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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Navigating User Behavior toward Personalized Multimodal Generation

arXiv:2606.24196v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern AIGC pipelines deliver high-fidelity images and videos but presuppose a well-formed creation instruction, while end users rarely articulate visual details, leaving generators misaligned with user demand. We study personalized content generation, which turns a user's interaction history into an executable instruction for downstream synthesis, and identify two obstacles: behavior must be encoded in a form legible to language reasoning, and the model must acquire instruction-writing skill absent from both pretraining and behavior data. We propose NaviGen, which represents each item with a dual identifier coupling a collaborative code and a textual code as a behavioral substrate and a semantic bridge in one token stream. On this representation, a two-stage SFT+RL pipeline first distills preference reasoning and instruction writing from evolutionarily searched supervision, then aligns generation with user intent through hierarchical and self-consistent rewards. Experiments across product, game, and short-video domains show that NaviGen improves personalized image and video generation, strengthens next-item prediction, and yields more specific, relevant, and visually generatable instructions. Our code is anonymously released at: https://github.com/iLearn-Lab/NaviGen.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Predicting the Neutrino Mass Ordering Using Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.03745v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Determining the neutrino mass ordering remains a central open problem in particle physics. While next-generation long-baseline experiments are expected to resolve this question, current data provide limited sensitivity because the spectral differences between normal and inverted ordering are subtle and entangled with parameter degeneracies. We investigate a machine-learning strategy for mass-ordering determination using a feed-forward neural-network classifier trained on synthetic long-baseline datasets generated with three-flavour oscillation probabilities, matter effects, and statistical fluctuations. We evaluate the classifier against standard $\chi^2$ and $\log\mathcal{L}$ approaches using common discrimination metrics, including receiver-operating-characteristic curves, to quantify sensitivity and to illustrate how operating points can be selected to prioritise purity or efficiency. We find that the neural network achieves performance comparable to conventional fits for the scenarios studied, providing a flexible, independent cross-check of established analyses. The framework can be extended to incorporate systematic uncertainties and to explore joint inference of oscillation parameters, and it may also serve as a pedagogical tool for introducing machine-learning methods in neutrino physics.

04.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-23

EnrichViz: An Interactive R Shiny Application for Visualization of Pathway Enrichment Results from Omics Data

Authors:

Pathway and functional enrichment analysis is a cornerstone of omics data interpretation, enabling researchers to map differentially expressed proteins or genes onto curated biological processes, signaling cascades, and molecular functions. While tools such as Ingenuity Pathway Analysis (IPA), g:Profiler, and Enrichr are widely used to generate ranked enrichment results, translating these tabular outputs into clear, publication-ready figures remains a time-consuming step that typically requires custom scripting and familiarity with visualization libraries, a significant barrier for researchers without a computational background. Here we present EnrichViz, a self-contained, browser-based R Shiny application that enables interactive, code-free visualization of pathway and functional enrichment results from quantitative proteomics, transcriptomics, and metabolomics experiments. EnrichViz accepts three standard CSV files as input, a normalized abundance matrix, a sample annotation or metadata file, and enrichment results from any platform that exports tabular output, and produces six complementary, publication-ready visualizations: bar and bubble plots for ranking enriched terms by significance, chord diagrams for exploring pathway-molecule connectivity, clustered heatmaps for displaying Z-score normalized expression patterns across experimental groups, and boxplots or violin plots for examining the abundance distribution of individual proteins, genes, or metabolites. The application supports both raw p-values and pre-transformed -log10(p) values through automatic detection, and all plot parameters are adjustable in real time through a graphical sidebar. Every figure can be exported as a high-resolution PNG file at 300 dpi. EnrichViz is implemented in R using the Shiny, ggplot2, pheatmap, and circlize packages, and is freely available at https://rgmilian.shinyapps.io/EnrichViz/

