Retraction: Identification of Potent EGFR Inhibitors from TCM Database@Taiwan
by The PLOS Computational Biology Editors
Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily
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by The PLOS Computational Biology Editors
Clinical oncology datasets often store systemic therapy as a regimen label with a start date and an end date. Those records are clinically recognizable but can be analytically incomplete when the research question concerns whether a patient was exposed to a concurrent CNS-active drug (cCNS-aD) or an adjuvant CNS-active drug (aCNS-aD) around radiotherapy. Contemporary CNS-oncology studies usually define CNS activity by empiric drug lists and define concurrency by fixed calendar windows, although the literature shows substantial heterogeneity across both concepts. This paper proposes a generalizable framework for converting raw systemic therapy records into reproducible cCNS-aD and aCNS-aD variables, useful in subgrouping for clinical studies. The framework uses a transparent CNS scoring model based on three clinical evidence components: intracranial objective response rate, consensus CNS endorsement, and intrathecal route of administration. It then defines a pharmacokinetic exposure proxy as the recorded end date plus five half-lives. Concurrent exposure is classified by overlap with the radiotherapy interval, while post-radiotherapy exposure is classified by overlap with a prespecified post-RT attribution window. The framework separately identifies post-RT pharmacokinetic persistence and post-RT treatment initiation, allowing investigators to distinguish continued exposure from true adjuvant initiation. This is a methodological framework and reference implementation. Implementation audits and endpoint-specific sensitivity analyses remain necessary before use as a definitive exposure classifier
We present V-JEPA 2.1, a family of self-supervised models that learn dense, high-quality visual representations for both images and videos while retaining strong global scene understanding. The approach combines four key components. First, a dense predictive loss uses a masking-based objective in which both visible and masked tokens contribute to the training signal, encouraging explicit spatial and temporal grounding. Second, deep self-supervision applies the self-supervised objective hierarchically across multiple intermediate encoder layers to improve representation quality. Third, multi-modal tokenizers enable unified training across images and videos. Finally, the model benefits from effective scaling in both model capacity and training data. Together, these design choices produce representations that are spatially structured, semantically coherent, and temporally consistent. Empirically, V-JEPA 2.1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on several challenging benchmarks, including 7.71 mAP on Ego4D for short-term object-interaction anticipation and 40.8 Recall@5 on EPIC-KITCHENS for high-level action anticipation, as well as a 20-point improvement in real-robot grasping success rate over V-JEPA-2 AC. The model also demonstrates strong performance in robotic navigation (5.687 ATE on TartanDrive), depth estimation (0.307 RMSE on NYUv2 with a linear probe), and global recognition (77.7 on Something-Something-V2). These results show that V-JEPA 2.1 significantly advances the state of the art in dense visual understanding and world modeling.
arXiv:2606.19859v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent research on Doeblin coefficients has shed light on their usefulness as a multi-way generalization of the Dobrushin contraction coefficient for TV distance, in a separate vein from their classic role in the theory of Markov chain ergodicity. However, strong conditions, such as being bounded away from 0, are typically necessary for Doeblin coefficients to establish the existence of information contraction. Building on recently formulated concepts of nonlinear information contraction, we aim to propose a finer-grained Doeblin-based characterization of multi-way contraction behavior which yields non-vacuous contraction guarantees even for channels whose Doeblin coefficient is 0. To this end, we introduce the notion of a Doeblin curve – a nonlinear function which quantifies the contraction behavior of a Markov kernel on collections of input distributions at specific levels of divergence and power. Through the course of our analysis, we develop a new variational characterization of Doeblin coefficients, present several properties of Doeblin curves, define several versions of power-constrained Doeblin curves, and derive upper and lower bounds using our aforementioned variational characterization. We then utilize these results in diverse areas, including generalization bounds for noisy iterative optimization, error bounds for reliable computation with noisy circuits, and differential privacy guarantees for online iterative algorithms. In particular, we extend results in these areas to broader domains or group settings, leveraging Doeblin curves to reveal finer-grained contraction phenomena than Doeblin coefficients.
