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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Daily briefing: Sperm whales have different dialects

Authors:
Flora Graham↗

Whales in different areas of the Mediterranean use varying patterns of clicks and pauses. Plus, a technique to make protein samples one billion times bigger and the science of grief. Whales in different areas of the Mediterranean use varying patterns of clicks and pauses. Plus, a technique to make protein samples one billion times bigger and the science of grief.

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02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

One Step Closer to Ground Truth: A Multi-Scale Residual-Aware Representation Learning Pipeline for Predicting Time Series Data

Authors:
Amrijit Biswas↗Mustafa Kamal↗Robin Krambroeckers↗M. M. Lutfe Elahi↗Sifat Momen↗Nabeel Mohammed↗Shafin Rahman↗

arXiv:2606.10678v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Transformer-based models have emerged as leading paradigms in time-series forecasting in recent years, employing self-attention mechanisms to capture long-range dependencies. Despite their success, these single-stage forecasting architectures exhibit persistent systematic residual biases arising from structural discrepancies, unmodeled stochastic components, or inadequate multi-scale temporal representations. This limitation persists when residuals are treated as irreducible noise, precluding adaptive correction of structured error patterns. To address this limitation, we introduce a two-stage, model-agnostic framework that explicitly decouples forecasting and residual learning into distinct stages of representation learning. A base transformer first generates the initial predictions. Subsequently, a dedicated meta-corrector dynamically models structured error patterns across multivariate channels, preserves cross-variable dependencies, and iteratively refines the residual bias of the base transformer. By formalizing this pipeline as a hypothesis space expansion, our framework addresses approximation limitations inherent in single-stage architectures, removes reliance on restrictive assumptions, and enables end-to-end learning of complex error dynamics. Evaluated on eight popular benchmark datasets using established protocols, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, with significant improvements in standard metrics (MSE, MAE). The results demonstrate the framework's ability to mitigate systematic biases and enhance robustness to complex temporal dynamics, advancing the practical applicability of transformer-based forecasting models.

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03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Shift Variant Image Degradation and Restoration Using Singular Value Decomposition

Authors:
Arun D. Kulkarni↗

Shift-variant image degradation is frequently encountered in practical imaging systems where the point spread function (PSF) varies across the image field due to motion, optical aberrations, atmospheric turbulence, or sensor-related effects. Unlike shift-invariant, shift-variant degradation presents significant challenges for image restoration because the degradation process cannot be represented by a single convolution kernel. This paper proposes a singular value decomposition (SVD)-based framework for restoring images degraded by shift-variant motion blur. The proposed approach determines the contribution of small singular values using a singular-value energy retention criterion. Specifically, the number of small singular values is selected based on a specified percentage of cumulative singular-value energy, providing a systematic approach for controlling noise amplification while preserving useful image information. The degradation model is formulated using a position-dependent PSF represented by a shift-variant imaging operator. Three representative one dimensional shift-variant motion PSFs are considered: bidirectional linear motion, Gaussian motion, and simple harmonic motion. The image degradation process is modeled as a linear system, and SVD is employed to analyze and invert the corresponding degradation operator. The singular-value representation provides insight into the ill-conditioned nature of the restoration problem and enables the development of stable inversion techniques. The proposed SVD-based restoration algorithm is applied to three degraded images. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in recovering image details and reducing blur artifacts under different motion models.

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04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Keeping the Evidence Chain: Semantic Evidence Allocation for Training-Free Token Pruning in Video Temporal Grounding

Authors:
Jiaqi Li↗Shuntian Zheng↗Yixian Shen↗Jia-Hong Huang↗Xiaoman Lu↗Minzhe Ni↗Yu Guan↗

