Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14318

Sectional Curvature for Kantorovich-Wasserstein and Hellinger-Kantorovich Geometries

Authors:

Karl-Theodor Sturm↗

arXiv:2606.14318v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We derive an explicit formula for the sectional curvature of the space ${\cal M}(M)$ of finite measures on a Riemannian manifold M. The space ${\cal M}(M)$ is equipped with the Hellinger-Kantorovich metric $HK$. Even in the case M=R^n, the curvature is comprised of two parts: the `lifted part' is negative, and the `twisted part' is positive. It will be analyzed in detail for the multidimensional torus. Our general approach to sectional curvature in geodesic spaces also leads to new insights into the curvature of the space $P_2(M)$ of probability measures on M equipped with the Kantorovich-Wasserstein metric $W_2$.

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02.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2503.17867

Detecting and Mitigating DDoS Attacks with AI: A Survey

Authors:

Alexandru Apostu↗Silviu Gheorghe↗Andrei H\^iji↗Nicolae Cleju↗Andrei P\u{a}tra\c{s}cu↗Cristian Rusu↗Radu Ionescu↗Paul Irofti↗

arXiv:2503.17867v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Distributed Denial of Service attacks represent an active cybersecurity research problem. Recent research shifted from static rule-based defenses towards AI-based detection and mitigation. This comprehensive survey covers several key topics. Preeminently, state-of-the-art AI detection methods are discussed. An in-depth taxonomy based on manual expert hierarchies and an AI-generated dendrogram are provided, thus settling DDoS categorization ambiguities. An important discussion on available datasets follows, covering data format options and their role in training AI detection methods together with adversarial training and examples augmentation. Beyond detection, AI based mitigation techniques are surveyed as well. Finally, multiple open research directions are proposed.

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03.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18790

Closing the Loop: PID Feedback Control for Interpretable Activation Steering in Symbolic Music Generation

Authors:

Ioannis Prokopiou↗Pantelis Vikatos↗Maximos Kaliakatsos-Papakostas↗Theodoros Giannakopoulos↗Themos Stafylakis↗

arXiv:2606.18790v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transformer-based architectures have significantly advanced the generation of complex symbolic sequences, yet a significant gap remains in achieving fine-grained, interpretable control over discrete signal attributes. This paper investigates the mechanistic interpretability of the Multitrack Music Transformer (MMT) and proposes a framework for deterministic attribute modulation without retraining to bridge this gap via inference-time activation steering. Utilizing the Difference-in-Means (DiffMean) methodology, we isolate latent directions for signal attributes, specifically Pitch and Duration, within the residual stream. We validate the Linear Representation Hypothesis in this domain, achieving high correlation between steering magnitude and attribute shift. To address the inherent feature entanglement in multi-attribute steering, we introduce a Dual Steering framework utilizing Gram-Schmidt Orthogonalization. Experimental results demonstrate that this geometric decoupling reduces conceptual interference and signal degradation compared to naive vector addition, enabling independent deterministic control even against strong autoregressive conditioning.

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04.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14695

Persona-Pruner: Sculpting Lightweight Models for Role-Playing

Authors:

Jinsu Kim↗Jihoon Tack↗Noah Lee↗Jongheon Jeong↗

Language Models (LMs) have shown remarkable potential as role-playing chatbots, delivering consistent, stylized interactions when given a specification of a character or user persona. However, applying these capabilities to real-world applications (e.g., ecosystems with numerous NPCs interacting simultaneously) exposes a critical inefficiency due to the excessive computational cost. In this paper, we question the necessity of dedicating a full, generalist model to a single persona, hypothesizing that a specific character identity relies on only a fraction of the model's total capacity. We observe that naively pruning LMs often severely degrades the role-playing performance for a specific persona; it does not distinguish between redundant knowledge and essential character traits. We propose Persona-Pruner, a framework that sculpts a lightweight role-playing model by isolating persona-specific sub-networks from a single description. Our experiments consistently show that Persona-Pruner preserves role-playing performance substantially more effectively than existing state-of-the-art LLM pruning techniques, reducing the performance drop from the dense model by up to 93.8% over the strongest baseline on RoleBench in LLM-as-a-judge score, while still maintaining general LLM capabilities. Code is available at https://github.com/jsu-kim/Persona-Pruner.

