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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

DiFlow-TTS: Compact and Low-Latency Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech with Discrete Flow Matching

Zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) has made significant progress in replicating unseen voices, yet balancing generation quality and inference efficiency remains challenging. Autoregressive models suffer from high latency, while diffusion-based approaches are constrained by training-time configurations. Moreover, most flow-based methods operate in continuous space, which introduces optimization challenges because continuous token spaces are inherently more complex than discrete ones. To address these limitations, we propose DiFlow-TTS, a novel zero-shot TTS framework based on discrete flow matching. The model consists of a deterministic Phoneme-Content Mapper for linguistic modeling and a Factorized Discrete Flow Denoiser that simultaneously generates prosody and acoustic token streams. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach across multiple evaluation metrics.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

PCRAgent: A Multi-Agent Framework for Transforming Noisy clinical conversations into Structured Pre-Consultation Medical Records and Reusable Clinical Data Resources

In primary care and outpatient settings, clinically important patient information is often embedded in fragmented, ambiguous, repetitive, and noisy communication between physicians and patients. This limits physicians ability to obtain a clear preconsultation overview of symptoms, history of present illness, and visit intent, while also preventing real world clinical dialogues from being reused in hospital information systems and medical artificial intelligence applications. To address this challenge, we developed PCRAgent, a centrally coordinated multi agent framework for preconsultation clinical information organization. Guided by physician inquiry logic, PCRAgent identifies, extracts, corrects, and standardizes patient-reported information from noisy consultations. Its coordinated modules including error detection, semantic editing, output control, contextual memory, and intent recognition enable robust parallel handling of spelling errors, repetitions, grammatical inconsistencies, medical ambiguities, and non-medical interference. A traceable edit list records intermediate corrections and context, allowing iterative refinement without redundant modifications. PCRAgent generates two complementary outputs. One is a PreConsultation Clinical Report for rapid physician review. The other is a Structured Clinical Conversation Dataset for hospital data construction and downstream AI applications. In evaluations using 220000 strongly perturbed consultations, PCRAgent maintained high robustness, achieving a clinical information accuracy of 4.99 out of 5 and key element completeness of 5 out of 5, outperforming GPT4o. Expert review of Chinese and English dialogues confirmed high clinical accuracy of 4.85 out of 5 and high safety of 4.79 out of 5. Multicenter validation in real-world outpatient workflows further demonstrated practical utility. These findings indicate that PCRAgent can efficiently transform noisy and unstructured consultations into physician ready reports and AI ready structured data, improving outpatient efficiency, reducing cognitive burden, ensuring information completeness, supporting precise decision-making, and enabling high-quality reuse of clinical data.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

ReMoT: Reinforcement Learning with Motion Contrast Triplets

We present ReMoT, a unified training paradigm to systematically address the fundamental shortcomings of VLMs in spatio-temporal consistency – a critical failure point in navigation, robotics, and autonomous driving. ReMoT integrates two core components: (1) A rule-based automatic framework that generates ReMoT-16K, a large-scale (16.5K triplets) motion-contrast dataset derived from video meta-annotations, surpassing costly manual or model-based generation. (2) Group Relative Policy Optimization, which we empirically validate yields optimal performance and data efficiency for learning this contrastive reasoning, far exceeding standard Supervised Fine-Tuning. We also construct the first benchmark for fine-grained motion contrast triplets to measure a VLM's discrimination of subtle motion attributes (e.g., opposing directions). The resulting model achieves state-of-the-art performance on our new benchmark and multiple standard VLM benchmarks, culminating in a remarkable 25.1% performance leap on spatio-temporal reasoning tasks.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Cross-Dataset, Age, and Gender Generalization: A Comprehensive Analysis of Fine-Tuning Strategies for Low-Resource Children's ASR

