Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

AcademicHub aggregates real-time literature from top journals and preprint platforms. Build your personal research radar and let large language models compile cross-disciplinary analysis briefings automatically.

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

Asymmetric and chiral dynamics of two-component anyons with synthetic gauge flux

arXiv:2512.19139v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this work, we investigate the non-equilibrium dynamics in a one-dimensional two-component anyon-Hubbard model, which can be mapped to an extended Bose-Hubbard ladder with density-dependent hopping phase and synthetic gauge flux. Through numerical simulations of two-particle dynamics and the symmetry analysis, we reveal the asymmetric transport with broken inversion symmetry and two dynamical symmetries in the expansion dynamics. The expansion of two-component anyons is dynamically symmetric under spatial inversion and component flip, when the sign of anyonic statistics phase or the signs of gauge flux and interaction are changed. In the non-interacting case, we show the dynamical suppression induced by both the statistics phase and gauge flux. In the interacting case, we demonstrate that both chiral and antichiral dynamics can be exhibited and tuned by the statistics phase and gauge flux. The dynamical phase regimes with respect to the chiral-antichiral dynamics are obtained. These findings highlight the rich dynamical phenomena arising from the interplay of anyonic exchange statistics, synthetic gauge fields, and interactions in multi-component anyons.

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

A Security Analysis of Long-Horizon Agentic AI Systems: Threats, Evaluation, and Framework Development

arXiv:2606.14816v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents a structured analysis of security challenges in long-horizon agentic AI systems. The study reviews existing threats, evaluation approaches, attack propagation mechanisms, and security frameworks. A taxonomy of security threats and a framework for analyzing attack propagation are proposed to support future research in agentic AI security

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

Towards Truly Multilingual ASR: Generalizing Code-Switching ASR to Unseen Language Pairs

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has become a key technology for human–AI interaction. However, code-switching ASR (CS-ASR) remains particularly challenging due to the severe scarcity of multilingual CS speech resources across diverse language pairs. Existing approaches primarily improve CS-ASR performance through synthetic CS speech generation or pair-specific fine-tuning on limited bilingual datasets. Nevertheless, these approaches face an inherent scalability limitation, as support for CS must be developed separately for language pairs whose number grows combinatorially with the number of supported languages. In this work, we investigate whether CS capabilities learned from a limited set of seen language pairs can generalize to unseen language pairs through model merging and domain generalization methods. Our experiments show that merged bilingual CS-ASR models modestly generalize to unseen language pairs, suggesting limited transfer of bilingual CS capabilities across language pairs.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Layer-Isolated Evaluation: Gating the Deterministic Scaffold of a Production LLM Agent with a No-LLM, Regression-Locked Test Harness

End-to-end task-success is the dominant way to evaluate LLM agents, but one aggregate number tells you that an agent regressed, not where. We present layer-isolated evaluation: a deployed ordering agent is decomposed into a fixed taxonomy of layers (ontology, intent, routing, decomposition, escalation, safety, memory, and cross-cutting envelope/defense), each exercised by its own assertion slice in a deterministic, no-LLM "pure" mode. The pure suite (238 cases across 23 slices; 225 run in 2.39 s, ~10 ms/case) runs in CI on every change against a locked per-slice baseline. We validate by controlled regression injection, degrading one layer at a time across seven non-safety layers. The effect we did not design in is masking: the aggregate pass-rate barely moves (-1.7 to -5.9 pp for six local regressions), while the matching slice craters (-25 to -91 pp). A layer's slice reacting to its own fault is partly by construction; the measured results are (i) the aggregate masking and (ii) that damage stays off the other slices: the injected layer's slice is the single worst-hit in 5 of 7 cases and top-3 in 7 of 7 (mean rank 1.29 of 19). Localization replicates on a second, structurally different tenant (Starbucks SG): all seven matching slices crater, so it is not a single-catalog artifact. We position it as a concrete, deterministic instantiation of the component-level evaluation EDDOps prescribes but leaves unimplemented, with CheckList as ancestor and as the deterministic mirror image of whole-workflow stochastic mutation testing. Our contributions: (a) a fully decomposed, sub-second, no-LLM per-layer harness for a production agent, (b) a coverage-honesty test-adequacy criterion that refuses to score an unexercised layer, and (c) the regression-injection demonstration that per-slice baseline-locked gates localize regressions an aggregate metric masks.

