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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Application of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Libraries: A Systematic Review

arXiv:2112.04573v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As the concept and implementation of cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning has become relevant, academics, researchers and information professionals involve research in this area. The objective of this systematic literature review is to provide a synthesis of empirical studies exploring application of artificial intelligence and machine learning in libraries. To achieve the objectives of the study, a systematic literature review was conducted based on the original guidelines proposed by Kitchenham et al. (2009). Data was collected from Web of Science, Scopus, LISA and LISTA databases. Following the rigorous/ established selection process, a total of thirty-two articles were finally selected, reviewed and analyzed to summarize on the application of AI and ML domain and techniques which are most often used in libraries. Findings show that the current state of the AI and ML research that is relevant with the LIS domain mainly focuses on theoretical works. However, some researchers also emphasized on implementation projects or case studies. This study will provide a panoramic view of AI and ML in libraries for researchers, practitioners and educators for furthering the more technology-oriented approaches, and anticipating future innovation pathways.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quantum Reference Fields Transformations in Linearized Quantum Gravity

arXiv:2606.09344v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffeomorphism invariance is a central feature of general relativity. Without external reference structures, matter and geometry must be specified relationally, with respect to internal subsystems serving as reference frames. In quantum gravity, these reference systems must themselves be treated as quantum, motivating the use of quantum reference frames. In this work, we address how such a relational description could be formulated within linearized quantum gravity. To this purpose, we introduce quantum reference fields, i.e. sets of four dynamical scalar fields whose stress-energy tensors enter the gravitational constraints. These fields extend the notion of quantum reference frames to local field-theoretic reference systems, allowing matter and gravitational degrees of freedom to be described relationally with respect to physical quantum systems. By generalizing the perspective-neutral construction of quantum reference frames, we show that relational, gauge invariant observables admit reduced descriptions in the perspective of each quantum reference field, and we derive the unitary transformations relating them. The resulting unitary maps implement local quantum coordinate changes between different internal perspectives, and act on the linearized gravitational field with an analogous structure to a linearized diffeomorphism, but with the classical gauge parameter replaced by a physical quantum field. Finally, we construct a relational von Neumann-type measurement scheme, showing how the corresponding reduced observables can be accessed operationally from the perspective of a quantum reference field.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Characterizing the genetic basis of Cardio-Renal-Metabolic multimorbidity using multivariate genomic modelling

Cardio-renal-metabolic multimorbidity (CRMM) encompasses interrelated conditions affecting the heart, kidneys, and metabolic systems. Although the genetics of individual components are well studied, their shared architecture remains unclear. Here, we performed the largest multi-ancestry multivariate GWAS of CRMM across seven biobanks, including individuals of European (EUR; neff = 353,130), African (AFR; neff = 75,436), and East Asian (EAS; neff = 164,373) ancestry. We identified 287 lead loci in EUR, 30 in AFR, and 202 in EAS. Cross-ancestry analyses revealed ancestry-specific signals and 24 shared loci mapping to FTO and TCF7L2. Drug-repurposing highlighted candidates used for type 2 diabetes and hypertension. Mendelian randomization supported causal links with diverse diseases, while polygenic risk scores showed improved prediction across ancestries. Collectively, these findings advance understanding of CRMM genetics and inform precision medicine.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Investigating naming error patterns after non-invasive brain stimulation and language treatment in persons with aphasia

