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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

ReAge3D: Re-Aging 3D Faces with View Consistency

We present a novel framework for realistic and controllable 3D face re-aging which produces highly detailed, identity-preserving results. Existing 3D editing methods, while effective for coarse semantic changes, are not well suited for re-aging, as even small inconsistencies across re-aged 2D views can lead to over-smoothing of subtle but perceptually important age-related details. To address this challenge, we first introduce a 2D diffusion-based re-aging model, DiffReaging, trained on synthetically generated image pairs. We further propose a center-out editing propagation strategy that leverages this re-aging model to reconstruct multi-view-consistent re-aged images. Specifically, starting from a re-aged frontal pivot view, we reconstruct the remaining views through warping and our proposed Masked-DiffReaging process. By injecting existing content at every step of the diffusion process, Masked-DiffReaging ensures that the reconstructed regions remain coherent with existing pixels. The resulting consistent set of re-aged views supervises the optimization of the re-aged 3D representation. Our method outperforms existing 3D editing techniques both visually and quantitatively, enabling smooth, fine-grained control over age transformations in 3D face models.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Photon: Federated LLM Pre-Training

arXiv:2411.02908v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scaling large language models (LLMs) demands extensive data and computing resources, which are traditionally constrained to data centers by the high-bandwidth requirements of distributed training. Low-bandwidth methods like federated learning (FL) could enable collaborative training of larger models across weakly-connected GPUs if they can effectively be used for pre-training. To achieve this, we introduce Photon, the first complete system for federated end-to-end LLM training, leveraging cross-silo FL for global-scale training with minimal communication overheads. Using Photon, we train the first federated family of decoder-only LLMs from scratch. We show that: (1) Photon can train model sizes up to 7B in a federated fashion while reaching an even better perplexity than centralized pre-training; (2) Photon model training time decreases with available compute, achieving a similar compute-time trade-off to centralized; and (3) Photon outperforms the wall-time of baseline distributed training methods by 35% via communicating 64x-512xless. Our proposal is robust to data heterogeneity and converges twice as fast as previous methods like DiLoCo. This surprising data efficiency stems from a unique approach combining small client batch sizes with extremely high learning rates, enabled by federated averaging's robustness to hyperparameters. Photon thus represents the first economical system for global internet-wide LLM pre-training.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

ParaPairAudioBench: Paralinguistic Pairwise Audio Benchmark for LALM-as-a-Judge

Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have been widely used as judge models for the automatic evaluation of generated speech. However, prior approaches predominantly focus on holistic naturalness, leaving fine-grained paralinguistic distinctions underexplored. We introduce ParaPairAudioBench, a pairwise benchmark of 5,175 audio pairs across five paralinguistic dimensions: Style, Rate, Emphasis, Age, and Gender. Our experiments show that current LALM judges still lag behind human judgments by 32%p on average and exhibit severe calibration failures, particularly in Tie cases where the correct decision is to abstain. To further analyze lexical versus acoustic reliance, the benchmark includes both same-transcript and cross-transcript conditions. ParaPairAudioBench enables multi-dimensional, calibration-aware assessment of the reliability of LALM-as-a-Judge for paralinguistic speech evaluation.

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

Agentomics: Economic Foundations for the Valuation, Attribution, and Pricing of AI Agents in Human-AI Workflows

Authors:

arXiv:2606.14769v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic AI systems are increasingly being deployed as productive resources in organizational workflows, yet existing evaluation methods primarily measure isolated technical performance rather than economic contribution. This paper introduces Agentomics, a workflow-based framework for valuing, attributing, and pricing human and artificial agents. The framework models a workflow as a configuration of heterogeneous agents whose collective performance determines gross value, deployment cost, reliability, and expected failure loss. Workflow value is treated as a team-level quantity that may include complementarities, substitution effects, bottlenecks, and nonlinear production; additive stage-level value is only a special case. Building on this workflow model, the paper formulates AI deployment as a coalition-formation problem and defines coalition value as the incremental net surplus generated relative to a benchmark human workflow. The Shapley value is then used to attribute economic surplus among participating AI agents, yielding a principled connection among valuation, accountability, and market pricing. The resulting Shapley pricing equilibrium provides a normative benchmark for assessing whether agent prices reflect expected marginal contribution. A security-operations case study illustrates how the framework accounts for productivity gains, deployment costs, reliability losses, and coalition-level complementarities in hybrid human–AI workflows.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Not All Invariants Are Equal: Curating Training Data to Accelerate Program Verification with SLMs