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

RECTOR: Masked Region-Channel-Temporal Modeling for Affective and Cognitive Representation Learning

arXiv:2606.15278v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Affective and cognitive disorders manifest as distributed, time-varying brain network dynamics across regions, channels, and time, challenging robust representation learning from EEG/sEEG for clinical diagnosis. We propose RECTOR (Masked Region-Channel-Temporal Modeling), an end-to-end self-supervised framework that unifies joint region-channel-temporal representation learning beyond fixed anatomical priors. At its core, RECTOR-SA is a hierarchical, block-sparse self-attention induced by Adaptive Functional Partitioning that evolves region structures from static anatomical definitions to adaptive functional regions. The self-supervision is driven by Masked Topology and Representation Learning, which jointly optimizes three complementary objectives: Masked Predictive Modeling, Topological Structure Modeling, and Cross-View Consistency. Across diverse benchmarks, RECTOR sets a new state-of-the-art in EEG emotion recognition and sEEG task-engagement classification. Crucially, its strong robustness to missing channels and cross-montage generalization underscores its potential for large-scale pre-training on heterogeneous EEG/sEEG, providing interpretable insights at both region and channel levels.

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

Modeling Sarcastic Speech: Semantic and Prosodic Cues in a Speech Synthesis Framework

Sarcasm is a pragmatic phenomenon in which speakers convey meanings that diverge from literal content, relying on an interaction between semantics and prosodic expression. However, how these cues jointly contribute to the recognition of sarcasm remains poorly understood. We propose a computational framework that models sarcasm as the integration of semantic interpretation and prosodic realization. Semantic cues are derived from an LLaMA 3 model fine-tuned to capture discourse-level markers of sarcastic intent, while prosodic cues are extracted through semantically aligned utterances drawn from a database of sarcastic speech, providing prosodic exemplars of sarcastic delivery. Using a speech synthesis testbed, perceptual evaluations show that semantic and prosodic cues enhance perceived sarcasm, with the combined system achieving the best downstream F1 while maintaining high subjective sarcasm ratings. These findings highlight the complementary roles of semantics and prosody in pragmatic interpretation and illustrate how modeling can shed light on the mechanisms underlying sarcastic communication.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Maternal deaths associated factors in the Conflict-Affected North West Region of Cameroon. Lessons from a cross-sectional survey

Background Maternal mortality is a significant global public health crisis, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and conflict-affected regions. Cameroon's maternal mortality ratio is high at 406 deaths per 100,000 live births, while the ongoing Anglophone conflict has further exacerbated maternal healthcare delivery in the North West Region (NWR){middle dot} Despite the evidence-based interventions like partographs, obstetric kits, birth preparedness plans, and active management of the third stage of labour, implementation gaps persist across health facilities. Objective The study aimed to assess factors related to preventable maternal deaths in the NWR of Cameroon by exploring maternal health service usage, implementation of obstetric measures, demand-side challenges, accessibility barriers, and health system weaknesses. Methodology The study employed a quantitative descriptive cross-sectional survey design{middle dot} Data was collected with structured questionnaires from postpartum women and healthcare workers in selected health facilities and catchment communities in the NWR{middle dot} Also, a multistage sampling technique was adopted, and Cochran's formula generated a sample size of 109 respondents{middle dot} In addition, data were analysed using SPSS version 27 and Stata version 18, employing descriptive and inferential statistics. Results In this study, while 70{middle dot}64 percent of females attended at least 4 ANC visits, only 38{middle dot}53 percent met WHO ANC adequacy requirements. Facility delivery was 96{middle dot}33 percent, yet only 38{middle dot}46 percent received completed delivery plans. Conflict-related challenges affected access, with 44{middle dot}95 percent reporting insecurity-associated movement difficulties, while 44{middle dot}95 percent reported increased transportation expenses due to the conflict. Near-miss complications were reported among 27.52 percent of participants. Delivery record reviews indicated that obstetric kits were utilised in 81{middle dot}76 percent of deliveries, partographs were accessible in 86{middle dot}49 percent of records but correctly filled in just 60{middle dot}81 percent , while oxytocin administration was 95{middle dot}95 percent. Integrated Health Centres showed poorer adherence with intrapartum interventions compared with District and Regional Hospitals (p

