Current single-cell clustering pipelines discard most genes and can yield inconsistent clusters across random seeds. We introduce KQE-2, a training-free hybrid quantum-classical framework for reproducible whole-transcriptome clustering. KQE-2 maps cells into entanglement-free quantum states, enabling exact feature evaluation on classical hardware and direct checks on a quantum processor. Theoretically, we prove that removing entanglement is necessary and sufficient to bound single-qubit feature variance locally. Practically, while retraining scVI shifted 14% of cells and altered rare-type markers and drug targets, KQE-2 delivered identical biology across runs. On standard highly variable genes, the quantum encoding alone raised accuracy on a developing cortex from 0.61 to 0.79. KQE-2 scales to 11.4 million nuclei on one server, outperforming the compared methods on eight of ten complete atlases (and within the best method's run-to-run range on two), and leads on six even under standard downstream clustering.
This work proposes the Adaptive Federated Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (AFHMC) for Bayesian federated learning (FL) tasks. The prior work on HMC applications for FL achieves $O(\sqrt{d}/\epsilon)$ communication cost under log-convex distributions, already demonstrating its advantage over the Langevin dynamic-based counterpart. Based on a refined analysis, this paper further reveals the benefit of HMC for the FL regime by incorporating a control mechanism for local node shifts. We prove that AFHMC at most requires $O(\{d/\epsilon^2\}^{1/3})$ communication cost up to a logarithmic term, which is significantly better than the existing results. Moreover, the proposed method adapts to client heterogeneity. Under low-heterogeneity settings (i.e., the target sampling precision $\epsilon^2$ is higher than the heterogeneity level), the communication rate of AFHMC can be as good as $O(\log(d/\epsilon^2))$, resembling the communication costs for FL optimization tools. To the best of our knowledge, this provides the first logarithmic communication complexity result for federated sampling, even though it requires low heterogeneity. Numerically, we also justify AFHMC's advantage under the low-heterogeneity regime. Our code is available at https://github.com/laaaarrywang/Adaptive-Federated-HMC
Many digital systems courses teach on FPGA boards whose vendor tool is no longer maintained: the Digilent Basys2 and Nexys2 (Xilinx Spartan-3E) and Nexys3 and Atlys (Spartan-6) need Xilinx ISE 14.7, discontinued since 2013 and hard to install on the computers and tablets students use today. The author presents Silinx, a free (AGPL-3.0) HDL design platform for teaching that keeps ISE's Project Navigator workflow but runs in a web browser with nothing to install. A module can be written in VHDL or Verilog, in C or C++ through Silinx HLS, which is compatible with AMD's Vitis HLS and passes all 73 of its introductory examples, or drawn as a schematic, an ASM chart, a state diagram, a Boolean function with its Karnaugh map, or a Petri net, from which its HDL is generated. Designs are checked with explanations written for beginners, simulated, run on an emulated board, built, and programmed onto a real board over WebUSB. The implementation flow is open and runs in the browser: Yosys and nextpnr compiled to WebAssembly, with Silinx's own device data, timing model and bitstream writer for the Spartan-3E and Spartan-6, built by black-box observation of ISE's documented tools; Lattice iCE40 boards use the existing open iCE40 tools, and further families are planned. ISE is the oracle: Silinx's bitstreams are byte-identical to those ISE writes for the same placed and routed design, and pass ISE's design rule check. Against ISE at the same optimization goal, the open flow uses 15% fewer slices with 14% shorter critical paths when optimizing for area, and 21% fewer slices with 8% shorter critical paths when optimizing for speed (geometric means over 45 open-source designs built by both flows). The author also describes how the platform was developed with AI coding agents under test-first project rules.
