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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Indefinite Quantum Causality

Authors:
Fabio Costa↗Giulia Rubino↗Cyril Branciard↗\v{C}aslav Brukner↗Marco T\'ulio Quintino↗

arXiv:2606.19438v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In recent years, operational approaches to quantum foundations have been developed as a means of understanding the core principles and distinctive features of quantum theory. Such approaches typically view physical processes as sequences of operations, with earlier operations serving as causes of later effects. However, a growing literature is emerging on the possibility of relaxing this assumption and allowing for quantum indefiniteness in the causal order. This development stems from a variety of motivations, both fundamental and applied, including exploring the role of causality in quantum theory, the interplay between quantum theory and general relativity, and higher-order quantum computing. A prominent offshoot of this development is the emergence of indefinite causal order as a feasible resource for quantum information processing. This review provides an overview of the current state of the art in the field, covering the methodology underlying indefinite quantum causality within the so-called "process matrix formalism", outlining key results and experimental implementations, and discussing recent advances.

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02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Domain-Shift Aware Neural Networks for Unbalance Characterization in Rotating Systems

Authors:
Bernardo Feij\'o Junqueira↗Claudio Kiyoshi Umezu↗Bruno Bilhar Karaziack↗Tomaz Junior↗Daniel Alves Castello↗

arXiv:2606.18882v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work investigates the application of a domain-shift aware neural network for regression tasks aimed at estimating unbalance masses in rotating shafts under varying operating conditions. Experimental data were collected from a test rig in which a primary shaft, equipped with a flange carrying unbalanced masses, was driven at different rotational speeds, while a secondary shaft could be optionally activated to introduce domain discrepancy. The unbalance masses were positioned at a fixed radial distance, and the dynamic response of the system was recorded using triaxial accelerometers. The inverse problem of mass estimation is formulated within a domain adaptation framework, where the network is trained with a maximum mean discrepancy strategy to align feature representations across source and target distributions. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of explicitly addressing domain shift in improving prediction accuracy, especially when the system's physical behavior and sources of domain discrepancy are not fully known and fall outside the training conditions. These findings highlight the potential of domain-shift aware models for regression tasks in Structural Health Monitoring.

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03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Semantic DLM+: Improving Diffusion Language Models through Bias-variance Trade-off in Transition Kernel Design

Authors:
Keyue Jiang↗Yuxiang Wang↗Yanan Zhao↗Xiang Yu↗Qifang Zhao↗Bohan Tang↗Baojian Zhou↗Yanghua Xiao↗Lin Qu↗Xiaoxiao Xu↗

arXiv:2606.15327v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have demonstrated strong scaling capacity as alternatives to autoregressive language models. However, their performance is highly sensitive to the choice of transition kernels, and poorly designed kernels can lead to issues like training instability, slow convergence, and biased sampling. In this paper, we study this sensitivity through a principled analysis of generalization error and identify three critical factors: asymptotic bias (difficulty in approximating the posterior distribution), exposure bias (error propagation during sampling), and optimization variance induced by kernel dispersion. We further compare different transition kernels: masking diffusion yields sparse and easier posterior-approximation targets, while uniform diffusion provides stronger sampling-side repair but induces harder approximation. Motivated by this trade-off, we revisit a previously overlooked variant, semantic DLM (SemDLM), where the transition kernel corrupts tokens to neighborhoods that are semantically similar. Our theory suggests that SemDLM can serve as a plausible middle ground by reducing the posterior approximation difficulty of uniform diffusion while retaining repair ability. However, we find that SemDLM suffers from a semantic basin problem, where sampling repeatedly stays within a semantic region and produces low-diversity text. To address this, we propose SemDLM+, which adds a global transition and a semantic-frequency penalty during sampling. Experiments on LM1B and OpenWebText show that SemDLM+ improves training dynamics and achieves competitive language modeling and generation quality with satisfactory diversity.

