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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Some Complexity Results for Robustness Verification for Binarized Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.18918v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper studies the computational complexity of verification problems for Binarized Neural Networks (BNNs), where activations (and sometimes weights) are binary. We analyze two problems: satisfiability and robustness under uniform image occlusion. We show that BNN satisfiability is NP-complete via a reduction from Boolean satisfiability problem (SAT), and that uniform occlusion induces a piecewise-constant structure in the network output, enabling a polynomial-time robustness-checking algorithm.

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

Sub-Poissonian Statistics and Quantum Non-Gaussianity from High-Harmonic Generation

arXiv:2602.10882v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum technologies are powered by platforms to generate complex non-classical states of matter or light to realize applications. We investigate the non-classical properties of high-harmonic generation in semiconductors, an emerging photonic platform. Measuring the click statistics of three double-digit orders, we evaluate witness operators to certify the non-classicality of the generated states. We show that higher-order harmonics driven by a coherent laser are squeezed and entangled. The properties of the emission are well retrieved with an entangled Gaussian state model, obtained by numerical state optimization to multiple observables. Additionally, we perform inter-order heralded measurements to engineer the quantum state of the emission. The heralded states have distinct properties, showing sub-Poissonian photon statistics. Further, we witness the generation of a quantum non-Gaussian state, a resource highly relevant for quantum information. With this, we establish high-harmonic generation as a platform for generating quantum optical resources.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Boundary Embedding Shaping with Adaptive Contrastive Learning for Graph Structural Disentanglement

arXiv:2606.20283v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs) excel at aggregating neighbor information for classification, yet their performance is hindered by graph structural entanglement, where spurious correlations from semantically irrelevant neighbors contaminate node embeddings. This challenge is most acute for nodes near class boundaries in the embedding space, where amplified structural noise blurs decision boundaries and destabilizes predictions. Existing robust GNN methods largely treat all nodes uniformly, ignoring boundary vulnerabilities. In this paper, to improve classification performance, we tackle graph structural disentanglement by identifying boundary-region entanglement as the primary bottleneck and propose Boundary Embedding Shaping (BES), an adaptive contrastive learning GNN plug-in module that selectively suppresses spurious structural noise at decision boundaries with minimal model parameter perturbation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BES consistently improves boundary discrimination and outperforms existing leading methods. Notably, BES boosts GCN performance by an average of 3.3% in node classification (up to 5.0% on WikiCS) and achieves superior accuracy in link prediction.

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

Learning New Tasks via Reusable Skills: Skill-Compositional Experts for Embodied Continual Learning

Embodied Continual Learning (ECL) aims to enable robots to continually acquire new manipulation tasks while retaining previously learned behaviors under closed-loop control. Compared with conventional continual learning, ECL suffers from more severe catastrophic forgetting. Feature drift accumulated under closed-loop control progressively propagates through sequential decision-making, leading to degradation of previously learned behaviors. A key challenge in ECL lies in structured skill reuse across continually evolving tasks, since existing methods primarily focus on skill learning without explicitly organizing them for coherent task execution. To address this issue, we propose SCE, a Skill-Compositional Experts framework for ECL. SCE builds a skill base via Compositional Skill Grounding (CSG), which decomposes task demonstrations into reusable skills. Based on this, Dual Execution-and-Transition Experts (DETE) enable new task learning through skill composition, where one branch ensures skill execution and the other supports transitions between skills for coherent behavior. Experiments on LIBERO benchmarks and real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate that SCE consistently improves retention and overall task performance. Further feature drift analyses and ablation studies verify the effectiveness of our method. Project website: https://eqcy.github.io/sce/.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Geometric mechanisms enabling spin- and enantio-sensitive observables in one photon ionization of chiral molecules

