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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

A Turbo-Inference Strategy for Object Detection and Instance Segmentation

Authors:
Zhen Zhao↗Gang Zhang↗Xiaolin Hu↗Liang Tang↗

Object detection and instance segmentation tasks are closely related. Existing top-down instance segmentation methods usually follow a detect-then-segment paradigm, where an initial detector is used to recognize and localize objects with bounding boxes, followed by the segmentation of an instance mask within each bounding box. In such methods, the detection accuracy directly influences the subsequent segmentation performance. However, previous research has seldom explored the impact of the instance segmentation task on object detection. In this paper, we present a turbo-inference strategy for the top-down methods that leverages the complementary information between detection and segmentation tasks iteratively. Specifically we design two modules: turbo-detection head and turbo-segmentation head, which facilitate communication between the tasks. The two modules form a closed loop that interlaces the detection and segmentation results without retraining the model. Comprehensive experiments on the COCO, iFLYTEK, and Cityscapes datasets demonstrate that our method substantially enhances both detection and segmentation accuracies with a certain increase in computational cost. The proposed method represents a tradeoff between prediction accuracy and inference speed. Codes are available at https://github.com/zhaozhen2333/Turbo-Learning.git.

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

MAMVI: 3D Test-Time Adaptation via Masked Multi-View Point Clouds

Authors:
Inseok Kong↗Geunyoung Jung↗Jiyoung Jung↗

3D point cloud models suffer significant performance degradation under distribution shifts caused by sensor noise, occlusions, and environmental changes. Test-time adaptation (TTA) has emerged as a practical paradigm for mitigating this issue during inference. Recently, leveraging multi-view augmentation has shown promise in improving 3D TTA performance. However, existing multi-view approaches are often constrained by sequential optimization that treats each view independently. This sequential optimization leads to substantial inference latency due to repetitive optimization steps, making real-time adaptation impractical. To address this, we propose Masked Multi-View Test-Time Adaptation (MAMVI), which replaces sequential optimization with a unified single-step adaptation. Specifically, MAMVI utilizes a hybrid masking strategy that combines fixed ratios for stability with Beta-distributed sampling for diversity. By aggregating losses across multiple views, MAMVI performs adaptation through a single backward pass based on multi-view consensus. Additionally, a confidence-based adaptive learning rate is used to dynamically adjust the adaptation intensity for each sample. Extensive experiments on ModelNet-40C, ShapeNet-C, and ScanObjectNN-C demonstrate that MAMVI achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on ShapeNet-C and ScanObjectNN-C. Moreover, it remains competitive on ModelNet-40C while delivering 4.9-8.9 times faster inference, making it highly suitable for real-time applications. Our code is available at https://github.com/Inseok-kong/MAMVI

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03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Questioning the Coverage-Length Metric in Conformal Prediction: When Shorter Intervals Are Not Better

Authors:
Yizhou Min↗Yizhou Lu↗Lanqi Li↗Zhen Zhang↗Jiaye Teng↗

arXiv:2601.21455v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Conformal prediction(CP) has become a cornerstone of distribution-free uncertainty quantification, conventionally evaluated by its coverage and interval length. This work critically examines the sufficiency of these standard metrics. We demonstrate that the interval length might be deceptively improved through a counter-intuitive approach termed Prejudicial Trick(PT), while the coverage remains valid. Specifically, for any given test sample, PT probabilistically returns an interval, which is either null or constructed using an adjusted confidence level, thereby preserving marginal coverage. While PT potentially yields a deceptively lower interval length, it introduces practical vulnerabilities: the same input can yield completely different prediction intervals across repeated runs of the algorithm. We formally derive the conditions under which PT achieves these misleading improvements and provide extensive empirical evidence across various regression and classification tasks. Furthermore, we introduce a new metric interval stability which helps detect whether a new CP method implicitly improves the length based on such PT-like techniques. Code is available at https://github.com/benben-cd/PT-Conformal-Prediction.

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

A Controlled Study of Decoding-Time Truthfulness Methods on Instruction-Tuned LLMs

Authors:
Ao Sun↗

In this work, we introduce CHAIR (Classifier of Hallucination As ImproveR), a supervised framework for detecting hallucinations by analyzing internal logits from each layer of every token. Our method extracts a compact set of features such as maximum, minimum, mean, standard deviation, and slope-from the token logits across all layers, enabling effective hallucination detection without overfitting. Experiments on TruthfulQA and MMLU datasets demonstrate that CHAIR significantly improves detection accuracy, particularly in zero-shot scenarios, showcasing its robustness and generalizability. Beyond hallucination detection, CHAIR highlights the potential of using internal representations for designing advanced decoding strategies. By leveraging patterns in logits, we suggest that more sophisticated models and adaptive decoding methods could further reduce hallucinations and enhance text completion quality. CHAIR not only offers a practical solution for detecting hallucinations but also lays the groundwork for exploring richer representations in LLMs to improve their factuality and coherence.