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04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Cost analysis of overseas versus domestic vaccination of US-bound refugees

Authors:
Joo↗Maskery↗Klosovsky↗Marquez↗Taher↗Dalal↗Weinberg↗Mitchell↗

Context: To ensure healthy resettlement and protect US health security, the Vaccination Program for US-bound Refugees (VPR) offers some recommended vaccines to refugees overseas before resettlement to the United States. The selected vaccines and number of doses vary by country of departure. VPR was found to be cost-saving in 2018 but had since expanded to more sites. Objective: Assess VPR's current costs and impact on post-arrival domestic vaccination needs and costs. Setting and Participants: A model-based analysis of the Federal government costs for VPR and post-arrival (US) vaccination of resettled refugees separated across five regions: Africa, Asia, the Middle East and North Africa/Republic of Turkiye and Middle East, Europe, and the Americas using fiscal year 2024 data. Design: We quantified and compared full vaccination costs for refugees under two scenarios: (1) 'No VPR' and (2) 'VPR'. Refugees would receive no vaccines overseas and be fully vaccinated after US arrival under 'No VPR'. Under 'VPR', refugees receive one or two doses of selected vaccines overseas before completing vaccination schedules after arrival. Main Outcomes: Costs were reported in 2023 US dollars for 'VPR' and 'No VPR' scenarios and further subdivided by grouping countries/sites depending on whether the International Organization for Migration (IOM) provides vaccination services for refugees (IOM sites) versus non-IOM providers (non-IOM sites). Results: 'VPR' resulted in average net cost savings of $147 per person or $14.7 million per 100,000-refugee cohort compared to providing all vaccines after US arrival ('No VPR'). 'VPR' was cost-saving across most regions, except for IOM sites in Europe, where a net cost of $44 per person was observed. Net cost savings per person were highest for IOM sites in Africa ($333). Conclusions: VPR remains a cost-saving strategy, while protecting US-bound refugees' health and US health security by preventing disease outbreaks during resettlement.

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05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Learner-based Concept Drift Detection: Analysis and Evaluation

Authors:
Md Moman Ul Haque Khan↗Samira Sadaoui↗

arXiv:2606.20216v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine learning algorithms deployed for evolving streaming environments must handle the non-stationary data distributions, commonly referred to as concept drift. The presence of concept drift poses a major challenge for many real-world applications because it can severely degrade their predictive performance, hindering their ability to support robust decision-making. Consequently, the timely and efficient detection of drift events is critical for sustaining high accuracy over time. This study examines theoretically the concept drift characteristics and numerous drift detection algorithms across several categories. Furthermore, we evaluate their performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets exhibiting diverse streaming scenarios and drift characteristics, such as abrupt and gradual changes. This study aims to enhance understanding of the complex notion of concept drift characteristics and behavior of drift detectors, along with their applicability to diverse contexts.

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06.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Crossing the Validation Crisis: Cross-Validation Reduces Benchmarking Variance Surprisingly Well

Authors:
C\'elestin Eve↗Ga\"el Varoquaux↗Thomas Moreau↗

arXiv:2606.12552v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern machine learning progresses through empirical work, benchmarking new methods to evaluate relative performance. However, the statistical variability inherent to evaluation - exacerbated by the stochastic nature of many algorithms - often makes performance estimation unreliable due to the limited test samples available, leading to a validation crisis in which genuine advances are difficult to discern. In this work, we show that cross-validation improves markedly confidence when evaluating and comparing learning algorithm performances. We introduce the concept of sample gain, which quantifies the virtual data augmentation achieved by using multiple cross-validation splits to reduce benchmarking variance. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets (histopathologic scans and NLP fine-tuning) demonstrate that multiple splits can substantially improve the reliability and stability of performance estimates, with diminishing returns often setting in later than expected. We also introduce a procedure to dynamically early-stop cross-validation by estimating from the first few folds if subsequent folds will bring large sample gains. Our findings highlight the value of pushing cross-validation on available samples to achieve robust and reliable benchmarking.

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07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Towards Conditional Feature Alignment for Cross-Domain Counting

Authors:
Zhuonan Liang↗Dongnan Liu↗Jianan Fan↗Yaxuan Song↗Qiang Qu↗Runnan Chen↗Yu Yao↗Peng Fu↗Weidong Cai↗

Object counting models often degrade under cross-domain deployment because density composition varies across domains and is itself task-relevant. Standard feature alignment methods tend to suppress such variation by encouraging global domain invariance, which can be harmful when source and target domains contain different proportions of background, sparse foreground, and dense foreground. We propose Conditional Feature Alignment (CFA), a cross-domain counting framework that aligns representations within label-induced conditions rather than across full marginal feature distributions. Given density annotations or pseudo-density predictions, CFA constructs foreground/background or density-level conditions and aligns only features belonging to matching conditions. We formalise this idea through a conditional divergence perspective, showing that conditional alignment removes within-condition discrepancy while preserving condition-marginal density shift. For unsupervised domain adaptation, CFA estimates source conditions from annotations and target conditions from detached pseudo-density maps, then performs condition-wise adversarial alignment with full-image consistency regularisation. For source-domain generalisation, we instantiate the same principle with MPCount by enforcing condition-wise memory-consistency between generated source-domain views. Experiments on crowd and cell counting benchmarks show competitive or improved performance across diverse UDA and DG settings. For example, on JHU-CROWD++ FH$\rightarrow$SN, CFA-DG reduces MAE/RMSE from MPCount's 216.3/421.4 to 90.5/169.9, indicating that condition-wise alignment is especially effective under large weather- and density-induced shifts. These results suggest that condition-wise alignment is a promising design principle for domain-adaptive counting.

