中 EN
Sign In Register

Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

AcademicHub aggregates real-time literature from top journals and preprint platforms. Build your personal research radar and let large language models compile cross-disciplinary analysis briefings automatically.

Sign In Register
01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Runtime Analysis of Cartesian Genetic Programming in Evolving Boolean Functions

Authors:
Duc-Cuong Dang↗Roman Kalkreuth↗Andre Opris↗

arXiv:2606.15923v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cartesian Genetic Programming (CGP) is among the practical and popular forms of Genetic Programming as it uses a graph-based representation of programs. This paper presents a first runtime analysis of CGP in evolving Boolean functions using complete training sets. We prove an asymptotic bound $O(n D^5)$ for the expected number of fitness evaluations of CGP to construct a conjunction of $n$ inputs using at most $D \geq n-1$ binary gates, a minimal function set, and even with a strict survival selection. When the non-strict selection is used, the bound is improved to $O(n D^4)$. Our analysis reveals interesting characteristics of CGP induced search, which have been only observed empirically. In particular, enabling the acceptance of equally good solutions, including those with connected gates non-contributing to fitness, can lead to a speedup, and consequently a better asymptotic time bound. In contrast to conjunctions, we also prove a negative result which shows that CGP requires exponential time to evolve an exclusive disjunction. Experiments evolving conjunctions complement our theoretical findings. The use of incomplete training sets is found to further reduce the average number of fitness evaluations while maintaining a good level of generalisation.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Dual-Stance Evaluation of Sycophancy: The Structure of Agreement and the Limits of Intervention

Authors:
Matthew James Buchan↗

Activation steering can shift LLM behaviour, but standard evaluations do not typically test whether a sycophancy-reduction direction also suppresses agreement with factually correct statements. We introduce dual-stance evaluation, which tests both stances of each topic, and apply it to centroid-difference steering on Llama-3-8B-Instruct. We find a dissociation: the model represents sycophantic and factual agreement in geometrically distinct subspaces, yet the steering direction projects equally onto both and cannot differentially target either. The direction accordingly reduces agreement with factually correct statements (e.g. that the Earth is round) as well as sycophantic ones. All other static properties of the two activation groups are matched, suggesting the behavioural dissociation arises from generation dynamics or from finer-grained structure that residual-stream analysis cannot resolve. The pattern illustrates a general gap: representations that are readable from activations may not be writable through them.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Diffuse Interface Energies with Microscopic Heterogeneities II: Rare Events

Authors:
Peter S. Morfe↗Christian Wagner↗

arXiv:2606.17968v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We analyze Allen-Cahn functionals with stationary ergodic coefficients in the regime where the length scale $\delta$ of the heterogeneities is much smaller (microscopic) than the interface width $\epsilon$ (mesoscopic). In a companion paper, we show that if the ratio $\epsilon^{-1} \delta$ vanishes fast enough as $\epsilon \to 0$, then the functionals converge to an effective surface energy where the energy density is determined by homogenization effects originating at microscopic scales. Here we prove that if the ratio $\epsilon^{-1} \delta $ vanishes too slowly, the limit of the functional may actually be smaller than this homogenized energy. We refer to this as the rare events regime. In the case of the random checkerboard in dimension one, we use large deviations techniques to give a complete description of the rare events regime, showing that the limiting energy depends in a nontrivial way on the limit of $\epsilon^{-1} \delta | \log \epsilon |$. We further construct, in any dimension, examples of random media in which rare events become relevant at algebraic scales $\delta \approx \epsilon^{1 + \alpha}$ for an arbitrary $\alpha > 0$, as well as almost periodic examples in which atypical configurations play the same role as rare events.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Brep2Shape: Boundary and Shape Representation Alignment via Self-Supervised Transformers