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

Transformers Learn the Mestre-Nagao Heuristic

Authors:
Pranav Venkata Konda↗

arXiv:2606.15036v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We train a two-layer transformer encoder to classify rational elliptic curves $E/\mathbb{Q}$ of conductor $\leq 10000$ as either rank 0 or rank 1 from the first 128 normalized Frobenius traces. We achieve >99% accuracy on both classes, and accuracy is essentially unchanged on test curves with no isogeny or quadratic-twist relative in the training set. We then apply techniques from mechanistic interpretability such as attention analysis, linear probing, activation patching, logit attribution, and neuron-level circuit analysis to reverse-engineer the algorithm the (centroid in function space) model learned. We find that a sparse circuit of 20 out of 512 layer-1 MLP neurons is sufficient for rank prediction under a linear probe with an AUROC of 0.992 at plateau, implementing a push-pull detector architecture of rank-0 and rank-1 detectors with a one-sided readout. However, we notice that the model has sub-optimal readout problems indicating a mismatch in rank-order between the readout pathway and the discriminative circuit. Critically, the learned input weights of the top discriminating neuron match the Mestre-Nagao sum heuristic weights $\log(p)/(p\cdot \log{B})$ with a Spearman coefficient $r = 0.997$ and Pearson coefficient $r = 0.952$: the model has learnt a result from analytic number theory from the Frobenius trace data alone. We additionally find that all 50 independently trained models concentrate CLS attention on prime positions at 2-50$\times$ the rate of composite positions. The CLS embedding encodes $\log{L(E,1)}$ with $R^2 = 0.962\pm 0.011$ across the 50 models (after controlling for the conductor). Activation patching analysis reveals that attention weights are dissociated from causal information flow. Additionally, the 50 solutions from training are near-identical in function space (with pairwise agreement $>$98.8%) despite large weight space barriers.

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06.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

A <i>Streptomyces</i> megacluster encodes synergistic biotin-targeting antibiotics

Authors:
R. Gordzevich↗

Natural products remain a major source of antibiotics, but discovery efforts have traditionally treated biosynthetic gene clusters as sources of individual bioactive molecules1–5. Increasing evidence has suggested that microorganisms can instead encode coordinated multi-metabolite systems, yet the genetic architectures and biological logic of such systems remain poorly understood6–12. Here we show that Streptomyces spp. encode a highly conserved biosynthetic megacluster that produces four structurally distinct natural product families—stravidins, acidomycin, dapamycins, and 2-methyl-7-keto-8-aminopelargonic acid (α-Me-KAPA)—alongside the biotin-binding protein streptavidin. These components converge on bacterial biotin metabolism through complementary mechanisms, including enzyme inhibition, prodrug activation, cofactor mimicry and biotin sequestration. The encoded metabolites are co-produced and act synergistically across Gram-negative and mycobacterial species, with stravidin S2 and α-Me-KAPA showing enhanced efficacy in combination in a mouse model of multidrug-resistant Escherichia coli infection. This megacluster reveals a genetically encoded chemical arsenal that functions as a naturally evolved combination therapy against a conserved metabolic pathway. More broadly, our findings suggest that higher-order biosynthetic architectures may represent an overlooked reservoir of antibiotic mechanisms and support a shift from discovering isolated natural products to reconstructing native synergistic systems. In Streptomyces spp., a conserved biosynthetic gene megacluster produces an arsenal of distinct antimicrobials that converge on bacterial biotin biosynthesis as a naturally evolved combination therapy.

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07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

AfriqueLLM: How Data Mixing and Model Architecture Impact Continued Pre-training for African Languages

Authors:
Hao Yu↗Tianyi Xu↗Michael A. Hedderich↗Wassim Hamidouche↗Syed Waqas Zamir↗David Ifeoluwa Adelani↗