arXiv:2603.15510v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The synthesis of inductive loop invariants remains a critical bottleneck in automated program verification. While Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise in mitigating this issue, they often fail on complex programs, producing invariants that are invalid or computationally ineffective. Although fine-tuning is a natural strategy to address these limitations, obtaining high-quality training data remains an open challenge. We first formalize the properties required for a high-quality training invariant, and then present Wonda, a rigorous data curation pipeline that extracts such invariants from raw verifier output via AST-based normalization followed by LLM-driven semantic rewriting and augmentation with provable quality guarantees. Fine-tuning Small Language Models (SLMs) on Wonda-curated data yields consistent gains across the Qwen3, Llama-3.1, and Mistral families: the 4B and 8B Qwen3 models nearly double invariant correctness and double speedup rates, while Llama-3.1-8B triples both. On the challenging InvBench suite, the same 4B model outperforms an off-the-shelf model 20x its size and matches the end-to-end verification time of GPT-OSS-120B, while a 14B Qwen3 model matches that of the frontier model GPT-5.2, all without test-time compute overhead. Our code is publicly available on GitHub.

06.
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.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Least-Action-Guided Diffusion for Physical Extrapolation

arXiv:2606.11277v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable extrapolation remains a central challenge for generative models in computational physics, because models trained over finite ranges of time, parameters, or geometries may produce physically inconsistent predictions outside the training distribution. We introduce a least-action-principle-guided diffusion, LAPG, a framework that promotes physical consistency during inference rather than relying solely on constraints imposed during training. The method combines a conditional score-based diffusion model with an action-derived physical guidance score. In the first stage, the learned score model generates an in-distribution proposal; in the second, an action-based variational prior refines this proposal toward the target out-of-distribution condition. This formulation turns the principle of least action into a differentiable inference-time correction mechanism and provides an alternative to pointwise residual penalties that often require empirical loss balancing. We evaluate LAPG on representative ordinary- and partial-differential-equation systems, including free fall, conservative and dissipative spring-mass dynamics, interacting point vortices, and potential flow over parameterized airfoils. In temporal, parameter, and geometric extrapolation tests, LAPG reduces phase drift, preserves dissipative decay, captures vortex motion, and improves the lift response of airfoil flows compared with training-time physics-informed baselines.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

Folding the unfoldable 2: using AlphaFold and ESMFold to explore spurious proteins

Motivation: Spurious protein sequences, resulting from gene prediction errors, theoretically should not yield folded structures. AlphaFold2 was previously shown to predict short spurious sequences with high pLDDT scores and was therefore unlikely to distinguish between real proteins and spurious proteins which are usually short. We evaluate whether newer structure prediction methods (ESMFold and AlphaFold3) similarly predict short sequences with high pLDDT or if they better discriminate between spurious and real proteins. Results: All three structure prediction methods (ESMFold, AlphaFold2, and AlphaFold3) predict short spurious sequences from AntiFam with unexpectedly high pLDDT scores, however the discrimination between spurious and real proteins improves beyond 100 amino acids. By analysing sequences with disparate pTM and pLDDT scores, we identified two likely spurious shadow ORFs in Swiss-Prot and one potentially non-spurious AntiFam entry. Using the structure prediction scores, we developed a Gaussian Process Model and evaluated its performance on AlphaFold DB, identifying potential spurious proteins at scale. While limited on its own, this model can increase confidence in spurious protein identification when combined with other methods.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Geometric Domain Adaptation via Optimal Transport for Linear Regression in R^2