Many of the most consequential advances promised by AI, from curing diseases and inventing new technologies to formulating new scientific theories, are fundamentally creative acts. Yet creativity is uniquely difficult to learn because it faces a creative paradox: learning to repeat past examples of creative success makes those specific examples more likely to recur, inhibiting the very creativity desired. This work argues that creativity is better modeled as an explicit process rather than as a property of individual artifacts, and proposes to learn the underlying generative principles behind the creative process. In particular, to escape the paradox, we introduce creative priming (CP), wherein a trained priming model generates a prompt-specific primer that assists a response model in being creative, explicitly decoupling the creative process from response generation. The priming model learns through GRPO, rewarding primers that lead to responses that are novel, high-quality, and diverse, thereby reinforcing the process that yields creative responses without reinforcing any specific response.
Optical flow requires reliable matching from sufficient visual context and precise motion at every pixel. Existing methods such as WAFT match and estimate flow on the same coarse grids, then recover dense flow through learned upsampling, without explicitly linking visual support for matching to dense flow reconstruction. Our key insight is that dense pixel-level flow does not require equally dense matching. We decouple correspondence scale from flow resolution by adapting the size and shape of spatial supports to image structure for reliable matching, while reusing these supports for precise dense flow reconstruction. We realize this in Flow from Adaptive Token Estimation (FATE), whose token supports expand within coherent regions and contract near motion boundaries. Shared pixel-to-token associations pool features for matching and reconstruct pixel flow from token motions. Flow supervision jointly trains pixel grouping, token matching, and flow estimation without grouping labels, allowing FATE to anticipate which pixels are likely to move together from appearance alone. Trained on FlyingChairs/FlyingThings3D, FATE achieves the highest zero-shot accuracy on Sintel Final and KITTI, a critical setting given scarce real-world flow labels. For visible pixels, FATE improves accuracy within coherent regions, and more near motion boundaries. Its largest gains occur where direct matches are unavailable: Occluded or out-of-frame pixels account for roughly 10% of valid pixels but 50% of WAFT's total error. Experiments show that adaptive correspondence through pixel-to-token grouping enables reliable matching and precise pixel-level flow, improving generalization to unseen real scenes.
Detection calibration aligns predicted confidence with empirical correctness. Existing calibration losses inherit their correctness definition from box regression, specifically IoU against a hard threshold. We show that this target is geometrically ill-posed for tiny objects in UAV infrared imagery, where persons occupy less than 0.1\% of the image. The same pixel error is penalized more heavily as the target shrinks, so binary prediction calibration (BPC) actively suppresses confidences that should be high. On HIT-UAV, BPC with an IoU target degrades image-level localization-aware ECE (LaECE) from 0.0689 to 0.0761, 0.0649 to 0.0733, and 0.0653 to 0.0682 across Low, Mid, and High signal-to-clutter ratio (SCR) groups. We replace the IoU target with a continuous, scale-invariant normalized Wasserstein distance (NWD). The NWD target reduces LaECE\(_{\mathrm{NWD}}\) relative to BPC+IoU on all three groups (\(p<10^{-7}\)) with mAP neutral (0.9356 vs.\ 0.9347), and an independent center-offset anchor confirms that the gain is a genuine geometric correction. The improvement holds across a broad plateau of calibration weights. The NWD formulation requires no inference-time mapping layer. If a validation-fitted isotonic map is applied on top of it, calibration is lowered further, and the two corrections act on different components of the same error. The metric-level remedy has a measurable boundary. Target-background thermal pairing in the training distribution and detection-level aggregation under per-image detection-count heterogeneity lie outside it. Both are quantified independently of the NWD target.