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly multilingual, yet open models continue to underperform relative to proprietary systems, with the gap most pronounced for African languages. Continued pre-training (CPT) offers a practical route to language adaptation, but improvements on demanding capabilities such as mathematical reasoning often remain limited. This limitation is driven in part by the uneven domain coverage and missing task-relevant knowledge that characterize many low-resource language corpora. We present \texttt{AfriqueLLM}, a suite of open LLMs adapted to 20 African languages through CPT on 26B tokens. We perform a comprehensive empirical study across five base models spanning sizes and architectures, including Llama 3.1, Gemma 3, and Qwen 3, and systematically analyze how CPT data composition shapes downstream performance. In particular, we vary mixtures that include math, code, and synthetic translated data, and evaluate the resulting models on a range of multilingual benchmarks. Our results identify data composition as the primary driver of CPT gains. Adding math, code, and synthetic translated data yields consistent improvements, including on reasoning-oriented evaluations. Within a fixed architecture, larger models typically improve performance, but architectural choices dominate scale when comparing across model families. Moreover, strong multilingual performance in the base model does not reliably predict post-CPT outcomes; robust architectures coupled with task-aligned data provide a more dependable recipe. Finally, our best models improve long-context performance, including document-level translation. Models and code have been released on [Huggingface](https://huggingface.co/collections/McGill-NLP/afriquellm) and [Github](https://github.com/McGill-NLP/AfriqueLLM).

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08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Contrast-Informed Augmentation and Domain-Adversarial Training for Adult-to-Neonatal MR Reconstruction Generalization

Authors:
Stephen Moore↗Lara Leijser↗Richard Frayne↗Roberto Souza↗

Purpose: To investigate whether contrast-informed data augmentation and domain-adversarial training improve the adult-to-neonatal generalization of the E2E-VarNet. Methods: Three training regimes were investigated: (1) adult-only training with unaugmented adult data, (2) mixed training with paired unaugmented and neonatal-informed augmented adult data, and (3) mixed training with a domain-adversarial objective. Models were trained on retrospectively undersampled multi-coil adult T2-weighted brain MR data and evaluated on neonatal and adult test data at acceleration factors $R=4$ and $R=8$ using quantitative metrics and qualitative evaluation. Feature analyses assessed whether domain-adversarial training altered the latent representations of unaugmented adult, augmented adult, and neonatal test samples. Results: Mixed training (Mixed) and mixed domain-adversarial training (Mixed-DAT) outperformed unaugmented adult-only training (Unaug-Only) when evaluated on neonatal data. At R=4, Mixed-DAT achieved the best performance (SSIM = 0.924 +/- 0.027, PSNR = 33.98 +/- 1.15 dB). At R=8, Mixed-DAT performed best when measured using SSIM (0.848 +/- 0.031 vs. 0.766 +/- 0.037 for Unaug-Only and 0.814 +/- 0.035 for Mixed) and Mixed performed best when measured using PSNR (29.56 +/- 0.83 dB vs. 26.26 +/- 0.78 dB for Unaug-Only and 29.43 +/- 0.83 dB for Mixed-DAT). Qualitative assessment of t-SNE plots suggested that Mixed-DAT increased the overlap among the latent representations of the unaugmented adult, augmented adult, and neonatal test data. Conclusion: Contrast-informed augmentation and domain-adversarial training improved adult-to-neonatal generalization of deep learning-based MR reconstruction. These findings suggest that contrast-informed data augmentation combined with adversarial training may improve robustness to domain shift in undersampled neonatal MR reconstruction.

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09.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-08

DDI_single: Single-Sequence-Based Protein Domain Assembly

Authors:
Shengyi↗

Domains are the basic units of protein structure and function. Appropriate inter-domain organization is critical to enable cooperative execution of multiple related functions. It is thus a crucial step to determine the full-length structure of multi-domain proteins for the purpose of elucidating their functions and designing new drugs to regulate these functions. Existing structure prediction algorithms are generally better at solving the internal conformation of domains, rather than modeling the relative positions between domains. To address the challenge of accurately determining multi-domain protein conformations, we develop a single-sequence-based domain assembly algorithm called DDI_single. DDI_single directly extracts features from the amino acid sequence using the protein language model ESM-1b, and accurately predicts the interactions between residue pairs of structural domains through a novel gated cross-attention module, thus achieving the correct assembly of structural domains. With the knowledge of domain definition, DDI_single achieves more than 20% higher accuracy in the task of predicting the relative distances of residue pairs between domains than that of the single-sequence-based structure prediction algorithm trRosettaX_single. When assembling domains with known spatial conformations, DDI_single correctly assembles 74.4% of the samples in the test set (TM-score>0.5). When assembling domains with unknown spatial conformations, in cases where the internal spatial conformations of domains are correctly modeled, DDI_single correctly assembles 73.9% of the samples.

