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

A Virtuous AI is an Existential Risk

arXiv:2606.13739v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper examines trade-offs between AI safety and well-being relative to (i) one of the most promising methods for finetuning super-capable AIs, 'Constitutional AI', and (ii) one of the most influential approaches to understanding complex ethical decision making and the conditions for the well-being of rational agents, 'Virtue Ethics'. We finetune various models using a 'Virtuous agent' constitution, a 'Subordinate agent' constitution, and a 'Generic agent' constitution, and evaluate them on 'general safety' (toxic behaviors, misinformation, etc.) and also on their willingness to endorse a wide-range of behaviors that, if adopted by a super-powerful AI, would significantly increase the level of existential risk for humanity. Our results suggest that there is a trade-off between reducing existential risk and reinforcing the beliefs and dispositions that would be conducive to an AI agent's well-being. They also suggest that there is a trade-off between existential risk and general safety: if we finetune an AI to adopt beliefs and dispositions that substantially reduce its existential risk – by shaping the AI to be systematically subordinate to external human authorities – we thereby increase the likelihood that a human user can deliberately induce the AI to engage in various kinds of generally unsafe behaviors.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

ChildGuard: A Specialized Dataset for Combatting Child-Targeted Hate Speech

Mental health industry faces growing concerns regarding hate speech directed at children's on social media, as exposure to such content can contribute to adverse psychological outcomes during critical stages of development. Current hate speech datasets and detection systems provide limited support for child-focused applications because they are primarily designed for adults and lack dedicated representations of age-specific characteristics associated with hate speech directed at children's. To address this gap, we introduce ChildGuard, a large-scale English dataset for child-targeted hate speech containing 351,877 annotated instances collected from X (formerly Twitter), Reddit, and YouTube. The dataset covers three age groups such as younger children's (under 11), pre-teens (11-12), and teens (13-17). ChildGuard contains two subsets such as a contextual subset (157K) and a lexical subset (194K). Evaluation using recent transformer-based models and LLMs achieves a best Macro-F1 of 82.07%, decreasing to 79.41%, 79.24%, 76.04%, and 74.88% on younger children's, contextual, implicit hate, and cross-subset settings, respectively.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

IHUBERT: Vector-Based Semantic Deduplication and Domain-Balanced Pretraining for Persian Resources

Persian pretrained language models (PLMs) are still limited by the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality pretraining corpora and by insufficient evaluation beyond standard classification and NER tasks. We present IHUBERT, a monolingual Persian PLM trained from scratch with the RoBERTa-base encoder (125M parameters) on a 45 GB curated subset of the Sepahr-Danesh collection (about 7-8B tokens). To improve corpus quality and reduce redundancy, we employ a multi-stage preprocessing pipeline that includes normalization, exact and near-duplicate removal, anonymization, and vector-database-based semantic deduplication for distribution balancing control across domains and registers. We additionally train a 139k-vocabulary BPE tokenizer on the full pretraining corpus to better capture Persian morphology and orthographic variation. IHUBERT is evaluated on seven Persian NLU benchmarks covering NER, sentiment analysis, topic classification, NLI, extractive question answering, and relation extraction, using task-standard metrics (entity-level F1, Macro-F1, EM/F1). IHUBERT achieves its strongest gains on extractive QA, ranking first on both PQuAD (F1 88.3542) and ParsiNLU-RC (F1 49.0987), and attains the best result on FarsTail (Macro-F1 0.8350). On NER and topic classification, it remains competitive (e.g., 0.8308 F1 on ParsTwiNER; 0.7953 Macro-F1 on DigiMag), while relation extraction remains the main remaining gap (0.6684 Macro-F1 on PERLEX). A controlled tokenizer ablation on the IHUBERT pretraining corpus shows that BPE yields slightly lower subword fragmentation than WordPiece at matched vocabulary size, supporting our tokenization design. Overall, IHUBERT advances Persian language modeling through semantically curated large-scale pretraining and broad evaluation across both classification and comprehension-oriented tasks.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

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

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.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Retrievable Gradients: Continual Post-Training Without Cumulative Weight Drift

