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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Breaking the Ice: Analyzing Cold Start Latency in vLLM

arXiv:2606.07362v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As scalable inference services become popular, the cold start latency of an inference engine becomes important. Today, vLLM has evolved into the de facto inference engine of choice for many inference workloads. Although popular, due to its complexity and rapid evolution, there has not been a systematic study of its startup latency. With major architectural innovations such as the V1 API and the introduction of torch.compile, this paper presents the first detailed performance characterization of vLLM startup latency. We break down the startup process into six foundational steps and demonstrate that it is predominantly CPU bound. Each step exhibits consistent and interpretable scaling trends with respect to model-level and system-level parameters, enabling fine-grained attribution of latency sources. Building on these insights, we develop a lightweight analytical model that accurately predicts vLLM startup latency for a given hardware configuration, providing actionable guidance for resource planning in large-scale inference environments. All benchmarking datasets, analysis tools, and prediction scripts are open sourced at https://github.com/upb-cn/vllm-startup-profiler.

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

Reliability without Validity: A Systematic, Large-Scale Evaluation of LLM-as-a-Judge Models Across Agreement, Consistency, and Bias

LLM-as-a-Judge has become the dominant evaluation paradigm for language models, but judge validation in practice relies on exact-match agreement, a metric that does not correct for chance and systematically overstates discriminative ability. We present the largest systematic evaluation of LLM-as-a-Judge to date: 21 judges from nine providers across MT-Bench, JudgeBench, and RewardBench, evaluated under three protocols (agreement, consistency, bias audit) over 118 runs and approximately 541,000 individual judgments. Four findings emerge, consistent across the full cohort, including the April 2026 frontier: kappa deflation between exact match and Cohen's kappa is universal (33–41 pp on MT-Bench), judge rankings shift by up to 14 positions across benchmarks, high test–retest reliability (>0.95) coexists with severe position bias (>0.10) in two production-deployed judges (instantiating a consistency–bias paradox), and verbosity bias is small (

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Decompose Sparsely Where You Should, Absorb Densely Where You Should No

arXiv:2606.14040v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are typically trained to reconstruct the entire residual stream through a sparse dictionary, implicitly assuming that all activation content is amenable to sparse, monosemantic decomposition. We question this assumption and hypothesize that activations contain a low-rank, dense component that is computationally important to the model yet inherently unsuitable for sparse representation, which serves as a major source of the persistent dense latents widely observed in trained SAEs. To test this, we add a small rank-$r$ linear bottleneck in parallel with standard SAEs (BatchTopK and Matryoshka), allowing dense structure to be absorbed before sparse reconstruction. On Gemma-2-2B layer 12, a rank-24 bottleneck reduces dense latent count by up to 84\% while improving sparse probing and targeted probe perturbation on both architectures at matched sparsity. The absorbed component is (i) structurally identifiable as the top principal components and outlier dimensions; (ii) causally necessary, with removing it raising next-token cross-entropy by 7.5$\times$, far exceeding the 2.8$\times$ from removing the geometrically near-identical top-24 PCA directions; and (iii) redundantly encoded by sparse dictionaries, with ablating 787 maximally aligned sparse features raising cross-entropy by only 2.9$\times$ and ablating 2,048 topic-aligned features leaving MMLU topic classification virtually unchanged, whereas removing the scaffold drops it from 98.7\% to chance. Together, our findings identify a compact, semantically informative and causally important component of residual stream activations (which we term a computational scaffold) that standard sparse dictionaries represent inefficiently, suggesting that the scope of sparsity-based interpretability methods warrants careful re-examination.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Relational Retrieval: Leveraging Known-Novel Interactions for Generalized Category Discovery