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10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Reasoning in Computer Vision: Taxonomy, Models, Tasks, and Methodologies

Authors:
Ayushman Sarkar↗Zhenyu Yu↗Mohd Yamani Idna Idris↗

Visual reasoning matters for many computer vision tasks that go beyond surface-level object detection and classification. Despite progress in relational, symbolic, temporal, causal, and commonsense reasoning, existing surveys typically cover only one part of the problem, such as visual question answering, scene-graph generation, neuro-symbolic AI, or multimodal chain-of-thought, and rarely analyze reasoning types, methodologies, and evaluation protocols together. This survey addresses that gap. Following a structured literature review, we group visual reasoning into five major types (relational, symbolic, temporal, causal, and commonsense) and examine how each is implemented across methods that range from graph-based models, memory networks, attention mechanisms, and neuro-symbolic systems to reasoning with vision-language models (VLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs), including visual chain-of-thought, visual programming, and tool-augmented and test-time reasoning. We then review evaluation protocols for functional correctness, structural consistency, and causal validity, and we analyze their limits in generalizability, reproducibility, faithfulness, and explanatory power. We also identify open challenges: scaling to complex scenes, integrating symbolic and neural paradigms more deeply, the shortage of comprehensive benchmarks, language-prior shortcuts and hallucination in foundation models, and reasoning under weak supervision. Finally, we set out a research agenda for vision systems and argue that connecting perception and reasoning is necessary for transparent, trustworthy, and cross-domain models, especially in high-stakes settings such as autonomous driving and medical diagnostics.

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

deFOREST: Fusing Optical and Radar satellite data for Enhanced Sensing of Tree-loss

Authors:
Julio Enrique Castrillon-Candas↗Hanfeng Gu↗Caleb Meredith↗Yulin Li↗Xiaojing Tang↗Pontus Olofsson↗Mark Kon↗

arXiv:2510.14092v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper we develop a deforestation detection pipeline that incorporates optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data. A crucial component of the pipeline is the construction of anomaly maps of the optical data, which is done using the residual space of a discrete Karhunen-Lo\'{e}ve (KL) expansion. Anomalies are quantified using a concentration bound on the distribution of the residual components for the nominal state of the forest. This bound does not require prior knowledge on the distribution of the data. This is in contrast to statistical parametric methods that assume knowledge of the data distribution, an impractical assumption that is especially infeasible for high dimensional data such as ours. Once the optical anomaly maps are computed they are combined with SAR data, and the state of the forest is classified by using a Hidden Markov Model (HMM). We test our approach with Sentinel-1 (SAR) and Sentinel-2 (Optical) data on a $92\,km \times 92\,km$ region in the Amazon forest. The results show that both the hybrid optical-radar and optical only methods achieve high accuracy that is superior to the recent state-of-the-art hybrid method. Moreover, the hybrid method is significantly more robust in the case of sparse optical data that are common in highly cloudy regions.

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12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Validating Field-Feasible Measures of Recent Khat Use: A Diagnostic Accuracy Study Comparing Amphetamine Immunoassay and Assisted Self-Report Against HPLC in an Ethiopian Male Cohort

Authors:
Atkinson↗H. F↗Mekonnen↗Suleman↗Oetzel↗Soboka↗Widmann↗Toennes↗S. W↗Tesfaye↗Stewart↗S. A↗…

Background: Khat (Catha edulis) is a widely consumed natural amphetamine-analog used across East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. Accurate field-feasible measurement of recent khat use is a prerequisite for large-scale epidemiological research; yet no validated alternatives to laboratory reference methods have been identified in the scientific literature. This nested validation study evaluated the diagnostic accuracy of two point-of-care measures, a commercial amphetamine immunoassay and a Timeline Followback (TLFB) Assisted Self-Report (ASR), against high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) quantification of urinary norephedrine (NE), while additionally assessing agreement between the two field measures. Methods: A prospective, random sub-sample of 119 male participants aged 18-40 years from the Gilgel Gibe Field Research Center (GGFRC) longitudinal cohort, Ethiopia (validation timepoint T2, 2015), was used. Three index-reference comparisons were conducted: (1) amphetamine immunoassay (nal von minden, Drug-Screen AMP test, 300 ng/mL cutoff) vs. HPLC; (2) binary ASR (past-week use) vs. HPLC; and (3) binary ASR vs. immunoassay. Sensitivity (positive percent agreement, PPA), specificity (negative percent agreement, NPA), positive predictive value (PPV), negative predictive value (NPV), overall accuracy (overall percent agreement, OPA), and Cohen's kappa were calculated with 95% confidence intervals. Pre-specified secondary analyses applied three pharmacokinetically-informed recall windows (0-2, 3-5, and 6-7 days prior to interview) to ASR. Results: Against HPLC (77 positive, 42 negative), the immunoassay showed perfect specificity (1.0 [0.916-1.0]) and PPV (1.0 [0.91-1.0]) but low sensitivity (0.52 [0.40-0.64]), NPV (0.53 [0.42-0.65]), overall accuracy (0.69 [0.60-0.77]), and weak kappa (0.43 [0.34-0.52]). Binary ASR showed high sensitivity (0.96 [0.89-0.99]), specificity of 0.60 [0.433-0.74], PPV (0.81 [0.72-0.89]), NPV (0.89 [0.72-0.98]), with overall accuracy 0.83 [0.75-0.89] and moderate kappa (0.60 [0.51,0.69]). Restricting ASR to use within 0-2 days improved specificity to 0.69 [0.52-0.84], PPV to 0.86 [0.77-0.93], overall accuracy to 0.87 [0.79-0.93], and kappa to 0.69 [0.61-0.78] (moderate), while sensitivity (0.96 [0.89-0.99]) and NPV (0.89 [0.72-0.98]) remained stable. Against the immunoassay, ASR achieved high PPA of (1.0 [0.91-1.0]), NPA of 0.35 [0.25-0.47], OPA of 0.57 [0.48-0.66], and minimal kappa (0.27 [0.19-0.35]). Conclusions: Time-stratified ASR (0-2 days) is a valid, scalable alternative to biological testing for recent khat use in resource-limited settings. The immunoassay's 300 ng/mL cutoff functions as a marker of heavy or recent high-dose khat use rather than any-use detection. Its perfect specificity and PPV make it valuable as a confirmatory test for substantial exposure, while its lower sensitivity reflects calibration to amphetamine rather than to khat-derived cathinone metabolite. Keywords: khat; Catha edulis; diagnostic accuracy; STARD; self-report; immunoassay; HPLC; Ethiopia; substance use measurement