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05.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.09039

Agent Economics: An Entropy-Controlled Pluralistic Alignment Framework for Preventing Artificial Hivemind in Autonomous Agents

Authors:

Cheonsu Jeong↗

arXiv:2606.09039v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This study proposes the Behavioral Protocol Framework (BPF), an entropy-controlled pluralistic alignment framework designed to address two critical challenges in autonomous agent economies: the hivemind effect arising from excessive strategic convergence among agents and the lack of transparency in autonomous decision-making processes. The proposed BPF consists of three core modules: Mentalizing-based Social Intelligence (MbSI) grounded in Theory of Mind (ToM), Pluralistic Alignment (PA), and a Verifiable Execution Kernel (VEK). These modules are organically integrated within a closed-loop architecture that governs the entire lifecycle of agent behavior, from decision-making and execution to verification and feedback. To evaluate the proposed framework, a simulation environment implemented in Python and a Streamlit-based user interface will be developed. Through empirical experimentation, the study aims to examine whether the entropy-control mechanism of the PA module can effectively preserve strategic diversity among agents and mitigate collective convergence, while the VEK module provides a comprehensive and transparent audit trail of the decision-making process. The anticipated results are expected to demonstrate that the proposed framework can simultaneously enhance the stability, efficiency, and trustworthiness of autonomous agent economies. Consequently, this research offers a practical approach for developing robust, transparent, and accountable agent-native economic systems.

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06.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15 DOI: HASH:ca0df469f0e50db3973b6b49a4680a2e

Two Blood-based Endotypes Reveal Divergent Clinical Outcomes of Fibrotic Hypersensitivity Pneumonitis

Authors:

Huang↗Ma↗S.-F↗Kim↗J. S↗Strickland↗Receveur↗B. A↗Bonham↗C. S↗Paul↗T. K↗…

Rationale: Fibrotic hypersensitivity pneumonitis (fHP) is an antigen-driven, life-threatening interstitial lung disease characterized by heterogeneous radiologic features, clinical outcomes, and treatment responses. Objectives: To identify blood-based fHP endotypes that inform mechanism, prognosis and therapeutic response. Methods: We performed integrative analyses of multi-compartment transcriptomic data derived from whole blood, peripheral blood mononuclear cells, bronchoalveolar lavage, and surgical lung biopsies, alongside circulating plasma proteomics. Multiple clustering algorithms were cross-compared to ensure robustness and reproducibility of endotypes identification. Immune cell composition was inferred using bulk RNA-seq deconvolution and annotated with BAL single-cell RNA-seq. Pathway activities were characterized using Gene Set Enrichment Analysis. Transplant-free survival (TFS) was evaluated for endotype and corticosteroid exposure by Kaplan-Meier methods, with hazard ratios analyzed using multivariable Cox proportional hazards models. Results: Two molecular endotypes, lymphocytic-associated (L-fHP) and non-lymphocytic-associated (N-fHP), were identified and validated. L-fHP showed enrichment of adaptive immune signaling and lymphocyte predominance, whereas N-fHP demonstrated myeloid-cell activation with neutrophil and macrophage predominance. Corticosteroid exposure was associated with worse TFS in L-fHP but not in N-fHP after adjusting for age, sex, and baseline pulmonary function. Compared to L-fHP, N-fHP had poorer baseline pulmonary function, faster 12-month FVC decline, and shorter TFS. N-fHP also exhibited elevated neutrophil-associated markers, including matrix metalloproteinase-9, across paired transcriptomic and proteomic datasets, supporting a neutrophil-driven, cross-compartment disease process. Conclusion: Multi-omic, multi-compartment analysis identifies two reproducible fHP endotypes with distinct clinical outcomes and corticosteroid responses, supporting a precision medicine approach beyond current clinical and radiologic classification.

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07.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2411.15490

Improving Factuality of 3D Brain MRI Report Generation with Paired Image-domain Retrieval and Text-domain Augmentation

Authors:

Junhyeok Lee↗Yujin Oh↗Dahyoun Lee↗Hyon Keun Joh↗Chul-Ho Sohn↗Sung Hyun Baik↗Cheol Kyu Jung↗Jung Hyun Park↗Kyu Sung Choi↗Byung-Hoon Kim↗Jong Chul Ye↗

Acute ischemic stroke (AIS) requires time-critical decision-making, where inaccurate interpretation of neuroimaging findings can lead to irreversible disability. Diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) and apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) maps from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are central to detecting acute infarction, yet generating factually reliable radiology reports directly from 3D MRI remains challenging due to the difficulty of learning robust cross-modal alignments between volumetric images and clinical text. We propose paired image-domain retrieval and text-domain augmentation (PIRTA), a retrieval-augmented generation framework that improves report factuality by avoiding explicit image-text alignment. PIRTA retrieves clinically similar 3D DWI/ADC volumes using a pretrained 3D vision encoder and leverages their paired clinician-authored reports to ground large language model (LLM)-based report generation. Experiments on multi-institutional in-house data, a held-out external privacy-preserving cohort, and the public ISLES benchmark demonstrate that PIRTA achieves strong image-domain retrieval performance and consistently improves ischemic-territory accuracy, a clinically grounded surrogate for report factuality, compared to direct image-to-text baselines. These results indicate that retrieval-grounded generation provides a scalable and reliable paradigm for producing factually consistent radiology reports from complex 3D brain MRI. Source code is available at https://github.com/jhlee0619/PIRTA.

