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Peer-reviewade publikationer — 59662 artiklar

UniShield: An Adaptive Multi-Agent Framework for Unified Forgery Image Detection and Localization
arXiv:2510.03161v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: With the rapid advancements in image generation, synthetic images have become increasingly realistic, posing significant societal risks, such as misinformation and fraud. Forgery Image Detection and Localization (FIDL) thus emerges as essential for maintaining information integrity and societal security. Despite impressive performances by existing domain-specific detection methods, their practical applicability remains limited, primarily due to their narrow specialization, poor cross-domain generalization, and the absence of an integrated adaptive framework. To address these issues, we propose UniShield, the novel multi-agent-based unified system capable of detecting and localizing image forgeries across diverse domains, including image manipulation, document manipulation, DeepFake, and AI-generated images. UniShield innovatively integrates a perception agent with a detection agent. The perception agent intelligently analyzes image features to dynamically select suitable detection models, while the detection agent consolidates various expert detectors into a unified framework and generates interpretable reports. Extensive experiments show that UniShield achieves state-of-the-art results, surpassing both existing unified approaches and domain-specific detectors, highlighting its superior practicality, adaptiveness, and scalability.
Where Vision Becomes Text: Locating the OCR Routing Bottleneck in Vision-Language Models
arXiv:2602.22918v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) can read text from images, but where does this optical character recognition (OCR) information enter the language processing stream? We investigate the OCR routing mechanism across three architecture families (Qwen3-VL, Phi-4, InternVL3.5) using causal interventions. By computing activation differences between original images and text-inpainted versions, we identify architecture-specific OCR bottlenecks whose dominant location depends on the vision-language integration strategy: DeepStack models (Qwen) show peak sensitivity at mid-depth (about 50%) for scene text, while single-stage projection models (Phi-4, InternVL) peak at early layers (6-25%), though the exact layer of maximum effect varies across datasets. The OCR signal is remarkably low-dimensional: PC1 captures up to 72.9% of variance. Crucially, principal component analysis (PCA) directions learned on one dataset transfer to others, demonstrating shared text-processing pathways. Surprisingly, in models with modular OCR circuits (notably Qwen3-VL-4B), OCR removal can improve counting performance (up to +6.9 percentage points), suggesting OCR interferes with other visual processing in sufficiently modular architectures.
MCAC: A Model Counting Algorithm for Exact Computation of Error Metrics of Approximate Circuits
arXiv:2411.10037v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Effective usage of approximate circuits for various performance trade-offs requires accurate computation of error. MCAC is a novel model counting framework for exact computation of several average and worst-case error metrics that are used to evaluate approximate circuits. Unlike other methods in the literature, our framework uses the same error miter for all metrics. It requires a single synthesis of the system consisting of the exact and approximate circuits followed by a subtractor that finds the difference of the two outputs. Existing miter-based methods require multiple calls to the model counter, one for each output of the miter. MCAC uses the CNF formula of the system to compute all metrics. Our algorithm converts the formula to a tree and uses message passing to compute all metrics. We propose data structures to efficiently store and perform sparse computations required for conversion to a tree and message passing. Results for all the error metrics for several benchmark instances show a significant speedup over using off-the-shelf model counters along with specialized miters for each metric.
Do Chinese models speak Chinese languages?
arXiv:2504.00289v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The release of top-performing open-weight LLMs has cemented China's role as a leading force in AI development. Do these models support languages spoken in China? Or do they support the same languages as models developed in the United States or in Europe? Comparing multilingual capabilities is important for two reasons. First, language ability provides insights into pre-training data curation, and thus into resource allocation and development priorities. Second, Chinese model developers need to navigate the tension between serving a linguistically diverse population domestically, and optimizing for globally visible benchmarks that are predominantly English. We investigate Chinese model developers' priorities through a comparative study of Chinese-developed and Western-developed open-weight LLMs, on 21 language variants including Asian regional, Chinese, and European languages. Our experiments on Information Parity and reading comprehension show Chinese models' performance across these languages correlates strongly (r=0.93) with their Western counterparts, with the sole exception being better Mandarin. Chinese-developed models are good at French and German, but they sometimes cannot identify languages spoken by Chinese minorities such as Kazakh and Uyghur. Overall, all open-weight LLMs we study have a similar multilingual performance profile, despite the diverse linguistic and cultural contexts the model developers operated within. We interpret the homogenization as consistent with the influence of global benchmarking practices and shared training resources. Rather than treating current language support as inevitable, our results highlight multilingual development as a space of prioritization and trade-offs, with implications for model developers, policymakers, and users.
