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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

On two overlooked stick-breaking constructions of the normalized inverse Gaussian process

arXiv:2606.19306v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We shed light on two alternative stick-breaking constructions of the normalized inverse Gaussian (NIG) random discrete distribution which appear to have been overlooked so far in the Bayesian nonparametric setting. The first is derived from a result in Aldous and Pitman (1998) for the conditional Brownian excursion partition, mixing over the local time at zero up to time one. The second arises as a particular case of a result in James (2013) for priors obtained by a random spatial and temporal change of the normalized generalized Gamma subordinator. Both constructions are in terms of straightforward transformations of standard random variables and can be easily generalized to provide the stick-breaking construction of any element, respectively, in a) the family of mixed Poisson-Kingman models driven by the $1/2$ stable Lévy measure and b) the family of Poisson-Gamma processes driven by the Inverse Gaussian subordinator.

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

Allure of Craquelure: A Variational-Generative Approach to Crack Detection in Paintings

Recent advances in imaging technologies, deep learning and numerical performance have enabled non-invasive detailed analysis of artworks, supporting their documentation and conservation. In particular, automated detection of craquelure in digitized paintings is crucial for assessing degradation and guiding restoration, yet remains challenging due to the possibly complex scenery and the visual similarity between cracks and crack-like artistic features such as brush strokes or hair. We propose a hybrid approach that models crack detection as an inverse problem, decomposing an observed image into a crack-free painting and a crack component. A deep generative model is employed as powerful prior for the underlying artwork, while crack structures are captured using a Mumford–Shah-type variational functional together with a crack prior. Joint optimization yields a pixel-level map of crack localizations in the painting.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Stochastic control with dividend payments and capital injections for Markov additive processes

作者:

arXiv:2604.00190v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Motivated by de Finetti's optimal dividend problem with capital injections, we study a stochastic control problem for the additive component of a Markov additive process (MAP). In contrast to previous studies, the modulating component is allowed to be a general right process on a Radon space, so the model is not restricted to finite-state regime switching and cannot in general be reduced to a finite collection of Lévy process control problems. Capital injections are allowed at arbitrary times. We first consider the case in which dividend payments are allowed only at prescribed discrete times and establish necessary and sufficient conditions for the optimality of a strategy. These conditions then yield the optimality of a class of Markov-modulated periodic–classical barrier strategies. Combining this optimality result with an approximation argument, we obtain insight into the possible form of optimal strategies in the case where dividend payments, like capital injections, may be made at arbitrary times. Because of the generality of the MAPs considered here, the proof techniques used in previous studies of similar problems are not directly applicable. We therefore develop an alternative argument based on the additive structure of MAPs and dynamic programming between dividend opportunities. The argument also suggests a possible approach to other stochastic control problems involving general MAPs.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Integral Formulation of QENDy for Robust Nonlinear System Identification

arXiv:2606.11629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This manuscript proposes an integral formulation of the newly defined quadratic embedding method for identifying nonlinear systems (QENDy). In the original algorithm, trajectory data points along with their time derivatives are used. Methods for calculating time derivatives make the algorithm sensitive to noise. Our integral formulation does not use the time derivatives. This results in a more robust method to learn the dynamics.

05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Pricing Excess-of-Loss Reinsurance and CAT Bonds under Climate Uncertainty: A Cox Process Framework with Temperature-Dependent Stochastic Intensity

arXiv:2606.14830v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper develops a climate-aware pricing framework for excess-of-loss (XL) reinsurance contracts and catastrophe (CAT) bonds under non-stationary catastrophe risk. Catastrophe arrivals are modeled as a Cox process whose stochastic intensity depends exponentially on a temperature-related climate index. To represent climate dynamics, the index is modeled as a mean-reverting Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process around a time-dependent warming trend. Within this setting, aggregate losses follow a compound Cox structure with lognormal severities. Pricing is performed under a reduced-form risk-adjusted measure, which provides a tractable valuation approach for XL reinsurance layers and binary zero-coupon CAT bond payoffs in an incomplete market setting. Because catastrophe losses are not dynamically replicable, the framework emphasizes scenario-based valuation rather than model-independent no-arbitrage bounds. A Monte Carlo valuation scheme is implemented to quantify the economic implications of climate-dependent catastrophe intensity. The numerical results show that climate dependence materially changes the loss-generation mechanism and affects the valuation of catastrophe-linked contracts. In the baseline calibration, the climate-aware model increases the excess-of-loss reinsurance premium and lowers the CAT bond price relative to the stationary benchmark. Furthermore, our analysis of the 99.5\% Tail Value-at-Risk (TVaR) indicates that stationary benchmarks may underestimate economic capital requirements by approximately 13.7\% compared to the climate-aware framework, highlighting the potential regulatory relevance of the proposed model. This finding highlights that benchmark design is critical for interpreting climate-pricing effects.

