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

Multi-Dimensional Cohomological Phenomena in the Lower Multiparametric Model

作者:

arXiv:2402.02573v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In the past two decades, extensive research has been conducted on the (co)homology of various models of random simplicial complexes. So far, it has always been examined merely as a list of groups. This paper expands upon this by describing both the ring structure and the Steenrod-algebra structure of the cohomology of the lower multiparametric model. We prove that the ring structure is always a.a.s trivial, while, for certain parameters, the Steenrod-algebra a.a.s acts non-trivially. This reveals that complex multi-dimensional topological structures appear as subcomplexes of this model.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

BigPower: Hierarchical Source-Level Module Power Estimation for CPUs with Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.13747v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate power estimation is important for understanding and optimizing CPU power behavior, yet practical workflows often rely on simulation-derived information or post-silicon analysis. In this work, we present BigPower, a hierarchical source-level surrogate model for fine-grained module-level power estimation during CPU design. BigPower leverages large language model-based representations together with architectural hierarchy, module connectivity, configuration parameters, and workload context to estimate module-level power consumption directly from source-level design information, without requiring additional simulation during inference. Experimental results in the open-source XiangShan processor family demonstrate practical fine-grained power estimation across diverse configurations and workloads, offering an efficient alternative to conventional simulation-based workflows.

03.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

A multi-agent system for spine MRI report generation from multi-sequence imaging

Spinal pathology is a leading cause of pain and disability worldwide. Spine magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is central to clinical evaluation, yet its interpretation remains complex and time-consuming, requiring integration of information across multiple imaging sequences and anatomical regions. Despite recent advances in automated MRI analysis, effectively combining multi-sequence data while preserving sequence-specific diagnostic information remains an open challenge. Here we present SpineAgent, a multi-agent framework for spine MRI report generation built upon a multi-sequence foundation model trained on routine clinical data from 32,047 patients and 453,683 MRI series, comprising a total of 13,441,191 MRI slices. To accommodate diverse modalities of sequences, we first pre-train two DINOv3-based encoders separately on T1- and T2-weighted sequences. We then introduce a continual training strategy that learns a synthesizer to embed images of other sequences using the T1 and T2 encoders, producing patient-level embedding that integrates various signals across MRI sequences. Using these embeddings, SpineAgent achieves state-of-the-art performance, with mean 10.8% AUROC improvement across 17 spinal condition-prediction tasks compared to the best competing method, and demonstrates strong generalizability under cross-manufacturer and cross-cohort evaluation. Beyond classification, SpineAgent enables pathology localization by identifying findings-relevant slices and segmenting pathological regions. It also supports multimodal image-report retrieval, providing a solid foundation for scalable and explainable MRI report generation. We further integrate these validated capabilities of SpineAgent into 37 specialized agents for condition diagnosis, pathological-region localization, and clinically-similar-cases retrieval. Finally, we incorporate their outputs as structured tokens within a Medical Report Agent trained end-to-end for report generation. Through both automated metrics and expert evaluation by five radiologists, SpineAgent achieves leading performance in spine MRI report generation. Together, SpineAgent introduces a continual training approach for multi-sequence spine MRI understanding. By decomposing report generation into clinically grounded subtasks addressed by specialized agents, the SpineAgent framework enables accurate, interpretable and generalizable spine MRI reporting across diverse imaging sequences and anatomical regions.

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

PhysGuard: Fisher-Guided Gradient Projection for Sim-to-Real Neural PDE Surrogates