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08.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24453

Bayesian control for coding agents

Authors:

Theodore Papamarkou↗Vladislav Smirnov↗Viktor Mazanov↗Artem Vazhentsev↗Preslav Nakov↗Timothy Baldwin↗Artem Shelmanov↗

Modern coding agents pair LLM generators with various tools, including cheap diagnostics and expensive verifiers. The tool-use decisions are typically governed by orchestrators that often use fixed rules and ignore uncertainty. We formulate orchestration as cost-sensitive sequential hypothesis testing: a Bayesian controller maintains a belief over candidate correctness and dynamically decides whether to gather more evidence, refine the candidate, verify it, or stop. Across six generators and nine coding benchmarks, Bayesian control proves to be most valuable when verification is costly and critics are informative but imperfect. Beyond control, the belief state yields an interpretable correctness score that outperforms token-probability and raw tool-success baselines for uncertainty quantification.

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09.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2504.20734

UniversalRAG: Retrieval-Augmented Generation over Corpora of Diverse Modalities and Granularities

Authors:

Woongyeong Yeo↗Kangsan Kim↗Soyeong Jeong↗Jinheon Baek↗Sung Ju Hwang↗

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has shown substantial promise in improving factual accuracy by grounding model responses with external knowledge relevant to queries. However, most existing approaches are limited to a text-only corpus, and while recent efforts have extended RAG to other modalities such as images and videos, they typically operate over a single modality-specific corpus. In contrast, real-world queries vary widely in the type of knowledge they require, which a single type of knowledge source cannot address. To address this, we introduce UniversalRAG, an any-to-any RAG framework designed to retrieve and integrate knowledge from heterogeneous sources with diverse modalities and granularities. Specifically, motivated by the observation that forcing all modalities into a unified representation space derived from a single aggregated corpus causes a modality gap, where the retrieval tends to favor items from the same modality as the query, we propose modality-aware routing, which dynamically identifies the most appropriate modality-specific corpus and performs targeted retrieval within it, and further justify its effectiveness with a theoretical analysis. Moreover, beyond modality, we organize each modality into multiple granularity levels, enabling fine-tuned retrieval tailored to the complexity and scope of the query. We validate UniversalRAG on 10 benchmarks of multiple modalities, showing its superiority over various modality-specific and unified baselines.

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10.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2602.05367

RaBiT: Residual-Aware Binarization Training for Accurate and Efficient LLMs

Authors:

Youngcheon You↗Banseok Lee↗Minseop Choi↗Seonyoung Kim↗Hyochan Chong↗Changdong Kim↗Youngmin Kim↗Dongkyu Kim↗

arXiv:2602.05367v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Efficient deployment of large language models (LLMs) requires extreme quantization, forcing a critical trade-off between low-bit efficiency and performance. Residual binarization enables hardware-friendly, matmul-free inference by stacking binary ($\pm$1) layers, but is plagued by pathological feature co-adaptation. We identify a key failure mode, which we term inter-path adaptation: during quantization-aware training (QAT), parallel residual binary paths learn redundant features, degrading the error-compensation structure and limiting the expressive capacity of the model. While prior work relies on heuristic workarounds (e.g., path freezing) that constrain the solution space, we propose RaBiT, a novel quantization framework that resolves co-adaptation by algorithmically enforcing a residual hierarchy. Its core mechanism sequentially derives each binary path from a single shared full-precision weight, which ensures that every path corrects the error of the preceding one. This process is stabilized by a robust initialization that prioritizes functional preservation over mere weight approximation. RaBiT redefines the 2-bit accuracy-efficiency frontier: it achieves state-of-the-art performance, rivals even hardware-intensive Vector Quantization (VQ) methods, and delivers a $4.49\times$ inference speed-up over full-precision models on an RTX 4090. Code is available at https://github.com/SamsungLabs/RaBiT.

