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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Quantum thermodynamics, quantum correlations and quantum coherence in accelerating Unruh-DeWitt detectors in both steady and dynamical state

Authors:
Omar Bachain↗Mohamed Amazioug↗Rachid Ahl Laamara↗Kottakkaran Sooppy Nisar↗Mohammed Zakarya↗Gamal M. Ismail↗Abdel-Haleem Abdel-Aty↗

arXiv:2512.18123v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate the interplay between quantum thermodynamics, quantum correlations, and quantum coherence within the framework of the Unruh-DeWitt (UdW) detector model. By analyzing both the steady and dynamical states of various quantum resources (including steerability, entanglement, quantum discord, and coherence), we study how these resources evolve under Markovian and non-Markovian environments. Furthermore, we investigate the impact of both the Unruh temperature and the energy levels on three key quantum phenomena: thermodynamic evolution, quantum correlations, and quantum coherence, considering different initial state preparations. The hierarchical structure relating quantum correlations and quantum coherence is determined. We further examine the thermodynamic performance of a quantum heat engine, highlighting the influence of memory effects and classical correlations on heat exchange, work extraction, and efficiency. Our results reveal that non-Markovian dynamics can enhance the preservation of quantum correlations and improve the engine's efficiency compared to purely Markovian regime. These findings provide insights into the role of quantum correlations and quantum coherence in quantum thermodynamic processes and open avenues for optimizing quantum devices operating in relativistic or open-system settings.

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02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Timage: A Generative Text-in-Image Paradigm for Fine-Tuning Vision-Language Models

Authors:
Yifeng Wu↗Huimin Huang↗Ruiluo Wu↗Chunyi Lin↗Guanhua Chen↗Xian Wu↗Wang Song↗Ruize Han↗

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often lose track of the right image regions during fine-grained spatial reasoning, because a textual query rarely carries any explicit geometric anchor into the pixel domain. Prevailing remedies either rewire the model's weights or pad the prompt with verbose instructions, yet neither reliably pins the language to the correct visual coordinates without eroding the backbone's general competence. We introduce Timage, a paradigm that recasts multimodal understanding as an alignment problem solved at the input: the query is drawn, as a typeset overlay, onto the image itself. The placement and appearance of this overlay are produced by a Constrained Schrödinger Bridge (cSB), an entropic optimal-transport sampler that factorizes layout synthesis into two coupled stochastic stages. The first stage, Region Search, transports noise toward query-aligned image zones while obeying a hard occlusion barrier that protects salient foreground content; the second stage, Appearance Shaping, sizes the glyphs through an ``ink-budget'' regularizer so that the rendered text stays legible and visually balanced. The resulting overlay behaves as an explicit attention beacon that channels the model's focus along spatial semantics. On the VMCBench suite, Timage paired with a modest 7B backbone clearly overtakes far larger proprietary systems as well as parameter-tuned baselines. The study positions deliberate input reconstruction as a powerful, architecture-neutral lever for strengthening multimodal reasoning.

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

Exact Federated Continual Unlearning for Ridge Heads on Frozen Foundation Models

Authors:
Yijun Quan↗Wentai Wu↗Giovanni Montana↗

arXiv:2603.12977v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Foundation models are commonly deployed as frozen feature extractors with a small trainable head to adapt to private, user-generated data in federated settings. The ``right to be forgotten'' requires removing the influence of specific samples or users from the trained model on demand. Existing federated unlearning methods target general deep models and rely on approximate reconstruction or selective retraining, making exactness costly or elusive. We study this problem in a practically relevant but under-explored regime: a frozen foundation model with a ridge-regression head. The exact optimum depends on the data only through two additive sufficient statistics, which we turn into a communication protocol supporting an arbitrary stream of add and delete requests via fixed-size messages. The server maintains a head that is, in exact arithmetic, pointwise identical to centralized retraining after every request. We provide deterministic retrain-equivalence guarantees, order and partition invariance, two server-side variants, and a Bayesian certificate of zero KL divergence. Experiments on four benchmarks confirm the guarantees: both variants match centralized ridge retraining to within $10^{-9}$ relative Frobenius error and complete each request at orders-of-magnitude lower cost than federated retraining baselines.