arXiv:2603.02735v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We examine spin-resolved photoionization of randomly oriented chiral molecules via circularly polarized light, and revisit earlier predictions of Cherepkov (J. Phys. B: Atom. Mol. Phys. 16, 1543, 1983). We will show that the dynamical origin of spin- and enantio-sensitive observables arise from two intrinsic mechanisms that are quantified by two pseudovectors stemming from the geometric properties of the photoionization dipoles in spin space and in real space, and an extrinsic mechanism which is a directional bias introduced by the well-defined direction of light polarization. These mechanisms arise solely from electric dipole interactions. Consequently, this means that the ten independent parameters that was earlier predicted by Cherepkov to fully describe spin-resolved photoionization of chiral molecules can be reduced as moments of these three pseudovectors. We also find that the molecular pseudoscalars describing the spin- and enantio-sensitive components of the yield can be described by the flux of these pseudovectors through the energy shell, which changes sign upon switching enantiomers. Our results provide compact expressions for these observables which provide an intuitive picture on what determines the strength of these spin- and enantio-sensitive observables. The approach can be readily generalized to photoexcitation, multiphoton processes, and arbitrary field polarizations. Regardless of the specific driving conditions, the resulting spin- and enantio-sensitive observables are still controlled by the same three pseudovectors, underscoring their universal role as the primary generators of chirality-induced spin asymmetries, emphasizing their fundamental geometric origin and the universality of the mechanism identified here.

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

Non-negative Elastic Net Decoding for Information Retrieval

Dense retrieval has become the dominant paradigm in information retrieval, in which each document is scored against a query by the inner product of their vector embeddings, and the top-$k$ documents by score are retrieved for this query. However, since each document's score depends solely on the embedding of the query and itself, the retrieval process is oblivious to the content of the entire corpus. Therefore, dense retrieval cannot avoid selecting semantically similar documents from the corpus, which may result in a non-diverse, redundant set of retrieved documents. To this end, we approach retrieval as a joint decoding problem, in which documents are selected as a set with regard to the context of the rest of the corpus. To achieve this, we propose Non-Negative elastic Net (NNN) decoding, which selects documents whose embeddings jointly reconstruct the query embedding as a sparse non-negative linear combination. Our main theoretical result establishes a strict separation between dense retrieval and NNN decoding. For any corpus, every query correctly handled by dense retrieval is also handled by NNN decoding, while on corpora containing correlated documents, NNN decoding additionally handles queries that dense retrieval cannot. Experimental results indicate that applying NNN decoding to frozen embeddings trained for inner-product scoring yields consistent improvements across several benchmarks. Moreover, we introduce an end-to-end training procedure which optimizes the embeddings for NNN decoding, producing significant performance gains surpassing in all metrics and benchmarks compared to dense retrieval. Our work establishes a new paradigm for leveraging dense embeddings in information retrieval, beyond the standard practice of inner-product scoring.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

MARS: Efficient, Adaptive Co-Scheduling for Heterogeneous Agentic Systems

arXiv:2604.26963v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as the execution core of autonomous agents rather than as standalone text generators. Agentic workloads induce a temporal shift from single-turn inference to multi-turn LLM-tool loops, and a spatial shift from chat-scale, GPU-only execution to repository-scale, GPU-CPU co-located execution. Consequently, coordinating heterogeneous resource demands of agentic execution has emerged as a critical system challenge. We design and implement MARS, an efficient and adaptive co-scheduling system that globally coordinates heterogeneous agentic workloads under coupled GPU-CPU resource pressure. By establishing holistic visibility across GPU inference and CPU tool execution via a unified information stream, an external control plane in MARS decouples admission from execution to prevent heterogeneous resource oversubscription. An internal agent-centric scheduler further minimizes the end-to-end critical path by prioritizing latency-sensitive continuations and adaptively retaining KV cache state only when warm resumption yields a latency benefit. Our evaluations show that MARS reduces end-to-end latency by up to 5.94x while maintaining nearly maximal system throughput. We further integrate MARS as the serving backend for the OpenHands coding agent framework, demonstrating its real-world effectiveness by accelerating end-to-end task completion time by up to 1.87x. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/Afterglow231/MARS_preview .