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

Selective Synergistic Learning for Video Object-Centric Learning

Typical video object-centric learning (VOCL) approaches employ slot-based frameworks that rely on reconstruction-driven encoder-decoder architectures, where learning is mediated by two spatial maps: attention maps from the encoder and object maps from the decoder. As these two distinct maps exhibit different properties, a recent dense alignment strategy attempted to reconcile this discrepancy by enforcing agreement across all spatio-temporal patches via contrastive learning. However, this indiscriminate alignment inadvertently propagates the inherent weaknesses of each module, such as noisy encoder predictions and blurred decoder boundaries. Moreover, computing dense similarities across all pairs incurs a computational cost quadratic in the total number of spatio-temporal patches, severely limiting scalability. Motivated by this, we propose Selective Synergistic Learning (SSync). Instead of exhaustive patch-to-patch alignment, SSync prevents error propagation by selectively distilling only the most reliable cues: leveraging the encoder strictly for boundary refinement and the decoder for interior denoising. This is realized via a pseudo-labeling with linear complexity, eliminating the need for quadratic spatial comparisons. Also, to prevent the reinforcement of architectural biases like slot redundancy, we introduce a transitive pseudo-label merging that consolidates overlapping slots based on spatio-temporal activation consistency. Extensive studies demonstrate that SSync improves decomposition quality and serves as a versatile, plug-and-play module while also exhibiting exceptional robustness to slot configurations. Code is available at github.com/wjun0830/SSync.

07.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

Multivariate Random Forests for Cross-Modal Multi-Omics Integration

Multi-omics studies are widely used across many areas of biomedical research. In many diseases, some signals are shared across data types, while others are strongest in a single omics layer. Current multi-omics clustering methods often either merge all data types into a single representation, which can blur biology that is strong in one layer, or rely on linear structure that may miss more complex relationships across data types. We introduce multiRF, a random-forest-based method that handles complex data types and separates shared and modality-specific structure for multi-omics data. multiRF learns sample similarities across omics layers from multivariate random forests, combines them across data types, and uses the resulting weights to estimate the part of each omics layer that is predictable from the others. The remaining residual is treated as modality-specific signal, allowing shared and modality-specific similarities to be clustered separately. In simulations, multiRF recovered shared clusters as well as or better than established integrative methods while more reliably separating modality-specific signal under nonlinear data structures. In TCGA head and neck squamous cell carcinoma, the shared component aligned with the main subtype structure across established reference classifications, while gene- and miRNA-specific components revealed additional immune and developmental biology. In the ADNI cohort with matched blood DNA methylation and structural MRI, the shared cross-modal aging signal was associated with future conversion to mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer's disease, and a DNAm-specific residual signal showed exploratory additional information. These results show that multiRF can recover a common disease axis while retaining biologically meaningful signals specific to one data type. multiRF is available as an open-source R package at https://github.com/novawz/multiRF.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Learning Developmental Scaffoldings to Guide Self-Organisation