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

EffGen: Enabling Small Language Models as Capable Autonomous Agents

Most existing language model agentic systems today are built and optimized for large language models (e.g., GPT, Claude, Gemini) via API calls; while powerful, this approach faces several limitations including high token costs and privacy concerns for sensitive applications. We introduce EffGen, an open-source agentic framework optimized for small language models (SLMs) that enables effective, efficient, and secure local deployment. EffGen makes four major contributions: (1) Enhanced tool-calling with prompt optimization that compresses input prompts by up to 70-80% (and 57% on average across our benchmarks) while preserving task semantics, (2) Intelligent task decomposition that breaks complex queries into parallel or sequential subtasks based on dependencies, (3) Complexity-based routing using five factors to make smart pre-execution decisions, and (4) Unified memory system combining short-term, long-term, and vector-based storage. Additionally, EffGen unifies multiple agent protocols (MCP, A2A, ACP) for cross-protocol communication. Results on 13 benchmarks show EffGen outperforms LangChain, AutoGen, and Smolagents with higher success rates, faster execution, and lower memory. Our results reveal that prompt optimization and complexity routing have complementary scaling behavior: optimization benefits SLMs more (11.2% gain at 1.5B vs 2.4% at 32B), while routing benefits large models more (3.6% at 1.5B vs 7.9% at 32B), providing consistent gains across all scales when combined. EffGen is released under the Apache 2.0 License, ensuring broad accessibility for research and commercial use, with the code available at https://github.com/ctrl-gaurav/effGen, the Python package at https://pypi.org/project/effgen/ (pip install effgen), and the project website and documentation at https://effgen.org/ and https://docs.effgen.org/.

06.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

MOCHA: Multi-modal Objects-aware Cross-arcHitecture Alignment

arXiv:2509.14001v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Personalized object detection aims to adapt a general-purpose detector to recognize user-specific instances from only a few examples. Lightweight models often struggle in this setting due to their weak semantic priors, while large vision-language models (VLMs) offer strong object-level understanding but are too computationally demanding for real-time or on-device applications. We introduce MOCHA (Multi-modal Objects-aware Cross-arcHitecture Alignment), a distillation framework that transfers multimodal region-level knowledge from a frozen VLM teacher into a lightweight vision-only detector. MOCHA extracts fused visual and textual teacher's embeddings and uses them to guide student training through a dual-objective loss that enforces accurate local alignment and global relational consistency across regions. This process enables efficient transfer of semantics without the need for teacher modifications or textual input at inference. MOCHA consistently outperforms prior baselines across four personalized detection benchmarks under strict few-shot regimes, yielding a +10.1 average improvement, with minimal inference cost.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Adaptive generative moment matching networks for improved learning of dependence structures

arXiv:2508.21531v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: An adaptive bandwidth selection procedure for the mixture kernel in the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) for fitting generative moment matching networks (GMMNs) is introduced, and improved learning of copula random number generators is demonstrated. Based on the relative error of the training loss, the number of kernels is increased during training; additionally, the relative error of the validation loss is used as an early stopping criterion. While training time remains similar, adaptively training GMMNs (AGMMNs) significantly increases training performance, which is shown based on validation MMD trajectories, samples and validation MMD values. Superiority of AGMMNs over GMMNs and parametric copula models is also demonstrated in terms of three applications. First, convergence rates of estimators based on quasi-random versus pseudo-random samples from copulas are investigated in dimensions as large as 100 for the first time. Second, replicated validation MMDs, as well as Monte Carlo and quasi-Monte Carlo applications demonstrate the improved training of AGMMNs for a copula model implied by the 50 constituents of the S&P 500 index after deGARCHing. Last, both the latter dataset and 50 constituents of the FTSE 100 are used to demonstrate that the improved training of AGMMNs indeed translates to an improved model prediction.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Discovery of connectivity-trainability trade-off of IQP Circuits for Hamiltonian Optimization

arXiv:2606.24264v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Instantaneous Quantum Polynomial-time (IQP) circuits are promising candidates for near-term quantum advantage due to the conjectured classical hardness of their sampling task. However, their capabilities for optimization remain largely unexplored. We present a systematic investigation of the performance and trainability of IQP circuits for Hamiltonian optimization. Our results reveal a trade-off between optimization performance and circuit connectivity, demonstrating that the circuit structure plays a key role in determining the ability of IQP circuits to reach low-energy states.

