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01.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-21

Novel symptoms associated with eclampsia could improve detection and save lives

by Alice Beardmore-Gray, Andrew Shennan Eclampsia is a life-threatening complication of pre-eclampsia, yet remains difficult to predict. In this Perspective, Alice Beardmore-Gray and Andrew Shennan highlight a recent study that identifies 10 novel prodromal symptoms of eclampsia, with potential to better predict which women are at risk and therefore reduce delays in intervention.

02.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-21

Machine learning evaluation of gene expression-based ALS subtypes across brain and blood tissues

The clinical and molecular heterogeneity observed in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) presents a challenge for diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment. RNA sequencing of post-mortem brain samples from ALS patients has identified several subtypes with distinct molecular signatures. We sought to evaluate these subtypes across diverse tissues and datasets and assess the feasibility of supervised machine learning models for sample classification. Unsupervised clustering and pathway analysis were performed to confirm the presence of ALS subtypes in motor cortex samples. Three machine learning strategies were then used to create models based on post-mortem motor cortex expression data of 112 people with ALS from the London Neurodegenerative Diseases Brain Bank. These models were subsequently improved through feature selection and evaluated in independent cohorts from motor cortex (n = 257, NYGC ALS Consortium) and blood (n = 96, Macquarie University Neurodegenerative Disease Biobank) samples. Multi-class linear discriminant analysis (LDA) models were then used for subtype classification. Clustering of ALS post-mortem motor cortex samples confirmed the presence of three subtypes: neuroinflammation (ALS-Neu), extracellular matrix organisation and muscle contraction (ALS-OxA), and synaptic and neuropeptide signalling (ALS-SNs). Among all machine learning strategies, random forests produced the most accurate and stable models for binary classification (~93% accuracy across the three subtypes). After feature selection, random forest models were able to classify samples from an independent post-mortem motor cortex cohort in their respective subtypes (AUC of ~0.98 across the three subtypes). When these models were evaluated in blood using LDA, we found consistent clustering patterns, with samples aligning in the same subtype regions of the post-mortem motor cortex samples, with ALS-SNs being the subtype in which samples were classified with the highest confidence (LDA class probability ~86%). Moreover, classification for this subtype improved when blood samples were collected closer to death. Our findings support the presence of three gene expression-based ALS subtypes in motor cortex samples and the utility of machine learning strategies for subtype classification. We also observed that the subtypes identified in the brain partially match those in the blood, with samples from the late stages of the disease more likely to be correctly predicted into the ALS-SNs cluster. This suggests a longitudinal effect in subtype identification that requires further investigation.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Characteristics and Outcomes of Gene-Elusive Dilated Cardiomyopathy

Background and Aims Genetic testing in dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) guides risk stratification and family screening. Likely pathogenic or pathogenic (LP/P) variants are identified in approximately one-third of patients, leaving many without a genetic diagnosis. Cohort studies suggest that "gene-elusive" patients have a lower risk of adverse events. This study aims to better characterise this group and identify factors associated with adverse outcomes. Methods Consecutive and unrelated DCM patients undergoing genetic testing and returning no LP/P variants were retrospectively recruited and compared to two control cohorts of DCM patients carrying LP/P variants in LMNA and TTN for a primary composite endpoint of end-stage heart failure (ESHF) or malignant ventricular arrhythmia (MVA). Results Among patients without prior MVA, the composite endpoint occurred in 36/423 (8.5%) gene-elusive, 14/39 (35.9%) LMNA and 11/100 (11%) TTN cardiomyopathy patients (log-rank p

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Inference-time Policy Steering via Vision and Touch

arXiv:2606.14981v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inference-time steering adapts pre-trained generative robot policies during deployment by verifying candidate actions before execution. While prior methods typically perform this verification only with visual observations, vision alone is often insufficient for contact-rich manipulation, where success depends on both global task progress and subtle local interactions such as contact force. We introduce ViTaL, a visuo-tactile inference-time steering framework that formulates multimodal guidance as a bi-level optimization problem. At the high level, visual sampling-and-verification performs long-horizon mode selection, deciding what behavior the robot should execute. At the low level, tactile-guided diffusion editing refines the selected action sequence over a shorter horizon to satisfy local contact requirements. To support outcome-based steering, ViTaL learns a visuo-tactile latent world model and employs semantically aligned visual and tactile verifiers, including a novel text-conditioned tactile reward that scores predicted tactile futures directly in latent space. Across three real-world contact-rich manipulation tasks, ViTaL improves overall success by 51% over the base policy, outperforms unimodal steering by at least 33%, and exceeds naive multimodal fusion by at least 20%. Website: https://yilin-wu98.github.io/vital_website.