arXiv:2511.07212v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Matrix-product state (MPS) skeletons are connected networks of Hamiltonians with exact MPS ground states that underlie a phase diagram. Such skeletons have previously been found in classes of free-fermion models. For the translation-invariant BDI and AIII free-fermion classes, it has been shown that the underlying skeleton is dense, giving an analytic approach to MPS approximation of ground states anywhere in the class. In this paper, we partially expose the skeleton in certain interacting spin chains: the $N$-state Onsager-integrable chiral clock families. We construct MPS that form a dense MPS skeleton in the gapped regions surrounding a sequence of fixed-point Hamiltonians (the generators of the Onsager algebra). Outside these gapped regions, these MPS remain eigenstates, but no longer give the many-body ground state. Rather, they are ground states in particular sectors of the spectrum. Our methods also allow us to find further MPS eigenstates; these correspond to low-lying excited states within the aforementioned gapped regions. This set of MPS excited states goes beyond the previous analysis of ground states on the $N=2$ free-fermion MPS skeleton. As an application of our results, we find a closed form for the disorder parameter in a family of interacting models. Finally, we remark that many of our results use only the Onsager algebra and are not specific to the chiral clock model representation.
Subject-driven image customization aims to generate images that not only follow textual instructions but also preserve the identity of a given reference subject. Existing approaches, including test-time fine-tuning, encoder-based methods, and token competition in shared attention spaces, suffer from limited efficiency, misalignment between extracted reference features and the generative process, and interference from irrelevant information. To address these limitations, we formulate the customization task as a distribution shift induced by incorporating reference images into text-to-image generation, and derive a Conditional Attention Distribution Shift formulation grounded in maximum entropy theory. Building on this formulation, we propose CustomShift, a dual-branch architecture based on Stable Diffusion 3. The Reference-Alignment Branch leverages self-attention between reference images and subject names to achieve layer-wise alignment with latent representations, while the Cross-Guidance Branch integrates textual and reference cues to guide generation. Experiments on the DreamBooth and Custom101 benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving a better balance between semantic fidelity and subject consistency.
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.
arXiv:2606.13871v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tabular data embeddings have become a cornerstone of data profiling and data integration pipelines, enabling tasks such as entity annotation and resolution; schema matching; column type detection; and table search, among others. Existing approaches embed rows, columns, or entire tables into a vector space and rely on nearest-neighbor search to retrieve candidate matches. A fundamental limitation of current embedding methods is the lack of interpretable similarity scores: the concrete similarity value between a query and its nearest neighbour carries no intrinsic meaning, making it impossible to determine whether that neighbour is a true match or simply the least-dissimilar item in a corpus that contains no valid answer. This inability to set principled thresholds for retrieval undermines practical deployment, particularly for zero-match detection. We investigate the use of HyperDimensional Computing (HDC), specifically the Holographic Reduced Representations (HRR) model, as a framework for tabular row embeddings when the retrieval task corresponds to answering structured select-project queries in vector space. Exploiting the algebraic properties of HDC operations, we derive closed-form expected similarity values for both equality and non-equality retrieval predicates, which converge to interpretable values as dimensionality increases, and use these to identify suitable retrieval thresholds. We evaluate HDC against EmbDI, a graph-based baseline, on two real-world datasets across varying table sizes and predicate lengths. Our results show that HDC matches or outperforms EmbDI for row retrieval across all configurations, handles non-equality predicates more robustly, and achieves perfect attribute projection accuracy at sufficient dimensionality – while uniquely enabling reliable identification of zero-match predicates through its principled thresholds.