arXiv:2606.19791v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The challenge associated with recognizing dysarthric speech primarily arises from pronounced acoustic variability attributed to impaired articulatory precision. Past research has demonstrated improved recognition through the use of hybrid DNN/HMM sequence discriminative training. This paper presents a comprehensive investigation of various combinations of acoustic features tailored to different Acoustic Models, offering suitable feature selections for each. The incorporation of Pitch features notably improved recognition performance, especially for sentence recognition tasks involving dysarthric speech. Through a systematic examination of the TORGO database, we have demonstrated the potential to enhance the performance of the state-of-the-art Factorized Time Delay Neural Network (F-TDNN) model for recognizing dysarthric speech. Our methods, implemented with the F-TDNN model, resulted in a 4.65\% relative improvement in isolated word recognition and a 4.63\% relative improvement in sentence recognition for dysarthric speech, compared to previous research. This improvement effectively compensates for speech variability, attributable to our deliberate selection of the number of overlapping frames between consecutive training example chunks.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Unraveling the Mechanism of Drug Binding to SARS-CoV-2 RNA Pseudoknot with Thermodynamics-Driven Machine Learning

arXiv:2604.14906v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The pseudoknot secondary structure in SARS-CoV-2 RNA is essential for regulating protein synthesis through $-$1 programmed ribosomal frameshifting ($-1$ PRF), a mechanism that allows the virus to generate both structural and non-structural proteins from overlapping reading frames. This pseudoknot exhibits both threaded and unthreaded long-lived topologies. The influence of ligand binding on its folding is a process critical for the development of $-$1 PRF small-molecule inhibitors. Understanding this process through unbiased molecular dynamics (MD) simulations can be facilitated by introducing collective variables (CVs) that capture the corresponding slowest dynamical modes. Here, we use spectral map (SM), a thermodynamics-driven machine learning technique, to learn such CVs directly from all-atom MD trajectories of the SARS-CoV-2 RNA pseudoknot in complex with the $-$1 PRF inhibitor merafloxacin and its two structural analogs in neutral and ionized forms. Free-energy landscapes (FELs) derived from the learned CVs indicate that ligand-induced destabilization is topology-selective. In the threaded pseudoknot, the inhibitors destabilize the S2 stem, while in the unthreaded pseudoknot, destabilization occurs in the S1 and S3 stems. Furthermore, the extent to which each ligand reshapes the FEL matches experimentally reported antiviral potency, whereas the protonation state qualitatively alters dynamics within the same RNA topology. Overall, our results show how pseudoknot topology, ligand type, and protonation state collectively influence the slow conformational dynamics of viral RNA and establish physiological protonation as a critical factor for modeling RNA-targeted drug action.

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

Visual Verification Enables Inference-time Steering and Autonomous Policy Improvement

arXiv:2606.18247v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robots deployed in the real world should learn from their experience and improve over time. This requires a mechanism of practicing and learning from feedback. In this paper, we propose VERITAS, a generator-verifier framework for generalist robot policies for inference-time policy steering and self-improvement. We use a pre-trained generalist robot policy as a ``generator'' and pair it with a gradient-free ``visual verifier'' that evaluates actions at inference time. This framework enables inference-time steering that improves policy performance without additional training. We demonstrate that inference-time verification consistently outperforms vanilla generalists without training on additional demonstration data. Additionally, we demonstrate that the verified rollouts provide effective supervision for offline policy improvement: policies fine-tuned on verified self-generated trajectories achieve consistent performance gains. Notably, we find that post-training with verified rollouts achieves comparable efficiency to expert demonstrations, while requiring no human interventions. Our results highlight inference-time verification as a practical and scalable mechanism for improving robotic policies during deployment.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Multi-objective design of photon blockade for bright single-photon sources

arXiv:2606.20160v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-quality single-photon sources, realized through saturable emitters, photon blockade, or heralded pair generation, are indispensable building blocks for photonic quantum platforms. Although these mechanisms suppress multiphoton emission through distinct principles typically captured by analytical models, their practical implementation is constrained by conflicting requirements for purity, brightness, and indistinguishability, which must be balanced within high-dimensional design landscapes. Here, we propose a computational framework for optimizing competing metrics of single-photon sources. Building on a Liouville-space adjoint formulation that efficiently evaluates multiple objectives in Markovian open quantum systems, we develop a Jacobian-based update, which ensures first-order monotonic reduction of multi-objective costs. By incorporating simulated annealing to escape gradient-vanishing plateaus, our framework achieves a design success rate of nearly 60 % for photon blockade with g2(0) smaller than 0.1 and theoretically bounded brightness across a broad parameter space, without any analytical guidance. This framework provides a general recipe for multi-objective design of open quantum systems.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Generative causal testing to bridge data-driven models and scientific theories in language neuroscience

