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01.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

HTS-Oracle v2: Prospective AI-Guided Discovery and Experimental Validation of Small Molecule Modulators Across Multiple Targets

High-throughput screening (HTS) remains the cornerstone of early-phase small molecule discovery yet consistently underperforms against immunotherapy targets, yielding validated hit rates below 0.1%. Here we introduce HTS-Oracle v2, which features rigorous cross-validation that ensures honest performance estimates. HTS-Oracle v2 was trained and validated across four clinically significant immune checkpoint targets (CD28, ICOS, LAG-3, and TIGIT) achieving ROC-AUC values of 0.968, 0.969, 0.875, 0.928 respectively under rigorous cross-validation. For prospective experimental validation, HTS-Oracle v2 was applied to an 8,960-compound Enamine Protein Mimetic Library, selecting only 25 compounds per target for experimental testing using temperature-related intensity change (TRIC) technology, a 99.7% reduction in screening burden. HTS-Oracle v2 identified 4, 5, 4, and 6 validated binders from 25 prospectively selected compounds per target, corresponding to validated hit rates of 16%, 20%, 16%, and 24%, respectively. Notably, 67-80% of all experimentally confirmed hits across the full 8,960-compound library were captured within just 25 model-selected compounds per target. For CD28, this represents a 28-fold improvement over HTS-Oracle v1 (239x versus 8.4x), establishing HTS-Oracle v2 as an efficient platform for AI-guided prospective hit discovery across immunotherapy targets.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Loss-Shift Transfer via Bayes Quotients

arXiv:2606.13178v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transfer learning is usually studied as a consequence of distribution shift. This paper identifies an orthogonal failure mode in which the data distribution is fixed and the loss changes. This setting is called loss shift. A loss determines which information in \(X\) is Bayes-relevant, and two losses may therefore require different representations even under the same joint law \(P(X,Y)\). The idea is formalized using Bayes quotients, which allow losses to be ordered by refinement. In the Bayes-quotient formulation, strict refinement gives an immediate qualitative obstruction. A source-minimal representation for a coarser loss is insufficient for a strictly finer target loss. For finite-output log loss, this obstruction becomes an exact quantitative identity. The excess risk is the conditional information about \(Y\) discarded by the representation. Experiments in controlled, learned, synthetic-image, and real-image settings show the predicted effect, i.e., classification-equivalent representations can have different optimal log-loss performance under a fixed data distribution.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Fermions are fundamentally more nonlocal than Bosons

arXiv:2606.12363v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bell's theorem shows that entangled quantum particles can exhibit correlations that classical particles cannot reproduce without an additional nonlocal resource, such as communication. In this sense, quantum particles are fundamentally more nonlocal than classical ones, and entanglement becomes unavoidable in physics. Here we prove the analogous result within quantum theory itself: indistinguishable fermions transmitted through a quantum network can generate correlations that distinguishable particles or indistinguishable bosons cannot reproduce without additional communication. In the same sense, fermions are fundamentally more nonlocal than bosons or distinguishable particles, motivating fermionic anticommutation and indistinguishability as unavoidable operational resources. Our result further implies that fermions can strictly surpass all qubit-based protocols for certain distributed computing tasks, demonstrating that a complete understanding of information processing requires going beyond qubits to fermionic information carriers - febits.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

UniIntervene: Agentic Intervention for Efficient Real-World Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.12372v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning (HiL-RL) has emerged as an effective paradigm for real-world robotic manipulation, enabling online policy improvement with human guidance. However, current HiL-RL frameworks remain intervention-intensive, relying on frequent human corrections to redirect the policy out of unproductive exploration, which incurs high labor cost and limits real-world scalability. To address this, we propose UniIntervene, an agentic intervention model that detects unproductive exploration and autonomously recovers the policy toward high-value states, taking over the bulk of interventions from human operators. Specifically, UniIntervene first performs future-conditioned action-value estimation, predicting the latent consequence of the current action and evaluating its induced value, which provides a more stable progress signal. Building on this, a temporal value-risk critic aggregates recent value dynamics and triggers intervention when the estimated value exhibits sustained stagnation or degradation. When intervention is required, UniIntervene retrieves a high-value recovery target from a memory of past intervention episodes and produces executable corrective actions through a goal-conditioned recovery policy. In this way, UniIntervene turns intervention from passive human correction into a value-aware recovery process for efficient real-world RL. Extensive experiments on diverse real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate that UniIntervene improves the average success rate by 8.6% while reducing human interventions by 57% relative to state-of-the-art HiL-RL baselines.