Advances in machine learning and other technologies are helping researchers to trace the movements, landmarks and social practices of wildlife. Advances in machine learning and other technologies are helping researchers to trace the movements, landmarks and social practices of wildlife.
arXiv:2606.12006v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predicting time-to-event outcomes such as mortality is a fundamental task in clinical decision-making, commonly addressed through survival analysis. While classical statistical and deep learning approaches have been widely studied, they typically require task-specific training and sufficient labeled data. Recent advances in tabular foundation models offer a new paradigm by learning general-purpose representations for structured data. However, their applicability to censored time-to-event prediction in clinical settings remains underexplored, as typical applications are restricted to discrete classification rather than survival analysis tasks. In this work, we propose a lightweight adaptation approach for applying tabular foundation models to clinical survival analysis by directly training a survival-aware head on top of the pretrained representations. We study representative architectures, including TabPFN, TabDPT, and TabICL, and adapt them using a multi-task logistic regression (MTLR) head to model right-censored time-to-event outcomes. We evaluate this approach on a diverse set of public survival benchmarks and two large-scale ICU cohorts, MIMIC-IV and eICU. Our results show that this transfer learning approach achieves competitive or superior performance compared to strong baselines. On MIMIC-IV, TabDPT-FT-MTLR reaches a C-index of 0.856, corresponding to a relative improvement of +1.4% over the best non-FM baseline (DeepSurv, 0.844) and +6.7% over the best zero-shot model (0.802). On eICU, TabICL-FT-MTLR achieves 0.797, yielding gains of +1.7% (DeepSurv, 0.784) and +6.4% (0.749), respectively. These findings highlight the importance of combining pretrained tabular representations with survival-aware objectives and suggest that tabular foundation models provide a practical and effective alternative for clinical survival prediction.
Foundation-model pipelines for individual-level livestock monitoring – combining open-vocabulary detection, promptable video segmentation, and self-supervised visual embeddings – have raised the accuracy ceiling of precision livestock farming (PLF), but their GPU memory budgets exceed the envelope of commodity edge accelerators. To close this gap, the 446M-parameter Perception Encoder (PE-ViT-L+) backbone of SAM 3 is distilled into a 40.66M-parameter multi-scale student through three mechanisms: a Feature Pyramid Network student encoder built on TinyViT-21M-512, a four-term direction-then-scale distillation loss, and backbone-substitution inference with sliding-window session pruning that bounds streaming GPU memory growth. The DINOv3 family includes a pre-distilled ViT-S/16 variant (21.6M parameters) released alongside a 6716M-parameter ViT-7B teacher; the ViT-S (21M) variant is adopted as the per-individual embedder. On the Edinburgh Pig dataset, the compressed pipeline reaches 92.29% MOTA and 96.15% IDF1 against the SAM 3 teacher (1.68- and 0.84-percentage-point losses), achieves a 7.77-fold reduction in system-level parameters and a 3.01-fold reduction in peak VRAM (19.52GB -> 6.49GB), and reaches 97.34% top-1 accuracy with 91.67% macro-F1 on nine-class pig behaviour classification. The pipeline fits inside an NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX 16GB envelope with 4.9GB of headroom, supporting a proposed – but not yet empirically validated – on-device embedding-pool re-identification mechanism whose per-individual footprint of approximately 94MB per animal per year produces a longitudinal visual record amenable to retrospective association with disease, lameness, reproductive, and growth outcome labels.
arXiv:2603.08558v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning compact state representations in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) has proven crucial for addressing the curse of dimensionality in large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) problems. Existing principled approaches leverage structural priors on the MDP by constructing state representations as linear combinations of the state-graph Laplacian eigenvectors. When the transition graph is unknown or the state space is prohibitively large, the graph spectral features can be estimated directly via sample trajectories. In this work, we prove an upper bound on the approximation error of linear value function approximation under the learned spectral features. We show how this error scales with the algebraic connectivity of the state-graph, grounding the approximation quality in the topological structure of the MDP. We further bound the error introduced by the eigenvector estimation itself, leading to an end-to-end error decomposition across the representation learning pipeline. Additionally, our expression of the Laplacian operator for the RL setting, although equivalent to existing ones, prevents some common misunderstandings, of which we show some examples from the literature. Our results hold for general (non-uniform) policies without any assumptions on the symmetry of the induced transition kernel. We validate our theoretical findings with numerical simulations on gridworld environments.