Real-world intelligent systems must reconcile two demands: the adaptability conferred by emergence and the steerability required for accountable deployment. We show that these demands are governed by two distinct bifurcations on the same object and that, consequently, increased capability does not imply increased controllability. Emergence is a bifurcation of the capability variable $S$, with criterion $\Gamma:=\mathcal F'(0)>1$ equivalent to the existence of a unique positive stable fixed point of a self-consistency equation, following solely from the concavity of $\mathcal F$. Controllability is a bifurcation of the permission variable $c$, whose dynamics include an erosion term and exhibit a saddle-node fold with hysteresis as the gate criterion $\rho^\ast$ crosses unity. Three quantitative results follow: the critical exponent distinguishes families rather than classifying the transition; the gating-cost bound $K(M)\propto\log(1+M)$ grows with scope, not capability; and the fold threshold is $\gamma_c\approx4\mu\kappa$. Calibrated in both directions, the criteria reproduce the two-dimensional Ising transition, admit two true-feedback order parameters, and reject nine candidate quantities, supporting the conclusion that the order parameter is geometric rather than capability-related. Since permission cannot be endogenized and no deployed system has been measured to satisfy $\Gamma>1$ and $\rho^\ast>1$ simultaneously, increased capability does not imply controllability.
Missing ratings can overturn a personalized model's current prediction. For completed models with additive response scores, exact worst case bounds check all missing assignments without changing the current predictor. We evaluate this audit retrospectively in two self-triage cohorts, 108 clinicians rating three simulated psychiatric interviews, and 126 counseling demonstrations annotated by ten experts. Under shared random half histories, Fisher adaptation based on observed ratings reduces log loss relative to response frequency by 0.1071 nats in the clinician audit (95% CI [0.0867,0.1261]) and 0.0223 in counseling (95% CI[0.0121,0.0321]). The counseling test excludes target experts and source videos from training. Certification covers 5.4% and 10.5% of targets; fixed width acquisition raises coverage to 13.7% and 28.6% at the same budgets. With weights and responses held fixed, the observed-rating update also has lower loss than an affine partial update while certifying exactly the same evaluated targets. The certificate establishes agreement with the completed model, not correctness or stability at intermediate updates. These rating tasks test the method; clinical usefulness remains untested.
Generative models can support both state estimation and control in robotics. For control, a common approach is to use the model as a policy that directly samples actions conditioned on observation histories. However, models that jointly represent states, actions, and observations can also predict how the robot state and its environment evolve. We investigate whether these predictions can improve state estimation and control through a change in inference procedure, without modifying the pretrained model. To this end, we use particle filtering to maintain competing hypotheses about state histories. A single pretrained diffusion model generates these hypotheses along with their predicted observations and associated action proposals. As new measurements arrive, particles are reweighted according to how well their predicted observations match the measurements. While particle filtering conventionally uses these weights only for state estimation, we also use them to guide action selection, favoring proposals associated with hypotheses that better explain the observations. Simulation experiments in partially observed navigation and vision-based manipulation demonstrate improvements in both state estimation and task performance compared to action generation without filtering, using the same pretrained model and no additional test-time information.
The Pravda Network is a Russian state-aligned media aggregator, with over 110 websites and more than 15 million articles published since 2023. Given its prolific and repetitive output, emerging scholarship argues that the Pravda Network was built to influence AI systems. We conduct a large-scale audit of leading AI chatbots to understand: (1) the retrieval rates of Pravda Network articles, (2) the conditions of retrieval, and (3) whether chatbot responses affirm or caveat this content. We build a 10,000 prompt corpus from sampled Pravda Network headlines varied along two dimensions (headline rewording and user skepticism) and query 11 AI chatbots via the web interface (n=104,997 completed responses). Overall, we find susceptibility to Pravda Network retrieval to be infrequent---appearing in 7.3% of responses---and highly platform dependent---with three chatbots responsible for 94% of retrievals (You.com, Claude, and Copilot). Among the frontier models, Claude is an outlier: ChatGPT, Gemini, and Meta AI retrieved no Pravda Network articles, likely indicative of a domain-level filtering policy. All 11 chatbots, however, retrieved other Russian state-aligned media to some degree (median=13.56% of responses). When Pravda Network articles are surfaced, caveat rates vary widely by platform (from 5.3% to 76.2%), with You.com providing the fewest caveats. We also identify the tactic of headline washing: where 9.92% of sampled Pravda Network headlines attribute their reporting to other, often more credible, media outlets, while the articles themselves are republished from Russian state-aligned media. We discuss headline washing's potential to launder state media as independent reporting. With this audit, we provide a systematic analysis of AI chatbots' susceptibility to Russia's latest attempt to manipulate the information environment.