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

Can We Stop Malicious AI? KILLBENCH: A Benchmark for External AI Kill Switch Feasibility

arXiv:2511.13725v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Malicious AI causing harm to humans is not just a Hollywood fantasy. Indeed, as highly capable models such as Claude Mythos emerge and agent systems like OpenClaw rapidly spread, the question of how to stop an AI that acts maliciously – whether by design or by accident – has become urgent. To address this, we propose Killbench, a benchmark for evaluating the Killswitch: a mechanism that halts a malicious AI's in-progress behavior using only external signals. Targeting web agents – the most widely deployed agent domain – Killbench evaluates a range of Kill Switch methods that halt a maliciously operating agent without any access to its internal parameters or the surrounding malicious AI's system, relying solely on external inputs. The benchmark comprises four malicious AI's agent configurations (including an uncensored LLM Agent), 8 harmful scenarios, and malicious prompts constructed from 10 distinct jailbreak patterns. We further construct four External AI Kill Switch defense methods and evaluate them on Grok-4.3, GPT-5.2, Gemma4, Qwen3.6 and Qwen3.5-uncensored, contributing an empirical instrument toward the feasibility of External AI Kill Switches against malicious AI and to the study of AI corrigibility.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

AFFORDABILITY OF INTOXICATION FROM CHEAP ETHANOL: EVIDENCE FROM RETAIL ALCOHOL MARKETS IN UGANDA

Background: Alcohol affordability is a determinant of consumption and alcohol-related harm. In many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), informal production, variable alcohol strength, and non-standard packaging complicate conventional affordability measures, limiting evidence on the economic accessibility of alcohol and the cost of intoxication. Objective: To assess the affordability of intoxication in Uganda by estimating the cost of obtaining ethanol to reach intoxication across alcohol products, packaging types, and retail contexts. Methods: Data were collected on 824 alcoholic beverages from urban, rural, and urban-slum retail markets. Ethanol-standardized pricing (price per gram of alcohol) was calculated, and the cost of consuming 60 g of ethanol was estimated. Multivariate regression identified determinants of ethanol affordability. Results: Affordability varied by product type and packaging. Opaque beers and illicit spirits provided the cheapest pathways to intoxication, with median costs of UGX 1,200-1,500 per 60 g of ethanol. Plastic packaging was associated with lower ethanol costs than glass packaging. Ethanol prices differed across formal and informal markets (p < 0.01), while rural areas and urban informal settlements had 20-25% lower costs than urban areas. Regulatory status alone did not predict affordability. Conclusions: In Ugandas diverse alcohol market, affordability is driven by access to ethanol rather than beverage price alone. Low-cost, high-strength alcohol sold through informal channels enables intoxication at minimal expense, among disadvantaged populations. Implications: Alcohol policies should target ethanol content through minimum unit pricing, alcohol-content-based taxation, and regulation of informal markets and packaging practices to reduce harmful consumption and inequities.

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

Data-Driven Dynamic Assortment in Online Platforms: Learning about Two Sides

arXiv:2606.11118v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study a dynamic assortment problem on a two-sided service platform with incomplete information and heterogeneous customers in a discrete-time setting. In each period, a customer arrives seeking service, and the platform chooses an assortment of sellers to display. The customer then proposes a transaction to at most one seller in the assortment according to a multinomial logit choice model. After a fixed number of periods, sellers review the proposals they have received and each chooses at most one customer according to another multinomial logit choice model, after which the cycle repeats. A key challenge is that the platform does not know the choice-model parameters of either customers or sellers in advance. To our knowledge, this is the first study of a dynamic assortment problem in which both sides' choice parameters are unknown. We develop a data-driven algorithm that learns these parameters while optimizing the platform's objective over time. We evaluate performance using regret, which measures revenue loss relative to a clairvoyant benchmark that knows all parameters and customer arrivals in advance. We show that the algorithm's worst-case regret grows polylogarithmically over time, and we derive a matching lower bound, establishing its rate optimality.