Representations from large language models are highly effective at predicting BOLD fMRI responses to language stimuli. However, these representations are largely opaque: it is unclear what features of the language stimulus drive the response in each brain area. We present generative causal testing (GCT), a framework for generating concise explanations of language selectivity in the brain from predictive models and then testing those explanations in follow-up experiments using LLM-generated stimuli.This approach is successful at explaining selectivity both in individual voxels and cortical regions of interest (ROIs), including newly identified microROIs in prefrontal cortex. We show that explanatory accuracy is closely related to the predictive power and stability of the underlying predictive models. Finally, we show that GCT can dissect fine-grained differences between brain areas with similar functional selectivity. These results demonstrate that LLMs can be used to bridge the widening gap between data-driven models and formal scientific theories.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Reducing Learner Redundancy in Boosting via Residual Orthogonalization

arXiv:2606.17567v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While sequential residual fitting is the bedrock of standard boosting frameworks, it inherently breeds learner redundancy by repeatedly revisiting correlated error components. To address this bottleneck, we propose a shift from residual fitting to residual orthogonalization and introduce SCBoost. Our framework tackles redundancy through two complementary mechanisms: Spectral Residual Projection (SRP) and Covariance-Regularized Weighting (CRW). During training, SRP projects each residual target onto the orthogonal complement of the historical prediction subspace, forcing successive learners to capture only novel empirical innovations. During aggregation, CRW optimizes ensemble weights on a validation set with an explicit covariance penalty to mitigate remaining correlations. Theoretically, we provide a finite-sample geometric characterization proving that SRP yields an exact additive residual-energy decomposition. Furthermore, under an isotropic-noise assumption, we rigorously establish the conditions under which this projection improves the effective Signal-to-Noise Ratio. Extensive experiments across ten benchmark datasets demonstrate that SCBoost delivers strong out-of-the-box performance, particularly in accuracy and F1 score. This work reinterprets boosting through a geometric lens, suggesting that explicit redundancy control is a principled and necessary step toward more efficient ensemble architectures.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

IBAD: Interpretable Behavioral Anomaly Detection on Human Mobility Data

arXiv:2606.16023v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human mobility appears highly diverse, yet much of a person's daily mobility can be explained by a small set of recurring behavioral templates, such as commuting, school-centered activities, caregiving, nightlife, or errand patterns. We present \texttt{IBAD} (\underline{I}nterpretable \underline{B}ehavioral \underline{A}nomaly \underline{D}etection), a framework that learns interpretable daily mobility templates and represents each individual as a distribution over mixtures of these templates. Rather than focusing on specific locations, IBAD characterizes activities that individuals perform across locations. This approach first discovers global behavioral templates using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), then employs a hierarchical self-supervised model to learn normal behavior of individuals from their soft behavioral templates. We also introduce a splicing benchmark that creates controlled behavioral mismatches between an individual's historical profile and injected mobility patterns. Experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets show that daily behavior can be effectively decomposed into a small number of interpretable templates. Crucially, we show that the learned behavioral archetypes transfer across distinct geographic and demographic contexts. Furthermore, IBAD maintains a robust competitive performance across all settings. For reproducibility purposes, the code is accessible at ~\href{https://github.com/USC-InfoLab/IBAD}{https://github.com/USC-InfoLab/IBAD}.

11.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-16

<b>Engineered heart muscle passes early clinical milestone</b>

Engineered heart muscle allografts derived from induced pluripotent stem cells show promising early outcomes in patients with treatment-refractory advanced heart failure with reduced left ventricular ejection fraction, in support of further clinical investigation. Engineered heart muscle allografts derived from induced pluripotent stem cells show promising early outcomes in patients with treatment-refractory advanced heart failure with reduced left ventricular ejection fraction, in support of further clinical investigation.