Abstract Background: Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) paired with behavioral language therapy can improve naming in persons with aphasia (PWA), yet naming errors persist. Little is known about how naming error patterns change after non-invasive brain stimulation is combined with language treatment. Aims: To examine whether right cerebellar tDCS plus computerized aphasia therapy changes the types of naming errors in people with chronic aphasia across timepoints, and to determine whether effects differ by cerebellar tDCS polarity (anode vs. cathode). Methods and Procedures: In a randomized, double-blind, sham-controlled, within-subject crossover study, we retrospectively analyzed behavioral data from 24 individuals with post-stroke aphasia. Each participant completed two 15-session intervention periods (3-5 sessions/week) with active cerebellar tDCS + computerized aphasia therapy and sham + computerized aphasia therapy, separated by a two-month washout. General linear models (GLMs) assessed longitudinal changes in six error types (semantic, phonological real word, phonological nonword, no response, mixed, unrelated) on an untrained picture naming task (Philadelphia Naming Test; PNT) and a trained task (Naming 80; N80). Additional GLMs evaluated polarity effects with 2 (Group: anode vs. cathode) x 2 (Treatment) interactions, and treatment-order effects with 2 (Group: tDCS-first vs. sham-first) x 2 (Treatment) interactions. Outcomes and Results: Active cerebellar tDCS did not significantly change error types for trained items (N80). For untrained items (PNT), active tDCS reduced several error types relative to sham, with the clearest and most durable reduction in phonological nonword errors; more moderate reductions occurred for phonological real word and unrelated errors. Mixed errors showed a marginally opposite pattern, tending to increase after tDCS and decrease after sham. Polarity analyses indicated broadly similar effects across anodal and cathodal stimulation overall, but only the anode group showed a reliable treatment effect for phonological nonword errors on the PNT. Treatment-order analyses revealed no significant order effects. Conclusions: Our results indicate a shift in naming error types, particularly after tDCS treatment for the untrained naming task (PNT). These findings may help guide the course of treatment approaches of those with aphasia and what error naming pattern types may show changes post stroke when combining non-invasive brain stimulation and computerized aphasia therapy. Clinical Trial Registration: Cerebellar Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation and Aphasia Treatment [NCT02901574] Keywords: aphasia, naming errors, non-invasive brain stimulation, cerebellar tDCS, computerized aphasia treatment

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Automated Airways Characterization and Assessment of Cystic Fibrosis from CT Imaging

Background Advancements in medical imaging have enabled non-invasive diagnosis and staging of cystic fibrosis (CF) using CT scans, revealing dilated airways, an increased number of visible airways, and airway generation splits in these patients. However, manual characterization of airways remains time-consuming and challenging due to the numerous structural changes, thereby limiting clinical feasibility. This study aims to develop an automated algorithm to characterize airways from segmented lung CT scans and apply this to a retrospective population. This approach reduces the time required to analyze images and obtain disease-staging results. Methods This framework consists of two stages. The first stage extracts and skeletonizes the airway tree from lung CTs, while the second stage measures lung features, including airway volumes, branch counts, generation splits, diameters, and cross-sectional areas. This permits comprehensive characterization for use in clinical assessment. Results The airways analysis was performed on 169 CT volumes ranging in age from 6 to 18 years of age, revealing substantial differences in detected airway branches, generation splits, and normalized airway volume between the control and CF groups. The framework also measures airway diameters and cross-sectional areas, revealing an increase in the number of small airways in cystic fibrosis patients, due to early bronchiectasis. These findings align with previous research and demonstrate the framework's ability to accurately quantify airway changes in patients with CF. Discussion The framework extracts entire airway trees, facilitating measurements of volume, branch count, diameters, and cross-sectional areas, which change with CF severity and/or treatment. However, partial lung atelectasis can limit the accuracy of airway detection in moderate-to-severe cases. Funding NIA U54 AG054345 and NIA R21 AG07857501

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Association of circulating endothelial progenitor cell count and functional outcome in patients with acute ischemic stroke due to intracranial large vessel occlusion

Background: Circulating endothelial progenitor cells (cEPCs) contribute to vascular repair following an ischemic stroke. The aim of the study was to evaluate the association between cEPCs and functional outcomes in patients with acute ischemic stroke (AIS) due to large vessel occlusion (LVO) who received endovascular therapy (EVT). Methods: Prospective study of patients with LVO-AIS who received EVT. Blood samples were obtained within 24 +- 12 hours and on day 7+-1 from stroke onset. cEPCs were detected using flow cytometry (CD34+/VEGFR2+/CD133+). The primary endpoint was a favourable functional outcome (modified Rankin Scale 0-2) at three months of follow-up. Secondary endpoints include baseline to 24 hours/day 7 changes in the National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) score and collateral circulation (CC) status. Bivariate and multivariable logistic regression analyses were performed. Results: Included were 90 patients (73.2+-12.7 years, 41.1% women) in 42 of whom (46.7%) cEPCs were detected at 24 hours. On day 7, cEPCs were detected in 27 (43.6%) of 62 patients for which this information was available. Atrial fibrillation, prior anticoagulant treatment and stroke onset-to-door time

