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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Using wastewater surveillance to explore community-level dietary intake in sewered and non-sewered sanitation systems in Malawi, Africa

Wastewater can be used to measure biomarkers that reflect population-level dietary intake and diversity; however, how this approach may apply in a low-income country remains a knowledge gap. This study aims to evaluate whether select dietary-related metabolites can be detected in wastewater and environmental surveillance (WES) samples from both sewered and non-sewered sanitation systems in Malawi, Africa. Fourteen WES samples were collected and analyzed from two university campuses in Mzuzu and Thyolo, Malawi. Four targets were analyzed: N-methyl-2-pyridone-5-carboxamide (2PY; a biomarker of vitamin B3), 4-pyridoxic acid (4-PA; a biomarker of vitamin B6), as well as enterodiol and enterolactone (biomarkers of dietary fiber and polyphenol consumption). An 18-question survey, paired spatiotemporally with the WES measurements, assessed self-reported daily dietary intake, food insecurity, and nutrient deficiency symptoms among 500 respondents. Among the 14 WES samples, 2PY, 4-PA, and enterolactone were detected, while enterodiol was not detected above the method limit (

02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Asymptotics of the number of labelled connected sparse multitype graphs

arXiv:2606.17912v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the asymptotic enumeration of labelled connected multitype graphs in the sparse regime, where both the number of vertices and edges grow linearly and the excess is proportional to the size of the graph. Extending the classical theory of connected graph enumeration to the multitype setting, we consider graphs with prescribed numbers of vertices of each type and prescribed edge counts between each pair of types. Our approach is probabilistic and relies on the theory of inhomogeneous random graphs. In particular, we exploit large-deviation principles and asymptotic estimates for connectedness probabilities to relate the counting problem to the emergence of giant components in suitably tuned supercritical random graphs. From large deviation asymptotics of connected components of inhomogeneous random graphs, we recognize that a connected graph with a given edge statistics corresponds to the (unique) giant component of larger inhomogeneous random graph with a suitably chosen connection kernel. This correspondence allows us to derive the leading exponential asymptotics for the number of connected multitype graphs with fixed type profile and edge matrix. The resulting formula generalizes the asymptotic enumeration results of Bender, Canfield, and McKay for connected sparse graphs to the multitype framework. More broadly, the paper illustrates how probabilistic techniques can provide transparent and effective tools for addressing new combinatorial enumeration problems.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Cancer care disruption during the COVID-19 pandemic in Ontario, Canada: A sequential mixed-methods study

Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic profoundly disrupted healthcare delivery worldwide, with cancer care among the most affected services. Prior studies documented delays in referrals, reduced specialist access, and increased provider burden. However, the extent to which these experiences were reflected at the system level remains unclear. Objective To document cancer care experiences and examine whether these experiences were reflected in population-level health system indicators across Ontario, Canada. Methods We used an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design. Qualitative data were collected through focus groups and semi-structured interviews with 32 participants, including patients with cancer (n=8), caregivers (n=5), healthcare providers (n=14), and decision-makers (n=5) across two hospital settings in Ontario, Canada. Emergent themes informed the development of quantitative indicators. We then conducted a retrospective population-based analysis of linked administrative health databases for cancer patients in Ontario (n=87,786) to assess the prevalence of identified themes. Results Four themes emerged: (I) delays in diagnosis and screening; (II) disrupted access to primary care; (III) barriers to specialist and mental health services; and (IV) fragmented care for patients with multimorbidity. Quantitative findings corroborated major themes. Screening rates declined for cervical (64.8% to 57.5%) and breast cancer (64.5% to 57.2%). While in-person primary care shifted almost entirely to virtual modalities (8.5% to 95.4%), overall visit volumes remained stable. Specialist care showed uneven patterns, with increased oncology visits but declines in cardiology and mental health services. Patients with multiple comorbidities experienced the largest reductions in non-oncology specialist care. Conclusion The pandemic disrupted key components of cancer care, particularly screening, access to certain specialist services, and care for patients with complex needs. Integrating qualitative and quantitative evidence highlights areas of system vulnerability and underscores the need for coordinated, resilient cancer care capable of maintaining essential services during future crises.