MultiMat: Multimodal Program Synthesis for Procedural Materials using Large Multimodal Models
arXiv:2509.22151v3 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Material node graphs are programs that generate the 2D channels of procedural materials, including geometry such as roughness and displacement maps, and reflectance such as albedo and conductivity maps. They are essential in computer graphics for representing the appearance of virtual 3D objects parametrically and at arbitrary resolution. In particular, their directed acyclic graph structure and intermediate states enable a modular, interpretable workflow for interactive appearance modeling. However, creating such graphs remains challenging and typically requires professional training. While recent neural program synthesis approaches attempt to simplify this process, they solely represent graphs as textual programs, failing to capture the inherently visual-spatial nature of node graphs that makes them accessible to humans. To address this gap, we present MultiMat, a multimodal program synthesis framework that leverages large multimodal models to process both visual and textual graph representations for improved generation of procedural material graphs. We train our models on a new dataset of production-quality procedural materials and combine them with a constrained tree search inference algorithm that ensures static correctness while efficiently navigating the program space. Our experimental results show that our multimodal program synthesis method is more efficient in both unconditional and conditional graph synthesis with higher visual quality and fidelity than text-only baselines, establishing new state-of-the-art performance.
Navigating the Challenges of AI-Generated Image Detection in the Wild: What Truly Matters?
arXiv:2507.10236v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) advances, the realism of AI generated imagery has reached a threshold capable of deceiving even vigilant human observers. Yet, while current AI-generated Image Detection (AID) approaches perform exceptionally well on controlled benchmark datasets, they struggle significantly with real-world cases. To study this behavior we introduce the ITW-SM dataset, a curated collection of real and AI-generated images originating from major social media platforms. We employ it to analyze the effects of key design choices typically considered when building a detector, involving its architecture, pre-trained latent spaces, training data as well as pre-processing approaches. We indicate that naively scaling the pre-training stage or opting for more training data does not always lead to better detection performance. Instead, our work reveals that it is crucial to optimize each design choice to enable the processing pipeline to propagate and effectively analyze both low-level traces as well as high-level image semantics. Building on our findings, we achieve a substantial average improvement of 26.87% in AUC across multiple state-of-the-art detection approaches and under real-world conditions, providing a roadmap for developing more resilient detectors. Our assets are available on https://mever-team.github.io/itw-sm.
Maximally recoverable codes with locality and availability
arXiv:2505.24573v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this work, we introduce maximally recoverable codes with locality and availability. We consider locally repairable codes (LRCs) where certain subsets of $ t $ symbols belong each to $ N $ local repair sets, which are pairwise disjoint after removing the $ t $ symbols, and which are of size $ r+\delta-1 $ and can correct $ \delta-1 $ erasures locally. Classical LRCs with $ N $ disjoint repair sets and LRCs with $ N $-availability are recovered when setting $ t = 1 $ and $ t=\delta-1=1 $, respectively. Allowing $ t > 1 $ enables our codes to reduce the storage overhead for the same locality and availability. In this setting, we define maximally recoverable LRCs (MR-LRCs) as those that can correct any globally correctable erasure pattern given the locality and availability constraints. We then identify a large class of global erasure patterns that can be corrected by such MR-LRCs and prove that they are all the correctable patterns when $ t=1 $. We provide three explicit constructions of LRCs that can correct such erasure patterns (thus MR-LRCs for $ t=1 $), based on MSRD codes, each attaining the smallest finite-field sizes for some parameter regime. Finally, we extend the known lower bound on finite-field sizes from classical MR-LRCs to our setting (for any value of $ t $).
