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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-22

Cancer cells adopt unprecedented strategies to produce a molecule that protects them from iron-dependent death

The finding that spermine molecules in cells bind to iron to prevent it unleashing ferroptosis, a type of cell death, opens up strategies for treating tissue damage and cancer. The finding that spermine molecules in cells bind to iron to prevent it unleashing ferroptosis, a type of cell death, opens up strategies for treating tissue damage and cancer.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

No Universal Purification in Quantum Mechanics

arXiv:2509.21111v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many central tasks in fundamental physics and quantum information processing are possible only insofar as mixed quantum states can be made purer. In this work, we prove that the linearity and positivity of quantum mechanics impose general restrictions on quantum purification, unveiling a new fundamental principle of quantum information processing. We first establish that no quantum operation can transform a finite number of copies of an unknown quantum state or channel into an exactly pure output that depends non-trivially on the input, thereby ruling out an important form of universal purification in both static and dynamical settings. Building on this, we show that, upon relaxing the requirement of exact purity, one can establish quantitative sample-complexity lower bounds for approximate purification that hold for arbitrary physically allowed strategies, whose scaling matches the performance of purification-related tasks across several different areas of quantum information processing. Moreover, this lower bound leads to a generalized standard quantum limit for learning arbitrary functions of a quantum state, greatly extending earlier results based on quantum Fisher information and revealing a deep connection between purification and quantum learning. Extending this principle to other important settings, we establish, for the first time, an exponential sample-complexity lower bound for approximate pure dilation state preparation and a no-go theorem for approximate bosonic Gaussian state purification with passive Gaussian operations, establishing much more stringent limitations under practical operational constraints.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

{\alpha}-Fair Insurance Pricing: A Fairness Continuum

arXiv:2606.14898v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fairness in insurance pricing remains a long-standing and deeply debated puzzle. On one hand, insurers, driven by profitability considerations, set premiums that differentiate across individual risks to achieve actuarial fairness. On the other hand, insurance serves a critical societal function by pooling risks across a population, motivating cross-subsidization among groups to promote solidarity fairness. The tension between these two competing notions of fairness makes insurance pricing inherently complex, particularly in modern settings where granular data allow for increasingly fine risk differentiation and regulators face growing pressure to protect vulnerable groups. To address this challenge, we propose an $\alpha$-Fair Individual Solvent Premium ($\alpha$-FISP) framework for insurance pricing that explicitly captures the trade-off between actuarial and solidarity fairness while guaranteeing solvency, a fundamental requirement in insurance operations. We formulate the pricing problem as a constrained optimization task, where actuarially fair premiums are adjusted subject to budget constraints on cross-subsidization within each risk class. This formulation naturally yields a family of solutions parameterized by $\alpha$, tracing a continuum between purely actuarial and purely solidarity-based pricing and enabling decision-makers to select an operating point along this fairness spectrum. We derive theoretical guarantees for the proposed framework. Numerical experiments show that $\alpha$-FISP is computationally tractable and aligns well with the U.S. regulatory regimes featuring heterogeneous state-level fairness requirements.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Efficient Rationale-based Retrieval: On-policy Distillation from Generative Rerankers based on JEPA

Unlike traditional fact-based retrieval, rationale-based retrieval typically necessitates cross-encoding of query-document pairs using large language models, incurring substantial computational costs. To address this limitation, we propose Rabtriever, which independently encodes queries and documents, while providing comparable cross query-document comprehension capabilities to rerankers. We start from training a LLM-based generative reranker, which puts the document prior to the query and prompts the LLM to generate the relevance score by log probabilities. We then employ it as the teacher of an on-policy distillation framework, with Rabtriever as the student to reconstruct the teacher's contextual-aware query embedding. To achieve this effect, Rabtriever is first initialized from the teacher, with parameters frozen. The Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) paradigm is then adopted, which integrates a lightweight, trainable predictor between LLM layers and heads, projecting the query embedding into a new hidden space, with the document embedding as the latent vector. JEPA then minimizes the distribution difference between this projected embedding and the teacher embedding. To strengthen the sampling efficiency of on-policy distillation, we also add an auxiliary loss on the reverse KL of LLM logits, to reshape the student's logit distribution. Rabtriever optimizes the teacher's quadratic complexity on the document length to linear, verified both theoretically and empirically. Experiments show that Rabtriever outperforms different retriever baselines across diverse rationale-based tasks, including empathetic conversations and robotic manipulations, with minor accuracy degradation from the reranker. Rabtriever also generalizes well on traditional retrieval benchmarks such as MS MARCO and BEIR, with comparable performance to the best retriever baseline.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Evaluating Open-Source LLMs for Multi-Label ATT&CK Technique Classification on CTI Reports