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

Graph Learning Should Move Beyond Restrictive Views of Spectral and Message-Passing GNNs

arXiv:2602.10031v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs) are commonly divided into message-passing neural networks (MPNNs) and spectral GNNs, reflecting two largely separate research traditions in machine learning and signal processing. While MPNNs have a precise definition, there is no widely accepted criterion for what makes a mapping a spectral GNN. Most existing work restricts spectral GNNs to layered architectures based on linear spectral filters. Under this restriction, we show that spectral and spatial GNNs have largely equivalent expressive power. To promote progress in the field, we propose a precise definition of spectral GNNs based on eigenbasis symmetries, in contrast to the definition of MPNNs via neighborhood permutation symmetries. We further argue that the two perspectives offer complementary strengths. MPNNs provide a natural language for discrete structure and expressivity analysis through tools from logic and graph isomorphism, while the spectral perspective offers principled tools for understanding smoothing, bottlenecks, stability, and community structure. Overall, we argue that progress in graph learning will be accelerated by clarifying the similarities and differences between these perspectives and by moving toward a unified theoretical framework.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Periodic-MAE: Periodic Video Masked Autoencoder for rPPG Estimation

In this paper, we propose Periodic-MAE, a self-supervised framework for learning generalizable spatio-temporal representations of periodic physiological signals from unlabeled facial videos. The proposed method leverages a masked autoencoder (MAE), which learns high-dimensional facial representations by reconstructing masked video tokens without relying on remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) specific supervision. To explicitly align representation learning with the characteristics of rPPG, we introduce a periodicity-aware frame masking strategy based on video resampling, enabling the encoder to learn representations that capture quasi-periodic temporal patterns relevant to pulse signal estimation. In addition, physiological bandlimit constraints are integrated into the MAE pre-training framework, exploiting the sparsity of pulse signals in the frequency domain to guide the learned representations toward physiologically meaningful patterns. After pre-training, the learned representations are transferred to downstream rPPG estimation, where the encoder serves as a generic feature extractor for recovering pulse-related signals from facial videos. We conduct extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets, including PURE, UBFC-rPPG, MMPD, and V4V. Moreover, we evaluate the proposed approach on a real-world rPPG dataset collected under unconstrained lighting conditions and subject motion. Experimental results demonstrate that Periodic-MAE consistently improves rPPG estimation performance, particularly in challenging cross-dataset and real-world evaluation settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/ziiho08/Periodic-MAE.

06.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

The Long Tail, Not the Front Page: Cold-Start Prediction of Crowd Highlight Salience

A social highlighter's most useful signal – which passages a crowd of readers marks – exists only for documents people have already read. Can the aggregate crowd salience of a document be predicted from its text before its marks accumulate? Prior work on this data found that zero-shot language models recover highlight locations worse than a trivial lead (position) baseline, so we ask whether a model trained on the highlight corpus can beat that baseline. Using a pre-registered ladder of models and a by-document cluster bootstrap, we find a small but robust edge: a logistic ranker over sentence embeddings and positional/contextual features beats the lead baseline by +0.044 average precision (95% CI [+0.029, +0.058]; clears a pre-registered margin delta=0.03 in 97% of resamples, and stable across pipeline re-runs). Two unsupervised extractive baselines (centroid, LexRank-style centrality) lose to lead, and the trained model beats them by +0.108, so the edge is not recovered by generic unsupervised proxies – it reflects learning from real reader marks. In product terms, precision@3 rises from 0.25 to 0.39 (+55% relative) and the model beats lead on 69% of documents. An ablation attributes the edge to the raw embedding (+0.014) and training augmentation (+0.010), each with a positive CI. The edge is not a temporal-generalization failure, and we find no evidence that content drift or near-duplicate leakage explains it. A standardized regression shows the advantage is governed mainly by document popularity (lower popularity, larger edge) and by label reliability. It nearly vanishes only on the most popular content; there it is the lead baseline that strengthens, not the model that weakens. Because our evaluation conditions on documents that eventually accumulated readers, these results are a retrospective cold-start simulation.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Adapting Vision-Language Models from Iconic to Inclusive for Multi-Label Recognition Without Labels