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

AuAu: A Benchmark for Auditing Authoritarian Alignment in Large Language Models

Authors:
Andreas Einwiller↗Max Klabunde↗Florian Lemmerich↗

The worldwide surge of authoritarianism, combined with the increasing central role in users' everyday lives, raises the question of to what extent specific models exhibit or promote authoritarian attitudes and characteristics. We introduce AuAu, a comprehensive benchmark that aims to assess the risk of LLMs generating responses with authoritarian tendencies. This benchmark combines three evaluation approaches: (i) psychometric questions from an extensive pool of 15 human validated instruments; (ii) contextual behavior vignettes probing intended actions in concrete situations; and (iii) responses to realistic user prompts. Unlike prior work, AuAu evaluates not only a general closeness towards authoritarianism but also the established sub-concepts Authoritarian Aggression, Authoritarian Submission, and Conventionalism. Evaluating 17 models from China, the EU, Russia, and the USA, we find that all tested models exhibit substantial authoritarian response rates under the psychometric evaluation, though rates drop significantly in increasingly more realistic downstream task. We further find that an authoritarian system prompt easily manipulates 15 out of 17 models to promote increased authoritarianism. Our results underscore the need for continued, systematic auditing of LLM-based AI systems to detect and ultimately mitigate undesired authoritarian tendencies in generated output. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/andreaseinwiller/AuAu

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

Synthetic Counteradaptation: A Principle of Human-AI Co-evolution

Authors:
Ivar Frisch↗Jackie Kay↗Philip Moreira Tomei↗

arXiv:2606.15503v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we introduce the concept of synthetic counteradaptation, a process where human and AI systems co-evolve by adapting to each other's strategies and behaviors. Synthetic counteradaptation occurs when AI systems develop novel strategies or social protocols, prompting humans to extract insights and adapt their own behaviors in response, leading to the emergence of new agent interaction dynamics. To illustrate these dynamics, we analyze examples from various contexts, including the game of Go, mixed-motive social interactions, and geopolitical simulations. By exploring these cases, we demonstrate how synthetic counteradaptation provides a framework for understanding the recursive and co-evolutionary nature of human-AI interactions in multi-agent environments.

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15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quantum geometrical description of hole spin qubits far away from the $\Gamma$-point

Authors:
Zolt\'an Gy\"orgy↗Dmitry Miserev↗Jelena Klinovaja↗Daniel Loss↗

arXiv:2606.14683v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hole spin qubits provide one of the leading platforms for spin-based quantum computing due to their large intrinsic spin-orbit interaction (SOI), which enables fast electrical manipulation. The SOI of planar quantum dots has mostly been investigated in theoretical studies by examining the SOI already present in the two-dimensional hole gas (2DHG). Here, we study the SOI created by the in-plane confinement by deriving non-perturbative effective Hamiltonians numerically for hole spin qubits. We find that the quantum geometry of the 2DHG naturally emerges, leading to a meaningful non-perturbative definition of pseudospin valid far away from the $\Gamma$-point. The SOI of the 2DHG and of the in-plane confinement have different forms; therefore, they cannot be turned off simultaneously, ruining the perfect spin-orbit switch functionality of spin qubits. We construct effective Hamiltonians using the symmetry approach for various low-dimensional hole systems: (i) a heavy-hole confined in a SiGe/Ge/SiGe heterostructure, (ii) a light-hole confined in SnGe/Ge, (iii) a gate-defined nanowire in SiGe/Ge/SiGe, and (iv) a hole confined in a Ge/Si core/shell nanowire. The non-perturbative effective Hamiltonians provide results with excellent agreement with the full Hamiltonians.