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

How rare are Markovian quantum dynamics?

arXiv:2606.24511v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A profound understanding of decoherence and dissipation in quantum dynamics is crucial for the realistic modeling of the evolution of quantum systems. In open quantum dynamics one distinguishes between a memoryless, so-called Markovian evolution and dynamics incorporating memory effects, termed non-Markovian. In this work we study how prevalent memory effects are in the set of all such dynamics. We thus investigate how often a Markovian description is applicable. This question is approached by investigating randomly generated two-step qubit dynamics with respect to different concepts and witnesses of non-Markovianity. We observe that almost all dynamics are non-Markovian, and only a small (yet finite) fraction is Markovian. Furthermore, we study how this proportion changes when considering certain subclasses such as lower rank or mixed-unitary dynamics. Importantly, our results shed light on the relative ratios of – and interrelations between – the sets of dynamics that are non-Markovian with respect to different criteria. Finally, we investigate the fraction of dynamics in which the memory effects are necessarily of quantum nature and establish a connection between two recently developed concepts that characterize the quantumness of memory in non-Markovian dynamics.

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

Landmark-free Assessment of Lower-limb Alignment with Implicit Neural Shape Functions from Knee Radiographs

Radiographic assessment of lower-limb alignment (LLA) is important for predicting joint health and surgical outcomes in total knee arthroplasty. Traditional measurement methods are manual and time-consuming, while recent machine learning approaches typically rely on locating a fixed set of anatomical landmarks. This dependence limits flexibility and may require re-annotation when clinical definitions change. To address this, we propose an automated workflow using Implicit Neural Shape Functions (INSF). Rather than relying on explicit landmark coordinates, we encode the anatomy into a compact latent space and regress clinical alignment measurements directly from these latent codes. This architecture allows for rapid extendability to new tasks without altering the backbone representation. We trained our method on an internal dataset of 566 knee radiographs, each annotated with the outline of the femur and tibia. We evaluated it on both an internal test dataset of 50 patients and a separate external set of 402 preoperative cases from the MRKR dataset. Manual clinical measurements are available for these data, and the MRKR measurements will be made publicly accessible. Performance was comparable to state-of-the-art landmark-based methods and manual agreement, while offering a flexible shape representation that can be extended to additional measurement tasks.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

A Riemannian Approach to Low-Rank Optimal Transport

arXiv:2606.12120v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Low-rank optimal transport (OT) mitigates the quadratic scaling of classical solvers, yet existing approaches rely heavily on first-order mirror-descent updates that require careful hyperparameter tuning and ignore the optimization landscape's curvature. To address these limitations, we propose a unified Riemannian geometric framework for low-rank OT, modeling balanced and unbalanced rank-$r$ positive factored couplings as novel smooth embedded submanifolds of the positive orthant. By equipping these manifolds with the Fisher-Rao product metric, we derive tractable formulations for Riemannian projectors, retractions, and Hessian-vector products. Our cost-agnostic framework seamlessly extends to linear OT, Gromov-Wasserstein (GW), fused GW, and their unbalanced counterparts. For balanced OT, our geometric ingredients are computed via efficient conjugate-gradient and iterative Bregman updates. For the unbalanced OT, our operations elegantly reduce to closed-form scalings, completely eliminating inner iterative loops. In both regimes, per-iteration complexity scales linearly with dataset size, and we provide a rank-sufficiency certificate for global optimality verification. Extensive experiments across a range of problem sizes demonstrate that our regularization-free first- and second-order solvers achieve faster convergence and superior performance over existing state-of-the-art low-rank OT solvers.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Attention-Based Prototype Calibration for Multi-Rater Few-Shot Medical Image Segmentation

Few-shot medical image segmentation methods typically assume a single ground-truth annotation, overlooking systematic variability across expert raters commonly observed in clinical datasets. We propose an attention-based prototype calibration framework for few-shot multi-rater segmentation that models rater-specific deviations from a consensus representation in prototype space. A lightweight yet principled attention operator directly refines rater prototypes without modifying the backbone feature extractor, making the approach fully compatible with existing prototype-based few-shot segmentation methods. This design preserves semantic consistency while enabling personalized segmentation outputs with minimal computational overhead. Experiments on multi-rater medical imaging datasets demonstrate consistent improvements over baseline prototype approaches, highlighting the effectiveness of structured prototype calibration for modeling annotation variability. Our code is available at https://github.com/truong2710-cyber/JAPC.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Active commuting, anxiety symptoms and mental wellbeing: a dose-response study