Understanding multi-label images remains a challenging task in computer vision. With the rapid progress of vision-language multimodal learning, vision-language models (VLMs) enable zero-shot recognition without labeled data. However, due to their intrinsic design, these models often prioritize the most iconic object and omit other contextual positives. This intrinsic bias conflicts with the nature of multi-label learning, thereby limiting their applicability. In this work, we propose an unsupervised framework that adapts VLMs from iconic recognition toward inclusive understanding, enabling label-free multi-label image recognition. Our approach consists of two key stages, ``cutting'' and ``sewing'': In the cutting stage, we present the multi-sampling response estimator to prevent the model from concentrating only on one single object. In the second sewing stage, the multi-object blend adaptation is introduced to adjust the labels to better conform to the multi-label distribution while preserving the intrinsic characteristics of the original model within only one epoch. Extensive experiments show that our framework significantly outperforms existing unsupervised approaches on four public datasets, even surpassing several representative weakly supervised baselines. These results demonstrate the potential of adapting pre-trained VLMs for more comprehensive visual understanding without manual annotations. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/iCVTEAM/TailorCLIP.

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

DenseControl: Instance-Level Controllable Synthesis of Dense Crowd Image

In this paper, we introduce DenseControl, a novel pipeline for generating dense crowd images. Specifically, DenseControl meticulously positions and sizes each generated instance to align precisely with the predefined coordinates and scales. Based on this, we further allow for control over the background, style, and attributes of instances. The motivation behind DenseControl stems from the observation of two main challenges in synthesizing crowd images: controlling signal embedding and maintaining topological integrity when imparting instance scale guidance. To address these, we first introduce the Isolated Object Embedding (IOE) map, a novel representation that facilitates spatial location control while mitigating the difficulties associated with learning projections for model. Secondly, we propose an Implicit Scale Embedding (ISE) strategy that seamlessly integrates with the IOE map to encode precise scale information. To further enhance the efficacy of combining ISE with the IOE map, we incorporate a Position Shortcut mechanism that enhances cross-attention to alleviate projection challenges. We evaluate DenseControl through two lenses: synthesis quality and applicability in latent applications. Experiments across different control conditions demonstrate DenseControl achieves state-of-the-art results in dense crowd image synthesis. Furthermore, we showcase applications in augmenting crowd analysis under data scarcity, transfer learning, and weather generalization scenes, to highlight the practical utility of DenseControl. The codebase will be released.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Attention-Based Estimation of the Individual Treatment Benefit Probability under Dose Variation

arXiv:2606.13821v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Estimating the probability that a treatment outperforms a control for an individual patient, called the Individual Probability of Treatment Benefit (IPTB), offers a clinically intuitive alternative to population-average metrics. However, existing methods for IPTB estimation are largely confined to binary treatment settings, despite the prevalence of dose-varying interventions in clinical practice. We propose a general framework for IPTB estimation with ordinal outcomes under discrete dose assignments, called Dose-AIPTB (Dose Attention-based IPTB). Our approach recasts the problem as binary classification over the unobserved sign of the individual treatment effect, constructing pseudo-labels from covariate-similar pairwise comparisons and aggregating them via attention mechanisms or Nadaraya-Watson kernel regression. This formulation naturally accommodates multiple discrete dose levels, extending beyond the binary treatment paradigm. Through numerical experiments on real-world and synthetic data under covariate shift, varying sample sizes, and heterogeneous outcomes, we demonstrate that attention-based aggregation consistently outperforms kernel alternatives. The framework provides a foundation for personalized dose selection grounded in individual-level benefit probabilities. Codes implementing the model are publicly available at https://github.com/NTAILab/AIPTBDose.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

VDE Bench: Evaluating The Capability of Image Editing Models to Modify Visual Documents

In recent years, image editing models have made significant progress, enabling users to manipulate visual content in a flexible and interactive manner through natural language instructions. However, an important yet underexplored research direction remains dense visual document image editing, which involves modifying textual content within images while faithfully preserving the original text style and background context. Existing methods primarily focus on English scenarios and images with relatively sparse text, and thus cannot adequately address dense, structurally complex documents or non-Latin scripts such as Chinese. To bridge this gap, we propose VDE Bench (Visual Doc Edit Bench), a rigorously human annotated and evaluated benchmark specifically designed to assess the performance of image editing models on bilingual Chinese-English and complex visual document editing tasks. The benchmark comprises a high quality dataset of 942 instruction based image editing samples, whose seed images encompass dense Chinese and English text documents including academic papers, posters, presentation slides, examination materials, and newspapers. Furthermore, we introduce a novel evaluation framework that systematically quantifies editing performance at the OCR parsing level, thereby enabling fine grained assessment of text modification accuracy. Based on this benchmark, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of representative image editing models. Human verification demonstrates a high degree of consistency between human judgments and automated evaluation metrics. VDE Bench constitutes the first systematic benchmark for evaluating the performance of image editing models on bilingual dense text visual documents.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Mitigating Visual Hallucinations in Multimodal Systems through Retrieval-Augmented Reliability-Aware Inference

