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01.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

VrySure: A Multi-Task AI Scientific Fraud Detection Platform for Identifying Manipulated and AI-Generated Biomedical Research Images

Integrity of scientific data is critical in biomedical research, where images often serve as primary evidence for experimental observations and conclusions. Advances in image-editing technologies and generative artificial intelligence (AI) have increased the accessibility and realism of visual manipulation, making detection through manual review increasingly challenging. To empower our laboratory researchers to continuously monitor and uphold scientific rigor and data integrity, and serve the global scientific community, we developed VrySure, an easy-to-deploy, AI-driven multi-task platform for automated image-integrity screening in biomedical research. VrySure integrates four detection modules: cross-image transformation detection, within-image copy-move detection, splicing detection in blot and gel images, and AI-generated image detection. The system identifies potentially manipulated images and, when possible, localizes suspicious regions using bounding-box outputs to support downstream verification. To support development and evaluation, we constructed task-specific datasets by combining public biomedical image resources, curated manipulated examples, and synthetic images generated by multiple generative AI systems. We evaluated VrySure using region-level F1 score, recall, precision, false negative rate (FNR), and false discovery rate (FDR) across multiple manipulation categories and compared its performance with two commonly used commercial image-integrity screening platforms under a predefined benchmark protocol. Under the tested conditions, VrySure achieved a higher F1 score and recall, lower FNR, and maintained a low FDR for within-image copy-move detection, splicing detection, and AI-generated image detection, while showing comparable performance in transformation detection. Beyond automated screening, VrySure is designed to support source-data comparison and evidence-based assessment in scientific integrity investigations. By integrating multiple detection capabilities into a unified and scalable workflow, VrySure provides a practical framework to improve the efficiency and consistency of image-integrity screening in biomedical research.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Generalizing Beyond Suboptimality: Offline Reinforcement Learning Learns Effective Scheduling through Random Solutions

arXiv:2509.10303v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Online reinforcement learning (RL) approaches have demonstrated strong performance on Job Shop Scheduling (JSP) and Flexible JSP (FJSP) problems by learning scheduling policies through direct interaction with simulated environments. However, these methods often require extensive training interactions, limiting their sample efficiency and practical applicability. Motivated by this challenge, we introduce Conservative Discrete Quantile Actor-Critic (CDQAC), an offline RL algorithm that learns effective scheduling policies directly from static, suboptimal datasets. CDQAC couples a quantile-based critic with delayed policy updates to estimate the return distribution of machine-operation pairs. Extensive experiments on JSP and FJSP benchmarks demonstrate that CDQAC consistently outperforms the data-generating heuristics, surpasses state-of-the-art offline and online RL baselines, and is highly sample efficient, requiring only 1 to 5% of the original dataset to learn high-quality policies. Our analysis suggests that, in scheduling, offline RL performance is governed mainly by state-action coverage rather than the quality of individual trajectories. Scheduling couples a dense reward aligned with the makespan objective with equal-length trajectories across heuristics, enabling effective learning from a broad range of behaviors. Consistent with this observation, datasets generated by a simple random heuristic with broader coverage let it outperform policies trained on datasets produced by stronger heuristics such as Genetic Algorithms.

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

Beyond Prediction: Tail-Aware Scheduling for LLM Inference

arXiv:2606.18431v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM serving exhibits extreme length variability, making size-based scheduling difficult in practice. Recent LLM schedulers approximate SJF/SRPT using predicted decode lengths or ranks and primarily report mean-centric metrics such as TTFT and TBT. We show that these prediction-driven policies can be fragile under distribution shifts, bursty arrivals, and GPU memory pressure, while offering limited control over the tail latency (P90-P99) that dominates user experience, even with perfect decode-length knowledge. We introduce a distribution-aware, prediction-free scheduling framework that replaces explicit length prediction with soft priority boosting driven by lightweight statistical signals. Our design co-optimizes scheduling and cache-aware preemption to account for memory-coupled decode dynamics across workload mixes. Evaluated on production and open-source traces, our method reduces P99 TTLT by up to 35-50% relative to SRPT with perfect length knowledge and reduces TTFT by 34-47% across workloads, including reasoning-heavy and chat-heavy tasks. These results demonstrate a robust alternative for optimizing tail latency in online LLM serving.