arXiv:2606.17022v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A central objective of machine learning is to identify structure and patterns in data. Advances in data acquisition have increasingly produced datasets whose observations possess rich geometric form, giving rise to shape spaces that encode variability in object geometry. Such datasets arise across a wide range of disciplines, including biology, medicine, anthropology, and computer vision, where subtle geometric differences often carry important scientific information. Traditional machine learning methods, however, are frequently ill-equipped to account for the nonlinear geometric structure underlying these data. This survey synthesizes a rapidly growing body of work on shape space analysis, which provides a mathematical and computational framework for the study of geometric data. Drawing on ideas from differential geometry, statistics, and machine learning, we organize the literature around a common analytical pipeline: shape representation and parameterization, the rigorous construction of robust geodesic metrics, statistical analysis on shape spaces, and geometry-aware learning methods. We discuss how these tools enable the characterization of shape variability, the comparison of geometric objects, and the analysis of structural trajectories across populations and time. To illustrate the breadth of the field, we highlight applications spanning multiple scales of biological organization, including studies of subcellular morphology and primate tooth evolution. Across these and many other domains, researchers face common challenges arising from complex, nonlinear, and often unaligned geometric variation. The review concludes by identifying key theoretical and computational challenges, as well as emerging opportunities driven by increasingly large and diverse geometric datasets.
Perioperative androgen-deprivation therapy plus apalutamide could represent a new treatment option for patients with high-risk, localized prostate cancer. Perioperative androgen-deprivation therapy plus apalutamide could represent a new treatment option for patients with high-risk, localized prostate cancer.
arXiv:2606.14206v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fourier analysis has become a crucial tool for understanding the expressivity of Variational Quantum Circuit (VQC) models, as well as an important indicator of barren plateaus (BP). While existing literature has only studied angle-embedded VQCs in a noiseless environment, here we develop the Fourier analysis of VQCs with non-linear data embedding, with particular focus on amplitude embedding, which provides a naturally compact encoding scheme. We first investigate a subtle difference in the domain of input features within amplitude embedding that leads to a distinct expressivity of the zero-frequency Fourier coefficient. By assuming that the ensemble of unitaries generated from the parameter space forms at least a 2-design with respect to the unitary group, we derive, via Weingarten calculus, that the mean of the Fourier coefficients is concentrated at zero, and the variance scales at an exponentially decaying order with respect to the multi-dimensional frequency magnitude. When a noise channel with unitary Kraus operators and probabilities $\{p_k\}$ is taken into account, the variance is further suppressed by a factor $\left(\sum_k p_k^2\right)^{Q}
arXiv:2606.15695v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated class-incremental learning (FCIL) becomes substantially harder when clients observe different label subsets, progress through tasks at different stages, and provide uneven supervision for the same semantic concepts. Existing FCIL methods often preserve old knowledge through input-space synthesis, but they can be fragile under heterogeneous task streams and difficult to transfer across modalities. To alleviate such issues, we propose PRO, a framework that replaces synthetic input replay with projected rehearsal orchestration. To remove external pretraining, we evaluate all methods under the same warmup. After this, PRO maintains compact class-level projected memories on the server and allows clients perform balanced pseudo multi-task training over current examples and old projected memories. To handle stronger representation drift, we further introduce PRO-MAX, which augments PRO with neighborhood-weighted memory alignment while preserving the same server-light principle that the server only aggregates model updates and memory statistics. Across image, text, and graph benchmarks, PRO and PRO-MAX improve retention and final utility under heterogeneous streams while remaining competitive in homogeneous FCIL. Even when baselines are given expanded replay budgets, they degrade under supervision imbalance and stage misalignment, indicating that replay quantity alone does not resolve replay-quality failures. Additional weak-task diagnostics further show that larger replay mismatch is associated with larger downstream degradation, while our method keeps projected memories better aligned with the evolving representation.
arXiv:2505.15215v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Data fusion, the process of combining observational and experimental data, can enable the identification of causal effects that would otherwise remain non-identifiable. Although identification algorithms have been developed for specific scenarios, do-calculus remains the only general-purpose tool for causal data fusion, particularly when variables are present in some data sources but not others. However, approaches based on do-calculus may encounter computational challenges as the number of variables increases and the causal graph grows in complexity. Consequently, there exists a need to reduce the size of such models while preserving the essential features. For this purpose, we propose pruning (removing unnecessary variables) and clustering (combining variables) as preprocessing operations for causal data fusion. We generalize earlier results on a single data source and derive conditions for applying pruning and clustering in the case of multiple data sources. We give sufficient conditions for inferring the identifiability or non-identifiability of a causal effect in a larger graph based on a smaller graph and show how to obtain the corresponding identifying functional for identifiable causal effects. Examples from epidemiology and social science demonstrate the use of the results.