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Decoding the Genetic Architecture of Autistic Traits in the Aging Population

Autism research has mostly focused on diagnostic frameworks in childhood. However, autistic traits including social skills, communication, attention switching, attention to detail, and imagination may also vary in many undiagnosed individuals beyond childhood, and the genetic architecture of autistic traits in undiagnosed aging adults remains poorly understood. Here, we performed an exome-wide association study of autistic traits in adults aged >=40 from the UK Biobank (n = 161,269) and independently validated key findings in the SPARK cohort (n = 142,357). We identified exome-wide significance at 17q21.31, represented by a lead variant associated with social skills (rs199533, beta = 0.081, P = 2.04e-11). In addition, we identified an independent signal for communication (rs12632110, beta = 0.042, P = 3.07e-12) and two independent signals for attention switching (rs690733, beta = 0.046, P = 4.26e-12; rs2164272, beta = -0.047, P = 1.73e-12). Gene-based analyses further implicated loss-of-function variation in ZSCAN2 (beta = 1.00, P = 2.44e-6), which was associated with communication differences. Enrichment analyses revealed preferential expression of implicated genes in the cerebral cortex, while phenotypic and neuroimaging analyses linked those variants to cortical brain structure and regional volume. Taken together, these findings delineate the genetic architecture of autistic traits in the aging population and link genetic variation to downstream molecular and neuroanatomical mechanisms.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

CacheWeaver: Cache-Aware Evidence Ordering for Efficient Grounded RAG Inference

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) improves factual grounding, but it also lengthens prompts and raises prefill cost. Prefix caching in serving engines such as vLLM reduces this cost only when requests share the same token prefix. In grounded generation, however, adjacent queries may retrieve overlapping evidence in different orders, so set overlap does not become reusable prefix overlap. We present CacheWeaver, a lightweight prompt-layer method for cache-aware evidence ordering. The method keeps a prefix tree over recently served evidence sequences and uses a greedy walk to place the most reusable prefix first, while leaving the serving engine and retrieved evidence set unchanged. Across three vLLM configurations, the method lowers median time-to-first-token (TTFT) by about 20-33 percent relative to retrieval-order prefix caching, without hurting answer quality in our QA tests. The greedy policy reaches 97.5 percent of the median TTFT gain from oracle ordering, indicating that most reusable prefix locality can be recovered by a simple scheduling layer between retrieval and inference.

10.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Plateau Gaps of Poisson Correctors Encode Metastable Reaction Rates

arXiv:2606.14789v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Metastable reaction rates are commonly inferred from transition-state fluxes, mean first-passage times, or fitted kinetic models. We show that they are directly encoded in the plateau gap of an occupation-time Poisson corrector. For a centered basin-occupation observable, the Poisson corrector develops metastable plateaus in the reactant and product basins, and their separation determines the forward and backward transition rates. This construction requires only the generator, stationary measure, and metastable partition, and therefore does not rely on a predefined transition-state surface. In overdamped and underdamped double-well dynamics, the plateau-gap rate recovers the Kramers, Grote-Hynes, and Pollak-Grabert-Hänggi hierarchy. The same corrector-martingale decomposition yields a reactive-noise density, revealing where stochastic forcing contributes to transitions in configuration or phase space. Thus, reaction rates and their fluctuation sources emerge from a single corrector field.

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

Time and Killed Resolvents in Reflected Optimal Stopping with a Max Payoff

arXiv:2606.18214v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study infinite-horizon optimal stopping for normally reflected two-dimensional diffusions in the positive quadrant with max payoff \(G(x_1,x_2)=x_1\vee\alpha x_2\). The non-smooth payoff produces a singular stopping-gain measure on the kink set \(\Delta=\{x_1=\alpha x_2\}\). We prove $\displaystyle \Gamma^\Delta(dx) = -\frac{n^\top a(x)n}{2\sqrt{1+\alpha^2}}\,\sigma_\Delta(dx)$, with $n=(1,-\alpha)$, so the diagonal component is non-positive and strictly negative under local ellipticity. This implies that every interior kink point lies in the continuation region. We further show that the correct value representation uses the resolvent killed at first entry into the stopping set, $\displaystyle V=G-R_r^{\mathcal C}\Gamma$, and give a closed-form reflected Brownian counter-example showing that the unrestricted reflected resolvent is generally wrong. A reflected Brownian benchmark and numerical experiments illustrate the local-time, resolvent-gap, and diagonal-avoidance mechanisms.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Optimizing Encoder Circuits of Entanglement-Assisted Quantum LDPC Codes via Beam Search