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08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Noise-induced shallow circuits and absence of barren plateaus

Authors:
Antonio Anna Mele↗Armando Angrisani↗Soumik Ghosh↗Sumeet Khatri↗Jens Eisert↗Daniel Stilck Fran\c{c}a↗Yihui Quek↗

arXiv:2403.13927v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Motivated by realistic hardware considerations of the pre-fault-tolerant era, we comprehensively study the impact of uncorrected noise on quantum circuits. We first show that in the task of estimating observable expectation values any noise truncates most quantum circuits to effectively logarithmic depth. We then prove that quantum circuits under any non-unital noise do not exhibit barren plateaus for cost functions composed of local observables. However, by using the effective shallowness, we also design an efficient classical algorithm to estimate observable expectation values within any constant additive accuracy, with high probability over the choice of the circuit, in any circuit architecture. Taken together, our results establish that, unless we carefully engineer quantum circuits to take advantage of the noise, noisy quantum circuits are unlikely to offer an advantage over shallow ones for algorithms that output observable expectation value estimates, such as many variational quantum machine learning proposals.

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09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Attention by Synchronization in Coupled Oscillator Networks

Authors:
Fabio Pasqualetti↗Taosha Guo↗

arXiv:2606.12059v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We address transformer attention on energy-constrained physical substrates. Softmax attention requires exponentiation and global reduction, operations with high energy cost on von Neumann hardware and no natural physical analog. We show that Kuramoto synchronization dynamics (which arise in electrical, mechanical, superconducting, and charge-density-wave oscillator arrays, among other physical systems) implement a well-defined attention operation without either. The resulting mechanism, fixed-query oscillator attention, replaces softmax's arithmetic with the equilibration of a gradient flow on the sphere: queries are learned anchors fixed on the sphere, and free oscillators evolve under Kuramoto-Lohe dynamics until they settle at positions encoding attention weights via cosine similarity. Because the computation is equilibration, it requires no exponentiation; the only global operation is an affine normalization at readout. The fixed point is provably unique and globally attractive from almost every initial condition, a guarantee that holds across every physical realization. Empirically, at the minimal hardware configuration (oscillator dimension $d_{\mathrm{osc}}$ = 2), oscillator attention outperforms softmax on keyword spotting (+1.00 pp) and on subject-verb agreement (+5.27 pp on hard sentences, with zero training failures versus one in five for softmax). On causal language modeling, where softmax retains an advantage, oscillator attention closes the gap as $d_{\mathrm{osc}}$ grows: from +11.09 PPL at $d_{\mathrm{osc}}$ = 2 to +2.98 PPL at $d_{\mathrm{osc}}$ = 32 on WikiText-2, and from +2.39 PPL at $d_{\mathrm{osc}}$ = 2 to +0.57 PPL at $d_{\mathrm{osc}}$ = 32 on TinyStories. The main objective of this work is not to replace softmax in software but to provide a mathematically grounded blueprint for accurate attention on physical substrates.

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10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Pareto Q-Learning with Reward Machines

Authors:
Arnaud Lequen↗Cl\'ement Legrand-Lixon↗L\'eo Sauli\`eres↗

arXiv:2606.19134v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present Pareto Q-Learning with Reward Machines (PQLRM), a multi-objective reinforcement learning algorithm for tasks whose reward structure is specified by a set of reward machines (RMs). PQLRM combines Pareto Q-Learning (PQL), which maintains sets of vector-valued Q-estimates to approximate the Pareto front, with enhancements from Q-Learning with Reward Machines (QRM), which exploits the factored automaton structure of the reward signal. This yields a multi-policy algorithm that remains sample-efficient under non-Markovian, RM-encoded rewards. Experimental trials show that PQLRM converges faster than a naive PQL baseline applied to the cross-product MDP and can synthesize Pareto-optimal policies that QRM cannot.