arXiv:2606.18166v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Classifying Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) using MITRE Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge (ATT&CK) is essential for proactive defense, but historically required extensive human effort. Pre-Large Language Model (LLM) automation sped up this process, but could not resolve the complex language and multi-step attack patterns found in unstructured CTI reports. LLMs addressed previous limitations by using contextual reasoning to understand unstructured text. However, current evaluations rely on simplified, single-technique sentences that ignore the complexity of real-world CTI reports, which often leads to inflated performance results. Consequently, the baseline performance of open-source LLMs on complex unstructured CTI reports remains unevaluated. To address this gap, we constructed a ground-truth dataset of 2,076 human-annotated sentences (1,281 technique-positive, 795 negative) from 83 complex unstructured CTI reports. These sentences were mapped to 114 unique ATT&CK techniques using a six-phase annotation process, achieving \k{appa} = 0.68 inter-annotator agreement. Using this dataset, we evaluated seven open-source LLMs ranging from 8B to 236B parameters across prompt strategy and temperature configurations. The highest-performing LLM achieved a micro-averaged F1 score of 0.22, establishing the empirical baseline for multi-label ATT&CK classification on complex unstructured CTI. Parameter size showed a statistically significant positive correlation with F1 score. Prompt strategy and temperature produced no statistically significant gains across model configurations. These results indicate that current open-source LLMs are insufficient for production-grade ATT&CK classification. The dataset, benchmark, and findings provide a reproducible foundation for future CTI research.

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

Quantitative Oppenheim Conjecture for Random Quadratic Forms and Optimal Variance Bounds in Function Fields

arXiv:2606.16699v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We prove a quantitative version of Oppenheim's conjecture in the function field setting. In order to do so, we compute the higher moments of the Siegel transform. In particular, we find an optimal bound on the variance of the number of lattice points in a set. Moreover, we compute the exact variance of the number of lattice points in a ball, which is of independent interest.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Certification of the genuine resolution of photon number resolving detectors

arXiv:2606.14365v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Photon-number-resolving (PNR) detectors are essential components of photonic quantum technologies, yet thus far, no practical metric exists to certify how many photons they can genuinely resolve in a single measurement. Here we introduce an operational framework for quantifying the capability of a PNR detector to distinguish between different numbers of photons, i.e. its genuine resolution. In turn, we develop a practical and scalable protocol for certifying the genuine resolution of a detector, which is based on coherent state probes. We apply the method to a 28-pixel photon-number-resolving superconducting nanowire single-photon detector (PNR-SNSPD) and certify genuine four-outcome resolution. Our work highlights the critical requirements in terms of detector efficiency towards achieving high genuine resolution. This approach provides an operational benchmark for PNR detectors and fills a crucial gap in the characterization of photonic quantum devices.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Invariant Measures and Weak-Magic-Injection Asymptotics in Random Monitored Quantum Circuits

arXiv:2606.13470v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Monitored quantum circuits provide a natural setting in which scrambling, measurements, and measurement-conditioned updates compete within a stochastic many-body dynamics. From the viewpoint of nonstabilizer resource theory, this competition is especially relevant because Clifford-compatible operations preserve the stabilizer structure, while weak non-Clifford perturbations inject magic resource. Most of the existing understanding of monitored quantum circuits has been shaped by numerical simulations and phenomenological descriptions, while a rigorous dynamics theory remains less developed. In this paper, we address this gap by developing an analytical framework which lays a rigorous mathematical foundation for the study of random monitored quantum dynamics. Specifically, we study a class of monitored quantum circuits driven by random Clifford. We prove the existence and uniqueness of the stationary law, which gives an ergodic description of the long-time dynamics. We then resolve the leading asymptotics of steady magic in the weak-magic-injection limit. This tangent description makes the contrast between resource measures transparent: in odd-prime local dimension, the steady Gross–Wigner mana has a linear leading asymptotic, whereas in qubit systems the steady 2-stabilizer Rényi entropy has a quadratic leading asymptotic. These different powers reflect the distinct local geometries of the two resource measures near the stabilizer layer. In this way, this work develops an analytical framework that first establishes the stationary ergodic dynamics of random monitored quantum circuits.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