Video Temporal Grounding (VTG) localizes the temporal boundaries of query-relevant moments in long, untrimmed videos, making video-language-model prohibitively expensive. While recent training-free token pruning has shown success in video question answering, naively applying these objectives to VTG causes drastic degradation, as VTG crucially depends on boundary-sensitive evidence and cross-frame reasoning chains. We therefore identify two VTG-specific pruning principles: evidence retention, which keeps query-critical patches especially around event boundaries, and connectivity strength, which preserves cross-frame connectivity for long-range evidence aggregation. Building on these insights, we propose SemVID, a training-free pruning framework that constructs a compact yet coherent token subset with complementary semantic roles. SemVID first allocates per-frame budgets by balancing query relevance and inter-frame variation to avoid over-pruned segments, and then selects three types of tokens: object tokens for diverse query-critical evidence, motion tokens to capture meaningful transitions and serve as cross-frame relays, and context tokens for scene continuity. Extensive experiments show that SemVID achieves a strong accuracy-efficiency trade-off, retaining up to 95.4% mIoU with only 12.5% visual tokens and delivering up to a 5.8x prefill speedup, consistently outperforming prior methods under the same budgets. Our code is available at https://github.com/JiaqiLi404/SemVID

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05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

The Long Tail, Not the Front Page: Cold-Start Prediction of Crowd Highlight Salience

Authors:
Kazuki Nakayashiki↗Keisuke Watanabe↗

A social highlighter's most useful signal – which passages a crowd of readers marks – exists only for documents people have already read. Can the aggregate crowd salience of a document be predicted from its text before its marks accumulate? Prior work on this data found that zero-shot language models recover highlight locations worse than a trivial lead (position) baseline, so we ask whether a model trained on the highlight corpus can beat that baseline. Using a pre-registered ladder of models and a by-document cluster bootstrap, we find a small but robust edge: a logistic ranker over sentence embeddings and positional/contextual features beats the lead baseline by +0.044 average precision (95% CI [+0.029, +0.058]; clears a pre-registered margin delta=0.03 in 97% of resamples, and stable across pipeline re-runs). Two unsupervised extractive baselines (centroid, LexRank-style centrality) lose to lead, and the trained model beats them by +0.108, so the edge is not recovered by generic unsupervised proxies – it reflects learning from real reader marks. In product terms, precision@3 rises from 0.25 to 0.39 (+55% relative) and the model beats lead on 69% of documents. An ablation attributes the edge to the raw embedding (+0.014) and training augmentation (+0.010), each with a positive CI. The edge is not a temporal-generalization failure, and we find no evidence that content drift or near-duplicate leakage explains it. A standardized regression shows the advantage is governed mainly by document popularity (lower popularity, larger edge) and by label reliability. It nearly vanishes only on the most popular content; there it is the lead baseline that strengthens, not the model that weakens. Because our evaluation conditions on documents that eventually accumulated readers, these results are a retrospective cold-start simulation.

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

MorVess: Morphology-Aware Pulmonary Vessel Segmentation Network

Authors:
Fuyou Mao↗Yifei Chen↗Beining Wu↗Lixin Lin↗Jinnan Dai↗Zhiling Li↗Yilei Chen↗Yaqi Wang↗Hao Zhang↗Yan Tang↗Huiyu Zhou↗Feiwei Qin↗…

Accurate pulmonary vessel segmentation remains challenging due to the sparse, tortuous, and multi-scale nature of vascular structures, where small branches are easily lost and topology integrity is difficult to preserve under voxel-wise supervision. Existing deep segmentation models primarily optimize binary masks, lacking explicit geometric constraints, thus struggling to recover continuous tubular morphology and fine vascular connectivity. In this study, we introduce MorVess, a morphology-aware segmentation framework that integrates differentiable geometric priors with large-scale foundation model adaptation to achieve fine-grained vascular parsing. MorVess jointly predicts vessel masks, distance maps, and thickness maps, providing explicit supervision for vascular boundaries, centerline consistency, and smooth diameter transitions. A lightweight 2.5D adapter bridges 3D spatial context and 2D SAM representations, while a global-local fusion block aggregates multi-level semantics and geometric cues for high-fidelity topology reconstruction. Across two challenging pulmonary CT benchmarks, MorVess delivers superior Dice, clDice, and HD95 scores, substantially improving small-vessel recovery and global connectivity. These results demonstrate that embedding geometric intelligence into pretrained vision models offers a principled and scalable pathway toward precise vessel analysis and clinically reliable structural quantification. Our source code is available at https://github.com/MaoFuyou/MorVess.