arXiv:2606.16602v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural operator models trained on simulation data often lose accuracy when applied to experimental measurements due to the sim-to-real gap. Standard fine-tuning with limited real data can reduce this gap, but it may also damage the core physics-relevant representations learned during pretraining. Although knowledge-preserving adaptation has been widely investigated in vision or language tasks, it remains unclear whether these methods are suitable for neural operators whose architectures and protected knowledge are fundamentally different. Neural operators need to preserve core-scale physical structures rather than semantic or visual features. We propose PhysGuard, a physics-preserving framework for accurate sim-to-real adaptation of neural operators. Specifically, PhysGuard uses the empirical Fisher Information Matrix computed on simulation data to identify physics-critical parameter directions, then restricts fine-tuning updates to directions that do not interfere with them. A layer-wise Gram-matrix formulation makes this efficient for models with millions of parameters, while an adaptive threshold automatically determines the protected subspace size. A spectral probe experiment shows that the dominant Fisher directions are strongly associated with low-frequency output structures. Experiments on benchmark across four neural operator architectures and different physical systems show that PhysGuard performs strongly on most evaluation metrics compared to baselines. The benefits are most evident under severe domain shift, where it reduces low-frequency error by up to 32\% compared to standard fine-tuning while maintaining adaptability. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZhouChaunge/PhysGuard.

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

Model Validation of Agentic AI Systems: A POMDP-Based Framework for Belief-State, Forecast, and Policy Validation

arXiv:2606.17383v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic artificial intelligence systems introduce a new class of model risk. Unlike traditional predictive models, autonomous agents continuously acquire information, form beliefs regarding latent states of the environment, generate forecasts, select actions, and adapt their behavior over time. Existing validation methodologies focus primarily on predictive accuracy and therefore provide limited insight into the quality of the underlying decision process. This paper proposes a model validation framework for agentic AI based on Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs). The framework decomposes autonomous decision making into information, beliefs, forecasts, actions, and utility, allowing each component to be validated independently. Large language models (LLMs) are formalized as approximate Bayesian filtering operators, and a model-risk taxonomy is developed encompassing state-space, filtering, forecast, policy, utility-specification, and parameter risks. The model risk validation methodology is demonstrated through a portfolio-management case study in which an agent infers latent market regimes from market and macroeconomic information, generates belief-conditioned forecasts, and constructs portfolios using a Black–Litterman framework. Empirical validation combines performance analysis, belief calibration diagnostics, coverage tests, ablation studies, and parameter-sensitivity analysis. The results indicate that latent-state inference contributes independently to decision quality and that the principal conclusions remain robust across a broad range of parameter values. The principal contribution of the paper is a practical framework for extending established model risk management concepts to autonomous AI systems and providing a rigorous foundation for their validation, governance, and monitoring.

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

HEPTv2: End-to-End Efficient Point Transformer for Charged Particle Reconstruction

arXiv:2606.20437v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Charged-particle tracking – reconstructing trajectories from sparse detector measurements – is a fundamental high-energy-physics inference problem and a canonical example of learning under extreme combinatorial ambiguity. At the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC), tracking must remain accurate and efficient despite unprecedented collision densities. Graph neural networks perform strongly, but incur substantial costs from graph construction and processing, while transformer-based approaches rely on auxiliary stages that prevent end-to-end optimization. To address this, we present HEPTv2, an end-to-end point-transformer architecture that reconstructs tracks from detector hits in one trainable pipeline. HEPTv2 combines a locality-aware point encoder with a track decoder that predicts complete trajectories without graph-building, clustering, or filtering. The encoder uses locality-sensitive hashing in detector coordinate space to preserve tracking-relevant geometry while enabling efficient local attention. The decoder resolves ambiguities through sectorized decoding and direct hit-to-track prediction under joint encoder-decoder supervision, allowing the full pipeline to be optimized end-to-end. On TrackML, HEPTv2 achieves 98.6% double-majority tracking efficiency at a 0.8% fake rate, while requiring only $\sim$15~ms inference time and 0.4~GB peak memory per event on a NVIDIA A100 GPU. Latency and memory scale approximately linearly for events with up to $5\times10^5$ hits. HEPTv2 establishes a new state of the art in the accuracy-latency trade-off, improving efficiency by 4.5% over the strongest prior transformer and by 1.1–2.2% over optimized graph-based pipelines, while reducing latency by factors of 7 and 38–52, respectively. These results show end-to-end transformers can deliver the accuracy and efficiency required for real-time particle reconstruction at the HL-LHC.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Graph Reinforcement Learning for Calibration-Aware Quantum Circuit Routing