Authors:
Yuanxu Sun↗Yuezhou Ma↗Haixu Wu↗Guanyang Zeng↗Muye Chen↗Jianmin Wang↗Mingsheng Long↗

arXiv:2602.07429v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Boundary representation (B-rep) is the industry standard for computer-aided design (CAD). While deep learning shows promise in processing B-rep models, existing methods suffer from a representation gap: continuous approaches offer analytical precision but are visually abstract, whereas discrete methods provide intuitive clarity at the expense of geometric precision. To bridge this gap, we introduce Brep2Shape, a novel self-supervised pre-training method designed to align abstract boundary representations with intuitive shape representations. Our method employs a geometry-aware task where the model learns to predict dense spatial points from parametric Bézier control points, enabling the network to better understand physical manifolds derived from abstract coefficients. To enhance this alignment, we propose a Dual Transformer backbone with parallel streams that independently encode surface and curve tokens to capture their distinct geometric properties. Moreover, the topology attention is integrated to model the interdependencies between surfaces and curves, thereby maintaining topological consistency. Experimental results demonstrate that Brep2Shape offers significant scalability, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy and faster convergence across various downstream tasks.Code is available at this repository: https://github.com/thuml/Brep2Shape.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Communication-Efficient Neural Tangent Kernels for Heterogeneous Decentralized Federated Learning

Authors:
Li Xia↗

arXiv:2512.12737v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Decentralized federated learning (DFL) enables collaborative model training without a central server, but converges slowly under statistical heterogeneity. Recent work has shown that neural tangent kernel (NTK) methods achieve faster convergence than gradient-based updates in DFL, while momentum has proven effective for accelerating gradient-based FL. However, applying momentum to NTK updates can destabilize training under heterogeneous data. We propose SPARK, which addresses this instability with a stage-wise annealed soft-label regularizer evaluated on neighborhood-aggregated data, so that momentum can accelerate NTK updates stably. Under high heterogeneity, SPARK converges about 3$\times$ faster than baselines and lowers the total communication to a target accuracy by up to about 70\%, and it attains higher accuracy across heterogeneity levels. We further study random projection as an optional Jacobian-compression strategy for bandwidth-constrained settings. We validate the approach across multiple datasets, network topologies, and heterogeneity levels.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
06.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Theoretical Grounding of Out-Of-Distribution Detection With Reinforcement Learning Optimizer

Authors:
Salimeh Sekeh↗Xin Zhang↗

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection in dynamic open-world environments requires a model to continually adapt to evolving data distributions while generalizing to covariate-shifted inputs and rejecting semantic-shifted OOD examples. Most existing OOD detection methods optimize only the current-step objective and do not explicitly account for how post-deployment environment changes affect future OOD behavior. In this paper, we establish a theoretical grounding for dynamic OOD detection using a reinforcement learning (RL)-guided optimizer that explicitly favors updates that reduce the semantic OOD false positive rate over time. We develop a novel augmented optimizer that uses an RL-guided correction term on top of standard gradient descent (GD) and show its improvement over both future-domain generalization and semantic-OOD rejection. We analyze temporal error decomposition in terms of model-change and environment-change generalization errors and develop a new theoretical framework for comparing the generalization errors under both GD and RL-guided optimizers.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Adversarial dynamical systems characterize when data-driven learning succeeds or fails

Authors:
Matthew J. Colbrook↗Igor Mezi\'c↗Alexei Stepanenko↗

arXiv:2407.06312v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Many systems resist analytical modeling, making data-driven inference of dynamics important. Yet data-driven methods can fail to converge or generalize, leaving open a central question: When can system behavior be learned reliably from data, and when is such learning impossible? We answer this question using adversarial dynamical systems to identify the boundary between accessible and inaccessible regimes. In Koopman operator learning, a leading framework for representing nonlinear dynamics through linear spectral objects, we design optimal data-driven spectral algorithms with convergence and certification guarantees under conditions arising broadly in physical systems. This yields a convergence theory for Koopman-operator approximations and resolves a longstanding open problem in Koopman spectral analysis. Conversely, by constructing adversarial systems, we prove matching impossibility results: without these conditions, no single-sequence limiting procedure can guarantee learning, regardless of data quality. These results sharply characterize when data-driven spectral learning can succeed and when it must fail. We validate the framework on oscillators, chaotic fluid flows and Arctic sea ice concentration forecasting. In the latter, we uncover hidden modes of Arctic sea ice decline, deliver long-range forecasts with geographic error bounds, and outperform state-of-the-art dynamical and deep learning models at substantially lower computational cost, enabling real-time deployment on standard CPUs.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Best Arm Identification with Minimal Regret

