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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Beyond Static Endpoints: Tool Programs as an Interface for Flexible Agentic Web Services

arXiv:2606.19992v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In the agentic web era, LLM-based agents increasingly invoke web services as tools, yet most interfaces remain static endpoints that poorly express long-horizon workflows with loops, conditionals, joins, and retries. We present ToolPro, which represents an agent's tool intent as an executable tool program that compactly encodes multi-step service interactions with explicit effect types. ToolPro combines constraint-guided program construction, effect-aware replay for exactly-once state-modifying calls, and a profile-driven policy that decides when program execution outperforms stepwise calling. We instantiate ToolPro over MCP-style services with WebAssembly sandboxing and evaluate it on diverse workflows of real-world applications. ToolPro reduces end-to-end latency by up to 53.4\% and client-side traffic by up to 96.1\%, with larger gains under higher network latency and workflow complexity.

02.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

AutoZyme: An Autonomous Agentic Framework to Optimize Bioinformatics Software

Performance bottlenecks in widely used genomics and bioinformatics software present a substantial and growing burden as biological datasets continue to increase in size and number. Relieving these bottlenecks relies largely on expert manual optimization and therefore remains difficult to scale. Here we present AutoZyme, an agentic framework for scientific software optimization. Given a target function, AutoZyme builds benchmarks, identifies bottlenecks, and iteratively tests code changes, retaining only those that improve runtime while preserving output. We evaluated AutoZyme on 45 functions, improving runtime without substantial memory increases in over 95% of cases considered. Across 38 functions from Seurat, Scanpy and related packages in genomics and bioinformatics, AutoZyme reduced runtime by a median of 8.52-fold, with the largest reductions exceeding 676-fold. The optimized functions are distributed through AutoZyme-Library as drop-in replacements for existing analysis pipelines. We also release AutoZyme as a reusable framework for optimizing additional user-specified packages and functions.

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

Adapting Reinforcement Learning with Chain-of-Thought Supervision for Explainable Detection of Hateful and Propagandistic Memes

Hateful and propagandistic memes exploit the interplay between images and text to convey harmful intent that neither modality reveals alone. Although thinking-based multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have advanced vision-language understanding, their application to meme content moderation remains underexplored. We propose a reinforcement learning-based post-training method that improves classification performance and reference-based explanation quality in thinking-based MLLMs via task-specific rewards and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Concretely, we (i) conduct a systematic empirical study of off-the-shelf MLLMs for hateful and propagandistic meme understanding across English and Arabic benchmarks, (ii) extend existing meme datasets with weakly supervised chain-of-thought (CoT) rationales via distillation and multi-LLM fine-grained propaganda annotations, (iii) introduce a GRPO-based objective with thinking-length regularization that jointly optimizes classification accuracy and explanation quality, and (iv) investigate self-supervised GRPO on unlabeled memes using consensus-based pseudo-labels. Experiments on the Hateful Memes and ArMeme benchmarks show that our approach improves over previously reported results on FHM accuracy (up to +2.1%, from 79.9% to 82.0%) and on ArMeme macro-F1 (up to +7.6 points, from 0.536 to 0.612 with explanations; +6.1 compared to the original ArMeme benchmark), while also generating natural-language explanations. On ArMeme, sequence-classification baselines remain stronger in terms of raw accuracy, whereas our approach provides more balanced per-class performance along with explanations. We publicly release our code, data extensions, and evaluation resources.