HybridCodeAuthorship: A Benchmark Dataset for Line-Level Code Authorship Detection

arXiv:2606.12620v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Thanks to the rapid adoption of AI code assistants powered by large language models (LLMs), industry codebases are, increasingly, a hybrid of AI- and human-authored code. For risk management and productivity analysis purposes, it is crucial to enable fine-grained location detection of AI-generated code. To develop algorithms for this task, quality benchmarks are needed to assess performance. However, existing benchmarks tend to comprise academic, LeetCode-style problems and presume a code snippet is either completely human-authored or completely AI-authored, which is not reflective of the diverse intents and styles of industry codebases utilizing AI code assistants. To fill these gaps, we introduce HybridCodeAuthorship, a novel benchmark of Python code files with interleaved human- and AI-authored lines of code to simulate authentic utilization of AI code assistants. In this paper, we first present our dataset construction pipeline, which leverages CodeSearchNet, a massive collection of links to open sourced repositories on GitHub. We then benchmark the performance of two state-of-the-art AI-generated code detection algorithms at both the line- and chunk-level. Experimental results demonstrate that HybridCodeAuthorship is a challenging benchmark with a top-scoring algorithm, AIGCode Detector, obtaining a highest F1 score of 0.48 and 0.56 on chunk-level and line-level code detection tasks, respectively.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Proper and improper mixed states serve as different prior beliefs for quantum state retrodiction

arXiv:2502.10030v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A mixed quantum state can be taken as capturing an unspecified form of ignorance; or as describing the lack of knowledge about the true pure state of the system ("proper mixture"); or as arising from entanglement with another system that has been disregarded ("improper mixture"). These different views yield identical density matrices and therefore identical predictions for future measurements. But when used as prior beliefs for inferring the past state from later observations ("retrodiction"), they lead to different updated beliefs. This is a purely quantum feature of Bayesian agency. Based on this observation, we establish a framework for retrodicting on any quantum belief and we prove a necessary and sufficient condition for the equivalence of beliefs. We also illustrate how these differences have operational consequences in quantum state recovery.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

MyPCBench: A Benchmark for Personally Intelligent Computer-Use Agents

Current benchmarks for computer-use agents evaluate models in impersonal environments. This leaves a gap between evaluation and deployment where personal assistants are expected to work across a user's whole digital life, including their context, historical data, and logged-in accounts. This gap is widest on web tasks, where live web evaluations cannot exercise sites that require logging in or personal information, the kind of site a real personal assistant has to drive. We introduce MyPCBench, which tests computer-use agents as personal assistants on a Linux desktop populated with 17 simulated real-world web applications and a full desktop stack, all seeded for one canonical persona, Michael Scott from The Office. We define 184 tasks in this environment, each inspired by a real request drawn from the OpenClaw community, and benchmark six closed and open-weight models with a uniform computer+bash tool surface. We find that the best model, Claude Opus 4.6, fully solves 55.4\% of the tasks, the only model above 50\%. Model failures cluster on tasks that span many applications and on long trajectories, where personalization stresses an assistant the most. We release the environment, task set, and agent harness at https://mypcbench.com.

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

Predictability as a Fine-Grained Measure for Privacy

arXiv:2606.20546v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Differential privacy (DP) ensures rigorous individual-level privacy guarantees against even the most knowledgeable attackers, but its worst-case nature can impose a costly privacy-accuracy tradeoff. We introduce privacy via predictability, a fine-grained framework that explicitly incorporates the attacker's core knowledge, a compromised portion of the dataset generated by a stochastic process, and a specified family of queries. Predictability measures privacy leakage as the incremental gain in an attacker's ability to predict sensitive information about unknown individuals after observing the algorithm's output, beyond what can already be inferred from the compromised data. We show that predictability and DP are generally incomparable: each can be small while the other is large. However, in the worst-case regime where all but one individual is compromised, and all binary queries are considered sensitive, predictability implies mutual-information DP. More generally, predictability provides a finer-grained privacy metric tailored to specific sensitive information and specific attacker models. We introduce a general framework, using the generalized method of moments (GMM), to analyze asymptotic predictability when the compromised data is generated by a stationary, ergodic, mixing process. Using this analysis, we derive a predictability-calibrated output perturbation scheme for ERM. Our approach is complementary to DP and can be used alongside DP to provide fine-grained privacy control.

