arXiv:2605.17826v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at multimodal reasoning, yet it remains unclear whether their answers are grounded in visual evidence or driven by learned language and world priors. Counting provides a precise testbed: when visual evidence conflicts with canonical object knowledge, a model must rely on the image rather than a prototypical count. We introduce CounterCount, a diagnostic framework for counterfactual counting in VLMs, consisting of paired factual and counterfactual images with edited count-relevant attributes, verified answers, and localized evidence annotations. Evaluating recent VLMs, we find strong performance on factual images but consistent degradation under counterfactual attribute changes, indicating reliance on object-level priors even when contradictory visual evidence is present. Using localized annotations, we show that these failures are not solely due to missing or ambiguous visual evidence, but to models underweighting attention to count-relevant visual tokens. We introduce a unified inference-time attention modulation strategy that reweights selected visual tokens, improving counterfactual counting accuracy by up to 8% across multiple VLMs. Overall, CounterCount exposes prior-driven counting failures and provides diagnostic insights for designing future VLMs.
Science Journals
arXiv:2510.15221v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Affective computing has matured rapidly in laboratory settings, yet no prior dataset combines (i) months-to-years of duration, (ii) a naturalistic workplace context, (iii) a stable small-team social structure, and (iv) a fully passive sensing protocol that survives institutional review. We introduce WELD, the first dataset to satisfy all four. WELD comprises 733,780 per-frame seven-class facial-expression probability vectors from 49 employees of a Chinese software company over 30.1 months (Nov 2021 - May 2024) -- the longest naturalistic in-the-wild emotion corpus and the only multi-year corpus supporting both within-individual longitudinal and within-team relational analyses on the same subjects. Data are released under a four-tier access model with only aggregated probabilities publicly downloadable. We validate the corpus by replicating three established phenomena (+43.1% weekend valence boost; 13:00-trough diurnal cycle; Shanghai 2022 lockdown effect d=-0.40), and report four novel findings: (1) variance decomposition attributes 19.3% of daily-valence variance to between-person differences and 29.8% to month seasonality -- a quantitative ceiling for future predictive models; (2) Hidden Markov decomposition reveals six emotional regimes with asymmetric negative-state dwell times (16-18 d vs 3 d); (3) leave-one-person-out turnover prediction reaches AUC=0.79 yet a Cox concordance index of only 0.52, exposing a metric-trap when AUC is reported without survival-aware baselines; (4) the corpus reveals systematic over-prediction of "angry" by an off-the-shelf FER model on neutral Asian faces (0.194 vs ~0.05 Western priors), making WELD valuable for FER fairness audits. A complex-systems analysis of the corpus appears as a companion preprint (arXiv:2510.16046).
arXiv:2605.08475v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Mechanistic accounts of in-context learning (ICL) have identified iterative algorithms for linear regression and related linear prediction tasks, often using linear or ReLU attention variants. For nonlinear ICL, prior work has related softmax and kernelized attention to functional-gradient-type dynamics, but it remains unclear whether a standard transformer with softmax attention can implement a convergent solver with an end-to-end prediction-error guarantee. In this paper, we study in-context kernel ridge regression (KRR) with Gaussian kernels and show that a standard softmax-attention transformer can approximate the KRR predictor during its forward pass by implementing preconditioned Richardson iteration on the associated kernel linear system. Under bounded-data assumptions, we construct a single-head transformer with $O(\log(1/\epsilon))$ blocks and MLP width $O(\sqrt{N/\epsilon})$ that achieves $\epsilon$-accurate prediction for prompts of length $N$. Our construction reveals a functional decomposition within the transformer architecture: softmax attention produces a row-normalized Gaussian-kernel operator needed for cross-token interactions, while ReLU MLP layers act locally to approximate the intra-token scalar arithmetic required by the update. Empirically, we train GPT-2-style transformers on Gaussian-process regression tasks to further test the preconditioned Richardson interpretation. Through linear probing, we compare the transformer's layer-wise predictions with the step-wise outputs of classical KRR solvers and find that its error profiles align most consistently with preconditioned Richardson iteration. Ablation studies further support this interpretation. Together, our theory and experiments identify preconditioned Richardson iteration as a concrete mechanism that softmax-attention transformers can realize for nonlinear in-context Gaussian-kernel regression.