arXiv:2606.11468v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Entanglement-assisted (EA) quantum QC-LDPC codes offer strong error-correction capabilities with structured parity-check matrices, but their practical use depends on efficient encoder circuits and the availability of pre-shared Bell pairs (ebits). In all encoder implementations based on the stabilizer formalism, the dominant contribution to this complexity comes from the use of controlled gates. In this paper, we adopt the Sharma-Kumar-Garani (SKG) encoder construction. We formulate the encoder optimization as a search over GF(2) row operations that decompose the binary matrix derived from its CNOT sub-sequence. We solve this problem using a beam search algorithm guided by a Hamming-distance heuristic. For the tested EA quantum QC-LDPC code families, the proposed method achieves CNOT-count reductions of 7.3-34.0% relative to the SKG baseline encoder. The optimized circuits also yield lower CNOT counts than Patel-Markov-Hayes synthesis on all tested instances and are verified by stabilizer-tableau simulation. These results show that substantial encoder simplification is possible for structured EA QC-LDPC codes.

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

Task-Error Residual Learning for Real-Robot Five-Ball Juggling

arXiv:2606.16978v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For residual learning that refines existing behavior, sample efficiency depends on two things: how much information each rollout returns, and how efficiently the learner uses that information. Reinforcement learning's standard scalar reward carries far less information than the directional task error that defines the task. Random exploration further discards whatever information each rollout returns. Through residual learning with directional task-error supervision and a task error model that drives sample selection, we achieve stable three-, four-, and five-ball juggling on anthropomorphic Barrett WAM arms. Despite planning and controlling through a simple, idealized stack, the system converges from the second attempt. The first attempt drops, after which task error decreases monotonically without further failures. In comparison, five-ball juggling typically takes humans years of practice. We compare residual learners across two ternary axes, the directional information in the learning feedback and the commitment of the analytic prior, spanning Newton-style Jacobian updates, Composite Bayesian Optimization, and stochastic search methods. Both axes prove necessary: neither directional feedback nor an informative prior suffices alone, and the simplest method that combines them, a fixed-Jacobian Newton update, is the most reliable. The learned residual tolerates substantial prior misalignment and degraded joint tracking, affecting mainly convergence speed. The bottleneck for residual learning on real robots is therefore the information content of the supervision signal and how the learner uses it, not the accuracy of the surrounding stack. Video documentation of all experiments is available at https://kai-ploeger.com/residual-juggling.

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

Conformal Risk-Averse Decision Making with Action Conditional Guarantee

arXiv:2606.05551v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reliable decision making pipelines powered by machine learning models require uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods that come with explicit safety guarantees. Conformal prediction provides such UQ by wrapping ML predictions into prediction sets, and recent work by Kiyani et al. (2025b) established that these sets can be translated into optimal risk-averse decision policies – yet only inheriting marginal safety guarantees. We generalize and strengthen their results by (i) introducing action-conditional conformal prediction, which yields safety guarantees conditioned explicitly on each action taken by the decision maker, (ii) showing that action-conditional prediction sets serve as a proxy for the feasible decision space for risk-averse decision makers aiming to optimize action-conditional value-at-risk, and (iii) proposing a principled finite-sample algorithm based on pinball-loss minimization, connecting the framework of Gibbs et al. (2025) to action-conditional guarantees. Experiments on two real-world datasets confirm that our approach significantly improves action-conditional performance over conformal baselines.