Climate change draws attention to the planetary health perspective in sport and exercise sciences, that is, to physical activity that supports both human wellbeing and environmental sustainability. Active commuting is a sustainable form of physical activity with well-established somatic health benefits. However, more knowledge is needed on its relationship with mental health. We examined dose-response associations between active commuting, anxiety symptoms, and mental wellbeing among Finnish adults, and whether green commuting environment moderates these relationships. We used data from the cross-sectional Environment and Health Survey collected in June-September 2023 in the ten largest cities in Finland. Employed participants with data on anxiety symptoms (Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7, GAD-7), mental wellbeing (World Health Organization-Five Well-Being Index, WHO-5), commuting profile over a year (mode, frequency, distance, and perceived greenness along the commute route), and sociodemographic and lifestyle factors were included (n=1,672; mean age 45.3 years; 53.8% women). Active commuting was defined as travelling the entire commute by walking or cycling (including e-biking) that was converted into approximated annual km/week and MET-h/week. We used linear and logistic regression with restricted cubic splines to evaluate dose-response associations, adjusted for key covariates. The role of perceived greenness was tested using an active commuting x commute greenness interaction term. We found no dose-response relationships between active commuting and anxiety symptoms or mental wellbeing in any of the models. No effect modification by commute greenness was observed. More research on how active commuting may support planetary health from a mental health perspective is needed.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

CoIRL-AD: Collaborative-Competitive Imitation-Reinforcement Learning in Latent World Models for Autonomous Driving

End-to-end autonomous driving models trained with imitation learning (IL) often generalize poorly, particularly in long-tail scenarios where expert demonstrations are sparse. Reinforcement learning (RL) can provide complementary task-level supervision, but applying RL to real-world autonomous driving is challenging in offline settings without interactive simulators, where datasets are dominated by expert actions and provide limited behavioral diversity. We propose CoIRL-AD, a competitive dual-policy framework that integrates IL and RL under a unified offline training regime. CoIRL-AD decouples imitation and reward optimization into separate actors to alleviate objective conflicts, uses imagined future rollouts for long-horizon reward estimation, and introduces a competition mechanism that selectively transfers beneficial behaviors while keeping RL anchored to expert-like driving. Experiments on the nuScenes benchmark show that CoIRL-AD consistently improves robustness over strong IL-based baselines, with especially large gains in cross-city generalization and long-tail scenarios. Code is available at: https://github.com/SEU-zxj/CoIRL-AD.

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

Rational Sparse Autoencoder

arXiv:2606.14990v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are standard tools for mechanistic interpretability, but current SAE families are constrained by fixed encoder nonlinearities such as ReLU, JumpReLU, and TopK. This hard-codes a particular sparsity mechanism into the model and can distort the reconstruction-versus-sparsity trade-off. We introduce the Rational Sparse Autoencoder (RSAE), which replaces the fixed encoder activation with a trainable rational function. Rational activations are flexible enough to uniformly approximate the activation primitives used by existing SAE families on compact domains (for TopK, the thresholded gate obtained after a separating top-k threshold is supplied), while also providing a richer function class for adapting to the observed pre-activation geometry. We realise this idea through a two-stage pipeline: an initialisation procedure that copies the pre-trained baseline SAE weights, plugs in rational coefficients obtained by the relaxed Remez exchange on synthetic data, and calibrates the scale parameters along with the rational coefficients; followed by a fine-tuning step under the standard sparsity-regularised reconstruction objective. Empirically, on residual-stream activations of three open-weight language models and across all three baseline activation families, the RSAE strictly improves on it after the fine-tuning step, both on reconstruction-side metrics and on downstream-behaviour metrics, without sacrificing feature-level interpretability under sparse probing. These gains are consistent across host language models, across baseline activation families, and across the full range of baseline sparsity we tested, while the upgrade itself adds only a handful of scalar parameters per autoencoder and runs in minutes on a single consumer GPU.