arXiv:2605.18545v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Fringe projection profilometry (FPP) is a widely used technique for measuring object surface form and three-dimensional (3D) geometry, capable of delivering high-precision, high-resolution measurements when paired with suitable cameras and projectors. However, in practical deployments, identifying parameter configurations that maximise precision while satisfying real-world constraints remains challenging. To address this, we present an automated digital twin framework implemented in Blender, an open-source 3D software package that provides a ray-traced rendering environment that enables accurate simulation of physical systems. We replicated the physical setup in our digital twin by matching characterisation quality, gamma response, and characterisation images. Accurate system characterisation using Zhang's method [1], to obtain intrinsic and extrinsic parameters, is shown to be critical for achieving high precision. Using this digital twin, we then demonstrate systematic exploration and optimisation of key parameters, including phase-shift count, camera-projector spacing, and fringe density. These parameters span both system geometry (e.g. camera-projector positioning) and algorithmic choices, such as 2D phase-shifting and unwrapping methods [2]. Three measurement artefacts, representative of real world metrology scenarios, were used to benchmark the system. The symmetrical mean Chamfer distance (SMCD), computed between ground-truth and reconstructed meshes, was used to evaluate reconstruction quality. After optimisation within the digital twin, transferring the optimal parameters to the physical system reduced the number of required images per measurement by 48% (from 36 to 21). A reduction of 74.0% mean SMCD was also achieved for fringe pattern stripe count alteration. A 36.9% mean SMCD was obtained for adjusting the camera and projector spacing purely in the digital-twin.
arXiv:2605.18541v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Modeling hyperspectral imagery (HSI) across different sensors presents a fundamental challenge due to variations in wavelength coverage, band sampling, and channel dimensionality. As a result, models trained under a fixed spectral configuration often fail to generalize to other sensors. Existing Vision Transformer (ViT) approaches either rely on implicit spectral modeling with fixed channel assumptions or adopt explicit spatial-spectral attention with prohibitive computational cost, leading to a fundamental trade-off between efficiency and expressiveness. In this work, we introduce Low-rank Efficient Spatial-Spectral ViT (LESSViT), a sensor-flexible architecture for cross-spectral generalization. LESSViT is built on LESS Attention, a structured low-rank factorization that models joint spatial-spectral interactions through separable spatial and spectral components, reducing the complexity of full spatial-spectral attention from $O(N^2 C^2)$ to $O(rNC)$, where $N$ is the number of spatial tokens, $C$ is the number of spectral channels, and $r$ is the rank of the low-rank approximation. We further incorporate channel-agnostic patch embedding and wavelength-aware positional encoding to support flexible spectral inputs. To enable efficient and robust pretraining, we introduce a hyperspectral masked autoencoder (HyperMAE) with decoupled spatial-spectral masking and hierarchical channel sampling. We evaluate LESSViT under a cross-spectral generalization setting that simulates cross-sensor variability. Experiments on the SpectralEarth benchmark demonstrate that LESSViT improves robustness under spectral shifts while remaining competitive in-distribution, and explicit and efficient spatial-spectral modeling is essential for scalable and generalizable hyperspectral representation learning.