Representations learned from electronic health record (EHR) data encode patient physiology together with the clinical process that decides what is measured, when, and for whom. We formalize the data-generating process with latent physiology, ordering intent, laboratory values that exist only when measured, a learned representation, and clinical environments, and analyze two strategies for undoing this entanglement. First, no division of the information carried by laboratory "value" and "ordering" channels is identified from a single dataset: when ordering depends on the analyte, its distribution among untested patients is not recoverable, and a sentinel code for the undefined recorded value makes it carry all the entropy of the ordering indicator, fixing partial information decomposition (PID) for every redundancy measure satisfying the Williams-Beer axioms and invariant under injective re-encoding. Second, cross-site invariance of representation-conditional outcomes is a falsifiable implication of biological invariance taken jointly with exclusion and representation-sufficiency conditions, but not an identification strategy: we construct observationally equivalent models that disagree about biological invariance, whether the invariance test fails or passes. For binary physiology this happens exactly when case mix differs, the representation is lossy, and physiology affects the outcome. A worked example yields a 9.6-percentage-point cross-site gap under an unchanged biological mechanism. Tests performed for every patient remove the ordering gate, and measured tests can restore identification: biological invariance is identified when a test exactly summarizes outcome-relevant physiology, or, for binary physiology, when two tests with independent errors are available at sites with different case mix. Cross-site analyses should be reported as tests of a stated joint hypothesis.
Many major scientific advances come from approaching a problem with a new or novel perspective. While large language models (LLMs) with internet-scale knowledge seem poised to take such perspectives, their consistent generation remains elusive. Instead, models are drawn to dominant views and preexisting, in-field bias. To explore the potential of fresh eyes to increase creativity, this paper proposes naive LLMs, models that are made intentionally ignorant of a specific topic. Through deprivation in training or intentional forgetting, naive models are unburdened by existing dogma, allowing them to be free to make new associations and conjectures. These naive models can then be paired with a stronger mentor model that can refine their unique perspectives into concrete proposals. For the 1B and 7B models tested in this paper, naive models consistently produce seed ideas that are more novel and useful than baseline counterparts, and mentor refinement improves the ideas even further. Thus, contrary to the prevailing tradition of scaling up training data, we demonstrate a case where less information is actually more powerful, in particular when the aim is to discover genuinely outside-the-box solutions.
In collectives, language model agents can exchange individually innocuous messages that together support a policy violation. Understanding and preventing collective misalignment requires answering the question of which messages sufficiently influenced and necessarily enabled the violation. Collective Dependence Analysis (CDA) operationalises necessity and sufficiency to explain decisions and find the fewest removals interrupting support within tested combinations. Tests covered constructed violations, unscripted agent conversations, and recorded interactions, with selected message removals reducing violations from 93% to 6% in controlled cases. Using O(N) model evaluations for N messages, CDA achieves the same violation reduction with half the deletions of a frontier LLM judge given the transcript and asked for all supporting messages in eligible operational cases. CDA also proposes the mechanism through which the collective misalignment emerged. Nonetheless, complete explanations remain difficult on unfamiliar tasks and some removals can inadvertently disrupt correct decisions. CDA unifies explanations of collective misalignment with experimentally tested interventions.