Performance Gains in Quantum SAT Solvers Using ESOP Encoding
arXiv:2605.16202v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) problem is a canonical NP-complete problem and a natural candidate for quantum acceleration via search-based algorithms. In Grover-based quantum SAT solvers, the dominant computational cost stems from the construction of a reversible oracle that evaluates the Boolean formula, rendering the choice of SAT encoding crucial for overall quantum resource efficiency. Although SAT instances are conventionally expressed in Conjunctive Normal Form (CNF), such encodings typically translate into quantum circuits with significant qubit overhead and high non-Clifford gate complexity. In this work, we investigate an Exclusive-Sum-of-Products (ESOP)-based CNF (e-CNF) representation tailored for quantum SAT solving and analyze its impact on oracle construction. We derive tighter upper bounds on qubit requirements and Clifford+$T$ gate counts for Grover-based SAT solvers when e-CNF encodings are employed in place of standard CNF. In addition, we propose a scalable transformation from Boolean formulas to e-CNF and present a systematic procedure for interpreting e-CNF representations as reversible quantum circuits suitable for oracle implementation. Experimental evaluation on representative SAT benchmarks demonstrates that the proposed e-CNF-based approach yields substantial and consistent reductions in quantum resources, including qubit count, T-gate complexity, and circuit depth, when compared to CNF-based oracle constructions. These results establish e-CNF as an effective quantum-aware SAT encoding that significantly improves the practicality of oracle-based quantum SAT solving.
A Scalable Nonparametric Continuous-Time Survival Model through Numerical Quadrature
arXiv:2605.16208v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Flexible continuous-time survival modeling is critical for capturing complex time-varying hazard dynamics in high-dimensional data; however, training such models remains challenging due to the intractable integral required for likelihood estimation. We introduce QSurv, a scalable deep learning framework that enables nonparametric continuous-time modeling without relying on time discretization or restrictive distributional assumptions. We propose a training objective based on Gauss-Legendre numerical quadrature, which approximates the cumulative hazard with high-order accuracy while facilitating efficient end-to-end training via standard backpropagation. Furthermore, to effectively capture non-stationary hazard dynamics in complex architectures, we introduce time-conditioned low-rank adaptation, a mechanism that conditions general neural backbones on time by dynamically modulating weights via low-rank updates. We provide theoretical analysis establishing approximation error bounds for cumulative-hazard evaluation. Comprehensive experiments across synthetic benchmarks, large-scale real-world tabular datasets, and high-dimensional medical imaging tasks demonstrate that QSurv achieves competitive predictive performance with advantages in instantaneous hazard function estimation, enabling more interpretable characterization of time-varying risk patterns.
A Finite-State Gibbs Construction from a Recognition Cost
arXiv:2605.15667v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On a finite outcome space, the canonical Gibbs distribution is usually obtained by maximizing Shannon entropy at fixed mean of an externally supplied energy functional. This paper studies the finite-state consequences of a ratio-cost construction instead: after adopting the normalized d'Alembert degree-two closure called the Recognition Composition Law (RCL), with unit log-curvature calibration at the reference ratio, the continuous nontrivial positive branch is $J(x)=\tfrac12(x+x^{-1})-1=\cosh(\log x)-1$. Given the induced cost vector $X_\omega=J(r_\omega)$, multinomial counting and convex duality recover the finite-state Gibbs weights and the identity $F_{\mathrm{R}}(q)-F_{\mathrm{R}}(p)=T_{\mathrm{R}}\,D_{\mathrm{KL}}(q\Vert p)$; the entropy-maximization steps are classical once the cost is fixed. New technical content includes a non-asymptotic Stirling bound and soft-shell constrained-type theorems for real-valued costs. A three-state example compares the Gibbs law to squared-log, affinity-as-energy, and Tsallis alternatives at the same cost vector and mean-cost constraint, with sample-size power calculations at fixed RCL ground truth. The framework is conditional on axioms (A1)--(A3) and restricted to finite outcome spaces with strictly positive weights; it does not derive the composition law from a more primitive principle.
Dynamics-Level Watermarking of Flow Matching Models with Random Codes
arXiv:2605.16239v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a dynamics-level approach to watermarking generative models. Rather than embedding signals into model weights or outputs, we embed the watermark directly into the learned continuous dynamics -- the velocity field of a flow matching model. We formulate this as random coding over a continuous channel: a key-dependent perturbation is added during training, and the message is recovered at detection time from black-box queries. The perturbation is designed to leave the generated distribution unchanged. Experiments on MNIST and CIFAR-10 across different architectures confirm reliable message recovery, preserved generation quality, and chance-level decoding accuracy without the secret key.