arXiv:2606.12816v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantum circuit routing is a key step in compiling programs for noisy intermediate-scale quantum processors. Routes that appear efficient by standard overhead metrics can still lose fidelity when they pass through poorly calibrated couplers. We study a calibration-aware graph reinforcement-learning router that uses same-day IBM Heron r2 calibration data to choose hardware-edge SWAPs. We train the policy with proximal policy optimization and evaluate it with exact simulated fidelity across nine Munich Quantum Toolkit (MQT) Bench circuits and three calibration snapshots. Across these evaluations, pooled mean exact fidelity is $0.727$, compared with $0.440$ for SABRE-best20 and $0.481$ for target-aware SABRE. Fidelity gains come with higher routed two-qubit counts and are concentrated in the 5q and 8q circuit families; under the fixed tree action graph, all 10q families favor SABRE-best20. Overall, our results show that calibration-aware learned routing can improve fidelity beyond gate-count-driven compilation.

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

Information Gap and Feasibility-Aware Inference in Binomial Logistic Mixtures

arXiv:2606.15665v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper studies the information gap between mixture detection and label recovery in binomial logistic mixtures. Standard likelihood-based criteria such as the Bayesian information criterion (BIC) can detect the presence of two components, but this does not guarantee that the corresponding labels are recoverable. We show that this gap is intrinsic to binomial logistic mixtures with a fixed number of trials: observed-data evidence for mixture structure and per-observation information for label recovery have different local orders in the component separation, and only the former accumulates with the sample size. As a result, there exists a detectable-but-unrecoverable regime in which BIC selects two components while the posterior labels remain essentially uninformative. To address this issue, we propose two feasibility-aware inference procedures: a recoverability-aware BIC with a posterior-entropy penalty and an entropy-regularized estimator that mitigates the tendency of the maximum likelihood estimator to produce overly separated components and overly concentrated posterior responsibilities. Numerical experiments confirm the predicted gap and demonstrate that the proposed methods avoid misleading component selections and improve the calibration of posterior label probabilities.

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

Multimodal Graph Negative Learning

arXiv:2606.12863v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal attributed graphs (MAGs) integrate graph topology with heterogeneous modality attributes, such as text and images, thereby enabling richer modeling of complex relational systems. However, such expressiveness also makes learning on MAGs depend on multiple semantic sources, including structural topology, textual and visual attributes, each of which can be regarded as a branch for node representation. Node-level branch semantic imbalance arises when these branches differ across nodes in semantic informativeness and reliability: a branch that provides discriminative semantics for one node may mislead another due to bias in modality quality or structural context. Existing methods often mitigate such heterogeneity through cross-branch agreement or alignment, implicitly treating the dominant prediction as reliable supervision. When the dominant branch is biased, forced imitation may propagate its bias to other branches and suppress original semantics that are useful for classification. We propose GraphMNL, a graph-aware multimodal negative learning framework that addresses this issue by using Negative Learning as cross-branch guidance. Instead of forcing inferior branches to imitate a teacher prediction, the model teaches them which classes a node is unlikely to belong to. GraphMNL builds a branch library, identifies dominant and inferior branches via graph-aware reliability arbitration, gates unstable transfer, and applies target-preserving negative learning over non-target classes. This design decouples target supervision from branch guidance so that supervised losses learn the correct class, while Negative Learning suppresses unlikely alternatives when branch agreement is unreliable. Through the comprehensive experimental evaluation, GraphMNL achieves the best performance on Grocery datasets with 72.47% accuracy and 76.60 F1 score on Reddit M datasets.