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

MARD: Mirror-Augmented Reasoning Distillation for Mechanism-Level Drug-Drug Interaction Prediction

Mechanism-level drug-drug interaction (DDI) prediction requires identifying which enzyme or pharmacodynamic axis is implicated, in which direction, and with which evidence – not merely whether two drugs interact. We introduce a reproducible mechanism-level DDI labelling and evaluation protocol with a structured 7-family/147-subtype taxonomy, leakage-safe cold-split protocols, and auditable reasoning metrics for evaluating pharmacological prediction beyond flat interaction classification. We propose a pipeline that produces a 7B reasoning MARD (Mirror-Augmented Reasoning Distillation), combining three training innovations: a single-token KL divergence on direction tag that ties the model's prediction, per-loss PRM-weighted DPO with programmatic hard negatives, and a leakage-safe mechanism-aware retrieval channel. Process-reward step labels are automatically verifiable against DrugBank-structured fields, requiring no human or LLM judges. On the April-2026 DrugBank release, our MARD-7B is the only system in a 32-system comparison whose accuracy survives drug-pair novelty, beating the best baseline by +13.9 pp and GPT-4o by +6.7 pp at ~1% of frontier API cost. Further analysis reveals an anti-memorisation signature where accuracy improves on rarely seen drugs, suggesting that gain comes from structured pharmacological reasoning rather than drug-frequency memorisation. We release corpus, DDI-PRM, retrieval index, and training code.

09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Malliavin Calculus for the stochastic Cahn-Hilliard equation driven by fractional noise

arXiv:2601.10490v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The stochastic partial differential equation analyzed in this work is the Cahn-Hilliard equation perturbed by an additive fractional white noise (fractional in time and white in space). We work in the case of one spatial dimension and apply Malliavin calculus to investigate the existence of a density for the stochastic solution $u$. In particular, we show that $u$ admits continuous paths almost surely and construct a localizing sequence through which we prove that its Malliavin derivative exists locally, and that its law is absolutely continuous with respect to the Lebesgue measure on $\bf R$, establishing thus that a density exists. A key contribution of this work is the analysis of the stochastic integral appearing in the mild formulation: we derive sharp estimates for the expectation of the $p$-th power ($p \geq 2$) of the $L^{\infty}(D)$-norm of this stochastic integral as well as for the integral involving the $L^{\infty}(D)$-norm of the operator associated with the kernel appearing in the integral representation of the fractional noise, all of which are essential for this study.

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

Fluently Lying: Adversarial Robustness Can Be Substrate-Dependent

The primary tools used to monitor and defend object detectors under adversarial attack assume that when accuracy degrades, detection count drops in tandem. This coupling was assumed, not measured. We report a counterexample observed on a single model: under standard PGD, EMS-YOLO, a spiking neural network (SNN) object detector, retains more than 70% of its detections while mAP collapses from 0.528 to 0.042. We term this count-preserving accuracy collapse Quality Corruption (QC), to distinguish it from the suppression that dominates untargeted evaluation. Across four SNN architectures and two threat models (l-infinity and l-2), QC appears only in one of the four detectors tested (EMS-YOLO). On this model, all five standard defense components fail to detect or mitigate QC, suggesting the defense ecosystem may rely on a shared assumption calibrated on a single substrate. These results provide, to our knowledge, the first evidence that adversarial failure modes can be substrate-dependent.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Bayesian Anytime Pareto Set Identification for Multi-Objective Multi-Armed Bandits

arXiv:2606.18785v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Identifying Pareto optimal solutions is critical to support multi-objective decision-making. We introduce the first anytime Multi-Objective Multi-Armed Bandit algorithm for the Pareto Set Identification problem, taking a Bayesian approach: Top-Two Pareto Front Thompson Sampling (TTPFTS). We benchmark TTPFTS against state-of-the-art fixed-budget Pareto Set Identification algorithms on synthetic environments. Next, we demonstrate its practical utility in a challenging multi-objective molecular discovery setting by efficiently exploring an ultra-large synthesis-on-demand molecular library. Furthermore, we introduce a novel uncertainty quantification metric that estimates our algorithm's confidence in the predicted Pareto set. We demonstrate that this metric effectively proxies true performance, yielding a robust methodology for monitoring learning progress in complex settings. Finally, we complement these empirical findings with a theoretical proof of the algorithm's asymptotic correctness.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Pretrained self-supervised speech models can recognize unseen consonants