Beyond Collision Avoidance: Multi-Robot Yielding and Spatial Affordance in Emergency Evacuations
arXiv:2605.16115v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As mobile service robots increasingly coexist with pedestrians, ensuring passively safe behaviour during confined emergency evacuations is critical. Existing multi-robot yielding strategies often focus solely on collision avoidance and macroscopic flow optimisation, overlooking environmental affordances and human spatial expectations. To bridge the gap between macroscopic theory and micro-level perception, we conducted a game-based virtual evacuation experiment (N=56). We investigated individual psychological responses to four multi-robot yielding strategies (Hide, LineEscape, Freeze, ShortestPath) across confined corridors with and without refuge niches. Our results establish a robust preference hierarchy (Hide > LineEscape > Freeze > ShortestPath), demonstrating that proactive space-yielding significantly outperforms freezing and efficiency-first approaches. Crucially, we found that environmental affordances heavily shape cognitive expectations. Actively utilising available niches amplifies the psychological comfort of proactive yielding (Hide). Conversely, failing to use an obvious niche (e.g., executing LineEscape) may trigger Expectation Violation. This is reflected in a drastically increased perceived cognitive delay, despite objectively unimpeded trajectories. Furthermore, prior robot interaction experience helps users decode complex social intents. Ultimately, this research demonstrates that safe human-robot interaction during emergencies must evolve from pure trajectory optimisation to semantically aware navigation. Future work will extend this framework to investigate complex interactions between robot swarms and pedestrian crowds.
Chladni states in Ising Spin Lattices
arXiv:2507.05961v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Low-temperature spin dynamics can become trapped in long-lived patterns shaped by the geometry of the interaction network. Here we introduce Chladni states: spin configurations obtained by binarizing the eigenmodes of the interaction Laplacian. These graph-spectral patterns organize the metastable configurations reached by Ising systems under non-ergodic relaxation. The resulting Topological Mode Decomposition provides a compact way to monitor and reconstruct frozen spin configurations in ferromagnets, frustrated antiferromagnets, and spin glasses.
SGR: A Stepwise Reasoning Framework for LLMs with External Subgraph Generation
arXiv:2605.16117v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities across diverse NLP applications, such as translation, text generation, and question answering. Nevertheless, they remain limited in complex settings that demand deep reasoning and logical inference. Since these models are trained on large-scale text corpora, their generation process may still introduce irrelevant, noisy, or factually inconsistent content. To mitigate this problem, we introduce SGR, a stepwise framework that enhances LLM reasoning through external subgraph generation. SGR builds query-specific subgraphs from external knowledge bases and uses their semantic structure to support multi-step inference. By grounding intermediate reasoning steps in structured external knowledge, the framework helps the model concentrate on relevant entities, relations, and supporting evidence. In particular, SGR first constructs a subgraph tailored to the input question. It then guides the model to reason progressively over the generated structure and combines multiple reasoning trajectories to obtain the final prediction. Experimental results across several benchmark datasets show that SGR achieves consistent improvements over competitive baselines, highlighting its value for improving both reasoning accuracy and factual reliability.
Hallucinations are inevitable but can be made statistically negligible
arXiv:2502.12187v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Hallucinations, a phenomenon where a language model (LM) generates nonfactual content, pose a significant challenge to the practical deployment of LMs. While many empirical methods have been proposed to mitigate hallucinations, recent studies established a computability-theoretic result showing that any LM will inevitably generate hallucinations on an infinite set of inputs, regardless of the quality and quantity of training datasets and the choice of the language model architecture and training and inference algorithms. Although the computability-theoretic result may seem pessimistic, its significance in practical viewpoints has remained unclear. This paper claims that those "innate" inevitability results from computability theory and diagonal argument, in principle, cannot explain practical issues of LLMs. We demonstrate this claim by presenting a positive theoretical result from a probabilistic perspective. Specifically, we prove that hallucinations can be made statistically negligible, provided that the quality and quantity of the training data are sufficient. Interestingly, our positive result coexists with the computability-theoretic result, implying that while hallucinations on an infinite set of inputs cannot be entirely eliminated, their probability can always be reduced by improving algorithms and training data. By evaluating the two seemingly contradictory results through the lens of information theory, we argue that our probability-theoretic positive result better reflects practical considerations than the computability-theoretic negative result.