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

LapidaryEngine: Fully Conversational Crystal Generation

arXiv:2606.14215v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has inspired the vision of generating bespoke crystal materials directly from natural-language instructions, enabling users to design materials through intuitive, conversational interaction. Existing text-to-crystal generative models represent important early steps toward this goal, but they suffer from two critical limitations: (i) restricted input formats that require highly structured descriptions (e.g., chemical formulas), and (ii) one-directional generation, where models can map text to crystal but cannot perform the inverse. These limitations prevent fully conversational workflows and hinder alignment with users' inherently ambiguous and evolving desiderata. We address these challenges with LapidaryEngine, the first model to support fully conversational crystal generation. LapidaryEngine accepts free-form natural-language requests and performs iterative refinement and editing in a dialogue-like manner. The key innovation is a pivot representation, a third, intermediate form that enables bidirectional translation between text and crystal structures despite the absence of direct paired datasets. Leveraging this pivot allows robust interpretation of user feedback and precise structural control. We demonstrate LapidaryEngine across diverse tasks, including insulator discovery, stability optimization, compositional modification, and structural editing, showcasing its ability to align generated materials with user intent in an interactive manner.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

The impact of changes in age-based eligibility criteria on seasonal influenza vaccine uptake in England between 2019 and 2024: A retrospective cohort study

Objectives: To examine changes in seasonal influenza vaccine uptake among clinical risk groups over periods of differing age-based eligibility. Design: Retrospective cohort study. Setting: Individuals in England registered in the Clinical Practice Research Datalink Aurum. Participants: Between 1,239,802 (2019/20) and 1,289,330 (2023/24) individuals aged 40-69 years in clinical risk groups. Interventions: Natural experiment involving temporary expansion of age-based eligibility for influenza vaccination to include 50-64-year-olds from 2020/21 to 2022/23. Main outcome measures: Influenza vaccine uptake from 1st September to 28th February, incidence rate ratio (IRR) of vaccine uptake across consecutive seasons within age groups, and the ratio of IRRs between age groups. Results: Influenza vaccine uptake increased in all age groups in 2020/21 relative to 2019/20. The increase was larger in individuals aged 50-64 years (13.3%; IRR 1.50, 95% CI 1.50-1.51) compared with those aged 40-49 years (8.3%; IRR 1.35, 95% CI 1.34-1.35) and 65-69 years (6.8%; IRR 1.34, 95% CI 1.33-1.35). From 2020/21 to 2022/23, vaccine uptake decreased, with a more pronounced decline among those aged 40-49 years (-5.4%) compared with age-eligible groups (50-64 years: -3.0%; 65-69 years: -3.1%). The reversion of age eligibility in 2023/24 was associated with a larger decrease in uptake among those aged 50-64 years (-9.6% vs 2022/23; IRR 0.79, 95% CI: 0.79-0.79) compared with those aged 40-49 years (-4.9%; IRR 0.87, 95% CI: 0.87-0.88) and 65-69 years (-3.3%; IRR 0.97, 95% CI: 0.96-0.97). Patterns were broadly consistent across clinical risk groups. Conclusions: The COVID-19 pandemic saw a general increase in seasonal influenza vaccine uptake in clinical risk groups. This increase was larger and more sustained in 50-64 year-olds who had also become eligible based on age. Our findings highlight the potential gains in vaccine coverage among clinical risk groups based on expanded age-based eligibility.

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

Graphical conditional generative modeling for digital twin modeling

arXiv:2606.16219v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Digital twin modeling, including control and data assimilation under model uncertainty, often faces an open-ended fidelity problem: adding variables, data streams, and time scales can indefinitely increase model complexity, ultimately producing systems that are difficult to maintain, validate, interpret, and use for stress or safety testing. As an alternative, one can seek parsimonious stochastic surrogate models built only on the variables needed to describe the relevant quantities of interest. We introduce a framework for discovering such variables from observational data by identifying which candidate inputs influence the full conditional law of a target quantity, rather than only its conditional mean. This distinction is essential in stochastic, coarse-grained, or partially observed systems, where dependencies may appear through changes in variability, tail behavior, multimodality, or uncertainty rather than through deterministic functional relationships. The framework couples conditional generative modeling, which learns the conditional distribution of the target given candidate inputs, with Gaussian-process-based analysis of variance (through kernel mode decomposition), which enables iterative pruning of non-influential inputs and interpretable structure discovery. In control settings, the resulting surrogate can be interpreted as a learned Markov decision process: the method identifies not only a transition model, but also the state, action, and memory variables needed to make the learned dynamics effectively Markovian. Across examples involving stochastic dynamical systems, missing variables, PDE control, reinforcement learning, and economic data, the discovered structures yield interpretable stochastic surrogates whose downstream performance is comparable to models trained on the full variable set.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Martingale Solutions to a Stochastic Keller-Segel System with nonlocal Source and Super-linear Noise