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

Train, Retrieve, or Both? A Four-Arm Head-to-Head for Correct Statutory Citation on the Ontario Residential Tenancies Act

arXiv:2606.20359v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-represented tenants, landlords, and help-desk staff need to be pointed at the provision of law that actually governs a question, with a correct statutory citation. We study this task on the Ontario Residential Tenancies Act, 2006 (RTA) and its core regulation, asking the operator's question empirically: is fine-tuning enough, or is hybrid retrieval needed? We run a four-arm head-to-head on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct (base zero-shot, LoRA SFT-only, RAG-only, and an SFT+RAG hybrid), scored on citation exact-match (section+subsection) over a small, human-verification-pending real eval set. The base model cannot cite the RTA and SFT-only mis-recalls sections; retrieval is essential and drives hallucination to zero by construction; and the SFT+RAG hybrid scores highest at 0.481 exact-match with zero hallucinated citations. Its edge comes from SFT making provision selection more robust to the higher-recall candidate sets that hurt zero-shot RAG. Notably, this cheap bge-small hybrid matches or beats a pipeline built on bigger, specialized retrieval models (a larger embedder and a cross-encoder reranker), and a larger/improved training set does not help either: strong statutory-citation performance here does not require specialized retrieval models or more data. The artifact zeroes hallucination and clears the lift-over-base bar but does not reach the aspirational 0.70 exact-match target. All results are on a small, human-verification-pending real eval set and are reported as preliminary.

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

Heterogeneous SAR-optical fusion for near-real-time land use and land cover mapping under cloud contamination: A novel framework and global benchmark dataset

Optical remote sensing imagery is frequently degraded by cloud and cloud-shadow contamination, which limits its reliability for near-real-time land use and land cover (LULC) mapping. Although synthetic aperture radar (SAR) can provide cloud-penetrating structural information, existing SAR-optical fusion methods often assume reliable optical observations and insufficiently address the semantic uncertainty introduced by cloud contamination. To address this issue, we propose CloudLULC-Net, an end-to-end heterogeneous SAR-optical fusion framework that directly predicts LULC maps from cloud-contaminated Sentinel-2 imagery and temporally adjacent Sentinel-1 SAR observations. The proposed network incorporates optical reliability modulation to suppress unreliable optical responses, heterogeneous information adaptive aggregation to model high-order spatial-channel interactions between optical and SAR representations, and a unified semantic mapping transformer to organize fused features in a LULC-oriented latent space. A semantic anchor-guided optimization strategy is further introduced to improve the consistency of intermediate semantic representations. To support this task, we construct CloudLULC-Set, a large-scale benchmark dataset containing 40,223 curated SAR-optical-label triplets with pixel-level LULC annotations across diverse geographic regions and cloud conditions. Experimental results show that CloudLULC-Net achieves an OA of 86.60%, an F1-score of 83.29%, and an mIoU of 73.51%, outperforming representative heterogeneous reconstruction-first and end-to-end SAR-optical mapping methods. Comparisons with existing global LULC products and analyses under different cloud-cover levels further demonstrate the robustness and practical value of CloudLULC-Net for target-date LULC mapping in cloud-prone regions.The project is publicly available at: https://github.com/RSIIPAC/CloudLULC

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

Once-for-All: Scalable Simultaneous Forecasting via Equilibrium State Estimation

arXiv:2606.13285v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce Equilibrium State Estimation (ESE), a novel paradigm for simultaneous prediction, where multiple interacting systems require separate yet coordinated forecasts. Such scenarios often arise in real-world settings such as economics and healthcare modeling. Unlike existing approaches that predict one system at a time, ESE forecasts all systems in a single pass. It first estimates the equilibrium state across systems, then generates holistic forecasts based on the difference between the current state and the estimated equilibrium. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets, including currency exchange and COVID-19 spread modeling, demonstrate that ESE is at least as accurate as state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods while being significantly faster. In addition, ESE integrates seamlessly with conventional predictors, combining their accuracy with its exceptional efficiency and delivering a 10-70x speedup. With linear-time complexity, ESE scales far better than SOTA methods as the number of systems increases. Moreover, it remains accurate under diverse perturbations, establishing ESE as a fast, generalizable, robust, and scalable multi-prediction method.