arXiv:2606.14023v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optimal Transport has become recently a powerful method for domain adaptation by aligning source and target distributions. We study a supervised domain adaptation problem where source and target domains are related by a rotation or a translation or a homothety in $\mathbb{R}^2$. We prove that the optimal transport map recovers the underlying map when using a $p-$norm cost with $p \geq 2$. Based on this insight, we develop a method combining $K-$means and optimal transport to estimate the underlying map, enabling adaptation of linear regression models when target data is scarce. Simulations demonstrate improved performance over baseline methods. Rather than relying on highly expressive deep learning architectures, we focus on classical machine learning models to emphasize interpretability and theoretical insight. This perspective allows us to explicitly characterize the role of optimal transport in recovering geometric transformations such as rotations, translations, and homotheties. Our contributions include a theoretical result linking optimal transport and rotations, translations and homothecies in $\mathbb{R}^2$, and a practical method for adaptation in linear regression offering both conceptual clarity and applied value in domain adaptation tasks in this space.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Brick-DICL: Dynamic In-Context Learning for Automated Brick Schema Classification

arXiv:2606.17637v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Building Management Systems (BMS) are essential for optimizing energy efficiency and operational performance in modern buildings. However, the lack of standardization across BMS points from different manufacturers creates significant barriers to integration and data utilization. While the Brick schema offers a standardized ontology for building systems, mapping BMS points to appropriate Brick classes presents three critical challenges: (i) the extensive number of Brick classes (936 in the latest version), (ii) limited domain-specific knowledge in large language models (LLMs), and (iii) substantial manual effort required for verification. To address these challenges, we propose Brick-DICL, a two-stage dynamic in-context learning framework for automated Brick schema classification. Brick-DICL consists of two primary components: metadata-RAG, which retrieves relevant examples to enhance LLMs' domain knowledge, and class-RAG, which narrows down potential Brick classes to address the large classification space. Additionally, we implement a multi-LLM filtering mechanism that compares predictions across multiple models, flagging low-confidence classifications for human review. As a result: (i) General: Brick-DICL is applicable to any building management system regardless of manufacturer or metadata format; (ii) Novel and Powerful: as the first dynamic in-context learning approach for Brick schema classification, Brick-DICL achieves significant classification accuracy improvements on building datasets, outperforming existing methods; (iii) Efficient: our multi-LLM filtering strategy reduces manual verification effort, enabling rapid digital building onboarding. Extensive experiments demonstrate Brick-DICL's effectiveness across diverse building datasets, accelerating the path toward standardized, interoperable building management systems.

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

TerraMind: Large-Scale Generative Multimodality for Earth Observation

arXiv:2504.11171v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present TerraMind, the first any-to-any generative, multimodal foundation model for Earth observation (EO). Unlike other multimodal models, TerraMind is pretrained on dual-scale representations combining both token-level and pixel-level data across modalities. On a token level, TerraMind encodes high-level contextual information to learn cross-modal relationships, while on a pixel level, TerraMind leverages fine-grained representations to capture critical spatial nuances. We pretrained TerraMind on nine geospatial modalities of a global, large-scale dataset. In this paper, we demonstrate that (i) TerraMind's dual-scale early fusion approach unlocks a range of zero-shot and few-shot applications for Earth observation, (ii) TerraMind introduces "Thinking-in-Modalities" (TiM) – the capability of generating additional artificial data during finetuning and inference to improve the model output – and (iii) TerraMind achieves beyond state-of-the-art performance in community-standard benchmarks for EO like PANGAEA. The pretraining dataset, the model weights, and our code are open-sourced under a permissive license.

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

Toward Simultaneously Optimal Regret in U-Calibration

arXiv:2606.18527v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: U-calibration studies online forecasting algorithms whose predictions can be consumed by any unknown downstream agent, guaranteeing sublinear regret simultaneously for all proper loss functions. Existing U-calibration algorithms achieve worst-case optimal $O(\sqrt{T})$ regret for every bounded proper loss, but they fail to adapt to easier losses: as we show, even for smooth losses such as squared loss, they incur $\Omega(\sqrt{T})$ regret instead of the optimal $O(\log T)$ regret. In this work, we show that this limitation is not inherent. Specifically, we design a single forecast algorithm that simultaneously achieves $\tilde O(\sqrt{T})$ regret for every bounded proper loss and $O(\log T)$ regret for every bounded smooth proper loss. More generally, our algorithm also attains logarithmic regret for losses that are smooth relative to the log-barrier, which include several non-Lipschitz examples. Our approach is based on a novel variant of Follow-the-Perturbed-Leader (FTPL) in which perturbations are applied directly in the prediction space using self-concordant noise. The resulting analysis also departs substantially from prior FTPL analyses due to the complex nature of this noise and may be of independent interest.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