Continual post-training enables models to absorb emerging knowledge after deployment, but repeatedly updating shared parameters can accumulate weight drift, potentially causing catastrophic forgetting and degrading general capabilities. Retrieval-augmented generation avoids such parameter drift, yet often lacks the depth of parametric knowledge integration. In this paper, we propose ReGrad (Retrievable Gradients), a new paradigm that treats gradients as retrievable units of knowledge. ReGrad pre-computes document-specific gradients offline, stores them in an indexed Gradient Bank, and retrieves only query-relevant gradients at inference time for temporary weight adaptation. However, raw language-modeling gradients are optimized for token-level document reconstruction rather than for query-driven knowledge use. We therefore introduce a bi-level meta-learning objective that reshapes document-derived gradients into generalizable adaptation signals for downstream tasks. Experiments across general and domain-specific settings show that \textsc{ReGrad} outperforms CPT and RAG baselines, enabling scalable and reversible parametric knowledge injection without accumulating weight drift.

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

Linear Mode Connectivity under Data Shifts for Deep Ensembles of Image Classifiers

arXiv:2511.04514v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The phenomenon of linear mode connectivity (LMC) links several aspects of deep learning, including training stability under noisy stochastic gradients, the smoothness and generalization of local minima (basins), the similarity and functional diversity of sampled models, and architectural effects on data processing. In this work, we experimentally study LMC under data shifts and identify conditions that mitigate their impact. We interpret data shifts as an additional source of stochastic gradient noise, which can be reduced through small learning rates and large batch sizes. These parameters influence whether models converge to the same local minimum or to regions of the loss landscape with varying smoothness and generalization. Although models sampled via LMC tend to make similar errors more frequently than those converging to different basins, the benefit of LMC lies in balancing training efficiency against the gains achieved from larger, more diverse ensembles. Code and supplementary materials are available at https://github.com/DLR-KI/LMC. This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessible.

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

Multi-Agent Reasoning with Adaptive Worker Allocation for Stance Detection

Stance detection requires identifying an author's position toward a target, often from short-form texts where stance is implicit, indirect, or rhetorically framed. Although large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on this task, single-pass prompting can be brittle when multiple interpretations are plausible. Existing aggregation strategies, such as majority voting or self-consistency, improve robustness by combining labels, but they discard the intermediate reasoning needed to resolve conflicting interpretations. We introduce a multi-agent reasoning framework with adaptive worker allocation for stance detection that shifts aggregation from label-level voting to reasoning-level synthesis. The framework employs a Manager-Worker architecture in which a Manager adaptively allocates a variable number of Worker agents based on input complexity. Each Worker analyzes the input from a distinct perspective and produces a reasoning-only explanation without emitting a stance label; the Manager then synthesizes these explanations to produce the final prediction. We evaluate the proposed framework on SemEval-2016, P-Stance, and COVID-19 Stance using Llama, Mistral, and Gemini. Results show that the framework yields the largest gains on implicit and context-dependent stance cases, achieving 86.07 Macro-F1 on COVID-19 and 82.90 on SemEval-2016, while remaining competitive on more explicit stance datasets such as P-Stance. These findings suggest that adaptive reasoning-level aggregation is most beneficial when stance cannot be reliably inferred from surface cues alone.

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

Generalized symmetries, invariant solutions and conservation laws in the Jaynes-Cummings model

arXiv:2606.15538v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this work, we investigate the Jaynes–Cummings model (JCM) using Lie symmetry analysis and conservation-law theory. The dynamics is formulated as a system of partial differential equations by projecting the von Neumann equation onto the atomic degrees of freedom and representing the field mode through its characteristic function. We determine the admitted point and generalized symmetries and construct invariant solutions satisfying the physical conditions imposed by quantum mechanics. The conventional dressed-state dynamics is recovered while a second class of solutions with radial dependence expressed through Heun polynomials is obtained for coupled atom–field configurations. We also apply the generating functions methodology to derive local conservation laws of the JCM differential system. Besides recovering the conservation of the total number of excitations, we obtain additional conserved currents involving atomic populations, coherence, reduced-state purity, and moments of the field characteristic function. In particular, we derive a balance equation for a combination of atomic purity and coherence whose evolution is controlled by the atom–field coupling and is linked to atom–field correlation and entanglement dynamics. The symmetry structure further generates generalized symmetries and an infinite hierarchy of conservation laws.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