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

HiMPO: Hindsight-Informed Memory Policy Optimization for Less-Entangled Credit in Long-Horizon Agents

Long-horizon agents rely on memory mechanisms to compress interaction history, but optimizing memory writing faces a distinct credit assignment challenge: a memory update may be rewarded or penalized due to downstream tool failures, noisy observations, or reasoning errors rather than its own contribution. This causally entangled credit can lead agents to discard useful evidence or preserve irrelevant information. We propose HiMPO, a Hindsight-Informed Memory Policy Optimization framework for assigning less-entangled credit to memory-writing actions in long-horizon agents. HiMPO first estimates the local utility of a memory update by comparing the task-relevant information recoverable from the previous and updated memories under the same pre-write state. It then uses hindsight relevance as a bounded retrospective filter that attenuates memory credit when local utility is not supported by the target outcome. The resulting memory-specific advantage is applied only to memory tokens, while trajectory-level rewards optimize the rest of the agent behavior. Across judge-based open-domain tasks and objective compressive-memory QA, HiMPO improves over strong memory-based and RL-based baselines while preserving compressed-context efficiency. Controlled interventions further show that HiMPO reduces blame leakage from tool-induced errors and improves attribution fidelity of memory updates.

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

Signals of Provenance: Practices & Challenges of Navigating Indicators in AI-Generated Media for Sighted and Blind Individuals

arXiv:2505.16057v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI-Generated (AIG) content has become increasingly widespread by recent advances in generative models and the easy-to-use tools that have significantly lowered the technical barriers for producing highly realistic audio, images, and videos through simple natural language prompts. In response, platforms are adopting provable provenance with platforms recommending AIG to be self-disclosed and signaled to users. However, these indicators may be often missed, especially when they rely solely on visual cues and make them ineffective to users with different sensory abilities. To address the gap, we conducted semi-structured interviews (N=28) with 15 sighted and 13 BLV participants to examine their interaction with AIG content through self-disclosed AI indicators. Our findings reveal diverse mental models and practices, highlighting different strengths and weaknesses of content-based (e.g., title, description) and menu-aided (e.g., AI labels) indicators. While sighted participants leveraged visual and audio cues, BLV participants primarily relied on audio and existing assistive tools, limiting their ability to identify AIG. Across both groups, they frequently overlooked menu-aided indicators deployed by platforms and rather interacted with content-based indicators such as title and comments. We uncovered usability challenges stemming from inconsistent indicator placement, unclear metadata, and cognitive overload. These issues were especially critical for BLV individuals due to the insufficient accessibility of interface elements. We provide practical recommendations and design implications for future AIG indicators across several dimensions.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Critically Engaged Pragmatism: Scientific Norm and Social, Pragmatist Epistemology for AI Science Evaluation Tools

Authors:

arXiv:2601.09753v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI science evaluation tools aim to assess research credibility. As with traditional metrics such as impact factors, their edicts can be decontextualised and repurposed in problematic ways. To address this, I propose Critically-Engaged Pragmatism as a scientific norm enjoining scientific communities to scrutinise the purposes and purpose-specific reliability of AI science evaluation tools. To foster Critically Engaged Pragmatism, creators of AI science evaluation tools should transparently and fully report design, training, and benchmarking details to facilitate assessments of purpose-specific reliability, liability to different types of error, and bias. What count as best practices for the transparent reporting of AI science evaluation tools should be updated as new forms of error, bias, and gamesmanship are discovered. Under this framework, AI science evaluation tools are not objective arbiters of scientific credibility. Rather, they are the object of critical discursive practices that ultimately ground the credibility of scientific communities.

08.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-08

Single-cell spatial pharmacobiology for imaging antibody-based therapies in solid tumors

Authors: Unknown Author

We have developed single-cell spatial pharmacobiology (SSP), which combines in situ imaging of a systemically infused fluorescent therapeutic antibody with high-plex spatial proteomics. Applied to head and neck and pancreatic tumors from patients treated in phase 1 trials, SSP revealed marked spatial heterogeneity in antibody delivery and target engagement, which was shaped by conserved stromal barriers.