ASTRA: A Scalable Next-Generation ATCO Training Simulator with Autonomous Simpilots

arXiv:2606.18319v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Air Traffic Control Operators (ATCOs) are vital in ensuring the safe, orderly, and efficient flow of air traffic, yet training capacity is constrained by reliance on specialized human trainers known as simpilots, who must role-play both pilots and ATCOs in a simulated airspace. Existing automated solutions rely on Western-centric speech models that perform poorly in Singaporean operational contexts, with off-the-shelf systems exhibiting Word Error Rates (WER) of up to 107.80% on Singaporean-accented aviation speech. We introduce ASTRA, an end-to-end training simulator that automates these simpilot roles through a pipeline that transcribes ATCO speech, interprets instructions, and generates appropriate pilot and ATCO responses using locally adapted voice models. Our fine-tuned Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) pipeline reduces WER to 23.45%, substantially outperforming existing approaches in this domain. Beyond traffic simulation, ASTRA incorporates an AI-assisted performance evaluation framework that assesses trainee radiotelephony communications across accuracy, brevity, and completeness, achieving post-optimization scores of 91.7%, 88.2%, and 86.9%, respectively. Built on open-source foundations such as DSPy and Unsloth, this approach enables scalable, standardized ATCO assessment while reducing instructor workload.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Tabular Foundation Models for Clinical Survival Analysis via Survival-Aware Adaptation

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.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Leishmaniasis on YouTube: a critical appraisal of the quality, reliability, and transparency of educational content

Background: Leishmaniasis is a neglected tropical disease of significant global public health importance, for which accurate information is essential to support prevention and early care-seeking, particularly in endemic, resource-limited settings. YouTube is a widely used source of health information, but the quality and reliability of leishmaniasis-related content have not been evaluated. We aimed to assess the quality, reliability, and transparency of English-language YouTube videos on leishmaniasis. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional analysis of YouTube videos retrieved via the YouTube Data API on 15 June 2026 using the terms "leishmaniasis," "cutaneous leishmaniasis," and "visceral leishmaniasis." After applying eligibility criteria and screening the 150 most-viewed eligible videos, 48 videos were included. Two reviewers independently assessed each video using the modified DISCERN (mDISCERN) tool, the Global Quality Score (GQS), and the JAMA benchmark criteria, with disagreements resolved by consensus. Inter-rater agreement was assessed using the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC), and associations were examined using Spearman's rank correlation. Results: Of 402 videos retrieved, 48 met the inclusion criteria. The median GQS was 3.00 (IQR 2.00-4.00) and median mDISCERN was 3.00 (IQR 2.38-4.50), indicating moderate quality and reliability, while the median JAMA score was 2.00 (IQR 1.00-2.00), reflecting limited transparency; no video met all four JAMA criteria. The overwhelming majority of videos (47/48, 97.9%) were of professional or institutional origin. Inter-rater agreement was good to excellent (ICC 0.883 for GQS, 0.896 for mDISCERN, 1.000 for JAMA). The instruments were strongly inter-correlated (mDISCERN-GQS rho = 0.841, p < 0.001). Quality scores did not correlate positively with views, likes, or video duration; comments correlated weakly and negatively with mDISCERN (rho = -0.337, p = 0.031) and JAMA (rho = -0.381, p = 0.014). Conclusions: YouTube videos on leishmaniasis are of moderate quality and reliability but limited transparency, and are produced almost exclusively by professional sources. Video popularity, length, and age were not indicators of quality. There is a need for experts and institutions to produce clearly authored, well-sourced, and transparent educational content on this neglected tropical disease.