arXiv:2605.18529v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) for complex reasoning heavily relies on Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). However, standard algorithms like GRPO apply sequence-level rewards uniformly to all tokens, creating a severe credit-assignment bottleneck. While on-policy self-distillation attempts to resolve this by conditioning a self-teacher on privileged contexts, direct exposure to raw oracle solutions often induces over-conditioned teacher distributions, implicit answer leakage, and late-stage training collapse. To overcome these limitations, we propose Asymmetric Meta-Reflective Self-Distillation (AMR-SD). Instead of conditioning directly on raw reference traces, AMR-SD inserts a reflection bottleneck: it compresses diagnostic signals -- from verifier outcomes, peer rollouts, or reference feedback -- into concise, self-generated Socratic hints and critiques. Furthermore, we introduce Causal Information Gain (CIG) with an asymmetric, ReLU-gated threshold to translate these reflections into sparse, highly precise token-level advantage modulations. Combined with temporal annealing, this mechanism preserves the base environmental reward while filtering out distributional noise. Experiments across scientific, mathematical, and tool-use benchmarks demonstrate that AMR-SD significantly outperforms existing baselines, achieving robust long-horizon stability and successfully preventing late-stage collapse.
arXiv:2605.18523v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ) is a central component of tropical climate, but the conditions under which a tropical rain belt remains zonally extended or becomes unstable to zonal organization are not well understood. We investigate this problem using idealized nonrotating kilometer-scale simulations forced by a prescribed sea surface temperature (SST) distribution that varies only in the meridional direction. This setup produces an ITCZ-like rain belt while allowing spontaneous zonal convective self-aggregation (ZCSA) to emerge. A parameter sweep shows that ZCSA occurs preferentially when both the peak SST and the meridional SST amplitude are large. ZCSA cases exhibit a temporary weakening of the meridional near-surface convergence. Boundary-layer momentum and thermodynamic analyses link this weakening to enhanced lower-tropospheric stability over the cool subsiding region, a shallower boundary layer, and stronger effective frictional damping of the meridional inflow. However, weak convergence alone is not sufficient for ZCSA. Aggregating cases also have a large meridional contrast in moist static energy forcing, implying a strong demand for meridional energy transport. Consistently, ZCSA reorganizes meridional moist static energy transport, including enhanced stationary eddy export from the warm region, and is accompanied by growing zonal moisture variability and weakening meridional moisture contrast. These results suggest that zonal symmetry breaking of an ITCZ-like rain belt is favored when weakened meridional inflow coincides with a large imposed meridional MSE-forcing contrast.
arXiv:2605.18517v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Data center electricity consumption reached 4.4% of U.S. total in 2023 and is projected to grow to 6.7--12% by 2028, imposing increasing stress on transmission networks while representing a largely untapped source of controllable demand-side flexibility. This paper proposes a modular security-constrained unit commitment (SCUC) framework that coordinates flexible data center workloads with system-level scheduling to reduce renewable curtailment, alleviate congestion, and lower operating costs. Three mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) models are formulated: the Data Center Spatial model (DC-S), enabling instantaneous workload redistribution across geographically distributed sites; the Data Center Temporal model (DC-T), permitting each site to shift its deferrable load across time while preserving the daily energy balance; and the Data Center Spatio-Temporal model (DC-ST), jointly activating both mechanisms and spanning the largest feasible operating region. Case studies on a modified IEEE 24-bus reliability test system show that DC-ST eliminates all base-case and post-contingency transmission violations at a flexibility ratio of 40%, and reduces renewable curtailment by up to 84.4% at 30% relative to the inflexible baseline. Sensitivity analysis further reveals that moderate flexibility levels of 20%--30% already capture most of the achievable benefits, supporting practical deployment with limited operational burden on data center operators.
arXiv:2605.18512v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: In-context learning (ICL) is highly sensitive to which demonstrations appear in the prompt, but selecting them is expensive because the space of possible demonstration contexts and combinations is enormous. We argue that demonstration selection is \emph{easier to judge than to find}: predicting whether a specific query--context pair $(q,D)$ will succeed is cheaper and more general than searching for an optimal $D^\star$. Based on this insight, we propose DiSP, a sample-and-judge framework that stratifies queries by difficulty. DiSP runs random demonstration trials to estimate success rate of each training query, trains a lightweight router to predict difficulty from the query, and trains level-specific judges for sampled demonstrations. At inference, DiSP performs stop-on-acceptance judging under an explicit budget, emitting diagnostic risk tags when no suitable context is found. Across five classification datasets with Llama~3--8B and Qwen~2.5--7B, DiSP achieves the best average accuracy, improving over strong learned selection baselines by up to 3.4\%, while achieving up to $23\times$ end-to-end wall-clock speedup.