In this study, we tackle Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) via a Relational Retrieval perspective, explicitly coupling labeled and unlabeled data through bidirectional knowledge transfer. While existing methods treat these sources separately, missing valuable interaction opportunities, we propose Relational Pattern Consistency (RPC) that enables mutual enhancement. RPC employs One-vs-All classifiers for soft ID/OOD decomposition, then introduces two mechanisms: (i) for known-class preservation, we transfer semantic behavioral alignment; (ii) for category discovery, we leverage the insight that samples from the same category maintain invariant relationships with known-class prototypes, transforming unreliable pseudo-labeling into well-defined relational pattern matching. This bidirectional design allows labeled data to guide unlabeled learning while discovering novel categories through their collective relational signatures. Extensive experiments demonstrate RPC achieves state-of-the-art performance on both generic and fine-grained benchmarks.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

PatchWorld: Gradient-Free Optimization of Executable World Models

Text-agent environments are typically modeled as partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs), assuming that the simulator's latent state and transition dynamics are hidden from the agent. Yet little work has examined whether executable code can be induced to serve as a world model for prediction and planning under partial observability. We introduce PatchWorld, a gradient-free framework that turns offline trajectories into executable Python world models through counterexample-guided code repair. Instead of predicting the next observation with a black-box model, PatchWorld induces symbolic belief-state programs whose action updates can be inspected, replayed, and locally patched. Across seven AgentGym environments, PatchWorld-Simple achieves the highest code-based planning score among evaluated methods, reaching 76.4\% macro success in live one-step lookahead while invoking no LLM calls inside the world-model prediction module itself. We further find that a human-specified residual-memory bias improves surface observation fidelity but weakens decision utility. This exposes a tradeoff in executable world models, since improving observation fidelity can come at the expense of action-discriminative dynamics, and vice versa. Code is available at https://github.com/HKBU-KnowComp/PatchWorld.

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

From Brewing to Resolution: Tracing the Internal Lifecycle of Code Reasoning in LLMs

arXiv:2606.17648v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Standard accuracy metrics cannot explain why LLMs handle variable tracking but fail on semantically equivalent loops. We study an internal lifecycle of code reasoning in which models first brew the answer, making it linearly recoverable many layers before it becomes self-decodable, and then diverge into one of four resolution outcomes: Resolved, Overprocessed, Misresolved, or Unresolved. Understanding this lifecycle matters because similar task accuracies can mask fundamentally different failure modes that surface-level evaluation cannot detect. We introduce a dual diagnostic framework pairing layer-wise linear probing with Context-Stripped Decoding (CSD) and apply it to six code-reasoning task families across 16 models spanning Qwen, Llama, and DeepSeek architectures. All four outcomes carry substantial mass in every task family: overall Resolved is only 41.5%, with multiple tasks below 30%. Controlled sweeps over structure, depth, and operators expose task-specific failure bottlenecks: Function Call Resolved plunges from 61.1% to 2.5% as call depth increases from one to three. Across architectures and scales, the brewing scaffold remains stable, with normalized brewing duration 24-42% across all 16 models, while resolution success varies with capability. This indicates that the scaffold is a stable empirical regularity across the tested decoder-only Transformer families, whereas resolution success covaries with capability, scale, and training. Code: https://github.com/euyis1019/llm-brewing

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

LLM Parameters for Math Across Languages: Shared or Separate?

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit substantial cross-lingual variation in mathematical reasoning performance, but it remains unclear whether these differences reflect language-specific parameters or a shared mechanism that manifests differently by language. We present a cross-lingual mechanistic analysis of mathematical reasoning in LLMs, enabling us to localize and compare model parameters that support mathematical reasoning across languages. We find that the extracted math-associated parameters exhibit partial cross-lingual overlap, with the strongest overlap concentrated in intermediate model layers. We further observe that English consistently produces the largest set of math-relevant parameters, whereas lower-resource languages reveal smaller sets of relevant parameters. These results suggest that math-related behavior in multilingual LLMs is neither fully language-invariant nor fully language-specific, but instead exhibits partial cross-lingual parameter overlap with systematic language-dependent differences.