arXiv:2605.14998v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: From subcellular structures to entire organisms, many natural systems generate complex organisation through self-organisation: local interactions that collectively give rise to global structure without any blueprint of the outcome. Yet a significant portion of the information driving such processes is not produced by self-organisation itself, instead, it is often offloaded to initial conditions of the system. Biological development is a prime example, where maternal pre-patterns encode positional and symmetry-breaking information that scaffolds the self-organising process. From maternal morphogen gradients in early embryogenesis to tissue-level morphogenetic pre-patterns guiding organ formation, this transfer of information to initial conditions, analogous to a memory-compute trade-off in computational systems, is a fundamental part of developmental processes. In this work, we study this offloading phenomenon by introducing a model that jointly learns both the self-organisation rules and the pre-patterns, allowing their interplay to be varied and measured under controlled conditions: a Neural Cellular Automaton (NCA) paired with a learned coordinate-based pattern generator (SIREN), both trained simultaneously to generate a set of patterns. We provide information-theoretic analyses of how information is distributed between pre-patterns and the self-organising process, and show that jointly learning both components yields improvements in robustness, encoding capacity, and symmetry breaking over purely self-organising alternatives. Our analysis further suggests that effective pre-patterns do not simply approximate their targets; rather, they bias the developmental dynamics in ways that facilitate convergence, pointing to a non-trivial relationship between the structure of initial conditions and the dynamics of self-organisation.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Cloze: An Open Research Platform for Studying Human-AI Conversations in Mental Health Contexts

Cloze is an open-source web platform for conducting controlled, monitored studies of human-AI conversation in mental health research contexts. Consumer large language model (LLM) products such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are built for individual productivity, and offer researchers little experimental control, inconsistent data export, and no shared safety scaffolding that holds across providers. Cloze gives research teams a single environment in which they configure which models participants converse with, how the AI is instructed, how conversations are scheduled over time, and which safety constraints apply unconditionally, while every message is captured with full provenance (model version, prompt configuration, timing). The platform currently supports OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and locally hosted open-weight models served through Ollama behind a unified interface, and runs in the cloud or fully on premises so that participant data need never leave an institution. Cloze is research infrastructure for building an evidence base on human-AI interaction in mental health contexts. It is not a therapeutic product.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Residual Context Diffusion Language Models

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to purely autoregressive language models because they can decode multiple tokens in parallel. However, state-of-the-art block-wise dLLMs rely on a "remasking" mechanism that decodes only the most confident tokens and discards the rest, effectively wasting computation. We demonstrate that recycling computation from the discarded tokens is beneficial, as these tokens retain contextual information useful for subsequent decoding iterations. In light of this, we propose Residual Context Diffusion (RCD), a module that converts these discarded token representations into contextual residuals and injects them back for the next denoising step. RCD uses a decoupled two-stage training pipeline to bypass the memory bottlenecks associated with backpropagation. We validate our method on both long CoT reasoning (SDAR) and short CoT instruction following (LLaDA) models. We demonstrate that a standard dLLM can be efficiently converted to the RCD paradigm with merely ~300 million tokens. RCD consistently improves frontier dLLMs by 4-11 percentage points in accuracy with minimal extra computation overhead across a wide range of benchmarks. Notably, on the most challenging AIME tasks, RCD nearly doubles baseline accuracy and attains up to 4-5x fewer denoising steps at baseline's peak accuracy.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Certification of the genuine resolution of photon number resolving detectors

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

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Q-Fold: Query-Aware Focus-Context Spatio-Temporal Folding for Long Video Understanding

Long-video understanding remains challenging for multimodal large language models, because temporally extended videos often contain thousands of frames and are therefore expensive to process exhaustively. Existing methods usually construct compact visual inputs from long videos under a limited visual budget. However, most of them still follow a frame-centric paradigm and apply similar representations to retained content regardless of its importance. This makes it difficult to preserve both high-fidelity visual evidence and broad temporal coverage. To address this issue, we propose Q-Fold, a training-free input construction framework for long-video understanding. Instead of treating isolated frames as the basic modeling unit, Q-Fold operates on contiguous temporal segments and constructs a heterogeneous Focus–Context representation under query guidance. Query-relevant segments are preserved as high-fidelity Focus Frames, while less relevant segments are folded into chronology-preserving contextual layouts. In this way, Q-Fold preserves critical visual evidence and broad temporal coverage, while better maintaining local temporal continuity within short segments. Experiments on four long-video benchmarks with multiple Video-MLLMs show that Q-Fold consistently improves performance without increasing the input budget. Notably, it achieves gains of up to 9.1 percentage points on an ultra-long video benchmark. Code will be made publicly available.

