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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

A Concavity Theorem for the Parisi PDE

Authors:

arXiv:2606.15432v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove that the map sending the diffusion profile to the solution of a time-changed Parisi PDE evaluated at time-space $(0,0)$ is concave. This result strengthens the raywise concavity result proven by Auffinger and Chen (2016). As an application, for the balanced multispecies Ising spin glasses, the lower bound of Bates and Sohn (2025) matches the Hopf-type upper bound given by the Hamilton–Jacobi framework developed by Mourrat, Chen and Xia.

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

Unraveling Syntax: Language Modeling and the Substructure of Grammars

While language models achieve impressive results, their learning dynamics are far from understood. Many domains of interest – such as natural language syntax, coding languages, arithmetic – are captured by context-free grammars (CFGs). In this work, we extend prior work on neural language modeling of CFGs in a novel direction: how language modeling behaves with respect to CFG substructure, namely subgrammars. We define subgrammars, and prove a set of fundamental theorems connecting language modeling and subgrammars. We show that language modeling loss recurses linearly over its top-level subgrammars; applied recursively, the loss decomposes into losses for "irreducible" subgrammars. Under additional assumptions, and empirically, parametrized models learn subgrammars in parallel, unlike children who first master simple substructures. We find that subgrammar pretraining can improve final performance, but only for tiny models relative to the grammar, while alignment analyses show that pretraining consistently leads to internal representations that better reflect the grammar's substructure.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Experimental realization of the complete seven-phase Anderson-localization landscape

arXiv:2606.14825v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Anderson localization has evolved far beyond the conventional dichotomy between extended and localized states. Modern localization theory predicts a complete transport hierarchy comprising extended, critical, and localized phases together with all coexistence phases among them, forming a seven-phase Anderson-localization landscape. Despite its fundamental importance, this hierarchy has never been experimentally realized within a single system. Here we realize the complete seven-phase Anderson-localization landscape in a one-dimensional Floquet photonic lattice. By engineering quasiperiodic hopping profiles containing inhomogeneously distributed hopping zeros, we generate critical states and enable their coexistence with extended and localized sectors. The resulting transport regimes are directly resolved through their distinct spatiotemporal dynamics, including ballistic expansion, confined critical oscillations, and persistent localization. We observe all seven phases, including the elusive triply coexisting extended-critical-localized phase, and experimentally track the phase transitions connecting them. Our results establish the first complete experimental map of the Anderson-localization landscape and provide a unified platform for investigating mobility edges, multifractality, and programmable coherent transport.

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

Redirecting the Flow: Image Customization through Attention Distribution Shift

Subject-driven image customization aims to generate images that not only follow textual instructions but also preserve the identity of a given reference subject. Existing approaches, including test-time fine-tuning, encoder-based methods, and token competition in shared attention spaces, suffer from limited efficiency, misalignment between extracted reference features and the generative process, and interference from irrelevant information. To address these limitations, we formulate the customization task as a distribution shift induced by incorporating reference images into text-to-image generation, and derive a Conditional Attention Distribution Shift formulation grounded in maximum entropy theory. Building on this formulation, we propose CustomShift, a dual-branch architecture based on Stable Diffusion 3. The Reference-Alignment Branch leverages self-attention between reference images and subject names to achieve layer-wise alignment with latent representations, while the Cross-Guidance Branch integrates textual and reference cues to guide generation. Experiments on the DreamBooth and Custom101 benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving a better balance between semantic fidelity and subject consistency.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Recursive Agent Harnesses

Recursive language models (RLMs) showed that recursion over model calls is an effective strategy for long-context reasoning, and production coding agents have begun to write code that spawns subagents at scale, most recently in Anthropic's dynamic workflows. We name and study the pattern between these two lines of work, where the recursive unit is a full agent harness with filesystem tools, code execution, and planning rather than a model call with no tools. We call this the Recursive Agent Harness (RAH) and frame it as harness recursion, the code-first extension to the model recursion of RLMs. A parent agent generates and runs an executable script that spawns subagent harnesses in parallel for fine-grained workloads and uses structured function calls for small subtasks. We provide a controlled evaluation on long-context reasoning. With the backbone held fixed at GPT-5 to match the published Codex and RLM baselines, RAH improves the Codex coding-agent baseline from 71.75% to 81.36% on Oolong-Synthetic (199 samples, 13 context-length buckets up to 4M tokens), a gain attributable to the harness rather than the model. With a stronger backbone, Claude Sonnet 4.5, the same design reaches 89.77%.