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

Stubborn: A Streamlined and Unified Reinforcement Learning Framework for Robust Motion Tracking and Fall Recovery for Humanoids

arXiv:2606.12814v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent reinforcement learning approaches have shown great promise in improving humanoid motion tracking performance and achieving fall recovery under disturbances. However, most existing works treat motion tracking and fall recovery as different tasks and require multi-stage training with specialized recovery rewards and/or separate recovery policies. Moreover, existing reinforcement learning-based methods often terminate training episodes immediately after severe tracking failures, limiting recovery-oriented exploration in unstable or fallen states. To address the above issues, we propose Stubborn, a streamlined and unified reinforcement learning framework to achieve robust humanoid motion tracking and fall recovery. Specifically, Stubborn uses an asymmetric Actor-Critic architecture and consists of three major components. First, a yaw-aligned tracking representation is adopted to reduce sensitivity to global drift and heading disturbances while preserving gravity-related balance information. Second, we introduce a Bernoulli-based probabilistic termination mechanism that enables the policy to encourage exploration of fall-recovery behaviors under varying failure modes. Third, we propose a probabilistic termination and tracking-error-driven strategy that dynamically reshapes the sampling distribution based on tracking performance, increasing the training efficiency for difficult motion segments and unstable states. Extensive comparisons with SOTA methods and ablation studies show that Stubborn achieved competitive performance, and the proposed probabilistic termination mechanism and adaptive sampling strategy contributed to the performance and robustness gains. For real-world demonstrations, please refer to https://aislab-sustech.github.io/Stubborn/.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Minimal surfaces, Knots, and Neural Networks

arXiv:2605.26234v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A recent conjecture by Joel Fine posits a relationship between the coefficients of the HOMFLY polynomial of a knot $K$ in the 3-sphere $S^3$, and the signed count of minimal surfaces in hyperbolic 4-space $\mathrm{H}^4$ meeting the sphere at infinity at $K$, with prescribed genus and self-intersection number. In this paper, we develop a novel machine learning framework based on Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) to solve the minimal surface equation in hyperbolic space. We utilise this framework to test Fine's Conjecture by constructing near-minimal surfaces bounding various families of knots in $S^3$. Furthermore, we develop an algorithmic method to find self-intersections and compute their sign. For every knot analysed, the computationally discovered minimal surfaces and their self-intersection numbers perfectly align with the predictions of Fine's Conjecture, providing empirical evidence for it.

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

LLM-Based Visual Explanation Evaluation Framework for Assessing the Explainability of Facial Skin Disease Classification Models

Authors:

This study proposes a domain-specific LLM-based Visual Explanation Evaluation Framework for assessing Grad-CAM explanations in facial skin disease diagnosis models. While previous studies have primarily focused on improving classification performance through data augmentation techniques, relatively few studies have systematically examined whether model explanations are grounded in clinically relevant lesion regions. In this study, geometric augmentation, color-based augmentation, and mixed augmentation strategies were applied to facial skin disease classification models based on EfficientNet-B0, MobileNetV3, and ResNet18. Grad-CAM was employed to generate visual explanations representing the models' decision-making processes. Furthermore, an LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation framework was designed using GPT-5.5, Gemini 3.5 Flash, and Claude Sonnet 4.6 to assess Grad-CAM explanations from the perspectives of lesion localization and explanation trustworthiness. To improve evaluation consistency and clinical grounding, a progressive prompt engineering strategy was introduced, incorporating evaluation rubrics, clinical knowledge, penalty rules, and structured output formats.

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

Dual-Network PINNs for Optimal Control: A Reproducible Benchmark on the Mass-Spring-Damper System

arXiv:2606.15271v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work presents a transparent and reproducible benchmark study of a direct dual-network Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) formulation for the optimal control of a mass-spring-damper system. The classical linear-quadratic optimal control problem is solved by two independent classical methods – Pontryagin's Minimum Principle with single shooting, and direct transcription through trapezoidal collocation – and recast as a constrained optimization problem solved by two feedforward neural networks: a state network whose boundary conditions are enforced exactly through a composite cubic-and-mask ansatz, and an unconstrained control network. The composite loss combines the physics residual at the collocation points with a trapezoidal approximation of the cost functional, weighted by a single scalar hyperparameter. On the benchmark considered, the PINN reproduces the classical optimal cost to four significant digits, satisfies the terminal state constraints exactly by construction, and produces pointwise state and control errors that fall within the spread of the two classical references. Training is approximately two orders of magnitude slower than classical shooting on this benchmark, which is honestly reported. The contribution is methodological clarity rather than methodological novelty: the formulation and the accompanying Google Colab implementation are intended to lower the barrier to entry for practitioners exploring PINN-based optimal control without prior exposure to adjoint methods or two-point boundary value problems.