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

CADO: From Imitation to Cost Minimization for Heatmap-based Solvers in Combinatorial Optimization

arXiv:2602.08210v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Heatmap-based solvers have emerged as a promising paradigm for Combinatorial Optimization (CO). However, we argue that the dominant Supervised Learning (SL) training paradigm suffers from a fundamental objective mismatch: minimizing imitation loss (e.g., cross-entropy) does not guarantee solution cost minimization. We dissect this mismatch into two deficiencies: Decoder-Blindness (being oblivious to the non-differentiable decoding process) and Cost-Blindness (prioritizing structural imitation over solution quality). We empirically demonstrate that these intrinsic flaws impose a hard performance ceiling. To overcome this limitation, we propose CADO (Cost-Aware Diffusion models for Optimization), a streamlined Reinforcement Learning fine-tuning framework that formulates the diffusion denoising process as an MDP to directly optimize the post-decoded solution cost. We introduce Label-Centered Reward, which repurposes ground-truth labels as unbiased baselines rather than imitation targets, and Hybrid Fine-Tuning for parameter-efficient adaptation. CADO achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse benchmarks, validating that objective alignment is essential for unlocking the full potential of heatmap-based solvers.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Towards Personalized Federated Learning for Dysarthric Speech Recognition

arXiv:2606.13253v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speech recognition is challenging for dysarthric speakers. While federated learning (FL)-based ASR can be an effective tool for protecting privacy, it suffers from heterogeneity issues caused by speaker variability. Forcing all speakers to share the same model components can be suboptimal under such heterogeneity, making personalization a promising direction; however, related research on dysarthric speech remains limited. To this end, this paper explores two aggregation strategies to achieve personalization, including the parameter-based averaging strategy and the embedding-based averaging strategy. Experiments on UASpeech and TORGO show that the proposed methods outperform the baseline regularized FedAvg by statistically significant WER reductions of up to 0.99% absolute (3.15% relative) on UASpeech and 0.56% absolute (4.73% relative) on TORGO, respectively.

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

When RAG Hurts: Diagnosing and Mitigating Attention Distraction in Retrieval-Augmented LVLMs

While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is one of the dominant paradigms for enhancing Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) on knowledge-based VQA tasks, recent work attributes RAG failures to insufficient attention towards the retrieved context, proposing to reduce the attention allocated to image tokens. In this work, we identify a distinct failure mode that previous study overlooked: Attention Distraction (AD). When the retrieved context is sufficient (highly relevant or including the correct answer), the retrieved text suppresses the visual attention globally, and the attention on image tokens shifts away from question-relevant regions. This leads to failures on questions the model could originally answer correctly without the retrieved text. To mitigate this issue, we propose MAD-RAG, a training-free intervention that decouples visual grounding from context integration through a dual-question formulation, combined with attention mixing to preserve image-conditioned evidence. Extensive experiments on OK-VQA, E-VQA, and InfoSeek demonstrate that MAD-RAG consistently outperforms existing baselines across different model families, yielding absolute gains of up to 4.76%, 9.20%, and 6.18% over the vanilla RAG baseline. Notably, MAD-RAG rectifies up to 74.68% of failure cases with negligible computational overhead.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Advancing Clinical Implementation of Cardiovascular Polygenic Risk Scores Through Patient-Level Robustness Assessment