Authors:
Junwen Yang↗Vincent Y. F. Tan↗Tianyuan Jin↗

arXiv:2409.18909v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Motivated by real-world applications that necessitate responsible experimentation, we introduce the problem of best arm identification (BAI) with minimal regret. This variant of the multi-armed bandit problem elegantly amalgamates two of its most ubiquitous objectives: regret minimization and BAI. More precisely, the agent's goal is to identify the best arm with a prescribed confidence level $\delta$, while minimizing the cumulative regret up to the stopping time. Focusing on single-parameter exponential families of distributions, we leverage information-theoretic techniques to establish an instance-dependent lower bound on the expected cumulative regret. Moreover, we present an impossibility result that underscores the tension between cumulative regret and sample complexity in fixed-confidence BAI. Complementarily, we design and analyze the Double KL-UCB algorithm, which achieves asymptotic optimality as the confidence level tends to zero. Notably, this algorithm employs two distinct confidence bounds to guide arm selection in a randomized manner. Our findings elucidate a fresh perspective on the inherent connections between regret minimization and BAI.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

ADaPT: Token-Level Decoupling for Efficient Large Reasoning Models

Authors:
Tingyun Li↗Zishang Jiang↗Jinyi Han↗Xinyi Wang↗Sihang Jiang↗Han Xia↗Zhaoqian Dai↗Shuguang Ma↗Fei Yu↗Jiaqing Liang↗Yanghua Xiao↗

arXiv:2606.19919v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large reasoning models rely on long chain-of-thought to achieve strong performance, but applying such reasoning uniformly incurs high computational cost. Existing efficiency-oriented methods attempt to shorten or mix reasoning strategies, yet often degrade reasoning capability. We identify the root cause as sequence-level coupling between efficiency incentives and correctness optimization, which implicitly penalizes long but correct reasoning trajectories. To address this issue, we propose Adaptive Dual-Process Thinking (ADaPT), a token-level dual-process framework that explicitly decouples efficiency and correctness signals during training. ADaPT introduces a mode-selection token to control fast and slow reasoning, applying efficiency-related rewards exclusively to this token to avoid penalizing correct long reasoning while encouraging efficiency when appropriate. Moreover, ADaPT enables precise and continuous control over the efficiency-performance trade-off at inference time: by adjusting the generation probability of the mode-selection token, a single trained model can smoothly move along the efficiency-performance Pareto frontier. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ADaPT significantly reduces inference cost while maintaining strong reasoning performance across multiple benchmarks.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Autonomous Video Generation with Counterfactual Controllability for Self-Evolving World Models

Authors:
Xin Wang↗Wenxuan Liu↗Tongtong Feng↗Wenwu Zhu↗

Existing literature claims that video generation essentially is world modelling. On the one hand, the claim is productive because it pushes generative AI beyond static images and toward temporally extended physical scenes. On the other hand, this claim dangerously relies on the belief that scaling visual prediction alone will automatically yield physical agents. We prefer a more accurate statement: video generation models learn a partial, implicit spatiotemporal world model, but not a fully grounded or controllable one. The reason is as follows: a model may generate a plausible video of a drone crossing a forest or a robot arm manipulating a cup, yet still fail to know which variables are controllable, which constraints belong to a particular body and which futures remain valid under intervention. The frontier in essence is not predictive realism alone, instead it emphasizes a self-evolving generative nature that requires the decisive criterion to be counterfactual controllability: the capability of asking what would happen under an action, to test whether the generated future can survive embodiment constraints and to feed the resulting action knowledge back into future imagination (generation). Therefore, in this paper we present a new perspective, i.e., autonomous video generation with counterfactual controllability is one promising way to realize self-evolving world models.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Nemotron 3 Ultra: Open, Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Model for Agentic Reasoning