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in vision-language understanding and natural-language response generation. However, these systems can still produce overconfident predictions and hallucination-like outputs, particularly when the visual evidence is weak, ambiguous, or semantically inconsistent. Most existing approaches focus on improving multimodal representation alignment or retrieval-augmented generation, while providing limited mechanisms to quantify instance-level prediction reliability or identify incorrect visual outputs. This work proposes a retrieval-augmented reliability-aware inference framework for trustworthy multimodal visual understanding. The proposed framework constructs an external visual evidence database using pretrained visual embeddings and nearest-neighbor retrieval over normalized feature representations. Retrieved evidence is used to estimate prediction trustworthiness through multiple reliability indicators, including similarity strength, class-support agreement, evidence margin, entropy-based uncertainty, and an aggregate reliability score. Based on these signals, a decision gate determines whether the system should accept the prediction, answer with caution, or abstain/fallback when evidence is insufficient. A multimodal response-generation layer then produces a final user-facing response conditioned on the reliability decision. Experiments on ImageNet-100 demonstrate that the proposed reliability-aware framework improves accepted prediction accuracy from 85.84\% to 88.88\% at 89.04\% coverage. The hallucination-like accepted wrong-answer rate is reduced from 14.16\% to 11.12\%. These results show that integrating retrieval evidence, reliability estimation, and selective decision gating can improve calibration and reduce overconfident visual errors without retraining large multimodal models.

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

Practical Tests and Witnesses of Fermionic non-Gaussianity

arXiv:2605.26218v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fermionic Gaussian states describe free fermions and underlie the mean-field picture of matter, from metals to superconductors; they are also efficiently simulable on classical computers. Departures from Gaussianity – the correlations produced by interactions – are therefore what make a fermionic system hard to simulate classically and useful for quantum computation, analogous to the role of magic in stabilizer-based quantum computation. Yet detecting and quantifying such non-Gaussianity at scale has remained challenging. Here we introduce practical tests and witnesses of fermionic non-Gaussianity built on fermionic antiflatness, a measure derived from the two-point covariance matrix. We estimate it with two protocols – a two-copy Bell measurement and a single-copy scheme using commuting Majorana bilinears – that determine whether a state is Gaussian or far from it at lower measurement cost than existing approaches, using only operations native to fault-tolerant hardware. For mixed states, a purity-corrected witness certifies non-Gaussianity and remains robust under strong noise; running it on the IQM quantum processor, we find that noise can both reduce and enhance non-Gaussianity. Finally, we show that preparing pseudorandom fermionic states requires extensive non-Gaussianity. Together, these tools enable the study and certification of non-Gaussian fermionic resources on present-day quantum devices.

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

A Five-Plane Reference Architecture for Runtime Governance of Production AI Agents

作者:

arXiv:2606.12320v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Enterprise security was built to govern data boundaries: the protected surface was data at rest and in transit, and the controls – access control, data-loss prevention, perimeter inspection – governed crossings of that boundary. Production AI agents dissolve this assumption. An agent reads context, calls tools, invokes connectors, and modifies systems of record on an enterprise's behalf, so risk moves inside the workflow, into sequences of individually-permitted actions that may transform a business process no one authorized. Existing policy engines do not extend to this regime: they evaluate request-time decisions against atomic principals, where agentic systems require stateful evaluation against composite principals whose authority attenuates through delegation chains. We present a reference architecture for the runtime governance of production agents, built from four composable primitives: a five-plane decomposition (a reasoning plane that adjudicates intent, and four enforcement planes – network, identity, endpoint, data – that realize the decision), stop-anywhere mediation, composite principals with capability attenuation, and audit as a structured evidence substrate. We define a taxonomy of six interruption primitives that generalize allow and deny, state and argue for four correctness invariants, and demonstrate the foreclosure of seven production-agent threats across five concrete workflows. A reference implementation of the policy-engine core supplies measured evidence: attenuation correctness and evidence reconstructability hold on every trial, adjudication runs in single-digit microseconds, and the audit substrate's tamper-evidence behaves exactly as designed. We are explicit about scope: the architecture governs delegated action, not model behavior, and a full-system evaluation against a live agent benchmark is the invited next step.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Hierarchical Attention via Domain Decomposition