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04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

ECHOCARDIOGRAPHY ABNORMALITIES IN PREECLAMPSIA WITH SEVERE FEATURES.

Authors:
Rathod↗A. T↗Sarojini↗PC↗S. R↗Deshmukh↗Fathima↗S. A↗

Purpose To determine the frequency of echocardiographic abnormalities in women with preeclampsia with severe features. To describe the spectrum and types of echocardiographic abnormalities associated with preeclampsia with severe features. Method This is a Prospective observational study conducted in Vani Vilas hospital attached to Bangalore Medical College and Research Institute, Bangalore from January 2023 to December 2025. 560 pregnant women diagnosed with severe preeclampsia(SPE) were included in the study. Chronic hypertension without superimposed preeclampsia, underlying cardiac diseases and previous history of peripartum cardiomyopathy were excluded from the study. Transthoracic echocardiography-TTE (2D ECHO) was done to evaluate cardiac structure and function. Echocardiographic abnormalities identified during the study were documented and analysed using descriptive statistical methods. Results Abnormalities in ECHO was noted in 23.03%. A unique finding was the documentation of elevated pulmonary artery systolic pressures (PASP) suggestive of Pulmonary Hypertension (PH) (PASP >35 mm HG) among 20.25% of the participants. It was also the commonest abnormality on ECHO. Mild PH was the commonest (15.71%), moderate PH was seen in 3.92% and severe PH in 0.71% of cases. Next most frequent abnormality was moderate to severe valvular regurgitation (10%), followed by left ventricular hypertrophy (5.53%). Diastolic dysfunction (DD) was seen in 3.92%, systolic dysfunction(SD) in 3.57%, chamber dilatation in 3.57% and LV global hypokinesia in 3.03% cases of SPE Conclusion Preeclampsia with severe features (SPE) is associated with 23.03% abnormalities on echocardiography. SPE is associated with systolic dysfunction, diastolic dysfunction, chamber dilatation, valvular regurgitation, left ventricular hypertrophy and pulmonary hypertension.

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05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Retrocausal capacity of a quantum channel: Communicating through noisy closed timelike curves

Authors:
Kaiyuan Ji↗Seth Lloyd↗Mark M. Wilde↗

arXiv:2509.08965v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the capacity of a quantum channel for retrocausal communication, where messages are transmitted backward in time, from a sender in the future to a receiver in the past, through a noisy postselected closed timelike curve mathematically represented by the channel. We completely characterize the one-shot retrocausal quantum and classical capacities, and we show that the corresponding asymptotic capacities are equal to the average and sum, respectively, of the channel's max-information and its regularized Doeblin information. This endows these information measures with a novel operational interpretation. Furthermore, our characterization can be generalized beyond quantum channels to all completely positive maps. This imposes information-theoretic limits on transmitting messages via postselected-teleportation-like mechanisms with arbitrary initial- and final-state boundary conditions, including those considered in various black-hole final-state models.

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

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Discrete-Time Gaussian Process Mixtures for Robot Policy Learning

Authors:
Jan Ole von Hartz↗Adrian R\"ofer↗Joschka Boedecker↗Abhinav Valada↗

arXiv:2505.03296v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present Mixture of Discrete-time Gaussian Processes (MiDiGap), a novel approach for flexible policy representation and imitation learning in robot manipulation. MiDiGap enables learning from as few as five demonstrations using only camera observations and generalizes across a wide range of challenging tasks. It excels at long-horizon behaviors such as making coffee, highly constrained motions such as opening doors, dynamic actions such as scooping with a spatula, and multimodal tasks such as hanging a mug. MiDiGap learns these tasks on a CPU in less than a minute and scales linearly to large datasets. We also develop a rich suite of tools for inference-time steering using evidence such as collision signals and robot kinematic constraints. This steering enables novel generalization capabilities, including obstacle avoidance and cross-embodiment policy transfer. MiDiGap achieves state-of-the-art performance on diverse few-shot manipulation benchmarks. On constrained RLBench tasks, it improves policy success by 76 percentage points and reduces trajectory cost by 67%. On multimodal tasks, it improves policy success by 48 percentage points and increases sample efficiency by a factor of 20. In cross-embodiment transfer, it more than doubles policy success. We make the code publicly available at https://midigap.cs.uni-freiburg.de.