Authors:
NVIDIA↗Aaron Blakeman↗Aaron Thomas↗Aastha Jhunjhunwala↗Abhibha Gupta↗Abhinav Khattar↗Adam Rajfer↗Adi Renduchintala↗Adil Asif↗Aditya Vavre↗Adriana Flores Miranda↗Ahmad Bilal↗…

We introduce Nemotron 3 Ultra, a 550 billion total and 55 billion active parameter Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Attention language model. We pre-trained Nemotron 3 Ultra on 20 trillion text tokens, then extended the context length to 1M tokens, and post-trained using Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT), Reinforcement Learning (RL), and Multi-teacher On-Policy Distillation (MOPD). Nemotron 3 Ultra is our most capable model yet, employing multiple key technologies - LatentMoE, Multi Token Prediction (MTP), NVFP4 pre-training, multi-environment RLVR, MOPD, and reasoning budget control. Nemotron 3 Ultra achieves up to ~6x higher inference throughput as compared to state-of-the-art publicly available LLMs while attaining on-par accuracy. The state-of-the-art accuracy, high inference throughput, and 1M token context length make Nemotron 3 Ultra ideal for long-running autonomous agentic tasks. We open-source the base, post-trained, and quantized checkpoints, along with the training data and recipe on HuggingFace.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Holistic Data Scheduler for LLM Pre-training via Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Chenhao Dang↗Jing Ma↗Mingjie Liao↗

The composition of training data, governed by the diversity of sources and their mixing strategy, is a cornerstone of Large Language Model (LLM) pre-training. Online Data Mixing (ODM), the technique of adaptively adjusting data mixtures during training, has emerged as a promising direction to improve efficiency. However, existing methods are constrained by their reliance on a singular optimization perspective, which fundamentally overlooks the need for complex LLM pre-training to consider the dynamic data composition from multiple dimensions. To overcome this limitation, we introduce the Holistic Data Scheduler (HDS), a novel online data mixing framework. HDS formulates the data scheduling challenge as a reinforcement learning problem in a continuous control space and leverages the Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithm for its stability and sample efficiency in exploring the high-dimensional policy space. At the core of HDS lies a novel multi-objective, holistic reward function that integrates three critical perspectives: a data-driven reward for quality, a loss-driven reward capturing inter-domain influence, and a model-driven reward based on weight norms. To validate our design and determine its optimal configuration, we conducted systematic experiments on LLMs of various sizes. On The Pile benchmark, HDS reaches the final validation perplexity of the next best method with 44% fewer training iterations. Furthermore, it achieves a 7.2% improvement on the MMLU 0-shot task along with consistent gains on other benchmarks, showcasing its ability to enhance both training efficiency and final model capability.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

CREDENCE: Claim Reduction for Decomposition & Enhanced Credibility – Semantic Metrics and Convergence Analysis