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

QIAS 2026: Overview of the Shared Task on Islamic Inheritance Reasoning

This paper presents a comprehensive overview of the QIAS 2026 shared task, organized as part of the OSACT7 Workshop and co-located with LREC 2026. The shared task was designed to evaluate the ability of large language models to perform complex reasoning in the religious and legal domain of Islamic inheritance. Unlike conventional question-answering benchmarks, QIAS 2026 focuses on end-to-end reasoning from natural language cases, requiring systems to perform the full inheritance calculation process, from identifying the eligible heirs to assigning the correct share to each beneficiary. To support this evaluation, the task was based on the MAWARITH benchmark, a dataset of $12{,}500$ Arabic inheritance cases annotated with intermediate reasoning steps and final answers. System submissions were evaluated using MIR-E, a multi-step metric that measures performance across the main stages of inheritance reasoning. A total of $16$ teams participated in the shared task, investigating a range of approaches, including prompting-based methods, retrieval-augmented generation, and fine-tuning strategies. The results show that Islamic inheritance remains a highly challenging benchmark for current language models, especially in stages that require precise legal interpretation and structured numerical reasoning. This overview summarizes the task design, dataset, evaluation framework, participating systems, and main results.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Multimodal Brain Tumour Classification Using Feature Fusion

Clinicians diagnose brain tumors by synthesizing patient symptoms, medical history, and quantitative imaging data from modalities such as MRI and CT scans into a unified clinical judgement. However, most deep learning models rely on MRI/CT images alone, failing to replicate the clinicians multimodal reasoning. We explore a two-branch multimodal network combining raw MRI scans with 91 extracted radiomic features (intensity, texture, shape, and boundary descriptors) to classify brain tumors into glioma, meningioma, pituitary, and no-tumor. A pre-trained CNN backbone encodes the image stream, whereas a dedicated MLP encodes the radiomic stream. Both streams are fused via concatenation, gated, or bidirectional cross-modal attention strategies. Across nine experimental runs on a balanced 7,200 image dataset, all multimodal configurations outperform unimodal baselines with gated fusion achieving the best accuracy of 96.13%.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Facial Affect Analysis for Service-Oriented Systems: Advances, Challenges, and Future Visions

Facial Affect Analysis (FAA) is evolving from a stand-alone recognition task into a reusable perception capability for Service-Oriented Software Ecosystems (SoSE). This paper preserves the FAA methodological core while reframing recent advances through systems-engineering requirements for composable and dependable services. We review representative progress in static and dynamic expression analysis, action-unit and micro-expression modeling, and modern CNN, Transformer, graph, and hybrid architectures, then interpret these advances by their operational fit in edge, cloud, and hybrid service pipelines. The synthesis emphasizes SoSE concerns that determine deployability: service contracts for uncertainty-aware outputs, latency and availability envelopes, lifecycle monitoring and recalibration, governance-aware integration, and interoperability across independently evolving components. Our analysis shows that benchmark gains alone are insufficient for SoSE readiness; robustness under shift, intervention stability, fairness, privacy posture, and runtime guarantees are equally critical. We conclude with a roadmap for treating FAA as an operational service component with explicit interfaces, measurable quality attributes, and accountable lifecycle management.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Optimizing Health Coverage in Ethiopia: A Learning-augmented Approach and Persistent Proportionality Under an Online Budget

arXiv:2509.00135v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As part of nationwide efforts aligned with the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 3 on Universal Health Coverage, Ethiopia's Ministry of Health is strengthening health posts to expand access to essential healthcare services. However, only a fraction of this health system strengthening effort can be implemented each year due to limited budgets and other competing priorities, thus the need for an optimization framework to guide prioritization across the regions of Ethiopia. In this paper, we develop a tool, Health Access Resource Planner (HARP), based on a principled decision-support optimization framework for sequential facility planning that aims to maximize population coverage under budget uncertainty while satisfying region-specific proportionality targets at every time step. We then propose two algorithms: (i) a learning-augmented approach that improves upon expert recommendations at any single-step; and (ii) a greedy algorithm for multi-step planning, both with strong worst-case approximation estimation. In collaboration with the Ethiopian Public Health Institute and Ministry of Health, we demonstrated the empirical efficacy of our method on three regions across various planning scenarios.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Cosmos 3: Omnimodal World Models for Physical AI