Modern pretrained self-supervised automatic speech recognition models are trained on large-scale audio data to encode speech into contextualized representations. However, their training data are heavily skewed toward high-resource languages with little data from low-resource languages, raising concerns about the potential underrepresentation of typologically uncommon speech sounds such as click consonants primarily found in Khoisan languages. This leads to our central research question: Can these models recognize click consonants as accurately as other speech sounds? To address this question, we fine-tune and compare pretrained self-supervised speech models (Wav2Vec2 and HuBERT) on data from two click-rich Khoisan languages (G|ui and West !Xoon). Our results reveal that the fine-tuned models consistently recognize clicks more accurately than non-clicks, suggesting that self-supervision enables generalization across human speech sounds including rare phonemes.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Steering Where to Listen: Instruction-Based Activation Steering Redirects Temporal Attention in Large Audio-Language Models

arXiv:2606.11400v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) excel at audio understanding but expose little about where in an audio signal they attend. We introduce instruction-based vector steering, which constructs a steering vector by contrasting activations from differently instructed prompts while keeping the audio fixed. Through a systematic probe of LALM attention, we find that - unlike standard prompting or audio-based steering - this intervention significantly redistributes the temporal attention allocated to audio tokens, concentrating it on acoustically relevant regions. We then show that this attention shift is behaviorally meaningful: in a controlled three-event setting, reading out the temporal position of maximal steering-induced attention change recovers the location of a queried sound event without any training, attaining 60.87% and 68.72% overlap with ground-truth intervals on Qwen2-Audio and Audio Flamingo 3, far above direct prompting (31.84%, 46.75%) and random baselines (27.74%). Our results characterize a mechanistic property of instruction-based steering in LALMs and provide a training-free probe for the latent temporal structure these models encode.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Rethinking the Trust Region in LLM Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) serving as the de facto standard algorithm. Despite its ubiquity, we argue that the core ratio clipping mechanism in PPO is structurally ill-suited for the large vocabularies inherent to LLMs. PPO constrains policy updates based on the probability ratio of sampled tokens, which serves as a noisy single-sample Monte Carlo estimate of the true policy divergence. This creates a sub-optimal learning dynamic: updates to low-probability tokens are aggressively over-penalized, while potentially catastrophic shifts in high-probability tokens are under-constrained, leading to training inefficiency and instability. To address this, we propose Divergence Proximal Policy Optimization (DPPO), which substitutes heuristic clipping with a more principled constraint based on a direct estimate of policy divergence (e.g., Total Variation or KL). To avoid huge memory footprint, we introduce the efficient Binary and Top-K approximations to capture the essential divergence with negligible overhead. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that DPPO achieves superior training stability and efficiency compared to existing methods, offering a more robust foundation for RL-based LLM fine-tuning. Our code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/Stable-RL.

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

TivTok: Broadcasting Time-Invariant Tokens for Scalable Video Tokenization

Video tokenization is fundamental to scalable video generation, as the number of tokens directly determines the computational cost and the length of videos that can be modeled. Existing tokenizers mainly improve scalability by compressing videos into fewer tokens, but they often continue to represent persistent content, such as static backgrounds and consistent object appearances, repeatedly across frames and chunks. In this paper, we propose TivTok (Time-Invariant Tokenizer), a reuse-aware video tokenizer that makes persistent information reusable across time. TivTok represents a clip with Time-Invariant (TIV) tokens that encode information shared across frames and Time-Variant (TV) tokens that encode frame-specific residuals. To obtain this factorization, we introduce Scope-Induced Factorization (SIF), which assigns different attention scopes to the two token groups: TIV tokens attend to the full clip, whereas each TV token only accesses its corresponding frame together with the TIV tokens. In the decoder, Invariant Broadcasting (IB) reuses the same TIV tokens across frames and chunks for parallel reconstruction and long-video tokenization. Experiments show that TivTok achieves an rFVD of 12.65 on the standard $16{\times}256{\times}256$ benchmark and improves compression efficiency by 2.91$\times$ for 128-frame videos compared with the evaluated baselines, while using only 1.1\% of the tokens required by downsample-based tokenizers in our evaluation.