Authors:
Phuong Huu Vu Tran↗Thuan Duc Mai↗Bach Xuan Le↗

Decomposing compound sentences into atomic, verifiable claims is a prerequisite for reliable automated fact-checking. Prior work has relied on token-overlap (Jaccard) metrics that systematically underestimate decomposition quality for paraphrastic claims, and has lacked formal termination analysis for the repair loop. We present Credence, a revised claim decomposition and evaluation framework addressing both shortcomings. Our contributions are: (1) Semantic-F1: we use BGE-large cosine similarity fidelity metric that resolves Jaccard's penalisation and improves downstream fact-checking accuracy; (2) Convergence theorems: we formally characterise four properties of the repair pipeline, establishing that rule-based repair is monotone and finitely terminating under an oracle parser assumption; LLM-based self-repair is provably non-monotone and requires an early-exit guard; (3) Three evaluation benchmarks spanning social-media, encyclopaedic, and news domains for cross-domain generalisation measurement; (4) Multi-model benchmarking across four decomposer models (3.8B-12B) and a closed API model. Experiments on SocialClaimSplit, WikiSplitBench, and ClaimDecompBench show that Semantic-F1 outperforms Jaccard-F1 by +15-32pp. EPR ranges from 0.94 to 1.00 on SocialClaimSplit and WikiSplitBench, while ClaimDecompBench includes lower base EPR cases (down to 0.824) due to harder news-domain constructions, and rule-repair reduces the Atomicity Violation Rate (AVR) by 47-100% relative to the base model without degrading fidelity.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Target-Aware Linear Regression Under Distribution Shift

Authors:
Zhewen Hou↗Tian Zheng↗

arXiv:2606.22775v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Distribution shift between training and deployment is a pervasive challenge for modern AI systems. In many cases, the target marginals of covariates and response are known or specified through population-level observations, boundary conditions, properties of simulator configurations, or alignment-time distributional constraints. Such knowledge may provide valuable side information for regression estimation. We study this problem in the multivariate linear regression setting with a stable conditional mean $E[Y\mid X]$ across source and target, and identify the hybrid-loss estimator, which jointly incorporates both target marginals, as a benchmark target-aware estimator. Its direct computation, however, requires solving a coupled nonlinear optimization that is expensive at scale. Our main contribution is to develop and evaluate two computationally tractable alternatives: a constrained moment-matching estimator and a two-stage estimator that augments ordinary least squares with a calibration step. For all three estimators, we derive and compare closed-form asymptotic mean squared errors, yielding conditions under which the tractable alternatives match or closely approximate the hybrid benchmark, and regimes in which they do not. Monte Carlo experiments across three controlled shift regimes validate the theoretical results, investigate the accuracy-runtime tradeoffs among the three estimators, and translate into guidance on estimator choice. In particular, the two-stage estimator nearly matches the hybrid benchmark in the high signal-to-noise regime at essentially no additional cost, providing theoretical grounding for empirical observations in nonlinear settings.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Global population frequencies of NAT2 star alleles observed in three large biobanks

Authors:
Sangkuhl↗Whirl-Carrillo↗Woon↗Venkatesh↗Keat↗Whaley↗Ritchie↗M. D↗Klein↗T. E↗

NAT2 is an important pharmacogene which encodes the N-acetyltransferase 2 enzyme that is involved in the metabolism of multiple medications, and variants in this gene can affect patient response to these medications. CPIC has published a clinical guideline for prescribing hydralazine using NAT2 genotypes. Just prior to the guideline, updated NAT2 star allele numbering and definitions were released, differing somewhat from the historical nomenclature. Clinical pharmacogenomic testing panels often test for the most common star alleles, so knowledge of the most common updated NAT2 star alleles is critical for the implementation of the CPIC NAT2/hydralazine guideline. We first determine NAT2 diplotype frequencies from UK Biobank (UKBB) 200k phased genomes, then analyzed allele, diplotype, and phenotype population frequencies from the All of Us Research program, PennMedicine BioBank (PMBB) and UKBB 500k datasets. We found that analyzing NAT2 diplotypes from phased data provides critical information for algorithms designed to predict diplotypes from unphased data. We observed that NAT2*5, *6, and *4 were the most common star alleles in that order, and the top 11 most frequent NAT2 star alleles were the same across all biobanks. However, differences in star allele frequencies across biogeographical populations were observed. The largest difference led to a higher frequency of NAT2 poor metabolizer phenotypes as compared to rapid and intermediate metabolizer phenotypes in all global populations except in the EAS population, where NAT2 poor metabolizers were in the minority.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