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11.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16564

Elastic ODYN: Differentiable Optimization for Infeasible Control and Learning in Robotics

Authors:

Aristotelis Papatheodorou↗Jose Rojas↗Ioannis Havoutis↗Carlos Mastalli↗

arXiv:2606.16564v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robotic systems routinely encounter conflicting objectives, modeling errors, and degenerate contact conditions that render quadratic programs (QPs) infeasible. Yet most optimization solvers and differentiable QP layers assume feasibility, leading to numerical failures, unstable gradients, or solver breakdown when constraints cannot be simultaneously satisfied. We present Elastic ODYN, a primal–dual non-interior-point QP solver that handles infeasibility through smooth squared-$\ell_2$ elastic relaxations. The resulting formulation remains well posed under ill-conditioning and degeneracy, supports warm starting, and converges to closest-to-feasible solutions when no feasible point exists. A lightweight refinement stage recovers physically meaningful dual variables from the elastic solution. Building on this framework, we develop Elastic OdynLayer, a differentiable QP layer with stable gradients under infeasibility, and Elastic OdynSQP, an infeasibility-aware SQP method that resolves inconsistent subproblems and intrinsically infeasible optimal control tasks through selective constraint relaxation. We evaluate the framework on benchmark QPs, singular contact mechanics, differentiable parameter identification, and quadrupedal and humanoid trajectory optimization. Across all settings, Elastic ODYN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art elastic QP solvers in robustness, warm-start performance, and convergence reliability, enabling optimization, simulation, control, and learning beyond the feasibility assumptions of existing methods.

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12.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2511.09465

Branching Flows: Discrete, Continuous, and Manifold Flow Matching with Splits and Deletions

Authors:

Lukas Billera↗Hedwig Nora Nordlinder↗Jack Collier Ryder↗Anton Oresten↗Aron St{\aa}lmarck↗Theodor Mosetti Bj\"ork↗Ben Murrell↗

arXiv:2511.09465v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion and flow matching approaches to generative modeling have shown promise in domains where the state space is continuous, such as image generation or protein folding & design, and discrete, exemplified by diffusion large language models. They offer a natural fit when the number of elements in a state is fixed in advance (e.g. images), but require ad hoc solutions when, for example, the length of a response from a large language model, or the number of amino acids in a protein chain is not known a priori. Here we propose Branching Flows, a generative modeling framework that, like diffusion and flow matching approaches, transports a simple distribution to the data distribution. But in Branching Flows, the elements in the state evolve over a forest of binary trees, branching and dying stochastically with rates that are learned by the model. This allows the model to control, during generation, the number of elements in the sequence. We also show that Branching Flows can compose with any flow matching base process on discrete sets, continuous Euclidean spaces, smooth manifolds, and `multimodal' product spaces that mix these components. We demonstrate this in three domains: small molecule generation (multimodal), antibody sequence generation (discrete), and protein backbone generation (multimodal), and show that Branching Flows is a capable distribution learner with a stable learning objective, and that it enables new capabilities.

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13.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15821

The Truth Stays in the Family: Enhancing Contextual Grounding via Inherited Truthful Heads in Model Lineages

Authors:

Miso Choi↗Seonga Choi↗Mincheol Kwon↗Woosung Joung↗Jinkyu Kim↗Jungbeom Lee↗

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have produced many specialized multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) that share common foundational LLMs, forming distinct model lineages. It remains unclear whether a fundamental behavioral link exists between the foundational LLMs and downstream variants. We investigate this question by quantifying head-level context-truthfulness scores. Across diverse LLM and MLLM lineages, including Vicuna-, Qwen2.5-, LLaMA2-, and Mistral-based models, we find that Truth Scores are strongly preserved within model families, even after instruction tuning or multimodal adaptation. We further show that this inheritance is consistent with attention-head weight preservation, and that context-truthful heads attend to query-relevant evidence. Building on this finding, we propose TruthProbe, a soft-gating strategy that amplifies context-truthful heads while preserving other head contributions. TruthProbe improves contextual truthfulness on HaluEval and reduces multimodal hallucination on POPE and CHAIR, with base-LLM Truth Scores transferring effectively to their fine-tuned LLM and MLLM descendants. Code is available at https://github.com/miso-choi/TruthProbe.