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

StaminaBench: Stress-Testing Coding Agents over 100 Interaction Turns

arXiv:2606.19613v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce StaminaBench, a benchmark that measures the stamina of coding agents: how many consecutive interaction turns (change requests) they can handle before failing. Unlike the prevailing fraction-of-tasks-solved metric, this matches real vibe-coding where sessions run dozens or hundreds of turns. In StaminaBench, agents implement a REST API server and modify it across a tunable number of procedurally generated follow-up change requests - 100 in our experiments, resulting in codebases of up to 6,000 lines. Tests are generated fully programmatically without LLM involvement, ensuring reproducibility and reliability; change sequences are drawn from either a hardcoded or LLM-driven sampler, both constrained to a structured action space to ensure changes are valid. The agent and the server run in an isolated environment and communicate with the benchmark through HTTP, making testing fully black-box and language-agnostic. We evaluate six agent harnesses paired with seven open-source LLMs across 20 scenarios of 100 turns each and find that: (1) all the tested models fail within 5-6 turns, confirming that vibe-coding-style programming without thorough testing produces bugs; (2) passing test feedback back to the agent and allowing it to retry improves passed turn count by up to 12x; and (3) a good harness is required for strong performance: stronger models exhibit up to a 6x gap between their best and worst harness, while weaker models fail with any harness. We release the benchmark and the generated tasks to enable further research into multi-turn coding agent behavior. Benchmark code and data: github.com/amazon-science/StaminaBench.

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

ResidualPlanner+: a scalable matrix mechanism for marginals and beyond

arXiv:2305.08175v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Noisy marginals are a common form of confidentiality protecting data release and are useful for many downstream tasks such as contingency table analysis, construction of Bayesian networks, and even synthetic data generation. Privacy mechanisms that provide unbiased noisy answers to linear queries (such as marginals) are known as matrix mechanisms. We propose ResidualPlanner and ResidualPlanner+, two highly scalable matrix mechanisms. ResidualPlanner is both optimal and scalable for answering marginal queries with Gaussian noise, while ResidualPlanner+ provides support for more general workloads, such as combinations of marginals and range queries or prefix-sum queries. ResidualPlanner can optimize for many loss functions that can be written as a convex function of marginal variances (prior work was restricted to just one predefined objective function). ResidualPlanner can optimize the accuracy of marginals in large scale settings in seconds, even when the previous state of the art (HDMM) runs out of memory. It even runs on datasets with 100 attributes in a couple of minutes. Furthermore, ResidualPlanner can efficiently compute variance/covariance values for each marginal (prior methods quickly run out of memory, even for relatively small datasets). ResidualPlanner+ provides support for more complex workloads that combine marginal and range/prefix-sum queries (e.g., a marginal on race, a range query on age, and a combined race/age tabulation that answers age range queries for each race). It even supports custom user-defined workloads on different attributes. With this added flexibility, ResidualPlanner+ is not necessarily optimal, however it is still extremely scalable and outperforms the prior state-of-the-art (HDMM) on prefix-sum queries both in terms of accuracy and speed.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Post-Hoc Merging is Not Enough: Many-Shot Model Merging with Loss-Gap Balancing

arXiv:2606.16501v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model merging has become a practical post-training strategy for building a single multi-task large language model (LLM) by combining multiple task-specialized models. However, most existing approaches rely on post-hoc merging, in which task-specific models are merged only once after training. This one-shot aggregation often suffers from task interference, leading to information erasure across individual tasks. In this work, we show that replacing post-hoc merging with an iterative many-shot merging protocol is effective in improving multi-task performance. Building on this insight, we propose METIS, Mitigating Erasure from Task Interference for Stable many-shot merging. METIS is a loss-aware many-shot merging method that addresses information erasure in post-hoc merging through task-wise loss-gap weighting and consensus-based masking. Notably, METIS exhibits significant performance improvement on the worst-performing task, effectively mitigating information erasure. (Project page: https://imkyungjin.github.io/METIS/)