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07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

TuneJury: An Open Metric for Improving Music Generation Preference Alignment

Authors:
Yonghyun Kim↗Junwon Lee↗Haiwen Xia↗Yinghao Ma↗Junghyun Koo↗Koichi Saito↗Yuki Mitsufuji↗Chris Donahue↗

arXiv:2606.17006v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce TuneJury, an open, instance-level pairwise reward model for text-to-music that predicts a music preference score from a text prompt and an audio clip. The released checkpoint is trained on publicly available human-preference labels covering arena-style (A vs. B) votes, metric-alignment preference pairs, crowdsourced pairwise comparisons, and expert aesthetic ratings. The predicted score margin between two clips is well calibrated on our held-out test split, supporting data filtering via a simple score threshold. TuneJury generalizes to both held-out test pairs and out-of-distribution benchmarks, remaining competitive with prior baselines on the latter. For generators released after training, we introduce anchor calibration, a post-hoc, per-system Bradley-Terry calibration that recovers agreement at substantially better data efficiency than from-scratch retraining. The same frozen reward drives consistent reward-axis gains across three downstream applications: inference-time best-of-N selection, DITTO-style latent optimization, and expert-iteration post-training. TuneJury is available at https://github.com/yonghyunk1m/TuneJury.

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08.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-21

U = U for all: Advancing equity in HIV prevention

Authors:
Thiago S. Torres↗

by Thiago S. Torres, Paula M. Luz Suppression of HIV with antiretrovirals eliminates HIV transmission risk, summarized as Undetectable = Untransmittable (U = U). However, U = U literacy remains unevenly understood and shared, and stigmas persist. Equitable and accurate awareness of U = U requires culturally tailored interventions, improved provider education, and supportive policy environments beyond biomedical evidence alone. Suppression of HIV with antiretrovirals eliminates HIV transmission risk, summarized as Undetectable = Untransmittable (U=U). However, U=U literacy remains unevenly understood and shared, and stigmas persist. In this Perspective, Thiago Torres and Paula Luz outline what is needed to improve equity and accuracy in global awareness and education of U=U.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Efficient Hallucination Detection for LLMs Using Uncertainty-Aware Attention Heads

Authors:
Artem Vazhentsev↗Lyudmila Rvanova↗Gleb Kuzmin↗Ekaterina Fadeeva↗Ivan Lazichny↗Alexander Panchenko↗Maxim Panov↗Mrinmaya Sachan↗Preslav Nakov↗Timothy Baldwin↗Artem Shelmanov↗

While large language models (LLMs) have become highly capable, they remain prone to factual inaccuracies, commonly referred to as "hallucinations." Uncertainty quantification (UQ) offers a promising way to mitigate this issue, but most existing methods are computationally intensive and/or require supervision. In this work, we propose Recurrent Attention-based Uncertainty Quantification (RAUQ), an unsupervised and efficient framework for identifying hallucinations. The method leverages an observation about transformer attention behavior: when incorrect information is generated, certain "uncertainty-aware" attention heads tend to reduce their focus on preceding tokens. RAUQ automatically detects these attention heads and combines their activation patterns with token-level confidence measures in a recurrent scheme, producing a sequence-level uncertainty estimate in just a single forward pass. Through experiments on twelve datasets spanning question answering, summarization, and translation across nine different LLMs, we show that RAUQ consistently outperforms state-of-the-art UQ baselines. Importantly, it incurs minimal overhead, requiring less than 1\% additional computation. Since it requires neither labeled data nor extensive parameter tuning, RAUQ serves as a lightweight, plug-and-play solution for real-time hallucination detection in white-box LLMs.