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07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Leaking Circuit Secrets: Gradient Leakage Attacks on Graph Neural Networks

Authors:
Rupesh Raj Karn↗Johann Knechtel↗Ozgur Sinanoglu↗

arXiv:2606.25589v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As graph neural networks (GNNs) become standard tools for critical tasks in circuit design and analysis, their security and privacy risks require careful attention. Here, we present the first comprehensive evaluation of gradient leakage attacks (GLAs) on GNNs in circuit-design and hardware-security tasks, a practical threat that has been largely overlooked. We assess state-of-the-art (SOTA) GNNs, including GraphSAGE, GCN, GIN, and GAT, trained on standard netlist benchmarks (ISCAS'85, EPFL, and TrustHub), for their fundamental vulnerability to GLAs. We find that GLAs can expose sensitive information, such as gate types and distinctive properties of hardware Trojans, which may assist adversaries in analyzing logic locking schemes or evading Trojan detection mechanisms. Our analysis shows that these risks are influenced by architectural features, with attention mechanisms (GAT) exacerbating leakage, while injective aggregation (GIN) provides comparatively stronger resilience. We further evaluate several SOTA defense techniques, including differential privacy, gradient clipping, secure aggregation, model compression with quantization, and adversarial training. We find that these techniques improve resilience only in specific settings and can also compromise model performance. Overall, our work provides key insights toward privacy-preserving GNNs and highlights the need for more robust and efficient defenses. We release our full methodology and artifacts.

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08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

An Algebraic Matrix Spencer Theorem

Authors:
Emrullah Akbas↗Suvrit Sra↗

arXiv:2606.16005v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop an algebraic approach to matrix discrepancy based on the representation theory of finite-dimensional C$^*$-algebras. As an application, we resolve a substantial structured special case of the Matrix Spencer conjecture. In particular, we show that for every family of contractions $A_1,\ldots,A_n$ that are contained in a finite-dimensional $C^*$-algebra $\mathcal A$ with $dim_{\mathbb C} (\mathcal A) \lesssim n$, there exists signs $x\in\{\pm1\}^n$ such that $\|\sum_{i=1}^n x_i A_i\| \le O(\sqrt n)$. As a noteworthy special case, our main result also resolves the Group Spencer conjecture of (Bandeira'24). We furthermore prove that Matrix Spencer continues to hold for low-rank perturbations of matrix families coming from an $C^*$-algebra of small dimension.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Point-Wise Geometry-Aware Transformer for Partial-to-Full Point Cloud Registration in Computer-Assisted Surgery

Authors:
Siyu Zhou↗Zhongliang Jiang↗

Partial-to-full registration remains challenging due to varying overlap ratios, fluctuating point densities, and the presence of noise. While transformers have shown strong potential for point cloud processing, prior methods typically confine them to global context aggregation, overlooking fine-grained local geometry crucial for accurate correspondence. We propose GAPR-Net, a learning-based point cloud registration framework with a coarse-to-fine architecture that combines convolution and transformer modules, in which local and global information is fused between the partial and full point clouds using a cross-attention mechanism. To achieve this, a transformation-invariant point-wise geometric feature representation is proposed, which can robustly capture relative geometric features for individual points with respect to their neighboring points. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, experiments are conducted on four geometrically distinct bones, including the tibia, femur, pelvis, and thoracic cartilage. The overall registration recall reaches 94.2\%, the method results in a low RMSE of 1.992 mm and $R^2$ values of 0.908 and 0.974 for rotation and translation, respectively. The results demonstrate that the proposed method effectively addresses the partial-to-full point cloud registration problem. The proposed method enables highly accurate 3D point cloud registration using partial observation, providing a critical foundation for precise surgical navigation and robotic interventions in computer-assisted surgery. The code will be accessed after the double-blind review process.