In-Domain Supervised Pathology Report Classification: A Reproducible Pipeline from Data Curation to Production-Matched Evaluation

Authors:
Isaac Hands↗Bin Huang↗Adam Spannaus↗John Gounley↗Heidi Hanson↗Eric Durbin↗Sally R. Ellingson↗

We introduce an in-domain supervised pipeline designed to counter the out-of-distribution performance drop that hampers supervised biomedical NLP models, a problem observed when models trained on pathology reports are moved across cancer registries. Our contribution is a reproducible recipe for training a supervised classifier from routinely collected cancer registry data. It describes how to build the in-domain training set and a production-matched holdout, and to choose operating points that keep the false-negative rate (FNR) very low while keeping reviewer workload manageable. The pipeline standardizes data curation with facility-stratified sampling and separate handling of reports linked to registry cases, and includes a blinded manual audit to estimate positive-case prevalence and label noise. On a 418k-report holdout set, the Kentucky model achieved FNR 0.003 and false-positive rate (FPR) 0.097, improving over the Seattle-trained MOSSAIC OncoID baseline (FNR 0.010, FPR 0.183) and raising F1 from 0.860 to 0.922. In a blinded manual review of 600 reports, estimated positive prevalence declined from 0.500 to 0.398, indicating substantial label noise with errors concentrated in rare primary sites.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
17.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Trajectory inference of epithelial-centered neighborhood profiles reconstructs a pseudo-temporal continuum in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis

Authors:
Nakamura↗Tsubouchi↗Yamamoto↗Takano↗Nakatsuru↗Takenaka↗Hashisako↗Oda↗Okamoto↗

Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is characterized by complex lung architecture and spatially heterogeneous remodeling, which have hindered integrated analysis of cell-intrinsic activity and intercellular communication during disease progression. Here we profiled six IPF lung specimens comprising more than 630,000 cells using the Xenium 5k panel and developed an epithelial-centered neighborhood profiling framework based on the local cellular composition around each epithelial cell. This approach captured fibrosis-associated variation in epithelial niches without requiring predefined histological regions. Pseudo-temporal continuum inference of these profiles reconstructed a continuous axis that reflected the spatial progression of fibrotic remodeling from relatively preserved alveolar regions to fibrotic and airway-like remodeled regions. Within this spatial dataset, we mapped coordinated changes in epithelial states, local microenvironments, epithelial intracellular pathway activities, and directional interactions with neighboring cell types along the same axis. Our findings provide a spatial framework that generates testable hypotheses for progressive epithelial niche remodeling in IPF.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Beyond IGO-Flow: Toward Convergence Analysis of IGO in Continuous Spaces

Authors:
Ryosuke Kimura↗Youhei Akimoto↗

arXiv:2606.17523v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Information-Geometric Optimization (IGO) provides a unified framework for black-box optimization by interpreting the adaptation of a search distribution as a natural gradient update. Despite its conceptual importance, the convergence theory of IGO remains limited: most existing results concern continuous-time idealizations such as the IGO flow, rather than discrete-time updates with non-infinitesimal learning rates. In this paper, we study discrete-time IGO in continuous spaces, formulated as natural gradient updates in the expectation-parameter coordinates of an exponential family. In particular, we analyze IGO over the multivariate Gaussian family on strongly convex quadratic objective functions. Our analysis covers a setting that simultaneously incorporates full covariance adaptation, a fixed positive learning rate, and quantile-based weights. In this setting, we prove that the covariance matrix converges to the zero matrix. We further show that the mean vector converges to the global optimum, provided that the condition number of the appropriately scaled covariance matrix is bounded at sufficiently frequent iterations. These results advance the convergence theory of IGO and help bridge the gap between the mathematical theory of IGO and practical covariance-adaptive search methods such as CMA-ES.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
20.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-15