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10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Clipping Makes Distributed and Federated Asynchronous SGD Robust to Stragglers

Authors:
Samuel Erickson↗Mikael Johansson↗

arXiv:2606.13287v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In modern machine learning, parallelization of training is an important strategy for increasing scale. Asynchronous stochastic gradient descent (ASGD), which maximizes the utilization of available hardware by avoiding waiting for slow workers. However, with constant step sizes, the convergence of ASGD is nonetheless affected negatively by slow workers due to large delays in updates. At the same time, it has been empirically observed in asynchronous training of deep learning models that gradient clipping "stabilizes" training. In this work, we provide a theoretical justification for this behavior, as we show that clipping removes the dependence of the maximum delay in the oracle complexity. We employ a sub-Weibull model of gradient noise which generalizes sub-Gaussian and sub-exponential distributions to more heavy-tailed distributions, motivated by empirical observations in deep learning. We show convergence in expectation, and the first time in asynchronous optimization, convergence with high probability.

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

MASK: Multi-Agent Semantic K-Scheduling for Risk-Sensitive 6G Robotics

Authors:
Ahmet Gunhan Aydin↗Elif Tugce Ceran↗

arXiv:2606.11249v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Realizing the vision of 6G connected robotics requires reconciling high-performance collaborative control with the rigid spectral limitations of physical wireless channels. In realistic collaborative sensing scenarios, spectral resources are quantized into finite physical resource blocks or orthogonal subcarriers, rendering simultaneous transmission by all agents infeasible. To address this, we propose Multi-Agent Semantic K-Scheduling (MASK), a control architecture designed to sustain robust, risk-aware coordination under strict instantaneous bandwidth caps. We introduce Arbiter-Assisted Semantic Information Gating (A-SIG), a lightweight coordination mechanism that enforces hard access constraints by scheduling only the top-K agents based on locally computed semantic importance scores. By aggregating these prioritized observations into a compact latent state, a self-supervised global encoder enables a distributional policy to mitigate tail risks despite data sparsity. We evaluate MASK across diverse benchmarks, demonstrating that it matches the performance of communication-unconstrained baselines even when channel access is restricted to a small fraction of the swarm size. Furthermore, the framework exhibits inherent resilience to packet erasures, validating semantic scheduling as a critical enabler for resource-constrained 6G systems.

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12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Invariants of Sequential Circuits and Generalized Non-Abelian Statistics

Authors:
Shintaro Sato↗Yoshimasa Hidaka↗Ryohei Kobayashi↗

arXiv:2606.11527v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Non-invertible symmetries in quantum many-body systems generally give rise to sequential unitary circuits that move symmetry defects. In this paper, we investigate invariants defined by sequences of such circuits, which move non-invertible defects and generate a Berry phase evaluated on quantum states with defects. We show that this Berry phase generally defines an invariant under local deformations, provided that the sequential circuits preserve the locality of those deformations. This invariant also rules out a short-range-entangled state that preserves the non-invertible symmetry, thereby signaling the 't Hooft anomaly of a non-invertible symmetry purely in terms of unitary operators acting on a state. We then apply this framework to loop excitations in three spatial dimensions and identify a new loop excitation in the (3+1)D $\mathbb{D}_4$ topological order, which we dub a non-Abelian fermionic loop. Using the invariant of sequential circuits, we characterize the statistics of non-Abelian fermionic loops. In addition, we find a new (3+1)D mixed topological order with a single non-Abelian fermionic loop, whose long-range entanglement is protected by an invariant of sequential circuits.