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14.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17 DOI: HASH:65a44857aaef1114ef08d121f834ffea

Proteomics Uncovers Cryptic JPH2 Loss in Paediatric Dilated Cardiomyopathy

Authors:

Smith-Diaz↗C. C↗Iaprintsev↗Huckstep↗Macciocca↗Piers↗A. T↗Henden↗Bryen↗Stewart↗Butters↗Baker↗…

Despite recent advances in next-generation sequencing, genetic diagnostic rates for dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) remain low. Among paediatric DCM, causes are often heritable, with a greater frequency of de novo, recessive and syndromic causes of disease. Novel diagnostic methods are therefore required to solve monogenic cases. To assess the value of proteomics as a diagnostic tool for paediatric DCM, we obtained left ventricle myocardial samples from paediatric patients undergoing heart transplantation at the Royal Children's Hospital, Melbourne. We performed genome sequencing and proteomics and leveraged this multi-omics dataset to uncover the molecular cause of disease in a gene elusive proband. The proband carried a heterozygous JPH2 frameshift variant identified on clinical exome sequencing. However, proteomic analysis showed a pronounced downregulation of JPH2, suggestive of biallelic loss-of-function. Closer inspection of the genomic data revealed a large inversion (~8.34 Mb) with a breakpoint falling within intron 5 of JPH2 that displaces the 3'UTR from the coding transcript. The two variants were confirmed to be in trans using long read DNA sequencing, consistent with a diagnosis of JPH2 autosomal recessive DCM. Finally, we applied RNA sequencing with total RNA library preparation to show that transcripts containing a 3'UTR were reduced to ~10% relative to controls. As a proof-of-principle, we present the first reported use of proteomics from explanted cardiac tissue to provide a genetic diagnosis. Our methodology has broad relevance to patients with genetically unsolved Mendelian diseases, who might undergo organ transplantation as part of clinical management.

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15.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2508.03736

Fusion of Pervasive RF Data with Spatial Images via Vision Transformers for Enhanced Mapping in Smart Cities

Authors:

Rafayel Mkrtchyan↗Armen Manukyan↗Hrant Khachatrian↗Theofanis P. Raptis↗

In this paper, we present a deep learning-based approach that integrates the DINOv2 architecture to improve building mapping by combining (possibly erroneous) maps from open-source platforms with pervasive radio frequency (RF) data collected from multiple wireless user equipments and base stations. Unlike prior methods, our approach leverages a vision transformer-based architecture to jointly process both RF and map modalities within a unified framework, effectively capturing spatial dependencies and structural priors for enhanced mapping accuracy. For the evaluation purposes, we employ a synthetic dataset co-produced by Huawei. To address the challenges associated with real-world data imperfections, we introduce controlled noise to its RF data so as to simulate real-world conditions. Additionally, we develop and train a model that leverages only aggregated path loss information to tackle the mapping problem. We measure the results according to three performance metrics: the Jaccard index (intersection over union, IoU), the Hausdorff distance, and the Chamfer distance. Our design achieves a macro IoU of 65.3%, significantly surpassing (i) the erroneous maps baseline, which yields 40.1%, (ii) an RF-only method from the literature, which yields 37.3%, and (iii) a non-AI fusion baseline that we designed which yields 42.2%. The comparative evaluation highlights the limitations of relying solely on RF data or on spatial data, as well as the effectiveness that AI can have on fusing data towards enhancing smart city mapping accuracy. We further validate our method on real-world data from the Oslo region, complementing the synthetic evaluation with a real deployment setting, where our best fusion model reaches 64.9% macro IoU. We additionally outline a strategy for deploying the model over larger areas by tiling the region with overlapping windows.

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16.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24170

Low Spatial Cost CCZ Magic State Factory

Authors:

Sungyeon Kook↗Yujin Kang↗Ilkwon Sohn↗Jun Heo↗

arXiv:2606.24170v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a design framework for reconstructing gate-based magic state distillation protocols as compact joint-measurement architectures implementable with the surface code. The goal is to reduce the surface-code resource cost of a magic state factory while preserving the logical function and error-detection structure of the distillation protocol. We construct a reduced architecture for implementing an eight-to-three CCZ distillation protocol using smaller surface-code patches. The proposed factory preserves the single-fault-detection property and the leading-order error suppression of the protocol, while producing CCZ magic states with lower spatial cost than the design of Gidney and Fowler. The proposed design perspective can also be applied to T-state factories and other multiqubit non-Clifford resource-state factories. Our approach provides a framework for extending the design space of surface-code magic state factories beyond a single CCZ layout optimization.