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

Semantic Reasoning in Medicine: The Role of Knowledge Graphs Across Five Key Domains

arXiv:2606.15155v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge graphs (KGs) have emerged as a promising solution for integrating and reasoning over complex biomedical and clinical data in healthcare. By representing structured relationships among entities such as diseases, drugs, symptoms, and patient records, KGs provide a semantic backbone for decision-making, prediction, recommendation, and personalized care. Recent advances have demonstrated their utility across diverse medical applications–including clinical decision support systems, disease and treatment outcome prediction, health recommender systems, precision medicine, and medical question answering–where KGs often enhance interpretability, semantic coherence, and patient-specific reasoning. In parallel, a growing body of work focuses on medical KG generation itself, proposing frameworks that construct graphs from EHRs, clinical narratives, biomedical literature, and web resources using ontologies, semantic web technologies, deep-learning-based information extraction, and hybrid neuro-symbolic pipelines. Despite this progress, significant challenges remain, including limited and fragmented knowledge coverage, difficulties in aligning heterogeneous data sources, the fragility of current reasoning and representation-learning methods on dense multi-relational graphs, and unresolved issues related to privacy, bias, and accountability. This survey reviews and categorizes current research on KGs in medicine along both application-oriented and methodology-oriented dimensions, discusses their benefits and technical foundations, and outlines key limitations and open research directions. By analyzing trends, architectures, and evaluation practices, this work aims to guide future developments in KG-driven medical AI systems and support their safe and effective integration into healthcare environments.

05.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

EMAlign: accurate alignment of cryo-EM maps through main-chain probability using deep learning

Accurate alignment of cryo-EM density maps is essential for comparing conformational states, searching map libraries, and guiding atomic model building, but remains challenging for noisy experimental maps and partially overlapping structures. Existing alignment methods are often based on raw maps, which may result in reduced accuracy due to the density noise, or require manual intervention for local alignment, which suffers from limited general applicability. Addressing the limitations, we present EMAlign, an automatic global and local cryo-EM map alignment with predicted main-chain probability using deep learning. First, EMAlign predicts main-chain prob ability maps from raw cryo-EM density maps using a BiMCUNet network. Then, a fast Fourier transform (FFT)-based search strategy is used to globally search the accurate alignment between cryo-EM maps based on predicted main-chain probability maps. As such, the main-chain prob ability map overcomes the noisy raw map problem, and the FFT-based exhaustive global search ensures the general applicability of alignment. EMAlign is evaluated on 64 global map pairs, 195 local map pairs, and 60 structure-to-map pairs at 3-10 [A] resolution and compared with gmfit, fitmap, VESPER, and CryoAlign. It is shown that EMAlign outperforms the other methods in both global and local alignment, achieving mean RMSDs of 1.03 [A] (global), 2.56 [A] (local), and 0.82 [A] (structure-to-map), with success rates of 100.0%, 100.0%, and 98.3% under the criterion of RMSD < 10 [A]. The EMAlign package is freely available at https://github.com/huang-laboratory/EMAlign/.

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

VOID: Defeating Unauthorized Mimicry in Latent Diffusion Models

While Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) have revolutionized visual synthesis, they are increasingly exploited for unauthorized mimicry of individuals. Existing defenses inject deceptive perturbations to steer the generated images toward irrelevant targets. However, this approach hinges on an ungrounded assumption: subtle perturbations can maintain their deceptive efficacy throughout an LDM's extensive generation process. In reality, the model's innate restoration mechanism will remove such perturbations and cause individual identities to re-emerge in the images generated. We propose VOID, a defense framework that overcomes this conundrum by manipulating an LDM's intrinsic stochasticity. VOID perturbs the diffusion pipeline in two novel ways: 1) amplifying the latent encoding errors to shatter an image's semantic structure, and 2) counteracting the target guidance signals to suppress the model's restoration capabilities. This results in a semantic corruption that thwarts any unauthorized mimicry. Notably, the security gain does not come at the price of visual utility, as VOID simultaneously manages to confine perturbations to human-imperceptible regions of protected images. Our comprehensive evaluation of 24 state-of-the-art defenses against 10 mimicry attacks on 5 datasets demonstrates VOID's unprecedented protection power: it increases the average Frechet Inception Distance (FID) from 113 to 365, a 223% improvement over the strongest defense to date.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