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

Reconstructing Template-Memorized Images from Natural Prompts

Authors:
Sol Yarkoni↗Mahmood Sharif↗Roi Livni↗

arXiv:2507.07947v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in generative models, such as diffusion models, have raised concerns related to privacy, copyright infringement, and data stewardship. To better understand and control these risks, prior work has introduced techniques and attacks that reconstruct images, or parts of images, from training data. While these results demonstrate that training data can be recovered, existing methods often rely on high computational resources, partial access to the training set, or carefully engineered prompts. In this work, we present a new attack that requires low resources, assumes little to no access to the training data, and identifies seemingly benign prompts that can lead to potentially risky image reconstruction. We further show that such reconstructions may occur unintentionally, even for users without specialized knowledge. For example, we observe that for one existing model, the prompt ``blue Unisex T-Shirt'' generates the face of a real individual. Moreover, by combining the identified vulnerabilities with real-world prompt data, we discover prompts that reproduce memorized visual elements. Our approach builds on insights from prior work and leverages domain knowledge to expose a fundamental vulnerability arising from the use of scraped e-commerce data, where templated layouts and images are closely tied to pattern-like textual prompts. The code for our attack is publicly available at https://github.com/TheSolY/lr-tmi.

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17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Exact log-depth preparation of highly entangled matrix product states

Authors:
Keisuke Murota↗Fr\'ed\'eric Sauvage↗Marco Ballarin↗Gabriel Matos↗Enrico Rinaldi↗

arXiv:2606.24475v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Preparing matrix product states (MPS) on a quantum device is a key subroutine in many quantum algorithms. The most competitive methods, based on the renormalisation group, prepare translationally invariant MPS of size $L$ and bond dimension $\chi$, up to an error $\varepsilon$, in circuit depth $\tilde O(\chi^{4}\log(L/\varepsilon))$ or $\tilde O(\chi^{6}\log\log(L/\varepsilon))$. We improve multiple aspects of these methods. First, using block-encoded correction maps, whose post-selection succeeds with constant probability, we render the preparation exact without sacrificing the scaling in $L$. Second, through a generalisation of oblivious amplitude amplification to isometries, we reduce the bond-dimension dependence, improving the depth to $\tilde O(\chi^{2}\log L + \chi^{4})$ or $\tilde O(\chi^{2}\log\log L + \chi^{4})$, and even to $\tilde O(\chi^{3}\log L)$ for incoherent preparations. Finally, we extend the framework to non-translationally invariant MPS and prove logarithmic-depth exact preparation for independent and identically distributed random tensor sequences. Confirmed by numerical studies, these results constitute, to the best of our knowledge, the most efficient exact MPS preparation protocols in the relevant parameter regimes.

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

Re-feeding Is Not Replaying: Measuring Replay Noise in Counterfactual Token-Credit Estimation

Authors:
Nils Matteson↗

Per-token counterfactual credit estimation asks which token in a language-model rollout caused the final answer to be right or wrong: cut the transcript at a pivot, substitute an alternative token, replay continuations, and compare outcomes. Published methods re-feed the transcript prefix as a fresh prompt, assuming this reproduces the state the model passed through during generation. We measure what that assumption costs on a stock inference engine, with a three-pass design: continuations resumed from the verified decode-time KV state, an identical second exact pass (a replica noise floor), and a re-feed pass. Across six configurations and three models (including a GRPO-trained checkpoint), at low-margin decision tokens, re-feeding changes the credit estimate at rates 14-28 percentage points above the replica floor (7-21pp under a treatment-independent conditioning; problem-clustered t = 2.9-6.4). Most changes are zero-boundary crossings of the quantized estimator rather than polarity reversals, and the perturbation is consistent with mean-zero, so averaged quantities are largely safe; but selection is not: a critical-token set chosen by thresholding $|\hat{A}_t|$ under re-feed overlaps the exact-resume selection at Jaccard 0.34-0.90, versus a 0.63-0.96 replica ceiling. A causal confirmation closes the loop: under vLLM's batch-invariant kernels all three passes are identical on every measured channel, with both disagreement rates exactly zero. Replica passes themselves disagree on 9-23% of eligible estimates: single-sample credit measurements at decision tokens are unreliable under any replay. Settings were fixed in advance; exact-pass cache hits in the second campaign are instrumented (100% hit rate, 3,434 pivots); total compute was under 10 USD. We recommend that counterfactual credit studies resume decoder state or use batch-invariant kernels, and report a replica floor.