10.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-02

Proteomic signatures of early retinal neurodegeneration in type 2 diabetes mellitus

Authors:

by Huangdong Li, Ziyu Zhu, Shaopeng Yang, Weijing Cheng, Shaoying Tan, Zhuoyao Xin, Lei Zhang, Zhuoting Zhu, Shida Chen, Wenyong Huang, Wei Wang Background Retinal neurodegeneration is an early and independent feature of diabetic retinal disease and has been proposed as a window into the systemic neural consequences of diabetes, yet accessible molecular biomarkers and individualized prediction tools remain scarce. We aimed to identify circulating plasma protein signatures of diabetic retinal neurodegeneration (DRN) and to translate them into a clinically usable risk prediction system. Methods and findings In this multi-cohort prospective observational study, we integrated high-throughput plasma proteomics with longitudinal optical coherence tomography (OCT) in two independent populations. The discovery cohort comprised 1,492 participants had baseline plasma proteomics and OCT, and 1,218 were followed with repeated OCT over 6 years in Guangzhou Diabetic Eye Study (GDES). DRN was quantified by the annualized OCT-derived retinal nerve fiber layer thinning rate. In multivariable analyses adjusted for age, sex, smoking, systolic blood pressure, HbA1c, and diabetes duration, we identified 71 plasma proteins associated with development and progression of DRN. These proteins mapped onto pathways governing inflammatory immune recruitment, extracellular matrix remodeling, and microvascular homeostasis, providing a plausible biological basis for DRN. We developed a proteomics-based DRN model (Pro-DRN) using eight machine learning (ML) algorithms, including XGBoost and LightGBM. In the independent test set, Pro-DRN achieved a C-index of 0.860, rising to 0.908 when integrated with clinical variables. Compared with six conventional models, Pro-DRN improved discrimination (ΔC-index 0.137 to 0.159; all P 

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

Unifying framework for quantum simulation algorithms for time-dependent Hamiltonian dynamics

arXiv:2411.03180v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recently, there has been growing interest in simulating time-dependent Hamiltonians using quantum algorithms, driven by diverse applications, such as quantum adiabatic computing. While techniques for simulating time-independent Hamiltonian dynamics are well-established, time-dependent Hamiltonian dynamics is less explored and it is unclear how to systematically organize existing methods and to find new methods. Sambe-Howland's continuous clock elegantly transforms time-dependent Hamiltonian dynamics into time-independent Hamiltonian dynamics, which means that by taking different discretizations, existing methods for time-independent Hamiltonian dynamics can be exploited for time-dependent dynamics. In this work, we systemically investigate how Sambe-Howland's clock can serve as a unifying framework for simulating time-dependent Hamiltonian dynamics. Firstly, we demonstrate the versatility of this approach by showcasing its compatibility with analog quantum computing and digital quantum computing. Secondly, for digital quantum computers, we illustrate how this framework, combined with time-independent methods (e.g., product formulas, multi-product formulas, qDrift, and LCU-Taylor), can facilitate the development of efficient algorithms for simulating time-dependent dynamics. This framework allows us to (a) resolve the problem of finding minimum-gate time-dependent product formulas; (b) establish a unified picture of both Suzuki's and Huyghebaert and De Raedt's approaches; (c) generalize Huyghebaert and De Raedt's first and second-order formula to arbitrary orders; (d) answer an unsolved question in establishing time-dependent multi-product formulas; (e) and recover continuous qDrift on the same footing as time-independent qDrift. Thirdly, we demonstrate the efficacy of our newly developed higher-order Huyghebaert and De Raedt's algorithm through digital adiabatic simulation.

12.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-08

Distributed control circuits across a brain-and-cord connectome

Just as genomes revolutionized molecular genetics, connectomes (maps of neurons and synapses) are transforming neuroscience. To date, the only organisms with complete connectomes are worms1–3, sea squirts4, and comb jellies5 (103–104 synapses). By contrast, the fruit fly is more complex (108 synaptic connections), with a brain that supports learning and spatial memory6,7 and an intricate ventral nerve cord analogous to the vertebrate spinal cord8–12. Here we report the first densely-reconstructed adult fly connectome that unites the brain and ventral nerve cord, and we leverage this resource to investigate principles of neural control. We show that effector neurons (motor neurons, endocrine cells, and efferent neurons targeting the viscera) are primarily influenced by sensory neurons in the same body part, forming local feedback loops. These local loops are linked by long-range circuits involving ascending and descending neurons organized into behavior-centric modules. Single ascending and descending neurons are often positioned to influence the voluntary movements of multiple body parts, together with the endocrine cells or visceral organs that support those movements. Brain regions involved in learning and navigation supervise these circuits. These results reveal an architecture that is distributed, parallelized, and embodied, reminiscent of distributed control architectures in engineered systems13,14.