SoftMoE: Soft Differentiable Routing for Mixture-of-Experts in LLMs

arXiv:2606.17952v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures enable scaling LLM parameters under a fixed inference budget by activating only a small subset of experts via top-$k$ routing. While this preserves causality and suits autoregressive language models, the discrete top-$k$ operator is not differentiable, forcing a fixed number of active experts per input and resulting in inefficient use of computation. We propose SoftMoE, which replaces discrete routing with a truncated soft top-$k$ LapSum relaxation, allowing gradient-based optimization of expert routing. We further parameterize the mean number of active experts per layer and impose a global budget constraint, enabling the model to learn how to allocate expert capacity across layers. SoftMoE remains fully compatible with autoregressive modeling and achieves performance comparable to or better than sparse MoE on language modeling and downstream tasks, while activating significantly fewer experts. Notably, the learned allocation is highly non-uniform, with later layers activating more experts. The source code is publicly available$^\dagger$.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Comparing Linear Probes with Mahalanobis Cosine Similarity

arXiv:2606.19603v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Linear probes are widely used in interpretability research and often compared by cosine similarity. The Mahalanobis cosine similarity (MCS) between two directions, which reweights the inner product by test data covariance, is a natural task-aware refinement. Ying et al. (2026) report that a probe's MCS to a reference probe trained on the out-of-distribution (OOD) data near-perfectly linearly predicts the probe's OOD AUROC (R^2 = 0.98). Here, we extend this empirical finding across models, layers, and concept domains, and prove this general phenomenon in closed form: For balanced classes whose projections are Gaussian, OOD AUROC and MCS to the reference probe are linear because both are sigmoid-shaped functions of the probe's signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) on the test data. The theory also predicts when this linearity fails, which we verify empirically. MCS offers a theoretically grounded and empirically effective alternative to Euclidean cosine similarity for comparing linear probes.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Effects of Resveratrol as an Adjunct to a Low-Calorie Diet in Postmenopausal Women with Obesity and Knee Osteoarthritis

Background. Obesity is a modifiable risk factor for osteoarthritis and may contribute to pain, functional impairment, inflammation, and cartilage degradation. Resveratrol has potential anti-inflammatory and chondroprotective effects, but its efficacy as an adjunct to dietary intervention remains unclear. Objective. This study evaluated whether resveratrol supplementation provides additional benefits when combined with a low-calorie diet in postmenopausal women with obesity and knee osteoarthritis. Methods. A total of 97 postmenopausal women with obesity and knee osteoarthritis were included in this randomized controlled clinical study. Participants received either a 10-day low-calorie diet alone or the same diet combined with 150 mg/day trans-resveratrol. Anthropometric parameters, body composition, biochemical markers, pain intensity, functional status, and urinary CTX-II were assessed at baseline and follow-up. Results. Both interventions were associated with reductions in body weight, BMI, waist and hip circumferences, fat mass, glucose, HOMA-IR, lipid parameters, hsCRP, VAS, WOMAC, LAI, and urinary CTX-II. Compared with diet alone, resveratrol supplementation did not provide additional benefits for anthropometric parameters, glucose metabolism, lipid profile, or WOMAC score. However, the resveratrol group showed a greater reduction in hsCRP and urinary CTX-II. The obesity class did not modify the treatment effect. Conclusion. A short-term low-calorie diet improved metabolic, inflammatory, and osteoarthritis-related parameters in postmenopausal women with obesity and knee osteoarthritis. The addition of resveratrol did not enhance weight loss or improve most metabolic outcomes but was associated with greater reductions in hsCRP and urinary CTX-II. These findings suggest a potential anti-inflammatory and cartilage-related effect of resveratrol, which requires confirmation in longer randomized trials.