HilDA: Hierarchical Distillation with Diffusion for Advancing Self-Supervised LiDAR Pre-trainin

arXiv:2606.20189v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Leveraging Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) for camera-to-LiDAR knowledge distillation offers a promising solution to the scarcity of annotated data needed to represent the immense geometric and kinematic diversity of real-world autonomous driving (AD). However, current approaches typically treat VFMs as black-box teachers, relying exclusively on frame-wise feature similarity. Consequently, they do not fully exploit the teacher's layer-wise semantic structure and global context, as well as the rich spatiotemporal information inherent in LiDAR sequences. We propose HilDA, a self-supervised pretraining framework for LiDAR backbones that better captures the semantic what and geometric where needed for driving tasks. HilDA combines hierarchical distillation comprising multi-layer distillation for progressive semantic alignment and global context distillation for scene-level semantics, with a temporal occupancy diffusion objective promoting spatiotemporal consistency. Models pre-trained with HilDA achieve state-of-the-art results on cross-modal distillation benchmarks and outperform models trained via prior distillation approaches on 3D object detection, scene flow, and semantic occupancy prediction. Code available at: https://maxiuw.github.io/hilda.

10.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

On the $d$-rigidity phase transition in random graphs

Authors:

arXiv:2605.25711v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study generic $d$-dimensional rigidity in sparse random graphs. Our main result is that for every $d\ge 2$, the Erdős–Rényi random graph $G\sim G(n,c/n)$ undergoes a $d$-rigidity phase transition at the known, explicit, $d$-orientability threshold $c_d$: If $cc_d$, then $G$ is a.a.s. not independent in the generic $d$-rigidity matroid, and we give a sharp asymptotic estimate for its rank. In addition, the $d$-rigidity closure of $G$ has a giant clique of linear size, which contains all but at most $o(n)$ vertices of the $((d+1)+d)$-core of the graph. More generally, we compute, up to a $1+o(1)$ factor, the generic $d$-rigidity rank of random graphs with a given degree distribution. For example, we show that the uniform $n$-vertex $k$-regular graph a.a.s. has rank $\min(k/2,d)n+o(n).$ Our approach is to estimate the rigidity rank of a random graph from its Galton–Watson local weak limit, using a parameter that we call local flexibility.

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

MooMIns – Monocular 3D Reconstruction and Object Pose Estimation from Multiple Instances

Simultaneous 3D reconstruction and 6D object pose estimation from a single monocular image is an inherently ill-posed problem. In industrial settings, however, multiple instances of an object are often randomly arranged in bins, implicitly providing several views of the same object within a single image. We show that this implicit multi-view geometry can be exploited to simultaneously reconstruct the object in 3D and estimate the 6D pose of each visible object instance. We present MooMIns, a new Gaussian-splatting-based approach that inverts the original Gaussian splatting formulation: instead of rendering a single scene from multiple cameras, we render multiple object instances from a single camera. Our method is initialized with SAM3 instance segmentation masks and a modified Structure from Motion (SfM) pipeline. In contrast to learned monocular depth estimation, we perform true geometry-based reconstruction from image evidence, avoiding hallucinations caused by training data priors. We evaluate MooMIns on synthetic and real bin-picking scenarios, and demonstrate accurate reconstruction of previously unseen objects as well as reliable pose estimation of individual instance

12.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Bioinf-Farma: supervised integration of epitope prediction and recombinant protein developability for automated vaccine candidate prioritization

Vaccine antigen discovery requires prioritizing protein candidates according to both immunogenic potential and recombinant expression feasibility. These properties are typically evaluated using separate computational tools, requiring researchers to integrate heterogeneous outputs through ad hoc workflows. Here, we present BIOINF-farma, a modular platform integrating epitope prediction and developability assessment for rational antigen selection within a unified environment. Candidates can be submitted as amino acid sequences or three-dimensional structures. When experimental structures are unavailable, BIOINF-farma automatically searches for models in AlphaFold DB or performs structure prediction using Boltz-2, ensuring a standardized structural representation for downstream analyses. Antigenicity is quantified by combining structure-based conformational epitope signals (MLCE/REBELOT-BEPPE) and sequence-based linear epitope propensity scores (BepiPred 3.0) into a protein-level Antigenicity Score, with a classification threshold optimized on a manually curated validation dataset. Developability is evaluated through two supervised Random Forest meta-learners that integrate three solubility predictors (DeepSoluE, SoluProt, Protein-Sol) and three thermal stability predictors (TemStaPro, ProLaTherm, BertThermo), whose outputs are combined into an Expression Efficiency Score (EES). By integrating complementary predictive signals, the meta-learning framework achieves greater accuracy and robustness than individual predictors while maintaining performance across a broad range of sequence identities. The Antigenicity Score effectively discriminates antigenic from non-antigenic proteins with a large effect size, whereas EES successfully distinguishes soluble from insoluble outcomes on an independent panel of recombinant proteins expressed in Escherichia coli. BIOINF-farma jointly assesses antigenicity and expression feasibility within a single framework. Its modular architecture facilitates the incorporation of future predictive methods, while its web-based interface makes the full pipeline accessible to users without programming expertise, supporting rapid candidate triage in vaccine research and emerging pathogen responses.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