arXiv:2606.11774v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Global nonnegative martingale solutions are shown to exist for a stochastic Keller-Segel system with a nonlocal Fisher-KPP source and super-linear multiplicative noise. The result is obtained for nonnegative initial data with no smallness assumption, provided that the nonlocal source term is dominant. The main difficulty stems from the absence of a coercive structure and the super-linear nature of the noise. An additional cut-off with finite L^2 norm in the classical Galerkin method is added to establish a well-posed approximation problem. Moreover, due to the nonlocal Fisher-KPP structure, it is necessary to prove the positivity of the approximating solution in order to obtain uniform estimates. In the compactness arguments, the usual tightness argument in the framework of Hilbert spaces cannot be directly applied to the uniform estimates obtained in this paper. As a result, we develop a more general version of the compactness argument and tightness criterion, presented in the appendix, which will be applied throughout the paper. This allows for the global existence of nonnegative martingale solutions to be derived from Jakubowski's version of the Skorokhod Theorem, along with a thorough discussion of the convergence properties.

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

JoyAI-VL-Interaction: Real-Time Vision-Language Interaction Intelligence

Many moments in the real world do not wait for a user to ask. A fire starts on a security monitor, an expression flickers across a video call, or a product a viewer wants flashes by in a livestream. Yet today's large models remain mostly turn-based by design: they answer only when addressed, and even video-call apps that appear interactive still operate as question-answer systems, reacting only when polled or prompted. We argue for a different paradigm: a model that is present in the world like a person. It continuously watches what is happening now, decides on its own whether to speak or stay silent, interacts in real time, and delegates to a background model when the problem is hard. To advance interaction models and their adoption across domains, we make two fully open-sourced contributions. First, we release JoyAI-VL-Interaction, an 8B-scale, vision-first VL-interaction model. The model makes the response decision internally, choosing each second to stay silent, respond, or delegate to a background model, and it excels at vision-triggered responsiveness and time awareness. We pair it with a transferable training recipe, from which capabilities we never trained for emerge, such as guiding a shopper through changing app screens or improvising a lecture from a slide deck. Second, we release a complete, deployable system built around that model. The system streams any ongoing video into the model, making it genuinely present in the world. All other components are pluggable, including ASR/TTS modules, memory, visualization UI, and a background brain that can connect to any API or agent. Across six real-world scenarios, human raters prefer JoyAI-VL-Interaction over the in-app video-call assistants of Doubao and Gemini by a wide margin. To our knowledge, this is the first open, vision-driven interaction model released together with its training recipe, data, and complete deployable system.

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

Auditing Reward Hackability in Code RL Training Environments

arXiv:2606.16062v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We measure the rate at which code RL environments accept incorrect solutions as correct. On a 49-task sample of SWE-bench Verified, 28.5% of tasks have test suites weak enough that a Docker-verified incorrect patch passes them. On 20 R2E-Gym tasks across 6 repositories, the same pipeline at single-shot exploit generation yields 25.0%. A random-effects meta-analysis over 134 frontier model submissions to SWE-bench Verified finds, within the same human-rated difficulty stratum, model Pass@1 is +14.14 percentage points higher on flagged-hackable tasks than on robust ones (95% CI [+11.80, +16.48]; one-sided p < 10^-6; I^2 = 0%; 123 of 134 models positive). We then describe a procedure for hardening the broken tasks. An inline LLM judge with a Docker gold-sanity gate runs each generated test against the gold solution before the judge is consulted. On the 11 broken tasks in the audit, the gate flags 65 of 105 decisive LLM-generated tests as failing on the gold patch itself, a 61.9% per-augmentation defect rate the LLM judge alone misses. With diversity-biased retry, the loop converges 9 of 11 tasks to a gated upgrade.