10.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

A 98-qubit trapped-ion quantum computer with all-to-all connectivity

Quantum computers require both high-fidelity operations and large qubit numbers to surpass classical capabilities1. Trapped-ion platforms have demonstrated the highest gate fidelities of any modality2–6 but scaling to larger qubit numbers while preserving performance has remained a central challenge. We report on Quantinuum Helios, a 98-qubit trapped-ion quantum processor based on the quantum charge-coupled device (QCCD) architecture7. Helios features 137Ba+ hyperfine qubits8,9, all-to-all connectivity enabled by a rotatable ion storage ring connecting two quantum operation regions by a junction10,11, speed improvements from parallelized operations12 and a new software stack with real-time compilation of dynamic programs13. Averaged over all operational zones in the system, we achieve average infidelities of 2.5(1) × 10−5 for single-qubit (1Q) gates, 7.9(2) × 10−4 for two-qubit (2Q) gates and 3.3(5) × 10−4 for state preparation and measurement (SPAM), none of which are fundamentally limited and probably able to be improved. These component infidelities are predictive of system-level performance in both random Clifford circuits and random circuit sampling (RCS), the latter demonstrating that Helios operates well beyond the reach of classical simulation and establishes a new frontier of fidelity and complexity for quantum computers14. A new quantum computer, Quantinuum Helios, which is a 98-qubit trapped-ion quantum processor built on the QCCD architecture, demonstrates performance well beyond classical capabilities and provides a path for scaling up quantum computing.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Stochastic signal sensing with finite energy and dead time at the fundamental quantum limit

arXiv:2606.18133v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: State preparation, measurement, and reset operations take finite time and use finite energy in realistic experiments, yet the impact of this on optimal quantum metrological protocols is not properly understood. We study the effect on sensing a stochastic signal, relevant for the detection of ultralight dark matter and other searches for fundamental physics. We prove that two-mode squeezed vacuum is the optimal probe state given a finite mean-energy constraint for a family of incoherent sensing problems, including noise sensing and quantum illumination. For estimating a gain independent of a loss, we show that entanglement is a required resource to achieve the fundamental quantum limit and observe a non-Gaussian to Gaussian transition in the optimal unentangled state as the dead time increases. We apply our results to bulk acoustic wave resonators.

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

Navigating the Safety-Fidelity Trade-off: Massive-Variate Time Series Forecasting for Power Systems via Probabilistic Scenarios

arXiv:2606.13338v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Probabilistic forecasting models are increasingly deployed on multivariate systems with distinct channel physics and operational constraints, but existing benchmarks evaluate neither property at scale. Public canonical multivariate benchmarks cap out at 2,000 channels, while power-system benchmarks either lack temporal structure or probabilistic evaluation. We introduce PowerPhase, a probabilistic forecasting benchmark built on six transmission grids ranging from 2,000 to 36,964 jointly forecasted channels, more than an order of magnitude beyond popular canonical multivariate benchmarks. Each target trajectory is the output of an AC power-flow solve, and PowerPhase ships with constraint-aware metrics, including Safety_mBrier, NECV, and CVaR-alpha, that complement CRPS and Distortion. Across eight baselines and three seeds, distributional accuracy and constraint satisfaction rank models differently, a trade-off we term safety-fidelity. We further propose PowerForge, a scenario-based quantile forecaster with type-specific decoding heads and a causal bridge between variable groups, which achieves the best average rank on every grid.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

