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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

RNN(p) for Power Consumption Forecasting

arXiv:2209.01378v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: An elementary Recurrent Neural Network that operates on p time lags, called an RNN(p), is the natural generalisation of a linear autoregressive model ARX(p). It is a powerful forecasting tool for variables displaying inherent seasonal patterns across multiple time scales, as is often observed in energy, economic, and financial time series. The architecture of RNN(p) models, characterised by structured feedbacks across time lags, enables the design of efficient training strategies. We conduct a comparative study of learning algorithms for these models, providing a rigorous analysis of their computational complexity and training performance. We present two applications of RNN(p) models in power consumption forecasting, a key domain within the energy sector where accurate forecasts inform both operational and financial decisions. Experimental results show that RNN(p) models achieve excellent forecasting accuracy while maintaining a high degree of interpretability. These features make them well-suited for decision-making in energy markets and other fintech applications where reliable predictions play a significant economic role.

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

E2Vec: Feature Embedding with Temporal Information for Analyzing Student Actions in E-Book Systems

Digital textbook (e-book) systems record student interactions with textbooks as a sequence of events called EventStream data. In the past, researchers extracted meaningful features from EventStream, and utilized them as inputs for downstream tasks such as grade prediction and modeling of student behavior. Previous research evaluated models that mainly used statistical-based features derived from EventStream logs, such as the number of operation types or access frequencies. While these features are useful for providing certain insights, they lack temporal information that captures fine-grained differences in learning behaviors among different students. This study proposes E2Vec, a novel feature representation method based on word embeddings. The proposed method regards operation logs and their time intervals for each student as a string sequence of characters and generates a student vector of learning activity features that incorporates time information. We applied fastText to generate an embedding vector for each of 305 students in a dataset from two years of computer science courses. Then, we investigated the effectiveness of E2Vec in an at-risk detection task, demonstrating potential for generalizability and performance.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Auditing Reward Hackability in Code RL Training Environments

arXiv:2606.16062v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We measure the rate at which code RL environments accept incorrect solutions as correct. On a 49-task sample of SWE-bench Verified, 28.5% of tasks have test suites weak enough that a Docker-verified incorrect patch passes them. On 20 R2E-Gym tasks across 6 repositories, the same pipeline at single-shot exploit generation yields 25.0%. A random-effects meta-analysis over 134 frontier model submissions to SWE-bench Verified finds, within the same human-rated difficulty stratum, model Pass@1 is +14.14 percentage points higher on flagged-hackable tasks than on robust ones (95% CI [+11.80, +16.48]; one-sided p < 10^-6; I^2 = 0%; 123 of 134 models positive). We then describe a procedure for hardening the broken tasks. An inline LLM judge with a Docker gold-sanity gate runs each generated test against the gold solution before the judge is consulted. On the 11 broken tasks in the audit, the gate flags 65 of 105 decisive LLM-generated tests as failing on the gold patch itself, a 61.9% per-augmentation defect rate the LLM judge alone misses. With diversity-biased retry, the loop converges 9 of 11 tasks to a gated upgrade.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Weisfeiler Lehman Test on Combinatorial Complexes: Generalized Expressive Power of Topological Neural Networks

arXiv:2605.00725v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Topological neural networks have emerged as effective tools for modeling higher-order relational structures beyond pairwise graphs, including hypergraphs, simplicial complexes, and cell complexes. However, existing Weisfeiler-Leman type expressivity analyses are typically developed on different structural domains and rely on domain-specific neighborhood systems, making their expressive powers difficult to compare within a common formalism. In this paper, we introduce the Combinatorial Complex Weisfeiler-Leman (CCWL) framework, a unified expressive power refinement defined on combinatorial complexes. By exploiting the ability of combinatorial complexes to represent both set-type relations and part-whole hierarchies, CCWL performs topological color refinement through four structural neighborhoods: boundary, co-boundary, lower adjacency, and upper adjacency. We show that, under specified lifting maps, CCWL can simulate several domain-specific WL-type refinements, thereby providing a common theoretical baseline for analyzing topological message passing. We further study the neighborhood sufficiency problem and prove that, under explicit coverage conditions, a reduced refinement using only lower- and upper-adjacent bridge information preserves the distinguishing power of the full four-neighborhood CCWL refinement. Guided by this theoretical result, we instantiate the reduced refinement as the Combinatorial Complex Isomorphism Network (CCIN). Experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that CCIN achieves competitive performance against representative graph and topological neural network baselines. Ablation studies and resource-efficiency analyses further support the effectiveness of the proposed lower/upper-neighborhood design.