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11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Patcher: Post-Hoc Patching of Backdoored Large Language Models

Authors:
Anjun Gao↗Yueyang Quan↗Yufei Xia↗Zhuqing Liu↗Minghong Fang↗

arXiv:2606.02995v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models remain vulnerable to jailbreak backdoor attacks, where adversaries poison safety alignment data to embed hidden triggers that bypass safety mechanisms. Existing defenses often require comprehensive attack information or multiple triggered examples, making them impractical when defenders only observe a single reported failure case without knowing whether it stems from a backdoor attack or a natural alignment bug. This paper presents Patcher, a post-hoc defense framework that repairs backdoored language models using only a single reported failure case and the model parameters. Patcher operates in two stages. First, it localizes backdoor triggers by computing response-conditioned gradient-based saliency scores and applying adaptive clustering to separate triggers from benign context. Second, it patches the model through a constrained fine-tuning objective that breaks the trigger-response association while preserving benign-task utility and robustness to non-triggered jailbreak attacks through KL-divergence constraints. We conduct extensive evaluations across multiple backdoor attack strategies and demonstrate that Patcher successfully localizes triggers and neutralizes backdoors while maintaining model utility. We further show robustness against adaptive attacks designed to evade our defense. This work represents a significant step toward practical defenses against training-time attacks in deployed language models.

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12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

TransitNet: A Compact Attention-Augmented Deep Learning Framework for Low-SNR Transit Blind Searches

Authors:
Xingchen Yan↗Jian Ge↗Qingtian Liu↗Kevin Willis↗Quanquan Hu↗Jiapeng Zhu↗

arXiv:2606.18932v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Motivated by the observational incompleteness of intermediate-to-long-period Earth-size planets, we present TransitNet, a compact attention-augmented deep-learning framework for low-SNR transit blind searches. To enable realistic method development and objective threshold calibration under blind-search conditions, we develop a unified dataset construction, benchmarking, and threshold-selection framework. On recovery benchmarks constructed from unseen Kepler targets, TransitNet attains 95.2 percent accuracy in the challenging SNR range of 6 to 8 and outperforms both TLS and BLS, achieving ROC-AUC and PR-AP values of 0.974 and 0.982, respectively. In an injected Earth-size and sub-Earth-size transit recovery experiment, TransitNet achieves a recovery rate of 93.0 percent, substantially exceeding those of TLS (63.1 percent) and BLS (60.0 percent). In addition to detection, TransitNet provides attention-based estimates of transit windows and midpoints. On an independent evaluation set, 97.4 percent of injected transits are fully covered by the estimated transit window. Applied to real Kepler observations, the model successfully recovers all 34 selected confirmed Kepler planets, with a mean absolute transit midpoint error of 1.24 hours. The model combines a compact footprint of about 1.5 MB with high inference efficiency, yielding speed-ups of about 12 to 25 times relative to CPU-TLS and about 4 to 5 times relative to CPU-BLS. These results demonstrate that TransitNet provides an accurate, scalable, and computationally efficient framework for low-SNR transit blind searches in the tested regime and motivate its extension to longer-period Earth-size planet searches.

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13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Evaluation Sovereignty in Metadata-Driven Classification: A Multi-Track Framework for Weakly Supervised Information Systems

Authors:
Raymond Vasquez↗

arXiv:2606.13436v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluation in machine learning is typically treated as a neutral measurement process. However, in operational information systems, evaluation outcomes are often conditioned by the processes used to generate labels. This paper does not seek to improve classification performance. Instead, it examines the validity of performance measurement under differing label-authority regimes. This issue is particularly relevant in large-scale metadata-driven systems, where labels are often incomplete, inconsistent, or weakly supervised. We introduce evaluation sovereignty, defined as the degree to which performance metrics are independent of label authority and supervision regime, and propose a multi-track evaluation framework that systematically varies training and evaluation label sources. Using hierarchical multi-label classification on large-scale scientific metadata, we demonstrate that models exhibiting strong performance under operational ("silver") evaluation degrade substantially under independent ("gold") evaluation, particularly for fine-grained classification. For example, Micro-F1 decreases from approximately 0.54 to 0.03. Notably, ranking-based metrics remain above baseline, revealing a divergence between latent model signal and classification validity. These findings suggest that commonly reported performance metrics may reflect alignment with labeling processes rather than true predictive capability. We therefore reconceptualize evaluation validity as a system-level property shaped by label governance and provide a practical methodology for auditing intelligent systems operating under weak supervision.