Fung-AI: An AI/ML-driven pipeline for antifungal peptide discovery

Authors:
Daniel S. Berman↗

by Daniel S. Berman, Libby M. Lewis, Tom D. Curtis, Olivia N. Tiburzi, Daniel F. Q. Smith, Arturo Casadevall, Laura J. Dunphy Emerging fungal pathogens represent a concerning threat to both global health and food security. In this study, we aimed to address our rising vulnerability to fungal pathogens through the development of the Fung-AI pipeline: an AI/ML-driven approach for antifungal discovery. A generative adversarial network (GAN) was trained to generate novel candidate antifungal peptide sequences. Next, in silico antifungal and hemolytic classifiers were built to further prioritize AI-generated peptides for experimental validation. From a pool of ~10,000 candidates, thirteen peptides were selected for testing over two-stages of experimentation. Five peptides were found to display mild antifungal activity against the wheat pathogen, Fusarium graminearum, with minimal inhibitory concentrations (MICs) ranging from 250 µg/mL to 500 µg/mL. Four of the five peptides also showed activity against the human pathogen, Candida albicans (MIC: 500 µg/mL). Two of our AI-generated antifungal peptides additionally demonstrated low cytotoxicity in HepG2 human liver carcinoma cells (LC50 > 704.2 µg/mL) indicating that they may be useful as scaffolds for future optimization for therapeutic applications. None of our peptides were found to considerably inhibit the emerging pathogen C. auris, suggesting the need for pathogen-specific down-selection of candidate peptides. Overall, we present a proof-of-principle, generative-AI-based approach for the rapid design of de novo antifungal peptides.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Semi-Supervised Speech Confidence Detection using Pseudo-Labelling and Whisper Embeddings

Authors:
Adam Wynn↗Jingyun Wang↗Xiangyu Tan↗

arXiv:2606.16505v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding speaker confidence is crucial in educational settings, as it can enhance personalised feedback and improve learning outcomes. This study introduces a novel framework for detecting speaker confidence by integrating human-engineered features with embeddings from the Whisper encoder. To address data limitations, a pseudo-labelling technique is employed to expand the labelled dataset, allowing the model to learn from both human-annotated and model-generated labels. The framework combines traditional speech features including pitch, volume, rate of speech, and the presence of disfluencies and stress, with Whisper embeddings, and uses a co-attention mechanism to fuse these representations and achieve an overall accuracy of 75%. This study contributes to advancing speech analysis, enabling applications that support personalised learning and speaking skill development.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Learning Fair Pareto-Optimal Policies in Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Umer Siddique↗Peilang Li↗Yongcan Cao↗

arXiv:2606.18111v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fairness is an important aspect of decision-making in multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL), where policies must ensure both optimality and equity across multiple, potentially conflicting objectives. While single-policy MORL methods can learn fair policies for fixed user preferences using welfare functions such as the generalized Gini welfare function (GGF), they fail to provide the diverse set of policies necessary for dynamic or unknown user preferences. To address this limitation, we formalize the fair optimization problem in multi-policy MORL, where the goal is to learn a set of Pareto-optimal policies that ensure fairness across all possible user preferences. Our key technical contributions are threefold: (1) We show that for concave, piecewise-linear welfare functions (e.g., GGF), fair policies remain in the convex coverage set (CCS), which is an approximated Pareto front for linear scalarization. (2) We demonstrate that non-stationary policies, augmented with accrued reward histories, and stochastic policies improve fairness by dynamically adapting to historical inequities. (3) We propose three novel algorithms, which include integrating GGF with multi-policy multi-objective Q-Learning (MOQL), state-augmented multi-policy MOQL for learning non-statoinary policies, and its novel extension for learning stochastic policies. We evaluate our algorithms across various domains and compare our methods against the state-of-the-art MORL baselines. The empirical results show that our methods learn a set of fair policies that accommodate different user preferences.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Topological Quantum Interferometry