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

Can In-Context Learning Support Intrinsic Curiosity?

arXiv:2606.19476v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Effective machine learning depends not only on how we model data, but also on what data we choose to collect. While large sequence models have revolutionized data modeling, the problem of automated data selection, or "intrinsic curiosity", remains a significant challenge. Classic approaches incentivize exploration by rewarding an agent based on its "learning progress", which measures how much a newly acquired observation improves a world model's predictive ability. However, evaluating these rewards traditionally requires expensive inner loops of gradient descent updates within each trajectory, rendering them computationally impractical at scale. In this work, we investigate whether the emergent in-context learning (ICL) capabilities of sequence models can eliminate this bottleneck by serving as immediate, update-free world models. Specifically, we evaluate whether an exploration policy can be trained to maximize learning progress, using solely the prediction errors and counterfactual context manipulations of an in-context learner. We first prove that in general Markov decision processes, this is in fact impossible in an unbiased way: the resulting intrinsic rewards either suffer from nuisance terms that bias their estimation of true learning progress, or they cannot be implemented using an in-context learner's prediction errors. Conversely, we prove a positive result for a broad subclass of non-temporal settings, encompassing active learning and Bayesian Experimental Design: here, ICL-derived rewards successfully bound and asymptotically converge to the true learning progress. We corroborate our theory with controlled experiments across continuous and symbolic environments, demonstrating that our ICL-driven framework successfully trains curious data-collection policies that explore optimally.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Native Active Perception as Reasoning for Omni-Modal Understanding

Passive models for long video understanding typically rely on a "watch-it-all" paradigm, processing frames uniformly regardless of query difficulty, causing computational cost to grow with video duration. Although interactive frameworks have emerged, they often rely on global pre-scanning, and their context cost still scales with video length. We propose OmniAgent, the first native omni-modal agent that formulates video understanding as a POMDP-based iterative Observation-Thought-Action cycle. OmniAgent executes on-demand actions to selectively distill audio-visual cues into a persistent textual memory, effectively decoupling reasoning complexity from raw video duration. To operationalize this, we introduce (1) Agentic Supervised Fine-Tuning to bootstrap native active perception via best-of-N trajectory synthesis with dual-stage quality control, and (2) Agentic Reinforcement Learning with TAURA (Turn-aware Adaptive Uncertainty Rescaled Advantage), which leverages turn-level entropy to steer credit assignment toward pivotal discovery turns. Crucially, OmniAgent exhibits positive test-time scaling, where performance improves as the number of reasoning turns increases, validating the efficacy of active perception. Empirical results across ten benchmarks (e.g., VideoMME, LVBench) demonstrate that OmniAgent achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models. Notably, on LVBench, our 7B agent outperforms the 10$\times$ larger Qwen2.5-VL-72B (50.5% vs. 47.3%).

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Space-sampled Value Decay: Forgetting Mechanisms for Non-stationary Deep Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.11797v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Studies on rodents such as mice have shown the capabilities to adapt their behavior when dealing with changing parameters (``drift'') of the environment even if no information about change is provided (uncertainty) – a behavior that can be modeled by forgetting mechanisms. Non-stationary Reinforcement Learning (NSRL) deals with adapting state-of-the-art RL methods to deal with changing environments: these however usually require (partially) perfect information about the drift such as ``task IDs'' or ``context''. To mitigate the effects of drift, this work develops Space-sampled Value Decay as an explicit forgetting mechanism for value-based deep RL architectures as a simple yet effective approach. In particular we demonstrate and discuss positive effects but also limitations in achieved returns for modifications of Deep Q-networks (DQN) and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) when evaluated on non-stationary environments.

