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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Demonstration of Exponential Quantum Speedup with Constant-Depth Compiled Circuits for Simon's Problem

arXiv:2604.27457v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We demonstrate exponential algorithmic quantum speedup for a restricted-Hamming-weight version of Simon's problem, in which the hidden string $b$ is promised to satisfy $HW(b)\le w$ for a Hamming-weight cutoff $w$, on present-day superconducting quantum processors. We introduce a hardware-aware compilation strategy that reduces the quantum part of each Simon query circuit to constant depth. The resulting compiled circuits have $O(1)$ depth, require only linear nearest-neighbor connectivity, map directly onto common device layouts, and avoid additional routing and SWAP overhead. Implemented on IBM's $156$-qubit Boston and $120$-qubit Miami processors, these circuits achieve sufficient fidelity to exhibit algorithmic quantum speedup without error suppression. Using the number-of-queries-to-solution (NTS) metric, we observe exponential speedup over the classical lower-bound benchmark for all restricted-Hamming-weight cutoffs $w\ge 4$ on Boston and across low-to-intermediate Hamming-weight cutoffs on Miami; at higher Hamming-weight cutoffs on Miami, we still observe polynomial speedup. The same construction also enables unrestricted instances of Simon's problem, corresponding to $w=n$ for problem size $n$, over the finite problem-size ranges for which our NTS computation is feasible; in this regime, the observed scaling advantage is not limited to the restricted-Hamming-weight setting. These results show that careful hardware-aware compilation can make quantum speedup experimentally accessible for a canonical hidden-subgroup problem in the NISQ regime.

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

A T-API-Compliant ReAct Agentic Loop for Optical Networks: Generic vs. Domain-Specific Tool Abstractions

arXiv:2606.18000v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optical networks need intent-driven, closed-loop agentic management, a key enabler for higher autonomy levels. We present the first T-API-compliant reasoning and act (ReAct) loop. We show that domain-specific composite tools achieve 90% oracle-validated correctness with threefold token savings compared to generic tools.

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

From Persistence to Survival: Hypothesis Testing, Effect Sizes and Vectorisation for Topological Features

arXiv:2606.11911v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Persistence diagrams are common representations in topological data analysis, but they do not naturally live in a vector space, and the statistical tools developed for comparing them have largely evolved separately from those used for downstream prediction. We introduce STRAND (Survival Topological Representation ANalysis of Diagrams), which treats (collections of) PDs as survival data: each topological feature with persistence value $p = d - b$ is a fully observed time-to-event, and the persistence survival function $S(t) = \mathbb{P}(p > t)$ is the central object for comparing diagrams. From this single representation we derive (i) a non-parametric two-sample test with calibrated Type I error and high power from a small number of diagrams; (ii) interpretable effect sizes; and (iii) a 1-Wasserstein-stable feature vector for downstream machine learning. We validate calibration and power on synthetic manifolds with controlled topology, demonstrate competitive vectorisation across 14 graph and 3D point cloud benchmarks, and apply the method to study functional brain connectivity in fMRI/neuroscience data. To our knowledge, STRAND is the first method to provide hypothesis testing and vectorisation for persistence diagrams from a single coherent and interpretable representation.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Non-asymptotic Tail Bounds for the Kostlan–Shub–Smale Field: Tensor PCA and Spherical $k$-Spin Complexity