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

An Adaptive Data cleaning Framework for Noisy Label Detection

Deep neural networks (DNNs) excel in computer vision tasks given large annotated datasets. In real-world applications, however, labels are often corrupted by ambiguity, human error, or dynamic environments. Over-parameterized DNNs easily memorize these noisy labels during training, degrading model accuracy and generalization. Existing data-cleaning and sample-selection strategies often rely on manually specified thresholds, prior knowledge of the noise ratio, or a single metric (either learning dynamics or geometric structure), making them unstable in complex data regimes. This paper proposes a self-adaptive data-cleaning framework that integrates local, global, and learning dynamics cues for robust noisy-label detection. Samples are mapped into a unified low-dimensional feature space through a modular feature concatenation paradigm. We provide two instantiations: a 2D metric integrating class-adaptive KNN-based local disagreement with k-means-based global centroid distance, and a 3D multi-metric that additionally incorporates a z-normalized score. Unlike conventional 1D Gaussian Mixture Models applied to a single scalar metric, our framework performs multi-metric clustering on the feature space to adaptively partition samples into clean-dominant and noise-dominant components without requiring manual thresholds or noise priors. Experiments on CIFAR-10, MNIST, and ImageNet-100 with 5% to 40% symmetric label noise show high recall across settings, including near-perfect recall (>=98%) on ImageNet-100 at 40% noise. Subsequent training yields accuracy gains across evaluated settings, especially under severe corruption on ImageNet-100. These findings suggest that multi-metric integration provides a threshold-free, practical, and low-tuning strategy for noisy label detection.

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

Kalman Linear Attention: Parallel Bayesian Filtering For Efficient Language Modelling and State Tracking

arXiv:2602.10743v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: State-space language models such as Mamba and gated linear attention (GLA) offer linear-complexity, parallelisable alternatives to transformers, but their linear state updates limit expressivity and robust state tracking. We close this gap from a probabilistic angle, casting sequence mixing as exact Bayesian filtering with the Kalman filter as the core primitive. Classical Kalman filters give principled state and uncertainty estimates but are viewed as inherently sequential; we show that reparameterising them in information form turns their updates into an associative scan - so the per-token recurrent update is non-linear (a Möbius/precision recursion) yet remains temporally parallel. The resulting Kalman Linear Attention (KLA) layer is a drop-in sequence mixer that performs time-parallel probabilistic inference, carries an explicit belief-state uncertainty, and is strictly more expressive than GLA-style linear updates at the same computational cost. This expressivity translates directly into stronger state tracking: KLA solves permutation-composition ($A_5$) tasks that linear SSMs and attention cannot, while staying scan-parallel. As a drop-in primitive it also matches or improves on modern SSMs and GLAs across synthetic token-manipulation and zero-shot commonsense benchmarks, and is among the first stacked Bayesian-filtering primitives trained at the billion-token scale.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Mitigating Disparate Impact of Differentially Private Learning through Bounded Adaptive Clipping

arXiv:2506.01396v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Differential privacy (DP) has become an essential framework for privacy-preserving machine learning. Existing DP learning methods, however, often have disparate impacts on model predictions, e.g., for minority groups. Gradient clipping, which is often used in DP learning, can suppress larger gradients from challenging samples. We show that this problem is amplified by adaptive clipping, which will often shrink the clipping bound to tiny values to match a well-fitting majority, while significantly reducing the accuracy for others. We propose bounded adaptive clipping, which introduces a tunable lower bound to prevent excessive gradient suppression. Our method improves worst-class accuracy by over 10 percentage points on Skewed and Fashion MNIST compared to unbounded adaptive clipping, 7 points compared to Automatic clipping, and 5 points compared to constant clipping. The code is available at https://github.com/TrustworthyMLHelsinki/adaptive-clipping-fairness.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