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

SEAGAN: domain-Specific and Edge-Aware Graph Attention Network for Dynamic Plant Processes

arXiv:2606.19623v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs) provide a flexible framework for learning from scientific data linked through physical, biological, or functional relationships. One promising domain is plant physiology, where measured responses often arise from multiple interacting processes whose exact separation remains difficult even with manual intervention. In plant physiology, a key example is the A-Ci curve, which relates net CO2 assimilation rate (Anet) to leaf intercellular CO2 concentration (Ci) and is used to estimate photosynthetic parameters in leaf and crop-canopy models. However, reliable estimation requires identifying the active biochemical limitation state at each curve point, which remains a major source of uncertainty. Here, we formulate limitation-state identification along A-Ci curves as a graph-based node classification problem, with curve points as nodes. Domain-specific graph representations are created using distance-based k-nearest-neighbor (kNN) and auxiliary-signal-guided (ASG) connectivity, with edge attributes encoding pairwise relations. The framework was evaluated against conventional learning baselines, graph-based architectures, and an automated fitting-based benchmark. Results on a large synthetic dataset with known ground-truth limitation states show that graph-based models improve classification, particularly near biochemical transition regions. The best-performing configuration, SEAGAN (domain-Specific and Edge-Aware Graph Attention Network for Dynamic Plant Processes), integrates process-aware node features, edge attributes, kNN connectivity, and graph attention with weighted cross-entropy loss, achieving an F1-score of 0.857 and an accuracy of 0.882. The results show that representing A-Ci curves as graphs improves biochemical limitation-state analysis, with edge-aware attention over local kNN neighborhoods providing the most effective strategy.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Minimum Distance Summaries for Robust Neural Posterior Estimation

arXiv:2602.09161v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Simulation-based inference (SBI) enables amortized Bayesian inference by first training a neural posterior estimator (NPE) on prior-simulator pairs, typically through low-dimensional summary statistics, which can then be cheaply reused for fast inference by querying it on new test observations. Because NPE is estimated under the training data distribution, it is susceptible to misspecification when observations deviate from the training distribution. Many robust SBI approaches address this by modifying NPE training or introducing error models, coupling robustness to the inference network and compromising amortization and modularity. We introduce minimum-distance summaries, a plug-in robust NPE method that adapts queried test-time summaries independently of the pretrained NPE. Leveraging the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) as a distance between observed data and a summary-conditional predictive distribution, the adapted summary inherits strong robustness properties from the MMD. We demonstrate that the algorithm can be implemented efficiently with random Fourier feature approximations, yielding a lightweight, model-free test-time adaptation procedure. We provide theoretical guarantees for the robustness of our algorithm and empirically evaluate it on a range of synthetic and real-world tasks, demonstrating substantial robustness gains with minimal additional overhead.

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

LLM-Based Visual Explanation Evaluation Framework for Assessing the Explainability of Facial Skin Disease Classification Models

作者:

This study proposes a domain-specific LLM-based Visual Explanation Evaluation Framework for assessing Grad-CAM explanations in facial skin disease diagnosis models. While previous studies have primarily focused on improving classification performance through data augmentation techniques, relatively few studies have systematically examined whether model explanations are grounded in clinically relevant lesion regions. In this study, geometric augmentation, color-based augmentation, and mixed augmentation strategies were applied to facial skin disease classification models based on EfficientNet-B0, MobileNetV3, and ResNet18. Grad-CAM was employed to generate visual explanations representing the models' decision-making processes. Furthermore, an LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation framework was designed using GPT-5.5, Gemini 3.5 Flash, and Claude Sonnet 4.6 to assess Grad-CAM explanations from the perspectives of lesion localization and explanation trustworthiness. To improve evaluation consistency and clinical grounding, a progressive prompt engineering strategy was introduced, incorporating evaluation rubrics, clinical knowledge, penalty rules, and structured output formats.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Reaffirming a Challenge to Bohmian Mechanics

arXiv:2509.06584v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In our recent work, we reported the first measurement of the speed of tunnelling particles using a coupled waveguide system. The measured speed is operationally defined through a comparison of two orthogonal motions in a coupled waveguide system, is compatible with the standard definition of dwell time and with the Büttiker-Landauer tunnelling time, and does not presuppose a trajectory picture. Here we respond to objections raised in comments, referee reports, preprints, and articles. We distinguish two questions that are often conflated: whether Bohmian mechanics reproduces the measured density, and whether the standard guiding equation assigns the correct state of motion to the particles. The first point follows under the usual quantum equilibrium assumptions. The second is a separate physical assumption, since the standard guiding equation does not follow from the Schrödinger equation alone. We argue that, in the evanescent regime, the state of motion assigned by the standard guiding equation is in disagreement with the measured speed. To make the distinction explicit, we also present a bidirectional Bohmian model that reproduces the same stationary density while assigning finite speeds compatible with the speed inferred in the evanescent regime.