09.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

SteerAF: Distogram-based Steering of AlphaFold2 toward Alternative Conformations

End-to-end structure predictors, such as AlphaFold2, typically output only the dominant conformational state of a given protein, which is biased by the training data set. Existing strategies for recovering alternative conformations are often computationally expensive and offer limited biological interpretability. Here, we present SteerAF, an inference-time optimization framework based on AlphaFold2 that leverages information encoded in the distogram derived from deep multiple sequence alignments (MSAs) to predict alternative protein conformations. Across four benchmark datasets, SteerAF matches or surpasses existing methods in predicting alternative conformations for the majority of systems. Sparse MSA-feature modifications generated via block gradient ascent exhibit a strong correlation with experimentally characterized functional residues, recovering them with approximately 50% precision in the tested proteins. Furthermore, SteerAF enables effective decoy selection in the absence of experimental structures, and its predictions can serve as seed structures for molecular dynamics simulations to map conformational landscapes. Thus, SteerAF provides an efficient and interpretable approach for predicting alternative conformations, offering a framework that can be extended to other similar predictors and problems.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

RATS! Patches Talk Through Registers: Emergent Parts in Register Attention Transformers

When humans see a bird, they recognize far more than just "bird" – they see a head, wings, and talons, a structured assembly of reusable parts that can be identified across every bird they have ever seen. We ask whether a self-supervised visual model can discover the same compositional structure on its own. To this end, we propose RATS (Register Attention Transformers), which decomposes the classification token into N learnable register tokens that route patch information through an L->N->N->L bottleneck via a three-step compress-communicate-broadcast attention. The N registers are partitioned across the H attention heads, so that registers assigned to different heads do not interact with each other. Without auxiliary losses or part annotations, each register spontaneously specializes into a proto-semantic region whose emerging structure resembles object parts. RATS surpasses all baselines by +12 mIoU on average across five segmentation benchmarks, with consistent gains on ADE20K (+1.11 mIoU) and COCO (+0.2 AP^m). Its register dictionary further exhibits part-level consistency and semantic proximity across related categories. Our results suggest that RATS may provide a useful architectural prior for structured and interpretable visual representation learning.

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

Model-Based and Data-Driven Hierarchical Control and Topology Co-Design for Robust Networked Systems

arXiv:2606.11596v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we consider a class of networked systems comprising an interconnected set of linear subsystems, disturbance inputs, and performance outputs. Using dissipativity theory, we first propose a model-based hierarchical control design strategy to ensure the closed-loop networked system is dissipative from its disturbance inputs to performance outputs. This involves designing local controllers for each subsystem to enforce local dissipativity guarantees, which are then exploited to co-design distributed global controllers and the interconnection topology to enforce global dissipativity guarantees while optimizing interconnection topology costs. The overall design process requires only solving a sequence of linear matrix inequality (LMI) problems, thereby retaining compositionality and decentralizability while avoiding non-convex, iterative design processes that are inefficient and centralized. This model-based hierarchical control design strategy assumes the knowledge of the subsystem dynamics, which may not hold in many real-world networked systems. Motivated by this, we also propose a data-driven hierarchical control design strategy that assumes only the availability of rich input-state-output trajectory data from the subsystems. The proposed data-driven design process assumes that the unknown disturbances affecting the subsystem dynamics are bounded by a quadratic matrix inequality (relaxing conventional bounds) and accounts for this by using the matrix S-lemma. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed model-based and data-driven hierarchical control designs is illustrated for a networked system representing a DC microgrid, with the aim of enforcing robust (dissipative) voltage regulation and current sharing.

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

SP$^3$: Spherical Priors for Plug-and-Play Restoration

In this paper, we introduce SP$^3$, a novel Plug-and-Play algorithm that accelerates maximum a posteriori image restoration by replacing denoisers with Spherical Encoders (SE) as generative priors. SP$^3$ approximates the intractable proximal prior step by utilizing the SE tightly structured latent space as a robust projection onto the natural image manifold. Alternating this projection with a closed-form data-consistency step, via Half-Quadratic Splitting, achieves stable convergence without requiring gradient computation during inference. This unique formulation unlocks "anytime" restoration capabilities, producing sharp, plausible images from the first iteration. Evaluations across a variety of image restoration tasks demonstrate that SP$^3$ achieves perceptual quality comparable to state-of-the-art zero-shot diffusion and flow methods while being $3$-$630\times$ faster.