Background and Aims: Polygenic risk scores (PRSs) for atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) can perform equivalently at the population level yet disagree for individual patients. We examined whether such intra-individual variability reflects genuinely complementary risk information or mainly statistical and methodological uncertainty, and whether it affects clinical classification once PRSs are integrated into SCORE2-OP. Methods: In 4,137 ASCVD-free participants of the CoLaus|PsyCoLaus cohort (478 incident events over a median 14.4 years), we identified 16 ASCVD-PRSs with practically equivalent population-level performance using Bayesian equivalence testing. We quantified intra-individual variability (standard deviation, coefficient of variation, intraclass correlation, Cohen's kappa, extreme discordance), tested whether discordance exceeded chance, decomposed scores into shared and unique genetic components, and assessed variability after integration into SCORE2-OP, benchmarked against perturbation of systolic blood pressure. Results: For a typical individual, risk estimates varied by 18 percentile points across PRSs. Discordance matched chance expectations under a shared-signal model, with no distinct phenotypic profile among discordant individuals, and predictive power resided overwhelmingly in the shared genetic component. Variability tracked PRS size and weighting rather than distinct variants. After integration into SCORE2-OP, 75.6% of participants were placed in different categories by at least one model and 54.6% as both low and high risk; instability was concentrated near guideline thresholds and far exceeded that from blood-pressure measurement error. Conclusions: Equivalent population-level performance is not sufficient to treat PRSs as interchangeable at the individual level, and methodological standardisation and pragmatic clinical trials remain necessary to determine whether PRS integration improves long-term cardiovascular outcomes.

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

Power Battery Detection

Power batteries are essential components in electric vehicles, where internal structural defects can pose serious safety risks. We conduct a comprehensive study on a new task, power battery detection (PBD), which aims to localize the dense endpoints of cathode and anode plates from industrial X-ray images for quality inspection. Manual inspection is inefficient and error-prone, while traditional vision algorithms struggle with densely packed plates, low contrast, scale variation, and imaging artifacts. To address this issue and drive more attention into this meaningful task, we present PBD5K, the first large-scale benchmark for this task, consisting of 5,000 X-ray images from nine battery types with fine-grained annotations and eight types of real-world visual interference. To support scalable and consistent labeling, we develop an intelligent annotation pipeline that combines image filtering, model-assisted pre-labeling, cross-verification, and layered quality evaluation. We formulate PBD as a point-level segmentation problem and propose MDCNeXt, a model designed to extract and integrate multi-dimensional structure clues including point, line, and count information from the plate itself. To improve discrimination between plates and suppress visual interference, MDCNeXt incorporates two state space modules. The first is a prompt-filtered module that learns contrastive relationships guided by task-specific prompts. The second is a density-aware reordering module that refines segmentation in regions with high plate density. In addition, we propose a distance-adaptive mask generation strategy to provide robust supervision under varying spatial distributions of anode and cathode positions. The source code and datasets will be publicly available at \href{https://github.com/Xiaoqi-Zhao-DLUT/X-ray-PBD}{PBD5K}.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Doctors, Wellness Influencers, and Probiotic Gummies: A Cross-Sectional Analysis of Gut Health Claims and Financial Conflicts on TikTok

TikTok has emerged as a major source of health information, yet concerns persist regarding the accuracy of content and influence of financial conflicts. Gut health content is particularly vulnerable to misinformation. This study examined the relationship between creator profession ("medical" versus "non-medical") and the quality of gut health claims and the presence of financial conflicts on TikTok. We conducted a cross-sectional study of 412 TikTok creator accounts identified using the search terms "guthealth," "gutcleansing," and "digestion." One video per creator was analyzed. Creator profession was categorized as medical or non-medical. Health claim quality was coded as high, moderate, or poor. Financial conflicts (Showcase, Subscription, external links) were assessed. Modified Poisson regression was used to estimate prevalence ratios (PRs) of health claim quality (high versus poor- or moderate-quality) and financial conflicts between medical and non-medical creators, and negative binomial regression was used to evaluate associations between claim quality and number of video likes. Non-medical creators were more likely than medical creators to present poor- or moderate-quality health claims (adjusted PR: 2.33; 95% CI: 1.50-3.62). Most creators (92%) exhibited at least one financial conflict, and Showcase use was greater among non-medical creators (adjusted PR: 1.57; 95% CI: 1.02-2.42). Videos containing moderate- and poor-quality health claims received three times as many likes as videos containing high-quality claims. Non-medical creators disproportionately produced lower-quality gut health content on TikTok, and misleading claims received greater engagement. These findings highlight a misalignment between information quality and visibility, emphasizing the need for interventions promoting evidence-based health communication.