06.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-05

StPedf: Cell trajectory inference of spatial transcriptomics via spatial proximity embedding and spatial density-adaptive fusion

Authors:

by Yuan Zhang, Ziyan Sun, Zhixin Shi, Mengdi Nan, Yuhan Fu, Qing Ren, Jie Gao Spatial transcriptomics is transforming our multidimensional understanding of cellular spatial organization and its functional mechanisms in processes such as development and disease by systematically resolving the spatial heterogeneity of gene expression within tissues. To delve deeper into the dynamic processes underlying spatial expression patterns, spatial trajectory inference integrates genetic and spatial information to reconstruct the spatial developmental trajectories of cells within tissues. This approach reveals the patterns of differentiation and dynamic changes as cellular states evolve continuously along spatial axes. However, existing methods often struggle to uniformly model the complex, nonlinear interactions between high-dimensional gene expression and spatial coordinates. Here, we introduce StPedf, whose core lies in employing a neural network with a masking mechanism to capture complex nonlinear interactions between high-dimensional genes and spatial positions. It further leverages spatial proximity information as a guiding cue, dynamically and adaptively adjusting the embedding of gene and spatial information and the weighting of spatial proximity information based on spatial density. This enables trajectory inference guided by spatial information. This enables optimal transport to derive intercellular transition matrices, reconstruct cellular differentiation trajectories, and construct pseudo-spatiotemporal maps. StPedf demonstrates superior performance over existing methods on five structurally distinct simulated datasets. Using StPedf, we successfully mapped distinct lineages in the spatial trajectories of telencephalon regeneration in the Ambystoma mexicanum, multiple malignant lineages expanding within primary tumors, and developmental spatial trajectories and pseudo-spatiotemporal maps in human dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). StPedf significantly enhances the accuracy and interpretability of spatial trajectory inference, providing critical technical support for revealing the dynamic patterns of cellular fate transitions within tissue microenvironments.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Constrained hybrid modelling to predict microbial dynamics and organic matter turnover in soil systems

arXiv:2606.20329v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Soil microorganisms control organic matter cycling and largely determine how soil systems can cope with and mitigate climate change and environmental threats. Representing microbial dynamics in process-based soil models is therefore critical to predict carbon cycling in soils, albeit highly challenging to inform from data. One promising approach to improve their parametrisation is the integration of genomic data, yet modelling the complex and unknown relationship between genomes and the processes the microbes are driving is an unsolved problem. In this work, we present the first hybrid modeling framework for deriving biokinetic parameter values of a process-based soil organic matter turnover model from metagenome-inferred functional traits based on DNA sequencing data. Our model predicts biokinetic parameters of the process-based model from genomic trait data with a neural network and integrates constraints from ecological theory and literature to ensure realistic behavior, even of non-observed state variables. We evaluate our method on synthetic genomic trait datasets of varying complexity and on real data, showing that our approach improves performance over multiple baselines and learns the dynamics of unmeasurable components of the process-based model effectively, even for small training datasets.

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

Rigel: Reverse-Engineering the Metal 4.1 Tensor Compute Path on the Apple M4 Max GPU

Apple's Metal 4.1 exposes a tensor compute path: the Metal Performance Primitives (MPP) matmul2d operation over cooperative_tensor fragments, whose interface is documented but whose hardware behavior is deliberately hidden. The specification states which data-type rows are supported, never whether they are hardware-accelerated, where the operation physically executes, what its accumulator width is, or how it partitions matrix fragments across threads. We present Rigel, an empirical characterization of this path on a single Apple M4 Max (a pre-neural-accelerator generation). Using a checksum-gated, provenance-tracked microbenchmark harness, Rigel recovers eleven facts the v4.1 specification hides or contradicts. The headline finding: the Metal 4.1 fp8 (E4M3) matmul2d is emulated, not accelerated: it sustains 0.94x the throughput of fp16 despite reading half the operand bytes, so on M4 it is a memory-footprint feature, not a performance feature. We further show, via a three-signal triangulation (throughput ceiling, comparison against simdgroup_matrix, and per-rail power attribution), that matmul2d executes entirely on the GPU shader cores with no dedicated matrix datapath and no evidence of Apple Neural Engine routing; that it accumulates in >=fp32; and we reconstruct the opaque 8x8 cooperative_tensor fragment layout Apple documents nowhere. Acting on the characterization, a hand-fused GEMM + bias + GELU kernel beats the decomposed path by +6.5-12.9% in the cache-resident regime. All findings are reproducible from committed MIT-licensed code and per-cell CSVs.