05.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

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

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

06.
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.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Giving AI a Headache: Acoustic Adversarial Attacks to Computer Vision Applications

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly used to automate a variety of real-world computer vision (CV) applications, such as autonomous vehicle control, facial recognition, and security cameras. Recent research has shown that acoustic vibration can induce real physical motion in cameras, interfering with their internal stabilization mechanisms. Because the motion falls outside the conditions the stabilization system was designed to handle, the system introduces artifacts into the frame, causing AI-based CV models to misclassify, miss targets, or hallucinate objects. Previous work used ultrasonic frequencies (>20 kHz) to perform short-range attacks, which limits them to short distances due to the attenuation exhibited by high frequencies. In this work, we investigate acoustic attacks using lower frequencies in the audible range (

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Improving Scientific Document Retrieval with Academic Concept Index

arXiv:2601.00567v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Adapting general-domain retrievers to scientific domains is challenging due to the scarcity of large-scale domain-specific relevance annotations and the substantial mismatch in vocabulary and information needs. Recent approaches address these issues through two independent directions that leverage large language models (LLMs): (1) generating synthetic queries for fine-tuning, and (2) generating auxiliary contexts to support relevance matching. However, both directions overlook the diverse academic concepts embedded within scientific documents, often producing redundant or conceptually narrow queries and contexts. To address this limitation, we introduce an academic concept index, which extracts key concepts from papers and organizes them guided by an academic taxonomy. This structured index serves as a foundation for improving both directions. First, we enhance the synthetic query generation with concept coverage-based generation (CCQGen), which adaptively conditions LLMs on uncovered concepts to generate complementary queries with broader concept coverage. Second, we strengthen the context augmentation with concept-focused auxiliary contexts (CCExpand), which leverages a set of document snippets that serve as concise responses to the concept-aware CCQGen queries. Extensive experiments show that incorporating the academic concept index into both query generation and context augmentation leads to higher-quality queries, better conceptual alignment, and improved retrieval performance.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

GLLaucoMed: A Secure LLM-Powered Agentic Workflow for Automated Medication Extraction from Free-Text Glaucoma Clinical Notes

Purpose: To evaluate the efficacy of large language models (LLMs) in extracting medication-related information from glaucoma clinical notes in the electronic health record (EHR). Design: Cross-sectional. Subjects: 1,250 subjects in the Bascom Palmer Ophthalmic Repository. Methods: Extracted clinical notes from glaucoma-related encounters between 2014 and 2024 were labeled by two glaucoma specialists with a third serving as an adjudicator. Graders were asked to label current topical medications (CTM), proposed changes to topical medications ({Delta}TM), current oral medications (COM), and proposed changes to oral medications ({Delta}OM) in a structured fashion. The dataset was split into development (10%), validation (10%), and test (80%) sets stratified by clinician. Development and validation sets were used to engineer and refine prompts, and the held-out test set was used for model assessment. Five LLMs (Claude Opus 4.6, DeepSeek-V3.2, GPT 5.2, Grok 4.1, and Qwen3.6-35B-A3B) were accessed via Microsoft Azure AI Foundry within a HIPAA-compliant environment. Inter-grader agreement was assessed with Gwet AC1. LLM performance was initially assessed in a binary fashion with F1 scores, and the degree of text match among positive cases was evaluated using exact match accuracy and Jaccard Index (JI). Main Outcome Measures: F1 score, exact match accuracy, JI. Results: Gwet AC1 for intergrader agreement was 0.799, 0.888, 0.985, and 0.988 for CTM, {Delta}TM, COM, and {Delta}OM, respectively. F1 scores for CTM were 0.985, 0.971, 0.978, 0.968, and 0.970 for Claude, Deepseek, GPT, Grok, and Qwen, respectively; for {Delta}TM: 0.905, 0.826, 0.897, 0.842, 0.855, respectively; for COM: 0.923, 0.887, 0.899, 0.906, 0.894, respectively; for {Delta}OM: 0.958, 0.815, 0.937, 0.835, 0.940, respectively. Among positive cases, range of exact match accuracies for CTM (N=1354) was 0.730- 0.882 and range of JIs was 0.809-0.918. For {Delta}TM (N=404), exact match accuracy range was 0.619-0.780 and JI range was 0.668-0.827. For COM (N=47), exact match accuracy range was 0.766-0.872 and JI range was 0.765-0.870. For {Delta}OM (N=25), exact match accuracy range was 0.583-0.920 and JI range was 0.583-0.922. Conclusions: The GLLaucoMed pipeline demonstrated high performance in extracting and standardizing medication data from unstructured clinical notes, including both current medications and proposed changes. Claude and GPT exhibited the strongest performance.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Confidence is Not Reliability: Rethinking MC Dropout in Brain Tumour Segmentation