A Benchmark for Omni-Modal Reasoning in Long Videos

Long-form omni-modal video understanding requires integrating vision, speech, and ambient audio with coherent long-context reasoning. Existing video benchmarks often trade off temporal scale, modality coverage, open-ended interaction, and interpretable scoring. To address this gap, we introduce LongShOTBench, a long video understanding benchmark designed around three coupled goals: holistic omni-modal integration, intent-driven open-ended interaction, and rubric-level diagnosis. It builds single- and multi-turn questions from real viewing scenarios, with systematic tasks probing visual, speech, ambient-audio, temporal, and cross-modal reasoning. Each item includes a reference answer and a weighted criterion-level rubric, letting evaluation identify which perceptual facts, temporal links, modality-grounding requirements, and reasoning steps are satisfied or missed. All samples are manually verified to improve grounding, clarity, and rubric reliability. We also introduce LongShOTAgent, a training-free omni-modal evidence-seeking agent coupling full-video preprocessing with targeted retrieval, query-adaptive segment refinement, and explicit claim verification over visual, speech, and non-speech audio evidence. Its iterative search-refine-verify loop exposes intermediate evidence and lets modality-specific specialists re-analyze relevant moments before answering. We evaluate 105 video-capable models spanning open-source omni-modal models, vision-language systems, audio LLMs, agentic pipelines and closed-source APIs. Current MLLMs remain far from saturating LongShOTBench, while our LongShOTAgent is the strongest training-free system, reaching 66.64% overall. By releasing the benchmark, leaderboard, and method, we provide a shared, interpretable testbed for advancing long-form omni-modal video reasoning. Code, data, and the leaderboard are available at https://longshot.cvmbzuai.com/.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Navigating Distribution Shifts in Medical Image Analysis: A Survey

Medical Image Analysis (MedIA) has become indispensable in modern healthcare, enhancing clinical diagnostics and personalized treatment. Despite the remarkable advancements supported by deep learning (DL) technologies, their practical deployment faces challenges posed by distribution shifts, where models trained on specific datasets underperform on others from varying hospitals, or patient populations. To address this issue, researchers have been actively developing strategies to increase the adaptability of DL models, enabling their effective use in unfamiliar environments. This paper systematically reviews approaches that apply DL techniques to MedIA systems affected by distribution shifts. Rather than organizing existing methods by technical characteristics, we explicitly bridge real-world clinical constraints – such as limited data accessibility, strict privacy requirements, and heterogeneous collaboration protocols – with the technical paradigms able to address them. By establishing this connection between operational constraints and methodological evolution, we categorize existing works into Joint Training, Federated Learning, Fine-tuning, and Domain Generalization, each aligned with specific healthcare scenarios. Beyond this taxonomy, our empirical analysis suggests that, as domain information becomes progressively less accessible across these paradigms, performance improvements become increasingly constrained, and further uncovers a gradual shift in methodological focus from explicit distribution alignment toward uncertainty-aware modeling, ultimately pointing to the need for more deployability-aware design in real-world MedIA.

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

DDTNet: Degradation Disentanglement and Transfer Network for Test-Time All-in-One De-weathering Adaptation

All-in-one adverse weather image restoration aims to remove multiple degradations, such as rain, haze, and snow, using a single unified model. Despite their broad applicability, existing methods typically compromise performance, delivering balanced but suboptimal results for individual degradation types. This issue becomes more pronounced when a domain gap exists between training and testing data. Motivated by the observation that modeling degradation patterns is more feasible than recovering clean content, we propose the Degradation Disentanglement and Transfer Network (DDTNet), which focuses specifically on degradation transfer. By disentangling degradation patterns from target-domain degraded images and transferring them to source domain clean images, DDTNet generates domain-adaptive paired training data. These pairs are then used to fine-tune restoration models, significantly enhancing their adaptability across diverse weather conditions and domains. The core of DDTNet is the Degradation Disentanglement Module (DDM), which comprises Degradation Coupled Attention (DCA) to capture both general and weather-specific features, thereby enabling effective disentanglement and transfer of degradation patterns. Experimental results demonstrate that DDTNet significantly and consistently improves existing all-in-one models across real-world deraining, desnowing, and dehazing datasets.