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

CoBit: Language Modeling with Bitstream Diffusion

Diffusion language models (DLMs) promise parallel, order-agnostic generation, but on standard benchmarks they have historically lagged behind autoregressive models in sample quality and diversity. Recent continuous flow and diffusion approaches have narrowed this gap. In this work, we further close the autoregressive gap by modeling text as a continuous diffusion process over fixed-width binary bitstreams. We refer to the resulting model as CoBit (Continuous Bitstream Diffusion). Our approach represents semantic tokens as analog bit sequences and uses a matched-filter residual parameterization to isolate contextual learning from analytic independent-bit posteriors. Crucially, we adopt a stochastic sampler that applies Langevin-type corrections gated by the entropy-rate profile, concentrating stochasticity in high-information regions while remaining nearly deterministic elsewhere. On LM1B, our 130M-parameter model reaches a generative perplexity (GenPPL) of 59.76 at matched real-data entropy (4.31) using 256 neural function evaluations (NFEs), outperforming prior DLM baselines and reaching the autoregressive reference. On OpenWebText (OWT), our sampler establishes a new continuous-DLM Pareto frontier, achieving GenPPL 27.06 at entropy 5.26 using 4x fewer steps than previous 1024-NFE baselines. Scaling the same recipe to a 462M-parameter model (CoBit-M) further improves the OWT GenPPL-entropy frontier over the 130M model (CoBit-S) and over medium-scale continuous and discrete DLM baselines, reaching GenPPL 19.5 at entropy 5.40, near real-data entropy (5.44), and approaching pretrained GPT-2 Medium over the high-quality region. As an additional benefit, bitstream diffusion removes the O(V) vocabulary scaling bottleneck of standard DLMs: by predicting O(log V) bitwise logits via semantic bit-patching, it lowers memory and raises throughput, a scalable paradigm as vocabulary sizes grow.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Fast and high-fidelity transfer of edge states via dynamical control of topological phases and effects of dissipation

arXiv:2505.16606v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Topological edge states are robust against symmetry-preserving perturbations and noise, making them promising for quantum information and computation, particularly in topological quantum computation through the braiding operations of Majorana quasiparticles. Realizing these applications requires fast and high-fidelity dynamic control of edge states. In this work, we theoretically propose a high-fidelity protocol for transferring topological edge states by dynamically moving a domain wall between two regions with different topological numbers in one dimension. This protocol fundamentally relies on Lorentz invariance and relativistic effects, because moving the domain wall at a constant speed is described by a mass term with the uniform linear motion in the Dirac equation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our protocol in transferring edge states with high fidelity using a one-dimensional quantum walk with two internal states, which is feasible with current experimental technology. We also investigate how bit-flip and dephasing dissipation to the environment affect transfer efficiency. Remarkably, bit (dephasing) dissipation does not affect the fidelity at the slow (fast) transfer limit, which can be explained by the relativistic effects on the edge states.

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

Coercivity and Local Convergence of Physical Learning in Linear Circuits

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

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Computing noise-canceling observables via Pauli propagation

arXiv:2606.20441v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The pursuit of quantum advantage is driving the co-evolution of quantum processors and classical simulation methods. Despite advances in scale and quality, the accuracy of quantum simulation is ultimately limited by error rates and sampling overheads. Similarly, while classical simulation methods such as Pauli propagation have made remarkable progress, their accuracy is ultimately limited by the exponential growth of operator paths and the truncations needed to control memory and runtime. Here we show that these complementary limitations can be mitigated by embedding Pauli propagation within a hybrid error-mitigation framework that reduces quantum sampling overhead while achieving lower truncation errors with fewer classical resources than traditional Pauli propagation alone. In this framework, a target observable is classically propagated through noise-canceling inverse channels, producing a modified observable that is measured directly on a quantum processor. We prototype two implementations and benchmark their performance numerically on canonical models that challenge traditional Pauli propagation. We also perform experiments on a quantum processor using 56 superconducting qubits, revealing the tradeoffs of their respective truncation strategies. These results illustrate how classical and quantum resources can be orchestrated to extend observable estimation beyond the limits of either approach alone, providing a foundation for quantum-centric supercomputing and future demonstrations of quantum advantage.