arXiv:2605.06566v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: We present a constructive framework for designing transformations between structured light fields using birefringent optical elements, formulated in terms of SU(2) operations on polarization. Within this framework, transformations between vector beams are treated as spatially varying SU(2) operations, leading to a direct procedure for designing doubly inhomogeneous waveplates (d-plates) that implement the desired mapping. We identify a condition under which a single element implements a prescribed transformation exactly, including the global phase, and provide an explicit prescription for constructing the corresponding doubly inhomogeneous waveplate (d-plate) when this condition is satisfied, along with its realization using a finite sequence of singly inhomogeneous plates, including a QHQ configuration. Within this formulation, a broad class of problems in structured light can be treated within a single framework, including vector beam transformations, spin-orbital dynamics, and complex beam shaping. Crucially, the same SU(2) operations directly realize quantum channels on the orbital angular momentum degree of freedom, with polarization serving as a physical ancilla. These results establish a unified and explicitly constructive route to complex beam shaping and vector beam transformations based on SU(2) parameter synthesis, and provide a systematic foundation for designing next-generation photonic elements for structured light and spin-orbit information processing.
arXiv:2605.18503v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Low-altitude economy (LAE) is transforming low-altitude airspace into a new cyber-physical infrastructure. Although air-ground communications have been widely studied, LAE is fundamentally different in the sense that it is mission-centric with diverse requirements, such as stringent safety and compliance constraints not be effectively addressed with a communication-centric design alone, which makes air-ground collaboration indispensable: Only through effectively coordinating air-ground infrastructure and resources can LAE missions be fulfilled. Consequently, LAE calls for task-driven, closed-loop, multi-resource orchestration of Sensing, Communication, Computing, Storage, and Intelligence (SCCSI), where key decisions must be co-designed under mobility and uncertainty. In this paper, we first present a novel framework that connects (i) LAE scenarios and a requirement--resource coupling matrix, (ii) an air--ground collaborative architecture, and (iii) methodological toolboxes for SCCSI co-optimization and online decision-making. We then systematically review enabling technologies for collaborative SCCSI resources and capabilities, emphasizing their coupling and end-to-end tradeoffs. Finally, we summarize testbeds, datasets, and evaluation metrics, and provide representative use cases to illustrate how the proposed framework translates application requirements into practical task-driven optimization designs, together with open challenges and a roadmap toward scalable and trustworthy LAE deployment.
arXiv:2605.18496v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We introduce a dialect of the Asynchronous pi-calculus, called AWpi, in which (1) an input name may be owned, at any time, by at most one process; (2) each name has either only the input or only the output capability. As a result, special processes called wires (aka forwarders, that is, processes that receive values at one name and re-transmit) behave as substitutions when composed with any AWpi process. Thus AWpi naturally yields a category, whose morphisms are AWpi processes (modulo the reference behavioural equivalence, barbed congruence) and whose objects are types; and where wires act as identity morphisms. We show that the category of processes can be further organised into (sub)categories with the structures needed for the interpretation of common higher-order language features in the literature by drawing on insights from game semantics; notably, we construct a relative Seely category, the categorical structure that concurrent game semantics has. At the same time, AWpi follows the tradition of ordinary pi-calculi in that expressiveness is preserved and the operational and algebraic theory are developed in a similar manner, notwithstanding substantial technical differences in their development and proofs. In short, the goal of AWpi is to remain faithful to the operational and algebraic tradition of the pi-calculi while connecting to the tradition of denotational models for programming languages.
arXiv:2401.14278v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Blockchain performance has historically faced challenges posed by the throughput limitations of consensus algorithms. Recent breakthroughs in research have successfully alleviated these constraints by introducing a modular architecture that decouples consensus from execution. The move toward independent optimization of the consensus layer has shifted attention to the execution layer.