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17.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2603.09818

An Introduction to the Foundations and Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics

Authors:

Theodore McKeever↗Ahsan Nazir↗

arXiv:2603.09818v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This article surveys a selection of key conceptual and interpretational developments in quantum mechanics, tracing the theory from its foundational postulates to contemporary discussions of measurement, nonlocality, and the emergence of classicality. Beginning with the structure of Hilbert space and the postulates governing state evolution and measurement, the epistemic stance of the Copenhagen interpretation and its modern reformulations are examined. The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen argument, Bell's theorem, and Hardy's paradox are then discussed as probes of locality and realism, alongside the deterministic but explicitly nonlocal de Broglie-Bohm theory. The measurement problem and the implications of contextuality are analyzed in relation to objective collapse models, which introduce new physical dynamics to account for definite outcomes. Finally, the role of decoherence in the suppression of interference and the emergence of classical behavior is explored, together with the interpretational frameworks of many-worlds and consistent histories. This material aims to provide a coherent introductory overview of how several of the most prominent interpretations address the central concern of what quantum mechanics tells us about the nature of physical reality.

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18.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2601.00181

Causal Emotion Recognition in Conversation: Context Saturation and Discourse-Marker Evidence

Authors:

Cheonkam Jeong↗Adeline Nyamathi↗

We address two persistent gaps in Emotion Recognition in Conversation: which modeling choices materially affect performance, and how recognition findings connect to interpretable discourse-level patterns. We study both through a systematic investigation on IEMOCAP with cross-dataset validation on MELD. For recognition, we run controlled ablations with 10 random seeds and paired significance tests with multiple-comparisons correction, yielding three findings. First, conversational context is the dominant factor, but performance saturates quickly: roughly 90% of the gain is captured within the most recent 10-30 preceding turns, depending on the label set. Second, hierarchical sentence representations help most in utterance-only settings and show a clear advantage on MELD, but their benefit disappears once turn-level context is available, suggesting that conversational history subsumes much of the intra-utterance structure. Third, integrating an external affective lexicon does not improve results, consistent with pretrained encoders already capturing most of the affective signal needed for ERC. Under a strictly causal setting, our simple models achieve strong performance (82.69% 4-way; 67.07% 6-way weighted F1), showing that competitive accuracy is achievable without future turns. For linguistic analysis, we examine 5,286 discourse-marker occurrences and find a reliable association between emotion and marker position (p < .0001). Sad utterances show reduced left-periphery marker usage (21.9%) relative to other emotions (28-32%), consistent with accounts linking left-periphery markers to active discourse management. This aligns with our recognition results, where Sad benefits most from conversational context (+22 percentage points), suggesting sadness may be more context-dependent than emotions with stronger local pragmatic cues.

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19.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15 DOI: HASH:1c8f65b3963f9c2683d559cd8fe8d228

Bidirectional associations between cannabis use, oddball performance, and P3 event-related potential

Authors:

Garasky↗Spychala↗Dong↗Anokhin↗Bogdan↗Chan↗Hesselbrock↗Kamarajan↗Kinreich↗Kuo↗Kutzner↗Miller↗…

Importance: Cannabis use remains prevalent in youth despite concerns regarding its potential impact on cognitive function. Unraveling whether the association between cannabis use and cognition is partially due to preexisting differences or primarily related to use is vital to understanding underlying mechanisms. Objective: To estimate the longitudinal association between cannabis initiation and cognitive trajectories, indexed by task performance and P3 event-related potential (ERP), and to estimate whether baseline cognition is associated with cannabis initiation. Design: Data were analyzed from the ongoing longitudinal Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism (COGA) cohort, which was followed up approximately every 2-5 years from 2004 to 2025. Setting: 6 sites across the United States. Participants: Adolescent and young adult offspring of past COGA participants and control families who reported on their cannabis use and who had Visual Oddball (VOP) performance and P3 ERP data (N=4814; 52.4% female, 68.4% white) were grouped based on the timing of cognitive data collection relative to cannabis initiation into Pre-onset (n=2,449; [&ge;]1 assessment) and Post-onset (n=998; [&ge;]3 assessments) subsamples. Main Outcomes and Measures: VOP measures include performance accuracy (%), reaction times (ms), and P3 amplitude (V) and latency (ms) during target trials. Cannabis measures included lifetime use of cannabis (i.e., ever used) and age at first use. Results: High P3 amplitude, and prolonged P3 latency and reaction time were associated with a reduced hazard of cannabis initiation (All Hazards Ratio, [H.R.s]< 0.91, p's

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20.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16281

Who Should Lead Decoding Now? Tracking Reliable Trajectories for Ensembling Masked Diffusion Language Models

Authors:

Heecheol Yun↗Joonhyung Park↗Joowon Kim↗Eunho Yang↗

Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) have emerged as a distinct paradigm for sequence generation. As MDLMs become diverse in capabilities and knowledge coverage, an important question is how to combine their knowledge. Toward this, we first investigate the unique decoding dynamics of MDLMs. We find that successful generations exhibit stable confidence dynamics over answer-relevant positions, while unreliable trajectories can often be corrected by injecting promising intermediate states from other models. Guided by this observation, we propose $TIE$ ($T$rajectory-based $I$terative $E$nsembling), a knowledge fusion framework in which MDLMs iteratively identify reliable decoding trajectories and relay them across models. TIE tracks confidence dynamics over answer-relevant positions to determine which model currently follows a more reliable trajectory and selectively transfers partially denoised sequences across models. As the model on the more promising trajectory often changes across denoising steps, TIE allows different models to contribute complementary strengths at different stages of generation. Strong performance across diverse reasoning tasks, along with our analyses, suggests that TIE offers a practical approach to the underexplored problem of MDLM ensembling.

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21.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11606

Frozen Foundation-Model Embeddings Discard Small-Lesion Signal in Chest Radiography: Implications for Pre-Deployment Evaluation

Authors:

Raajitha Muthyala↗Zhenan Yin↗Alekhya Jilla↗Frank Li↗Theo Dapamede↗Bardia Khosravi↗Mohammadreza Chavoshi↗Judy Gichoya↗Saptarshi Purkayastha↗

Frozen vision-transformer (ViT) foundation-model embeddings increasingly serve as the substrate for downstream chest-radiography (CXR) pipelines, yet where small-scale, low-contrast signal is retained or lost in the frozen forward pass has not been systematically quantified across architectures, pretraining domains, and objectives. We probed five frozen ViTs (RAD-DINO, DINOv2-B/14, DINOv3 ViT-7B, BiomedCLIP, MedSigLIP) and a frozen DINO-pretrained ResNet-50 architectural control across three large CXR cohorts (NIH-CXR14, MIMIC-CXR, Emory-CXR; aggregate pool n=492,724) and ChestX-Det10 (n=3,543; 1,462 small-lesion bounding boxes across Calcification, Nodule, Mass). Each model was evaluated with a small-scale-perturbation panel and a region-aware bounding-box-stratified probe on real lesions, comparing three pooling modes from the same forward pass: classification token (CLS), patch-mean (mean over all final-layer patch tokens), and bounding-box-restricted patch-local. On the perturbation panel, CLS embeddings sat at the chance floor (area under the ROC curve [AUC] 0.500-0.524); patch-mean was indistinguishable from CLS on iso-blur and reticular-fine cells but rose with CLS on larger directional-blur footprints, while disease AUC on globally decided tasks ranged 0.642-0.913. Patch-local probes recovered AUC ~1.0 from the same forward pass (per-model mean improvement +0.412 to +0.488); the ResNet-50 control reproduced the chance floor. On ChestX-Det10, image-level CLS classification showed within-class small-versus-large stratum gaps up to +0.243 AUC; bounding-box-level patch-local pooling on the same forward pass recovered AUC >= 0.899 on every (model x class) cell. Frozen ViT embeddings silently suppress small-scale signal at the global-aggregation step; the signal is recoverable from patch tokens conditional on a region of interest.

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22.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14000

Formalizing Numerical Analysis: An Agent Pipeline and Quality Audit Beyond Kernel Acceptance

Authors:

Theodore Meek↗Siyuan Ge↗Di Qiu Xiang↗Simon Chess↗Vasily Ilin↗

arXiv:2606.14000v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent work has demonstrated that coding agents can formalize entire advanced mathematics textbooks in Lean 4, yet existing efforts concentrate on branches of mathematics already well-represented in mathlib and measure success solely through kernel acceptance. We address both limitations by applying a coding agent to formalize Numerical Methods for Ordinary Differential Equations, a textbook in numerical analysis that is largely absent from mathlib, stressing the agent's capacity to develop new theory from scratch. We further introduce a systematic, reproducible three-dimensional framework for evaluating the quality of agent-produced formalizations beyond compilation: semantic correctness, Mathlib reuse, and cross-file reuse via LLM-as-judge methods. Applying this framework to our own formalization and to the released outputs of RepoProver and M2F, we uncover recurring unfaithful formalization patterns, including incomplete multi-part statements, added weakening hypotheses, and parameter restrictions, that kernel acceptance entirely obscures. Our results suggest that compilation-based metrics substantially overstate formalization quality, and we provide a reproducible audit methodology to support more rigorous evaluation of future autoformalization systems.