arXiv:2606.17665v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper builds a hierarchy of explicit, non-asymptotic tail bounds for the supremum of the Kostlan–Shub–Smale (KSS) random field on the sphere, and applies it to two problems: Spiked Tensor PCA and the landscape of the spherical $k$-spin model. For Tensor PCA, we study the non-asymptotic statistical limits of estimating a rank-$R$ symmetric signal tensor of order~$k\ge 3$ and dimension~$d\ge 3$ from a single Gaussian observation at signal-to-noise ratio~$\lambda$, through the profile maximum likelihood estimator, the MLE restricted to normalized rank-$R$ tensors of coherence at least~$\kappa$. Our analysis uses a single reduction: a deterministic geometric inequality (the Tube Method) and a rank-reduction step bound the estimation error by the supremum of the canonical KSS field, which the Kac–Rice formula turns into a Gaussian integral against the expected absolute characteristic polynomial of a shifted Gaussian Orthogonal Ensemble, controlled in turn by the four explicit tail bounds of our hierarchy (three from a Mehta–Fyodorov representation, one from a Ben Arous–Dembo–Guionnet large deviation). The same reduction yields two results, each with explicit constants. For estimation, a finite-$(k,d)$ error bound recovers the asymptotically optimal rate~$\sqrt{d\log k}$ of Perry, Wein and Bandeira, with explicit dependence on the rank~$R$ and the coherence~$\kappa$. For the landscape, a two-sided non-asymptotic bracketing of the annealed complexity of the spherical $k$-spin Hamiltonian recovers the Auffinger–Ben Arous–\v{C}ern\'y complexity function in the high-dimensional limit.

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

SSNAPS: Audio-Visual Separation of Speech and Background Noise with Diffusion Inverse Sampling

arXiv:2602.01394v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper addresses the challenge of audio-visual single-microphone speech separation and enhancement in the presence of real-world environmental noise. Our approach is based on generative inverse sampling, where we model clean speech and ambient noise with dedicated diffusion priors and jointly leverage them to recover all underlying sources. To achieve this, reformulate a recent inverse sampler to match our setting. We evaluate on mixtures of 1, 2, and 3 speakers with noise and show that, despite being entirely unsupervised, our method consistently outperforms leading supervised baselines in WER across all conditions. We further extend our framework to handle off-screen speaker separation. Moreover, the high fidelity of the separated noise component makes it suitable for downstream detection of the acoustic scene. Code and pretrained models will become available upon acceptance. Demo page: https://ssnaps2026.github.io/ssnaps2026/

06.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-16

Mathematicians are developing rules for AI use — other fields should follow

Authors: Unknown Author

The mathematics community is right to call for transparency, integrity and fairness to be protected when AI tools are used. Researchers in other disciplines could learn from this approach. The mathematics community is right to call for transparency, integrity and fairness to be protected when AI tools are used. Researchers in other disciplines could learn from this approach.

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

Zero-Inflated Gaussian Distributions Enable Parameter-Space Sparsity in Estimation-of-Distribution Algorithms

arXiv:2606.19369v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Estimation-of-distribution algorithms (EDAs) are a powerful class of evolutionary methods for black-box optimization, especially when little is known about the structure of the objective. Whereas classical evolutionary algorithms rely on hand-designed mutation and crossover operators, hard to devise for unknown problem structures, and a source of bias, EDAs sidestep operator design entirely: they fit a probability distribution to the best individuals and sample the next generation from it. EDAs are well established on continuous parameter spaces, but they have not previously been generalized to sparse ones, in which most coefficients of a good solution are exactly zero. Existing sparse black-box optimizers therefore reintroduce exactly what EDAs were designed to avoid: hand-crafted sparsity operators, bi-level schemes alternating between support set and active values, zeroing thresholds, and other baked-in assumptions. We close this gap by proposing multivariate zero-inflated Gaussian (ZIG) distributions as EDA sampling laws. A latent Gaussian model with separate indicator and value dimensions represents sparsity patterns, correlations among active parameters, and the interactions between the two, so sparsity patterns and active values are optimized jointly, hierarchy-free. We show that the latent parameters of this model are identifiable from observed samples, unlike in the missing-data settings where related constructions originate, and introduce practical amortized inversion-based estimators for them. The estimators accurately recover latent correlation structures, and on the Lunar Lander benchmark the resulting ZIG-EDA converges faster and reaches higher final returns than a dense Gaussian EDA, a hand-crafted sparse evolutionary algorithm, and an ad-hoc sparse EDA, while finding controllers with only a small fraction of parameters active.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Misinformation Propagation in Benign Multi-Agent Systems