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

Spectrally Corrected Polynomial Approximation for Quantum Singular Value Transformation

arXiv:2603.03998v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum Singular Value Transformation (QSVT) provides a unified framework for applying polynomial functions to the singular values of a block-encoded matrix. QSVT prepares a state proportional to $\bA^{-1}\bb$ with circuit depth $O(d\cdot\mathrm{polylog}(N))$, where $d$ is the polynomial degree of the $1/x$ approximation and $N$ is the size of $\bA$. Current polynomial approximation methods are over the continuous interval $[a,1]$, giving $d = O(\sqrt{\kap}\log(1/\varepsilon))$, and make no use of any properties of $\bA$. We observe here that QSVT solution accuracy depends only on the polynomial accuracy at the eigenvalues of $\bA$. When all $N$ eigenvalues are known exactly, a pure spectral polynomial $p_{S}$ can interpolate $1/x$ at these eigenvalues and achieve unit fidelity at reduced degree. But its practical applicability is limited. To address this, we propose a spectral correction that exploits prior knowledge of $K$ eigenvalues of $\bA$. Given any base polynomial $p_0$, such as Remez, of degree $d_0$, a $K\times K$ linear system enforces exact interpolation of $1/x$ only at these $K$ eigenvalues without increasing $d_0$. The spectrally corrected polynomial $p_{SC}$ preserves the continuous error profile between eigenvalues and inherits the parity of $p_0$. QSVT experiments on the 1D Poisson equation demonstrate up to a $5\times$ reduction in circuit depth relative to the base polynomial, at unit fidelity and improved compliance error. The correction is agnostic to the choice of base polynomial and robust to eigenvalue perturbations up to $10\%$ relative error. Extension to the 2D Poisson equation suggests that correcting a small fraction of the spectrum may suffice to achieve fidelity above $0.999$.

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

SkillChain: Closing the Loop on Skill Evolution for Image-Based E-Commerce AI Assistants

Image-based AI assistants are now deployed at production scale on e-commerce platforms, where a single uploaded image can trigger fundamentally different user intents: product search, style recommendation, visual encyclopedia, or utility tool calls, each demanding its own response format, tool invocation, and domain knowledge. Without per-intent behavioral constraints, LLM-based systems conflate these heterogeneous modes and fall short of domain quality standards, while the breadth and dynamism of the intent space render manual engineering infeasible. To address this, we present SkillChain, which closes the production feedback loop on Skill evolution, automating the lifecycle of Skills through three stages: Skill Creator for bootstrapping from task specs and trajectories, Route Optimizer for routing alignment, and Body Refiner for iterative Skill Body refinement via dual-path LLM-Judge evaluation. Deployed on a production-scale e-commerce image assistant, SkillChain substantially improves aggregate response quality, with the strongest gains on structural compliance and content quality; a one-week online A/B experiment further confirms significant gains in user engagement, content consumption, and long-term retention.

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

MolE-RAG: Molecular Structure-Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Chemistry

arXiv:2606.05693v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for molecular property prediction, but their ability to reason over chemical structures remains limited, as molecular representations such as SMILES differ substantially from the natural language on which LLMs are primarily trained. To bridge this semantic and chemical knowledge gap, we propose MolE-RAG, a training-free, molecule-centric retrieval-augmented generation framework for LLM-based molecular property prediction. MolE-RAG augments each prediction with three complementary sources of inference-time context: retrieved chemistry literature, molecule-specific information including compound synonyms, identifiers, functional group annotations, and physicochemical descriptors, and structurally similar molecules retrieved from the training set. We evaluate MolE-RAG across nine molecular property prediction tasks using proprietary, chemistry-specialized, and open-source LLMs. Across general-purpose LLMs, MolE-RAG improves ROC-AUC by up to 28 percentage points on classification tasks and reduces regression RMSE by up to 67% relative to a SMILES-only baseline. We further find that the utility of each context source varies across models and tasks, with different models benefiting most from textual retrieval, molecular context, or structural retrieval. These results suggest that molecule-centric retrieval can improve LLM-based molecular property prediction without model fine-tuning while providing a flexible framework for integrating heterogeneous chemical knowledge at inference time.