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

MASCOT-Android: A Curated Dataset and Automated Collection Pipeline for Android Malware Source Code Specimens

arXiv:2606.16072v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Compared with binaries and decompiled code, malware source code more directly reflects the attackers' original intent. However, the scarcity of source code and the high cost of manual review make such datasets difficult to build and maintain. We propose MASCOT-Android, a curated dataset of Android malware source code and an automated collection framework for scalable malware source code discovery on GitHub. A key finding of our work is that repository-level documentation alone provides a strong signal for malware source code collection. Our model extracts character-level TF-IDF features from 8,772 malware and 25,747 benign README documents and trains a LinearSVC classifier to distinguish malware repositories. This README-only model achieves an accuracy of 96.28\% and an FPR of 1.06\% in local evaluation. In addition, the model outputs confidence scores, allowing users to adjust the decision threshold to balance FPR and coverage, which is practical in real-world malware source code collection.

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

S-SPPO: Semantic-Calibrated Self-Play Preference Optimization

arXiv:2606.01561v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences is often formulated via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). However, the standard Bradley-Terry instantiation of DPO is limited in modeling common departures from transitivity in human preferences. To address this, recent work has introduced Self-Play Preference Optimization (SPPO), which iteratively refines the policy by training on self-generated win-lose pairs. Our investigation, however, reveals a critical instability in SPPO: the optimization is prone to policy degeneration when the preference oracle assigns overly confident wins to semantically indistinguishable responses. To mitigate this, we propose S-SPPO, a dual-space semantic calibration framework comprising: i) Supervision Calibration via semantic gating, which anneals win rate targets toward the maximum-entropy baseline as semantic overlap increases; and ii) Representation Calibration via latent repulsion to enforce geometric diversity to prevent manifold collapse and maintain latent diversity between chosen and rejected samples. Theoretically, we show that the calibration preserves the constant-sum game structure, facilitating convergence to a Nash Equilibrium. Empirically, S-SPPO avoids the performance degradation seen in prior methods, achieving 52.19% win rate and 47.46% length-controlled win rate on AlpacaEval 2.0 with Llama-3-8B, without using additional human-annotated preferences during training. The code will be available at https://github.com/xiwenc1/s-sppo.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Code-Augur: Agentic Vulnerability Detection via Specification Inference

arXiv:2606.18619v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The advent of agentic vulnerability detection is already becoming a watershed moment for software security. Audits conducted entirely by autonomous LLM agents are uncovering critical vulnerabilities in fundamental software underpinning digital society. Many of these vulnerabilities remained masked for years, surfacing only now with AI agents. Yet the reasoning behind these discoveries remains alarmingly opaque and unvalidated. What assumptions did the agent make about a function's inputs when it deemed that function to be secure? Failures in reasoning and incorrect assumptions can lead to missed vulnerabilities and reduce trust in agentic analysis. We propose a security-specification-first paradigm that (1) exposes the agent's tacit assumptions explicitly as security specifications and (2) continuously refines those specifications via runtime falsification. We realize our approach in Code-Augur, a novel harness for agentic vulnerability detection. Given a codebase, Code-Augur analyzes each component of the system for vulnerable code. When it deems a component to be secure, it commits the local invariants behind that judgment as in-source assertions. In parallel, Code-Augur leverages a guided fuzzer to attempt to falsify those assumptions. When the fuzzer triggers an assertion, this either reveals a genuine vulnerability or a flawed specification to refine. In both cases, this process grounds the agent's understanding, aligning its view of code intent with how the code actually behaves. On real-world subjects, Code-Augur effectively leverages security specifications to detect more vulnerabilities than other state-of-the-art agents. Additionally, Code-Augur found 22 new vulnerabilities in key open-source projects. Compared to curated specialized models like Claude Mythos, Code-Augur offers effective agentic vulnerability detection built on widely available LLMs like Sonnet and DeepSeek.