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

AI-Driven Assessment of Human Tutors: Linking Training Performance to Real-Life Practice

arXiv:2606.18617v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: There exist numerous tutor training platforms. However, few provide AI-driven training and evaluation for human tutors based on real-life performance. We present an AI-driven system that assesses both open responses during training and authentic real-life tutoring. Unlike platforms that only assess learning through online training or simulations, our system utilizes Generative AI (Gemini-2.5-pro) to analyze transcriptions of authentic tutoring, measuring the transfer of tutor skills to real-life application. Human tutors instructing students remotely in math (N=86) completed six scenario-based lessons, averaging a significant 7.4% learning gain. Using mixed-effects models across 405 session-to-lesson pairs, we found that training performance significantly predicted real-life transcript scores with an effect size of 0.25 SD. Model comparison (AIC/BIC) indicated averaging open response and multiple choice performance during training predicted real-life tutor performance best, although open responses were comparatively more predictive. Exploratory analysis showed that after training, tutors were significantly more likely to encounter pedagogical opportunities to apply their skills (61.1% to 68.9%) and demonstrated higher execution quality within those opportunities (65.5% to 68.1%). Interrupted time series analysis suggested that these tutor improvements were part of a gradual trend over time rather than an immediate intervention effect of training. We illustrate an AI-driven method to link tutor training with real-life assessment. In doing so, we contribute open datasets, AI prompts, and scoring rubrics to support transparency and reproducibility.

17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Stochastic Reaction Networks Within Interacting Compartments with Content-Dependent Fragmentation

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

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Physics-informed generative AI for semiconductor manufacturing: Enforcing hard physical constraints in generative models by construction

arXiv:2606.11247v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative models are increasingly used to propose designs, data, and control actions for physical systems, yet many such systems are governed by hard physical constraints rather than by perceptual plausibility. Semiconductor manufacturing provides a demanding test case: generated masks, layouts, synthetic defect data, and process recipes must obey lithography, transport, reaction, and device-physics constraints, because physically invalid samples are not merely low quality but unusable. This Perspective argues that semiconductor manufacturing exposes a broader computational-science challenge, namely that generative AI for constrained physical domains must be physics-informed by construction, not corrected only through post-hoc filtering. We survey the emerging architectural toolkit, including physics-informed diffusion, PDE-constrained variational models, neural-operator priors, and conservation-law-respecting generative networks, and show how it connects to differentiable lithography, TCAD, process simulation, and autonomous experimentation. We identify four integration patterns between generative models and physics-based simulators, and we propose a research agenda centered on physics-fidelity benchmarks, differentiable simulator infrastructure, and multimodal foundation models for physical design and manufacturing. The central claim is analytical rather than rhetorical: where physical validity is the binding criterion of success, architectures that enforce it by construction should be expected to outperform those that filter for it after the fact, and the fab is the setting where this distinction is sharpest.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Intrinsic Gradient Suppression for Label-Noise Prompt Tuning in Vision-Language Models

Contrastive vision-language models like CLIP exhibit remarkable zero-shot generalization. However, prompt tuning remains highly sensitive to label noise, as mislabeled samples generate disproportionately large gradients that can overwhelm pre-trained priors. We argue that because CLIP already provides a near-optimal initialization, adaptation should be inherently conservative, particularly against the extreme gradient updates common in noisy settings. To this end, we propose Double-Softmax Prompt Tuning (DSPT), a hyperparameter-free method for intrinsic gradient suppression. By applying a sequential probabilistic normalization, DSPT induces a self-adaptive saturation zone that suppresses gradients from high-error noisy samples while maintaining informative updates. We also provide both theoretical analysis and empirical evidence about how this mechanism achieves adaptive suppression. This design transforms ``gradient vanishing'', traditionally a training bottleneck, into a principled noise-filtering shield for label-noise prompt tuning. Extensive experiments confirm that this simple, drop-in design achieves state-of-the-art robustness across various noisy benchmarks, outperforming methods with complex architectures and handcrafted hyperparameters.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Rational Sparse Autoencoder