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

XAI-Grounded Explanation Generation for Speech Deepfake Detection with Training-Free Multimodal Large Language Models

Speech deepfake detection (SDD) systems require trustworthy explanations for reliable decision-making. Existing explanation ways mainly fall into two categories. Traditional explainable AI (XAI), such as gradient-based attribution, produces low-level attribution signals tightly coupled with model decisions, and harder to be understood by human than natural language explanations. Meanwhile, large language model (LLM)-based explanation generation often produces generic and ungrounded descriptions due to the lack of heuristic evidence and task-specific supervision, stemming from limited grounded explanation datasets for SDD. We therefore propose a training-free explanation framework that integrates XAI evidence with multimodal LLMs to generate grounded and specific explanations. Using the PartialSpoof dataset, we construct a grounded explanation dataset and show that methods with XAI increase inside accuracy by over 45\%, verified through human evaluation and faithfulness checks.

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

RegMix-D: Dynamic Data Mixing via Proxy Training Trajectories

Data mixture selection is critical for Large Language Model pretraining. Existing methods such as RegMix select a single static mixture by fitting a regression model on small-scale proxy runs. We propose RegMix-D, a simple extension of RegMix to dynamic mixing. Our key observation is that proxy runs produce not only endpoint losses, but also full loss trajectories, which can be used to further improve data mixture. By training regression model on these trajectories, we can predict optimal mixtures at multiple training stages. RegMix-D supports two deployment modes: an offline variant that generates a complete mixture schedule before target training, and an online variant that adapts the mixture during training using observed loss. Experiments on 25B tokens of the Pile dataset with a 1B parameter target model show that RegMix-D consistently improves over RegMix and DoReMi across 13 downstream tasks while remaining proxy-efficient: it surpasses RegMix even with only 128 proxy models (25% of RegMix's proxy compute budget).

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Semi-Device-Independent Certification for Nonlocality without Entanglement

arXiv:2606.13667v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, we investigate maximum-confidence discrimination, which encompasses minimum-error and unambiguous discrimination, for ensembles of separable states by considering global and separable measurements. We demonstrate that global measurements outperform separable ones, thereby establishing nonlocality without entanglement (NLWE) in terms of confidence in a detection event, a fine-grained state-identification strategy that maximizes the probability of a correct guess given a measurement outcome. Conversely, verifying achievable confidence in measurement outcomes can certify global measurements, namely, semi-device-independent certification of NLWE. Our results make it feasible to experimentally demonstrate NLWE using present-day quantum measurement devices, even with non-unit detection efficiencies, since maximum-confidence measurements rely only on detected measurement outcomes.

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

Can Agents Distinguish Visually Hard-to-Separate Diseases in a Zero-Shot Setting? A Pilot Study

The rapid progress of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has led to increasing interest in agent-based systems. While most prior work in medical imaging concentrates on automating routine clinical workflows, we study an underexplored yet clinically significant setting: distinguishing visually hard-to-separate diseases in a zero-shot setting. We benchmark representative agents on two imaging-only proxy diagnostic tasks, (1) melanoma vs. atypical nevus and (2) pulmonary edema vs. pneumonia, where visual features are highly confounded despite substantial differences in clinical management. We introduce a multi-agent framework based on contrastive adjudication. Experimental results show improved diagnostic performance (an 11-percentage-point gain in accuracy on dermoscopy data) and reduced unsupported claims on qualitative samples, although overall performance remains insufficient for clinical deployment. We acknowledge the inherent uncertainty in human annotations and the absence of clinical context, which further limit the translation to real-world settings. Within this controlled setting, this pilot study provides preliminary insights into zero-shot agent performance in visually confounded scenarios.

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

Workflow-GYM: Towards Long-Horizon Evaluation of Computer-use Agentic tasks in Real-World Professional Fields

arXiv:2606.11042v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent years have witnessed the rapid evolution of AI agents toward handling increasingly complex, real-world tasks. However, existing benchmarks rarely evaluate whether agents can operate graphical user interfaces to complete long-horizon, high-value professional workflows across diverse domains. Current GUI benchmarks still predominantly focus on general-purpose software, relatively simple applications, and short-horizon tasks, leaving it largely unknown whether modern agents can follow user instructions to autonomously operate domain-specific professional software and accomplish economically valuable work in an end-to-end manner. To bridge this gap, we introduce Workflow-GYM, a benchmark for long-horizon GUI tasks centered on professional domains and specialized software environments. Through extensive experiments on state-of-the-art models, we find that even the strongest models achieve only slightly above 30% success rates, highlighting that professional long-horizon GUI workflows remain highly challenging for current GUI agents. Further analysis reveals that current agents struggle to maintain long-horizon workflow consistency, frequently exhibiting workflow stage omission, error propagation, objective drift, and insufficient understanding of professional software environments. Our findings provide important insights into the limitations of current agent systems and suggest key directions for the next generation of GUI-agent research.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Mental-R1: Aligning LLM Reasoning for Mental Health Assessment