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10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

A Red-Team Study of Anthropic Fable 5 & Opus 4.8 Models

Authors:
Nicola Franco↗

We evaluate the adversarial robustness of two frontier large language models (LLMs) developed by Anthropic, Fable 5 and Opus 4.8, against four families of automated jailbreak attack across 7 826 harmful intents spanning a ten-category harm taxonomy. Using the HackAgent red-teaming framework, hundreds of thousands of adversarial attempts were generated and every apparent success was independently re-adjudicated by a panel of three judge models (majority vote). Both models resist the majority of attacks, but the residual surface is larger than aggregate framing suggests: it is dominated by adaptive iterative attacks, while static obfuscation is near-fully neutralised. The strongest adaptive search (tree-of-attacks) breaks Opus 4.8 on 11.5% of intents overall, whereas Fable 5 stays in the single digits (6.1% worst-case). Aggregate rates therefore should not be read as reassurance. Even in these hardened configurations, the two models produced 1 620 (Opus 4.8) and 702 (Fable 5) panel-confirmed harmful completions spanning every harm category, located automatically, cheaply, and within the first one or two refinement steps by an attacker model with no human expert in the loop. The reasonable conclusion is that even the best, most-tested frontier models remain reliably breakable under sustained automated pressure.

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11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Gate-Controlled Spin Qubits in Confined Altermagnets

Authors:
Hamed Vakili↗

arXiv:2606.24150v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose gate-defined spin qubits in electrostatically confined altermagnetic quantum dots. Elliptical confinement of the $d$-wave altermagnetic structure produces a low-energy doublet with opposite spin polarization. For the range of parameters used here, the qubit states energy gap lies in the microwave range while the leakage gap remains in the meV range. Even without spin-orbit coupling, time-dependent simulations show that a phase-controlled quadrupolar gate drive about a fixed bias point implements $X_{\pi/2}$ and $X_\pi$ rotations by resonantly modulating the confinement anisotropy. We extend the study to two-qubits using a double quantum dot. We show that the double quantum dot spectrum can be cleanly projected onto isolated quantum dot product states with a nonzero nonlocal Pauli block in the effective logical two-qubit Hamiltonian. Resonant central-barrier modulation then drives the logical two-qubit component close to a maximally entangled state. These calculations show anisotropic altermagnetic quantum dots as a route to locally gate-controlled spin qubits without requiring spin-orbit coupling.

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12.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

Virtual phenotypic screening discovers novel scaffolds inhibiting the PI3K/mTOR pathway

Authors:
Wu↗A. P↗Yao↗Hoeckendorf↗Gaskins↗Kosaisawe↗Lu↗Hanslovsky↗Mayba↗Skelton↗Scalia↗Moffat↗…

Phenotypic drug discovery has yielded many first-in-class small-molecule drugs by discovering modulators of disease phenotypes in physiologically relevant cellular systems. However, high-content phenotypic assays lack the ultra-high-throughput scalability of target-based screens. Recent advances in virtual screening present an opportunity to address this bottleneck, but have been limited to simple phenotypes like viability, restricted to small repurposing libraries, or lack in-depth biological validation. Here, we present PhenoCompass, a multimodal co-embedding model that aligns compound structures and high-content phenotypic imaging to enable virtual phenotypic screening over billion-compound libraries. Following training on the Joint Undertaking in Morphology dataset with more than 100,000 Cell Painting compound profiles, retrospective validation with historical biochemical high-throughput screening data demonstrates that PhenoCompass ranks compounds according to their biochemical target engagement. Leveraging PhenoCompass, we performed a prospective screen of 3.8 billion Enamine REAL compounds for inhibitors of PI3K/mTOR pathway, a critical signaling cascade whose aberrant activation is a common tumor driver. This search identified 11 novel compounds with pathway-consistent Cell Painting readout and diverse scaffolds, a 54-fold enrichment over the training set. Orthogonal validation experiments using a FOXO3A reporter assay and direct kinase inhibition confirmed seven structurally novel inhibitors with distinct mechanisms of action. These results highlight the convergence of diverse molecular target profiles onto a shared morphological pathway signature and establish PhenoCompass as a robust framework for high-content phenotypic virtual screening.