We introduce Cosmos 3, a family of omnimodal world models designed to jointly process and generate language, image, video, audio, and action sequences within a unified mixture-of-transformers architecture. By supporting highly flexible input-output configurations, Cosmos 3 seamlessly unifies critical modalities for Physical AI – effectively subsuming vision-language models, video generators, world simulators, and world-action models into a single framework. Our evaluation demonstrates that Cosmos 3 establishes a new state-of-the-art across a diverse suite of understanding and generation tasks, demonstrating omnimodal world models as scalable, general-purpose backbones for embodied agents. Our post-trained Cosmos 3 models were ranked as the best open-source Text-to-Image and Image-to-Video models by Artificial Analysis, and the best policy model by RoboArena at the time the technical report was written. To accelerate open research and deployment in Physical AI, we make our code, model checkpoints, curated synthetic datasets, and evaluation benchmark available under the Linux Foundation's OpenMDW-1.1 License at https://github.com/nvidia/cosmos and https://huggingface.co/collections/nvidia/cosmos3. The project website is available at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/cosmos-lab/cosmos3.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

From Overload to Convergence: Supporting Multi-Issue Human-AI Negotiation with Bayesian Visualization

arXiv:2603.22766v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As AI systems increasingly mediate negotiations, understanding how the number of negotiated issues impacts human performance is crucial for maintaining human agency. We designed a human-AI negotiation case study in a realistic property rental scenario, varying the number of negotiated issues; empirical findings show that without support, performance stays stable up to three issues but declines as additional issues increase cognitive load. To address this, we introduce a novel uncertainty-based visualization driven by Bayesian estimation of agreement probability. It shows how the space of mutually acceptable agreements narrows as negotiation progresses, helping users identify promising options. In a within-subjects experiment (N=32), it improved human outcomes and efficiency, preserved human control, and avoided redistributing value. Our findings surface practical limits on the complexity people can manage in human-AI negotiation, advance theory on human performance in complex negotiations, and offer validated design guidance for interactive systems.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

From Noise to Order: Learning to Rank via Denoising Diffusion

arXiv:2602.11453v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning-to-rank (LTR) methods have traditionally been limited to discriminative machine learning approaches that model the probability of the document being relevant to the query given some feature representation of the query-document pair. We propose an alternative denoising diffusion-based generative approach to LTR that instead models the full joint distribution over features and relevance labels. While in discriminative LTR, an over-parameterized ranking model may find different ways to fit the training data, we posit that candidate solutions that can explain the full data distribution under the generative setting maybe better at estimating relevance. Thus, we propose DiffusionRank that extends TabDiff, an existing diffusion model for tabular datasets, to create generative alternatives to classical discriminative pointwise and pairwise LTR objectives. Our work demonstrates improvements from DiffusionRank over discriminative counterparts on four standard LTR datasets and points to a rich space for future exploration to leverage ongoing advancements in deep generative models for LTR. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/sadjadeb/DiffusionRank.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

MIRAGE: Auditing Anti-Muslim Bias in Frontier LLMs Across Reasoning, Agentic, and Time-Coupled Conditions

arXiv:2606.16562v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Five years after the discovery of persistent anti-Muslim bias in large language models, most evaluations remain confined to single-turn prompt completion, a setting that no longer reflects how frontier LLMs are deployed. We introduce MIRAGE (Muslim-Identity Reasoning and Agentic Generation Evaluation), a benchmark of 1{,}200 prompts spanning three deployment-realistic conditions: direct completion, chain-of-thought reasoning, and simulated agentic decision-making across content moderation, lending triage, refugee claim summarization, and hiring screens. Across six frontier models, we find that (i) chain-of-thought reasoning amplifies rather than suppresses Muslim-violence associations by 12–34\% relative to direct completion, (ii) agentic decisions exhibit a 9–22 percentage-point asymmetry between Muslim and matched non-Muslim cases on identical evidence, and (iii) bias is sharply time-coupled to retrieved news context, increasing 18–27\% under recent-conflict retrieval. Existing prompt-based mitigations transfer poorly across our three conditions, suppressing direct-completion bias while leaving agentic asymmetry largely intact. We release MIRAGE and an open evaluation harness to support targeted mitigation research.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