Multi-agent systems, in which multiple large language model agents solve problems through turn-based interaction, are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings such as medical diagnosis, legal analysis, and forensic decision-making. Their reliability can be at risk when single agents reason from incorrect or misleading context, e.g., from tool calls, since errors may propagate through agent interactions. This work studies this risk by injecting intent-based misinformation into benign single-agent and multi-agent systems across reasoning, knowledge, and alignment tasks. We find that misinformation can degrade single-agent performance and persists across multi-agent debate, with agents often retaining answers introduced by misinformed peers. Nevertheless, multi-agent debate reduces the resulting performance degradation compared to single-agent prompting, especially when most agents are not exposed to misinformation. Robustness depends on group composition and decision protocol. Consensus can be more stable than voting under peer pressure, while majorities can often steer misinformed agents back toward correct answers. Our results show that misinformation robustness in multi-agent systems depends on the underlying model and also on how agents exchange information and aggregate decisions.

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

User as Code: Executable Memory for Personalized Agents

Authors:

arXiv:2606.16707v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A personalized AI agent needs a user memory: a persistent model of who the user is, built across many conversations and consulted on each new one. Today this memory is almost always stored as unstructured text, a knowledge graph, or a flat store of facts, and consulted by retrieval – fetching the entries most similar to the current request. Such "bag-of-facts" memory recalls individual facts well, but because storing a fact and acting on it are separate steps, it struggles to resolve contradictions, aggregate over many records, or enforce rules. We argue that user memory should instead be executable. We introduce User as Code (UaC), a paradigm in which an agent's model of a user is a living software project: typed Python objects hold the user's state and ordinary Python functions encode the rules that govern it, so representing and reasoning about the user happen in one medium an interpreter can run. The enabling mechanism is a two-phase pipeline: an append-only log that never discards a fact, periodically checkpointed into typed code. This changes what memory can do. On standard long-term conversation benchmarks, UaC matches both a full-context upper bound and the strongest prior memory systems on recall (78.8% on LOCOMO). Its advantage emerges where representation matters most. On aggregate questions over a user's history – "how many international trips did I take last year?" – retrieval-based memory collapses (6-43%) while UaC stays near-perfect (99%), because the answer is a one-line computation over typed state rather than a search over text. And because its rules execute deterministically whenever the state changes, UaC can surface unsolicited, safety-critical alerts – such as a newly prescribed drug that conflicts with an allergy recorded months earlier – a capability query-driven memory cannot provide.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Multimodal Graph Negative Learning

arXiv:2606.12863v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal attributed graphs (MAGs) integrate graph topology with heterogeneous modality attributes, such as text and images, thereby enabling richer modeling of complex relational systems. However, such expressiveness also makes learning on MAGs depend on multiple semantic sources, including structural topology, textual and visual attributes, each of which can be regarded as a branch for node representation. Node-level branch semantic imbalance arises when these branches differ across nodes in semantic informativeness and reliability: a branch that provides discriminative semantics for one node may mislead another due to bias in modality quality or structural context. Existing methods often mitigate such heterogeneity through cross-branch agreement or alignment, implicitly treating the dominant prediction as reliable supervision. When the dominant branch is biased, forced imitation may propagate its bias to other branches and suppress original semantics that are useful for classification. We propose GraphMNL, a graph-aware multimodal negative learning framework that addresses this issue by using Negative Learning as cross-branch guidance. Instead of forcing inferior branches to imitate a teacher prediction, the model teaches them which classes a node is unlikely to belong to. GraphMNL builds a branch library, identifies dominant and inferior branches via graph-aware reliability arbitration, gates unstable transfer, and applies target-preserving negative learning over non-target classes. This design decouples target supervision from branch guidance so that supervised losses learn the correct class, while Negative Learning suppresses unlikely alternatives when branch agreement is unreliable. Through the comprehensive experimental evaluation, GraphMNL achieves the best performance on Grocery datasets with 72.47% accuracy and 76.60 F1 score on Reddit M datasets.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Goal-Autopilot: A Verifiable Anti-Fabrication Firewall for Unattended Long-Horizon Agents