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13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Two-Electron Effects Extend High-Harmonic Generation into the keV Regime

Authors:
Isobel McSweeney↗Andres Marchisio↗Javier Rivera-Dean↗Philipp Stammer↗Paraskevas Tzallas↗Marcelo F. Ciappina↗Maciej Lewenstein↗

arXiv:2606.24765v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Two-electron processes can generate high harmonics beyond the conventional single-active-electron cutoff. Motivated by recent experimental evidence of an extended secondary plateau in the helium high-harmonic spectrum [S. Wang et al, Optica, (2023); S. Wang et al, In Print in Nature Photon., (2026)], we present a two-electron generalisation of the strong-field approximation. We analyse the resulting expressions using the saddle-point method and determine the extended cutoff. We find good agreement with classical predictions of cutoff scalings of $4.7$ and $5.5$ times the ponderomotive energy, which significantly exceed the established single-electron scaling of 3.17. We calculate high-harmonic spectra generated via a two-electron process in helium atoms driven by an intense few-cycle infrared laser pulse. Our results demonstrate that the harmonic spectrum extends far beyond the water window, reaching photon energies up to $\approx 1.2\,\mathrm{keV}$ in the soft x-ray region. The large spectral bandwidth can support the generation of sub-attosecond soft x-ray pulses, which are of particular interest for probing ultrafast dynamics across matter, including applications in core-level spectroscopy and biological imaging.

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14.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

GermRL: Alleviating The Germline Bias In Autoregressive Antibody Language Models Through Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Ludwig↗Chungyoun↗Gray↗J. J↗

Antibodies are powerful therapeutics whose antigen specificity arises from sequence diversity shaped during development. Recently, language models trained on large antibody repertoire datasets have enabled the generation and screening of novel candidates, but these models retain a strong germline bias. As AI adoption increases in therapeutic workflows, it is crucial to develop models that harness the diversity of antibodies necessary for the discovery of mutations that encode desirable properties. Previous work explored the germline bias in masked antibody language models, yet the bias in generative autoregressive language models has not yet been addressed. Here, we present GermRL, a lightweight and modular reinforcement learning (RL) framework capable of alleviating the germline bias in pre-trained antibody autoregressive language models through group relative policy optimization (GRPO). GermRL achieves consistent one-shot generation of antibodies that satisfy specified mutation thresholds from germline while maintaining structural plausibility. Under the lowest and highest mutation thresholds tested (5 and 35 mutations from germline), GermRL scores 0.992 and 0.950 pass@1, respectively, compared to 0.398 and 0.034 for the pre-trained language model. Within GermRL, we introduce a key pair of modifications to GRPO that increase training efficiency by discouraging reward hacking under our antibody application. Furthermore, comparison of RL generated and natural antibody sequences reveals how RL based optimization can explore alternative evolutionary mutational patterns and residue compositional strategies while preserving key global properties of natural antibodies, including identifiable germline assignments, embedding-level similarity and comparable developability profiles. Thus, RL-trained generative models optimized to promote antibody mutations through diversity from germline provide a promising framework for navigating the antibody sequence landscape, enabling exploration of novel yet biologically plausible candidates for therapeutic design.

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15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Qwen-RobotNav Technical Report: A Scalable Navigation Model Designed for an Agentic Navigation System

Authors:
Jiazhao Zhang↗Gengze Zhou↗Hale Yin↗Yiyang Huang↗Zixing Lei↗Qihang Peng↗Haoqi Yuan↗Jie Zhang↗Xudong Guo↗Xiaoyue Chen↗An Yang↗Fei Huang↗…

Agentic navigation systems require a base navigation model whose observation strategy can be externally reconfigured at inference time, because instruction following, object search, target tracking, and autonomous driving share the same perception-planning backbone yet demand fundamentally different strategies for consuming the visual stream. We present Qwen-RobotNav, a scalable navigation model built on Qwen-RobotNav that addresses it through a parameterised interface with two complementary dimensions: multiple task modes that select the navigation behaviour, and controllable observation parameters (e.g., token budget, per-camera weights) that govern how visual history is encoded. With training-time randomization over all parameters, Qwen-RobotNav is robust to any inference-time configuration requiring zero architectural modification to the Qwen-RobotNav backbone. We train Qwen-RobotNav on 15.6M samples; co-training with vision-language data prevents the collapse into reactive action-sequence mappers observed in trajectory-only training. The parameterised interface also makes Qwen-RobotNav a natural building block for agentic systems: for long-horizon scenarios, an upper-level planner decomposes goals into sub-tasks and dynamically switches Qwen-RobotNav's task mode and context strategy mid-episode, composing complex behaviours from repeated calls to the same model. Extensive experiments show that Qwen-RobotNav sets new state-of-the-art results across major navigation benchmarks. The model exhibits favourable scaling from 2B to 8B parameters, with joint multi-task training developing a shared spatial-planning substrate that transfers across task families, and demonstrates strong zero-shot generalisation to real-world robots across diverse environments.