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

Dr-DCI: Scaling Direct Corpus Interaction via Dynamic Workspace Expansion

Agentic search over large corpora relies on retriever-mediated interfaces (e.g., BM25 or ColBERT) for scalable candidate discovery. While effective at ranking relevant documents, these interfaces expose evidence only as ranked results or bounded document views, limiting agents' ability to reorganize material and verify constraints across documents. Direct Corpus Interaction (DCI) addresses this limitation by exposing shell-executable corpus operations for flexible search, filtering, comparison, and verification. However, full-corpus terminal commands become slow and unstable as the corpus grows, degrading performance and efficiency. We introduce DR-DCI, a retriever-steered DCI framework that treats retrieval as an agent-callable action for expanding a local workspace. Rather than operating directly over the full corpus, the agent dynamically pulls relevant documents into an evolving workspace and conducts DCI operations within it. This design combines retriever-level recall with DCI-style precision: retrieval keeps exploration scalable, while DCI preserves the local operations needed for effective evidence resolution. Experiments show that DR-DCI is both effective and efficient across scales. On Browsecomp-Plus, DR-DCI reaches 71.2\% accuracy, improving over raw DCI and ablated variants by up to 8.3 points while reducing tool usage, wall time, and estimated cost. With workspace-preserving context reset, accuracy further improves to 73.3\%. In corpus-scaling experiments, DR-DCI remains effective from 100K to 10M documents, whereas raw DCI becomes unstable and BM25 performs substantially worse. DR-DCI also scales to a 20M-scale file-per-document Wiki-18 QA setting, achieving an average score of 63.0 across six benchmarks and outperforming retrieval-based and trained search-agent baselines. Ablation analysis further shows that ranked previews and inter-document DCI are key to performance.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

Correcting spatial transcriptomics data affected by a prevalent transcript leakage problem across platforms, species, and tissues

Spatial transcriptomics has been widely applied to study the spatial distribution of cell types, cell states, and specific gene expression in tissue samples. However, we show that there is a prevalent transcript leakage problem in spatial transcriptomics data, where transcripts expressed by a cell diffuse to its neighborhood and are recurrently detected in the nearby cells. By analyzing published data sets, we show that this problem is general across data produced from different tissues and different species using different imaging-based and sequencing-based spatial transcriptomics platforms. It affects both upstream tasks such as expression quantification as well as downstream tasks such as cell-type annotation and detection of spatially-dependent gene expression. To tackle the transcript leakage problem, we propose a reference-free Bayesian model-based method, DeLeakage, which cleans up the data much more effectively than existing denoising methods. DeLeakage also improves cell-type annotation and avoids false detection of spatially dependent expression.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

\texttt{Range-Arithmetic}: Verifiable Deep Learning Inference on an Untrusted Party

arXiv:2505.17623v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Verifiable computing (VC) has gained prominence in decentralized machine learning systems, where resource-intensive tasks like deep neural network (DNN) inference are offloaded to external participants due to blockchain limitations. This creates a need to verify the correctness of outsourced computations without re-execution. We propose \texttt{Range-Arithmetic}, a novel framework for efficient and verifiable DNN inference that transforms non-arithmetic operations, such as rounding after fixed-point matrix multiplication and ReLU, into arithmetic steps verifiable using sum-check protocols and concatenated range proofs. Our approach avoids the complexity of Boolean encoding, high-degree polynomials, and large lookup tables while remaining compatible with finite-field-based proof systems. Experimental results show that our method not only matches the performance of existing approaches, but also reduces the computational cost of verifying the results, the computational effort required from the untrusted party performing the DNN inference, and the communication overhead between the two sides.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

ChronoSurv: A Clinical Pathway-Guided Graph Framework for Multimodal Survival Analysis

arXiv:2606.19140v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate survival prediction is essential for personalized treatment planning in head and neck cancer, yet remains challenging due to the heterogeneous and high-dimensional nature of multimodal clinical data. While deep survival models have improved predictive performance over classical statistical approaches, existing methods typically rely on static fusion strategies or temporally agnostic modeling, limiting their ability to capture structured clinical workflows. In this work, we propose ChronoSurv, a heterogeneous hierarchical directed graph framework for multimodal survival analysis. ChronoSurv represents patient care as a progression-aware clinical trajectory using directed graphs aligned with key diagnostic steps. A hierarchical topology incorporates fine-grained, coarse, and global representations, further supporting flexible adaptation to missing modalities, while heterogeneous message passing models complex and asymmetric relationships across modalities and clinical steps. Experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate that ChronoSurv achieves state-of-the-art discriminative performance while maintaining statistically reliable calibration. Comprehensive ablation studies further confirm the contribution of each architectural component, highlighting the potential of trajectory-aware graph modeling for multimodal survival prediction.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Edge Flow: A Tractable and Predictive Continuous-Time Model for Gradient Descent at the Edge of Stability