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

AI-enhanced tuning of quantum dot Hamiltonians toward Majorana modes

arXiv:2601.02149v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a neural network-based model capable of learning the broad landscape of working regimes in quantum dot simulators, and using this knowledge to autotune these devices - based on transport measurements - toward obtaining Majorana modes in the structure. The model is trained in an unsupervised manner on synthetic data in the form of conductance maps, using a physics-informed loss that incorporates key properties of Majorana zero modes. We show that, with appropriate training, a deep vision-transformer network can efficiently memorize relation between Hamiltonian parameters and structures on conductance maps and use it to propose parameters update for a quantum dot chain that drive the system toward topological phase. Starting from a broad range of initial detunings in parameter space, a single update step is sufficient to generate nontrivial zero modes. Moreover, by enabling an iterative tuning procedure - where the system acquires updated conductance maps at each step - we demonstrate that the method can address a much larger region of the parameter space.

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

GLACIER: A Multimodal Student-Teacher Foundation Model for Molecular Property Prediction

arXiv:2606.11382v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep learning models facilitate the discovery of molecules with tailored properties among billions of candidate compounds. However, the computational burden to develop and deploy state-of-the-art models continuously increases, limiting their scalability. Most large-scale models are unimodal in nature and overlook the potential to leverage complementary molecular data modalities. To address these shortcomings, this paper introduces the Graph-Language Alignment for Chemical Inference and Exploration using Representations (GLACIER) model, a student-teacher framework that integrates molecular graphs, SMILES strings, and physicochemical descriptors to learn rich molecular embeddings. Our framework consists of three stages: (1) we pretrain three student encoders on 100,000 drug-like molecules: a message-passing neural network for molecular graphs, a transformer-based encoder for SMILES strings, and a multilayer perceptron for physicochemical descriptors, (2) we fuse these student modalities using a novel Finsler geometry-aware module, and (3) distill complementary knowledge from large teacher models, including MiniMol and MolFormer, into a single lightweight model via contrastive learning. We demonstrate that GLACIER is a robust framework that delivers high predictive performance and computational efficiency in complex molecular property prediction tasks. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/eemokey/glacier.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Accounting for uncertainty in the expected treatment effect substantially increases the sample size required for randomised trials: implications for the feasibility of clinical trials in anaesthesia and critical care

Background Multicentre trials in anaesthesia and critical care report low rates of statistically significant differences. This finding may partly reflect conventional sample size methods, which assume a fixed treatment effect. Assurance methods use a design prior to represent uncertainty in the expected treatment effect, which may provide a more realistic way of estimating sample sizes. Methods We calculated power curves across a range of effect sizes, design priors, and sample sizes using frequentist and Bayesian assurance methods and compared the sample sizes required to achieve 80% and 90% power to the conventional method. We standardised the design priors across effect sizes using the coefficient of variation. We derived a theoretical limit for achievable power. We validated a normal approximation to the Bayesian posterior distribution. Results Frequentist and Bayesian assurance methods produced similar power curves across all scenarios. At a coefficient of variation of 0.5 - reflecting realistic prior uncertainty in the expected effect size - both methods required sample sizes that were approximately 1.5 to 3.5 times larger than the conventional method. The theoretical power limit depends only on the coefficient of variation of the design prior and holds true across all effect sizes. The normal approximation to the Bayesian posterior distribution matched the results obtained from Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling. Conclusions Incorporating clinical uncertainty in the expected effect size substantially increases the sample size required to achieve adequate power, which has important implications for the feasibility of randomised trials in anaesthesia and critical care.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Efficient On-Device Diffusion LLM Inference with Mobile NPU