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

Learning What to Remember: Observability-Safe Memory Retention via Constrained Optimization for Long-Horizon Language Agents

arXiv:2606.10616v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Long-horizon language agents accumulate observations, reasoning traces, and retrieved facts that exceed their finite context windows, making memory retention a fundamental resource-allocation problem. Existing memory systems improve management through heuristic scoring, retrieval optimization, or learned compression, but largely treat retention as a local decision problem and do not explicitly model its long-term consequences under realistic observability constraints. To fill this gap, we formulate memory retention as a constrained stochastic optimization problem with explicit budget feasibility, evidence utility, and delayed costs including miss penalties, reacquisition delays, and stale-information risk. We then propose OSL-MR (Observability-Safe Learning for Memory Retention), a novel framework that enforces a strict separation between online-observable features and offline-available supervision (OAS). OSL-MR combines an evidence learner trained from realized evidence supervision with a Mixed-Score heuristic that serves both as a deployable online-safe baseline and as a structured inductive prior for learning. The resulting policy learns query-conditioned evidence value directly from interaction data while remaining deployable under the same observability constraints. Experiments on LOCOMO and LongMemEval show that OSL-MR consistently outperforms recency-based methods, Generative Agents-style scoring, and other heuristic baselines, particularly under tight memory budgets. The Mixed-Score prior further improves precision while preserving recall, and sensitivity analysis demonstrates robustness across a wide range of cost configurations.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Adiabatic preparation of a fractional quantum Hall fluid by coherently pumping atoms from a Bose-Einstein condensate

arXiv:2606.15951v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a protocol to adiabatically prepare a many-particle fractional quantum Hall fluid of bosonic ultracold atoms exploiting a time-dependent coherent coupling of a strongly interacting atomic state with a large dilute Bose-Einstein condensate. Starting from an empty cloud, atoms with well-defined angular momentum are coherently pumped into the fluid by Raman beams with a Laguerre-Gauss profile. Compared to number-conserving schemes which rely on finite-size-induced topological gaps, we identify an adiabatic path in the Fock space which avoids crossing topological phase transitions and thus maintains a sizable adiabatic gap open at all times. The efficiency of our preparation protocol is numerically assessed for typical experimental parameters up to particle numbers that largely exceed the experimental state-of-the-art. The crucial advantage of including an anharmonic confinement is finally highlighted.

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

Wisdom of Committee: Diverse Distillation from Large Foundation Models and Domain Experts

arXiv:2402.14035v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Knowledge distillation from foundation models to compact domain models is challenging due to substantial gaps in capacity, architecture, and modality. For example, in our experiments, distilling from a 76M-parameter language model to a 2M-parameter recommender closes less than 40% of the performance gap between the undistilled student and the teacher. We show that introducing domain-specific experts – which share the student's architectural characteristics – alongside the foundation model as a diverse teacher committee significantly improves transfer. However, standard multi-teacher methods fail to exploit this diversity: naively combining heterogeneous teachers can degrade performance below single-teacher distillation. To address this, we propose DiverseDistill, an interactive distillation framework that employs a learnable Question-Answer mechanism to generate teacher-conditioned queries and align heterogeneous teacher outputs into the student's representation space. Unlike methods requiring gradient-based co-optimization or architectural modification of teachers, DiverseDistill operates with frozen teachers using only forward-pass inference through their intermediate layers: no parameter updates, no co-training, and no architectural surgery. A dynamic teacher importance mechanism further reduces training cost by filtering low-relevance teachers per sample (e.g., ~30% fewer forward passes with no quality loss for recommendation tasks), while the entire Distillation Module is discarded after training, adding zero inference overhead. Evaluations on recommendation (38x compression) and vision (3.6x compression) tasks demonstrate that DiverseDistill recovers 73-114% of the teacher-student performance gap, consistently outperforming all single- and multi-teacher baselines.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quantum gates with parametrically driven multi-qubit couplers