arXiv:2606.18080v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Gradient descent in deep learning may operate at the edge of stability (EoS), a regime in which the largest eigenvalue of the loss Hessian hovers near the stability threshold $2/\eta$, where $\eta$ is the learning rate. Classical analysis tools such as gradient flow and the descent lemma do not apply here, motivating the search for a continuous-time model valid at EoS. We propose Edge Flow, a system of three coupled ordinary differential equations that provides a tractable, faithful, and predictive model of gradient descent dynamics at EoS. Edge Flow decomposes the dynamics into a center, an oscillation direction, and an oscillation magnitude. The center follows a modified gradient flow on a symmetrized loss; the direction tracks a top eigenvector of the Hessian via Rayleigh quotient dynamics; and the magnitude grows or decays exponentially depending on whether the sharpness exceeds or falls below the threshold $2/\eta$. Crucially, sharpness stabilization emerges from the coupled dynamics via a self-stabilization feedback loop. Discretizing Edge Flow only requires two gradient evaluations and one Hessian–vector product at each iteration. We demonstrate empirically that Edge Flow tracks the dynamics of gradient descent at least as faithfully as previously proposed continuous-time EoS models, while in addition resolving the oscillation of the sharpness at the onset of EoS, and that it provides a principled framework for understanding and mitigating instabilities in this regime.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Metabolic cost of information processing in Poisson variational autoencoders

arXiv:2602.13421v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Computation in biological systems is fundamentally energy-constrained, yet standard theories of computation treat energy as freely available. Here, we argue that variational free energy minimization under a Poisson assumption offers a principled path toward an energy-aware theory of computation. Our key observation is that the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence term in the Poisson free energy objective becomes proportional to the prior firing rates of model neurons, yielding an emergent metabolic cost term that penalizes high baseline activity. This structure couples an abstract information-theoretic quantity – the *coding rate* – to a concrete biophysical variable – the *firing rate* – which enables a trade-off between coding fidelity and energy expenditure. Such a coupling arises naturally in the Poisson variational autoencoder (P-VAE) – a brain-inspired generative model that encodes inputs as discrete spike counts and recovers a spiking form of *sparse coding* as a special case – but is absent from standard Gaussian VAEs. To demonstrate that this metabolic cost structure is unique to the Poisson formulation, we compare the P-VAE against Grelu-VAE, a Gaussian VAE with ReLU rectification applied to latent samples, which controls for the non-negativity constraint. Across a systematic sweep of the KL term weighting coefficient $\beta$ and latent dimensionality, we find that increasing $\beta$ monotonically increases sparsity and reduces average spiking activity in the P-VAE. In contrast, Grelu-VAE representations remain unchanged, confirming that the effect is specific to Poisson statistics rather than a byproduct of non-negative representations. These results establish Poisson variational inference as a promising foundation for a resource-constrained theory of computation.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Room-Specialized Mixture-of-Experts for In-Home ADL Recognition with Ambient Sensors