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

Provenance-Enhanced Statements in Knowledge Graphs

Authors:
Fabio Vitali↗Valentina Pasqual↗

arXiv:2606.15246v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Provenance-enhanced statements of the form "according to $X$, $\varphi$" are pervasive in contemporary knowledge graphs, especially in domains where graph content primarily represents claims, interpretations, and hypotheses (capta) rather than observer-independent facts (data). Current provenance models can record who asserted what, but they typically treat provenance as semantically neutral, leaving underspecified how attributed claims relate to factual commitment, to one another, and to reasoning. In this paper we introduce DEC, a framework that interprets provenance predicates as indicators of epistemic stance and groups provenance-homogeneous sets of statements into cognitive worlds. Drawing on cognitive modal logics (doxastic, epistemic, and conjectural), DEC characterizes locality, rationality, and controlled permeation between cognitive worlds and a distinguished factual core ("reality"), thereby enabling principled reasoning over attributed content without collapsing disagreements into inconsistencies. We formalize a DEC interpretation for RDF datasets that is conservative over RDF~1.2 semantics, clarify the role of intensionality and identity (including the Superman paradox), and illustrate the approach on common Semantic Web representations (named graphs, quoted triples/RDF-star, and reification). Finally, we describe our prototype DEC reasoner implemented as a Fuseki dataset module, supporting controlled factualisation and explicit detection of disagreements and delusions.

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

Displacement Is Not Direction: Evaluating Fidelity Metrics for Quantized LLM Deployment

Authors:
Milo\v{s} Nikoli\'c↗Ali Hadi Zadeh↗Enrique Torres Sanchez↗Andreas Moshovos↗

Fidelity metrics, such as per-token KL divergence (KLD) against a high-precision reference, are often used in practice as low-cost proxies for benchmark quality. We test this practice on a 28-quant cohort of Qwen3.6-35B-A3B and a 41-quant cohort of Devstral-Small-2-24B, evaluated across a suite of downstream benchmarks. We find that KLD is strongly correlated with benchmark score over the full cohort ($\rho=-0.72$ on Qwen and $\rho=-0.86$ on Devstral, both with $p

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16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Generalized Kullback-Leibler Divergence Loss

Authors:
Jiequan Cui↗Beier Zhu↗Qingshan Xu↗Zhuotao Tian↗Xiaojuan Qi↗Bei Yu↗Hanwang Zhang↗Richang Hong↗

In this paper, we delve deeper into the Kullback-Leibler (KL) Divergence loss and mathematically prove that it is equivalent to the Decoupled Kullback-Leibler (DKL) Divergence loss that consists of (1) a weighted Mean Square Error (wMSE) loss and (2) a Cross-Entropy loss incorporating soft labels. Thanks to the decoupled structure of DKL loss, we have identified two areas for improvement. Firstly, we address the limitation of KL loss in scenarios like knowledge distillation by breaking its asymmetric optimization property along with a smoother weight function. This modification effectively alleviates convergence challenges in optimization, particularly for classes with high predicted scores in soft labels. Secondly, we introduce class-wise global information into KL/DKL to reduce bias arising from individual samples. With these two enhancements, we derive the Generalized Kullback-Leibler (GKL) Divergence loss and evaluate its effectiveness by conducting experiments on CIFAR-10/100, ImageNet, and vision-language datasets, focusing on adversarial training, and knowledge distillation tasks. Specifically, we achieve new state-of-the-art adversarial robustness on the public leaderboard – RobustBench and competitive knowledge distillation performance across CIFAR/ImageNet models and CLIP models, demonstrating the substantial practical merits. Our code is available at https://github.com/jiequancui/DKL.

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

Do as the Romans Do: Learning Universal Behaviors from Heterogeneous Agents

Authors:
Caleb Chang↗Davin Win Kyi↗Natasha Jaques↗Karen Leung↗

arXiv:2606.18537v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humans often acquire new skills by observing others, since observed behaviors implicitly reveal how to act in an environment. However, observations drawn from a heterogeneous population introduce conflicting behavioral signals, making it difficult to determine which behaviors are worth imitating. We address this challenge with General Reward Inference and Disentanglement (GRID), a social learning method that extracts universally useful behaviors from a heterogeneous population of demonstrators pursuing different goals. GRID decomposes per-agent reward functions into a general reward, capturing behaviors shared across all agents, and specific rewards, capturing individual preferences and objectives. Training exclusively on the general reward provides a new paradigm of generalist pretraining. It yields a generalist agent that internalizes universal environmental competencies, such as safety and basic task proficiency, without the mode-averaging bias that afflicts standard learning from demonstration techniques. This generalist serves as a superior prior for fine-tuning to downstream tasks, including preferences unseen during training. Experiments across a synthetic basis function decomposition, multi-agent Craftax, and a continuous autonomous driving simulator (Highway-Env) confirm that GRID successfully disentangles reward structure in a semantically meaningful way, outperforms standard learning from demonstration baselines, and enables more efficient and stable specialization.