arXiv:2606.14522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Superconducting quantum processors could significantly profit from enhanced connectivity together with precise control of interactions and gates between qubits. Here we investigate plaquettes of four qubits that are coupled via a central tunable coupling circuit, so that not only gates between qubits connected by an edge of the plaquette can be executed but also between qubits across the diagonal. By numerically and analytically analyzing parametrically driven processes, we explore $\sqrt{iSWAP}$-gates between any pair of qubits, also across the diagonal, as well as three-qubit interactions and gates. For experimentally available circuit parameters, we for example find $\sqrt{iSWAP}$-gates with a gate time of 50 ns and 99.9\% fidelity, which is decreased to 99.4\% if two such gates are executed in parallel on disjoint qubit pairs in the plaquette. For three-qubit gates we find fidelities of 95\% fidelity at a gate time of 200 ns.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Simulation of Language Evolution under Regulated Social Media Platforms: A Synergistic Approach of Large Language Models and Genetic Algorithms

arXiv:2502.19193v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Social media platforms frequently impose restrictive policies to moderate user content, prompting the emergence of creative evasion language strategies. This paper presents a multi-agent framework based on Large Language Models (LLMs) to simulate the iterative evolution of language strategies under regulatory constraints. In this framework, participant agents, as social media users, continuously evolve their language expression, while supervisory agents emulate platform-level regulation by assessing policy violations. To achieve a more faithful simulation, we employ a dual design of language strategies (constraint and expression) to differentiate conflicting goals and utilize an LLM-driven GA (Genetic Algorithm) for the selection, mutation, and crossover of language strategies. The framework is evaluated using two distinct scenarios: an abstract password game and a realistic simulated illegal pet trade scenario. Experimental results demonstrate that as the number of dialogue rounds increases, both the number of uninterrupted dialogue turns and the accuracy of information transmission improve significantly. Furthermore, a user study with 40 participants validates the real-world relevance of the generated dialogues and strategies. Moreover, ablation studies validate the importance of the GA, emphasizing its contribution to long-term adaptability and improved overall results.

14.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Orion: Towards Lab Automation with Computer-Using Agents

Laboratory discovery increasingly depends on computational workflows that connect experimental data to analysis, interpretation and follow-up hypotheses. Yet these workflows remain constrained by labor-intensive use of specialized software, visual inspection through graphical user interfaces, and integration of knowledge across multiple sources. Here, we present Orion, a computer-using AI agent for biomedical image analysis and interpretation that moves towards lab automation by automating this computational layer of laboratory work. Orion combines large language models with terminal execution, GUI control and adaptive multi-step reasoning in a shared computing environment. It can inspect visual data, operate standard scientific software, mine web resources and conduct end-to-end analysis and interpretation workflows without requiring bespoke software integrations. Across benchmarks, Orion achieved over 90% accuracy on biomedical database and literature retrieval tasks, learned to use the popular tools CellProfiler and QuPath for quantitative analysis of cellular and tissue images, respectively, and facilitated autonomous discovery in experimental imaging data. In 100 hours of autonomous exploration of a large-scale perturbation imaging dataset, Orion generated 52 research reports, of which human scientist review prioritized 22 plausible mechanistic hypotheses. These results show that computer-using AI agents can substantially expand the reach of laboratory automation, providing a scalable and auditable route from experimental imaging data to quantitative analysis, reports and biologically grounded hypotheses.