13.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

<i>CHPO</i> coordinates chilling recovery and nitrogen use in rice

Authors:

Global rice production faces mounting challenges from abnormal temperature fluctuations and nitrogen-fertilizer-driven environmental pollution1–7. Developing varieties that balance chilling resilience and nitrogen-use efficiency (NUE) offers a promising solution, but the molecular networks coordinating these traits remain poorly understood. Here we identify CHILLING PHOENIX (CHPO), a major gene underlying the quantitative trait locus shared by both chilling tolerance and resilience. It encodes a MYB transcription factor that acts as a key regulator coordinating post-chilling recovery with nitrogen use in rice. Natural variation in a GCG-repeat-encoded polyalanine tract alters CHPO DNA-binding preference and redirects regulatory outputs between the japonica-type (CHPOjap) and indica-type (CHPOind), causing opposing effects on chilling tolerance and resilience. This allelic variation is shaped by domestication selection, with the CHPOjap allele probably derived from Chinese wild rice. CHPOjap directly targets OsTCP19 and OsNRT2.4 to fine-tune NUE, thereby enhancing chilling tolerance and resilience. These findings provide a mechanistic framework for a chilling-induced high-nitrogen-utilization module that alleviates the damage caused by chilling stress, and a potential molecular design&nbsp;strategy for breeding rice varieties with both chilling resilience and high NUE at the&nbsp;recovery stage. A rice gene, CHPO, links chilling resilience with nitrogen-use efficiency, revealing a domestication-shaped regulatory mechanism that could guide breeding of climate-resilient, sustainable rice varieties.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantum enhancement and Doppler suppression of Kasevich-Chu atom interferometer with motional squeezing states

arXiv:2606.16632v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hybridization of internal and external atomic degrees of freedom in a Kasevich-Chu interferometer enables the possibility to enhance the sensitivity significantly even under quantum-standard limit. By introducing motional squeezing state as an input, we systematically derive the computational framework of quantum and classical Fisher information of two measurement protocols for arbitrary strength of Doppler effects. Through maximizing the corresponding classical Fisher information, we obtain the optimal control parameters and the corresponding quantum Fisher information. For population measurement, the largest sensitivity can be as large as four times than the semi-classical limit through enlarging the atom coherence length. For joint measurement of population and position, the competition between quantum enhancement and Doppler suppression induces two three behaviors, in one regime, the quantum enhancement dominates even in presence of strong Doppler broadening effects where the sensitivity is significantly enhanced; while in another regime, an optimal squeezing parameter is observed where the classical Fisher information reaches the maximum. Our results clearly demonstrate the robustness of external quantum enhancement against Doppler suppression. Our proposal can be readily applied to gravimeter of mobile platform where decoherence from noise will damage the many-body entanglement of internal spin squeezing.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Moving Beyond Diffusion: Hierarchy-to-Hierarchy Autoregression for fMRI-to-Image Reconstruction

Reconstructing visual stimuli from fMRI signals is a central challenge bridging machine learning and neuroscience. Recent diffusion-based methods typically map fMRI activity to a single neural embedding, using it as static guidance throughout the entire generation process. However, this fixed guidance collapses hierarchical neural information and is misaligned with the stage-dependent demands of image reconstruction. In response, we propose MindHier, a coarse-to-fine fMRI-to-image reconstruction framework built on scale-wise autoregressive modeling. MindHier introduces three components: a Hierarchical fMRI Encoder to extract multi-level neural embeddings, a Hierarchy-to-Hierarchy Alignment scheme to enforce layer-wise correspondence with CLIP features, and a Scale-Aware Coarse-to-Fine Neural Guidance strategy to inject these embeddings into autoregression at matching scales. These designs make MindHier an efficient and cognitively aligned alternative to diffusion-based methods by enabling a hierarchical reconstruction process that synthesizes global semantics before refining local details, akin to human visual perception. Extensive experiments on the NSD dataset show that MindHier achieves superior semantic fidelity, 4.67$\times$ faster inference, and more deterministic results than the diffusion-based baselines.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