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

Helping Figures Tell their Story! Paper-Grounded Video Generation Explaining Complex Scientific Figures

Authors:
Ishani Mondal↗Javad Baghirov↗Jordan Boyd-Graber↗

Scientific figures compress complex pipelines into a single canvas, yet understanding them requires paper-grounded, step-by-step narration aligned with visual highlights a capability missing from current video generation systems and benchmarks. To address this, we introduce paper-grounded figure-to-video generation: generating narrated, region-grounded walkthrough videos from a figure and its paper. We propose MINARD (Multimodal Interpretation of Narrated Architecture via Region Decomposition), a pipeline that generates paper-grounded narrations and sequentially grounds them to figure regions. We also release FigTalk, a benchmark with new sequential and component-level grounding metrics derived. On FigTalk, MINARD generates humanlike, paper-faithful narrations and outperforms narration-conditioned figure spatial grounding compared to existing approaches in both automatic and human evaluation

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14.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Light slows down carbon nanotubes in water

Authors:
Nikita Kavokine↗

Water-suspended carbon nanotubes move more slowly in green light, suggesting that excited electrons in the tubes couple to the water through ‘quantum friction’. Water-suspended carbon nanotubes move more slowly in green light, suggesting that excited electrons in the tubes couple to the water through ‘quantum friction’.

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15.
Science (Express) 2026-05-07

Induction of broadly neutralizing HIV antibodies by a two-step mechanism informs vaccine design | Science

Authors: Unknown Author

A major obstacle confronting HIV-1 vaccine and cure research is the lack of an outbred animal model for rapid and consistent induction of broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs). We designed an epitope-focused simian-human immunodeficiency virus (SHIV.5MUT) that elicited broad and potent V3-glycan-targeted antibodies within a year of infection in 14 of 22 macaques compared with 0 of 14 control animals. SHIV.5MUT elicited bNAbs by a two-step mechanism, inducing an initial wave of V1-directed antibodies that selected for Envs with shortened, hypoglycosylated V1 loops, which in turn primed V3-glycan bNAb precursors. Rhesus bNAbs were immunogenetically and structurally diverse, closely resembling human V3-glycan bNAbs. Env-bNAb coevolution revealed a diverse repertoire of bNAb precursors and the Env variants that matured them, yielding a molecular blueprint for vaccine design.

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

Efficient Financial Language Understanding via Distillation with Synthetic Data

Authors:
Wen-Fong↗Huang↗Edwin Simpson↗

Large instruction-following models are powerful but costly to deploy, particularly in finance, where labelled data are limited by confidentiality and expert annotation cost. We present an efficient framework for financial sentiment analysis through distillation with synthetic data, transferring knowledge from a large instruction-tuned teacher to compact student models. The framework is designed for low-resource conditions, where a small set of real examples are collected and labelled by hand. The framework then clusters the examples and uses the clusters to select seeds for generating synthetic examples via structured few-shot prompting. Experiments show that clustering-based seed selection yields more representative synthetic data than random sampling, enabling compact models to achieve strong performance with minimal supervision. Notably, on a more complex and noisy text domain, the compact model trained on the complete synthetic-seed corpus even outperforms the teacher model, while remaining competitive on formal text. The framework provides a practical route toward resource-efficient domain adaptation in financial NLP with minimal human labelling effort.

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

Analyzing and Encoding the Al-Mawrid Arabic-English Dictionary with the ISO Language Markup Framework and TEI Lex-0

Authors:
Diaa Fayed↗Laurent Romary↗

This paper presents a robust methodology for the systematic digitization and encoding of the Al-Mawrid Arabic-English dictionary, transforming it from a legacy print resource into a standardized computational lexicon. Addressing a significant gap in Arabic lexical infrastructure, the study adopts a dual-standard framing that aligns the ISO Lexical Markup Framework (LMF) with the Text Encoding Initiative TEI Lex-0 guidelines. By applying an editorial view to the dictionary's macro- and microstructure, the research resolves the structural ambiguities and punctuation inconsistencies typical of 20th-century bilingual dictionaries. The methodology is grounded in an empirical analysis of the dictionary's lexical knowledge density. Drawing on a representative sample (the letter Ayn, comprising 4.6% of the total volume), the study provides scientific weight to the encoding process, demonstrating a structural parsing accuracy of 91%. Quantitative evaluation of the information extraction rules reveals high performance, with 85% precision and 98% recall for synonyms, and 88% precision for other morpho-semantic features. Beyond technical description, the paper provides a critical comparison with existing Arabic lexical resources and discusses the limitations of TEI Lex-0 when modelling specific Arabic phenomena, such as implicit "open set" semantic relations and scattered morphological cues. Furthermore, the study explores the potential for Linguistic Linked Open Data (LLOD) integration by establishing a scalable prefix-based referencing system that facilitates the resource's inclusion in the semantic web. The result is an interoperable, machine-tractable resource that provides a reproducible workflow for the retro-digitization of complex legacy bilingual lexicons within the Arabic NLP and Digital Humanities communities.