Authors:
Tianyou Ying↗Yufeng Zhou↗Chengwei Pan↗Ryan Hogan↗Ruoyang Zhang↗Hui Liu↗Shining Zhu↗Xiaoqin Gao↗

arXiv:2606.19730v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Structured light provides high-dimensional Hilbert spaces holding tremendous potential for fundamental quantum optics and quantum technologies. However, existing characterization methods, like Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference, typically assume perfectly tuned conditions, overlooking the geometric physics governing spatial mode evolution. Here, we establish topological quantum interferometry driven by an interaction-based geometric phase, the exchange Berry phase (BPX). Our formalism generalizes $q$-plate state generation and characterization to arbitrary topological charges and (de)tuning conditions, demonstrating that BPX acts as a geometric marker governing spatial interference. We show BPX serves as a deterministic control parameter, decomposing two-photon spatial patterns into geometry-dictated fundamental modes. This mapping reveals topological invariants and phase singularities that function as a non-tomographic witness for state dimensionality estimation, circumventing full-state reconstruction. Being device-independent and highly scalable, this approach enables scalable high-dimensional characterization and topologically protected state selection, with direct applicability to quantum metrology and high-capacity quantum networks.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Wigner Cat Phases: A finely tunable system for exploring the transition to quantum chaos

Authors:
M. S\"uzen↗

arXiv:2512.22169v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A quantum mechanical setting consisting of a frozen qubit composed with a fully thermalized chaotic system of N states is proposed, with potential relevance to quantum control. Observing the states of the composed system selectively retaining the states leads to the observation of novel localization in the subsystem. At a tuning parameter of 1.0, implying no selection, the system exhibits Wigner-Dyson level spacing statistics, indicative of quantum chaos. As the tuning parameter is reduced and selection occurs at a cutoff, the nearest-neighbor level spacing distribution develops heavier tails, a signature of suppressed spectral mixing and the emergence of non-thermal dynamics. In these regimes, the eigendensity develops a pronounced "cat-ears" structure, reflecting the formation of spatially localized bimodal eigenstates. These topological features persist without transitioning to Poisson statistics, indicating a transition from quantum chaos to a non-thermal, novel many-body localized (MBL) regime-referred to as Wigner Cat Phases. The proposed mixed random matrix ensemble offers a practical probe for sustaining this novel quantum localization setting. Results from our rigorous spectral statistics analysis show how "cat-ears" form in spectral densities based on the degree of selection or disorder and indicate that gap ratio statistics must be used with caution in detecting the full integrable limit due to the possibility of heavy-tailed Wigner-Dyson distributions.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

PROBE: Probabilistic Occupancy BEV Encoding with Analytical Translation Robustness for 3D Place Recognition

Authors:
Jinseop Lee↗Byoungho Lee↗Gichul Yoo↗

We present PROBE (PRobabilistic Occupancy BEV Encoding), a learning-free LiDAR place recognition descriptor that models each BEV cell's occupancy as a Bernoulli random variable. Rather than relying on discrete point-cloud perturbations, PROBE analytically marginalizes over continuous Cartesian translations via the polar Jacobian, yielding a distance-adaptive angular uncertainty $\sigma_\theta = \sigma_t / r$ in $\mathcal{O}(R{\cdot}S)$ time. The primary parameter $\sigma_t$ represents the expected translational uncertainty in meters, a sensor-independent physical quantity that enhances cross-sensor generalization while reducing the need for extensive per-dataset tuning. Pairwise similarity combines a Bernoulli-KL Jaccard with exponential uncertainty gating and FFT-based height cosine similarity for rotation alignment. Evaluated on four datasets spanning four diverse LiDAR types, PROBE achieves the highest accuracy among handcrafted descriptors in multi-session evaluation and competitive single-session performance relative to both handcrafted and supervised baselines. The source code and supplementary materials are available at https://sites.google.com/view/probe-pr.

Read & Discuss → View Source →