ED3R: Energy-Aware Distributed Disaster Detection Enabled by Cooperative Robotic Agents

Robotics are expected to support environmental monitoring and natural disaster management, where decisions must be made under uncertainty, resource limitations, and strict operational constraints. In critical missions, such as wildfires, robotic agents must not only identify hazardous events with sufficient confidence, but also manage the energy cost and time until detection. This paper introduces ED3R, an energy-aware distributed framework for wildfire detection under uncertainty. ED3R enables hierarchical cooperative decision-making between a robot and a remote controller. The remote controller decides upon the robot's motion, while the robot senses the environment and decides where to execute the wildfire detection (onboard or remotely) and how. The common goal is to detect wildfires with a required confidence while minimizing the energy consumed by any robot operation. ED3R further integrates mechanisms to avoid nearby obstacles, prevent redundant exploration, enable adaptive early mission completion, and ensure feasibility through a custom penalty function. ED3R also introduces a forward-looking capability, enabled through distributed neural regression models that allow the agents to anticipate the future by evaluating candidate strategies before execution. The framework is evaluated through realistic robotics simulations, ablation studies, and baseline comparisons. Overall, ED3R achieves a mission success rate of up to 97.18%. Especially in the most demanding missions, it reduces energy consumption by up to 36.4% and detects wildfires up to 41% faster than baselines.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Computational Methods and Challenges in Cell-Free DNA Analysis for Multi-Cancer Early Detection

arXiv:2606.20174v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cell-free DNA (cfDNA) is a promising avenue for non-invasive multicancer early detection (MCED), in that, it can enable multiple cancer detection simultaneously from a single blood draw, with particular sensitivity to cancers that currently lack established screening programs. Here we review the computational methods developed between 2022 and 2025 for cfDNA-based MCED. We focus on how fragmentomics and epigenetic features are extracted and analyzed to detect cancer at early stages. We first briefly outline the biological basis of cfDNA signals, then review classical statistical and machine learning approaches alongside deep learning frameworks including autoencoder-based models. For each method we discuss biological interpretability, validation strategy, and readiness for clinical integration. Furthermore, we categorize the current challenges into technical, computational, and methodological while outlining open problems in the field. This review shows that multimodal ensemble approaches have the strongest promise for clinical integration and the highest readiness. However, for better assessment of future work and side-by-side comparison, standardization of evaluation protocols and reporting results will be crucial.

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

NetBurst: Event-Centric Forecasting of Bursty, Intermittent Time Series

arXiv:2510.22397v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Network operators monitor their infrastructure by collecting telemetry data such as packet counts, byte rates, or flow volumes, yet answering the questions that effective operations demand – forecasting future load, diagnosing and characterizing anomalies, and searching for and retrieving historical precedents – requires more than raw measurements. Bridging this gap calls for learned representations: compact per-entity summaries that capture temporal dynamics from each entity's univariate time series. Time-series foundation models are the natural starting point, but they are designed for dense, periodic benchmark datasets – the mild statistical regime. However, network telemetry data inhabits the wild regime: operationally relevant events are rare, separated by variable-length stretches of low or no activity (``ebbs''), with intermittent bursts of heavy-tailed extremes (``tides''). We present NetBurst, an event-centric pipeline that collapses ebbs, separates each time series into a stream of burst timings and a stream of burst magnitudes, and learns a single representation serving all three operational tasks. Compared to the strongest competitors among eight baselines – including Amazon's Chronos-2 and Datadog's Toto – and across nine production telemetry configurations, NetBurst reduces median forecasting error by $1.3$–$116\times$ on wild-regime data with a $1.0$–$7.5\times$ better match to the true burst distribution, and matches baselines on mild-regime benchmarks. For characterizing anomalies, NetBurst produces balanced, well-spread clusters that are $16\times$ more describable in operator-familiar terms under a novel interpretability score, and cluster-filtered search delivers $7.5\times$ faster end-to-end retrieval.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

S3OD: Towards Generalizable Salient Object Detection with Synthetic Data

Salient object detection exemplifies data-bounded tasks where expensive pixel-precise annotations force separate model training for related subtasks like DIS and HR-SOD. We present a method that dramatically improves generalization through large-scale synthetic data generation and ambiguity-aware architecture. We introduce S3OD, a dataset of over 139,000 high-resolution images created through our multi-modal diffusion pipeline that extracts labels from diffusion and DINO-v3 features. The iterative generation framework prioritizes challenging categories based on model performance. We propose a streamlined multi-mask decoder that handles the inherent ambiguity in salient object detection by predicting multiple valid interpretations. Models trained only on synthetic data achieve 20-50% error reduction in cross-dataset generalization, while fine-tuned versions reach state-of-the-art performance across DIS and HR-SOD benchmarks.