arXiv:2606.13740v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) accelerate generation by denoising multiple tokens in parallel, making them attractive for latency-sensitive mobile inference. However, repeated denoising introduces substantial computation on smartphones. Mobile neural processing units (NPUs) offer high-throughput dense matrix computation, but efficiently exploiting them remains challenging: token commitment shrinks per-block effective workloads, token revision complicates KV cache reuse, and limited NPU-visible address space incurs costly remapping and data transfer overheads. In this paper, we propose llada.cpp, the first NPU-aware inference framework for accelerating dLLMs on smartphones. llada.cpp aligns block-wise dLLM inference with the execution characteristics of mobile NPUs through three techniques. (1) Multi-Block Speculative Decoding fills the shrinking workload in late-stage current-block decoding with speculative future-block tokens. (2) Dual-Path Progressive Revision keeps committed tokens revisable until stable and refreshes unstable tokens through a CPU-side path without stalling dense NPU execution. (3) Swap-Optimized Memory Runtime compacts NPU-visible address layouts and overlaps data staging with NPU computation to reduce remapping and transfer overheads. We implement llada.cpp as an end-to-end framework and evaluate it across diverse hardware platforms and dLLM workloads. llada.cpp reduces LLaDA-8B generation latency by 17x-42x over the CPU baseline with prefix KV cache reuse, while preserving generation quality.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Strategic PAC Learnability via Geometric Definability

arXiv:2605.13426v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Strategic classification studies learning settings in which individuals can modify their features, at a cost, in order to influence the classifier's decision. A central question is how the sample complexity of the induced (strategic) hypothesis class depends on the complexities of the underlying hypothesis class and the cost structure governing feasible manipulations. Prior work has shown that in several natural settings, such as linear classifiers with norm costs, the induced complexity can be controlled. We begin by showing that such guarantees fail in general - even in simple cases: there exist hypothesis classes of VC dimension $1$ on the real line such that, even under the simplest interval neighborhoods, the induced class has infinite VC dimension. Thus, strategic behavior can turn an easy learning problem into a non-learnable one. To overcome this, we introduce structure via a geometric definability assumption: both the hypothesis class and the cost-induced neighborhood relation can be defined by first-order formulas over $\mathbb{R}_{\mathtt{exp}}$. Intuitively, this means that hypotheses and costs can be described using arithmetic operations, exponentiation, logarithms, and comparisons. This captures a broad range of natural classes and cost functions, including $\ell_p$ distances, Wasserstein distance, and information-theoretic divergences. Under this assumption, we prove that learnability is preserved, with sample complexity controlled by the complexity of the defining formulas.

24.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-20

SAbDab2: The structural antibody database in the age of machine learning

The Structural Antibody Database (SAbDab) is a publicly available repository of experimentally determined antibody structures, first released in 2013. Explicit support for single-domain antibodies was added in 2021, with SAbDab-nano. Recently, increasing interest in antibodies has led to a proliferation of novel antibody formats, while simultaneous advances in machine learning have increased demand for standardised, high-quality structure data. Here, we present SAbDab2, re-engineered for the machine-learning age. It introduces support for a variety of new formats, and makes it easy to retrieve and compare all known structures of a given antibody. In addition, SAbDab2 provides ready access to ML-grade structures of antibody and antibody–antigen-complexes, with standardised, versioned train/test splits. These will be updated every six months going forward, and are available at https://zenodo.org/records/20083995. SAbDab2 itself is updated weekly and is freely available at https://sabdab2.opig.stats.ox.ac.uk.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Objective Quality Assessment of Point Clouds Using Multi-scale Implicit Structural Similarity

The unstructured and irregular nature of points poses a significant challenge for accurate point cloud quality assessment (PCQA), particularly in establishing accurate perceptual feature correspondence. To tackle this, we propose the Multi-scale Implicit Structural Similarity Measurement (MS-ISSM). Unlike traditional point-to-point matching, MS-ISSM utilizes radial basis function (RBF) to represent local features continuously, transforming distortion measurement into a comparison of implicit function coefficients. This approach effectively circumvents matching errors inherent in irregular data. Additionally, we propose a ResGrouped-MLP quality assessment network, which robustly maps multi-scale feature differences to perceptual scores. The network architecture departs from traditional flat multi-layer perceptron (MLP) by adopting a grouped encoding strategy integrated with residual blocks and channel-wise attention mechanisms. This hierarchical design allows the model to preserve the distinct physical semantics of luma, chroma, and geometry while adaptively focusing on the most salient distortion features across High, Medium, and Low scales. Experimental results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that MS-ISSM outperforms state-of-the-art metrics in both reliability and generalization. The source code is available at: https://github.com/ZhangChen2022/MS-ISSM.