO: A Cross-Attention Enhanced Wavelength Selection Framework for LIBS Quantitative Analysis

arXiv:2606.17476v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) quantitative analysis faces critical challenges in wavelength selection due to high-dimensional spectral data and the fundamental trade-off between prediction accuracy and feature efficiency. This paper presents a novel Multi-Adapter PPO framework that transforms wavelength selection into a reinforcement learning problem, leveraging cross-attention mechanisms and multiple specialized adapters to capture complex spectral relationships. Our approach outperforms traditional Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) by an average of 28.4\% in comprehensive score and 45.2\% in prediction accuracy across steel and coal datasets. The proposed method demonstrates superior performance in balancing prediction accuracy with feature efficiency, achieving state-of-the-art results in LIBS quantitative analysis while maintaining interpretability and computational efficiency. We released our code and dataset here: https://github.com/Hflying/MAPPO

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Non-negative Matrix Factorisation with Topological Regularisation

arXiv:2606.17531v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the learning of interpretable bases in non-negative matrix factorisation (NMF) by regularising the topology of the learned basis functions. Our approach is motivated by the observation that many data modalities can be viewed as non-negative functions on a structured domain, where the quality of a basis is intrinsically linked to its topology. However, naive methods for incorporating the topology of the support are often hindered by discreteness and threshold dependence, rendering them unsuitable for continuous optimisation. We address these challenges by employing persistent homology as a stable, threshold-free topological quantifier and by designing topological scores that integrate into the NMF objective as regularisers. The resulting framework encompasses spatially coherent image components, periodic time-series structures, and clique-like graph signals within a unified modelling language.

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

CycliST: A Video Language Model Benchmark for Reasoning on Cyclical State Transitions

We present CycliST, a novel benchmark dataset designed to evaluate Video Language Models (VLM) on their ability for textual reasoning over cyclical state transitions. CycliST captures fundamental aspects of real-world processes by generating synthetic, richly structured video sequences featuring periodic patterns in object motion and visual attributes. CycliST employs a tiered evaluation system that progressively increases difficulty through variations in the number of cyclic objects, scene clutter, and lighting conditions, challenging state-of-the-art models on their spatio-temporal cognition. We conduct extensive experiments with current state-of-the-art VLMs, both open-source and proprietary, and reveal their limitations in generalizing to cyclical dynamics such as linear and orbital motion, as well as time-dependent changes in visual attributes like color and scale. Our results demonstrate that present-day VLMs struggle to reliably detect and exploit cyclic patterns, lack a notion of temporal understanding, and are unable to extract quantitative insights from scenes, such as the number of objects in motion, highlighting a significant technical gap that needs to be addressed. More specifically, we find no single model consistently leads in performance: neither size nor architecture correlates strongly with outcomes, and no model succeeds equally well across all tasks. By providing a targeted challenge and a comprehensive evaluation framework, CycliST paves the way for visual reasoning models that surpass the state-of-the-art in understanding periodic patterns.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Structured vs. Unstructured Pruning: An Exponential Gap

arXiv:2603.02234v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Strong Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (SLTH) states that large, randomly initialized neural networks contain sparse subnetworks capable of approximating a target function at initialization without training, suggesting that pruning alone is sufficient. Pruning methods are typically classified as unstructured, where individual weights can be removed from the network, and structured, where parameters are removed according to specific patterns, as in neuron pruning. Existing theoretical results supporting the SLTH rely almost exclusively on unstructured pruning, showing that logarithmic overparameterization suffices to approximate simple target networks. In contrast, neuron pruning has received limited theoretical attention, despite its practical appeal for direct hardware speedups. In this work, we consider the problem of approximating a single bias-free ReLU neuron by pruning hidden units of a randomly initialized two-layer ReLU network, effectively isolating the intrinsic limitations of neuron pruning. We show that achieving an $\varepsilon$-approximation requires a starting network size of $\Omega(1/\varepsilon)$ for neuron pruning, whereas weight pruning succeeds with only $O(\log(1/\varepsilon))$ hidden units, revealing an exponential separation between the two approaches.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Quantum thermodynamics of the Caldeira-Leggett model with non-equilibrium Gaussian reservoirs