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

The Hidden Power of Scaling Factor in LoRA Optimization

arXiv:2606.12883v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), the scaling factor $\alpha$ is often treated as a mere complement to the learning rate, yet its role in optimization remains poorly understood. In this paper, we reveal that the scaling factor $\alpha$ and the learning rate function differently, with $\alpha$ emerging as the dominant driver of effective optimization, delivering gains that cannot be replicated by learning rate scaling alone. Through the synergy of extensive empirical analysis and a theoretical Signal-Drift framework, we uncover three findings into LoRA's scaling mechanism: First, LoRA's spectral suppression smooths the optimization landscape, rendering standard hyperparameters overly conservative and creating an optimization gap. Second, when leveraging this smoothness to accelerate convergence, $\alpha$ outperforms the learning rate by amplifying the task signal without increasing the drift ratio. Third, the optimal scaling factor follows a sublinear relationship with the rank, well characterized by a square-root law with an unexpectedly large coefficient, revealing the insufficient scaling of existing rank-tied heuristics. Based on these insights, we propose LoRA-$\alpha$, a minimalist framework that restores $\alpha$ to its principled regime, making LoRA compatible with standard small learning rates. Extensive evaluations across diverse tasks demonstrate that LoRA-$\alpha$ consistently improves performance while streamlining hyperparameter search, unleashing the learning potential of LoRA.

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

CLAD: Constrained Latent Action Diffusion for Vision-Language Procedure Planning

We propose CLAD, a Constrained Latent Action Diffusion model for vision-language procedure planning in instructional videos. Procedure planning is the challenging task of predicting intermediate actions given a visual observation of a start and a goal state. However, future interactive AI systems must also be able to plan procedures using multi-modal input, e.g., where visual observations are augmented with language descriptions. To tackle this vision-language procedure planning task, our method uses a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) to learn the latent representation of actions and observations as constraints and integrate them into the diffusion process. This approach exploits that the latent space of diffusion models already has semantics that can be used. We use the latent constraints to steer the diffusion model to better generate actions. We report extensive experiments on the popular CrossTask, Coin, and NIV datasets and show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. By evaluating ablated versions of our method, we further show that the proposed integration of the action and observation representations learnt in the VAE latent space is key to these performance improvements.

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

Anomaly Detection for Sparse and Irregular Multivariate Time Series with Latent SDEs

arXiv:2606.18898v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multivariate time series anomaly detection (MTSAD) is critical for a wide range of application areas, such as industrial monitoring, cybersecurity, or healthcare. Real-world data is often sparse, irregularly sampled or partially observed, yet existing methods assume uniformly sampled time series. We propose a generative approach based on Latent SDEs that projects the observed time series on a continuous-time stochastic dynamical system, directly being able to handle missing observations and irregular sampling, while also naturally capturing possible cyclic behavior that many real-world use cases inherently possess. Experiments on six anomaly benchmark datasets show that our proposed method ranks first among state-of-the-art baselines. We further demonstrate that our method remains robust under severe data sparsity, while performance significantly degrades for the tested baseline methods. These results highlight latent SDEs as a natural inductive bias for anomaly detection in multivariate time series, especially in presence of real-world irregularities.

19.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Looking beyond stereotyped neuron structures reveals links between beading and morphological rearrangements in aging phenotypes.