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

Models Take Notes at Prefill: KV Cache Can Be Editable and Composable

作者:

arXiv:2606.17107v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Prefix caching reuses prefill only across an exactly shared prefix, so one changed field invalidates the entire downstream cache. Yet overwriting the field's own key/value vectors and reusing the rest leaves the model acting on the old value. The reason, established causally across four model families: at prefill the model has already written the field-conditioned conclusion onto downstream notes; the field's own key/value drives under 1% of the decision. Read as a notebook of memoized conclusions, two capabilities follow. (1) It is editable. A salient erratum amends the notes; and with chain-of-thought, editing the field alone recovers the decision (1.00 at 8B, ~1% compute), while without CoT it is ignored. (2) It is composable. The notes are position-portable, so a precompiled skill can be RoPE-repositioned and spliced into any context, indistinguishable from full recompute (logit cosine 0.90-0.999, twelve models) at O(L) rather than O(L^2) time-to-first-token. A unified edit+compose agent stays decision-identical to recompute at up to 14.9x lower latency. The approach applies to any per-token attention KV cache, validated across scale, quantization, Mixture-of-Experts, and multimodal caches, and extends to several attention variants through small adapters. Because the erratum is append-only, it composes with production prefix caching: in an online vLLM benchmark it keeps the prefix cache-aligned (98.5% hit-rate), cutting p90 time-to-first-token by 53-398x.

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

GraphPO: Graph-based Policy Optimization for Reasoning Models

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become a standard paradigm for enhancing the capability of large reasoning models. RLVR typically samples responses independently and optimizes the policy using from final answers. This paradigm has two limitations. First, independently responses often contain similar intermediate reasoning steps, causing redundant exploration and wasted computation. Second, sparse final-answer rewards make it hard to identify useful steps. Tree-based methods partly address this problem by sharing prefixes and comparing branches from the same prefix to provide fine-grained signals. However, tree branches are still expanded independently. When different branches reach similar reasoning states, they cannot share information and repeat similar exploration. Moreover, tree-based methods ignore such dispersion and only perform local comparisons within separate branches, which can lead to higher variance in advantage estimation. To address this challenge, we propose GraphPO (Graph-based Policy Optimization), a novel RL framework that represents rollouts as a directed acyclic graph, with reasoning steps as edges and semantic states summarized from the reasoning paths as nodes. GraphPO merges semantically equivalent reasoning paths into equivalence classes, allowing them to share suffixes and reallocating budget away from redundant expansions to diverse exploration. Furthermore, we assign efficiency advantages to incoming edges and correctness advantages to outgoing edges, thereby improving inference efficiency while deriving process supervision from outcome. Theory shows that GraphPO reduces advantage-estimation variance and enhances reasoning efficiency. Experiments on three LLMs across reasoning and agentic search benchmarks show that GraphPO consistently outperforms chain- and tree-based baselines with the same token budgets or response budgets.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Morphology-resolved scrambling in a chaotic quantum billiard

arXiv:2606.16865v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chaotic quantum systems can retain spatial memory through scarred eigenstates, but whether these static structures control scrambling remains unclear. This work establishes a morphology-resolved connection between scarred eigenstates and eigenstate-resolved OTOCs in a peanut-shaped quantum billiard. Scalar localisation diagnostics, including differential entropy and continuum participation ratios, detect anomalous concentration but discard spatial architecture. A scale-normalised density overlap, in contrast, directly compares probability density profiles, revealing families of orthogonal eigenstates with nearly identical spatial morphology. Comparing the complete OTOC time traces of these orthogonal eigenstates reveals that morphological recurrence has dynamical content: moderate density overlap yields no universal prediction, whereas strongly recurring morphologies exhibit nearly identical OTOC growth and saturation. Thus, scarred structures act as spatial templates for operator growth, not merely static violations of ergodicity. This morphology-resolved framework turns eigenstate shape into a quantitative predictor of scrambling and provides a scale-controlled diagnostic of weak ergodicity breaking in quantum chaos.