arXiv:2405.00215v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a non-equilibrium version of the Caldeira-Leggett model in which a quantum particle is strongly coupled to a set of engineered reservoirs. The reservoirs are composed by collections of squeezed and displaced thermal modes, in contrast to the standard case in which the modes are assumed to be at equilibrium. The model proves to be very versatile. Strongly displaced/squeezed reservoirs can be used to generate an effective time dependence in the system Hamiltonian and can be identified as sources of pure work. In the case of squeezing, the time dependence is stochastic and breaks the fluctuation-dissipation relation, this can be reconciled with the second law of thermodynamics by correctly accounting for the energy used to generate the initial non-equilibrium conditions. To go beyond the average description and compute the full heat statistics, we treat squeezing and displacement as generalized Hamiltonians on a modified Keldysh contour. As an application of this technique, we show the quantum-classical correspondence between the heat statistics in the non-equilibrium Caldeira-Leggett model and the statistics of a classical Langevin particle under the action of squeezed and displaced colored noises. Finally, we discuss thermodynamic symmetries of the heat generating function, proving a fluctuation theorem for the energy balance and showing that the conservation of energy at the trajectory level emerges in the classical limit.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

"I Didn't Make the Micro Decisions": Measuring, Inducing, and Exposing Goal-Level AI Contributions in Collaboration

As large language models (LLMs) increasingly shape how users form, refine, and extend their goals, attributing contributions in human-AI collaboration becomes critical for users calibrating their own reliance and for evaluators assessing AI-assisted work. Yet existing methods focus on final artifacts, missing the process through which goals themselves are jointly shaped. We introduce a goal-level attribution framework, CoTrace, that decomposes explicit goals into verifiable requirements and traces both direct contributions and indirect influences across dialogue turns. Applying CoTrace to 638 real-world collaboration logs, we find that while models account for only 11-26% of goal-shaping contribution, they contribute substantially more on introducing lower-level concrete requirements, and make various kinds of indirect contributions. Through controlled simulations, we show that interaction design choices significantly affect model goal-shaping behavior. In a user study, exposing participants to goal-level analyses shifts their perceived contributions by nearly 2 points on a 5-point scale, revealing systematic miscalibration in how users understand their own AI-assisted work.

24.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

Virtual phenotypic screening discovers novel scaffolds inhibiting the PI3K/mTOR pathway

Phenotypic drug discovery has yielded many first-in-class small-molecule drugs by discovering modulators of disease phenotypes in physiologically relevant cellular systems. However, high-content phenotypic assays lack the ultra-high-throughput scalability of target-based screens. Recent advances in virtual screening present an opportunity to address this bottleneck, but have been limited to simple phenotypes like viability, restricted to small repurposing libraries, or lack in-depth biological validation. Here, we present PhenoCompass, a multimodal co-embedding model that aligns compound structures and high-content phenotypic imaging to enable virtual phenotypic screening over billion-compound libraries. Following training on the Joint Undertaking in Morphology dataset with more than 100,000 Cell Painting compound profiles, retrospective validation with historical biochemical high-throughput screening data demonstrates that PhenoCompass ranks compounds according to their biochemical target engagement. Leveraging PhenoCompass, we performed a prospective screen of 3.8 billion Enamine REAL compounds for inhibitors of PI3K/mTOR pathway, a critical signaling cascade whose aberrant activation is a common tumor driver. This search identified 11 novel compounds with pathway-consistent Cell Painting readout and diverse scaffolds, a 54-fold enrichment over the training set. Orthogonal validation experiments using a FOXO3A reporter assay and direct kinase inhibition confirmed seven structurally novel inhibitors with distinct mechanisms of action. These results highlight the convergence of diverse molecular target profiles onto a shared morphological pathway signature and establish PhenoCompass as a robust framework for high-content phenotypic virtual screening.

25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Convergence of a Critical Multitype Bellman–Harris Process with One Infinite-Mean Lifetime

arXiv:2606.11511v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a critical multitype Bellman–Harris branching particle system in $\mathbb R^N$ with a finite type space $\mathbb K=\{1,\dots,K\}$. Particles of type $i$ move according to a symmetric $\alpha_i$-stable process and reproduce according to a critical offspring law whose mean matrix is irreducible and stochastic. The lifetime distribution of type $1$ is assumed to have infinite mean with regularly varying tail $$ 1-F_1(t)\sim c_1t^{-\gamma},\, 0 \frac{\gamma}{\beta}, $$ and a local increment condition on the heavy lifetime distribution, we prove convergence of the system to a Poisson random measure concentrated on the infinite-mean type.