Shaping Sparse Rewards in Reinforcement Learning: A Semi-supervised Approach
arXiv:2501.19128v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In many real-world scenarios, reward signal for agents are exceedingly sparse, making it challenging to learn an effective reward function for reward shaping. To address this issue, the proposed approach in this paper performs reward shaping not only by utilizing non-zero-reward transitions but also by employing the \emph{Semi-Supervised Learning} (SSL) technique combined with a novel data augmentation to learn trajectory space representations from the majority of transitions, {i.e}., zero-reward transitions, thereby improving the efficacy of reward shaping. Experimental results in Atari and robotic manipulation demonstrate that our method outperforms supervised-based approaches in reward inference, leading to higher agent scores. Notably, in more sparse-reward environments, our method achieves up to twice the peak scores compared to supervised baselines. The proposed double entropy data augmentation enhances performance, showcasing a 15.8\% increase in best score over other augmentation methods
Region-Grounded Report Generation for 3D Medical Imaging: A Fine-Grained Dataset and Graph-Enhanced Framework
arXiv:2604.18145v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Automated medical report generation for 3D PET/CT imaging is fundamentally challenged by the high-dimensional nature of volumetric data and a critical scarcity of annotated datasets, particularly for low-resource languages. Current black-box methods map whole volumes to reports, ignoring the clinical workflow of analyzing localized Regions of Interest (RoIs) to derive diagnostic conclusions. In this paper, we bridge this gap by introducing VietPET-RoI, the first large-scale 3D PET/CT dataset with fine-grained RoI annotation for a low-resource language, comprising 600 PET/CT samples and 1,960 manually annotated RoIs, paired with corresponding clinical reports. Furthermore, to demonstrate the utility of this dataset, we propose HiRRA, a novel framework that mimics the professional radiologist diagnostic workflow by employing graph-based relational modules to capture dependencies between RoI attributes. This approach shifts from global pattern matching toward localized clinical findings. Additionally, we introduce new clinical evaluation metrics, namely RoI Coverage and RoI Quality Index, that measure both RoI localization accuracy and attribute description fidelity using LLM-based extraction. Extensive evaluation demonstrates that our framework achieves SOTA performance, surpassing existing models by 19.7% in BLEU and 4.7% in ROUGE-L, while achieving a remarkable 45.8% improvement in clinical metrics, indicating enhanced clinical reliability and reduced hallucination. Our code and dataset are available on GitHub.
Convergent Representations of Linguistic Constructions in Human and Artificial Neural Systems
arXiv:2603.29617v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Understanding how the brain processes linguistic constructions is a central challenge in cognitive neuroscience and linguistics. Recent computational studies show that artificial neural language models spontaneously develop differentiated representations of Argument Structure Constructions (ASCs), generating predictions about when and how construction-level information emerges during processing. The present study tests these predictions in human neural activity using electroencephalography (EEG). Ten native English speakers listened to 200 synthetically generated sentences across four construction types (transitive, ditransitive, caused-motion, resultative) while neural responses were recorded. Analyses using time-frequency methods, feature extraction, and machine learning classification revealed construction-specific neural signatures emerging primarily at sentence-final positions, where argument structure becomes fully disambiguated, and most prominently in the alpha band. Pairwise classification showed reliable differentiation, especially between ditransitive and resultative constructions, while other pairs overlapped. Crucially, the temporal emergence and similarity structure of these effects mirror patterns in recurrent and transformer-based language models, where constructional representations arise during integrative processing stages. These findings support the view that linguistic constructions are neurally encoded as distinct form-meaning mappings, in line with Construction Grammar, and suggest convergence between biological and artificial systems on similar representational solutions. More broadly, this convergence is consistent with the idea that learning systems discover stable regions within an underlying representational landscape - recently termed a Platonic representational space - that constrains the emergence of efficient linguistic abstractions.