While concurrent transaction execution is a promising solution for increasing throughput, practical challenges persist. Its effectiveness varies based on the workloads, and the associated increased hardware requirements raise concerns about undesirable centralization. This increased requirement results in full nodes and stragglers synchronizing from signed checkpoints, decreasing the trustless nature of blockchain systems.
In response to these challenges, this paper introduces Chiron, a system designed to extract execution hints for the acceleration of straggling and full nodes. Notably, Chiron achieves this without compromising the security of the system or introducing overhead on the critical path of consensus. Evaluation results demonstrate a notable speedup of up to 30%, effectively addressing the gap between theoretical research and practical deployment. The quantification of this speedup is achieved through realistic blockchain benchmarks derived from a comprehensive analysis of Ethereum and Solana workloads, constituting an independent contribution.
arXiv:2605.18491v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Methods: Nine SSL methods spanning four pretext-task families were pretrained from scratch using the same 10{,}412 3D CT scans (1.89~M 2D axial slices) covering varied disease sites. The pretrained Swin Transformer encoder from each method was integrated into a SwinUNETR-style segmentation network (Swin encoder with a 3D CNN decoder and skip connections) and fine-tuned on nine public segmentation tasks of varying complexity, including large abdominal organs, head-and-neck structures, and tumors from CT and MRI. Performance was assessed using Dice similarity coefficient (DSC). Fine-tuning convergence speed, transferability across modalities (CT-to-MRI), and feature-reuse patterns between few- and many-shot fine tuning were further analyzed using centered kernel alignment.
Results: Self-distilled masked image transformer (SMIT), which combines masked image modeling (MIM) with local and global self-distillation, achieved the highest overall segmentation accuracy across the nine tasks, the fastest fine-tuning convergence, and the smallest few-shot-to-many-shot performance gap, indicating the strongest data efficiency. SMIT also showed the most consistent feature-reuse patterns between few- and many-shot fine tuning. MIM-based SimMIM and self-distillation methods (DINO, iBOT) outperformed contrastive learning and rotation prediction, which rely on image-level global representations. Differences between SSL methods were largest in the few-shot setting and narrowed as the size of the labeled fine-tuning dataset increased, indicating that the choice of SSL pretraining matters most under limited annotation budgets.
arXiv:2605.18480v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The computation of chance constraints in stochastic model predictive control is often numerically challenging due to the non-Gaussian nature of the disturbances. To overcome this problem, we propose an optimization computational framework applicable to non-Gaussian disturbances. This framework employs a numerical inversion method, utilizing the characteristic function of the disturbance distribution to compute the probability in the chance constraint as well as its gradient. To improve efficiency, it vectorizes integral points and reuses intermediate computations in Gauss-Kronrod quadrature. The framework is implemented within the YALMIP toolbox to perform chance constraint calculations for arbitrary non-Gaussian disturbances, applicable to both single-component distributions and mixture models. It allows the user to simply specify a distribution type and its parameters for the disturbance and directly compute the probability and its gradient to solve the optimization problem. The method is validated through a numerical example of a stochastic model predictive control application.