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

Skeleton Sparsification and Densification Scale-Spaces

Authors:
Julia Gierke↗Pascal Peter↗

The Hamilton-Jacobi skeleton, also known as the medial axis, is a powerful shape descriptor that represents binary objects in terms of the centres of maximal inscribed discs. Despite its broad applicability, the medial axis suffers from sensitivity to noise: Minor boundary variations can lead to disproportionately large and undesirable expansions of the skeleton. Classical pruning methods mitigate this shortcoming by systematically removing extraneous skeletal branches. This sequential simplification of skeletons resembles the principle of sparsification scale-spaces that embed images into a family of reconstructions from increasingly sparse pixel representations. We combine both worlds by introducing skeletonisation scale-spaces: They leverage sparsification of the medial axis to achieve hierarchical simplification of shapes. Unlike conventional pruning, our framework inherently satisfies key scale-space properties such as hierarchical architecture, controllable simplification, and equivariance to geometric transformations. We provide a rigorous theoretical foundation in both continuous and discrete formulations and extend the concept further with densification. By growing the skeleton successively instead of shrinking it, we allow inverse progression from coarse to fine scales. Densification scale-spaces can even reach beyond the original skeleton to produce overcomplete shape representations with relevancy for practical applications. Through proof-of-concept experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework for practical tasks including robust skeletonisation, shape compression, and stiffness enhancement for additive manufacturing.

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

Doeblin Curves

Authors:
Dongmin Lee↗William Lu↗Anuran Makur↗Japneet Singh↗

arXiv:2606.19859v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent research on Doeblin coefficients has shed light on their usefulness as a multi-way generalization of the Dobrushin contraction coefficient for TV distance, in a separate vein from their classic role in the theory of Markov chain ergodicity. However, strong conditions, such as being bounded away from 0, are typically necessary for Doeblin coefficients to establish the existence of information contraction. Building on recently formulated concepts of nonlinear information contraction, we aim to propose a finer-grained Doeblin-based characterization of multi-way contraction behavior which yields non-vacuous contraction guarantees even for channels whose Doeblin coefficient is 0. To this end, we introduce the notion of a Doeblin curve – a nonlinear function which quantifies the contraction behavior of a Markov kernel on collections of input distributions at specific levels of divergence and power. Through the course of our analysis, we develop a new variational characterization of Doeblin coefficients, present several properties of Doeblin curves, define several versions of power-constrained Doeblin curves, and derive upper and lower bounds using our aforementioned variational characterization. We then utilize these results in diverse areas, including generalization bounds for noisy iterative optimization, error bounds for reliable computation with noisy circuits, and differential privacy guarantees for online iterative algorithms. In particular, we extend results in these areas to broader domains or group settings, leveraging Doeblin curves to reveal finer-grained contraction phenomena than Doeblin coefficients.

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

ShoppingBench: A Real-World Intent-Grounded Shopping Benchmark for LLM-based Agents

Authors:
Jiangyuan Wang↗Kejun Xiao↗Qi Sun↗Huaipeng Zhao↗Tao Luo↗Jian Dong Zhang↗Xiaoyi Zeng↗

Existing benchmarks in e-commerce primarily focus on basic user intents, such as finding or purchasing products. However, real-world users often pursue more complex goals, such as applying vouchers, managing budgets, and finding multi-products seller. To bridge this gap, we propose ShoppingBench, a novel end-to-end shopping benchmark designed to encompass increasingly challenging levels of grounded intent. Specifically, we propose a scalable framework to simulate user instructions based on various intents derived from sampled real-world products. To facilitate consistent and reliable evaluations, we provide a large-scale shopping sandbox that serves as an interactive simulated environment, incorporating over 2.5 million real-world products. Experimental results demonstrate that even state-of-the-art language agents (such as GPT-4.1) achieve absolute success rates under 50% on our benchmark tasks, highlighting the significant challenges posed by our ShoppingBench. In addition, we propose a trajectory distillation strategy and leverage supervised fine-tuning, along with reinforcement learning on synthetic trajectories, to distill the capabilities of a large language agent into a smaller one. As a result, our trained agent achieves competitive performance compared to GPT-4.1.