19.
Science (Express) 2026-05-06

A 481-meter-high landslide-tsunami in a cruise ship–frequented Alaska fjord | Science

Authors: Unknown Author

Early in the morning of 10 August 2025, a >64 × 10 6 m 3 landslide struck Tracy Arm fjord in Alaska. The landslide was preconditioned by glacial retreat caused by climate change. The resulting 481 m runup megatsunami followed an initial 100-m-high breaking wave traveling >70 m s −1 . The landslide was preceded by several days of microseismicity, which increased in rate and magnitude until ~1 hour before failure. The landslide produced globally observed long-period seismic waves equivalent in size to a M5.4 earthquake. A long-period (~66 s) global seismic signal, produced by a landslide-induced seiche trapped within the fjord, persisted for up to 36 hours, the second time a days-long seiche has been thus observed. With fjord regions increasingly visited by cruise ships, and climate change making similar events more likely, this unanticipated, near-miss event highlights the growing risk from landslides and tsunamis in coastal environments.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Fast Adiabatic Quantum Gates via Hyperfine Intermediate States

arXiv:2606.11655v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The appeal of adiabatic quantum computing lies in its intrinsic robustness against various technical imperfections, making it attractive for many quantum information applications. However, it faces a fundamental challenge: accelerating the adiabatic operations while preserving adiabaticity within the qubit coherence time. In this article, we propose an electromagnetically induced transparency-based adiabatic CNOT gate protocol which harnesses atomic hyperfine intermediate states (HISs) to speed up the adiabatic evolution. The HISs, naturally-existed in two-photon transitions, often need to be suppressed due to their significant decay errors. In contrast, this paper introduces a novel method that utilizes appropriately chosen HISs not only to enhance the adiabaticity in STAY pathway but also to accelerate the population transfer in TRANSFER pathway. Through pulse optimization, we achieve adiabatic gate fidelities exceeding 0.9991 within 0.3903 {\mu}s in realistic Cs atomic setups. To demonstrate the generality of protocol we further assess the impact of decays from multiple HIS and extend our model to arbitrary number of states, providing a practical route toward fast and robust adiabatic quantum gates in Rydberg-atom platforms.

21.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Killed resolvents and measure-valued stopping gains for reflected optimal stopping with max-type rewards

arXiv:2606.17517v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study an infinite-horizon optimal stopping problem for a normally reflected two-dimensional diffusion in the positive quadrant with nonsmooth max-type reward \(G(x_1,x_2)=x_1\vee \alpha x_2\). The paper develops a conditional measure-theoretic framework for the associated reflected obstacle problem. The main innovation is to show that the stopping gain \(\Gamma=c+rG-\mathcal LG\) is a signed measure, not a function: the kink of \(G\) generates an explicit negative surface measure on \(\Delta=\{x_1=\alpha x_2\}\). We then prove that the correct potential representation uses the resolvent of the reflected diffusion killed on first entry into the stopping set, rather than the unrestricted reflected resolvent. Under explicit monotonicity, regularity, and measure-superharmonicity assumptions, we derive an epigraph representation, a continuation-side boundary-trace condition, and a candidate verification theorem. The framework clarifies hidden regularity and uniqueness assumptions in multidimensional nonsmooth optimal stopping.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

The Target48 Neurodegeneration Panel: A Novel Tool for Profiling Protein Signatures in Neurodegenerative Disorders