arXiv:2606.13176v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mental health problems such as anxiety, depression, and suicide remain urgent global challenges, where timely and accurate assessment is critical for effective intervention. Recently, large language models have been explored for mental health assessment. However, existing general-purpose post-training methods do not align with the cognitive processes of human assessment, which may lead to unreliable reasoning outcomes. To bridge this gap, we propose Cognitive Relative Policy Optimization (CRPO), a reinforcement learning framework tailored for the mental health domain. CRPO extends group relative policy optimization by integrating stage-dependent uncertainty modeling into the policy optimization process. Specifically, we introduce a stage-wise entropy regularization mechanism that encourages broad exploration in early reasoning phases and progressively enforces confident decision-making in later stages, mimicking the human cognitive shift from uncertainty to certainty. In addition, inspired by cognitive appraisal theory, we formalize cognitive reasoning stages, thereby guiding theory-grounded interpretable inference. Experiments on 8 mental health datasets show that CRPO achieves an average improvement of 10.4 percentage points in weighted F1-score over the best reinforcement learning baseline. Furthermore, the CRPO-trained model Mental-R1 demonstrates clear advantages compared with existing large language models on reasoning-intensive cases, suggesting that CRPO enhances reasoning capabilities for mental health assessment.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Neuron Level Analysis of Large Language Model in Legal Domain Reasoning

We presented a neuron-level analysis of legal-domain reasoning in LLMs, comparing it with other applied domain tasks across seven open-weight models. Using neuron attribution scores to rank and suppress influential neurons, we confirmed that suppressing the identified neurons collapses accuracy on the target task, whereas suppressing the same number of random neurons does not. We further found a small subset of neurons influential across all seven tasks; once these are removed, suppressing the remaining neurons degrades only the task they were identified from, revealing genuinely task-specific neurons in every model studied. Within the legal domain, the three benchmarks exhibit relatively high neuron overlap and tend to be affected jointly, suggesting of legal components neurons that span jurisdictions. The distribution of identified neurons in our experiments suggests that the hypothesis that influential neurons are concentrated in middle MLP layers may depend on the input format and content, rather than being a universal phenomenon.

22.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Bioinf-Farma: supervised integration of epitope prediction and recombinant protein developability for automated vaccine candidate prioritization

Vaccine antigen discovery requires prioritizing protein candidates according to both immunogenic potential and recombinant expression feasibility. These properties are typically evaluated using separate computational tools, requiring researchers to integrate heterogeneous outputs through ad hoc workflows. Here, we present BIOINF-farma, a modular platform integrating epitope prediction and developability assessment for rational antigen selection within a unified environment. Candidates can be submitted as amino acid sequences or three-dimensional structures. When experimental structures are unavailable, BIOINF-farma automatically searches for models in AlphaFold DB or performs structure prediction using Boltz-2, ensuring a standardized structural representation for downstream analyses. Antigenicity is quantified by combining structure-based conformational epitope signals (MLCE/REBELOT-BEPPE) and sequence-based linear epitope propensity scores (BepiPred 3.0) into a protein-level Antigenicity Score, with a classification threshold optimized on a manually curated validation dataset. Developability is evaluated through two supervised Random Forest meta-learners that integrate three solubility predictors (DeepSoluE, SoluProt, Protein-Sol) and three thermal stability predictors (TemStaPro, ProLaTherm, BertThermo), whose outputs are combined into an Expression Efficiency Score (EES). By integrating complementary predictive signals, the meta-learning framework achieves greater accuracy and robustness than individual predictors while maintaining performance across a broad range of sequence identities. The Antigenicity Score effectively discriminates antigenic from non-antigenic proteins with a large effect size, whereas EES successfully distinguishes soluble from insoluble outcomes on an independent panel of recombinant proteins expressed in Escherichia coli. BIOINF-farma jointly assesses antigenicity and expression feasibility within a single framework. Its modular architecture facilitates the incorporation of future predictive methods, while its web-based interface makes the full pipeline accessible to users without programming expertise, supporting rapid candidate triage in vaccine research and emerging pathogen responses.