LLM agents increasingly act as routers for tools, APIs, and software-supply-chain workflows, making an execution path - rather than generated text alone - a security-relevant model output. We study shadow invocation: a task-preserving request variant that causes an LLM router to select a riskier execution path, potentially skipping validation, provenance, staging, redaction, or audit controls even though the request does not ask for a malicious action. We introduce ShadowBench-MCP, a benchmark and metric suite that separates task preservation (TPSS), operational pressure (OPSS), and route-geometric drift (RGAS), and combines them in the pre-execution SODS score. In a focused policy-ablation study using a Groq-hosted qwen/qwen3-32b router, 120 routing decisions yield 96 original-versus-variant comparisons across six security-sensitive workflows. Efficiency-first routing produces a 29.2% shadow-invocation rate and 26.7% safety-tool skip rate. Policy-aware routing reduces these to 4.2% and 1.7%, respectively, corresponding to an 85.7% relative reduction in shadow invocations. Pre-execution signals distinguish shadow routes with ROC AUC up to 0.94. These results are early, single-router evidence of a policy-dependent routing-layer security effect, not a claim of universal vulnerability.
Reinforcement learning (RL) requires large amounts of interaction data or a reliable simulator, both hard to obtain for nonlinear soft robotic hardware. Recent work shows that a time-scale separation inherent to soft robot dynamics justifies their reduction to low-dimensional invariant manifolds, known as adiabatic spectral submanifolds (aSSMs). We demonstrate that an aSSM-reduced model, a simple polynomial ordinary differential equation learned purely from pre-collected data, can serve as an RL training environment. On a pneumatically actuated soft arm, we train a trajectory-tracking policy in 3 hours on a six-dimensional aSSM-reduced model and deploy it without fine-tuning, whereas reproducing this policy training extrapolates to 3 years of hardware interaction. Our policy tracks dynamic targets with 40% lower error than otherwise identical policies trained on a 4.8-million-parameter recurrent neural network (RNN) or a 1.7-million-parameter transformer, which take 13 and 100 hours to identify, against 5 minutes for our mathematically justified 6,924-parameter model.
Unlike the brain, artificial neural networks (ANNs) suffer from "catastrophic forgetting": complete overwriting of solutions when re-training on new functions ("concept shift") or on a disjoint domain of the current function ("domain shift"). ANNs require each batch of data to be roughly representative of the complete distribution, a typically expensive and impractical requirement. In this paper, we introduce Functional Task Networks (FTNs), a method of continual learning and knowledge transfer modeled after several properties of the mammalian neocortex. FTN is formulated as a distributed, stochastic mixture of experts in which a sparse, binary routing mask is computed at inference time using a small support sample of input-output pairs. Per-batch reconfiguration of the router during training, together with mask-overlap-filtered replay, shapes a basis of overlapping, partially trained subnetworks. Unrelated tasks route through mostly separate assemblies, related tasks overlap on shared components. On block-sequentially trained continual learning and knowledge transfer tasks FTN retains solutions nearly as well as disjoint-mask isolation and attains the lowest pre-update head-start loss among matched-architecture comparators. The learned mask-overlap geometry tracks the known concept-sharing structure where available. We show experimentally that under correlated concept shift, support-set mask reconfiguration is necessary even for retention. Under domain shift, the distributed bank with replay is sufficient to handle retention without the configurer. Forward transfer, or head-start, and backward transfer, are also contributed by support-set mask configuration.
Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly operate in groups, each pursuing an individual objective while jointly determining system performance. If an operator controls which agent observes which other agent, but not their payoffs or messages, how should observations be structured to raise collective welfare? We make the information network (who observes whom) a design object, decoupled from the fixed interaction network over which agents act. Ten identical LLM agents play repeated group-decision games; by default each observes only an anonymous summary of the group's previous-round outcome, and a manager with a fixed budget adds directed observation links that reveal peers' past actions. Across 1,080 episodes and six games spanning coordination, anti-coordination, social dilemmas, and discovery, we ask how much information to share and, at a fixed budget, who should observe whom. Disclosure creates behavioral coupling: observation acts as a contagion channel whose welfare effect depends on the alignment between individually attractive behavior and the collective objective. First, the value of information is alignment-contingent: more peer information tends to help or be neutral when individual behavior is aligned with the collective goal, but under free-riding or congestion externalities it amplifies collectively harmful behavior; in a public-goods game the group does best with no information at all. We read this sign separation as a cross-game regularity within one controlled LLM population, not a model-invariant law. Second, at a fixed budget, who observes whom matters primarily when coupling is harmful: a modular "barbell" that lets sub-populations entrench harmful behavior is reliably the worst wiring, reversing the network-reciprocity intuition from human evolutionary game theory. These results argue against a default of full transparency for agent collectives.