arXiv:2605.18441v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Formation control of wheeled mobile robots (WMRs) has been extensively studied due to its broad applications in fields such as logistics transportation, environmental monitoring, and search and rescue. However, most existing works mainly focus on tracking predefined formations, which limits their adaptability to complex real-world environments. To address this, we propose REACT (Real-time Environment-Adaptive architecture for Continuous formation navigaTion), a hierarchical architecture integrating centralized formation generation and distributed formation maintenance. Specifically, our upper layer generates new environment-adaptive formations when necessary and uses our proposed TCF-R2T (Trajectory-Conflict-Free Robot-to-Target assignment) algorithm to compute conflict-free WMR-to-target assignments in polynomial time, enabling timely formation transitions without trajectory conflicts. At the lower layer, each WMR executes our developed JSTP (Joint Spatio-Temporal trajectory Planning) method to maintain the generated formation by simultaneously optimizing spatial positions and temporal durations, thereby enhancing coordination among WMRs and enabling continuous navigation in obstacle-rich environments and dynamic-obstacle scenarios. Both simulation and real-world experiments validate the effectiveness and practical applicability of REACT. Experimental videos are available on our project website: https://dongjh20.github.io/REACT-website.
arXiv:2502.17007v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: In this paper we argue that, to its detriment, transparency research overlooks many foundational concepts of artificial intelligence. As an illustrating example we focus on uncertainty quantification in the context of counterfactual explainability, demonstrating that its broader adoption could address key challenges in the field. To this end, we show how uncertainty can provide a principled unifying framework for counterfactual explainability by expressing the core counterfactual properties in terms of uncertainty, allowing us to build two variants of an explainer upon them -- one based solely on uncertainty estimates and another pairing them with distance measured in the feature space. Our comprehensive experiments illustrate highly competitive performance of our framework when compared to many state-of-the-art methods despite its radically simple design. More broadly, the paper demonstrates that integrating artificial intelligence fundamentals into transparency research promises to yield more reliable, robust and understandable predictive models. We posit that making artificial intelligence explainability truly uncertainty-aware is the first step towards this goal.
arXiv:2605.18437v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Vehicular edge computing (VEC) enables latency-sensitive vehicular applications by offloading computation-intensive tasks to nearby edge servers. However, real-world vehicular workloads are typically modeled as heterogeneous directed acyclic graph (DAG) tasks with complex dependency structures, making joint offloading and resource allocation highly challenging. Moreover, distributed MEC deployment raises privacy concerns when collaboratively training learning-based policies.
In this paper, we propose a Federated Meta Deep Reinforcement Learning framework with GAT-Seq2Seq modeling (FedMAGS) for heterogeneous task offloading in VEC systems. The proposed approach leverages Graph Attention Networks to capture DAG dependencies, a Seq2Seq-based policy to generate structured offloading decisions, and federated meta-learning to enable fast adaptation across distributed MEC servers without sharing raw data.
Extensive simulations demonstrate that FedMAGS achieves faster convergence, lower execution delay, and better scalability compared with state-of-the-art baselines. In addition, the federated design preserves data privacy while reducing communication overhead, making the framework well suited for dynamic and large-scale VEC environments.
arXiv:2604.07292v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Real-time supervisory control of advanced reactors requires accurate forecasting of plant-wide thermal-hydraulic states, including locations where physical sensors are unavailable. Meeting this need calls for surrogate models that combine predictive fidelity, millisecond-scale inference, and robustness to partial observability. In this work, we present a physics-informed message-passing Graph Neural Network coupled with a Neural Ordinary Differential Equation (GNN-ODE) to addresses all three requirements simultaneously. We represent the whole system as a directed sensor graph whose edges encode hydraulic connectivity through flow/heat transfer-aware message passing, and we advance the latent dynamics in continuous time via a controlled Neural ODE. A topology-guided missing-node initializer reconstructs uninstrumented states at rollout start; prediction then proceeds fully autoregressively. The GNN-ODE surrogate achieves satisfactory results for the system dynamics prediction. On held-out simulation transients, the surrogate achieves an average MAE of 0.91 K at 60 s and 2.18 K at 300 s for uninstrumented nodes, with $R^2$ up to 0.995 for missing-node state reconstruction. Inference runs at approximately 105 times faster than simulated time on a single GPU, enabling 64-member ensemble rollouts for uncertainty quantification. To assess sim-to-real transfer, we adapt the pretrained surrogate to experimental facility data using layerwise discriminative fine-tuning with only 30 training sequences. The learned flow-dependent heat-transfer scaling recovers a Reynolds-number exponent consistent with established correlations, indicating constitutive learning beyond trajectory fitting. The model tracks a steep power change transient and produces accurate trajectories at uninstrumented locations.