ShopGym: An Integrated Framework for Realistic Simulation and Scalable Benchmarking of E-Commerce Web Agents
arXiv:2605.16116v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Developing and evaluating e-commerce web agents requires environments that preserve meaningful task structure while enabling controllable, reproducible, and scalable scientific comparison. Existing methodologies force a tradeoff: live storefronts provide realism but are non-stationary, difficult to inspect, and irreproducible, while hand-built sandbox benchmarks provide control but cover only a narrow range of layouts, catalogs, policies, and interaction patterns. We argue that the core bottleneck is methodological: the field lacks a scalable way to construct evaluation settings that are simultaneously realistic, diverse, controllable, inspectable, and reproducible. We introduce ShopGym, an integrated framework for realistic simulation and scalable benchmarking of e-commerce web agents. ShopGym is a framework for constructing e-commerce simulation environments and grounded benchmark tasks. Its simulation layer, ShopArena, converts live seed storefronts into self-contained sandbox shops through anonymized shop specifications and a staged, validated generation process. On top of these simulated storefronts, ShopGuru synthesizes benchmark tasks across seven skill categories, grounding each task in the shop's catalog, navigation structure, policies, and interaction affordances. Together, ShopArena and ShopGuru produce self-contained, resettable, inspectable, and stable evaluation artifacts that preserve structural properties and agent-evaluation signals relevant to shopping tasks. We validate the framework through graph-based structural analysis and agent-based behavioral evaluation with 224 generated tasks across six sandbox shops: three constructed with synthetic data and three with real data. Our results show that the synthetic shops preserve key structural properties of live storefronts, with agent performance on synthetic shops positively correlated with performance on live storefronts.
Can We Trust AI-Inferred User States. A Psychometric Framework for Validating the Reliability of Users States Classification by LLMs in Operational Environments
arXiv:2605.15734v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The use of large language models to assess user states in conversational and adaptive systems is based on the assumption that the metrics used for such assessment are stable and interpretable at the level of individual scores. This paper empirically tests this assumption, focusing on the psychometric reliability of artificial intelligence (AI) measures of user states. This study employed replication evaluation procedures to assess the repeatability of a broad set of metrics across three different bimodal large language models (GPT-4o audio, Gemini 2.0 Flash, Gemini 2.5 Flash). Analyses include both individual score reliability and aggregated reliability, allowing us to distinguish metrics potentially useful for real-time adaptation from those that retain their value only in aggregated analyses. The results demonstrate that metric reliability cannot be considered a default property in interpretive domains. The lack of stability at the level of individual scores precludes the interpretation of such scores as indicators of user state in real-time adaptive systems, even if these metrics demonstrate stability after aggregation. At the same time, the study indicates that individually unstable metrics can retain analytical utility in post-hoc studies, identifying rules governing interactions and their relationships with user experience parameters such as satisfaction, trust, and engagement. The main contribution of this work, besides quantifying the severity of the problem (only 31 of 213 metrics met the criteria), is the proposal of a replicable evaluation framework, enabling measurable evaluations of metric applicability. This approach supports more responsible AI design of adaptive systems, in which the interpretation of results requires explicit validation of reliability and monitoring for violations over time.
Energy recovery twin linear $e^+e^-$, $e^-e^-$ colliders (ERLC ) with high luminosities and accelerating gradients
arXiv:2302.09758v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A recently proposed superconducting linear collider with energy recovery (ERLC) and multiple beam reuse employs twin RF structures to eliminate parasitic collisions in the linacs. Such a collider can operate in either pulsed or continuous-wave (CW) mode, achieving a luminosity of ${\cal O}(10^{36})$ cm$^{-2}$s$^{-1}$ at $2E_0$ = 250--500 GeV. This paper demonstrates that in pulsed mode, the ERLC luminosity is independent of the accelerating gradient for a fixed total power, enabling operation at the highest available gradients. A similar independence holds for the CW mode when the available power significantly exceeds the operational threshold. The luminosity scales with the cavity quality factor as $L\propto Q_0^{1/2}$. We also present, for the first time, a study of a twin $e^-e^-$ ERLC and estimate its performance. This configuration is simpler than the $e^+e^-$ version as it eliminates the need for beam recirculation; electrons can be generated anew for each cycle. In this case, the luminosity scales as $L\propto Q_0^{1/4}$. Furthermore, the use of traveling-wave (TW) RF structures allows for higher gradients and reduced thermal loading. We show that an ERLC with $G$ = 40 MeV/m can operate in CW mode, reaching luminosities of $L_{e^+e^-}$= (1-2.5)$\times 10^{36}$ and $L_{e^-e^-}$= (3-7)$\times 10^{36}$ cm$^{-2}$s$^{-1}$ at $2E_0$ = 250 and 500 GeV, respectively, with a total power consumption of 150-300 MW. These results position the ERLC as a highly promising candidate for a future Higgs factory.