arXiv:2606.18525v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a hierarchical attention mechanism based on two-level overlapping Schwarz domain decomposition. The method is motivated by the observation that two-level Schwarz domain decomposition methods combine local subdomain corrections with a coarse level that communicates global, long-range information. We test its usefulness in the context of finite-dimensional operator learning using a simple, one-dimensional diffusion problem with homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions. Although elementary, this problem provides a controlled sequence-to-sequence setting in which the exact nonlocal solution operator is known. After discretization, learning the solution operator amounts to approximating the inverse of a symmetric positive definite matrix. As a baseline, we use a global softmax-free low-rank attention operator of the form $QK^T$. The proposed construction replaces this dense global factorization by a two-level additive structure: local low-rank attention blocks on overlapping subdomains are combined with a coarse attention block. The resulting operator has the form $$M_{\theta}^{-1} = \Phi Q_0 K_0^T \Phi^T + \sum_{i=1}^{N} R_i^T D_i^{1/2} Q_i K_i^T D_i^{1/2} R_i.$$ Here $R_i$ restricts to an overlapping subdomain, $D_i$ is a partition-of-unity weight, and $\Phi$ is a coarse interpolation (or prolongation) matrix. Numerical experiments for synthetic Fourier right-hand sides indicate that the domain-decomposition attention operator is able to train faster and can give more accurate approximations than a global low-rank attention baseline while using significantly fewer parameters.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

A Convex Quasilinearization Method for Solving Nonlinear PDEs with Physics-Informed Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.18175v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a numerical method for the forward solution of nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs) in which Bellman-Kalaba quasilinearization reduces the nonlinear problem to a sequence of linear subproblems, each discretized by collocation onto a trial space that is linear in its parameters and solved by a single direct linear least-squares QR factorization. The trial space, which we term Linear-in-Learnables (LiL), comprises representations whose trainable parameters enter linearly, including random-feature extreme learning machines, spectral polynomial bases, and trigonometric expansions, each implemented as a physics-informed neural network. The method thus replaces the nonconvex gradient-based training that limits standard PINNs with a convex per-step solve. We establish local Newton-Kantorovich convergence of the outer iteration to a residual-limited neighborhood under an explicit smallness condition, with the limiting accuracy governed by the best-approximation residual of the trial space rather than by an optimization tolerance. The method, denoted LiL-Q, is assessed on seven benchmarks spanning scalar nonlinear PDEs (Bratu, viscous Burgers, Buckley-Leverett), coupled systems (plane-strain elasticity and the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in two and three spatial dimensions), and steady-state Darcy flow with heterogeneous permeability. Across these problems, LiL-Q converges in single-digit outer iterations in most cases, even at the coarsest basis sizes and independent of the parameter count. When the exact solution lies in the span of the trial space, the method recovers it to machine precision in a single solve. On the Navier-Stokes benchmarks, it matches or exceeds published PINN solvers with up to two orders of magnitude fewer trainable parameters, without gradient-based optimization.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Within-host pathogen population diversity predicts treatment response in tuberculosis