Introduction: Novel tools for absolute quantification of established and emerging fluid neuro-biomarkers are required to advance diagnostic studies and improve biological insights. Methods: We conducted an extensive analytical and clinical validation of the Olink Target 48 Neurodegeneration panel (T48 Neuropanel) in 352 paired CSF and plasma samples from cognitively unimpaired controls (CU), Alzheimer dementia (AD), frontotemporal dementia (FTD), and dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), n=44 per group. Comparisons with benchmark assays were performed. Results: Good detectability (CSF: 31 out of 42 assays; plasma: 38 out of 42 assays) and technical performance was observed. Benchmark assays showed good correlations, supporting method transformation formulas. Next to emerging biomarkers (MMP10, ITGB2), discriminative performance was excellent in AD: CSF pTau217: AUC=1; FTD: plasma NfL: AUC=0.952; and DLB: CSF DDC: AUC=0.901. Discussion: This analytical and clinical validation of the T48 Neuropanel highlights initial cut-offs and emerging biomarkers to aid clinical studies for the diagnosis, prognosis, and monitoring of neurodegenerative diseases. Highlights: The T48 Neuropanel shows robust analytical performance, with high detectability across both plasma and CSF matrices. The T48 Neuropanel validates established (i.e., pTau217, Abeta42, NfL, and GFAP) and emerging biomarkers (i.e., DDC, MMP10, ITGB2, ITGAM, NPTX2, NPTXR, SMOC1, sTREM1, and sTREM2) in CSF and plasma. CSF NfL, GFAP, ITGB2, and ITGAM and plasma GFAP were dysregulated across AD, FTD, and DLB dementias. -The multiplex design of the T48 Neuropanel enables rich biological interpretation by simultaneously quantifying established and emerging neurodegeneration biomarkers. Importantly, the inclusion of absolute quantification facilitates the establishment of cut-offs, supporting its potential for clinical translation.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

When to Trust, How to Distill: Multi-Foundation Model Guidance for Lightweight, Robust Scientific Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.19363v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The deployment of Time-Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) in physical sciences is hindered by a critical trade-off: while these models encode rich, universal temporal dynamics, they suffer from severe distributional misalignment when applied zero-shot to specific scientific domains, and their computational cost prohibits deployment in edge-computing sensor networks. We address a fundamental challenge: How can we extract latent structural knowledge from misaligned foundation models (FM) to train lightweight, specialized forecasters? We propose Gated Uncertainty-Aware Routing for Distillation (Guard), a novel framework that reframes multiteacher distillation as an instance-wise decision process with two adaptive mechanisms: (1) a Contextual Router that dynamically selects the most relevant teacher based on local input statistics, exploiting complementarity across diverse foundation models; and (2) an Uncertainty-Gated Temperature mechanism that acts as a "circuit-breaker," automatically attenuating distillation strength when teacher confidence diverges from domain reality. We evaluate our proposed lightweight framework on four climate-critical domains: meteorology, ecosystem carbon flux, soil moisture, and energy grids. Our method significantly reduces RMSE relative to a fixed-weight multi-teacher distillation baseline, successfully distilling knowledge from pretrained FMs (teachers) even when they exhibit suboptimal zero-shot accuracy due to distribution shift between the original and target data domains. We demonstrate that these domain-misaligned teachers can still serve as critical correctives, outperforming the globally superior FMs on 28.5% of the hardest instances. Ultimately, this enables high-precision scientific forecasting suitable for resource-constrained edge deployment. Code is available at https://github.com/RupasreeDey/GUARD-KDD2026.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Pseudo-Feature Padding: A Lightweight Defense Against False Data Injection in Power Grids

arXiv:2606.20415v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep Neural Networks DNNs have achieved remarkable accuracy in various tasks including their application in CyberPhysical Systems CPS for detecting False Data Injection Attacks FDIA during critical operations However the unique infrastructure of CPS makes DNNs vulnerable to exploitation by attackers aiming to evade detection Additionally the distinct nature of CPS presents challenges for conventional defense mechanisms against FDIA This paper proposes an innovative defense framework that strengthens DNNs against such attacks by introducing an additional input layer that performs padding in the input samples using pseudofeature values derived from the inputs statistical distribution This padding increases the input dimensionality in a randomized and dataaware manner making adversarial attacks computationally infeasible due to the nontransferable nature of crafted perturbations and the unpredictability of the padded structure Our method is lightweight modelagnostic and requires no modifications to the core architecture making it highly deployable in realworld CPS settings We evaluated our framework on critical power grid applications such as state estimation using the IEEE 14bus 30bus 118bus and 300bus systems Experiments under adversarial settings demonstrate that our padding strategy significantly improves model robustness with negligible impact on performance and effectively mitigates attacks that would otherwise bypass conventional defenses

25.
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.