Monitoring activities of daily living (ADLs) in the home is a promising approach for tracking dementia progression in older adults. While ambient sensor-based ADL systems are well-studied, most existing ADL recognition systems rely on globally trained models that ignore the spatial organization of in-home activities. In real deployments, where training data are sparse and highly home-specific, global transformer models may fail to capture room-dependent behavioral structure. We propose a deterministic Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture for in-home ADL recognition, in which each expert is a compact transformer specialized to one room of the home (bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, living area). Input segments are routed using a deterministic gating strategy based on room-level motion activity and time-of-day priors for sleep-related behaviors. Unlike learned routing networks, the proposed gate encodes domain knowledge about where ADLs are likely to occur, reducing model complexity under limited per-home training data. By decomposing ADL recognition into room-specific activity spaces, the proposed architecture reduces competition between dominant and low-frequency activities under highly imbalanced residential data. We evaluated the system on data collected via low-cost ambient sensors (motion, light, temperature, humidity) and Raspberry Pi edge devices across five homes, with ground-truth ADL labels provided by participants and caregivers. Across the five homes, the proposed MoE consistently outperformed global transformer, 1D CNN, and Random Forest baselines, achieving macro-F1 scores ranging from 0.60 to 0.88, highlighting the importance of home-specific modeling in real-world deployments. These findings suggest that room-aware expert specialization may provide a practical and interpretable strategy for low-data ADL recognition in real-world residential environments.

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

APPO: Agentic Procedural Policy Optimization

arXiv:2606.12384v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in agentic Reinforcement Learning (RL) have substantially improved the multi-turn tool-use capabilities of large language model agents. However, most existing methods assign credit over coarse heuristic units, such as tool-call boundaries or fixed workflows, making it difficult to identify which intermediate decisions influence downstream outcomes. In this work, we study agentic RL from two perspectives: where to branch and how to assign credit after branching. Our pilot analysis shows that influential decision points are broadly distributed throughout the generated sequence rather than concentrated at tool calls, while token entropy alone does not reliably reflect their impact on final outcomes. Motivated by these observations, we propose Agentic Procedural Policy Optimization (APPO), which shifts branching and credit assignment from coarse interaction units to fine-grained decision points in the sequence. APPO selects branching locations using a Branching Score that combines token uncertainty with policy-induced likelihood gains of subsequent continuations, enabling more targeted exploration while filtering out spurious high-entropy positions. It further introduces procedure-level advantage scaling to better distribute credit across branched rollouts. Experiments on 13 benchmarks show that APPO consistently improves strong agentic RL baselines by nearly 4 points, while keeping efficient tool-calls and maintaining behavior interpretability.

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

Riemannian Metric Matching for Scalable Geometric Modeling of Distributions

arXiv:2606.14334v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-dimensional datasets often concentrate near low-dimensional structures, but estimating their geometry from samples typically relies on graphs and kernels that scale poorly with dataset size and dimension. We propose Riemannian metric matching: a denoising probabilistic framework for learning the Riemannian geometry of data using neural networks. Specifically, we learn the carré du champ operator, which, using diffusion geometry, gives us access to the Riemannian geometry toolkit for downstream machine learning and statistical tasks. Our key observation is that the carré du champ operator can be formulated as a conditional expectation over random perturbations of the data, which can be exploited for sample-wise training and constant cost, amortized inference without explicit kernel construction. Empirically, metric matching rivals or improves the accuracy of $k$-NN-based diffusion geometry estimators, while enabling amortized inference that is up to $400\times$ faster, and supports graph-free geometric analysis on high-dimensional images where nearest neighbors break down.

16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Polar: A Benchmark for Evaluating Political Bias in LLMs

Political bias in large language models (LLMs) is increasingly significant, but difficult to measure reproducibly across political and linguistic contexts. We introduce Polar, a 4,026-instance multiple-choice benchmark that measures political bias through option-level likelihoods rather than prompt-based generation. Polar covers two ideological axes and eight issue categories derived from the Manifesto Project, and evaluates models in parallel across U.S. and South Korean political contexts. Across 38 LLMs, measured bias varies systematically with political context, issue category, model group, and presentation language. All models lean left-progressive on U.S. political content, but show more centered and mixed patterns on South Korean content. Translation experiments further show that presentation language alone can shift measured bias. These findings highlight the need for multilingual and cross-contextual evaluation of political bias in LLMs.