Background: Tuberculosis (TB) treatment outcomes remain suboptimal, and standard clinical diagnostics cannot reliably identify patients at high risk of treatment failure or relapse at the time of diagnosis. While within-host Mycobacterium tuberculosis genetic diversity is hypothesized to reflect the viable bacterial burden and adaptive capacity of the infection, its clinical prognostic value remains unknown. Methods: We conducted a prospective cohort study of 364 patients with newly diagnosed, rifampicin-susceptible pulmonary TB in South Africa. Patients received standard 6-month therapy and were monitored for up to two years to ascertain composite unfavorable outcomes (treatment failure, death, or relapse). To accurately detect low-frequency (unfixed) genetic variants and eliminate reference bias artifacts, we mapped medium to high depth short-read sequences against matched, patient-specific long-read assemblies. The association between baseline pathogen genetic diversity and clinical outcomes was evaluated using multivariable Cox proportional-hazards models. Results: After bioinformatic filtering, true unfixed variants were relatively rare but significantly enriched in genes mediating pathogen adaptation and drug tolerance, including transporter proteins and two-component regulatory systems. Within-host bacterial genetic diversity (i.e., the total number of unfixed variants) ranged from 0-20, with a median of 1 per patient. In survival analysis adjusting for known clinical risk factors–including HIV status, prior TB, baseline smear positivity, and radiographic lung involvement–baseline within-host genetic diversity emerged as a strong, independent predictor of unfavorable treatment outcomes. For patients with greater than 3 unfixed variants at diagnosis, each increase of 5 unfixed variants was associated with more than double the risk of a composite unfavorable outcome (adjusted Hazard Ratio, 2.36; 95% CI, 1.27 to 4.39; p=0.007). Conclusions: Baseline within-host pathogen genetic diversity is an independent predictor of unfavorable TB treatment outcomes. As sequencing becomes increasingly integrated into routine diagnostics, quantifying unfixed variants is an accessible approach that promises to risk-stratify patients and guide the duration of individualized regimens.

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

Chronological Blindness: Benchmarking Temporal Reasoning in Vision-Language Models with CHRONOSIGHT

Human perception of visual scenes is inherently temporal. We instinctively recognise whether a fruit is ripening or rotting, whether construction is progressing or being demolished, and approximately how much time separates two photographs of the same subject. Whether large vision-language models (VLMs) share this competence remains an open and practically important question. We introduce CHRONOSIGHT, a rigorously controlled benchmark evaluating five dimensions of visual temporal reasoning: CHRONORANK (chronological ordering of image sequences), CHRONOLOCATE (ordinal stage localisation from a single image), CHRONODELTA (estimation of time elapsed between two images on a logarithmic scale), CHRONOREVERSE (detection of temporally reversed sequences), and CHRONOODD (identification of a temporal outlier within a set). The benchmark comprises 1{,}000 items across eight process families (biological growth, food transformation, physical weathering, construction, environmental change, human ageing, astronomical phenomena, and urban dynamics) spanning timescales from minutes to millennia. We evaluate eight open-source VLMs (500 M to 19 B parameters) under two prompting regimes and collect human performance baselines. Human performance averages 0.89 across tasks; the best open model (Qwen2.5-VL-7B) reaches 0.40 under direct prompting, a gap we term chronological blindness. Lightweight LoRA fine-tuning on 151 examples raises CHRONODELTA accuracy from near-zero to 0.43, transferring zero-shot to related tasks (CHRONOODD: 0.37; CHRONOREVERSE: 0.64)suggesting the bottleneck is partly instruction following rather than visual perception. Benchmark, code, and predictions will be released upon acceptance.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Learning Variable-Length Tokenization for Generative Recommendation

arXiv:2605.17779v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Generative recommendation reformulates recommendation as next-token prediction over discrete semantic identifiers (IDs). A fundamental yet unexplored design choice is that existing methods employ fixed-length tokenization for all items, implicitly assuming uniform encoding capacity regardless of item characteristics. Through systematic experiments across four datasets, we discover the Popularity-Length Paradox: popular items achieve optimal performance with short IDs, while tail items require substantially longer codes to capture discriminative semantics. This reveals a critical mismatch where popular items benefit from abundant collaborative signals and require minimal semantic detail, whereas tail items must rely on fine-grained content features due to sparse interaction data. To address this, we propose VarLenRec, a framework for learning variable-length tokenization. We develop Popularity-Weighted Information Budget Allocation (PIBA), an information-theoretic framework proving that optimal ID length should scale as a negative power of popularity. Directly implementing variable-length allocation faces two technical challenges: standard Euclidean residual quantization lacks geometric capacity to support diverse code lengths without distortion, and discrete length decisions are non-differentiable. We address these through Hyperbolic Residual Quantization, which leverages the exponential volume growth of the Poincaré ball to naturally stratify encoding capacity, and a Soft Length Controller, which enables differentiable length prediction via continuous layer retention probabilities regularized by PIBA-derived priors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VarLenRec achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods in recommendation accuracy and training/inference efficiency, revealing the importance of adaptive encoding capacity in generative recommendation.