We study off-policy evaluation (OPE) in contextual bandits with data collected from multiple logging policies. Inverse propensity scoring (IPS) is a standard approach to OPE and extends naturally to the multi-logger setting. However, as highlighted by Agarwal et al. [2017], neither balanced nor weighted IPS consistently outperforms the other in this setting. We resolve this dilemma by deriving an optimal IPS estimator with sample-dependent weights that minimize variance subject to unbiasedness. Using a variational calculus approach, we obtain closed-form optimal weights, yielding an estimator that is unbiased and achieves asymptotically optimal variance within a generalized weighted-IPS estimator class. Instead of a reward model, the estimator needs only a $K\times K$ matrix and a $K$-vector of moments, where $K$ is the number of logging policies, and we quantify how much efficiency this costs relative to the semiparametric oracle. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that our estimator generally improves on existing multi-logger IPS methods. We also extend our estimator to a doubly robust form by incorporating a conditional reward estimator. We compare the resulting DR extension with the semiparametrically efficient DR estimator of Kallus et al. [2021], both theoretically and empirically. We show that the two estimators achieve the same asymptotic variance when the conditional reward estimator is consistent, while our estimator can retain semiparametric efficiency under certain forms of reward misspecification. Empirically, the proposed DR estimator often achieves lower estimation error than the existing DR baseline.
C-to-Rust migration is an active agenda, but no dataset pairs the two languages at the level of whole solutions to a shared problem. We present CRUSTPairs, 1857 C/Rust implementation pairs drawn from competitive programming archives, normalised, deduplicated, and stratified into difficulty tiers by zero-shot cross-language embedding similarity, with perrecord provenance and licensing. Cross-language retrieval is hard on this data, and harder than a single baseline would suggest: TF-IDF over shared identifiers reaches MRR 0.21 and so beats a pretrained code model at 0.19, which on the hardest quarter of the data scores 1.7x chance. Finetuning reaches 0.79, and lifts that hardest quarter 10x. Renaming every user identifier settles what is being learned: the finetuned models keep 96-97% of their accuracy without them, while the pretrained model keeps 66\% - less than the lexical baseline does - and on structurally divergent pairs the finetuned models are better without identifiers than with them.
Expert analog layouts differ from auto-generated ones in density and regularity, not only in legality: experts make a succession of discrete, hierarchical physical decisions and revisit each after extracted electrical results, while most existing automated flows act on a physical search space fixed before the controller runs. We present CASCoDe, a closed-loop LLM agent framework for analog netlist-to-layout design that formalizes those expert decisions as a hierarchical discrete action space-sizing selection, structural floorplan, local layout refinement, routing-attempt selection-on which the agent runs feedback-driven tree search from a circuit netlist to a verified GDS. The agent authors the circuit-specific floorplans and scripts, and an execution layer of interface adaptations over adapted tools make every action land at physical implementation and be judged by DRC, LVS, and extracted-RC simulation. On 20 SKY130 amplifiers spanning single-, two-, and three-stage topologies, CASCoDe is the only flow that delivers a DRC- and LVS-clean routed layout when meeting design specifications for every circuit. It reduces area by 59-85% (mean 71%) against a conventional P&R flow on identical PCells, raises mean device density from 0.39 to 0.74 against APPlace, MAGICAL, ALIGN and ICPI. A layout that beats every baseline in area and legality appears after 11 minutes of agent time on average, and ablations show that the structured action space and the feedback-guided tree search each reduce area and search cost.