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

Curvature-Guided Geometric Representation for Protein-Ligand Binding Affinity Prediction

arXiv:2606.14159v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein-ligand binding affinity (PLA) prediction is critical in drug discovery. Despite the notable advancements in machine learning-based approaches, existing methods struggle to jointly characterize local geometric organization and globally coordinated cross-molecular interactions, limiting their ability to model complex binding mechanisms. Here, we propose RicciBind, a geometric representation framework that integrates curvature-guided hierarchical structure learning with optimal transport (OT)-based cross-domain alignment to model molecular interactions. Specifically, RicciBind leverages Ricci curvature to capture local interaction tightness within molecular structures, enhancing structural awareness and organizing atomic interactions into curvature-aware hierarchical representations. An OT-based cluster matching mechanism then aligns protein and ligand clusters across heterogeneous domains under geometric constraints, enabling globally consistent correspondences and revealing higher-order interaction patterns beyond local neighborhoods. By coupling curvature-guided structure encoding with OT-driven cross-domain alignment, RicciBind effectively models complex interaction semantics and substantially improves both the accuracy and interpretability of binding affinity prediction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RicciBind achieved superior predictive performance and generalization across PLA benchmarks and virtual screening tasks. Ablation studies further confirmed the essential role of Ricci curvature in enhancing molecular interaction representations.

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

Hidden Degradation Costs in Energy-Cost-Only HEMS Optimisation: Study on Battery and PV Sensitivity

arXiv:2606.16051v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Residential battery energy storage systems (BESS) are increasingly deployed alongside photovoltaic (PV) generation to reduce household energy costs under volatile time-of-use (TOU) tariffs. Model predictive control (MPC) is a widely adopted optimisation strategy for home energy management systems (HEMS), typically formulated to minimise net energy cost, subject to physical and operational constraints. However, battery degradation is rarely embedded in the optimisation objective, meaning its cost is unquantified and aggressive; high-cycle-count strategies could incur significant losses once deployed to physical systems. This paper presents a receding-horizon mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) baseline for a UK residential HEMS, using demand data from the REFIT dataset. A 3 by 3 sensitivity study is conducted across three battery sizes and three PV array sizes, with post-hoc degradation cost estimated using the Naumann stress model and rainflow cycle counting. Results show that degradation remains constant for each battery size and can exceed energy cost savings by up to 1,060 %. These results demonstrate that energy-cost-only optimisation systematically underestimates the true system cost, motivating a degradation-aware control formulation.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

SheafStain: Sheaf-Theoretic Schrödinger Bridge for Spatially and Biologically Coherent Virtual Staining

Current virtual staining approaches offer the potential for time- and cost-efficient biomarker quantification in cancer diagnostics and prognostics. However, patch-wise inference for gigapixel whole slide images (WSIs) fails to maintain spatial continuity, yielding artifacts that cause catastrophic mismatches with ground-truth images. Although pathology Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) offer rich representations, their self-attention causes varying global contexts to produce inconsistent embeddings for the same physical region. We formalize and validate this ``context contamination'' as a sheaf-theoretic problem where these embeddings form a presheaf that violates the gluing axiom. To address this, we propose SheafStain, a new approach that reinterprets VFM features as sheaf-like sections for spatially and biologically coherent virtual staining. Specifically, SheafStain integrates class and patch tokens into a Schrödinger Bridge framework as sheaf-like sections. While the class token anchors biological consistency, patch tokens form a per-position spatial map. A backbone co-pretrained on Hematoxylin \& Eosin (H\&E) and Immunohistochemistry (IHC) yields non-degenerate cross-stain stalks, so a single VFM feature space supervises both input conditioning and output stain alignment. Departing from prior work that evaluates on isolated $256 \times 256$ patches and either random-crops or resizes the $1024 \times 1024$ ground truth, we translate at $256 \times 256$ and evaluate on the stitched $1024 \times 1024$ outputs across HER2, ER, PR, and Ki-67. SheafStain demonstrates promising results against six prior methods while mitigating patch-boundary stitching artifacts. Code will soon be released.