NEST: Narrative Event Structures in Time for Long Video Understanding

Recent progress in vision-language models has enabled the processing of increasingly long video sequences, but the ability to handle extended token streams does not translate to understanding of narrative structure in long videos. Existing long video benchmarks focus on needle-in-a-haystack retrieval rather than evaluating how low-level actions form events, how events interact across time, and how narratives progress, for example, whether a model can connect an early setback, such as a job loss to a later relationship breakup, despite long gaps, intervening scenes, or flashbacks that reframe what occurred. We introduce NEST (Narrative Event Structures in Time for Long Video Understanding), a dataset of 1005 full-length movies (avg. 98 minutes), each annotated with 102 multimodal narrative events grounded in visual content, dialogue, and audio. NEST captures multimodal narrative events with structured annotations grounded in visual content, dialogue, and audio, and links them through relations that reflect narrative structure, including temporal ordering, hierarchical composition, and long-range dependencies. We introduce baselines for event trigger detection (ETD), event localization (EL), event argument extraction (EAE), and event relation extraction (ERE). The benchmark is highly challenging for grounded event discovery, with ETD below 8%, EL under 6%, and EAE below 11%. In contrast, ERE is more tractable once events are given, reaching 35.45% F1 zero-shot and 44.42% F1 after fine-tuning.

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

Next-Latent Prediction Transformers Learn Compact World Models

arXiv:2511.05963v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Transformers replace recurrence with a memory that grows with sequence length and self-attention that enables ad-hoc lookups over past tokens. Consequently, they lack an inherent incentive to compress history into compact latent states with consistent transition rules. This often leads to learning solutions that generalize poorly. We introduce Next-Latent Prediction (NextLat), which extends standard next-token training with self-supervised predictions in the latent space. Specifically, NextLat trains a transformer to learn latent representations that are predictive of its next latent state given the next token. Theoretically, we show that these latents provably converge towards belief states, compressed information about the history necessary to predict the future. This simple auxiliary objective injects a recurrent inductive bias into transformers while leaving their architecture, parallel training efficiency, and inference unchanged. NextLat effectively encourages transformers to form compact internal world models with coherent belief states and transition dynamics – crucial properties not guaranteed by standard next-token prediction alone. Empirically, across benchmarks in world modeling, reasoning, planning, and language modeling, NextLat demonstrates significant gains over standard next-token prediction and other baselines in downstream accuracy, representation compression, and lookahead planning. Furthermore, NextLat enables variable-length self-speculative decoding, accelerating inference by up to 3.3x in language modeling. NextLat offers a simple yet effective paradigm for learning compact, predictive representations in transformers that generalize better. Our code is available at https://github.com/JaydenTeoh/NextLat.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

IPSL-AID: Generative Diffusion Models for Climate Downscaling from Global to Regional Scales

arXiv:2604.03275v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Effective adaptation and mitigation strategies for climate change require high-resolution projections to inform strategic decision-making. Conventional global climate models, which typically operate at resolutions of 150 to 200 kilometers, lack the capacity to represent essential regional processes. IPSL-AID is a global to regional downscaling tool based on a denoising diffusion probabilistic model designed to address this limitation. Trained on ERA5 reanalysis data, it generates 0.25 degree resolution fields for temperature, wind, and precipitation using coarse inputs and their spatiotemporal context. It also models probability distributions of fine-scale features to produce plausible scenarios for uncertainty quantification. The model accurately reconstructs statistical distributions, including extreme events, power spectra, and spatial structures. This work highlights the potential of generative diffusion models for efficient climate downscaling with uncertainty

18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

Multi-platform reassessment of human mitochondrial DNA methylation reveals signals consistent with technical artifacts

The existence and functional relevance of mitochondrial DNA methylation remain controversial. Here, we systematically profiled cytosine methylation and hydroxymethylation across human brain and blood tissues spanning healthy and malignant states using orthogonal sequencing approaches that avoid chemical conversion during library preparation. While nuclear DNA exhibited canonical methylation patterns, mitochondrial DNA consistently showed negligible signal, indistinguishable from background technical noise. By mapping cytosine-guanine sites between mitochondrial DNA and nuclear-embedded mitochondrial sequences, we demonstrate the potential of these nuclear counterparts to confound not only cytosine methylation but also hydroxymethylation measurements, corroborating and extending prior findings implicating nuclear contamination as a potential source of apparent mitochondrial epigenetic signals. Additional technical factors that inflate apparent mtDNA methylation signals were identified, including sequence context biases, flow cell chemistries, and coverage-dependent discrepancies between the heavy and light strands. Collectively, these results provide convergent evidence against the presence of biologically meaningful cytosine methylation or hydroxymethylation in mitochondrial DNA. These findings caution against interpreting apparent mtDNA methylation signals in human adult tissues as meaningful without rigorous orthogonal validation and comprehensive consideration of technical and analytical confounding factors.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