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

Finding Sparse Subnetworks in One Training Cycle via Progressive Magnitude-Based Pruning

Neural network pruning reduces model size by removing less important parameters while aiming to preserve predictive performance. Although the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) shows that sparse subnetworks can match dense networks when trained from suitable initializations, its iterative pruning procedure requires multiple complete training cycles. This work evaluates progressive magnitude-based pruning as a single-cycle alternative. The method gradually increases sparsity during training using a linear schedule and updates pruning masks based on active weight magnitudes. We conduct systematic experiments on CIFAR-10 and MNIST across ResNet, VGG-style, and LeNet architectures, comparing the proposed method with representative iterative and initialization-based pruning baselines, including LTH, SNIP, and GraSP. On CIFAR-10, the method achieves 95.12\% accuracy on ResNet-18 at 72.9\% sparsity, compared with 90.5\% reported for LTH. At extreme sparsity, it achieves 93.13\% accuracy on a VGG-like architecture at 97\% sparsity, compared with approximately 92.0\% for SNIP, and 93.44\% accuracy on VGG-19 at 97.97\% sparsity, compared with 92.19\% for GraSP at 98\% sparsity. A sparsity-accuracy analysis on ResNet-18 further shows that accuracy remains within 0.1 percentage points of the dense baseline across 70–85\% sparsity. These results indicate that progressive magnitude-based pruning provides an effective single-cycle approach for neural network sparsification under the evaluated settings.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Unveiling Hierarchical Invariants in Multiphoton Linear Optics

arXiv:2506.12857v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Linear optical networks driven by quantum states of light are important building blocks of photonic quantum technologies. They access large bosonic Hilbert spaces through multiphoton interference. At the same time, their dynamics are generated by single-particle mode transformations, thereby defining a highly structured subset of multiphoton unitaries and setting boundary on linear optics capability. To elucidate this boundary, we reveal an underlying fine-grained symmetry structure that partitions the multiphoton operator space into invariant subspaces and generates a hierarchy of invariants. We experimentally confirm the conservation of high-order invariants and demonstrate their operational utility in characterizing state reachability and the metrological capability of multiphoton probes. Our framework provides a symmetry-based perspective for understanding and harnessing structured multiphoton dynamics across photonic quantum technologies.

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

Disentangling Perception and Reasoning in Multimodal LLMs via Reward Design

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has driven major gains in LLM reasoning, and it is intuitive to assume this recipe will transfer well to multimodal models. However, multimodal models do two things: first, perceive what is in an image, then reason about what it implies. Because these stages are graded jointly, it is hard to tell how much room reasoning alone has to grow. We study this on algorithmic visual puzzles, where both components are necessary and show that perception, not reasoning, is the binding constraint. Replacing images with simple textual descriptions raises performance by over 20 points on average for Claude models. We then evaluate six reward designs aimed at inducing visual grounding during reasoning without chain-of-thought supervision. Training Qwen-2.5-VL-7B with GRPO, reward design induces long, structured reasoning with self-reflection and visual references, yielding a 5.56-point gain over the base model. These gains are, however, uneven; no single reward improves all categories, and rewards with verifiable accuracy signals trade out-of-domain transfer for in-domain accuracy. These results point to perception-aware reward design as a path forward, so that signals correct perception at its source rather than the reasoning that inherits its errors.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Optimizing resource allocation for accuracy in noisy variational quantum algorithms

arXiv:2606.20153v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For quantum algorithms to achieve their full potential, we need methodologies to optimize them, such as reaching a given output accuracy with minimal resource costs. Here, we develop such a methodology for a class of Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) algorithms. We leverage simulations of a Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) to propose a phenomenological model of such algorithms that captures the complex relationship between algorithmic accuracy, algorithmic resource costs, and the noise that exists in realistic quantum hardware. For this, we take the algorithmic resource cost to be the total number of quantum gate-operations in the algorithm; minimizing this cost typically makes the algorithm faster and more energy-efficient. We consider the subtle trade-off between quantum circuit size (small circuits are too imprecise, but large ones are too noisy), and the number of iterations of that quantum circuit for the full algorithm to sufficiently converge. Using a noise-metric-resource methodology, we identify the sweet spot (of circuit size versus iterations) that minimizes the algorithmic resource costs for a desired algorithm accuracy. It also gives the circuit size that maximizes algorithm accuracy for a fixed resource cost. Our methodology provides a practical guideline for near-term deployment of variational algorithms on realistic noisy hardware, including hardware that uses error mitigation.