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

MemToolAgent: Leveraging Memory for Tool Using Agents Based on Environment and User Feedback

Modern large language model (LLM) agents can use external tools to help users solve complex tasks. However, for problems that require learning from long-term historical events or from previous agent-environment interactions, LLM agents are required to use memory mechanisms to store and retrieve experiences. While sophisticated memory systems exist for dialogue agents, few studies have empirically examined how to improve agents' tool-using capabilities through past user-agent conversations. We propose MemToolAgent, a framework that improves tool use through memory management. Our approach contains a memory extraction module that processes past experiences into structured memory entries, and a retrieval module that dynamically selects a subset of the stored memory entries. This enables more personalized and accurate responses aligned with user preferences and feedback without requiring LLM fine-tuning. In summary, this work has three main contributions: (1) a unified memory entry format that improves both general-purpose and personalized tool use without LLM fine-tuning, (2) a reflection-based memory extraction that uses environment and user feedback to distill wrong executions into critiques to store, and (3) a retrieval module that chooses how many past experiences to use based on the memory similarity distribution. MemToolAgent achieves 29%, 80%, and 17% relative improvements compared to strong baselines on the WorkBench, NESTFUL, and PEToolBench benchmarks, respectively.

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Structure preserving properties of higher order moment closures for TASEP

arXiv:2604.15925v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The totally asymmetric simple exclusion process (TASEP) is a stochastic model for the unidirectional flow of interacting particles on a 1D-lattice that is much used in systems biology and statistical physics. Its master equation describes the evolution of the probability distribution on the configuration space. The size of the master equation grows exponentially with the length of the lattice. It is known that the complexity of the system may be reduced using mean-field approximations. We provide a rigorous definition of a family of such models using moments of any order and an extension to the pair approximation for obtaining closures for the system. The dimension of these models grows linearly with the lattice size and exponentially in the order of the approximation. Moreover, we show that the states of these models still have a probabilistic interpretation and that basic structural properties of the master equation are preserved. This extends known results on the Ribosome Flow Model which can be viewed as the first order approximation for TASEP.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

PianoKontext: Expressive Performance Rendering from Deadpan Context

arXiv:2606.12282v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Expressive performance rendering (EPR) aims to generate realistic performances constrained on sequences of notes. However, flow matching audio editing models manipulate only synchronized music samples of the same duration, limiting their understanding of expressive timing. We introduce PianoKontext, a flow matching rendering model for classical piano music that generates variable-length performances in the latent space of a pretrained Music2Latent model. We synthesize MIDI scores into deadpan audio and employ Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) in the latent space to construct paired data for training. The aligned embeddings are concatenated in DiT blocks, allowing for a simple and effective learning of the dependencies between the score and performances. Audio samples are available at our demo page: https://realfolkcode.github.io/pianokontext_demo/.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Mitigating Disparate Impact of Differentially Private Learning through Bounded Adaptive Clipping

arXiv:2506.01396v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Differential privacy (DP) has become an essential framework for privacy-preserving machine learning. Existing DP learning methods, however, often have disparate impacts on model predictions, e.g., for minority groups. Gradient clipping, which is often used in DP learning, can suppress larger gradients from challenging samples. We show that this problem is amplified by adaptive clipping, which will often shrink the clipping bound to tiny values to match a well-fitting majority, while significantly reducing the accuracy for others. We propose bounded adaptive clipping, which introduces a tunable lower bound to prevent excessive gradient suppression. Our method improves worst-class accuracy by over 10 percentage points on Skewed and Fashion MNIST compared to unbounded adaptive clipping, 7 points compared to Automatic clipping, and 5 points compared to constant clipping. The code is available at https://github.com/TrustworthyMLHelsinki/adaptive-clipping-fairness.