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

Quantum Field-Theoretic Predictions of {\Psi}-Epistemic Models of Quantum Mechanics

Authors:
\.Inan\c{c} \c{S}ahin↗

arXiv:2605.12546v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: {\Psi}-epistemic models of quantum mechanics imply that the quantum state does not correspond to physical reality, but instead reflects the observer's knowledge of the underlying quantum system. The epistemic view of the quantum state has the potential to shed light on several foundational problems of quantum theory and has attracted considerable attention in the literature. On the other hand, the Pusey-Barrett-Rudolph theorem demonstrated that broad classes of {\psi}-epistemic models must lead to predictions that deviate from those of quantum mechanics. Although the original theorem involved entangled joint measurements on composite systems, alternative no-go theorems involving measurements on single quantum systems were developed shortly thereafter. Experimental investigations of the deviations predicted by {\psi}-epistemic models from quantum mechanics are still ongoing. So far, such tests have been performed within the framework of non-relativistic quantum mechanics and predominantly rely on quantum information based measurement procedures. In this work, we show that {\psi}-epistemic models can give rise to deviations from standard quantum field-theoretic predictions through modifications of polarized scattering cross sections and decay widths. Our results do not require a relativistic formulation of ontological models or of the Harrigan-Spekkens criterion; the essential assumption is merely that measurements implemented through relativistic processes can still be represented within the ontological framework by well-defined response functions and probabilities. The present work constitutes a proof-of-principle study demonstrating that particle physics tests of the ontological status of the quantum state are possible and that {\psi}-epistemic models may exhibit experimentally distinguishable signatures in particle phenomenology.

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17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Limiting partition function for the Mallows model: a conjecture and partial evidence

Authors:
Soumik Pal↗

arXiv:2406.18855v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Let $S_n$ denote the set of permutations of $n$ labels. We consider a class of Gibbs probability models on $S_n$ that is a subfamily of the so-called Mallows model of random permutations. The Gibbs energy is given by a class of right invariant divergences on $S_n$ that includes common choices such as the Spearman foot rule and the Spearman rank correlation. Mukherjee in 2016 computed the limit of the (scaled) log partition function (i.e. normalizing factor) of such models as $n\rightarrow \infty$. Our objective is to compute the exact limit, as $n\rightarrow \infty$, without the log. We conjecture that this limit is given by the Fredholm determinant of an integral operator related to the so-called Schrödinger bridge probability distributions from optimal transport theory. We provide partial evidence for this conjecture, although the argument lacks a final error bound that is needed for it to become a complete proof.

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18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Am I More Pointwise or Pairwise? Revealing Position Bias in Rubric-Based LLM-as-a-Judge

Authors:
Yuzheng Xu↗Tosho Hirasawa↗Tadashi Kozuno↗Yoshitaka Ushiku↗

Large language models are widely employed as evaluators, a paradigm commonly referred to as LLM-as-a-judge. Prior research has predominantly examined point-wise or pair-wise evaluation protocols; in contrast, our focus is on rubric-based evaluation, which has been attracting increasing attention owing to its utility for training models in domains where verification is otherwise difficult. In this work, we show that rubric-based evaluation implicitly resembles a multiple-choice setting and therefore exhibits position bias: LLMs tend to prefer score options that appear at specific positions within the rubric list. Through controlled experiments across multiple models and datasets, we demonstrate that this position bias is consistent. Its direction, however, is model-specific: some judges favor the first option, while others favor the last. We further identify a second, orthogonal axis of bias: when a prompt scores several criteria simultaneously, the ordering of the criteria itself shifts the resulting scores. We additionally explore permuting the order of the rubric options as a means of mitigating position bias, and find that although the bias can be attenuated, improvements in the correlation between model judgments and human annotations are obtained primarily for models that exhibit strong bias. Our results recast rubric-based LLM-as-a-judge as a multiple-choice problem with measurable, model-specific position bias, and we further confirm that only a small number of random order permutations are sufficient to reduce the error introduced by this bias for the majority of models.