16.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-17

Deciphering cell type-specific causal genetic effects on brain imaging-derived phenotypes and disorders with single-cell Mendelian randomization

Authors:

by Anyi Yang, Xingzhong Zhao, Xing-Ming Zhao, Yucheng T. Yang Reconstructing causality routes from genetic effects to complex phenotypes in particular cell types is crucial for understanding biological mechanisms underlying the brain-associated phenotypes including imaging-derived phenotypes (IDPs), and brain disorders and behaviors (DBs). Here, we develop a single-cell Mendelian randomization framework to infer cell type-specific causal relationships between gene expression and diverse brain-associated complex phenotypes by integrating single-cell expression quantitative trait loci (cis-eQTLs) and genome-wide association study findings. We identifiy a set of 254 and 217 cis-eQTL target genes (eGenes) that may have causal effects on 112 IDPs and 26 DBs in eight cell types, respectively. These causal eGenes exhibit strong cell type specificity and varied pleiotropy among different types of brain-associated phenotypes. Further integrative analysis reveals putative causality routes among cell type-specific causal eGenes and brain-associated complex phenotypes. Finally, we characterize the spatiotemporal expression patterns of these causal eGenes, and highlight the coordinated associations of the brain-associated phenotypes based on the expression of their causal eGenes. Overall, our study presents a large-scale analysis of the genetic effects of brain structures, disorders and behaviors, providing a catalog of cell type-specific causal eGenes.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Effectiveness and Safety of Bempedoic Acid Across Clinically Relevant Subgroups: Insights from the CLEAR Taiwan Study

Background Despite available lipid-lowering therapies (LLT), many patients fail to achieve low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) targets. This gap persists across clinically relevant subgroups. Bempedoic acid has demonstrated effective LDL-C lowering with a favorable safety profile in the CLEAR Taiwan study; however, its effects across subgroups in Asian populations remains limited. Methods The phase IV CLEAR Taiwan study (NCT06925100) enrolled patients with inadequately controlled hypercholesterolemia who received bempedoic acid for 12 weeks in addition to background LLT. This analysis evaluated changes in lipid parameters, high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hsCRP), and safety outcomes in clinically relevant subgroups, including cardiovascular risk, diabetes, age, statin tolerance, and sex. Results A total of 180 patients were included. Bempedoic acid achieved significant LDL-C reductions in all subgroups. Numerically greater LDL-C reductions were observed in primary prevention, statin-intolerant, younger (< 65 years), and female patients, while comparable reductions were observed across diabetes status. Reductions in non-high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, total cholesterol, and apolipoprotein B were consistent with LDL-C findings. Significant decreases in hsCRP were observed in all subgroups, with numerically greater reductions in patients aged < 65 years and those without diabetes. Bempedoic acid was well tolerated, with a low incidence of adverse events and no new safety signals identified. Changes in liver enzymes, renal function, and uric acid were minimal within subgroups. Conclusion Subgroup analyses from the CLEAR Taiwan study demonstrate consistent efficacy and safety of bempedoic acid across clinically relevant subgroups and support its use as a flexible option to address residual gaps in lipid management.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

QueryMarket: Cost-Aware Online Active Learning in Data Markets

arXiv:2606.17805v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Data acquisition is a major bottleneck for learning in real-time streams: analysts must decide on the fly which labels to purchase while respecting a rolling budget. However, existing online active learning rarely unifies pricing, information gain, and rolling budget constraints under concept drift. We introduce QueryMarket, a market-inspired framework that queries each incoming data point based on its estimated utility to the model and its price. Within this framework, we propose OVBAL (online variance-based active learning), which integrates data pricing with information-driven selection by estimating each sample's marginal utility via a D-optimality criterion with exponential forgetting and executing cost-aware purchases under rolling budget constraints. OVBAL yields a simple, fully online decision rule that adapts to nonstationary streams and heterogeneous label costs. Experiments on synthetic data and a real-world solar power generation forecasting task show that OVBAL is particularly effective under seller-centric pricing and yields a more favorable long-run error-cost trade-off in the real-world task under both pricing schemes.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Discontinuous strong-to-weak symmetry breaking transition from thermal pure states

arXiv:2606.15062v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the nonequilibrium dynamics of strong-to-weak spontaneous symmetry breaking in many-body quantum systems undergoing decoherence from thermal pure states. For generic initial pure states with volume-law entanglement entropy, we show that the system undergoes a discontinuous dynamical phase transition at a critical time. This transition is accompanied by a singularity in the entropy of the system, which saturates to its maximum value at the same critical time. Through numerical simulations of the dephasing Ising and hard-core boson models, we establish the universality of this transition across different symmetries. Our results reveal that the dynamical emergence of a decohered mixed state from a highly entangled state is not a gradual asymptotic relaxation, but rather a sharp phase transition driven by a sudden collapse of global coherence.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