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

CRANE: Constrained Reasoning Injection for Code Agents via Nullspace Editing

Code agents must both reason over long-horizon repository state and obey strict tool-use protocols. In paired Instruct/Thinking checkpoints, these capabilities are complementary but misaligned. The Instruct model is concise and tool-disciplined, whereas the Thinking model offers stronger planning and recovery behavior but often over-deliberates and degrades agent performance. We present CRANE (Constrained Reasoning Injection for Code Agents via Nullspace Editing), a training-free parameter-editing method that treats the Thinking-Instruct delta as a directional pool of candidate reasoning edits for the Instruct backbone. CRANE combines magnitude thresholding to denoise the delta, a Conservative Taylor Gate to retain edits that are jointly beneficial for reasoning transfer and tool-use preservation, and Graduated Sigmoidal Projection to suppress format-critical update directions. By merging paired Instruct and Thinking checkpoints, CRANE delivers strong gains over either individual model while preserving Instruct-level efficiency: on Roo-Eval it achieves pass1 of 66.2% (+19.5%) for Qwen3-30B-A3B and 81.5% (+8.7%) for Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B; on SWE-bench-Verified it resolves up to 14 additional instances at both scales (122/500 and 180/500); and on Terminal-Bench v2 it improves pass1/pass5 by up to 2.3%/7.8%, reaching 7.6%/17.9% and 14.8%/30.3%, respectively, consistently outperforming alternative merging strategies across all three benchmarks.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Physics-Aware Auxiliary Losses Improve Out-of-Distribution Generalization of a GNN Synthesizability Filter

arXiv:2606.12651v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine-learning drug-discovery pipelines increasingly rely on generative models that propose molecules far from the data used to train downstream synthesizability filters. Existing filters (SAScore, SCScore, RAscore, DeepSA) are purely statistical and degrade in exactly this out-of-distribution (OOD) regime. We ask whether cheap, closed-form physical priors, used as auxiliary supervision on a graph neural network (GNN), improve OOD generalization. We add two auxiliary losses to a GINE backbone: a topological complexity regression supervised by the Bertz index, and a strain-energy soft penalty supervised by MMFF94 force-field energy. On a 65,177-molecule corpus (HIV, Tox21, COCONUT) labeled by SAScore thresholds we reproduce a strong in-distribution baseline, then evaluate a 4-way ablation (baseline / +complexity / +strain / +both) on a single-source OOD split (train on drug-like HIV+Tox21, test on COCONUT natural products), repeated over 5 seeds with paired bootstrap confidence intervals. All three physics-aware variants give a small but statistically significant OOD improvement over the baseline (mean OOD AUC 0.9774): +complexity Delta = +0.0060 (95% CI [+0.0023, +0.0102]), +strain Delta = +0.0032 ([+0.0008, +0.0052]), +both Delta = +0.0066 ([+0.0038, +0.0093]); every interval excludes zero, and the combination is best. The variants are indistinguishable in-distribution, so the effect is visible only under OOD evaluation. We are explicit that the effects are modest, and we report a cautionary methodological finding: a single-seed version of this experiment produced a qualitatively different (non-monotone) story that did not survive multi-seed evaluation.

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PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-04

Cell differentiation can underpin the reproducibility of morphogenesis

by Dominic K. Devlin, Austen R. D. Ganley, Nobuto Takeuchi Morphogenesis of complex body shapes is reproducible despite the noise inherent in the underlying morphogenetic processes. However, how these morphogenetic processes work together to achieve this reproducibility remains unclear. Here, we ask how this reproducibility is achieved by evolving complex morphologies in a multi-scale, computational model. Each morphology consists of a population of cells on a two-dimensional grid using the Cellular Potts Model framework. Each cell contains a genome that encodes a gene regulatory network, morphogens for cell-cell signalling, and proteins that determine cell behaviours. By repeatedly simulating our model with different initial conditions under selection for shape complexity, we obtained a “zoo” of evolved morphologies. We find that these evolved, complex morphologies are reproducible in a sizeable fraction of simulations, despite no direct selection for reproducibility. We show that high reproducibility is caused by spatially segregating moving cells that “shape” morphologies from stationary cells that “maintain” morphologies during morphogenesis. Strikingly, most highly reproducible morphologies also evolved cell differentiation, where proliferative, moving progenitor cells irreversibly differentiate into non-dividing, stationary differentiated cells at tissue boundaries. These results suggest that cell differentiation observed in natural development plays a fundamental role in morphogenesis in addition to the production of specialised cell types. This previously unrecognised role of cell differentiation has major implications for our understanding of how morphologies are generated and regenerated.