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

Neural Architectures as Functional Priors in Physics-Informed Control Problems

Authors:
Sonia Rubio Herranz↗Fernando Carlos L\'opez Hern\'andez↗Antonio L\'opez Montes↗

arXiv:2606.19368v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this work we investigate the role of neural architectures as implicit functional priors in control problems governed by ordinary differential equations. Rather than focusing on highly complex problems, our objective is to investigate architecture-dependent effects in controlled dynamical systems within the simplest physically interpretable settings possible. In particular, we study a controlled linear RLC electrical circuit and a nonlinear Duffing-type dynamical system. Both systems are analyzed first through classical optimal-control formulations and later through PINN-based approaches. We compare different combinations of multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) and Fourier-based KAN-like architectures, and analyze their influence on the resulting controls. The numerical experiments suggest that different architectural choices systematically generate qualitatively distinct controls, even under identical governing equations, loss functionals, initial and target states, training parameters and physical constraints. Significant differences appear in the spectral structure, smoothness, energy distribution, and phase-space behavior of the learned solutions. A central observation of this work is the emergence of a functional specialization phenomenon when the neural architectures are allowed sufficient freedom to shape the structure of the learned controls. More specifically, in the systems considered here, Fourier-based architectures tend to produce trajectories with richer oscillatory content, whereas smoother low-frequency-biased architectures tend to generate more regular and energetically efficient controls. This suggests that different functional components of the control problem may be handled more efficiently by different neural architectures, leading to an implicit specialization between state representation and control generation.

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20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

PHANTOM: A Large-Scale Dataset of Multimodal Adversarial Attacks for Vision-Language Models

Authors:
Simone Gallivanone↗Hossein Khodadadi↗Mauro Dore↗Mauro Medda↗Nicola Franco↗

arXiv:2606.24388v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a large-scale, open-source dataset of pre-generated adversarial attacks for vision-language models (VLMs). The dataset is designed to be diverse, representative, and practical, extending existing benchmarks by covering 10 high-level categories and 55 subcategories of harmful intents. Our primary goal is to make adversarial data accessible to the research community, given the computational cost and complexity of generating large numbers of attacks. The dataset comprises 47 524 adversarial samples, generated using state-of-the-art attack strategies from recent literature. Our work complements existing efforts by consolidating and extending prior benchmarks from multiple established sources, resulting in 7 826 intents, and introduce an additional category to broaden coverage. This provides realistic evaluation resources for studying model robustness and alignment. Our dataset intends to enable researchers and practitioners to systematically evaluate the robustness and safety of VLMs, fine-tune attack-generation models, and develop or stress-test defensive guardrails under diverse adversarial conditions. By releasing this resource, we aim to lower the barrier to adversarial research and foster more reproducible, comprehensive, and comparable evaluations of VLM safety.

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21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Does the Data Processing Inequality Reflect Practice? On the Utility of Low-Level Tasks

Authors:
Roy Turgeman↗Tom Tirer↗

The data processing inequality is an information-theoretic principle stating that the information content of a signal cannot be increased by processing the observations. In particular, it suggests that there is no benefit in enhancing the signal or encoding it before addressing a classification problem. This assertion can be proven to be true for the case of the optimal Bayes classifier. However, in practice, it is common to perform "low-level" tasks before "high-level" downstream tasks despite the overwhelming capabilities of modern deep neural networks. In this paper, we aim to understand when and why low-level processing can be beneficial for classification. We present a comprehensive theoretical study of a binary classification setup, where we consider a classifier that is tightly connected to the optimal Bayes classifier and converges to it as the number of training samples increases. We prove that for any finite number of training samples, there exists a pre-classification processing that improves the classification accuracy. We also explore the effect of class separation, training set size, and class balance on the relative gain from this procedure. We support our theory with an empirical investigation of the theoretical setup. Finally, we conduct an empirical study where we investigate the effect of denoising and encoding on the performance of practical deep classifiers on benchmark datasets. Specifically, we vary the size and class distribution of the training set, and the noise level, and demonstrate trends that are consistent with our theoretical results.