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

A Tutorial on World Models and Physical AI

Authors:

arXiv:2606.12783v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World modeling is emerging as a central principle for building intelligent systems capable of prediction, reasoning, and decision making. A central distinction can be drawn between explicit world models, which learn structured dynamics for rollout-based reasoning and planning, and implicit world models, which encode predictive structure within scalable learned representations. These complementary paradigms provide a foundation for physical AI in domains such as robotics and autonomous driving, enabling intelligence beyond reactive control under real-world constraints. Recent foundation models further suggest a pathway toward unified systems integrating perception, prediction, and action. Despite rapid progress, major challenges remain in hierarchical reasoning, long-horizon planning, and autonomous goal formation, which are critical for advancing toward artificial general intelligence. This tutorial presents a coherent framework in which diverse world modeling approaches are unified through shared predictive structure and differentiated by how such structure is represented and exploited.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Quantum Reservoir Computing for Short-Term Power Load Forecasting in Resource-Constrained Energy Systems

arXiv:2606.12806v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Short-term load forecasting is essential for reliable energy management, but practical deployment on edge devices requires models that remain accurate under limited memory, finite measurement budgets, and hardware noise. This work proposes a hardware-efficient Quantum Reservoir Computing (QRC) framework for energy load forecasting, where a fixed quantum reservoir transforms temporal input windows into high-dimensional features and only a classical Elastic Net readout is trained. To reduce deployment cost, the trained readout is compressed using post-training fixed-point quantization at bit widths from 8 to 2 bits. The framework is evaluated on the Tetouan and Spain energy load datasets under exact statevector simulation, 512-shot finite sampling, and realistic hardware-noise models from IBM FakeTorino and IBM FakeMarrakesh. Results show that 6-bit readout precision preserves full-precision forecasting performance while reducing readout memory by 81.2%. Below this point, degradation becomes dataset dependent, with Tetouan showing stronger sensitivity and Spain degrading more gradually. Hardware-noise validation further shows that the trained readout transfers to noisy reservoir states without retraining. These findings support quantized QRC as a resource-aware forecasting approach for near-term quantum time-series applications.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Quantum statistical enhancement of collective behaviour in a bosonic active Ising model

arXiv:2606.18091v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Collective behaviour such as flocking (the collective motion of a spontaneously formed group along a common direction) or aster formation (the binding of opposing flocks, inhibiting each others motion) are intriguing emergent phenomena in active systems with local alignment rules. Until recently, their occurrence was mainly studied for classical systems, a prime example being the active Ising model (AIM), which translates the main ingredients of flocking and aster formation (i.e., alignment and self-propulsion) to a lattice framework. Here we introduce and study a one-dimensional (1D) quantum lattice variant of the AIM, based on ideal bosons with a spin degree of freedom. We find that both the collective behaviours of the 1D classical model, flocking and aster formation, are markedly enhanced by the bosonic quantum statistics. This contrasts with a recent quantum generalization of the AIM based onto hard-core bosons [Khasseh et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 248302 (2025)], where flocking, but neither its quantum-statistical stabilization nor aster states were observed as a consequence of interactions. Moreover, we investigate the competition of this quantum statistical stabilization of collective phases with their suppression by the quantum fluctuations induced by a transverse external magnetic field.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Position: Generative Engine Optimization Creates Underexamined Risks, Governance Must Target Concentration, Disclosure, and Academic Blind Spots

arXiv:2606.12439v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) answer engines are increasingly used for information seeking, shifting visibility from ranked lists to synthesized answers. This enables Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), which targets LLM answer engines' evidence pool and generation. We analyze the search engine optimization (SEO) to GEO transition to identify two risks: (i) concentrated influence from low contestability and system sensitivity, and (ii) undisclosed commercial influence embedded in evidence and reasoning. We then formalize a general GEO pipeline to locate where optimization acts and compare academic and industry practices, revealing a third risk: (iii) academic-industry blind spots driven by visibility and evaluation asymmetries between offline setups and deployed systems. This position argues the need for answer-level governance and measurement: stronger contestability, high-precision disclosure, black-box auditing of material influence, and deployment-aligned metrics for exposure persistence.

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

Surprise-Guided MergeSort: Budget-Efficient Human-in-the-Loop Ranking via Adaptive Comparison Scheduling

arXiv:2606.15623v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pairwise comparison is the gold standard for subjective ranking tasks; however, exhaustive annotation requires a massive number of human comparisons ($O(n^2)$). While sorting-based methods have reduced this burden to $O(n\log n)$, they still require expensive human judgment for every single comparison. To further improve annotation efficiency, we propose leveraging a Vision-Language Model (VLM) not as an annotator replacement, but as a question prioritizer to identify which comparisons genuinely require human judgment. The proposed Surprise-Guided MergeSort (SGS) framework achieves this through three integrated components: (1) a bottom-up MergeSort scheduler that structures comparisons and exploits transitivity, (2) a composite Surprise Scorer – combining position-bias-cancelled VLM confidence, Elo gap, and vote entropy – to quantify comparison ambiguity, and (3) an adaptive budget allocator that routes high-surprise pairs to humans while automating low-surprise pairs via transitivity inference. Validation was conducted on six diverse benchmarks spanning text similarity (STS-B, BIOSSES, SICKR-STS) and image quality assessment (KonIQ-10k, TID2013, LIVE Challenge). SGS effectively identified and skipped up to 535 non-informative comparisons per session. Consequently, it achieved Kendall's $\tau{\times}100$ improvements of $+6$ to $+12$ over Active Elo under the same total budget. These results demonstrate that combining VLM-guided surprise metrics with algorithmic sorting provides a generally consistent accuracy-efficiency trade-off across diverse domains.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Echo2ECG: Enhancing ECG Representations with Cardiac Morphology from Multi-View Echos