Glioma segmentation in multiparametric MRI is a critical component of treatment planning. A segmentation model that fails silently on treatment-critical sub-regions represents a patient safety risk that overlap-based metrics such as Dice scores cannot expose. We ask whether voxel-level uncertainty estimation via Monte Carlo (MC) Dropout can reliably identify segmentation errors in clinically critical sub-regions, and whether calibration failure modes are detectable from standard reporting metrics alone. In an empirical two-model case study on 126 BraTS21 patients, we evaluate a high-performance pretrained SegResNet and a locally trained UNet with residual units (UNet-Res). MC dropout preserved segmentation accuracy ($|\Delta Dice|$ $

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

Closing the Auto-Research Loop: An AI Co-Scientist for Production Search Ranking

arXiv:2603.22376v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present an AI Co-Scientist framework that closes the research loop for the production search-ranking system of a large online travel platform – pairing LLM agents with direct cloud-compute access so that idea generation, code implementation, GPU experimentation, and result analysis iterate end-to-end with a human scientist in the loop. The framework uses a hybrid agent architecture: single-LLM agents handle routine work, while multi-LLM consensus (GPT-5.2, Gemini Pro 3, Claude Opus 4.5) is invoked for higher-stakes decisions. On the production ranking task, a human-designed transformer baseline (V2) yielded $+0.118\%$ over a pre-transformer baseline (V1); the AI Co-Scientist's automated loop on top of V2 contributed an additional $+0.083\%$, for a combined $+0.201\%$ offline gain delivered in roughly one extra week of wall-clock time (single-run numbers; statistical limits discussed in the paper). The most useful AI proposals – unified long-sequence layouts, slot-type embeddings, and multi-phase learning-rate schedules – are standard practice in NLP and Vision but were absent from our production stack, suggesting that LLM agents can serve as cross-disciplinary connectors for ranking teams. We also report deployment context, negative results, and lessons learned.

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

Towards Scalable Customization and Deployment of Multi-Agent Systems for Enterprise Applications

Large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems demonstrate strong performance on complex reasoning and task execution, enabling broad enterprise applications. However, production deployment remains challenging due to domain-specific customization requirements and high latency and inference costs in agentic workflows. We propose a unified framework for customization and efficient deployment of multi-agent systems in real-world settings. The first stage, Agentic Model Customization, combines continual pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, and preference optimization to adapt a compact model to specialized domains while retaining strong agentic capabilities. The second stage, Inference Optimization, integrates speculative decoding and FP8 quantization with targeted calibration to enable cost-efficient serving with minimal quality loss. Across enterprise workloads, our framework enables rapid domain adaptation and achieves a 4.48x speedup in throughput while maintaining performance and improving robustness on long-tail scenarios.

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

Frames2LoRA: Parametric Video Internalization for Vision-Language Models

Processing video in vision-language models is expensive: each frame occupies hundreds of tokens, and inference cost scales with every frame and every repeated query. We introduce Frames2LoRA, a method for parametric video internalization. A perceiver hypernetwork reads the intermediate representations produced layer-by-layer as a frozen VLM encodes a video, and generates a Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) adapter in a single forward pass. Unlike standard LoRA fine-tuning, which requires iterative gradient updates, Frames2LoRA predicts these weights directly from the video. Trained for SmolVLM2 500M and 2.2B on video summarization and captioning, Frames2LoRA enables the same frozen VLM to answer queries from the adapter alone, with zero visual tokens in its context at query time. Frames2LoRA is statistically non-inferior and equivalent to direct video-in-context inference across all five captioning benchmarks at both model scales, and across seven of eight video question answering benchmark-scale pairings. Although trained only on 12 frames at 384px, it remains stable up to 1,024 frames and 1024px, where direct video-in-context inference often degenerates. Across this sweep, it reduces answer-time visual-token load by up to 1,500x and query TTFT by 6-80x, while preserving video-faithful outputs. We also find that independently generated adapters for non-overlapping video segments can compose in rank space, suggesting a path toward chunked long-video internalization.