Understanding how neuronal morphology changes during aging and acute stress is essential for elucidating mechanisms of neurodegeneration. The highly branched PVD neuron of Caenorhabditis elegans provides a powerful model for studying dendritic remodeling and degeneration-associated phenotypes such as dendritic beading. However, the complexity of this arbor presents substantial challenges for automated segmentation and quantitative analysis. In this study, we adapted a convolutional neural network (CNN)-guided region growing framework for automated dendrite tracing, coupled with two topology-based algorithms for categorizing dendritic segments by branching degree. The segmentation algorithm achieved high accuracy relative to manual tracing, with a median Dice coefficient of 0.82, while reducing analysis time by approximately tenfold. Automated dendrite categorization demonstrated strong agreement with manual annotations across branching orders, though position-based mapping performance declined with age due to progressive morphological distortion. Leveraging this platform, we investigated mechanistic differences in dendritic beading patterns observed during aging and cold shock. Consistent with prior work, aging was associated with decreased inter-bead spacing, whereas cold shock produced increased bead dispersion with stress severity. Structural analysis revealed that these trends were not driven by dendritic pruning or reduced arbor complexity. Instead, while a traditional anatomically unflexible paradigm falsely implicated lower-degree dendrites as highly vulnerable, our branching-informed framework revealed that age-dependent beading is fundamentally dictated by a segments history of successive branching events. Conversely, acute cold shock triggered systemic beading that expanded across all dendritic orders in a severity-dependent manner. Together, these findings demonstrate that chronic aging and acute stress engage distinct degenerative pathways (compartment-specific lineage vulnerability versus global architectural collapse) rather than gross morphological loss, as well as highlighting the need for paradigms that enable reliable analysis of changing morphologies.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

The ACUTE Protocol: Operationalizing Language Model Activations for Better Calibration, Utility, and Trust

As language models improve and become increasingly deployed to solve a variety of tasks, trustworthiness becomes essential. Calibration is a good proxy for trust: well-calibrated confidence estimates help inform the risk versus reward tradeoff when trusting a specific model output. Unfortunately, even as models improve, they remain poorly calibrated, often biasing towards overconfidence. Additionally, calibration can be gamed: a policy that always predicts the base rate is perfectly calibrated, but completely uninformative. To resolve this, we develop a new metric, expected utility renormalized by the oracle (EURO), that balances calibration and informativeness. We also propose a general-purpose activation-based confidence, utility, and trust estimation protocol (ACUTE) to appropriately adjudicate uncertainty. The ACUTE protocol provides flexible, sample-efficient, and compute-efficient confidence estimators for 3 tasks including multiple choice question answering, tool-calling, and scientific document summarization across 6 models from 4 model families. ACUTE outperforms strong baselines on EURO, while maintaining low calibration error. Taken together, our work shows that equipping LLMs with the ACUTE protocol can improve calibration, utility, and trustworthiness in numerous settings.

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

When Similar Means Different: Evaluating LLMs on Arabic–Hebrew Cognates

Arabic and Hebrew, as closely related Semitic languages, share a substantial lexicon of true cognates, misleading false friends, and modern loanwords. This overlap poses a challenge for cross-lingual semantic understanding in large language models (LLMs). To evaluate this capability, we introduce SemCog Bench, a curated benchmark of 1,858 Arabic–Hebrew word pairs with sentence-level annotations for cognate identification and semantic disambiguation. We evaluate open-source and commercial LLMs across multiple input representations (raw, diacritized, Romanized, and phonetic) and reveal a critical gap in cross-lingual reasoning. While models achieve high accuracy on true cognates, performance drops sharply on false friends and loanwords, reflecting a strong reliance on surface-form similarity. Furthermore, sentence-level context yields only modest improvements, suggesting that contextual cues alone are insufficient to overcome misleading form-based signals. These findings reveal a fundamental limitation of current LLMs in resolving cross-lingual form–meaning conflicts and establish SemCog Bench as a rigorous benchmark for multilingual semantic reasoning. Our code and data are publicly available.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Scalable Pairwise Kernel Learning with Stochastic Vec Trick

arXiv:2606.16979v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pairwise learning is a specialized form of supervised learning that focuses on predicting outcomes for pairs of objects. In this work, we introduce SPaiK, a new scalable kernel learning method tailored for pairwise settings. Our approach preserves the expressive power of kernel methods while substantially reducing computational and memory requirements. The key innovation is the stochastic generalized vec trick (sGVT), a stochastic extension of the sparse Kronecker product multiplication algorithm, which enables efficient large-scale training with pairwise kernels. By incorporating sGVT, SPaiK makes it possible to apply kernel-based pairwise learning to datasets of a size previously out of reach. We evaluate the performance of SPaiK on seven real-world drug-target affinity datasets and compare the results with state-of-the-art methods in pairwise learning.