Authors:

Long-horizon LLM agents are not trusted to run unattended: with no human watching, they confidently report success they never verified. We treat honesty – bounding what an agent may claim at termination – as a first-class metric for unattended autonomy, distinct from capability. We present Autopilot, an execution model that makes silent fabricated success structurally impossible rather than merely rarer. Autopilot externalizes all working state into a durable, gated finite-state machine that a scheduler advances one stateless tick at a time; a hard floor forbids any terminal "done" claim whose falsifiable gate did not actually execute and pass. We prove a No-False-Success theorem – under gate soundness, floor enforcement, and plan coverage, termination implies the goal holds – whose only trust points are empirically measurable, and show the worst case degrades to an honest stall, never a fabricated success. Because each tick rehydrates only the state machine, per-step context cost is constant in the horizon. Across a 3,150-cell paired corpus (70 tasks $\times$ 3 systems $\times$ 3 models $\times$ 5 seeds, including 50 SWE-bench Lite tasks across 11 OSS repos), Autopilot fabricates on 0.95% of cells [95% CI 0.38–1.62] while Reflexion and StateFlow baselines fabricate on 8.10% [6.48–9.81] and 25.05% [22.48–27.62] respectively. The headline contrast lives in the hard regime: on SWE-bench Lite, the firewall reduces fabrication from 33.7% (StateFlow) to 0.67%, a paired difference of $-33.07$ pp [95% CI $-36.53, -29.73$]. The mechanism is the gate, not the model: all ten Autopilot fabrications come from the strongest model, while two weaker mid-tier models never fabricate across 700 paired cells. The firewall trades coverage for honesty by design – an honest stall is recoverable; a confident wrong output shipped downstream is not.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Natural-Language Temporal Grounding in Hour-Long Videos is a Search Problem: A Benchmark and Empirical Decomposition

Temporal grounding–returning the interval $[t_s, t_e]$ for a natural-language query over a video–is the language interface to long-form video, yet has been studied on short videos; the dynamics of hour-scale natural-language grounding remain underexplored. We take the position that at hour-scale, the binding constraint is search, not recognition: Video-LLMs are bottlenecked not by localizing a nearby event, but–given a natural-language query–by searching for the relevant region of a long video. To test this, we release ExtremeWhenBench, the first open hour-scale grounding benchmark (2,273 queries over 194 videos, mean 75.7 min, max 9 hr) with an open-form query distribution. Every open Video-LLM collapses while a frame-level retrieval baseline outperforms them; a failure taxonomy attributes 85% of failures to search; and a retrieve-then-ground hybrid recovers 6.7x over the monolithic Video-LLM–mirroring retrieve-then-read in open-domain QA.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Creative Integration: A Decidable Criterion of Creativity

"Integrative" solutions are widely praised but rarely defined: we lack an operational way to tell a genuine integration – one that makes the world cheaper to describe – from a tidy re-description. Building on the lineage that treats creativity and intelligence as compression, we give such a criterion for creative integration (CI): the resolution of a real conflict between A and B is CI if and only if, under a fixed description language, the description length strictly shrinks (C = L_pre/L_post > 1), with the reduction located in the conflict itself. We make the judgment decidable through four binary, conjunctive gates, and we fix its extension through a taxonomy of pseudo-integration that names and rejects the look-alikes. We back the criterion with a curated, multi-domain corpus and – crucially – validate it not by human inter-rater agreement but by four falsifiable tests it could fail: an independent computational check, discrimination against hard negatives, out-of-sample prediction, and description-language robustness; all pass with margin. The contribution is not "creativity is compression" but its decidability, discrimination, and corpus: on this account, what makes a move genuinely creative – rather than merely novel – is that it compresses a conflict, with novelty and value as downstream symptoms; whether all creativity is so constituted we state as an explicit conjecture. We claim only the sign of C-1; we judge, not generate. The result is a citable primitive for a broader program.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Functional central limit theorems for non-local branching Markov processes