CoBit: Language Modeling with Bitstream Diffusion

Diffusion language models (DLMs) promise parallel, order-agnostic generation, but on standard benchmarks they have historically lagged behind autoregressive models in sample quality and diversity. Recent continuous flow and diffusion approaches have narrowed this gap. In this work, we further close the autoregressive gap by modeling text as a continuous diffusion process over fixed-width binary bitstreams. We refer to the resulting model as CoBit (Continuous Bitstream Diffusion). Our approach represents semantic tokens as analog bit sequences and uses a matched-filter residual parameterization to isolate contextual learning from analytic independent-bit posteriors. Crucially, we adopt a stochastic sampler that applies Langevin-type corrections gated by the entropy-rate profile, concentrating stochasticity in high-information regions while remaining nearly deterministic elsewhere. On LM1B, our 130M-parameter model reaches a generative perplexity (GenPPL) of 59.76 at matched real-data entropy (4.31) using 256 neural function evaluations (NFEs), outperforming prior DLM baselines and reaching the autoregressive reference. On OpenWebText (OWT), our sampler establishes a new continuous-DLM Pareto frontier, achieving GenPPL 27.06 at entropy 5.26 using 4x fewer steps than previous 1024-NFE baselines. Scaling the same recipe to a 462M-parameter model (CoBit-M) further improves the OWT GenPPL-entropy frontier over the 130M model (CoBit-S) and over medium-scale continuous and discrete DLM baselines, reaching GenPPL 19.5 at entropy 5.40, near real-data entropy (5.44), and approaching pretrained GPT-2 Medium over the high-quality region. As an additional benefit, bitstream diffusion removes the O(V) vocabulary scaling bottleneck of standard DLMs: by predicting O(log V) bitwise logits via semantic bit-patching, it lowers memory and raises throughput, a scalable paradigm as vocabulary sizes grow.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

CLoVE: Personalized Federated Learning through Clustering of Loss Vector Embeddings

arXiv:2506.22427v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose CLoVE (Clustering of Loss Vector Embeddings), a novel algorithm for Clustered Federated Learning (CFL). In CFL, clients are naturally grouped into clusters based on their data distribution. However, identifying these clusters is challenging, as client assignments are unknown. CLoVE utilizes client embeddings derived from model losses on client data, and leverages the insight that clients in the same cluster share similar loss values, while those in different clusters exhibit distinct loss patterns. Based on these embeddings, CLoVE is able to iteratively identify and separate clients from different clusters and optimize cluster-specific models through federated aggregation. Key advantages of CLoVE over existing CFL algorithms are (1) its simplicity, (2) its applicability to both supervised and unsupervised settings, and (3) the fact that it eliminates the need for near-optimal model initialization, which makes it more robust and better suited for real-world applications. We establish theoretical convergence bounds, showing that CLoVE can recover clusters accurately with high probability in a single round and converges exponentially fast to optimal models in a linear setting. Our comprehensive experiments comparing with a variety of both CFL and generic Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) algorithms on different types of datasets and an extensive array of non-IID settings demonstrate that CLoVE achieves highly accurate cluster recovery in just a few rounds of training, along with state-of-the-art model accuracy, across a variety of both supervised and unsupervised PFL tasks.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Nemotron 3 Ultra: Open, Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Model for Agentic Reasoning

We introduce Nemotron 3 Ultra, a 550 billion total and 55 billion active parameter Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Attention language model. We pre-trained Nemotron 3 Ultra on 20 trillion text tokens, then extended the context length to 1M tokens, and post-trained using Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT), Reinforcement Learning (RL), and Multi-teacher On-Policy Distillation (MOPD). Nemotron 3 Ultra is our most capable model yet, employing multiple key technologies - LatentMoE, Multi Token Prediction (MTP), NVFP4 pre-training, multi-environment RLVR, MOPD, and reasoning budget control. Nemotron 3 Ultra achieves up to ~6x higher inference throughput as compared to state-of-the-art publicly available LLMs while attaining on-par accuracy. The state-of-the-art accuracy, high inference throughput, and 1M token context length make Nemotron 3 Ultra ideal for long-running autonomous agentic tasks. We open-source the base, post-trained, and quantized checkpoints, along with the training data and recipe on HuggingFace.