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21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

The Coin Flip Judge? Reliability and Bias in LLM-as-a-Judge Evaluation

Authors:
Abel Yagubyan↗

LLM-as-a-Judge is now widely used to rank model outputs, train reward models, and populate public leaderboards, but its run-to-run reliability remains under-characterized. We study repeated identical evaluations on 29 tasks spanning 10 categories using two OpenAI judge models (GPT-4o-mini and GPT-4.1-mini), with 50 pairwise trials and 50 pointwise trials per question, supplemented by temperature and prompt-sensitivity ablations. Across judges, pairwise preferences flip on average 13.6% of the time, with 28% of questions exceeding a 20% flip rate and one question reaching 56%. GPT-4o-mini also exhibits a significant first-position bias (72% A-majority, p = 0.024). At the same time, mean pointwise score gaps are small (0.19–0.36 on a 10-point scale) and not statistically significant in aggregate, producing a pairwise–pointwise gap: judges frequently choose a winner even when their own scalar scores provide little evidence of a meaningful quality difference. Beyond within-judge instability, cross-judge agreement is only 76% ($\kappa = 0.51$), semantically equivalent prompt templates change majority outcomes in 25% of tested cases, and deterministic decoding reduces but does not eliminate inconsistency. A reliability curve analysis shows that, in our dataset, 11 repeated trials are needed for a majority vote to recover the 50-trial reference verdict with 95% probability on average, rising to 15 for high-variance questions. These findings suggest that single-trial LLM judging is often too noisy for high-stakes evaluation, and that multi-trial aggregation, position randomization, and explicit uncertainty reporting should be standard practice. Because both judges are from a single provider, cross-provider replication remains an important next step.

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22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Continuous-time Optimal Stopping through Deep Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Cosmin Borsa↗Michael Ludkovski↗

arXiv:2606.17545v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Simulation based solvers for optimal stopping problems must discretize the stopping decision. Under classical dynamic programming, a coarse exercise grid with only a few stopping opportunities can materially undervalue the optimal expected reward, whereas on a very fine grid, approximation errors accumulate through the backward recursion. To remove this limitation, we develop a new reinforcement-learning inspired algorithm that enables us to learn the exercise rule at arbitrarily fine time resolution. Our CARLOS (Continuous-time Adaptive Reinforcement Learning for Optimal Stopping) algorithm utilizes an aggregate deep neural network (ADNN) to learn a joint space-time decision boundary. Starting from a coarse time grid, we progressively increase the frequency of stopping opportunities, while in parallel training the ADNN to refine its timing-value estimates. We moreover design an adaptive sampling strategy that gradually concentrates training effort near the stopping boundary. Benchmarked results show that CARLOS delivers higher prices than existing Bermudan solvers, approaching the American upper bound, and achieves high computational efficiency relative to non-RL comparators.