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

Graph2Idea:Retrieval-Augmented Scientific Idea Generation with Graph-Structured Contexts

arXiv:2606.09105v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Generating novel, feasible, and high-quality research ideas is an important yet challenging task in scientific discovery. Recent Large Language Model (LLM)-based methods often ground idea generation with retrieved literature, but the retrieved evidence is usually provided as flat text, such as titles, abstracts, or summaries. Such flat contexts may contain redundant or weakly relevant information, while making cross-paper relations among problems, methods, mechanisms, and findings difficult to identify and trace. To address this challenge, we propose Graph2Idea, a knowledge graph-guided framework for retrieval-augmented scientific idea generation.Graph2Idea first retrieves papers according to the input topic, transforms them into structured knowledge triples, and dynamically constructs a target-centered knowledge graph to make literature relations explicit. It then extracts compact graph-derived contexts that retain target-relevant relational evidence while reducing noisy textual input. Based on these contexts, a two-stage generation process first identifies promising research directions and then guides the LLM to synthesize candidate ideas from graph-grounded evidence. Experiments on a scientific idea generation benchmark show that Graph2Idea outperforms representative baselines under the automatic evaluation protocol. Compared with the strongest baseline scores, it improves Novelty from 0.45 to 0.52, Quality from 0.24 to 0.29, and Feasibility from 0.22 to 0.28. These results suggest that graph-structured evidence helps LLMs generate research ideas through more explicit, compact, and traceable recombination of prior scientific knowledge.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Scalable Deep Unfolding of Conic Optimizers

arXiv:2606.13825v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep unfolding (DU) accelerates iterative optimizers by introducing learnable components and training them through unrolled iterations, but extending DU to the large-scale semidefinite programs (SDPs) common in robotics has remained limited. Unrolling a full-update conic solver such as COSMO exposes two obstacles that prior work on learned conic solvers has not: backpropagating through the per-iteration linear-system solve incurs memory quadratic in the problem size once the coefficient matrix is formed explicitly, and backpropagating through the positive semidefinite (PSD) cone projection becomes numerically unstable when eigenvalues coincide. We address the first obstacle with a matrix-free implicit differentiation rule that operates entirely through matrix-vector products, reducing memory from $O(n^2)$ to $O(n)$ and enabling backpropagation at scales where direct factorization runs out of memory. We address the second with a backward rule based on the Dalečkii–Krein representation of the Fréchet derivative, which remains well-defined under repeated eigenvalues. Together these make it possible to learn lightweight hyperparameter policies and warm-starts for a full-update conic solver. We evaluate on nonlinear covariance steering problems solved via sequential convex programming (SCP), as well as standalone SDPs and second-order cone programs ranging from max-cut and Lovász $\vartheta$ SDPs to robust estimation and control problems. The learned policies outperform state-of-the-art solvers across all problems, and can provide up to a 50$\times$ speedup depending on the class. When used as a subroutine in SCP, the learned approach delivers over a 30$\times$ speedup compared to COSMO.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Beyond the Linear Separability Ceiling: Aligning Representations in VLMs

A challenge in advancing Visual-Language Models (VLMs) is determining whether their failures on abstract reasoning tasks, such as Bongard problems, stem from flawed perception or faulty top-down reasoning. To disentangle these factors, we introduce a diagnostic framework centered on the Linear Separability Ceiling (LSC), the performance achievable by a linear classifier on a VLM's raw visual embeddings. Applying this framework to state-of-the-art VLMs, we uncover a pervasive ''alignment gap'', where most models fail to generatively outperform the linear separability of their representations. We find that the few models surpassing this ceiling do so via two mechanisms: by further refining visual representations into a more linearly separable format or by executing non-linear decision logic. We demonstrate that this bottleneck is not a fundamental limitation but a solvable visual alignment issue. Our method augments standard next-token prediction with a contrastive objective to restructure the visual manifold into a more one-dimensionally linear geometry, improving image-to-image comparison and enabling models to significantly surpass the LSC on abstract compositional reasoning tasks.