arXiv:2603.08505v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Electrocardiography (ECG) is a low-cost, widely used modality for diagnosing electrical abnormalities like atrial fibrillation by capturing the heart's electrical activity. However, it cannot directly measure cardiac morphological phenotypes, such as left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF), which typically require echocardiography (Echo). Predicting these phenotypes from ECG would enable early, accessible health screening. Existing self-supervised methods suffer from a representational mismatch by aligning ECGs to single-view Echos, which only capture local, spatially restricted anatomical snapshots. To address this, we propose Echo2ECG, a multimodal self-supervised learning framework that enriches ECG representations with the heart's morphological structure captured in multi-view Echos. We evaluate Echo2ECG as an ECG feature extractor on two clinically relevant tasks that fundamentally require morphological information: (1) classification of structural cardiac phenotypes across three datasets, and (2) retrieval of Echo studies with similar morphological characteristics using ECG queries. Our extracted ECG representations consistently outperform those of state-of-the-art unimodal and multimodal baselines across both tasks, despite being 18x smaller than the largest baseline. These results demonstrate that Echo2ECG is a robust, powerful ECG feature extractor. Our code is accessible at https://github.com/michelleespranita/Echo2ECG.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Everywhere Valid Bounds on False Discovery Proportions in Conformal Inference

arXiv:2605.20726v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern applications of conformal inference to multiple testing problems, such as outlier detection and candidate selection, often involve selecting test samples whose conformal p-values fall below a threshold. The quality of such methods is often measured by the false discovery proportion (FDP), defined as the fraction of incorrect selections. Existing approaches typically control the expected value of the FDP, using methods such as the Benjamini-Hochberg procedure. This approach fails to provide high-probability bounds on the realized false discovery proportion and invalidates statistical guarantees if the rejection threshold is selected after inspecting the data. This paper establishes finite-sample, distribution-free upper bounds on the FDP that hold simultaneously over all possible rejection thresholds, enabling arbitrary post hoc selection of the threshold. Simultaneous validity is achieved by constructing a high-probability envelope for the empirical distribution function of null conformal p-values by sampling from their joint distribution. Furthermore, our framework allows practitioners to modulate the envelope's shape, thereby producing tight bounds in rejection regions of primary interest. We use this flexible approach to derive simultaneous FDP upper bounds for both outlier detection and conformal selection. We demonstrate through synthetic and real-data experiments that the resulting bounds are both valid and substantially less conservative than those derived from existing approaches.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Generalized Kullback-Leibler Divergence Loss

In this paper, we delve deeper into the Kullback-Leibler (KL) Divergence loss and mathematically prove that it is equivalent to the Decoupled Kullback-Leibler (DKL) Divergence loss that consists of (1) a weighted Mean Square Error (wMSE) loss and (2) a Cross-Entropy loss incorporating soft labels. Thanks to the decoupled structure of DKL loss, we have identified two areas for improvement. Firstly, we address the limitation of KL loss in scenarios like knowledge distillation by breaking its asymmetric optimization property along with a smoother weight function. This modification effectively alleviates convergence challenges in optimization, particularly for classes with high predicted scores in soft labels. Secondly, we introduce class-wise global information into KL/DKL to reduce bias arising from individual samples. With these two enhancements, we derive the Generalized Kullback-Leibler (GKL) Divergence loss and evaluate its effectiveness by conducting experiments on CIFAR-10/100, ImageNet, and vision-language datasets, focusing on adversarial training, and knowledge distillation tasks. Specifically, we achieve new state-of-the-art adversarial robustness on the public leaderboard – RobustBench and competitive knowledge distillation performance across CIFAR/ImageNet models and CLIP models, demonstrating the substantial practical merits. Our code is available at https://github.com/jiequancui/DKL.