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

Functional Equivalence in Attention: A Comprehensive Study with Applications to Linear Mode Connectivity

arXiv:2606.17830v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural network parameter spaces are inherently non-injective, as distinct parameter configurations can realize identical functions through functional equivalence. While this symmetry is well understood in classical fully connected and convolutional models, it becomes substantially more intricate in modern attention-based architectures. Existing analyses of multihead attention have largely focused on the vanilla formulation, overlooking positional encodings that fundamentally reshape architectural symmetries. In this work, we provide a formal study of functional equivalence in Transformers with positional encodings. Focusing on the two most widely used variants–sinusoidal and rotary positional encodings (RoPE)–we show that sinusoidal encodings preserve the equivalence structure of vanilla attention, whereas rotary encodings significantly reduce the symmetry group, thereby enhancing expressivity. This offers a principled explanation for the growing prominence of RoPE in practice. We further examine how positional encodings affect linear mode connectivity, and through an alignment algorithm, empirically demonstrate that the presence and variability of connectivity across Transformer settings crucially depend on the positional encoding.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Coarse-grained quantum thermodynamics: Observation-dependent quantities, observation-independent laws

arXiv:2507.15918v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In both classical and quantum thermodynamics, physical quantities are typically assigned objective values defined independently of our observations. We then refer to the 'work performed by a gas', or the 'entropy of the gas', regardless of how they are evaluated. Here, we question this conception in the context of quantum thermodynamics, estimating how the definition of pivotal thermodynamic quantities is affected by experimental instruments of limited precision. We find that the coarse-grained thermodynamic quantities frequently lead to different conclusions from those drawn in fine-grained scenarios. For instance, the irreversibility of a process, or its work payoff, can significantly vary with the instrument precision. We show nonetheless that coarse-grained thermodynamic quantities satisfy the same relations (i.e., the second law inequality, the relation between dissipation and distinguishability of a process from its time-reverse, and the quantum work fluctuation theorems) as their fine-grained counterparts. These results highlight the observation-independence of relations linking thermodynamic quantities which are themselves observation-dependent.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Supporting people to access social security payments through the Special Rules for End of Life: a qualitative study of the perspectives of patients, carers and health care professionals

Background: People living with terminal illness face a double financial burden from additional costs and loss of earning for themselves and their carers. Social security benefits are intended to help alleviate some of this financial pressure, and in the UK and other countries people are eligible for fast-tracked access to financial support via the Special Rules for End of Life. One in 3 people who are eligible miss out on this support, yet there is limited evidence on the reasons for this take-up deficit. Objectives: The aim of this study is to understand the barriers and facilitators to claiming benefits for terminally ill people from the perspectives of patients, carers, and health care professionals. Methods: This is a qualitative study combining i) focus groups with healthcare professionals recruited via professional networks and social media, and ii) interviews with patients and carers recruited in hospital and hospice settings. We analysed the data using Practical Thematic Analysis Results: Fifty-five multidisciplinary healthcare professionals participated in 11 focus groups, and we interviewed 10 patients and carers. We constructed five descriptive themes to summarise the data: Navigating priorities and uncertainty; positive impacts alongside a sense of shame and stigma; talking about money, difficulties and dividends; everybodys, yet nobodys, responsibility; and sticking points in the system. Conclusion: The themes reveal several challenges that may contribute to people not taking up this financial support. However, discussions about access to benefits were also seen as a core part of holistic care, a positive way to offer support and a gateway to other discussions about end-of-life care preferences and decisions. Recommendations for policy and practice include evaluating the adoption of a diagnostic rather than a prognostic eligibility criteria, integrating discussions about benefits into existing processes such as advance care planning, and improving education and support for clinicians.

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

Fantastic Pretraining Optimizers and Where to Find Them II: Hyperball Optimization

arXiv:2606.16899v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Matrix based optimizers such as Muon can substantially speed up language model pretraining, but their gains over AdamW are observed to shrink as model size and data scale grow when using standard constant decoupled weight decay. We propose Hyperball, a simple optimizer wrapper that addresses this issue. Given a base optimizer such as Adam or Muon, Hyperball sets the Frobenius norms of weight matrices and their corresponding optimizer updates to fixed constants. On Qwen3 style models up to 1.2B parameters, Muon Hyperball achieves 20–30% token equivalent speedup over weight decay baselines. Hyperball also improves learning rate transfer across widths and depths compared to decoupled weight decay. This method is motivated by prior theory showing that training with weight decay leads to an equilibrium weight norm that only depends on the training hyperparameters. Through this mechanism, the weight decay then decides the angular learning rate, i.e. how fast the direction of the weight matrix changes.