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

The Distribution Postulate in Algorithmic Bohmian Mechanics

arXiv:2606.16165v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In order to make the right empirical predictions Bohmian mechanics requires a special statistical boundary condition – the distribution postulate – but it is unclear how best to understand this condition. We show how one might use the theory of algorithmic randomness to formulate the distribution postulate as an objective constraining law. The framework requires us to say something about admissible quantum-mechanical states and measurements. In return, algorithmic Bohmian mechanics (aBM) guarantees the standard Born statistics for a collection of canonical quantum experiments in the limit, not just with high probability. The algorithmic distribution postulate provides a sharp typicality condition, clarifies the status of quantum probabilities in the deterministic theory, and provides a concrete example of how notions provided by the theory of algorithmic randomness can aid in specifying the content of a physical law.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Fuzzy-Geometric Branch-Point Modeling for Structure-Aware Augmentation of Handwritten Chinese Characters

Data scarcity and structural distortion significantly limit handwriting recognition in high-security authentication. Existing augmentation methods often cause topological and morphological damage, particularly when processing complex Chinese characters where stroke intersections, ligatures, and sharp turns render traditional branch-point detection unreliable. To address this, this paper proposes a fuzzy geometry-driven structure-aware (FGSA) augmentation framework. We model branch points as fuzzy sets within the skeleton space, constructing a continuous branch-point membership field by integrating topological neighborhood evidence with direction field divergence. This membership field is adaptively optimized via an unsupervised surrogate objective, enabling robust stroke decoupling without manual annotation. Finally, kinematically-aligned samples are synthesized through parameterized cubic Bézier reconstruction and multi-strategy perturbations, ensuring a balance between structural fidelity and sample diversity. Moreover, we establish LZUSig, a large-scale, highly challenging dataset specifically dedicated to fine-grained structural degradation in Chinese handwritten signatures. Extensive experiments on CASIA-HWDB1.1, ChiSig, and LZUSig demonstrate that FGSA significantly reduces the word-level error rate ($\Delta$WER), achieving optimal recognition gains over the compared baselines. More importantly, it strikes a robust trade-off among task gain, structural fidelity, and discriminative feature preservation, offering a highly controllable solution for handwriting augmentation.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Geometry-Aware Superpixel Graph Transformer with Metadata for Skin Lesion Classification

Automated skin cancer classification from dermoscopic images remains challenging due to heterogeneous lesion structure, strong intra-class variability, and subtle visual differences between benign and malignant cases. Existing CNN/ViT pipelines typically rely on global or patch-level features and often combine patient metadata via late fusion, which limits spatially grounded multimodal reasoning. We present a novel region-based graph learning framework that explicitly models lesions as graphs of spatially coherent superpixel regions represented as frozen CNN features. To capture fine-grained lesion arrangements, we encode inter-regional geometry as edge attributes and introduce a dedicated metadata context node connected to all regions, providing structured integration of demographic/clinical variables within the same relational space. Node representations are updated using our edge-aware graph transformer followed by attention-driven propagation, and a final graph-level embedding for benign-malignant classification. Experiments on four public benchmarks demonstrate that explicit region-level relational modeling and graph-native multimodal fusion yield consistent gains over the state-of-the-art. Consequently, we establish a new graph-centric perspective in which CNN features are modeled as relational nodes and improved through contextual integration, yielding more expressive and robust classifications.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Perceptions of aging well among older adults with heart failure: insights from a qualitative study

Background: Heart failure (HF) is a prevalent and often debilitating cardiovascular condition among older adults, frequently accompanied by multimorbidity, functional limitations, and the need to age in place. Traditional models of successful aging emphasize disease absence and preserved function, yet most individuals with HF live with ongoing symptoms and chronic health challenges. How older adults with HF define aging well, particularly across different socioeconomic contexts, remains underexplored. Objectives: To explore how older adults with HF conceptualize aging well and to identify perceived facilitators and barriers across more and less resourced New York City neighborhoods. Methods: We conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 adults diagnosed with HF residing in Manhattan and Brooklyn neighborhoods classified by 2019 United States Census data. Interviews were guided by Rowe and Kahn's model. Transcripts were analyzed using an inductive-deductive thematic approach and interpreted in alignment with the Healthy People 2030 framework. Results: Participants had a mean age of 69 years; 50% identified as Black and 50% were women. Despite functional limitations, 65% reported aging well. Five themes emerged: maintaining physical function, maintaining cognitive function, sustaining social relationships, avoiding pain, and promoting overall well-being. Avoiding pain and promoting well-being extended beyond traditional models. Neighborhood context shaped priorities, with financial stability emphasized in more affluent areas and social cohesion prioritized in less affluent communities. Conclusions: Older adults with HF frequently perceive themselves as aging well despite chronic illness, reframing successful aging beyond disease avoidance. These findings support a patient-centered, place-informed model of aging well with implications for healthcare delivery and policy.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Open-World Video Segmentation