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

Practical Anonymous Two-Party Gradient Boosting Decision Tree

arXiv:2605.26903v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Structured data is well handled by gradient-boosted decision trees (GBDT), which are usually trained on vertically partitioned features across mutually distrustful parties. High speed and interpretability make GBDTs popular in finance and healthcare, where neural networks may fall short. Enabling secure computation for GBDTs poses unique challenges, requiring secure record alignment for comparison. Relying on private set intersection (PSI) is a de facto approach. Mistaking PSI for a safety measure actually exposes which record identifiers (IDs) are shared between the datasets. Although circuit-PSI could help, it is costly for generic uses. New ideas are needed to efficiently train in a "dark forest". Aiming to hide the IDs, we initiate the study of anonymous GBDT training on split data held by two parties. Dual circuit-PSI in our design lets the parties alternate as receiver to run pick-then-sum over local features. Via oblivious programmable pseudorandom functions, we propagate circuit-PSI outputs as shared state across runs. Avoiding universal alignment, we resolve the neglected dilemma that ID hiding incurs a cost that scales with domain size. Next, we halve the cost of ciphertext packing used to convert single-instruction multiple-data homomorphic encryption from (ring) learning with errors in prior secure GBDT (Usenix Security' 23) and related secure machine-learning computations. Comparative experiments show our protocol remains competitive with leaky approaches in efficiency. Enabling ID-hiding aggregation, our techniques can extend to other vertically partitioned analytics.

19.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

Dynamic balance of sparse flux vectors for efficient simulation of culture dynamics and metabolic network reduction

Dynamic Flux Balance Analysis (DFBA) enables simulation of microbial culture dynamics under changing environmental conditions, but remains computationally expensive for tasks such as parameter calibration and fermentation optimization when applied using genome-scale metabolic models (GEMs). To address this challenge, we introduce Dynamic Flux Vector Balancing (DFVB), a reformulation of DFBA that solves an equivalent problem using a pre-computed, sparse basis of flux solutions that reduces the dimensionality of the internal optimization problem without information loss. Notably, DFVB provides a compact, interpretable representation of flux states that can readily identify dynamically inactive pathways and enable simulation-based automatic metabolic network reduction. We showed that DFVB produces the same culture dynamics as DFBA across multiple model scales and conditions, and identifies inactive reactions more accurately than Flux Variability Analysis (FVA) when compared to transcriptomic data profiles. Furthermore, computational performance analyses demonstrated that integrating DFVB with solver warm-start strategies and model reduction enhances computational efficiency relative to DFBA, yielding up to 3-fold reductions in simulation time for large-scale metabolic models. Finally, kinetic parameter estimation of culture dynamics with DFVB in two fermentation scenarios using a large-scale yeast GEM reached equal or higher prediction fidelity and narrower confidence intervals than DFBA, indicating improved parameter identifiability and robustness. Together, these results position DFVB as a scalable, robust, and biologically coherent framework for dynamic metabolic modeling, easing the integration of GEMs for culture dynamics simulation.

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Stochastic Reaction Networks Within Interacting Compartments with Content-Dependent Fragmentation

arXiv:2511.10223v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Stochastic reaction networks with mass-action kinetics provide a useful framework for understanding processes – biochemical and otherwise – in homogeneous environments. However, cellular reactions are often compartmentalized, either at the cell level or within cells, and hence non-homogeneous. We investigate a model of compartmentalization in which the rate of fragmentation of a compartment depends on the abundance of some designated species inside that compartment. The particular model of study is part of a general framework for compartmentalized chemistry with dynamic compartments that was proposed in (Duso and Zechner, PNAS, 2020). This paper builds on (Anderson and Howells, Bull. Math. Biol., 2023) where the special case where the compartment dynamics do not depend on their contents was studied mathematically. In particular, we demonstrate that the explosivity characterization from (Anderson and Howells, Bull. Math. Biol., 2023) fails in this setting and provide new sufficient conditions for non-explosivity and positive recurrence, under the assumption that the underlying CRN admits a linear Lyapunov function. These results extend the theoretical foundation for modeling content-mediated compartment dynamics, with implications for systems such as cell division and intracellular transport.