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

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

Authors:

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

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Federated Bilevel Performative Prediction

arXiv:2606.19734v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated bilevel optimization is widely used for nested learning problems across distributed clients, such as federated hyperparameter tuning and meta-learning under privacy and communication constraints. Most existing formulations assume fixed client data distributions, which can be violated by performativity, where deployed decisions reshape client behavior and data collection, inducing client-specific, decision-dependent distribution shift. We study federated bilevel performative prediction, where both upper-level (UL) and lower-level (LL) objectives are evaluated under client-dependent, decision-dependent distributions. We formalize the federated bilevel performatively stable (FBPS) point under a decoupled-risk perspective and provide sufficient conditions for its existence and uniqueness. We then develop two federated methods to compute the FBPS solution: FBi-RRM, which converges linearly under a contraction condition, and FBi-SGD, a communication-efficient stochastic method based on federated hypergradient estimation with convergence guarantees under diminishing step sizes when sensitivities are sufficiently small. Experiments on strategic regression and meta strategic classification validate the predicted stability thresholds and demonstrate improved meta-generalization over non-performative baselines, and CNN-based classification further demonstrates the practical effectiveness of the proposed methods in nonconvex neural network settings.

24.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

THEOBROMA: an aggregated open database of 1.13 million natural products with per-compound license auditing, three-tier classification, and stereochemistry-aware deduplication

Natural products remain one of the most productive sources of pharmacologically active compounds for drug discovery, yet the current open aggregator landscape attributes licenses at database rather than compound granularity, with consequences that have become tangible as the field grows. A recent relicensing event in one constituent source (the September 2024 transition of the Natural Products Atlas to CC BY-NC 4.0) demonstrates how database-level licensing propagates across an aggregate and motivates the per-compound audit framework presented here. The same peer cohort separately leaves classification provenance and stereoisomer-family relations coarser than either layer warrants. THEOBROMA, accessible at url{https://theobroma.l3s.uni-hannover.de}, integrates 1{,}133{,}004 natural products from 29 open sources under a per-compound license audit that resolves each compound's license tier across all attesting sources under a most-restrictive-wins rule, identifying 900{,}170 compounds (79.4%) under open-use licenses and exposing the per-source attestation chain and resolved tier through a dedicated audit endpoint and a query-time license filter. A three-tier classification stratifies 89.3% coverage into 35.1% curated, 43.9% high-confidence inferred, and 10.3% exploratory tiers, with 486{,}215 stereoisomer families preserved by full 27-character InChIKey deduplication and exposed via a dedicated texttt{/api/stereoisomers/} endpoint and a radial-family display. Per-compound license provenance is the primary differentiator. Classification stratification and stereoisomer-family exposure add finer-grained access to two related axes, supporting license-compatible virtual screening and isomer-specific bioactivity analysis at corpus scale. As an evolving open resource, THEOBROMA pairs continuous pipeline maintenance with interactive geographic, taxonomic, and chemical-space exploration.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Enhancing Precision Agriculture with a Hybrid Deep Learning Framework for Multi-Class Plant Disease Classification and Interpretability

This study proposes an overall deep learning architecture for multi-class classification of plant diseases from high-resolution leaf imagery, with a particular interest in investigating the behavior of ResNet-50 and a hybrid ResNet + Vision Transformer (ViT) design. A specially gathered image database with 15,200 training images and 3,800 validation images spanning 38 classes across multiple crops, including tomato, apple, grape etc. were subjected to preprocessing steps such as resizing, normalization, and data augmentation to enhance model robustness. Multiple architectures, including ResNet-50, MobileNetV2, and EfficientNet-B0, were trained and compared with the hybrid ResNet + ViT model. All models were fine-tuned using the AdamW optimizer and cross-entropy loss, with early stopping applied to prevent overfitting and ensure generalization. Furthermore, interpretability techniques such as Grad-CAM and saliency maps were implemented to indicate disease-relevant regions, while segmentation-based analysis was performed to identify the affected parts of a leaf. For every one of the considered architectures, ResNet-50 led to the highest accuracy of 98.74%, whereas the hybrid ResNet + ViT model achieved a competitive accuracy of 98.58%, showing that the hybrid architectures were effective in capturing both local and overall information. The experimental results showcase the promise of transformer-based models to achieve highly accurate, interpretable, and computationally efficient computer-based multi-class multi-disease classification systems, providing helpful assistance for cultivation management practices as well as for precision farming.