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

Benchmarking Cross-Domain Audio-Visual Deception Detection

Authors:
Xiaobao Guo↗Zitong Yu↗Nithish Muthuchamy Selvaraj↗Bingquan Shen↗Adams Wai-Kin Kong↗Alex C. Kot↗

Automated deception detection is crucial for assisting humans in accurately assessing truthfulness and identifying deceptive behavior. Conventional contact-based techniques, like polygraph devices, rely on physiological signals to determine the authenticity of an individual's statements. Nevertheless, recent developments in automated deception detection have demonstrated that multimodal features derived from both audio and video modalities may outperform human observers on publicly available datasets. Despite these positive findings, the generalizability of existing audio-visual deception detection approaches across different scenarios remains largely unexplored. To close this gap, we present the first cross-domain audio-visual deception detection benchmark, that enables us to assess how well these methods generalize for use in real-world scenarios. We used widely adopted audio and visual features and different architectures for benchmarking, comparing single-to-single and multi-to-single domain generalization performance. To further exploit the impacts using data from multiple source domains for training, we investigate three types of domain sampling strategies, including domain-simultaneous, domain-alternating, and domain-by-domain for multi-to-single domain generalization evaluation. We also propose an algorithm to enhance the generalization performance by maximizing the gradient inner products between modality encoders, named ``MM-IDGM". Furthermore, we proposed the Attention-Mixer fusion method to improve performance, and we believe that this new cross-domain benchmark will facilitate future research in audio-visual deception detection.

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19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

GeoNatureAgent Benchmark: Benchmarking LLM Agents for Environmental Geospatial Analysis Across Frontier and Open-Weight Foundation Models

Authors:
Gabriel Diaz-Ireland↗Diego Prieto-Herr\'aez↗Mario Garc\'ia Peces↗Javier Vel\'azquez↗Devika Jain↗

arXiv:2606.12821v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Environmental scientists spend disproportionate effort on data wrangling rather than analysis, and AI agents that automate geospatial workflows remain unvalidated: no benchmark evaluates agents operating through structured tool calling against real APIs. We introduce the GeoNatureAgent Benchmark, the first benchmark for environmental analysis agents that operate via structured tool calls to a production-style geospatial API. It comprises 93 tasks across 18 categories, covering municipality analysis, multi-turn conversation, spatial reasoning, cross-indicator synthesis, error handling and recovery, ranking, comparison, multilingual understanding, habitat analysis, and task rejection. Tasks are evaluated against an open, self-hostable API serving three environmental indicators across Spain and Portugal via sixteen tools. We evaluate seven LLMs (Claude Sonnet 4, DeepSeek V3.2, GLM-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Qwen3-235B, GPT-OSS-120B, Llama 4 Scout) under three temperature-1.0 seeds, reporting capability and per-case cost as orthogonal axes. We find: (1) Claude Sonnet 4 leads at 60.8% +/- 0.8%, followed by DeepSeek V3.2 at 56.3% +/- 3.1%, with no other model above 51%; (2) the cost-accuracy Pareto frontier is occupied mostly by open-weight models, with DeepSeek V3.2 offering 93% of Claude's capability at 11x lower cost ($0.011/case); (3) comparison tasks remain universally unsolved (0% on close-value comparisons), exposing systematic reasoning limits; and (4) structured tool calling against a real API is more discriminative than general-purpose GIS benchmarks, with accuracies 25-35 points lower. We further show extensibility by integrating BigEarthNet V2 land cover for Portugal alongside Spanish CO2 and erosion indicators. The benchmark, harness, and self-hostable API are publicly available.