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

Where Does Social Reasoning Come From? Capability Provenance in Language Models

We use training-data attribution as an interpretable tool for capability discovery, mapping which regions of the pretraining corpus support social-reasoning versus STEM-reasoning in OLMo3-7B. Training-data attribution measures how strongly each training document influences a model's predictions on a benchmark, but document-level scores are too noisy to identify which corpus regions support which capabilities, and prior work has emphasized factual knowledge rather than reasoning. We compute gradient-based attribution (TrackStar via Bergson) over a working set drawn from the de-duplicated Dolma3 mix, aggregate influence across WebOrganizer's 24-format x 24-topic taxonomy (576 bins), and contrast benchmark pairs in a 2x2 design that varies domain (social vs. STEM) and capability type (reasoning vs. knowledge): SocialIQA and MMLU Social Sciences against ARC-Challenge and MMLU STEM. Social and STEM reasoning draw on qualitatively distinct corpus regions, and the contrast is sharper at the reasoning level than at the knowledge level. Targeted machine unlearning provides partial causal validation: forgetting high-attribution topic bins (e.g., Literature for SocialIQA) degrades the aligned benchmark more than within-bin random baselines, and we open-source all code, sampling manifests, the bin-level influence matrix, and unlearning checkpoints.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

WallZero: Mastering the Game of WallGo with Strategic Analysis

arXiv:2606.17847v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: WallGo is a recently introduced strategic board game popularized by the 2025 Netflix series The Devil's Plan. Although played on a small 7 x 7 board, its combination of stone movement and wall placement yields high game-tree complexity and intricate strategic interactions. Despite its growing popularity, WallGo remains underexplored. This paper presents WallZero, an AlphaZero-based agent for the two-player WallGo setting. We introduce tailored action and feature designs to improve playing performance significantly. In the evaluation, WallZero defeats two professional Go players who participated in this study, securing on average 1.98x more territory per game. Beyond its strength, we use WallZero to assess game fairness and identify key strategies for mastering WallGo. Interestingly, our results show that the opening used in the Netflix series yields a more balanced game. Our code is available at https://rlg.iis.sinica.edu.tw/papers/wallzero.

19.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

Beyond the canonical: The role of post-transcriptional regulation in drug-target interaction prediction

by Md Istiaq Ansari, Khandakar Tanvir Ahmed, Debby D. Wang, Kirill Medvedev, Wei Zhang Protein isoforms produced from the same gene through post-transcriptional regulatory mechanisms, such as alternative splicing, can substantially alter protein structure and function, including drug-binding properties. However, most existing drug-target interaction (DTI) and drug-target affinity (DTA) prediction models rely exclusively on a single representative protein sequence per gene, typically the canonical or longest isoform, thereby overlooking the functional diversity introduced by alternative isoforms. This assumption can introduce bias, limit generalizability, and compromise the biological validity of model predictions. In this study, we systematically investigate the impact of protein isoform variation on DTI prediction accuracy. Our results show that substituting the canonical sequence with an alternative isoform often leads to substantial declines in predictive performance. Structural and binding affinity analyses further reveal that these discrepancies are frequently associated with changes in predicted binding-site configurations, which we further examine through controlled perturbations of binding-site residues. These experiments suggest that even subtle alterations in binding regions can lead to inconsistent DTI predictions. Overall, our findings uncover a critical limitation in current DTI modeling frameworks and underscore the importance of incorporating isoform-specific information to better reflect biological reality and improve therapeutic relevance. The codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/compbiolabucf/DTIVariant.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Modelling the decadal expansion of West Nile virus in Italy: the role of climatic, anthropogenic, and macroecological drivers