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

MMD-SLAM: Structure-Enhanced Multi-Meta Gaussian Distribution-Guided Visual SLAM

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has significantly boosted novel view synthesis and high-fidelity scene reconstruction, expanding the potential of 3DGS-based Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) methods. However, most existing systems fail to fully exploit the underlying structural information, which limits rendering quality and often leads to inconsistent maps. To address these limitations, we propose MMD-SLAM, a structure-enhanced Visual SLAM framework that leverages the Atlanta World (AW) assumption to guide a Multi-Meta Gaussian representation for photorealistic mapping. First, we introduce a point-line fusion strategy for pose optimization, where 3D line segments are incorporated to improve tracking robustness and provide additional constraints for mapping. Second, we design a Multi-Meta Gaussian representation with dominant directions, explicitly encoding structural priors from the AW hypothesis. Finally, we propose a Gaussian evolution strategy that adapts to scene geometry and incorporates structural cues into global optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that these innovations enable MMD-SLAM to achieve state-of-the-art performance in both tracking accuracy and mapping quality. e.g., our method achieves a 48.56% reduction in ATE RMSE on ScanNet and a 5.71% improvement in PSNR on Replica, compared with MonoGS.

22.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

A thalamus–brainstem attractor network drives history-biased decisions

作者:

Natural environments often change gradually, making it adaptive to bias decisions on the basis of the recent past — a phenomenon known as serial dependence1–3. Large-scale recordings during behaviour have identified that serial dependence is a common motif for decision-making, with neural representations of past experiences found throughout the brain4–11. However, it remains unclear whether this bias arises from dedicated neural circuits with history-specific computations. Using whole-brain, cellular-resolution imaging in zebrafish performing memory-guided evasive manoeuvres12–14, we identified a hierarchical circuit that maintains past information and biases future choices. Discrete attractors in the dorsal thalamus encoded the position of the most recent obstacle, maintaining a categorical memory via persistent activity lasting 10–20 s. Optogenetic manipulation of the dorsal thalamus abolished or imposed serial bias. A downstream hindbrain integrator received input from the thalamus and combined it with current sensory cues to produce graded responses reflecting multi-trial history. Leveraging a comprehensive brain atlas in zebrafish15, we constructed a whole-brain computational model that recapitulated behaviour and also predicted a key role for heterogeneous inhibitory subtypes in enabling flexible state transitions. This attractor–integrator architecture reveals a hierarchical and modular computation that unifies robust memory retention with flexible sensory integration, providing a general principle for history-biased decisions. Whole-brain, cellular-resolution imaging reveals a hierarchical thalamus–brainstem attractor network that encodes recent history and shapes behavioural bias in zebrafish.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

A Multimodal Approach to Alzheimer's Diagnosis: Geometric Insights from Cube Copying and Cognitive Assessments

arXiv:2512.16184v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Early and accessible detection of Alzheimer's disease (AD) remains a critical clinical challenge, and cube-copying tasks offer a simple yet informative assessment of visuospatial function. This work proposes a multimodal framework that converts hand-drawn cube sketches into graph-structured representations capturing geometric and topological properties, and integrates these features with demographic information and neuropsychological test (NPT) scores for AD classification. Cube drawings are modeled as graphs with node features encoding spatial coordinates, local graphlet-based topology, and angular geometry, which are processed using graph neural networks and fused with age, education, and NPT features in a late-fusion model. Experimental results show that graph-based representations provide a strong unimodal baseline and substantially outperform pixel-based convolutional models, while multimodal integration further improves balanced classification performance and discriminative ability. SHAP-based interpretability analysis identifies specific graphlet motifs associated with corner integrity and edge continuity as key predictors, closely aligning with clinical observations of distorted cube drawings in AD. Together, these findings establish graph-based analysis of cube-copying behavior as an interpretable, non-invasive, and scalable framework for Alzheimer's disease screening.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Differential Recovery Trajectories of Emergency Otolaryngologic Conditions across the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Six-year Longitudinal Study from an Urban Emergency Center