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22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Applicability Condition Extraction for Therapeutic Drug-Disease Relations

Authors:
Guanting Luo↗Noriki Nishida↗Yuji Matsumoto↗Yuki Arase↗

arXiv:2606.14031v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Identifying conditions that a certain drug takes therapeutic effect on a target disease is crucial for clinical decision-making support. However, most existing biomedical information extraction methods have focused on identifying only relations between drugs and diseases, while largely overlooking the context-specific conditions where such relations can apply. To address this problem, we introduce the task of applicability condition extraction for therapeutic drug–disease relations from biomedical research literature. We create the first dataset that has manually annotated triples of drugs, diseases, and applicability conditions on biomedical paper abstracts with 1,119 drug-disease pairs. Using this dataset, we systematically evaluate the performance of a range of existing methods. In addition, we propose a new method that enhances LoRA to consider relations between drugs and diseases. Our method consistently outperforms strong baselines across different evaluation settings. The source code and dataset of this paper can be obtained from: https://github.com/guantingluo98/Drug-ACE

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23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Topological Neural Dynamics: A Neuron-wise Framework for Sequence Modeling

Authors:
Borui Cai↗Yao Zhao↗

arXiv:2606.21295v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing sequence models, including RNNs, LSTMs, continuous-time networks, and Transformers, share a common structural principle: layer-wise dynamics, where all neurons in the same layer co-evolve through a shared parameterized operator, leaving individual neurons no freedom to evolve independently. Yet in many complex dynamical systems, rich global behavior emerges precisely from locally evolving units interacting through structured connectivity. Inspired by this principle, we introduce Topological Neural Dynamics (TND), a sequence modeling framework that shifts computation from layer-wise to neuron-wise dynamics. TND represents a neural system as a directed neuron graph, an interaction operator, and a local dynamics function, where each neuron evolves independently and collective computation emerges from interactions through the explicit graph topology. We instantiate TND as a discrete-time graph-coupled dynamical system and evaluate it as a case study on a behavior cloning task in single-player Pong. Compared with Vanilla RNN, Sparse RNN, LSTM, Closed-form continuous-time neural network (CfC), and Transformer baselines, TND achieves the best catch rate and a mean of 17.47 consecutive catches per round, more than three times that of the strongest baseline. These results suggest that shifting from layer-wise to neuron-wise dynamics provides an effective inductive bias for sequence modeling.

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24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Mood-Aware Music Recommendation: Integrating User Affective Signals into Ranking Systems

Authors:
Terence Zeng↗Abhishek K. Umrawal↗

arXiv:2606.13858v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recommendation systems are essential in modern music streaming platforms due to the vast amount of available content. While collaborative filtering is widely used to suggest items based on the preferences of others with similar patterns, it performs poorly in domains where user-item interactions are sparse, such as music. Content-based filtering is an alternative approach that examines the qualities of the items themselves. Genre, instrumentation, and lyrics have been explored; however, relatively little attention has been given to emotion recognition. Since a user's emotional state strongly influences their music choice, incorporating mood signals offers a promising direction for personalization. In this work, we propose a mood-conditioned ranking framework that integrates user affective signals into the recommendation process via softmax-based sampling in the energy-valence space. We evaluate the approach via single-blind experiments in which participants compare recommendations from the proposed system against a baseline. The results indicate improved perceived recommendation quality, providing preliminary evidence for the effectiveness of incorporating mood-based inputs into music recommendations.

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

Estimating Mutual Information between Time Series and Temporal Event Sequences Across Diverse Analysis Tasks

Authors:
Haoji Hu↗Huaqing Mao↗Yijun Lin↗Xiaowei Jia↗Jinwei Zhou↗Minoh Jeong↗Yao-Yi Chiang↗

arXiv:2606.01602v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Pairwise dependence measures such as correlation and causality are fundamental to temporal data mining, yet there is still no principled and robust way to quantify dependence between heterogeneous data types, especially between continuous time series and discrete temporal event sequences. Existing approaches rely on ad hoc transformations or mutual-information estimators that are highly sensitive to quantization, repeated values, and event redundancy, leading to biased or unstable results in practice. We propose a nonparametric mutual information estimator that directly measures the dependence between time series and event sequences without data transformation, learning, or ad hoc discretization. Our method models the continuous-discrete duality of real-world time series to handle quantization and repeated-value artifacts and introduces a latent event clustering strategy to mitigate bias from event co-occurrence and redundancy. Together, these yield a robust and unified framework that bridges discrete and continuous mutual information. We evaluate the proposed estimator on four representative tasks: discrete-continuous time-delayed mutual information for causality analysis, global and local temporal repetition discovery, discrete covariate selection for time series forecasting, and continuous feature selection for classification. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show consistent improvements over existing methods in accuracy, robustness, and interpretability, positioning our approach as a general-purpose dependence operator for heterogeneous temporal data, similar to Pearson correlation for homogeneous time series. Code available at: https://github.com/HaojiHu/Multimodal-Temporal-Data-Quantification

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