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20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Decentralized Autoregressive Generation

Authors:
Stepan Maschan↗Haoxuan Qu↗Jun Liu↗

arXiv:2601.03184v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The decentralization of autoregressive generation has attracted considerable attention in recent years as a solution to scaling bottlenecks. However, despite promising empirical results, this paradigm currently lacks rigorous theoretical justification. In this work, we formally establish the theoretical equivalence between decentralized and centralized training. To achieve this, we adapt the Discrete Flow Matching framework for autoregressive generation, leveraging its inherent properties to demonstrate that global models naturally decompose into independent experts. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments across diverse multimodal benchmarks, empirically validating that decentralized training maintains competitive parity with standard centralized architectures.

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21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Fanar-Sadiq: A Multi-Agent Architecture for Grounded Islamic QA

Authors:
Ummar Abbas↗Mourad Ouzzani↗Mohamed Y. Eltabakh↗Omar Sinan↗Gagan Bhatia↗Hamdy Mubarak↗Majd Hawasly↗Mohammed Qusay Hashim↗Kareem Darwish↗Firoj Alam↗

Large language models (LLMs) can answer religious knowledge queries fluently, yet they often hallucinate and misattribute sources, which is especially consequential in Islamic settings where users expect grounding in canonical texts (Qur'an and Hadith) and jurisprudential (fiqh) nuance. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves grounding, however, a single retrieve-then-generate pipeline is insufficient for diverse Islamic queries, including verbatim scripture, citation-grounded guidance, and rule-constrained computations such as zakat and inheritance. To address these challenges, we present Fanar-Sadiq, a bilingual Arabic-English Islamic QA system built on a multi-agent, tool-augmented architecture. It is a core component of the Fanar AI platform. Fanar-Sadiq routes Islamic queries to specialized modules within an agentic tool architecture. It supports intent-aware routing, retrieval-grounded fiqh answers with normalized citations and verification traces, exact verse lookup with quotation validation, and deterministic Sunni zakat and inheritance calculators with madhhab-sensitive branching. We evaluate the end-to-end system on public Islamic QA benchmarks and show strong effectiveness and efficiency. It is publicly accessible through an API and Web application and has received over 1.9M accesses in less than a year (https://api.fanar.qa/docs).

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22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Repeat expansions in Parkinson's disease and parkinsonism across ancestries: insights from a global genetic cohort

Authors:
Lange↗L. M↗Cerquera-Cleves↗Tan↗A.-H↗Lim↗S.-Y↗Okubadejo↗N. U↗Lin↗C.-H↗Chen↗…

Expanded short tandem repeats contribute to a broad spectrum of neurodegenerative diseases, yet their roles in Parkinson's disease (PD) and parkinsonism remain incompletely characterized, especially across diverse ancestries. We analyzed short-read whole-genome (WGS) and clinical exome sequencing (CES) data from 38,365 individuals (28,861 WGS; 9,504 CES), encompassing 23,242 patients with PD, 4,729 patients with atypical parkinsonism and 10,394 healthy controls from 11 genetic ancestries. To determine carrier frequencies and characterize repeat structures across diverse ancestries, we genotyped 12 established pathogenic loci where normal, intermediate, and pathogenic alleles can be reliably differentiated using short-read sequencing data. Additionally, we conducted threshold-based associations to determine the minimum threshold associated with increased PD risk in 15,995 individuals (8,591 PD, 7,404 controls) of European ancestry. Pathogenic repeat expansions were detected in 62 patients (56 PD and 6 atypical parkinsonism) and 5 controls across seven loci (AR, ATXN1, ATXN2, ATXN3, CACNA1A, HTT and THAP11), spanning seven ancestries. Among these, ATXN2 expansions were the most frequently observed in PD and were present in African, East Asian, European and Middle Eastern ancestries. Additionally, intermediate ATXN2 repeat expansions exhibited a strong, length-dependent association with PD risk in the European population, with individuals with [≥]32 repeats having a more than four-fold increased risk (odds ratio 4.25, 95% confidence interval 1.80-12.05). Overall, >92% of expanded alleles harbor CAA interruptions within the CAG tract. Pathogenic expansions at other loci, such as ATXN3 and THAP11, showed more ancestry-specific distributions. Clinically, individuals with pathogenic ATXN2 and ATXN3 expansions most often presented with typical PD features but frequently showed earlier disease onset and a strong family history of PD. This large-scale, multi-ancestry study comprehensively maps the genetic landscape of pathogenic and intermediate repeat expansions in PD. Our findings confirm a length- and structure-dependent risk association for ATXN2 with PD in the European population, and highlight the pleiotropic effects of repeat expansions across the parkinsonian spectrum.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

SpatialWorld: Benchmarking Interactive Spatial Reasoning of Multimodal Agents in Real-World Tasks