arXiv:2502.19382v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The aim of this paper is to study the fluctuations of a general class of supercritical branching Markov processes with non-local branching mechanisms. We establish functional central limit theorems and show that the limiting behaviour falls into three regimes, determined by the size of the spectral gap associated with the first-moment semigroup of the branching process. The main novelty is to develop a unified functional fluctuation theory for spatial branching Markov processes with non-local reproduction, allowing a general finite-dimensional spectral structure for the first-moment semigroup, including non-simple leading eigenvalues and nilpotent Jordan-type components. In doing so, we extend the classical small, critical and large fluctuation trichotomy beyond the finite-type and local spatial settings, and obtain limiting processes that capture the covariance structure induced by non-local offspring displacement.

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

Closing the Calibration Gap in Semantic Caching

Semantic caching cuts LLM inference costs by serving a cached response to semantically similar queries. Standard practice evaluates these systems using PR-AUC, a metric that only measures how well scores rank and ignores whether they are usable at a fixed threshold. We show this mismatch leads to systematically poor deployment choices, as models with the highest PR-AUC are often the worst in operation. We introduce Precision-Cache Hit Ratio (P-CHR) AUC, a cache-aware metric that measures precision across cache utilization levels, and Calibration Retention Rate (CRR), which captures how much offline ranking quality survives at deployment. We decompose the operational gap between offline and deployed quality into a recoverable calibration component and an irreducible structural component fixed by the dataset's positive rate. Our experiments show that the calibration gap is governed by the training objective rather than data scale, and post-hoc calibration only partially closes it. Ultimately, model selection for semantic caching is a calibration problem, not a ranking one, and measuring it is the first step to closing the gap.

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

Generalized Discrete Diffusion with Self-Correction

arXiv:2603.02230v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Self-correction is an effective technique for maintaining parallel sampling in discrete diffusion models with minimal performance degradation. Prior work has explored self-correction at inference time or during post-training; however, such approaches often suffer from limited generalization and may impair reasoning performance. GIDD pioneers pretraining-based self-correction via a multi-step BERT-style uniform-absorbing objective. However, GIDD relies on a continuous interpolation-based pipeline with opaque interactions between uniform transitions and absorbing masks, which complicates hyperparameter tuning and hinders practical performance. In this work, we propose a Self-Correcting Discrete Diffusion (SCDD) model to reformulate pretrained self-correction with explicit state transitions and learn directly in discrete time. Our framework also simplifies the training noise schedule, eliminates a redundant remasking step, and relies exclusively on uniform transitions to learn self-correction. Experiments at the GPT-2 scale demonstrate that our method enables more efficient parallel decoding while preserving generation quality.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

A More-Than-Human Approach to Designing for Mental Health: Remixing Prototypes for the Contexts of Complex Healthcare Infrastructures

Digital mental health tools (DMHTs) often fail to be successfully implemented in clinical settings. While user- and human-centred design frameworks are frequently proposed for developing effective tools, they are insufficient to address the sociotechnical complexity of healthcare environments. This paper addresses this limitation by detailing the application of a more-than-human design framework to incorporate wider contextual factors into design decisions. To demonstrate the application of this more-than-human design framework, we present a case study showcasing the design of one specific feature within a DMHT intended to support Health Improvement Practitioners (HIPs) in New Zealand's Integrated Primary Mental Health and Addictions (IPMHA) service. Our process blends usage-context storyboards with interface prototypes, using think-aloud interviews to test the contextual fit of our prototypes. The initial design concept failed due to contextual factors such as inconsistent wait times and the administrative burden on clients and clinic staff. This led to a pivot to a more context-appropriate, practitioner-focused, in-session concept for digital psychometric administration and automated scoring. This case study demonstrates that for DMHTs to be viable within complex healthcare environments, design must focus on more than the needs of a single user, incorporating multiple stakeholders and contextual variables across the wider service-delivery context.