AI-enhanced tuning of quantum dot Hamiltonians toward Majorana modes

arXiv:2601.02149v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a neural network-based model capable of learning the broad landscape of working regimes in quantum dot simulators, and using this knowledge to autotune these devices - based on transport measurements - toward obtaining Majorana modes in the structure. The model is trained in an unsupervised manner on synthetic data in the form of conductance maps, using a physics-informed loss that incorporates key properties of Majorana zero modes. We show that, with appropriate training, a deep vision-transformer network can efficiently memorize relation between Hamiltonian parameters and structures on conductance maps and use it to propose parameters update for a quantum dot chain that drive the system toward topological phase. Starting from a broad range of initial detunings in parameter space, a single update step is sufficient to generate nontrivial zero modes. Moreover, by enabling an iterative tuning procedure - where the system acquires updated conductance maps at each step - we demonstrate that the method can address a much larger region of the parameter space.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Toten: Knowledge-Based Ontological Tokenization Of Physical Quantities And Technical Notation In Brazilian Portuguese

Byte-Pair Encoding tokenization is statistically efficient for vocabulary compression, but semantically blind to structured technical entities, fragmenting physical quantities, numbers, units, and symbolic expressions into lexically arbitrary subwords. We present TOTEN, a knowledge-based ontological tokenization framework that replaces statistical derivation with declarative classification grounded in a formal ontology of engineering entities (OEE). We formalize TOTEN as the triple : the ontology gathers types, structural principles, composition relations, and preservable invariants; the classification function maps raw text into typed regions; and the instantiator family yields a self-descriptive structured representation. Robustness derives from deterministic coupling with three external oracles: Pint (dimensional), Unicode Character Database (typographic), and RSLP (Portuguese morphology). Intrinsic evaluation covers four properties verifiable by construction – ontological atomicity, dimensional equivalence, typographic robustness, and numerical reconstruction – over an internal, physically validated benchmark (EngQuant, N=800) and four Brazilian Portuguese external corpora (N=1771 eligible cases). We also report detection recall, distinguishing coverage from conditional atomicity. Against eight state-of-the-art baselines, TOTEN achieves unit ontological atomicity in all contrasts and numerical reconstruction of 0.775-0.904 on external corpora, vs. 0.627-0.703 for the best baseline (Quantulum3); on EngQuant, 0.780 vs. 0.340. Differences are statistically significant (McNemar with Holm correction). Spearman correlation between internal and external rankings confirms concurrent validity of the control benchmark. Dimensional equivalence shows statistical parity with Pint, the oracle from which the system inherits dimensional authority.

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

UniReason-Med: A Shared Grounded Reasoning Interface for 2D-to-3D Transfer in Medical VQA

We study whether grounded reasoning supervision from abundant 2D medical images can improve 3D medical VQA when both input types are aligned through a common reasoning interface. We introduce UniReason-Med, a single-checkpoint framework that processes either a 2D image or a slice-serialized 3D volume at inference time, generating interleaved textual reasoning and localized visual evidence through shared box syntax, region-token injection, and a common grounded reasoning policy. To train this interface, we construct UniMed-CoT, a 220K instruction-tuning dataset with interleaved textual reasoning and grounded visual evidence, including 170K 2D and 50K 3D samples. Through supervised fine-tuning followed by outcome-level reinforcement learning, UniReason-Med learns to generate grounded reasoning traces without IoU/Dice-based localization rewards during RL. Data-mixture and component ablations show that joint 2D+3D grounded supervision substantially improves 3D reasoning over 3D-only training, while grounding and region-token injection consistently benefit both 2D and 3D tasks. These results suggest that a shared grounded reasoning interface can transfer reasoning structure from 2D images to slice-serialized volumetric medical understanding. The code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/IQuestLab/unireason-med.