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

STEAM: Squeeze and Transform Enhanced Attention Module

Channel and spatial attention mechanisms introduced in earlier work enhance the representational capabilities of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) but often increase parameter and computational costs. While recent approaches focus solely on efficient feature context modeling for channel attention, we aim to model both channel and spatial attention comprehensively with minimal parameters and reduced computation. Leveraging the principles of relational modeling in graphs, we introduce a constant-parameter module, STEAM: Squeeze and Transform Enhanced Attention Module, which integrates channel and spatial attention to enhance the representation power of CNNs. To our knowledge, we are the first to propose a graph-based approach for modeling both channel and spatial attention, utilizing concepts from multi-head graph transformers. Additionally, we introduce Output Guided Pooling (OGP), which efficiently captures spatial context to further enhance spatial attention. We extensively evaluate STEAM for large-scale image classification, object detection and instance segmentation on standard benchmark datasets. STEAM achieves a \(2\%\) increase in accuracy over the standard ResNet-50 model with only a meager increase in GFLOPs. Furthermore, STEAM outperforms the leading modules, ECA and GCT, in terms of accuracy while achieving a threefold reduction in GFLOPs. The code will be made available upon acceptance.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Factor Analysing Predictive Processing: No Evidence for a General Factor Across Tasks

Background & Hypothesis: Dysfunctional predictive processing (PP), specifically the aberrant weighting of priors, is a frequently-proposed mechanism for psychosis and psychosis-like phenomena (schizotypy). Evidence for this theory mostly originates from single-task studies, which assume that all tasks load onto a single latent construct of PP performance, but the underlying factor structure of PP tasks is unknown. PP deficits in psychosis may be better described by a two-factor, hierarchical model: weakened lower-level (perceptual) priors compensated by higher-level (cognitive) priors. Study Design: This study implements a multi-paradigm approach in healthy participants to investigate latent constructs underlying PP and their relationship to schizotypy. Participants (N = 73) completed 6 tasks measuring reliance on priors across language, memory, visual, and auditory domains. A factor analysis investigated whether performance across tasks is captured by a single or two-factor model. Study Results: Although a two-factor model best described performance, factors reflected within-task correlations rather than a PP hierarchy. Cross-task PP measures were poorly correlated, suggesting that individuals' weighting of priors was task-specific. A full model including all task outcomes (not factors) significantly predicted the severity of schizotypal aberrant beliefs but no other schizotypal measures. Conclusions: These results do not evidence a single factor underpinning PP performance. It is therefore inappropriate to use results from single tasks to propose a generalised PP deficit in psychosis. Variation was also not captured by a two-factor hierarchical model of priors. Further multi-paradigm research is required to evaluate alternative models or additional variables that describe aberrant PP in psychosis.

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

Proact-VL: A Proactive VideoLLM for Real-Time AI Companions

Proactive and real-time interactive experiences are essential for human-like AI companions, yet face three key challenges: (1) achieving low-latency inference under continuous streaming inputs, (2) autonomously deciding when to respond, and (3) controlling both quality and quantity of generated content to meet real-time constraints. In this work, we instantiate AI companions through two gaming scenarios, commentator and guide, selected for their suitability for automatic evaluation. We introduce the Live Gaming Benchmark, a large-scale dataset with three representative scenarios: solo commentary, co-commentary, and user guidance, and present Proact-VL, a general framework that shapes multimodal language models into proactive, real-time interactive agents capable of human-like environment perception and interaction. Extensive experiments show Proact-VL achieves superior response latency and quality while maintaining strong video understanding capabilities, demonstrating its practicality for real-time interactive applications.