Integrating chemical structures as treatments improves representations of microscopy images for morphological profiling
arXiv:2504.09544v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent advances in self-supervised deep learning have improved our ability to quantify cellular morphological changes in high-throughput microscopy screens, a process known as morphological profiling. However, most current methods only learn from images, despite many screens being inherently multimodal, as they involve both a chemical or genetic perturbation as well as an image-based readout. We hypothesized that incorporating chemical compound structures during self-supervised pre-training could improve learned representations of images from high-throughput microscopy screens. We introduce a representation learning framework, MICON (Molecular-Image Contrastive Learning), that models chemical compounds as treatments that induce transformations of cell phenotypes. MICON significantly outperforms classical hand-crafted features such as CellProfiler and existing deep-learning-based representation learning methods in challenging evaluation settings where models must identify reproducible effects of drugs across independent replicates and data-generating centers. We demonstrate that incorporating chemical compound information into the learning process provides small, but consistent improvements in performance and that modeling compounds specifically as treatments outperforms approaches that directly align images and compounds in a single representation space. Our findings point to a new direction for representation learning in morphological profiling, suggesting that methods should explicitly account for the multimodal nature of microscopy screening data.
Traj-CoA: Patient Trajectory Modeling via Chain-of-Agents for Lung Cancer Risk Prediction
arXiv:2510.10454v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) offer a generalizable approach for modeling patient trajectories, but suffer from the long and noisy nature of electronic health records (EHR) data in temporal reasoning. To address these challenges, we introduce Traj-CoA, a multi-agent system involving chain-of-agents for patient trajectory modeling. Traj-CoA employs a chain of worker agents to process EHR data in manageable chunks sequentially, distilling critical events into a shared long-term memory module, EHRMem, to reduce noise and preserve a comprehensive timeline. A final manager agent synthesizes the worker agents' summary and the extracted timeline in EHRMem to make predictions. In a zero-shot one-year lung cancer risk prediction task based on five-year EHR data, Traj-CoA outperforms baselines of four categories. Analysis reveals that Traj-CoA exhibits clinically aligned temporal reasoning, establishing it as a promisingly robust and generalizable approach for modeling complex patient trajectories. Implementation of Traj-CoA is available on https://github.com/zengsihang/Traj-CoA.
SemanticOpt: Towards LLM-Based Semantic Black-Box Optimization
arXiv:2510.25404v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Optimizing an experimental system can be extremely challenging when each experiment is expensive, time-consuming, or difficult to perform. Existing optimizers for expensive black-box problems, such as Bayesian optimization, are typically limited to numerical or categorical observations. They do not make use of broader domain knowledge, such as expert heuristics, relevant scientific papers, or similar previous experiments. Large language models (LLMs) can interpret this semantic information; however, even state-of-the-art LLMs struggle to reliably solve black-box optimization problems. We introduce SemanticOpt, a framework for semantic black-box optimization that equips LLMs with optimization capabilities by fine-tuning them on structured Bayesian optimization trajectories augmented with natural-language context. SemanticOpt jointly uses numerical and semantic evidence when proposing new experiments, while producing interpretable predictions aligned with Bayesian surrogate models. We construct a range of real-world optimization problems paired with semantic information to create a diverse benchmark for evaluating semantic black-box optimization. Across these domains, SemanticOpt outperforms both classical optimizers and existing LLM-based approaches on average when given relevant semantic information.
Neural simulation-based inference of the Higgs trilinear self-coupling via off-shell Higgs production
arXiv:2507.02032v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: One of the forthcoming major challenges in particle physics is the experimental determination of the Higgs trilinear self-coupling. While efforts have largely focused on on-shell double- and single-Higgs production in proton-proton collisions, off-shell Higgs production has also been proposed as a valuable complementary probe. In this article, we design a hybrid neural simulation-based inference (NSBI) approach to construct a likelihood of the Higgs signal incorporating modifications from the Standard Model effective field theory (SMEFT), relevant background processes, and quantum interference effects. It leverages the training efficiency of matrix-element-enhanced techniques, which are vital for robust SMEFT applications, while also incorporating the practical advantages of classification-based methods for effective background estimates. We demonstrate that our NSBI approach achieves sensitivity close to the theoretical optimum and provide expected constraints for the high-luminosity upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider. While we primarily concentrate on the Higgs trilinear self-coupling, we also consider constraints on other SMEFT operators that affect off-shell Higgs production.