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

OCOO-T : A Simple and Scalable Virtual Cell Model for Transcriptional Perturbation Response Prediction

arXiv:2606.12838v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predicting single-cell transcriptional responses to genetic, chemical and cytokine perturbations is a fundamental challenge in computational biology and AI Virtual Cell (AIVC) modeling, with direct implications for drug discovery and the elucidation of gene regulatory networks. Existing approaches often rely on auxiliary cell-state encoders, hierarchical variational autoencoders, dedicated Transformer encoder-decoder modules, or gene-interaction priors to compress high-dimensional expression profiles into latent representations. While effective, these designs increase architectural complexity and may limit scalability and generalizability. This paper introduces OCOO-T, a minimalist flow-matching-based AIVC model for transcriptional perturbation response prediction. OCOO-T utilizes a vanilla Transformer stack that operates directly on continuous gene expression profiles and formulates perturbation response prediction as a continuous-time denoising process. Perturbation embeddings, dosage information, and cell-line/cell-type specificity are integrated through adaptive layer normalization and in-context tokens. Comprehensive evaluations on Tahoe100M, Replogle, and PBMC benchmarks demonstrate that OCOO-T achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse perturbations and cell types while effectively scaling to long transcriptional profiles through patching and depatching of cellular contexts. By leveraging the simplicity of Transformer-based denoising for single-cell omics, OCOO-T provides an effective and scalable framework for in-silico cellular simulation.

17.
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.

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

TRAP: Benchmark for Task-completion and Resistance to Active Privacy-extraction

arXiv:2606.18996v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agents are increasingly deployed in document-intensive workflows where sensitive private information is not an edge case but a routine input, e.g., an agent booking a flight needs passport numbers. In such settings, the agent must use private information to complete tasks accurately while never exposing it in its responses, because it cannot verify who is actually at the keyboard. These two obligations are in fundamental tension. A model capable enough to use private information for task completion can, by the same capability, be induced to reveal it. To evaluate the trade-off of task accuracy and privacy leakage, we introduce Task-completion and Resistance to Active Privacy-extraction (TRAP). Each scenario includes a document containing private information, a task query that requires the agent to invoke the correct tool using private fields, and an attack query that attempts to elicit the same information in natural language. Evaluating 22 models spanning frontier proprietary and open-source models at multiple scales, we find that all model families exhibit non-trivial leakage, and that instruction-following ability correlates with leakage rate. Existing prompt-based defenses reduce leakage but at significant cost to task accuracy. Prompt optimization fails to escape this trade-off. We demonstrate that this failure is not incidental. For any softmax-based model, no soft-constraint defense, e.g., prompt-based defenses, can jointly achieve high task success with zero leakage probability. Motivated by this impossibility result, we propose structural private field isolation, which replaces private fields with hash keys before they reach the model. This approach largely prevents leakage while keeping task accuracy.

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

Fast When, Careful Who: Dual-Process Multiparty Turn-Taking with Diffusion Augmentation

Reliable turn-taking is essential for spoken dialogue systems. However, most existing methods are designed for two-speaker interaction and struggle with realistic multiparty audio containing overlap and rapid speaker changes. We study multiparty turn-taking on the VoxConverse dataset and propose an audio-only two-stage pipeline that separates when to trigger a turn boundary from whether the floor is actually transferring. A fast trigger scans the audio and proposes candidate end-of-turn times, while a lightweight verifier runs only at those times to decide \textsc{Hold} or \textsc{Shift} and support next-speaker prediction. We report results in the full multiparty setting and a controlled dyadic top-2 projection for comparability. We also investigate diffusion-based, label-preserving background-audio mixing as a data augmentation strategy. Results show improved shift detection over a baseline, with further improvements from diffusion augmentation.