arXiv:2606.11698v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model watermarking safeguards AI model intellectual property by embedding distinctive knowledge that induces unique behavioral signatures. The primary technical challenge lies in ensuring watermark robustness against various post-processing attacks on the watermarked model. Model extraction attacks emerge as the most severe threat, where adversaries exploit prediction outputs to train surrogate models that illegally replicate the original model's functionality. In this work, we propose a rehearsal-based watermark embedding framework to enhance the robustness of model watermarks against model extraction attacks. By simulating the extraction process, our method leverages the loss of a simulated stolen model on a trigger set as a training signal to fine-tune the watermark knowledge within the target model. This fine-tuning step encourages the watermark to be embedded in a way that boosts transferability, thereby increasing its chances of persisting and remaining detectable in stolen models. Comprehensive experiments conducted under diverse settings demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves the robustness of model watermarks against both model extraction and subsequent watermark removal attacks.
arXiv:2606.11836v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents a novel data-free and training-free compression approach for speech foundation models using channelwise clustering via k-means. More fine-grained, mixed sparsity pruning by layer-level varying number of parameter clusters is also explored. Experiments conducted on the LibriSpeech dataset suggest that when operating with pruning sparsity of 50% on HuBERT-large, consistent WER reductions of 27.73%/18.61% absolute (34.37%/21.91% relative) over the magnitude-based pruning were obtained on the test-clean and test-other subsets before fine-tuning and 0.19%/0.79% absolute (3.36%/4.62% relative) after fine-tuning with only 3 epochs. Similar WER reductions of 2.86%/5.02% absolute (59.21%/55.29% relative) were observed against magnitudebased pruning on Whisper-large-v3 at 10% sparsity, all with no significant WER increase relative to the uncompressed baseline.
arXiv:2606.11306v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While Hamiltonian Lattice Gauge Theory is gaining traction, today's limited numerical capacity leaves simulations affected by discretization errors. This motivates the implementation of renormalization group (RG) techniques to find discretization-error-free operators. To this end, we introduce VAPOR, a variational quantum algorithm that decomposes operators into Pauli strings, identifies RG flow orbits, and determines fixed points of a naively discretized operator. We illustrate this using a toy model of a kinematic operator in a symmetry-restricted SU(2) Yang-Mills theory.
arXiv:2606.17426v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We consider the concentration properties of functions of infinitely exchangeable random variables. By conditioning on the de Finetti directing measure, we show that the deviation of any function with bounded-difference constants $c_1, \dots, c_n$ decomposes into a conditional sampling fluctuation and a latent mixture fluctuation. When this latent mixture is $\sigma_{\mathrm{mix}}^2$-subgaussian, we establish a concentration inequality with an effective variance proxy of $\frac{1}{4}\sum_i c_i^2 + \sigma_{\mathrm{mix}}^2$. Crucially, we demonstrate that for zero-sum linear contrasts, such as the difference between a subsample mean and a full population mean, the latent mixture term cancels exactly. This cancellation yields a tight, mixture-free Hoeffding-type bound that provides a direct de Finetti mechanism for the infinite-extendibility limit of recent finite-exchangeable concentration results. We apply this framework to quantify uncertainty in composite AI benchmarks, such as MMLU, where question items naturally exhibit exchangeable dependence across domains. Our results provide both a domain-stratified hierarchical model for bounding the uncertainty of accuracy scores, and a distribution-free, cost-saving statistical guarantee for accurately estimating full benchmark scores from random subsets.