A Multi-Agent AI System for Automated High School Transcript Processing: Collaborative Document Analysis at Scale

arXiv:2606.13916v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Each year, college admissions offices face an overwhelming challenge: processing millions of high school transcripts, each with unique formats, grading systems, and layouts. This manual process creates operational bottlenecks that delay admissions decisions and consume valuable resources. We present a transformative solution through a multi-agent AI system where specialized agents collaborate to automatically process diverse transcript formats through intelligent coordination and communication. Our multi-agent architecture consists of three specialized agents-a Pattern Recognition Agent for format-specific parsing, a Semantic Analysis Agent for natural language understanding, and a Vision Intelligence Agent for multimodal document analysis-coordinated by an Orchestration Agent that manages agent communication and result reconciliation. Our key innovation lies in agent-based quality control using GPA extraction as a coordination signal, ensuring reliable agent collaboration and preventing critical information loss. When evaluated on 40 real world transcripts from high schools across 13 U.S. states, our agent system successfully processed every document, achieving 96.7% accuracy compared to expert manual review while maintaining practical processing speeds of 45 seconds per transcript. This work demonstrates how multi-agent coordination can solve complex document processing challenges, offering institutions a scalable, collaborative AI solution that preserves accuracy while dramatically reducing processing time.

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

LLM-Powered Personalized Glycemic Assessment in Type 2 Diabetes with Wearable Sensor Data

arXiv:2606.12699v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) poses an increasing global health threat, demanding effective glycemic assessment to support personalized and improved diabetes care. Wearable sensors such as continuous glucose monitors (CGM) and fitness trackers offer many valuable insights for glycemic assessment. However, effectively analyzing these data requires integration with essential individual-level context. Existing methods are often based on traditional machine learning (ML) and rely primarily on historical blood glucose measurements and overlook personalized information, which limits their performance across diverse diabetes populations. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their ability to integrate diverse data modalities while modeling sequential dependencies, motivating the exploration of their potential for personalized glycemic assessment. In this paper, we propose GlyLLM, an LLM-powered framework for modeling CGM-based glycemic dynamics through the integration of wearable sensor data and structured metadata. GlyLLM can leverage the extensive prior knowledge of pre-trained LLMs and achieve sensor-text semantic abstraction at decision time. Experiments on two related tasks on the AI-READI dataset demonstrate that our model outperforms traditional ML methods by an average of 13.66\% in Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) for glucose forecasting and 13.08\% in Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic (AUROC) for diabetes categorization. Additionally, our ablation study shows that diabetes surveys and biometric tests are more critical than other health information for glycemic assessment. Our work presents a promising step toward harnessing the power of LLMs to advance personalized glycemic assessment in T2D care.

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

Getting Better at Working With You: Compiling User Corrections into Runtime Enforcement for Coding Agents

Interactive LLM agents are becoming part of daily work, but they do not reliably become easier to work with over time: a correction remembered in one session may still be violated in the next. We study this gap between preference access and preference compliance. In tasks derived from anonymized real-user friction cases, Mem0 memory still leaves 57.5% of applicable preference checks violated. We introduce Test-time Rule Acquisition and Compiled Enforcement (TRACE), a drop-in skill-layer pipeline for coding-agent runtimes that mines user corrections, rewrites them as atomic rules, and compiles them into runtime checks that must pass before an agent completes future tasks. Unlike runtime checks written ahead of time by developers, TRACE skills come from the user's own chat corrections. We evaluate TRACE with simulated user-in-the-loop experiments on ClawArena coding-agent tasks and MemoryArena-derived memory-intensive tasks. On ClawArena, TRACE reduces held-out preference violation from 100.0% to 37.6% on in-distribution tasks and from 100.0% to 2.0% on out-of-distribution tasks. On MemoryArena-derived tasks, TRACE reduces in-distribution violation from 100.0% to 60.5% while matching or exceeding the strongest memory baseline on task pass. These results suggest that compiling corrections into runtime enforcement can address a repeated-friction failure mode that memory alone does not reliably solve, reducing the need for users to restate the same correction across future sessions. Experiment code is available at https://github.com/YujunZhou/TRACE_exp, and the deployable skill is available at https://github.com/YujunZhou/tellonce.