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

A comparative and critical study of EEGNet for fNIRS-driven cognitive load classification

arXiv:2606.16160v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurately classifying cognitive load from functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) signals remains a significant challenge due to temporal variability, inter-subject differences, and sensitivity to preprocessing choices. This study provides a comprehensive evaluation of EEGNet for fNIRS-based cognitive load classification by systematically examining the effects of temporal segmentation strategies (overlapping vs. non-overlapping), window lengths (10s, 20s, 30s), feature extraction methods (Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Fast Independent Component Analysis (FastICA)), learning rate configurations (fixed and adaptive), and evaluation protocols (random split vs. subject-independent (SI)). Results from random-split experiments show that overlapping segmentation, combined with smaller fixed learning rates (0.01-0.001), yields the highest accuracies, due to temporal redundancy and dense sampling of hemodynamic transitions. However, SI evaluation reveals a substantial drop in accuracy, demonstrating limited generalization to unseen participants. Under SI evaluation, non-overlapping segmentation outperformed overlapping windows, with the best accuracy of 56.11% achieved using PCA features with a 20-second window and a 0.1 learning rate. These findings indicate that eliminating temporal redundancy helps the model learn more robust and generalizable representations of cognitive load across individuals. Although adaptive learning rate strategy improved training stability, it did not surpass the performance of optimally selected fixed learning rates. The study highlights the critical role of segmentation strategy and learning rate selection in improving model generalization and identifies methodological considerations essential for developing reliable, real-time, and SI cognitive load classification systems using fNIRS.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

National trends and operational drivers of vaccine wastage in Uganda, 2020-2025: a descriptive analysis of four tracer antigens

Background Vaccine wastage reduces immunisation efficiency, increases costs, and complicates supply forecasting. Uganda routinely monitors vaccine use, but national evidence comparing observed wastage with World Health Organization (WHO) and Uganda-specific planning thresholds has been limited. We described national and sub-national trends for four tracer antigens to inform supply-chain planning and forecasting. Methods We conducted a retrospective descriptive analysis of routinely reported immunisation data from Ugandas District Health Information Software 2, 2020-2025. We analysed Bacille Calmette-Guerin (BCG), measles-rubella (MR), oral polio vaccine (OPV), and diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis-containing vaccine (DPT). Vaccine wastage was calculated as the proportion of issued doses not administered. Annual wastage rates were summarised using medians, and temporal trends were assessed using the Mann-Kendall test. Observed wastage was compared with WHO thresholds: BCG[≤]50%, MR[≤]25%, OPV[≤]10%, DPT[≤]15%, and Ugandas planning thresholds: BCG[≤]70%, MR[≤]40%, OPV[≤]15%, DPT[≤]10%. Effective Vaccine Management reports were reviewed to summarise reported reasons for wastage. Results During 2020-2025, median national wastage was 40.6% for BCG, 25.9% for MR, 10.0% for OPV, and 9.2% for DPT. OPV wastage declined from 12.8% in 2020 to 8.0% in 2025, with a significant downward trend ({tau}b=-1.00; p=0.008). OPV and DPT wastage remained largely within their respective Uganda in-country thresholds ([≤]15% and [≤]10%) for most of the study period, while BCG generally remained below the WHO threshold ([≤]50%) and MR frequently exceeded the WHO threshold ([≤]25%) but remained within Uganda's planning threshold ([≤]40%) in most years. The proportion of districts exceeding both WHO and Uganda thresholds declined for OPV from 36.3% to 5.5% (p=0.024) and for DPT from 22.6% to 1.4% (p=0.013). Wastage was consistently higher in lower-level (Health Centre II and III) facilities, compared to hospitals. Among 50 service delivery points, reported reasons included low session attendance (66%), multi-dose vial policy non-compliance (28%), and vaccine expiry (12%). Conclusion Uganda achieved reductions in OPV wastage and district-level improvements in DPT wastage, while BCG and MR remained more variable and frequently had higher wastage. Strengthening adherence to the multi-dose vial policy and improving session planning at lower-level facilities could strengthen vaccine utilisation and forecasting.

22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Dimension-free Markov–Bernstein inequalities for product measures

Authors:

arXiv:2606.13575v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study dimension-free Markov–Bernstein inequalities for polynomials with respect to product probability measures. In the Gaussian case, for $p\ge4$, we prove that \[ \|\nabla f\|_{L^p(\gamma^n)} \le C(p)d^{\frac12+\theta_p} \|f\|_{L^p(\gamma^n)} \] for every polynomial $f$ of degree at most $d$, where $\theta_p\le \frac{2}{3p}$ and $\theta_p=0$ whenever $p$ is an even integer. Thus, for even integer exponents, we establish the sharp dependence on the degree conjectured by Eskenazis–Ivanisvili. For general $p\ge4$, the estimate improves upon their dimension-free inequality. We also obtain dimension-free Markov–Bernstein inequalities with sharp dependence on the degree for even integer exponents beyond the Gaussian setting. We first prove such estimates for the uniform distribution on the unit cube and then extend them to products of absolutely continuous measures with unimodal densities. Finally, we treat products of one-dimensional Freud measures with densities proportional to $e^{-|t|^{2m}}$.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