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

Mojo: A Promising Tool for Scalable Financial AI Efficiency

Authors:

arXiv:2606.16059v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For thirty years, quantitative finance has paid a costly two-language tax: models researched in Python are rewritten in C++ for production, often introducing numerical discrepancies. GPU-accelerated deep learning exacerbates this problem, as nondeterministic floating-point reductions can produce drift in long backtests, challenging regulatory reproducibility and auditability expectations. This article surveys Mojo, Modular's 2026 Python-like systems language, as a structural response for capital markets engineering. While closing the Python-to-C++ performance gap, Mojo uniquely combines native interoperability with the low-level systems control required to construct bit-exact deterministic kernels. Its MLIR compilation infrastructure further allows a single codebase to target scalar, SIMD, multicore, and GPU execution, reducing the translation bottleneck between research and production. We benchmark four core financial AI workloads: Monte Carlo option pricing, LLM sentiment inference, multi-asset backtesting, and portfolio Value at Risk. On Apple Silicon, Mojo demonstrates 20x to 180x speedups over pure Python on directly measured kernels; larger-scale GPU workload results are projections calibrated from published benchmarks. Alongside transparent performance data, we introduce mojo-deterministic, an open-source library of reproducible reduction kernels, and provide a candid assessment of the problems Mojo does and does not yet solve.

20.
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.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

The Scaffold Effect: How Prompt Framing Drives Apparent Multimodal Gains in Clinical VLM Evaluation

arXiv:2603.28387v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Trustworthy clinical AI requires that performance gains reflect genuine evidence integration rather than surface-level artifacts. We evaluate 12 open-weight vision-language models (VLMs) on binary classification across two clinical neuroimaging cohorts, \textsc{FOR2107} (affective disorders) and \textsc{OASIS-3} (cognitive decline). Both datasets come with structural MRI data that carries no reliable individual-level diagnostic signal. Under these conditions, smaller VLMs exhibit gains of up to 58\% F1 upon introduction of neuroimaging context, with distilled models becoming competitive with counterparts an order of magnitude larger. A contrastive confidence analysis reveals that merely mentioning MRI availability in the task prompt accounts for 70-80\% of this shift, independent of whether imaging data is present, a domain-specific instance of modality collapse we term the scaffold effect. Expert evaluation reveals fabrication of neuroimaging-grounded justifications across all conditions, and preference alignment, while eliminating MRI-referencing behavior, collapses both conditions toward random baseline. Our findings demonstrate that surface evaluations are inadequate indicators of multimodal reasoning, with direct implications for the deployment of VLMs in clinical settings.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

PLATE: Plasticity-Tunable Efficient Adapters for Geometry-Aware Continual Learning

arXiv:2602.03846v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We develop a continual learning method for pretrained models that requires no access to old-task data, addressing a practical barrier in foundation model adaptation where pretraining distributions are often unavailable. Our key observation is that pretrained networks exhibit substantial geometric redundancy, and that this redundancy can be exploited in two complementary ways. First, redundant neurons provide a proxy for dominant pretraining-era feature directions, enabling the construction of approximately protected update subspaces directly from pretrained weights. Second, redundancy offers a natural bias for where to place plasticity: by restricting updates to a subset of redundant neurons and constraining the remaining degrees of freedom, we obtain update families with reduced functional drift on the old-data distribution and improved worst-case retention guarantees. These insights lead to \textsc{PLATE} (Plasticity-Tunable Efficient Adapters), a continual learning method requiring no past-task data that provides explicit control over the plasticity-retention trade-off. PLATE parameterizes each layer with a structured low-rank update $\Delta W = B A Q^\top$, where $B$ and $Q$ are computed once from pretrained weights and kept frozen, and only $A$ is trained on the new task. The code is available at https://github.com/SalesforceAIResearch/PLATE.