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

StainFlow: Entity-Stain Tracking and Evidence Linking for Process Rewards in GUI Agents

arXiv:2606.07027v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become a promising approach for improving GUI Agents in long-horizon, stochastic digital environments, but trajectory-level success feedback is too sparse to provide reliable credit assignment for intermediate exploration steps. To mitigate this issue, recent studies introduce Process Reward Models (PRMs), which provide finer-grained training feedback through global milestone verification or local step-level evaluation. However, these methods still suffer from two level-specific limitations: global milestone decomposition is subjective and singular, making it difficult to accommodate the multiple valid execution paths in real GUI tasks, while fixed local judging windows may miss long-range key evidence or dilute the decision signal with irrelevant frames. Inspired by stain-tracing mechanisms in network flow analysis, we propose StainFlow, an entity-stain-flow process reward model for GUI Agents. To reduce the subjectivity of global partitioning, we introduce the Global Entity Stain Tracking module, which extracts visually verifiable task entities and tracks how their stain concentrations and states evolve along the trajectory, allowing task phases to be objectively separated by changes in the entity evidence flow. To improve the accuracy of local verification, we introduce the Local Stain Evidence Linking module. Centered on the triggering entities of each candidate key node, it retrieves relevant steps based on their stain concentrations and state changes, and dynamically constructs high-density evidence windows for verifying true key nodes. Extensive experiments on AndroidWorld and OGRBench show that StainFlow relatively improves online RL success by 3.2% and trajectory completion judgment accuracy by 1.8%.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

BLUEmed: Retrieval-Augmented Multi-Agent Debate for Clinical Error Detection

Terminology substitution errors in clinical notes, where one medical term is replaced by a linguistically valid but clinically different term, pose a persistent challenge for automated error detection in healthcare. We introduce BLUEmed, a multi-agent debate framework augmented with hybrid Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) that combines evidence-grounded reasoning with multi-perspective verification for clinical error detection. BLUEmed decomposes each clinical note into focused sub-queries, retrieves source-partitioned evidence through dense, sparse, and online retrieval, and assigns two domain expert agents distinct knowledge bases to produce independent analyses; when the experts disagree, a structured counter-argumentation round and cross-source adjudication resolve the conflict, followed by a cascading safety layer that filters common false-positive patterns. We evaluate BLUEmed on a clinical terminology substitution detection benchmark under both zero-shot and few-shot prompting with multiple backbone models spanning proprietary and open-source families. Experimental results show that BLUEmed achieves the best accuracy (69.13%), ROC-AUC (74.45%), and PR-AUC (72.44%) under few-shot prompting, outperforming both single-agent RAG and debate-only baselines. Further analyses across six backbone models and two prompting strategies confirm that retrieval augmentation and structured debate are complementary, and that the framework benefits most from models with sufficient instruction-following and clinical language understanding.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Compute Efficiency and Serial Runtime Tradeoffs for Stochastic Momentum Methods

arXiv:2606.19179v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Stochastic momentum methods such as heavy ball (HB), Nesterov momentum, and variants of Accelerated SGD (ASGD) [Kidambi et al., 2018] are widely used in modern training, but their stochastic benefits depend on two distinct quantities: serial runtime, the number of iterations needed to reach a target accuracy, and compute efficiency (CE), the inverse total gradient-query or FLOP cost. Larger batches reduce serial runtime without hurting CE only when the contraction gap grows linearly with batch size. We study stochastic HB and ASGD for consistent linear regression with Gaussian covariates and prove finite-dimensional, discrete-time lower bounds on their batch-size tradeoffs. Our first result shows that HB does not improve the CE frontier over SGD for arbitrary spectra; rather, it preserves SGD-level CE over a larger batch-size window, allowing larger batches to reduce serial runtime until HB reaches its deterministic accelerated scale. This window can be a factor $\sqrt{\kappa}$ larger than the SGD critical batch size. For ASGD, the picture is more spectrum-dependent: for rapidly decaying power-law spectra, ASGD improves small-batch CE over HB/SGD, but as batch size grows it trades this CE advantage for improved serial runtime. Synthetic linear-regression experiments verify these qualitative regimes, including near-overlap of ASGD and HB for slowly decaying spectra and the predicted CE–serial tradeoff for rapidly decaying spectra.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