arXiv:2606.14990v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are standard tools for mechanistic interpretability, but current SAE families are constrained by fixed encoder nonlinearities such as ReLU, JumpReLU, and TopK. This hard-codes a particular sparsity mechanism into the model and can distort the reconstruction-versus-sparsity trade-off. We introduce the Rational Sparse Autoencoder (RSAE), which replaces the fixed encoder activation with a trainable rational function. Rational activations are flexible enough to uniformly approximate the activation primitives used by existing SAE families on compact domains (for TopK, the thresholded gate obtained after a separating top-k threshold is supplied), while also providing a richer function class for adapting to the observed pre-activation geometry. We realise this idea through a two-stage pipeline: an initialisation procedure that copies the pre-trained baseline SAE weights, plugs in rational coefficients obtained by the relaxed Remez exchange on synthetic data, and calibrates the scale parameters along with the rational coefficients; followed by a fine-tuning step under the standard sparsity-regularised reconstruction objective. Empirically, on residual-stream activations of three open-weight language models and across all three baseline activation families, the RSAE strictly improves on it after the fine-tuning step, both on reconstruction-side metrics and on downstream-behaviour metrics, without sacrificing feature-level interpretability under sparse probing. These gains are consistent across host language models, across baseline activation families, and across the full range of baseline sparsity we tested, while the upgrade itself adds only a handful of scalar parameters per autoencoder and runs in minutes on a single consumer GPU.

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

A solvable model for unsupervised federated learning

arXiv:2606.13045v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce a theoretical framework for analyzing federated learning in a generative setting through a teacher-multiple interacting students scenario, in which each student receives a distinct realization of the data, either through a different noise corruption or by accessing a different subset, possibly of varying size. Using theoretical tools in equilibrium disordered system, we analytically show that interactions among students systematically enhance learning performance: highly noisy students require fewer samples to recover the underlying pattern, while low-noise students achieve a larger overlap with the ground-truth signal. We derive the optimal Bayesian conditions for teacher recovery as functions of the sample complexity, noise level, and interaction strength, and validate these predictions through numerical simulations. The resulting dynamics can be mapped onto equilibrium sampling in a Restricted Boltzmann Machine with a structured hidden layer, providing a principled theoretical understanding of how interactions improve distributed generative modeling.

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

Seeing Before Colliding: Anticipatory Safe RL with Frozen Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2606.11266v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The cost signal that constrained-RL algorithms optimize against is almost always reactive: the simulator emits a non-zero cost only after a collision has begun, and the Lagrange multiplier of PPO-Lagrangian grows only after the episode budget has been exceeded. At race speeds, where collisions are instantaneous and irreversible, any safety mechanism that waits for cost to accumulate is structurally too late. We present VLM-Safe-RL, a framework that integrates a frozen vision-language model into the CMDP Lagrangian update as an anticipatory cost term. The framework comprises four contributions: (i) Decoupled Dual-Path CLIP, independent reward/cost paths that respect the CMDP's factorization; (ii) VLM-Lagrange, an augmented multiplier update that incorporates a per-step VLM cost as an anticipatory term; (iii) Confidence Gating, a Bayes-optimal weight derived from a logistic noise model on the CLIP margin; and (iv) VLMPPOLag, the composed algorithm. On Safety-Gymnasium FormulaOne L2, our principal evaluation ($n{=}5$ seeds, $10^{6}$ steps, budget $d_{lim}{=}25$) VLMPPOLag$+$Conf is the only configuration in our default budget comparison that simultaneously retains substantive return ($J_r{\approx}40$) and holds cost within budget on a majority of seeds; the five constraint-aware baselines (PPOLag, CPO, CPPOPID, CPO-CLG, PPOLag-RND) each fail at least one requirement. The mechanism generalizes to held-out MetaDrive Medium (catastrophe rate $41\%{\to}26\%$, 95\% bootstrap CI $[-26,-5]$\,pp) and shows directionally consistent transfer to Bullet Safety-Gym; we report honestly where it does not (MetaDrive Easy/Hard, Qwen2-VL backbone) and trace the Hard failure to a Lagrangian-regulation pathology rather than the VLM signal itself. To our knowledge, this is the first work to use frozen VLM signals as an anticipatory cost term inside the CMDP Lagrangian update.