arXiv:2604.02511v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Public pooled single-cell perturbation atlases are valuable resources for studying transcription factor (TF) function, but downstream re-analysis can be limited by incomplete deposited metadata and missing internal controls. Here we re-analyze the human TF Atlas dataset (GSE216481), a MORF-based pooled overexpression screen spanning 3,550 TF open reading frames and 254,519 cells, with a reproducible pipeline for quality control, MORF barcode demultiplexing, per-TF differential expression, and functional enrichment. From 77,018 cells in the pooled screen, we assign 60,997 (79.2\%) to 87 TF identities. Because the deposited barcode mapping lacks the GFP and mCherry negative controls present in the original library, we use embryoid body (EB) cells as an external baseline and remove shared batch/transduction artifacts by background subtraction. This strategy recovers TF-specific signatures for 59 of 61 testable TFs, compared with 27 detected by one-vs-rest alone, showing that robust TF-level signal can be rescued despite missing intra-pool controls. HOPX, MAZ, PAX6, FOS, and FEZF2 emerge as the strongest transcriptional remodelers, while per-TF enrichment links FEZF2 to regulation of differentiation, EGR1 to Hippo and cardiac programs, FOS to focal adhesion, and NFIC to collagen biosynthesis. Condition-level analyses reveal convergent Wnt, neurogenic, EMT, and Hippo signatures, and Harmony indicates minimal confounding batch effects across pooled replicates. Our per-TF effect sizes significantly agree with Joung et al.'s published rankings (Spearman $\rho = -0.316$, $p = 0.013$; negative because lower rank indicates stronger effect). Together, these results show that the deposited TF Atlas data can support validated TF-specific transcriptional and pathway analyses when paired with principled external controls, artifact removal, and reproducible computation.
arXiv:2605.18068v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Residual error propagation remains a fundamental problem in recurrent models, where small prediction inaccuracies compound over time and degrade long-horizon performance. Accurately modeling the correlation structure of such residuals is critical for reliable uncertainty quantification in probabilistic multivariate timeseries forecasting. While recent time-series deep models efficiently parametrize time-varying contemporaneous correlations, they often assume temporal independence of errors and neglect spatial correlation across the observed network. In this paper, we introduce Teger, a structured uncertainty module that overcomes the spa- tial and temporal limitations of error-correlated autoregressive forecasting. Teger proposes a spatial curvature-aware graph rewiring mechanism explicitly strengthening information-bottleneck edges identified by discrete Forman curvature. The component is integrated into a low-rank-plus-diagonal covariance head, preserving tractable inference via the Woodbury identity. Teger is backbone-agnostic, requiring only the latent state produced by any autoregressive encoder. We provide theoretical evidence of Teger, and experimentally evaluate it on LSTM, Transformer, and xLSTM backbones across four real-world spatio-temporal datasets, showing consistent improvement in Continuous Ranked Probability Score (CRPS). We further provide a formal theoretical analysis connecting curvature-aware rewiring to (i) oversquashing alleviation, (ii) improved spectral connectivity, (iii) reduced effective resistance, and (iv) improved covariance calibration bounds
arXiv:2510.07799v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: The efficiency of multi-agent systems driven by large language models (LLMs) largely hinges on their communication topology. However, designing an optimal topology is a non-trivial challenge, as it requires balancing competing objectives such as task performance, communication cost, and robustness. Existing frameworks often rely on static or hand-crafted topologies, which inherently fail to adapt to diverse task requirements, leading to either excessive token consumption for simple problems or performance bottlenecks for complex ones. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel generative framework called \textit{Guided Topology Diffusion (GTD)}. Inspired by conditional discrete graph diffusion models, GTD formulates topology synthesis as an iterative construction process. At each step, the generation is steered by a lightweight proxy model that predicts multi-objective rewards (e.g., accuracy, utility, cost), enabling real-time, gradient-free optimization towards task-adaptive topologies. This iterative, guided synthesis process distinguishes GTD from single-step generative frameworks, enabling it to better navigate complex design trade-offs. We validated GTD across multiple benchmarks, and experiments show that this framework can generate highly task-adaptive, sparse, and efficient communication topologies, significantly outperforming existing methods in LLM agent collaboration.