14.
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.

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

The Token Is a Group Element: On Lie-Algebra Attention over Matrix Lie Groups

arXiv:2606.20547v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We place the attention token on the group: a token is an element $g_i$ of a matrix Lie group $G$ – a bare transformation, with no feature payload and no external action $\rho(g)$ carrying it. To our knowledge this is the first attention construction whose tokens are bare matrix Lie group elements: their score is the closed-form algebra norm of the relative pose rather than a learned kernel, and it reaches the affine full-frame groups that every irrep- or surjective-exp-based method must exclude. We call it Lie-Algebra Attention. Once tokens are group elements, the rest follows with none of the usual representation-theoretic machinery. The relative geometry of a pair is canonical, $g_i^{-1} g_j$, so the pairwise invariant $w_{ij} = \log(g_i^{-1} g_j)$ is intrinsic rather than designed; equivariance under the diagonal $G$-action is tautological, and the cocycle condition holds automatically. The attention score is the negative squared algebra norm, $s_{ij} = -\|\log(g_i^{-1} g_j)\|_\lambda^2/\tau$: the canonical proximity kernel under a block-weighted Frobenius inner product, with no irreducible representations, spherical harmonics, Clebsch-Gordan products, or learned kernel. The construction applies to any matrix Lie group on a chosen logarithm chart containing the relative poses, including the non-compact non-abelian affine groups with scale and shear that no vector-token attention method reaches: neither the irrep tradition nor surjective-exp methods. Three sequence-completion experiments, on SE(2), SO(3), and Aff(2), bear this out: the closed-form score matches a learned MLP kernel on the same invariant and outperforms it on SE(2), using 50 to 80x fewer score parameters, while a vector-token baseline breaks invariance by five to twelve orders of magnitude.

16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

LAUKIN: A Multi-jurisdictional Common Law Contract Dataset

Multinational companies increasingly require cross-jurisdictional contract review, yet existing legal NLP datasets are largely restricted to a single jurisdiction. We introduce LAUKIN (Legal equivalence dataset of Australia, UK, and INdia), a dataset of clause pairs (AU-UK, UK-IN, IN-AU) labelled for boolean legal equivalence. We develop a novel multi-stage retrieval and reranking pipeline to construct the initial clause pair mapping, with a subset of clause pairs subsequently annotated by legal experts as Equivalent or Not Equivalent. The dataset comprises 14,727 clause pairs from 204 contracts across 8 agreement types, of which 3,000 are manually labelled: 900 train, 600 dev, and 1,500 test. We evaluate 12 models across 4 techniques, achieving a best macro-F1 of 65.11%, establishing LAUKIN as a challenging benchmark. Results reveal that, despite shared legal heritage, drafting conventions diverge significantly across jurisdictions, making cross-jurisdictional equivalence classification non-trivial. LAUKIN also includes 11,727 unlabelled training pairs to support future semi-supervised learning research in legal NLP.

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

Evaluating LLM Personalization via Semantic Constraint Verification

Current evaluation paradigms for Large Language Model (LLM) personalization rely heavily on brittle surface-matching metrics or computationally expensive LLM-as-a-judge protocols, both of which lack interpretability. To address these limitations, we introduce Natural Language Inference Constraint Verification (NLICV), a scalable, semantically invariant framework that maps sentence meanings to truth-condition sets to verify personalization constraints via a Natural Language Inference (NLI) model. Moving beyond binary scoring, NLICV categorizes LLM behaviors into four distinct modes: personalization, generalization, sycophancy, and failure. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NLICV aligns closely with human annotations while drastically reducing the latency and token costs associated with LLM judges (up to 2100 inference speedup). Finally, through an ablation-based procedure, NLICV pinpoints the exact sentences driving the constraint verification, yielding faithful, understandable evidence for its evaluations.