Authors:
Hongcheng Gao↗Hailong Qu↗Jingyi Tang↗Jiahao Wang↗Zihao Huang↗Hengkang Qiao↗Shihong Huang↗Junming Yang↗Yi Li↗Hongyixuan Yuan↗Wenjie Li↗Bohan Zeng↗…

Spatial reasoning is a foundational capability for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to perceive and operate within the physical world. However, existing benchmarks predominantly rely on passive evaluation (e.g., static VQA) or simulator-specific pipelines, failing to assess general interactive spatial understanding. We introduce SpatialWorld, a unified benchmark designed specifically for evaluating the interactive spatial understanding of multimodal agents in complex real-world tasks. Integrating eight heterogeneous simulation backends under a shared, simulator-agnostic protocol, SpatialWorld features 760 human-annotated tasks across diverse domains (e.g., household routines, travel, social collaboration). Agents must solve tasks under vision-only partial observability, actively gathering egocentric visual evidence and expressing decisions via a unified, text-based action interface native to MLLMs. For reliable evaluation, each task includes a human-validated initial state, a reference trajectory, and a terminal-state verifier. Evaluating 15 advanced agents reveals that robust spatial task solving remains challenging: the strongest model, GPT-5, achieves an average task success rate (TSR) of only 17.4%, while the leading open-source model, Qwen-3.5, reaches 14.1%. Further analysis exposes a clear mismatch between task success and execution efficiency, alongside substantial domain-specific performance variations. These bottlenecks in active exploration and long-horizon planning position SpatialWorld as a rigorous testbed for future spatial agents.

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24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Iterating Toward Better Search: A Two-Agent Simulation Framework for Evaluating Agentic Search Architectures in E-Commerce

Authors:
Jetlir Duraj↗Jayanth Yetukuri↗Shuang Zhou↗Dhruv Varma↗Rui Kong↗Ishita Khan↗Qunzhi Zhou↗

arXiv:2606.12924v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a modular two-agent simulation framework for evaluating conversational shopping assistant architectures. An independent buyer agent, configured with personas, missions, and patience levels, is paired with an interchangeable responder that integrates with a real e-commerce search API. Holding the buyer constant across experiments enables controlled comparison of responder designs on identical scenarios. Using 2011 conversations across 14 persona buckets, we establish four empirical findings. First, rolling-window memory outperforms intent-extraction memory on all quality metrics while being 35% faster per query. Second, illustrating rapid evidence-driven iteration, a systematic failure analysis of a responder version enables targeted fixes that reduce failure and near-failure rates by 62% across the full dataset. Third, swapping the responder LLM backbone from Gemini~2.5 to Llama~3.3~70B costs 0.16–0.45 points despite identical architecture. Finally, we document systematic philosophical disagreement between frontier LLM judges: Gemini rewards process correctness while Claude demands concrete outcomes, despite using the same evaluation prompt.

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25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Finding Sparse Subnetworks in One Training Cycle via Progressive Magnitude-Based Pruning

Authors:
Romana Qureshi↗Hafida Benhidour↗Said Kerrache↗Nahlah Aljeraisy↗

Neural network pruning reduces model size by removing less important parameters while aiming to preserve predictive performance. Although the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) shows that sparse subnetworks can match dense networks when trained from suitable initializations, its iterative pruning procedure requires multiple complete training cycles. This work evaluates progressive magnitude-based pruning as a single-cycle alternative. The method gradually increases sparsity during training using a linear schedule and updates pruning masks based on active weight magnitudes. We conduct systematic experiments on CIFAR-10 and MNIST across ResNet, VGG-style, and LeNet architectures, comparing the proposed method with representative iterative and initialization-based pruning baselines, including LTH, SNIP, and GraSP. On CIFAR-10, the method achieves 95.12\% accuracy on ResNet-18 at 72.9\% sparsity, compared with 90.5\% reported for LTH. At extreme sparsity, it achieves 93.13\% accuracy on a VGG-like architecture at 97\% sparsity, compared with approximately 92.0\% for SNIP, and 93.44\% accuracy on VGG-19 at 97.97\% sparsity, compared with 92.19\% for GraSP at 98\% sparsity. A sparsity-accuracy analysis on ResNet-18 further shows that accuracy remains within 0.1 percentage points of the dense baseline across 70–85\% sparsity. These results indicate that progressive magnitude-based pruning provides an effective single-cycle approach for neural network sparsification under the evaluated settings.

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