arXiv:2606.15303v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Dirac oscillator is obtained from the Dirac Hamiltonian $H^{\mathrm{D}} = \left( c\vec{\alpha}\cdot \vec{p} + mc^{2}\beta \right)$ by modifying the momentum through a non-Hermitian substitution $\overrightarrow{p} \rightarrow \overrightarrow{p} \pm i\omega \beta \overrightarrow{q}$. Despite the non-Hermitian nature of this momentum operator, the full Hamiltonian remains Hermitian due to the presence of the Dirac matrix $\vec{\alpha}$. However, if one instead introduces a Hermitian modification of the form $\vec{p} \rightarrow \vec{p} \pm \omega \beta \overrightarrow{q}$, the resulting Hamiltonian is no longer Hermitian. In this case, the system corresponds to an inverted Dirac oscillator $H^{\mathrm{r}}$, where the potential becomes unbounded from below, the energy spectrum becomes continuous, and the eigenfunctions fail to be square-integrable, leading to normalization difficulties. We show that the Hamiltonian $H^{\mathrm{r}}$ is a pseudo-$\mathcal{PT}$-symmetric operator, and we introduce an unbounded, non-unitary transformation that establishes a connection between $H^{\mathrm{r}}$ and $H^{\mathrm{D}}$. The purpose of this work is to analyze this relativistic quantum system – known as the Dirac inverted oscillator – which, despite its various applications, admits an exact analytical solution
Instruction-tuned LLMs can annotate thousands of instances at low cost. This raises two questions for active learning (AL): can LLM labels replace human labels within the AL loop, and does AL remain necessary when entire corpora can be cheaply labeled? We investigate both on a new dataset of 277,902 German political TikTok comments (25,974 LLM-labeled, 5,000 human-annotated), comparing LLM and human annotation across seven conditions, four encoders, and 10 random seeds. Under a two-question interface that mirrors the human annotation task, LLM annotation at scale outperforms human-supervised classifiers at roughly one-tenth the cost (\$28 for GPT-5.2 Batch API vs. \$316 for Prolific). The advantage holds for both a closed-source (GPT-5.2) and an open-weight (Qwen3.5-122B-10B) LLM, is robust under soft-label evaluation, and is unlocked specifically by the two-question decomposition; a holistic single-prompt baseline only ties with human supervision. AL provides no reliable advantage over random sampling under either LLM annotator. However, error structure varies sharply: only GPT-5.2 under the two-question interface produces classifiers with near-human FP/FN balance, while other LLM variants over-flag border-control and economic competition discourse. We release the dataset and code.
arXiv:2606.18236v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In learning theory, the sign rank of a binary concept class captures the smallest dimension in which it can be represented by points and halfspaces. Despite tremendous interest, lower bounds on sign rank are notoriously difficult to come by. Two recent approaches to the problem establish lower bounds on sign rank by measures that are easier to analyze: the $\mathbb{Z}_2$-index and the list replicability number. We order these measures, showing that the $\mathbb{Z}_2$-index is upper-bounded by a linear function of the list replicability number. As a main consequence, we obtain a strong separation between sign rank and $\mathbb{Z}_2$-index, thereby resolving a question of Frick, Hosseini, and Vasileuski. This motivates a thorough study of list replicability, the stronger of the two lower-bounding measures. We establish upper bounds on the list replicability number by two combinatorial measures: height and minimum star number. We also prove a fundamental composition result, showing that the product of two concept classes has list replicability number bounded by the sum of the list replicability numbers of the two classes.
While Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems enable emotional control via natural-language instructions, expressiveness, naturalness, and speech quality degrade when the target emotion conflicts with the textual semantics. We propose a Cross-modal Consistency Guided Classifier-Free Guidance (CCG-CFG) method with dynamic scales based on the degree of inconsistency between the text emotion and the explicit speech emotion, replacing the dropout condition with the text emotion. We also distill the CCG-CFG guidance signal using a hard-sample mining strategy, improving the TTS model's emotional alignment capability. Evaluations on five emotional corpora and two TTS benchmarks show that our approaches applied to CosyVoice2 achieve up to a 12% absolute improvement in emotion-recognition accuracy and a 10% relative improvement in subjective scores, outperforming baselines including HierSpeech++, Qwen3-TTS, and original CosyVoice2, while preserving intelligibility, naturalness, and high speech quality.