18.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-11

‘Footballers are not superheroes’: we must tackle the mental and physical pressures of elite sport

作者:

As the men’s football World Cup gets under way, how the game weighs on the health of athletes still isn’t talked about enough, says player-turned-medic Vincent Gouttebarge. As the men’s football World Cup gets under way, how the game weighs on the health of athletes still isn’t talked about enough, says player-turned-medic Vincent Gouttebarge.

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

When to Trust, How to Distill: Multi-Foundation Model Guidance for Lightweight, Robust Scientific Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.19363v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The deployment of Time-Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) in physical sciences is hindered by a critical trade-off: while these models encode rich, universal temporal dynamics, they suffer from severe distributional misalignment when applied zero-shot to specific scientific domains, and their computational cost prohibits deployment in edge-computing sensor networks. We address a fundamental challenge: How can we extract latent structural knowledge from misaligned foundation models (FM) to train lightweight, specialized forecasters? We propose Gated Uncertainty-Aware Routing for Distillation (Guard), a novel framework that reframes multiteacher distillation as an instance-wise decision process with two adaptive mechanisms: (1) a Contextual Router that dynamically selects the most relevant teacher based on local input statistics, exploiting complementarity across diverse foundation models; and (2) an Uncertainty-Gated Temperature mechanism that acts as a "circuit-breaker," automatically attenuating distillation strength when teacher confidence diverges from domain reality. We evaluate our proposed lightweight framework on four climate-critical domains: meteorology, ecosystem carbon flux, soil moisture, and energy grids. Our method significantly reduces RMSE relative to a fixed-weight multi-teacher distillation baseline, successfully distilling knowledge from pretrained FMs (teachers) even when they exhibit suboptimal zero-shot accuracy due to distribution shift between the original and target data domains. We demonstrate that these domain-misaligned teachers can still serve as critical correctives, outperforming the globally superior FMs on 28.5% of the hardest instances. Ultimately, this enables high-precision scientific forecasting suitable for resource-constrained edge deployment. Code is available at https://github.com/RupasreeDey/GUARD-KDD2026.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

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

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

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

The Morse Transform for Discrete Shape Analysis

arXiv:2503.04507v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The geometry of an object plays a vital role in modulating its interactions with the physical world. It nevertheless remains difficult to describe geometric information numerically for the purposes of statistical inference or classification tasks. Here, we introduce a new topological transform which leverages directional piecewise-linear Morse theory to quantify the geometry of an embedded object by cataloguing critical points across multiple height-functions. The output of this Morse transform records both the heights and the local topological type (peak, trough or saddle) of the critical points that characterise the underlying shape, retaining finer information than the Euler characteristic transform whilst naturally prioritising a shape's outermost regions. Crucially, this output can be further compressed into a rich but compact feature vector. We benchmark the Morse feature vector as a descriptor for ligand-based virtual screening (LBVS), which intrinsically depends on the shape of molecules. Under a common gradient-boosted tree classification pipeline, Morse descriptors achieve the highest mean AUROC when compared to other topological transform descriptors and to standard shape-based LBVS descriptors.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Interpreting Neural Combinatorial Optimization via Evolving Programmatic Bottlenecks

arXiv:2606.19741v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) achieves strong performance, yet its black-box nature remains a key roadblock to deployment and scientific diagnosis. Standard interpretability tools, such as Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs), are ill-equipped for NCO, whose decisions are dynamic, state-dependent, and lack proper concept vocabulary definition. To close this gap, we introduce Evolving Programmatic Bottlenecks (EPB), to our knowledge, the first framework for interpreting NCO policies by distilling black-box NCO models into human-readable program portfolios. EPB employs an LLM to autonomously evolve a bank of programs, where each program's per-step action distribution serves as the bottleneck. EPB works through an iterative framework: Block I fixes program bank capacity and introduces a hybrid textual-numerical gradient descent scheme that couples numerical gradients for student router updates and textual gradients for LLM-based program revision; Block II dynamically adapts bank capacity via fault-targeted expansion and redundancy pruning. Extensive experiments demonstrate EPB's effectiveness and broad applicability, where the distilled program portfolios largely match original performance. EPB also reveals that NCO behavior shifts across optimization stages and can be approximated as a composition of classic heuristic variants. Our work advances interpretable NCO and establishes EPB as a promising tool for interpreting sequential decision-making models.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Evaluating Interactive 2D Visualization as a Sample Selection Strategy for Biomedical Time-Series Data Annotation