While video segmentation has advanced rapidly on short clips and closed-set benchmarks, open-world video segmentation remains largely unexplored. The challenge is twofold: (1) existing methods are not designed to support object discovery and identity maintenance in long videos of dynamic ego-motion, and (2) existing evaluation protocols rely on a rigid 1:1 matching that unfairly penalizes semantically valid predictions with mismatched granularity. To address both gaps, we introduce Savvy, a practical and strong system for zero-shot open-world long-horizon video segmentation. Savvy combines hierarchical mask discovery, deferred admission, and track consolidation to support persistent object discovery, safe track promotion, and stable long-range identity maintenance. We further propose OGA, a granularity-aware evaluation suite for open-world video segmentation. Built on a Granularity-Agnostic (GA) matching protocol, OGA relaxes conventional 1:1 matching to an n:1 mapping, but still enforces temporal rigor by detecting support discontinuities through sever points and scoring each reference object through its dominant coherent fragment. This prevents fragmented or flickering support from being over-rewarded while enabling GA-adapted metrics and structural diagnostics: identity persistence (IP), and identity concentration (IC). On VIPSeg, we show that standard 1:1 evaluation substantially underestimates open-world methods, whereas GA evaluation recovers much of their suppressed performance. On the more realistic long-horizon benchmarks: ScanNet and HM3D, Savvy consistently outperforms strong baselines across both classical and proposed metrics, including STQ, VPQ$_\infty$, IP and IC. Together, these results establish a practical benchmark and a strong baseline for open-world long-horizon video segmentation.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

OPD-Evolver: Cultivating Holistic Agent Evolver via On-Policy Distillation

Memory has become a standard substrate for self-evolving agents, yet retaining experience is not the same as learning how to evolve through it. Existing memory agents can store trajectories, retrieve reflections, or accumulate skills, but often lack the holistic competence to select useful experience, act on it, write reusable knowledge, and maintain a growing repository. We introduce OPD-Evolver, a slow-fast co-evolution framework that cultivates such an agent evolver through on-policy self-distillation. In the fast loop, OPD-Evolver interacts with a four-level memory hierarchy to read, use, write, and maintain experience for rapid test-time evolution. In the slow loop, outcome-calibrated memory attribution and privileged hindsight distill these four abilities into the deployable policy. Across multi-domain benchmarks, OPD-Evolver surpasses memory systems such as ReasoningBank by up to 11.5%, and training-based methods such as Skill0 by ~5.8%. Further analysis shows that OPD-Evolver internalizes high-value experience and memory management, enabling OPD-Evolver-9B to challenge giant counterparts such as Qwen3.5-397B-A17B and Step-3.5-Flash, pointing beyond memory-augmented agents toward genuinely qualified agent evolvers.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Provable Recovery of Locally Important Signed Features and Interactions from Random Forest

arXiv:2512.11081v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Feature and Interaction Importance (FII) methods are essential in supervised learning for assessing the relevance of input variables and their interactions in complex prediction models. In many domains, such as personalized medicine, local interpretations for individual predictions are often required, rather than global scores summarizing overall feature importance. Random Forests (RFs) are widely used in these settings, and existing interpretability methods typically exploit tree structures and split statistics to provide model-specific insights. However, theoretical understanding of local FII methods for RF remains limited, making it unclear how to interpret high importance scores for individual predictions. We propose a novel, local, model-specific FII method that identifies frequent co-occurrences of features along decision paths, combining global patterns with those observed on paths specific to a given test point. We prove that our method consistently recovers the true local signal features and their interactions under a Locally Spike Sparse (LSS) model and also identifies whether large or small feature values drive a prediction. We illustrate the usefulness of our method and theoretical results through simulation studies and a real-world data example.