The Circumplex Degeneracy Behind the Rare-Class Limit in Affect Recognition

In-the-wild expression recognition persistently fails on a few rare emotions, and the standard explanation is class imbalance. Through a controlled multi-task study on two benchmarks, we show the failure is instead a property of affect geometry: the rare classes are degenerate on Russell's circumplex, and that degeneracy bounds what any loss or cost can achieve. Our instrument is a circumplex-cost optimal-transport term that prices expression confusions by their valence-arousal distance. The term improves the official score and expression macro-F1, but a control most studies omit shows the gain is not geometric: a uniform cost, equivalent to a generic confidence penalty, matches it on Aff-Wild2 (p=0.625) and significantly exceeds it on AffectNet (+0.057 over base, larger than the circumplex). What the geometry reshapes is the structure of the errors, making them affectively nearer the truth on Aff-Wild2 (p=0.031 against the uniform control), an effect that does not survive on AffectNet, where a visual confound at the far corner of the circumplex overwhelms it. The rare-class failure, by contrast, is stable across both datasets we examine: the degenerate pairs (anger-fear on Aff-Wild2, anger-contempt on AffectNet) resist frequency-based interventions, the transport term, and an action-unit-augmented cost built specifically to separate them. We conclude that progress on rare expressions requires representations that distinguish the classes, not supervision that reprices their confusions, and we provide the controls and metrics needed to tell the two apart.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Off-Policy Evaluation for Missingness-Aware Policies in MDPs with Rewards Missing Not at Random

arXiv:2606.20206v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In offline Reinforcement Learning, immediate rewards in logged batch data are often unobserved due to sparse or irregular record-keeping, or censored beyond certain reward values. This issue arises in practical settings, including health care and marketing. We investigate off-policy evaluation (OPE) in finite-horizon Markov decision processes when rewards are missing not at random (MNAR), which breaks ignorability and induces selection bias even after conditioning on states and actions. To address this, we formalize a reward-dependent propensity model and use future states as shadow variables to identify the full-data conditional mean reward. We further introduce a bridge function that recovers the conditional mean reward without explicitly modeling the MNAR mechanism, and estimate it via a min-max procedure to avoid double sampling. Building upon these identification results, we propose an Fitted-Q-Evaluation-style estimator that propagates the recovered rewards while allowing target policies to depend on past missingness indicators. Finally, we establish consistency and finite-sample error bounds for our OPE estimator, and show through experiments the strong performance of our method compared to existing methods on simulated and MIMIC-III Sepsis data.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

SkillCAT: Contrastive Assessment and Topology-Aware Skill Self-Evolution for LLM Agents

Skill self-evolution methods for LLM agents aim to turn execution trajectories into reusable skill documents, but current pipelines typically learn from one trajectory per task, merge candidate skill patches before checking them, and load the full skill corpus before inference. We propose SkillCAT, a training-free framework that separates this process into three stages. Contrastive Causal Extraction (CCE) samples multiple trajectories for each task and compares same-task success/failure pairs to identify evidence that explains outcome differences. Assessment-Augmented Evolution (AAE) replays each candidate patch on source-task clones and keeps only patches that improve or preserve task outcomes before hierarchical skill patch merging. Topology-Aware Task Execution (TTE) compiles the evolved skills into a routable sub-skill topology, so inference loads only the capability nodes relevant to the task. We evaluate SkillCAT on common agent benchmarks, including SpreadsheetBench, WikiTableQuestions, and DocVQA, and further test cross-model and out-of-distribution generalization. Across these settings, SkillCAT raises the average score over baselines by up to 40.40%, demonstrating reliable skill evolution without model training.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Prevalence and Correlates of Ideal Cardiovascular Health among Ugandan Adolescents: A Cross-Sectional Study

Introduction: Cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors often emerge during adolescence and track into adulthood, yet data on cardiovascular health (CVH) in sub-Saharan Africa remain limited. We assessed the prevalence and correlates of ideal CVH among Ugandan adolescents. Methods: We analysed baseline data of adolescents enrolled in a cluster-randomised controlled trial being conducted in urban (Kampala) and rural (Jinja) districts of Uganda. In this study, Ideal CVH was defined as meeting "ideal" status of 5-7 of the American Heart Association's Life's Simple 7 metrics. Random-effects logistic regression was used to identify factors associated with ideal CVH, accounting for village-level clustering. Results: We recruited 1316 participants with a mean age of 13.2 years, of whom 58.1% were female. Overall, the prevalence of ideal CVH was 66.8% (95% CI: 64.2% - 69.3%). The prevalence was higher in Jinja (74.4%, 95%CI: 70.9% - 77.7%) than Kampala (59.6%, 95%CI: 55.8%-63.2%) and the difference was evident (p