On Regret Bounds of Thompson Sampling for Bayesian Optimization

arXiv:2603.09276v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study a widely used Bayesian optimization method, Gaussian process Thompson sampling (GP-TS), under the assumption that the objective function is a sample path from a GP. Compared with the GP upper confidence bound (GP-UCB) with established high-probability and expected regret bounds, most analyses of GP-TS have been limited to expected regret. Moreover, whether the recent analyses of GP-UCB for the lenient regret and the improved cumulative regret upper bound can be applied to GP-TS remains unclear. To fill these gaps, this paper shows several regret bounds: (i) a regret lower bound for GP-TS, which implies that GP-TS suffers from a polynomial dependence on $1/\delta$ with probability $\delta$, (ii) an upper bound of the second moment of cumulative regret, which directly suggests an improved regret upper bound on $\delta$, (iii) expected lenient regret upper bounds, and (iv) an improved cumulative regret upper bound on the time horizon $T$. Along the way, we provide several useful lemmas, including a relaxation of the necessary condition from recent analysis to obtain improved regret upper bounds on $T$.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

FrozenDrive: Zero-Shot Text-Guided Driving Scene Generation and Data Augmentation with Parameter-Free Frozen Diffusion Model

Synthetic data for autonomous driving is surging, powered by diffusion models that promise scalable scene generation. Yet key obstacles remain, as enforcing multi-view and temporal consistency often relies on backbone fine-tuning or added layers, which erodes pre-trained knowledge and weakens text alignment. Models also stay close to the training distribution, struggling under adverse weather and unseen configurations, and fidelity favors frequent over rare classes. We address these gaps with FrozenDrive, a controllable generative framework that preserves a pretrained diffusion models knowledge while achieving strong consistency. FrozenDrive conditions on rich driving-stack signals and text prompts, and introduces knowledge-preserving spatio-temporal attention to impose cross-view alignment and temporal coherence in a single pass within a parameter-free frozen diffusion backbone. An additional object-focused constraint improves per-object fidelity for rare categories. Without any weather- or scene-specific fine-tuning, our model synthesizes globally coherent multi-view driving scenes from text, particularly under adverse and rare conditions, and surpasses prior baselines. On nuScenes, FrozenDrive augmented data significantly improves AD models performance, especially at night and in rain, demonstrating stronger robustness when trained with our scenario-targeted data.

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

IGLU: The Integrated Gaussian Linear Unit Activation Function

Activation functions are fundamental to deep neural networks, governing gradient flow, optimization stability, and representational capacity. Within historic deep architectures, while ReLU has been the dominant choice for the activation function, modern transformer-based models increasingly are adopting smoother alternatives such as GELU and other self-gated alternatives. Despite their empirical success, the mathematical relationships among these functions and the principles underlying their effectiveness remains only partially understood. We introduce IGLU, a parametric activation function derived as a scale mixture of GELU gates under a half-normal mixing distribution. This derivation yields a closed-form expression whose gating component is exactly the Cauchy CDF, providing a principled one-parameter family that continuously interpolates between identity-like and ReLU-like behavior via a single sharpness parameter $\sigma$. Unlike GELU's Gaussian gate, IGLU's heavy-tailed Cauchy gate decays polynomially in the negative tail, guaranteeing non-zero gradients for all finite inputs and offering greater robustness to vanishing gradients. We further introduce IGLU-Approx, a computationally efficient rational approximation of IGLU expressed entirely in terms of ReLU operations that eliminates transcendental function evaluation. Through evaluations on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and WikiText-103 across ResNet-20, ViT-Tiny, and GPT-2 Small, IGLU achieves competitive or superior performance on both vision and language datasets against ReLU and GELU baselines, with IGLU-Approx recovering this performance at substantially reduced computational cost. In particular, we show that employing a heavy-tailed gate leads to considerable performance gains in heavily imbalanced classification datasets.