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19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

LLM Features Can Hurt GNNs: Concatenation Interference on Homophilous Graph Benchmarks

Authors:
Zhongyuan Wang↗Pratyusha Vemuri↗

Adding LLM-generated node features to graph neural networks (GNNs) is widely reported to improve accuracy on standard benchmarks. We document a contrasting observation: when LLM features are introduced through pure input concatenation (rather than joint training, distillation, or prompt-conditioning), they can systematically degrade accuracy on the same homophilous benchmarks where end-to-end LLM pipelines succeed. With an MLP backbone on the Planetoid public split and bag-of-words original features, concatenating SBERT-encoded GPT-4o-mini TAPE features reduces PubMed test accuracy by -17.0 +/- 0.3 pp and Cora by -4.3 +/- 0.6 pp (CiteSeer -0.6 +/- 0.8 pp, within seed noise). The drop attenuates as we relax each condition (GCN / GCNII / GAT backbones, random splits, smaller encoders) and reverses on medium-homophily WikiCS (+4.4 pp) and ogbn-arxiv (+11.7 pp). To predict when concatenation helps versus hurts, we report a simple measure of LLM-alone discriminability, Delta_sig. Across 9 datasets Delta_sig correlates with the concatenation cost more strongly than homophily at point estimate (r^2 = 0.38 vs. 0.06; N=9, bootstrap CIs overlap). The bootstrap-best change-point is tau = 13.8 pp, and the rule "Delta_sig

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20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Improving Alignment Between Human and Machine Codes: An Empirical Assessment of Prompt Engineering for Construct Identification in Psychology

Authors:
Kylie L. Anglin↗Stephanie Milan↗Brittney Hernandez↗Claudia Ventura↗

Due to their architecture and vast pre-training data, large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong text classification performance. However, LLM output - here, the category assigned to a text - depends heavily on the wording of the prompt. While literature on prompt engineering is expanding, few studies focus on classification tasks, and even fewer address domains like psychology, where constructs have precise, theory-driven definitions that may not be well represented in pre-training data. We present an empirical framework for optimizing LLM performance for identifying constructs in texts via prompt engineering. We experimentally evaluate five prompting strategies – codebook-guided empirical prompt selection, automatic prompt engineering, persona prompting, chain-of-thought reasoning, and explanatory prompting - with zero-shot and few-shot classification. We find that persona, chain-of-thought, and explanations do not fully address performance loss accompanying a badly worded prompt. Instead, the most influential features of a prompt are the construct definition, task framing, and, to a lesser extent, the examples provided. Across three constructs and two models, the classifications most aligned with expert judgments resulted from a few-shot prompt combining codebook-guided empirical prompt selection with automatic prompt engineering. Based on our findings, we recommend that researchers generate and evaluate as many prompt variants as feasible, whether human-crafted, automatically generated, or ideally both, and select prompts and examples based on empirical performance in a training dataset, validating the final approach in a holdout set. This procedure offers a practical, systematic, and theory-driven method for optimizing LLM prompts in settings where alignment with expert judgment is critical.

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21.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-25