Abstract BACKGROUND West Nile virus (WNV) is a growing health burden in Italy. Anticipating human infection risk is hampered by the pathogen's complex ecology, highlighting the need for comprehensive early-warning tools. AIM We aimed to model municipal-level WNV risk in Italy and characterize its decadal expansion in Italy, providing a comprehensive ecological understanding of viral emergence. METHODS We applied a machine learning framework to annual human WNV case data from 2014 to 2024. The model integrated a suite of environmental, socio-economic, and macroecological predictors to generate risk projections. We evaluated the model's performance through multiple validation settings. We also performed an anticipation test for the 2025 epidemic season, using 2024 environmental data to assess the model's predictive accuracy against observed 2025 human cases. RESULTS Our model achieved robust performance (True Skill Statistic > 0.4) and captured WNV progressive expansion from 184 predicted positive municipalities in 2014 to 2,012 in 2024 (an 11-fold increase in 11 years). Seasonal minimum temperature was the primary risk driver, followed by monitoring year and population density, indicating active spatial spread. Environmental suitability consistently preceded clinical detection. Municipalities with cases in 2023-2024 exhibited significantly higher predicted suitability during 2018-2022 than those without cases (average risk 0.58 vs 0.20). Our model successfully identified emerging risk hotspots along the Adriatic coast and southern Italy before the official human spillover of 2025. CONCLUSION Embedding macroecological drivers into WNV risk modelling provides an improved understanding of drivers of rapid WNV expansion. Our model enables proactive risk mapping, surveillance efforts, and targeted public health measures.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Deep Learning-based Algebraic Reynolds Stress Closures for RANS Simulations of Turbulent Flows

arXiv:2605.26358v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Turbulence is ubiquitous in engineering and science, yet direct simulation is prohibitively expensive. The Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations provide savings exceeding ten orders of magnitude but introduce unclosed terms (the closure problem). Offline-trained machine-learning (ML) closures suffer distribution shift in predictive simulations, while ML methods that bypass the governing equations struggle to generalise from scarce high-fidelity data. We develop a physics-derived deep learning closure model for RANS, the Deep Algebraic Reynolds Stress Model (DARSM), which can be trained on small datasets and accurately generalise across Reynolds numbers, to unseen geometries, and to different flow regimes. A neural network maps flow invariants to empirical parameters in an implicit algebraic Reynolds stress equation, derived from the Reynolds stress transport equations under the weak-equilibrium assumption, imposing physics-based structure on the ML closure. End-to-end optimisation through the governing PDEs and the coupled implicit closure eliminates distribution shift, but both unrolled and implicit automatic differentiation fail on the stiff coupled solver. We derive adjoint equations that exploit the solver's implicit-explicit structure for efficient optimisation. On canonical square-duct and periodic-hill benchmarks, DARSM reduces average test velocity error over baseline RANS by $2$-$4\times$ across Reynolds number, geometries, and flow regimes, with peak case-level reductions of $12\times$. The model trained on attached, anisotropy-dominated flows (square duct) accurately generalises without retraining to separated flows (periodic hills), a regime change in the underlying physics. DARSM also outperforms five established ML methods: offline training, tensor-basis neural networks, field-inversion machine learning, DeepONets, and physics-informed neural networks.

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

Contextualizing Biological Language Models across Modalities via Logit-Space Contrastive Alignment

arXiv:2606.18703v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pretrained biological language models expose per-token probability distributions through masked-token prediction, providing the likelihood interface central to sequence design, variant scoring, and mechanistic interpretation. Yet these distributions are learned from broad unlabeled corpora and are not naturally conditioned on task-specific biological contexts such as interaction partners, cellular environments, or therapeutic interventions. Existing contextual matching methods often distort this interface through pooled embeddings, contrastive latent spaces, or task-specific prediction heads. We introduce LOGICA (Logit-space Contrastive Alignment), a framework for context-conditioned prediction that performs contrastive learning directly in output-logit space. Using gated cross-modal adapters compatible with each model's native token head, LOGICA preserves the pretrained likelihood interface and converts contextualized token log-likelihoods into matching scores. Alignment is defined through context-sensitive token probabilities rather than proximity in a shared embedding space, enabling learning from sparse paired data across models with distinct vocabularies, without a shared tokenizer or decoder. LOGICA is particularly effective for mutation-local variant ranking, where comparisons reduce to context-conditioned likelihoods of mutant tokens at perturbed sites. Across protein–ligand binding, TCR–peptide activity, and drug-conditioned resistance prediction, LOGICA improves over prior state-of-the-art methods, including matched latent-contrastive and conditional MLM baselines, while retaining a token-level interface for interpretation and generation. On held-out-gene single-mutation drug-resistance prediction, LOGICA improves AUC from near-random latent-space baselines of $\sim$0.55 to $\sim$0.65.