arXiv:2510.08886v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Going beyond simple text processing, financial auditing requires detecting semantic, structural, and numerical inconsistencies across large-scale disclosures. As financial reports are filed in XBRL, a structured XML format governed by accounting standards, auditing becomes a structured information extraction and reasoning problem involving concept alignment, taxonomy-defined relations, and cross-document consistency. Although large language models (LLMs) show promise on isolated financial tasks, their capability in professional-grade auditing remains unclear. We introduce FinAuditing, a taxonomy-aligned, structure-aware benchmark built from real XBRL filings. It contains 1,102 annotated instances averaging over 33k tokens and defines three tasks: Financial Semantic Matching (FinSM), Financial Relationship Extraction (FinRE), and Financial Mathematical Reasoning (FinMR). Evaluations of 13 state-of-the-art LLMs reveal substantial gaps in concept retrieval, taxonomy-aware relation modeling, and consistent cross-document reasoning. These findings highlight the need for realistic, structure-aware benchmarks. We release the evaluation code at https://github.com/The-FinAI/FinAuditing and the dataset at https://huggingface.co/collections/TheFinAI/finauditing. The task currently serves as the official benchmark of an ongoing public evaluation contest at https://open-finance-lab.github.io/SecureFinAI_Contest_2026/.
arXiv:2510.10528v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Large reasoning models (LRMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in tackling complex tasks through step-by-step thinking. However, this lengthy reasoning process incurs substantial computational and latency overheads, hindering the practical deployment of LRMs. This work presents a new approach to mitigating overthinking in LRMs via black-box persuasive prompting. By treating LRMs as black-box communicators, we investigate how to persuade them to generate concise responses without compromising accuracy. We introduce Whisper, an iterative refinement framework that generates high-quality persuasive prompts from diverse perspectives. Experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that Whisper consistently reduces token usage while preserving performance. Notably, Whisper achieves a 3x reduction in average response length on simple GSM8K questions for the Qwen3 model series and delivers an average ~40% token reduction across all benchmarks. For closed-source APIs, Whisper reduces token usage on MATH-500 by 46% for Claude-3.7 and 50% for Gemini-2.5. Further analysis reveals the broad applicability of Whisper across data domains, model scales, and families, underscoring the potential of black-box persuasive prompting as a practical strategy for enhancing LRM efficiency.
arXiv:2605.01815v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can help overcome data scarcity in computer vision tasks by generating additional training samples. In this work, we explore generative data augmentation in two low-resource domains: Bangla handwritten character recognition and chest X-ray image analysis. We use DCGAN-based models trained on 64x64 images to generate synthetic samples and evaluate their quality using Inception Score (IS), Fr\'echet Inception Distance (FID), and visualization methods such as t-SNE and UMAP. To measure practical usefulness, we train image classifiers using real data and a combination of real and synthetic data. Experimental results show that synthetic augmentation improves data diversity and consistently increases classification performance in limited-data settings. We also investigate training stability techniques, including gradient penalty and spectral normalization, and perform ablation studies on synthetic-to-real data ratios and sample filtering strategies. In addition, we discuss challenges related to medical image evaluation, dataset licensing, and privacy concerns of synthetic data. Our approach is simple, reproducible, and provides a strong baseline for generative augmentation in resource-constrained imaging applications.