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

SPI: Query-Depth-Adaptive Indexing for Streaming RAG in Vector Databases

Authors:
Dong Liu↗Yanxuan Yu↗

Vector databases (VecDBs) are increasingly deployed in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines where query processing and document ingestion occur concurrently. The index layer needs to provide low-latency search while incorporating new vectors without frequent global rebuilding. Existing VecDB pipelines typically operate within a uniform representation regime, despite substantial variation in the semantic granularity required across queries. This motivates an index design that supports incremental updates while adapting retrieval depth to query distribution and complexity. We propose Semantic Pyramid Indexing (SPI), a VecDB-layer indexing framework that organizes embeddings into $L$ semantically aligned resolution levels and selects retrieval depth per query via a lightweight uncertainty-aware controller. SPI supports progressive coarse-to-fine ANN search, level-wise streaming insertion without global rebuilds, and distributed execution through LSH partitioning with asynchronous gRPC coordination. Unlike hierarchical ANN structures with fixed traversal rules (e.g., SPANN), SPI adapts resolution at query time while remaining compatible with FAISS and Qdrant backends. On MS MARCO and Natural Questions, SPI achieves competitive Recall@10 with lower latency under the same dense encoder family, yielding a 1.4–2.3$\times$ average retrieval latency reduction under fixed Recall@10 targets relative to comparable approximate-ANN baselines. A prototype scaling study up to 8 nodes shows $6.2\times$ throughput scaling (${\approx}73\%$ efficiency); the 16-node configuration is included for completeness but shows diminishing efficiency. We provide a top-$K$ stability guarantee: queries with sufficient retrieval margin return an identical top-$K$ set at a shallower level. Code and configurations are available at https://github.com/FastLM/SPI_VecDB.

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24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

An integrated AI-microfluidic platform reveals the broad persistence and developmental potential of rare sperm in non-obstructive azoospermia

Authors:
Chen↗Xiao↗Wang↗Song↗Liu↗Shen↗Guo↗Li↗Zhao↗Mo↗Huang↗Xu↗…

Non-obstructive azoospermia (NOA) represents the most severe form of male infertility, severely limiting a patient's prospects for biological fatherhood when surgical retrieval fails. However, the true biological limits of NOA remain obscured by the inherent limitations of conventional gamete recovery protocols: standard centrifugation frequently causes substantial cell loss, masking extremely rare sperm, while surgical interventions are constrained by spatial sampling biases. Here we report SpermSeek, an integrated AI-guided microfluidic platform for real-time, non-destructive isolation of single sperm directly from semen. Operating at scalable throughput (0.36 mL/h), the system achieves 98.3% detection precision and a 95.5% target encapsulation efficiency, suppressing background debris. In a 59-patient NOA cohort, SpermSeek detected morphologically identifiable sperm in 64.4% (38/59) of cases, spanning diverse genetic etiologies, including AZFb/c microdeletions, and severe histopathological phenotypes, such as Sertoli-cell-only syndrome (SCOS). Notably, among a sub-cohort of 41 patients who remained consistently sperm-negative despite prior medical or micro-TESE interventions, our platform identified gametes in 53.7% (22/41) of these cases. Comprehensive safety profiling in healthy human donors and wild-type mice confirmed that processed sperm retain high DNA integrity and epigenomic concordance (r=0.98), supporting transgenerational developmental stability in mice. Furthermore, in a 26-patient validation cohort, SpermSeek recovered rare sperm in 11 cases. Utilizing gametes from a subset (n=5), we demonstrated their capacity to support early human embryogenesis, yielding high-quality cleavage-stage embryos with confirmed genomic euploidy. This work establishes a highly sensitive framework for re-examining the biological limits of human spermatogenesis, laying the foundation to expand autologous reproductive options for patients refractory to conventional retrieval protocols.

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

Airport Terminal Passenger Queue Forecasting for Departure Gates and Security Checkpoints

Authors:
Juhwan Lee↗Seokbin Yoon↗Keumjin Lee↗Hojong Baik↗Seyeon Jung↗

arXiv:2606.07622v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate passenger queue forecasting in airport terminals is essential for efficient departure operations, as it enables proactive congestion management. However, time-varying passenger demand and heterogeneous facility usage across multiple departure facilities make forecasting challenging. In this work, we propose a passenger queue forecasting framework that learns historical passenger flow patterns from operational data. The proposed model employs a Transformer-based architecture to capture temporal dependencies and inter-facility correlations using past queue length and waiting time at departure gates and security checkpoints, together with passenger throughput at check-in islands. The learned representations are mapped to two facility-specific prediction heads to predict queue length and waiting time at departure gates and security checkpoints. Experimental results demonstrate accurate forecasts up to two hours ahead. The proposed approach offers practical real-time decision support for proactive queue management and staff reallocation in airport terminal operations.

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