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

ProHiFlo: Hierarchical Flow Matching with Functional Guidance for De Novo Protein Generation

De novo protein generation has transformative potential in therapeutic design, enzyme engineering, and synthetic biology. While diffusion-based and flow matching approaches have achieved progress, they typically operate at single resolution and lack mechanisms for incorporating functional constraints. We introduce ProHiFlo, a hierarchical flow matching framework with three innovations: (1) coarse-to-fine generation that models backbone geometry before refining to all-atom coordinates, reducing computational cost while maintaining accuracy; (2) functional guidance leveraging pretrained predictors to steer generation toward desired properties without retraining; (3) adaptive SE(3)-equivariant architecture for efficient multi-scale processing. Experiments on unconditional generation, motif scaffolding, and functional design demonstrate state-ofthe-art performance while requiring 4 fewer sampling steps. On enzyme active site scaffolding, ProHiFlo achieves 58.9% success rate compared to 41.2% for RFDiffusion.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Hospital-Level Variation in Antenatal Corticosteroids for Late Preterm Births

Objective: To determine whether and to what extent hospitals across the United States vary in their use of late-preterm steroids using a novel data set in which the timing of steroid administration relative to delivery can be observed. Methods: This was a retrospective cohort study of singleton births with known gestational ages identified in the Premier Healthcare Database from 2015 to 2022. The primary variable of interest was hospital-level adoption of antenatal corticosteroids for late-preterm singleton deliveries, calculated as the proportion of late-preterm singleton births (34-36 completed weeks of gestation) with any betamethasone exposure during the same late-preterm period. Hospital adoption was defined as the weighted average rate of ALPS administration among late-preterm infants across the entire post-period. Hospitals were ranked by their late-preterm steroid adoption rates and categorized by quartile based on the empirical distribution. Temporal trends were assessed using annual hospital-level adoption rates and visualized using time-series plots and distributional plots. A logistic regression model was constructed to determine hospital characteristics associated with being a highest-quartile adopting hospital. Results: The analysis cohort included 728 hospitals and 5,452,791 births, of which 361,006 (6.6%) were singleton late preterm births. Hospital steroid exposure rates ranged from 0 to 82% and were categorized into quartiles based on overall exposure rate, with cutoffs at 20.6%, 29.8%, and 40.1%. Median exposure rates increased progressively across quartiles from 14.1% (IQR 9.3-17.4%) in the lowest adopting hospitals (Q1) to 47.6% (IQR 43.7-53.2%) in the highest adopting hospitals (Q4), with substantial within-quartile variation. In the multivariable model, urban location was a strong predictor of high adoption after adjustment (aOR 2.05; 95% CI 1.11-3.83, p=0.02). Compared to Midwest hospitals, Southern hospitals had significantly lower odds of being high adopters (aOR 0.37; 95% CI 0.20-0.69, p

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

HeteRo-Select: Informativeness as the Participation Driver in Heterogeneous Federated Learning

arXiv:2508.06692v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated learning systems typically allocate gradient compression by link speed. This is sensible when bandwidth and data informativeness align. However, under non-IID data, these signals often decorrelate or invert. A bandwidth-driven allocator then risks compressing the most informative gradients hardest. We propose HeteRo-Select, a framework that replaces bandwidth with a per-client informativeness score as the primary driver of compression. The score jointly governs three decisions per round: client selection, compression ratio, and server aggregation weight, with bandwidth retained only as a hard ceiling. Score-proportional selection provably reduces the effective heterogeneity of the chosen subset; score-proportional compression provably lowers aggregate top-$k$ error at fixed traffic. Under the exact FedCG simulation protocol, HeteRo-Select delivers a $1.78\times$ speedup and an $18.2\%$ reduction in traffic on CIFAR-10. The same configuration, unchanged, scales from a $7{,}850$-parameter logistic regression to an $11.27$M-parameter ResNet-18, hitting the accuracy target on three of four benchmarks. When bandwidth and informativeness are deliberately anti-correlated, the method still achieves the target accuracy with less traffic than the normal-bandwidth run.