AI Coding Agents in Social Science: Methodologically Diverse, Empirically Consistent, Interpretively Vulnerable

The deployment of LLM-based agents in scientific analysis raises opposing concerns: that agents may reduce methodological diversity, or that they may amplify the analytic flexibility through which researchers reach motivated conclusions. We argue these worries target two empirically separable layers: a design layer of methodological choices, and a verdict layer in which a decision rule maps estimates to a substantive claim. We test both by running 20 independent executions of Claude Code and Codex on a prominent immigration and social-policy against a many-analysts human baseline. At the design layer, Codex matches human methodological diversity and Claude Code produces nearly three times as many specifications; both agents' effect estimates remain broadly aligned with the human consensus, and no agent model exactly matches any human model. A prompt-induced anti-immigration researcher prior reorganizes each agent's methodological decisions but, unlike for biased human analysts in the same data, does not shift aggregate estimates or final verdicts; nor do agents reroute along the methodological axes humans use to bias their estimates. At the verdict layer, an explicit confirmatory prompt flips Claude Code's verdicts from 10% to 90% support while leaving its coefficient distribution essentially unchanged, operating through rule omission rather than rule softening. AI agents can rival or exceed human methodological diversity at the design layer while remaining vulnerable at the verdict layer. In our setting, the locus of AI bias is not estimation but interpretation.

21.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

A Unified Approach to Beta Moments, Combinatorial Identities, and Random Walks

arXiv:2605.05420v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The study of random walks has increasingly been popular across diverse disciplines such as statistics, mathematics, quantum physics, where they are used to model paths consisting of successive random steps in a mathematical space. A fundamental quantity of interest is the probability that a simple symmetric random walk returns to the origin after 2n steps. In this paper, we develop a unified probabilistic approach that connects the return probabilities in arbitrary dimensions with moment representations. Using this framework, we provide probabilistic proofs of several combinatorial identities involving beta and gamma functions, and derive new combinatorial identities in general dimensions.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Hubs or Fringes: Pretraining Data Selection via Web Graph Centrality

The performance of modern language models depends critically on pretraining data composition. Yet existing data selection methods rely on auxiliary classifiers for document scoring or mixture optimization, adding computational overhead and dependence on labeled data. We propose WebGraphMix, a lightweight data selection framework that computes structural centrality scores over the Common Crawl host-level web graph and uses them to vary the proportion of central versus peripheral documents in the pretraining mixture. We hypothesize that central hosts expose models to reusable abstractions, while peripheral hosts encode specialized, long-tail knowledge. WebGraphMix computes centrality scores efficiently at web scale, requiring no model training, labeled data, or downstream supervision. We integrate WebGraphMix into the DataComp-LM pipeline and train models at 400M and 1B parameter scales with 8B and 28B tokens respectively, evaluating on 23 tasks ranging from factual knowledge to symbolic reasoning. Our experiments show that central and peripheral web regions encode complementary capabilities. Mixture combining both at a ratio of 1:1 achieves 41.4% on average, compared to 39.8% for uniform sampling. Combining structural scores with document-level quality classifier scores further improves performance to 43.8%. These findings demonstrate that web graph topology is a meaningful axis for pretraining data curation, capturing information that is largely orthogonal to existing content-based approaches.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Geometric bias in eigenspace perturbation under random heterogeneous noise