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23.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2606.25795

Benchmarking Dark Matter Search using a Parity-Check Protocol with Machine-Learning Optimized Pulses

Authors:

Yu-Han Chang↗Ilya Moskalenko↗Marko Kuzmanovi\'c↗Ognjen Stanisavljevi\'c↗Isak Bj\"orkman↗David D\'iez-Ib\'a\~nez↗Yikun Gu↗Akash V. Dixit↗Igor G. Irastorza↗Gheorghe Sorin Paraoanu↗

arXiv:2606.25795v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We report on an improved microwave detection protocol for dark matter candidates such as the axion and the dark photon. We employ a superconducting transmon qubit dispersively coupled to a double-cavity system, enabling quantum non-demolition measurements of the photon occupation in a relatively short-lived storage cavity. To reduce the experimental cycle time and enhance sensitivity for axion and dark-photon searches, we operate this detector in a regime of increased qubit-cavity coupling, resulting in Stark shifts of 4.6 MHz. In this regime, conventional control pulses suffer from strong frequency-detuning sensitivity and photon-number-dependent errors. We address this limitation by implementing frequency-detuning-robust $\pi/2$ pulses (obtained by machine-learning optimization) that preserve high-fidelity qubit control over a bandwidth of approximately 20 MHz. We experimentally validate this protocol and demonstrate single-photon detection performance comparable to previous implementations, despite significantly reduced qubit coherence times and storage-cavity lifetimes. Using parity-based measurement sequences combined with a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) analysis, we achieve background rates on the order of $\mathcal{O}(20)$ Hz. In the absence of a magnetic field, we derive exclusion limits on the dark photon model for dark matter, reaching a sensitivity to the kinetic mixing angle of $\epsilon_{95\%} \sim 1\times10^{-14}$ at 5.051 GHz. These results establish machine-learning robust control as a key enabler for faster, more scalable microwave quantum sensors for dark-matter searches.

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24.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11918

The Art of Interrogation: Consistency Amplifies Factuality in Spatial Reasoning

Authors:

Theo Uscidda↗Marta Tintore Gazulla↗Maks Ovsjanikov↗Federico Tombari↗Leonidas Guibas↗

arXiv:2606.11918v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) exhibit remarkable general capabilities but significantly underperform in spatial reasoning tasks. Existing approaches treat this gap as a knowledge deficit, relying on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to ingest labeled spatial data from external vision sources or synthetic engines. In contrast, we argue that for many tasks, spatial reasoning capabilities are already present in pre-trained LRMs but require alignment through logical coherence under geometric 2D and 3D constraints. In this work, we propose a self-supervised reinforcement learning (RL) framework that targets the internal reasoning process without requiring ground-truth annotations. By formalizing the notion of consistency verifiers – reward functions that check for geometric and semantic consistency under transformations – we demonstrate that models can improve their spatial reasoning abilities. We use both image transformations, like flipping, and textual transformations, like swapping the order of objects in the question, and propose a new optimal transport-based RL strategy, OT-GRPO, which is a minimal-matching variant of group relative policy optimization tailored to pairwise verifiers. We show that this label-free consistency training approaches the accuracy of models trained with ground-truth supervision and achieves similar generalization across diverse tasks and data domains.

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25.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15554

RaLMPH: Reliability-aware Learning for Multi-Pathologist Harmonization in Whole-Slide Image Classification

Authors:

Sungrae Hong↗Jiwon Jeong↗Soeun Cheon↗Donghee Han↗Sol Lee↗Jisu Shin↗Kyungeun Kim↗Mun Yong Yi↗

Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) is a standard paradigm for Whole-Slide Image (WSI) analysis and has achieved strong results in computational pathology. However, most MIL pipelines assume a single "gold" label per slide, which conflicts with clinical practice where substantial inter-pathologist variability is common. Existing multi-annotator learning and label-refinement methods typically estimate global annotator reliability or rely on single-instance assumptions, making them poorly suited to MIL and to localized diagnostic contexts where experts disagree. We propose RaLMPH (Reliability-aware Learning for Multi-Pathologist Harmonization), a MIL-based label reconciliation framework for WSIs annotated by multiple pathologists. RaLMPH introduces a reliability field that jointly models (i) local neighborhood structure in WSI feature space and (ii) expert uncertainty (entropy), enabling per-sample identification of trustworthy reference neighborhoods. Leveraging this field, RaLMPH performs sample-wise local annotator ranking to select reliable opinions per slide and applies an adaptive gating mechanism to fuse labels conditioned on local reliability. Experiments on a clinical WSI dataset with labels from six pathologists, as well as controlled simulated benchmarks, show that RaLMPH consistently outperforms existing approaches. Further analyses clarify how our reliability-aware mechanism improves label reconciliation and downstream MIL performance.

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