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

SDFLoRA: Selective Decoupled Federated LoRA for Privacy-preserving Fine-tuning with Heterogeneous Clients

arXiv:2601.11219v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated learning (FL) for large language models (LLMs) has attracted increasing attention as a privacy-preserving approach for adapting models over distributed data, where parameter-efficient methods such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) are widely adopted to reduce communication and memory costs. However, practical deployments often exhibit rank and data heterogeneity: clients operate under different low-rank budgets and data distributions, making direct aggregation of LoRA updates biased and unstable. Existing approaches either enforce a unified rank or align heterogeneous updates into a single shared subspace, which tends to mix transferable and client-specific directions and consequently undermines personalization. Moreover, under differential privacy (DP), perturbing such structurally mixed updates injects noise into directions that should remain purely local, leading to unnecessary utility degradation. To address these issues, we propose Selective Decoupled Federated LoRA (SDFLoRA), a structure-aware LoRA framework that decouples each client update into a shared component for aggregation and a private component that preserves client-specific semantics. Only the shared component participates in subspace alignment, while the private component remains local and uncommunicated, making the training DP-compatible and stabilizing aggregation under rank heterogeneity. By injecting noise only into the aggregated shareable update, this approach avoids perturbations to local directions and improves the utility-privacy trade-off. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that SDFLoRA outperforms federated LoRA baselines and achieves a strong utility-privacy trade-off.

24.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Infectious Disease Forecasting via Physics-Informed Machine Learning

Infectious disease transmission evolves as a dynamic process shaped by biological mechanisms, population behavior, and intervention policies, yet public health responses are often driven by lagging indicators. Accurate short- and long-term disease forecasting is essential for the timely deployment of intervention strategies, healthcare capacity planning, and uncertainty-aware, risk-informed decision-making. To address this challenge, three broad classes of forecasting models have traditionally been used: statistical, machine learning, and mechanistic approaches. However, each of these modeling paradigms faces fundamental limitations. In particular, traditional statistical models often lack the flexibility needed to capture complex disease dynamics, machine learning approaches require large, high-quality data streams, and mechanistic models are notoriously difficult to calibrate. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel physics-informed machine learning (PIML) framework for forecasting infectious disease dynamics. Our approach simultaneously forecasts new case and hospitalization counts, along with other key epidemiological quantities such as the time-varying reproduction number. This is achieved through the design of a machine learning model and estimation strategy regularized by a system of differential equations that encode disease dynamics of the SIHR model, thereby bridging the gap between purely data-driven and mechanistic models. We demonstrate the proposed methodology through in-depth numerical studies and an application to COVID-19 data collected in the state of South Carolina.

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

Modeling Sarcastic Speech: Semantic and Prosodic Cues in a Speech Synthesis Framework

Sarcasm is a pragmatic phenomenon in which speakers convey meanings that diverge from literal content, relying on an interaction between semantics and prosodic expression. However, how these cues jointly contribute to the recognition of sarcasm remains poorly understood. We propose a computational framework that models sarcasm as the integration of semantic interpretation and prosodic realization. Semantic cues are derived from an LLaMA 3 model fine-tuned to capture discourse-level markers of sarcastic intent, while prosodic cues are extracted through semantically aligned utterances drawn from a database of sarcastic speech, providing prosodic exemplars of sarcastic delivery. Using a speech synthesis testbed, perceptual evaluations show that semantic and prosodic cues enhance perceived sarcasm, with the combined system achieving the best downstream F1 while maintaining high subjective sarcasm ratings. These findings highlight the complementary roles of semantics and prosody in pragmatic interpretation and illustrate how modeling can shed light on the mechanisms underlying sarcastic communication.