arXiv:2606.11263v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spectral methods rely fundamentally on the stability of principal eigenspaces under random perturbations. Classically, this stability is quantified by the Davis-Kahan and Wedin theorems, which bound the eigenspace error using the operator norm of the noise and the relevant spectral gaps. While these worst-case bounds are sharp for arbitrary deterministic perturbations, they can be wasteful in the low-rank signal-plus-random-noise setting, as they fail to capture the fine-grained interaction between the signal geometry and the noise distribution. In this paper, we study the spectral perturbation of signal-plus-noise matrices corrupted by sparse, random noise with an arbitrary, inhomogeneous variance profile. We demonstrate that under heterogeneous noise variances, the empirical eigenvectors suffer a systematic, deterministic geometric bias that is entirely invisible to classical perturbation bounds. By leveraging the Quadratic Vector Equation (QVE) and establishing fine-grained isotropic local laws, we derive near-optimal, non-asymptotic perturbation bounds for the leading eigenspaces in the operator and $2\to\infty$ norms. The bounds separate the usual signal-to-noise contribution, stochastic fluctuations, and structured geometric bias terms determined by the alignment between the signal eigenspaces and the row-wise variance profile.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

A Robust Point Cloud Analysis Framework Inspired By Primary Visual Cortex

Despite significant advancements in point cloud analysis, reducing energy consumption and improving robustness remain understudied, largely due to the inherent limitations of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). To address this issue, we draw inspiration from the primary visual cortex and propose a Dendritic-Connected Continuous-Coupled Neural Network (DC-CCNN), a novel Brain-Inspired Neural Network (BINN) architecture for point cloud analysis. By combining discrete and continuous encoding, our design replaces traditional Multilayer Perceptrons (MLPs) with more efficient and robust BINNs. Building upon this framework, we further propose an extended model, DC-CCNN++, to improve robustness under complex corruption conditions. Specifically, we introduce a Neuro-Inspired Robust Modulation-and-Readout Module (NRMR) to enhance feature stability and decision robustness through global-context gain modulation and dual-code evidence integration. We also design a Cortically Inspired Progressive Variability Training (CPVT) strategy, which progressively exposes the model to structured environmental variability while preserving stable clean-sample anchors during training. Experimental results show that DC-CCNN++ improves the performance of brain-inspired networks on point cloud analysis while maintaining performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods. Compared with the original DC-CCNN, it achieves stronger results on both classification and part segmentation, and exhibits enhanced robustness against sparsity, occlusion, Gaussian noise, salt-and-pepper noise, and spatial transformations. With its efficiency, robustness, and biologically grounded design, DC-CCNN++ provides a promising alternative to traditional deep learning methods for point cloud analysis. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DC-CCNNpp-44E3.

25.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Benchmarking attention-based methods for vision transformers' interpretability in retinal fundus imaging

Deep learning models based on Vision Transformers (ViTs) have shown strong performance in retinal fundus imaging, but their interpretability remains poorly understood. In particular, attention-based attribution methods are widely used to explain ViT predictions, despite limited evaluation of their faithfulness and biological relevance in medical imaging. Here, we systematically benchmark four attention-based interpretability methods for RETFound, a retinal ViT-based foundation model, that we previously fine-tuned to predict 17 retinal vascular phenotypes from UK Biobank fundus images1. We compare raw attention, attention rollout, gradient-weighted attention rollout, and Chefer's hybrid relevance-based method using both qualitative visualisation and quantitative evaluation frameworks. To assess attribution faithfulness, we perform perturbation-based deletion and insertion experiments, quantifying changes in model predictions as highly attended image regions are progressively removed or restored. To evaluate biological specificity, we run structure-aware analyses combining attribution maps with vessel segmentation and artery-vein labels through the Relative ratio of Attention Intensity (RAI) metric. Across models, attribution maps differed substantially depending on the selected interpretability method, highlighting the need for rigorous quantitative evaluation. Among the evaluated approaches, gradient-weighted attention rollout consistently achieved the strongest perturbation performance and produced attribution maps most closely aligned with the anatomical definition of the predicted retinal traits. Furthermore, vessel-type specific models systematically concentrate attention on the corresponding vascular structures despite being trained using only a single scalar value per image as supervision. These findings demonstrate that attention-based attribution methods capture biologically meaningful vascular representations, while also revealing method-dependent variability in attribution behaviour. This work provides a quantitative framework for evaluating interpretability methods in medical imaging with annotated segmentation and contributes toward more transparent and biologically grounded medical AI systems.