22.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-08

TRACEY: an updated resource for SNARE protein domain annotation with improved HMMs and expanded sequence coverage

Motivation: SNARE proteins catalyse membrane fusion across the eukaryotic endomembrane system, from synaptic vesicle exocytosis to intracellular trafficking, endosomal and vacuolar transport, and autophagy, and their accurate domain annotation depends on the quality of profile models and the sequence diversity behind them. The original SNARE domain classification predates the recent expansion of eukaryotic sequence data, leaving its HMM profiles and subgroup coverage unable to resolve divergent and lineage-specific paralogs. Results: We present an updated release of TRACEY built on a resynchronized, non-redundant collection of 18,915 curated SNARE proteins spanning 1,188 species, together with a consolidated set of 83 HMM profiles, including 43 models for newly defined subgroups, reconstructed through an iterative, mixture-model-driven procedure. In direct comparison with the legacy models, at least ~75% of sequences in every overlapping group scored better with the new HMMs, indicating systematic gains in domain detection. A redesigned web interface adds multiparameter querying, FASTA download, and direct scanning of user-submitted sequences against the curated profiles. Availability and implementation: TRACEY is freely available at https://tracey.unil.ch.

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

Human-AI Agent Interaction in a Business Context

arXiv:2606.18716v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As AI agents are increasingly integrated into core business processes, understanding and designing effective interaction patterns between humans and AI agents becomes crucial for value creation. This study identifies and evaluates principles and criteria for a positive User Experience (UX) with AI agents, along with methods for its measurement. We identify user expectations and needs to facilitate adoption, build trust, and support user-centered decision-making by development teams. Using a mixed-methods approach that combines qualitative and quantitative techniques, we explore interaction patterns between humans and AI agents. The findings from this exploratory research serve as the basis to develop a survey experiment which evaluates the effectiveness of specific design elements on a larger scale. This foundational research contributes to the development of more intuitive and effective human-AI agent interactions in business settings.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

ALIGNBEAM : Inference-Time Alignment Transfer via Cross-Vocabulary Logit Mixing

Domain fine-tuning degrades the safety of large language models: fine-tuned specialists readily comply with harmful prompts framed in domain language. Existing inference-time defenses that mix logits from a safe anchor model require both models to share a vocabulary, which rules them out for the cross-family specialists where safety is most degraded. We present ALIGNBEAM, a training-free method that lifts this restriction by translating anchor logits into the target model's vocabulary token-by-token at each decoding step; a small LLM judge then selects the safest among K candidate continuations. No weights are changed, and the safety-utility trade-off can be tuned at deployment without retraining. Across both cross-vocabulary and same-vocabulary evaluation pairs, ALIGNBEAM substantially raises refusal on adversarial benchmarks while keeping task accuracy and inference overhead within practical bounds. The results show that safety alignment can be transferred between model families at inference time, without touching either model's weights.

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

Multi-Rate Mixture of Experts for Accelerating Liquid Neural Network Training

arXiv:2606.12240v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multivariate time-series data often exhibit complex temporal dependencies, irregular sampling, and heterogeneous dynamics across multiple time scales, making accurate sequence modeling particularly challenging. Traditional recurrent neural networks (RNNs), such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, operate in discrete time and may struggle to effectively capture continuous and irregular temporal behaviors. Liquid Neural Networks (LNNs) address some of these limitations through continuous-time dynamics, but standard LNN architectures typically rely on a single dynamical system, limiting their ability to model heterogeneous temporal patterns. To address these challenges, we propose a Multi-Rate Mixture-of-Experts (MR-MoE) framework built on top of Liquid Neural Networks. In the proposed architecture, multiple LNN-based experts operate at distinct time scales, enabling the model to explicitly separate fast-changing dynamics from slow-evolving temporal trends. A gating network further enables adaptive expert specialization based on input conditions. In addition, we incorporate both feature-level and temporal attention mechanisms to improve robustness, interpretability, and long-range dependency modeling. Feature-level attention suppresses noisy or irrelevant variables, while temporal attention selectively focuses on informative historical states. We evaluate the proposed framework on a complex multivariate time-series prediction task and compare it against strong baselines, including LSTM, monolithic LNN, and standard MoE models. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed MR-MoE framework consistently achieves improved AUROC and AUPRC performance while maintaining favorable computational efficiency. These results highlight the effectiveness of combining continuous-time dynamics, multi-scale expert decomposition, and adaptive attention mechanisms for time-series modeling.