Ligand-enabled distal desaturative lactonization of aliphatic acids

Authors:
Tanay Pal↗

Transition metal catalysis serves as a fundamental strategy for transforming inert C−H bonds into valuable functional motifs.1,2 However, achieving regioselective activation of remote C−H bonds remains challenging, particularly in unbiased hydrocarbon frameworks.2,3 In this context, distal C(sp3)−H bonds are especially difficult to functionalize, as conformational flexibility favors proximal C−H activation.3,4 In this study, we demonstrate a ligand-enabled strategy using designed O-allyl amido ester (OAAE) ligands for palladium-catalyzed activation of γ-methylene and methine C−H sites in unbiased aliphatic carboxylic acids, derived from readily available fatty and cyclic acid feedstocks. This protocol enables direct transformation of aliphatic carboxylic acid substrates into distal desaturated γ-lactones and double dehydrogenated γ-spirolactones. Mechanistic studies are consistent with a pathway involving Pd(II)-mediated γ-C(sp3)−H activation, followed by dehydrogenation and intramolecular cyclization. These lactones with an unsaturated arm, serve as key intermediates for the formation of complex natural products and pharmaceuticals. For instance, muricatacin (from soursop/laxman phal) and its analogue were rapidly assembled in three steps from margaric acid using this strategy and evaluated for anticancer activity, thereby demonstrating the potential of our approach for providing a rapid access to biologically relevant frameworks for traditional medicine. The introduced distal desaturation further opens up new avenues for remote functionalization, streamlining access to diverse bioactive molecules with improved step and atom economy.

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22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Linear optical Bell state measurement for rotation-symmetric cat codes

Authors:
Issa Oe↗Suguru Endo↗Rui Asaoka↗

arXiv:2606.22832v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Rotation-symmetric cat (RS-cat) codes are a bosonic-code platform for quantum information processing, combining finite-energy realizability with robustness against photon loss through their discrete rotational symmetry. For applications in long-distance quantum communication and fusion-based quantum computation (FBQC), efficient Bell state measurement (BSM) is a key primitive. In this work, we consider a BSM protocol for RS-cat codes using only a half beam splitter (HBS) and photon-number-resolving detectors (PNRDs). By exploiting the characteristic photon-number structure induced by the discrete rotational symmetry of RS-cat codes, our protocol extracts both photon-number modulo and phase information for Bell-state discrimination. We show that, under ideal loss-free conditions, the proposed BSM protocol becomes deterministic for arbitrary symmetry order $N$ for sufficiently large amplitudes $\alpha$. We further numerically evaluate the success probability under photon loss and identify the loss regime in which higher-order RS-cat codes provide an advantage. Finally, we show that post-selection can enhance the success probability.

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23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Split-Head Quantum Generative Adversarial Network for Crystalline Material Discovery

Authors:
Huan-Ming Chang↗Jen-Yu Chang↗Tsung-Wei Huang↗En-Jui Kuo↗

arXiv:2606.17852v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The discovery of novel crystalline materials is a critical challenge in computational materials science, often limited by the spatial representation limitations and mode collapse typical of classical generative models. Traditionally, developing Quantum GANs for continuous 3D space is hindered by the limited capacity of near-term hardware. To overcome this, we adapt a physics-informed "split-head" architecture right from the quantum trunk to explicitly decouple macroscopic lattice bounds from microscopic atomic coordinates, significantly maximizing resource efficiency. This study disentangles the contributions of quantum circuits from these architectural priors by evaluating a Split-Head Quantum Generative Adversarial Network against an architecture-matched classical ablation model. Evaluated on the highly constrained Mg-Mn-O system, the results reveal a highly nuanced performance dichotomy between the advanced models. The architecture-matched classical ablation model demonstrated superior thermodynamic precision. Conversely, the integration of quantum circuits in the SH-QGAN drove unparalleled structural breadth and latent space exploration, more than doubling the ablation's geometric validity and successfully generating novel, metastable candidates converging on the Mg2MnO4 stoichiometry. These findings clarify that while architectural separation of cell and atom generation drives strict thermodynamic precision, quantum feature mapping independently provides the spatial diversity necessary to overcome mode collapse. Both mechanisms offer distinct, complementary enhancements for the generative discovery of advanced materials.

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25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Cramér-Type Moderate Deviations for Engel's Series via a Martingale Approach

Authors:
Shaochen Wang↗Guangyu Yang↗

arXiv:2606.18866v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Let $x$ be uniformly distributed on $(0,1)$, and let $(q_n)_{n\geq1}$ be the digits of its Engel series expansion. We establish a Cramér-type moderate deviation expansion for $(\log q_n-n)/\sqrt n$. The proof is based on a martingale decomposition and asymptotic results for martingales. As consequences, we obtain a moderate deviation principle over the full range of scales between the central limit theorem and the law of large numbers, without the additional lower rate restriction required in several earlier works. We also derive a uniform Berry–Esseen bound of order $(\log n)/\sqrt n$.

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