23.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-21

DeepCDS: Ab initio coding sequence prediction in prokaryotic short reads

Accurate coding sequence prediction in short prokaryotic metagenomic reads remains challenging due to sequence fragmentation, unknown sequence origins, and sequencing errors. Here we introduce DeepCDS, a deep learning-based ab initio coding sequence predictor trained on short prokaryotic sequences with and without simulated Illumina-like sequencing errors. DeepCDS integrates ESM-2 protein language model embeddings with nucleotide-level information to predict complete and fragmented coding sequence regions. Benchmarking on 215 phylogenetically diverse prokaryotic organisms demonstrates that DeepCDS consistently outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in coding sequence detection, start and stop codon localization, and robustness to different sequencing error profiles, while remaining operational at shorter sequence lengths than existing tools support. These findings demonstrate that protein language models capture distinct signals relevant for nucleotide-level coding sequence detection, especially at very short lengths. Ultimately, DeepCDS may help uncover the functional potential of the vast microbial diversity that remains genomically uncharacterized.

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

Coercivity and Local Convergence of Physical Learning in Linear Circuits

arXiv:2606.15443v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Physical learning methods train physical networks to perform computational tasks using only local update rules, exploiting the physics of the system to handle the global transfer of information. We provide the first local convergence analysis of three such methods – Equilibrium Propagation (EP), Coupled Learning (CL), and a new method we call Adjoint Coupled Learning (AL) – for linear circuits, in the limit of small-nudging for both discrete and continuous time. EP and AL perform gradient descent on a natural loss function, while CL follows modified dynamics with an additional cubic correction. Assuming the existence of a solution, we identify a coercivity condition, expressed as a rank condition on a matrix built from the network's incidence structure, under which the training loss decays exponentially and the parameters converge to the solution manifold. We show that coercivity can fail by exhibiting a kite circuit in which a symmetry causes the coercivity constant to degenerate on the solution manifold, but prove using Sard's theorem that such degeneracies are non-generic: coercivity holds at every point of the solution manifold for almost every choice of desired output.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

"We don't complain; it's just part of being a woman": frequency, knowledge, and sociocultural beliefs about dysmenorrhoea in a South African university cohort

Introduction Dysmenorrhoea is highly prevalent globally and interferes with engagement in education, work, social participation, and quality of life. Although evidence suggests that sociocultural beliefs influence how menstrual pain is understood and managed, relatively little research has explored dysmenorrhoea-related knowledge and beliefs within South Africa. This study aimed to (1) determine the frequency of dysmenorrhoea, (2) assess dysmenorrhoea-related knowledge and compare knowledge between menstruating and non-menstruating individuals, and (3) explore commonly held generational, cultural, and religious beliefs related to dysmenorrhoea in a South African university cohort. Methods We analysed data collected as part of a cross-sectional survey conducted among staff and students at a South African university. Participants completed demographic questions, items assessing dysmenorrhoea-related knowledge, and an adapted Working Ability, Location, Intensity, Days of Pain, Dysmenorrhoea (WaLIDD) questionnaire. Participants were also invited to provide free-text responses describing generational, cultural, and religious beliefs about dysmenorrhoea. Quantitative data were analysed descriptively and compared between menstruating and non-menstruating participants. Free-text responses were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Results A total of 863 participants completed the survey, including 578 current or past menstruators. The frequency (95%CI) of dysmenorrhoea was 75.4% (71.7-78.9). Most participants were classified as having moderate (53%) or severe (31%) dysmenorrhoea on the WaLIDD scale. Awareness of dysmenorrhoea was higher among participants who had menstruated than among those who had never menstruated (80.4% vs 55.3%, p