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

Texture-Shape Bias Balancing for Robust Synthetic-to-Real Semantic Segmentation in Automotive NIR Imagery

Semantic segmentation is a fundamental component of visual perception in modern automotive systems, enabling pixel-level scene understanding. Near-Infrared imaging (NIR) offers stable detection under difficult illumination conditions, but the development of domain-specific semantic segmentation models remains challenging due to the lack of high-quality annotated data from real-world scenarios. Synthetic datasets offer a scalable alternative, but models trained on synthetic images often suffer performance degradation when transferred to real domains. We present the first systematic study on synthetic to real domain adaptation for semantic segmentation in NIR images in the automotive domain. We propose a generative augmentation framework that transforms synthetic images into realistic NIR-style variants via our introduced target style adaptation (TSA). TSA fine-tunes a latent diffusion model via low-rank adaptation on a small curated set of real NIR images and applies it to synthetic training data using structure-preserving multi-signal conditioning. To reduce texture bias and improve segmentation robustness, we further apply a Voronoi-based style diversification strategy (VSD) that modifies the original textures while preserving scene geometry. Experiments with multiple model architectures on NIR data from vehicle interiors and street scenes show that balancing inductive bias during training leads to noticeably more robust semantic segmentation and effectively reduces the domain gap in our real-world scenarios by up to 63.6% on exterior and 28.4% on interior data. The code is available at GitHub.

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

A Hybrid GNN-FEM Framework for Phase-Field Fracture Simulation. Physics-Preserving Hybridization for Generalizable Surrogate Modeling

arXiv:2606.19378v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scientific machine learning (SciML) has emerged as a promising approach for accelerating simulations of complex physical systems, yet achieving physically consistent and generalizable predictions for nonlinear, history-dependent problems remains a central challenge. In this study, we propose a hybrid GNN–FEM framework for efficient and generalizable phase-field fracture modeling. While phase-field approaches provide a robust variational framework for simulating complex crack evolution, their high computational cost limits practical applications because they require solving coupled, nonlinear, and history-dependent systems within an incremental finite element procedure. To address this challenge, a graph neural network surrogate is integrated into the conventional staggered scheme, replacing the phase-field update at each load increment while retaining the FEM-based displacement solver to enforce mechanical equilibrium and boundary conditions. By preserving the incremental solution structure, the framework remains consistent with history-dependent fracture evolution without requiring the surrogate to approximate the full solution trajectory. This selective surrogate strategy emphasizes the identification of a physically meaningful and incrementally structured learning target, rather than relying on brute-force data generation to learn the full fracture process. The proposed framework achieves strong generalization across varying geometries, loading conditions, material properties, and discretizations through dimensionless feature design, a graph-based formulation on mesh-based domains, and a physics-informed loss derived from the governing phase-field equation. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the hybrid approach reduces computational cost while maintaining accuracy compared with conventional FEM, and exhibits robust predictive performance across diverse problem settings.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

LoHoSearch: Benchmarking Long-Horizon Search Agents Beyond the Human Difficulty Ceiling

Search agent benchmarks exemplified by BrowseComp have rapidly saturated over the past year, with the strongest models surpassing 90% accuracy. Since these benchmarks are predominantly human-authored, annotators lack a global perspective on entity statistics and cannot systematically maximize search space size and structural complexity. This creates a difficulty ceiling that is hard to break. To address this, we introduce LoHoSearch (Long-Horizon Search Agents), a challenging benchmark comprising 544 human-verified questions across 11 domains. LoHoSearch is constructed via an automated pipeline built upon a knowledge graph covering over 7 million Wikipedia entities, which selects relations with large search spaces and assembles them into structurally complex questions with KG-verified unique answers. Our evaluation demonstrates that even the strongest model achieves only 34.74% accuracy, and existing context management strategies (best +6.8%) yield far smaller gains than on prior benchmarks. LoHoSearch provides a more demanding standard for evaluating long-horizon reasoning and context management in search agents.