作者:

Objective: The COVID-19 pandemic markedly altered social activity patterns, healthcare utilization, and the epidemiology of infectious diseases. However, its long-term impact on emergency otolaryngologic conditions remains incompletely understood. This study investigated long-term trends in emergency otolaryngologic conditions before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic using comprehensive data from a large urban emergency clinic in Osaka, Japan. Methods: All new otolaryngologic outpatients who visited the Chuo Emergency Medical Clinic (CEMC) in Osaka City between 2019 and 2024were retrospectively analyzed. Annual trends in absolute numbers and relative proportions of emergency otolaryngologic conditions were examined by anatomical region and disease category, using 2019 as the pre-pandemic baseline. Results: A total of 99,324 new otolaryngologic outpatients were analyzed. Overall emergency visits declined sharply to approximately half of baseline in 2020, followed by a gradual but incomplete recovery toward pre-pandemic levels by 2024. Most anatomical categories declined to 45-61% of baseline in 2020 and exhibited gradual yet incomplete recovery through 2023; in stark contrast, laryngeal conditions diverged sharply, surging beyond pre-pandemic levels after 2022. Acute infectious otorhinolaryngologic diseases fell to 23-50% of baseline in 2020 and showed variable recovery (69-103%) by 2024. Notably, laryngitis exceeded the baseline, reaching 132% in 2023, whereas epiglottic edema exhibited only a transient increase approaching the baseline in 2021. Non-infectious emergency conditions generally showed only a marginal decrease in 2020 and remained relatively stable throughout the study period, except for sudden sensorineural hearing loss (SSNHL), which dropped sharply to 39% of the baseline in 2020 and remained persistently reduced through 2024. Traumatic emergencies declined variably to 53-81% of the baseline in 2020, followed by an incomplete recovery, reaching only 55-69% by 2024. Conclusion: Emergency otolaryngologic conditions demonstrated heterogeneous recovery trajectories following the COVID-19 pandemic. While most infectious and traumatic conditions gradually but incompletely normalized, laryngeal conditions showed a distinct post-pandemic surge, and SSNHL remained persistently suppressed. These findings reveal heterogeneous, condition-specific recovery trajectories that reflect both genuine shifts in community pathogen burden, true traumatic incidence, and persistent alterations in healthcare-seeking behaviors, insights essential for resource allocation during future public health emergencies.

25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

The central heat trace on large compact classical groups

arXiv:2511.08288v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the large-$N$ asymptotics of the central trace of the heat kernel on compact classical groups. For every classical family $G_N\subset \mathrm{GL}_N(\C)$, we prove a full large-$N$ asymptotic expansion, using a highest weights/partitions correspondence adapted to the large-rank regime, under which the eigenvalues of the Laplace–Beltrami operator stabilize as observables in the algebra of shifted symmetric functions. Then, we prove a random surface representation of the trace in terms of ramified coverings of the torus. We provide two independent applications: an explicit large-rank counting law for the Casimir spectrum, with exponential Hardy–Ramanujan-type growth in contrast with the polynomial behavior of Weyl's law at fixed rank, and a rigorous probabilistic formulation of the Yang–Mills/Hurwitz duality on a two-dimensional torus initiated by Gross and Taylor, completing a previous work of the authors. We also extend this duality to a Yang–Mills/Gromov–Witten duality by expressing the coefficients of the central heat trace as explicit functionals of the generating function of Gromov–Witten invariants.