arXiv:2603.26592v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reliable machine-learning models in biomedical settings depend on accurate labels, yet annotating biomedical time-series data remains challenging. Algorithmic sample selection may support annotation, but evidence from studies involving real human annotators is scarce. Consequently, we compare three sample selection methods for annotation: random sampling (RND), farthest-first traversal (FAFT), and a graphical user interface-based method enabling exploration of complementary 2D visualizations (2DVs) of high-dimensional data. We evaluated the methods across four classification tasks in infant motility assessment (IMA) and speech emotion recognition (SER). Twelve annotators, categorized as experts or non-experts, performed data annotation under a limited annotation budget, and post-annotation experiments were conducted to evaluate the sampling methods. Across all classification tasks, 2DV performed best when aggregating labels across annotators. In IMA, 2DV most effectively captured rare classes, but also exhibited greater annotator-to-annotator label distribution variability resulting from the limited annotation budget, decreasing classification performance when models were trained on individual annotators' labels; in these cases, FAFT excelled. For SER, 2DV outperformed the other methods among expert annotators and matched their performance for non-experts in the individual-annotator setting. A failure risk analysis revealed that RND was the safest choice when annotator count or annotator expertise was uncertain, whereas 2DV had the highest risk due to its greater label distribution variability. Furthermore, post-experiment interviews indicated that 2DV made the annotation task more interesting and enjoyable. Overall, 2DV-based sampling appears promising for biomedical time-series data annotation, particularly when the annotation budget is not highly constrained.

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

When RAG Hurts: Diagnosing and Mitigating Attention Distraction in Retrieval-Augmented LVLMs

While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is one of the dominant paradigms for enhancing Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) on knowledge-based VQA tasks, recent work attributes RAG failures to insufficient attention towards the retrieved context, proposing to reduce the attention allocated to image tokens. In this work, we identify a distinct failure mode that previous study overlooked: Attention Distraction (AD). When the retrieved context is sufficient (highly relevant or including the correct answer), the retrieved text suppresses the visual attention globally, and the attention on image tokens shifts away from question-relevant regions. This leads to failures on questions the model could originally answer correctly without the retrieved text. To mitigate this issue, we propose MAD-RAG, a training-free intervention that decouples visual grounding from context integration through a dual-question formulation, combined with attention mixing to preserve image-conditioned evidence. Extensive experiments on OK-VQA, E-VQA, and InfoSeek demonstrate that MAD-RAG consistently outperforms existing baselines across different model families, yielding absolute gains of up to 4.76%, 9.20%, and 6.18% over the vanilla RAG baseline. Notably, MAD-RAG rectifies up to 74.68% of failure cases with negligible computational overhead.

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

BrainDINO: A Brain MRI Foundation Model for Generalizable Clinical Representation Learning

Brain MRI underpins a wide range of neuroscientific and clinical applications, yet most learning-based methods remain task-specific and require substantial labeled data. Here we show that a single self-supervised representation can generalize across heterogeneous brain MRI endpoints. We trained BrainDINO, a self-distilled foundation model, on approximately 6.6 million unlabeled axial slices from 20 datasets encompassing broad variation in population, disease, and acquisition setting. Using a frozen encoder with lightweight task heads, BrainDINO supported transfer across tumor segmentation, neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental conditions classification, brain age estimation, post-stroke temporal prediction, molecular status prediction, MRI sequence classification, and survival modeling. Across tasks and supervision regimes, BrainDINO consistently equaled or exceeded natural-image and MRI-specific self-supervised baselines, with particularly strong advantages under label scarcity. Representation analyses further showed anatomically organized and pathology-sensitive feature structure in the absence of task-specific supervision. Our findings indicate that large-scale slice-wise self-supervised learning can yield a unified brain MRI representation that supports diverse neuroimaging tasks without volumetric pretraining or full-network fine-tuning, establishing a scalable foundation for robust and data-efficient brain imaging analysis. Code is available at https://github.com/mclwu22/BrainDINO