22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

A scaling limit theorem for controlled branching processes with a size-divisible term

arXiv:2508.17116v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper establishes general sufficient conditions for a sequence of controlled branching processes to converge weakly on the Skorokhod space. We focus on a class of control mechanisms that extend previous results by decomposing those random variables into the sum of two independent components: an immigration term, which depends on the current population size, and a size-divisible term, which can be expressed as the sum of random contributions from each individual. This extension allows us to capture a broad range of control functions including Poisson, binomial, and negative binomial distributions, commonly used in the literature. The assumptions are formulated in terms of probability generating functions of the offspring and control laws, distinguishing in this latter between the immigration and the size-divisible parts. The limit process is shown to be a continuous-state branching process with dependent immigration. The proof essentially relies on tightness arguments and the identification of a martingale problem. We also identify the special case in which the limit reduces to a classical Feller branching diffusion with immigration.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Multimodal Speaker Identification in Classroom Environments

Automated analysis of K-12 classroom dynamics faces challenges due to background noise and variable child speech, often confounding acoustic-only models. This study evaluates a multimodal speaker identification framework anchoring acoustic embeddings with LLM-derived semantic context. Using a subset of the EDSI dataset (8 math classrooms, N = 2,801 utterances), we found an acoustic baseline (ECAPA-TDNN) achieved only 39.0% accuracy. By integrating transcript-based "contextual anchoring" into a gradient boosting classifier, our multimodal approach raised student identification to 50.3%. Performance also improved for utterances over 5 seconds, reaching 76.9% accuracy (vs. 64.9% baseline) with a 90.9% Top-3 accuracy. Additionally, the model distinguished teacher vs. student roles with 99.3% accuracy. This approach advances the feasibility of automated feedback systems capable of considering individual student participation, a crucial step for supporting equitable instruction at scale.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Evolutionary Dynamics of Cooperation in Next-Generation LLM Agent Systems: A Cross-Provider Empirical Extension

arXiv:2605.29874v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Do next-generation LLM agents inherit the cooperative biases documented in their predecessors, or does scale and provider diversity reshape equilibrium behaviour in competitive multi-agent settings? Willis et al. established a benchmark for this question using evolutionary game theory and the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (IPD), finding consistent cooperative biases in ChatGPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. We extend this benchmark to four frontier models released in 2025-2026 - Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and GPT-5.4 Mini - applying the identical protocol across three prompting styles (Default, Prose, Self-Refine) and four population compositions (balanced and biased, with and without noise). Cooperative bias persists across providers (H1): ten of twelve model-prompt combinations favour cooperative equilibria in balanced noiseless conditions. Cross-provider divergence is substantial (H3): Gemini 2.5 Flash reaches up to 77% aggressive equilibria under biased conditions, while GPT-5.4 Mini reaches 70% cooperative equilibria under Self-Refine. Support for aggressive capability parity is partial (H2): Self-Refine raises ICD in all models and Gemini 3.1 Pro Refine achieves the highest ICD in the dataset (0.925), but Default and Prose prompts show no systematic narrowing. Evidence on noise robustness is directionally positive but not robustly confirmed (H4): with n=500 Moran iterations per condition, average noise sensitivity is about 6 percentage points for Claude Sonnet 4.6 versus 13 pp for Claude 3.5 Sonnet, but this cross-study gap is not statistically significant once the predecessor's unreported sampling error is propagated. Provider identity, rather than model generation, is the strongest correlate of equilibrium outcomes; noise remains a universal challenge regardless of model size or vintage.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Comparing Commercial Depth Sensor Accuracy for Medical Applications

Depth estimation has numerous medical and surgical applications. We benchmark four depth sensors on a porcine bone specimen, a porcine belly specimen, and a silicone kidney phantom using stylus-sampled references. These objects contain several real-world challenges, including homogeneous surfaces, specular surfaces, and subsurface scattering. The comparison includes stereo, structured-light, and time-of-flight sensors at a distance of approximately 50 cm. Specifically, the Intel RealSense D405 (Intel RealSense, United States), PMD Flexx2 (pmdtechnologies, Germany), Stereolabs ZED 2i (Stereolabs, France), and Zivid 2M+ 60 (Zivid, Norway) are compared. The Zivid 2M+ 60 performed best across all objects and metrics considered in this work. The ZED ranked second for real tissue, but last on the phantom.