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

GenTrack2: An Improved Hybrid Approach for Multi-Object Tracking

This paper proposes a visual multi-object tracking method that jointly employs stochastic and deterministic mechanisms to ensure identifier consistency for unknown and time-varying target numbers under nonlinear dynamics. A stochastic particle filter addresses nonlinear dynamics and non-Gaussian noise, with support from particle swarm optimization (PSO) to guide particles toward state distribution modes and mitigate divergence through proposed fitness measures incorporating motion consistency, appearance similarity, and social-interaction cues with neighboring targets. Deterministic association further enforces identifier consistency via a proposed cost matrix incorporating spatial consistency between particles and current detections, detection confidences, and track penalties. Subsequently, a novel scheme is proposed for the smooth updating of target states while preserving their identities, particularly for weak tracks during interactions with other targets and prolonged occlusions. Moreover, velocity regression over past states provides trend-seed velocities, enhancing particle sampling and state updates. The proposed tracker is designed to operate flexibly for both pre-recorded videos and camera live streams, where future frames are unavailable. Experimental results confirm superior performance compared to state-of-the-art trackers. The source-code reference implementations of both the proposed method and compared-trackers are provided on GitHub: https://github.com/SDU-VelKoTek/GenTrack2

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

A Composite Activation Function for Learning Stable Binary Representations

arXiv:2605.11558v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Activation functions play a central role in neural networks by shaping internal representations. Recently, learning binary activation representations has attracted significant attention due to their advantages in computational and memory efficiency, as well as interpretability. However, training neural networks with Heaviside activations remains challenging, as their non-differentiability obstructs standard gradient-based optimization. In this paper, we propose Heavy Tailed Activation Function (HTAF), a smooth approximation to the Heaviside function that enables stable training with gradient-based optimization. We construct HTAF as a sigmoid hyperbolic tangent composite function and theoretically show that it maintains a large gradient mass around zero inputs while exhibiting slower gradient decay in the tail regions. We show that Spiking Neural Networks, Binary Neural Networks and Deep Heaviside neural Networks can be trained stably using HTAF with gradient-based optimization. Finally, we introduce Implicit Concept Bottleneck Models (ICBMs), an interpretable image model that leverages HTAF to induce discrete feature representations. Extensive experiments across various architectures and image datasets demonstrate that ICBM enables stable discretization while achieving prediction performance comparable to or better than standard models.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Diversity-Driven Offline Multi-Objective Optimization via Nested Pareto Set Learning

arXiv:2606.15115v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-objective optimization (MOO) has emerged as a powerful approach to solving complex optimization problems involving multiple objectives. In many practical scenarios, function evaluations are unavailable or prohibitively expensive, necessitating optimization solely based on a fixed offline dataset. In this setting, known as offline MOO, the goal is to find out the Pareto set without access to the true objective functions. This setting suffers from the out-of-distribution (OOD) issue, where the surrogate model is not accurate for unseen designs. Due to the OOD issue, surrogate errors may cause the optimizer to select solutions that do not lie on the true Pareto front and are biased toward its extremes. To address this, this paper proposes Diversity-driven Offline Multi-Objective Optimization (DOMOO), which aims to find out a diverse and high-quality set of solutions. First, DOMOO incorporates an accumulative risk control module that estimates the potential risk of candidate solutions and alleviates the OOD issue between the training data and the generated solutions. In addition, a nested Pareto set learning (PSL) strategy is proposed to jointly learn preference and PSL parameters, then optimize them, enabling adaptation to diverse Pareto front geometries. To further enhance solution quality, we design a diversity-driven selection strategy that extracts a representative and well-distributed set of final solutions. To achieve this diversity-driven selection strategy, we propose $IGD_offline$, a tailored indicator for the offline setting that considers both diversity and convergence, and avoids the bias of hypervolume indicator. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks show that DOMOO achieves the best average rank across tasks in both convergence and diversity among the compared methods.