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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Vorticity Induced by Non-frontal Collisions of Quantum Droplets

arXiv:2606.17498v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rotational dynamics induced by the non-frontal binary collisions of quantum droplets composed of ultracold alkali atoms are analyzed. A theoretical study is presented within the extended Gross-Pitaevskii equation framework, using experimentally feasible conditions. Numerical experiments elucidate a rich landscape of possible topological excitations in the system that are robust towards measurements. The collision of heteronuclear quantum droplets composed of $^{41}$K and $^{87}$Rb atoms in the incompressible regime, gives rise to dynamical instabilities that spontaneously generate topological defects: vortex rings, dislocation lines, and vortices in one species. Their presence depends on the Weber number and the impact parameter. An experimental proposal for vortex detection in both real and Fourier space using interaction ramps is described.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Temperature driven false vacuum decay in coherently coupled Bose superfluids

arXiv:2602.03834v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The relaxation of a quantum field from a metastable state (false vacuum) to a stable one (true vacuum), also known as false vacuum decay, is a fundamental problem in quantum field theory and cosmology. We study this phenomenon using a two-dimensional interacting and coherently coupled Bose-Bose mixture, a platform that has already been employed experimentally to investigate false vacuum decay in one dimension. In such a mixture, it is possible to define an effective magnetization that acts as a quantum field variable. Using the Stochastic Gross-Pitaevskii equation (SGPE), we prepare thermal equilibrium states in the false vacuum and extract decay rates from the magnetization dynamics. The decay rates show an exponential dependence on temperature, in line with the thermal theory of instantons. Since the SGPE is based on complex scalar fields, it also allows us to explore the behavior of the phase, which turns out to become dynamic during decay. Our results confirm the SGPE as an effective tool for studying coupled magnetization and phase dynamics and the associated instanton physics in ultracold quantum gases.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Stab-QRAM: A Clifford-Only Quantum Oracle for Affine Boolean Data

arXiv:2509.26494v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Oracle-based quantum algorithms require coherent evaluation of classical functions on superposed inputs, and in fault-tolerant architectures this cost is dominated by non-Clifford gates: generic lookup constructions incur $T$-counts that grow with the data size. Here we show that affine Boolean functions $f(\mathbf{x})=A\mathbf{x}+\mathbf{b}$ over $\mathbb{F}_2$ – the algebraic core of parity checks, linear feedback shift registers, and cipher linear layers – are exactly the functions admitting computational-basis-preserving Clifford oracles, and we develop this correspondence into Stab-QRAM, a compiler mapping a specification $(A,\mathbf{b})$ to an ancilla-free circuit of CNOT and $X$ gates with zero $T$-count. Via K\"{o}nig's edge-coloring theorem, the compiled schedule provably attains the minimum depth for its gate set. Case studies spanning Simon-type oracles, block-encodings of $X$-type coset operators, and syndrome extraction for CSS codes show one compiler serving the algorithm, primitive, and error-correction layers of the quantum stack.

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

Multi-Bitwidth Quantization for LLMs Using Additive Codebooks

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed across heterogeneous hardware with varying resource constraints, the ability to adaptively manage the trade-off between performance and efficiency without retraining is critical. We propose Drop-by-Drop, a novel multi-bitwidth post-training quantization framework that enables inference-time precision control over LLM weights from a single trained model. Our method is theoretically grounded in information theory and successive refinement. We establish that LLM weights, which commonly follow a Gaussian distribution, can be optimally reconstructed with increasing fidelity as additional bits are incorporated, under a weighted mean squared error distortion motivated by LLM loss functions. To realize this in practice, Drop-by-Drop incorporates Matryoshka-style supervision into the loss function, exploiting the structure of additive codebooks. Drop-by-Drop produces a single model where ordered subsets of codebooks yield accurate partial reconstructions at each precision level. This approach significantly reduces storage and memory overhead by allowing a single checkpoint to serve multiple bitwidths, while maintaining competitive perplexity and accuracy across major architectures, such as Qwen, LLaMA, Gemma, and Mistral.

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

Through-Foliage Surface-Temperature Reconstruction for Early Wildfire Detection

We present a method to reconstruct surface temperatures through forest vegetation by combining signal processing and machine learning, enabling fully automated aerial wildfire monitoring with drones for early fire detection. Synthetic aperture (SA) sensing reduces canopy occlusion but introduces thermal blur. To overcome this, we train a visual state space model to recover subtle thermal signals of partially occluded soil and fire hotspots from blurred data. To address limited real-world training data, we generate realistic surface temperature simulations using a latent diffusion model, temperature augmentation, and procedural thermal forest modeling. On simulated datasets, our method reduces RMSE by 2-2.5 versus conventional thermal and uncorrected SA imaging; in field experiments on hotspots, RMSE improved by 12.8-fold and 2.6-fold, respectively. Our approach also generalizes to other thermal signals, including human signatures, capturing morphology and extent – critical where simple thresholding fails – while conventional imaging struggles with partial occlusion.

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

Beyond Accuracy: Measuring Bias Acknowledgment in Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Responsible AI Evaluation

arXiv:2606.15127v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning models are increasingly used in settings where the final answer is not the only object of review: educational tools may show students intermediate steps, decision-support systems may require human oversight, and audit workflows may inspect traces for misleading or biased input. In such settings, two responses can receive the same final-answer score while differing in whether the trace explicitly flags injected biasing content. Accuracy-only evaluation collapses these cases. We study this gap as a measurement blind spot for responsible evaluation and introduce a minimal trace-level diagnostic with two axes: susceptibility (whether the bias breaks a previously correct answer) and acknowledgment (whether the trace contains a rubric-defined surface reference to the injected content). Across thousands of biased GSM8K trials, GPT-4o and Claude Sonnet~4 have similar susceptibility rates ($1.3\%$ vs.\ $1.2\%$) but substantially different acknowledgment rates ($13.0\%$ vs.\ $75.0\%$) under the same rubric.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

From Bounding Boxes to Visual Reasoning: An On-Policy Data Annotation Tool for Vision-Language Models

Vision-language models (VLMs) are rapidly advancing toward sophisticated grounded structured visual reasoning. Training models for such advanced capabilities demands a new genre of data that seamlessly unifies spatial coordinates, open-vocabulary descriptions, structured attributes, and topological relationships into a singular representation. However, existing data annotation tools fundamentally fail to meet these intricate demands, suffering from three systematic bottlenecks: limited expressiveness, severe annotation-training decoupling, and poor data reusability. To bridge this infrastructure gap, we introduce an open-source annotation tool, ScreenAnnotator. First, we define a unified annotation atom schema that binds spatial, semantic, and structural primitives into a single unit. Second, we implement an on-policy annotation loop embedded with a Bayesian Annotation Verifier (BAV). Finally, we design a template-driven multi-task data synthesis process dynamically transforms static atoms into diverse multi-dimensional reasoning tasks, eliminating redundant re-annotation. The on-policy loop drives the annotation accept rate to nearly 100% on flowcharts and 77% on GUI screenshots, while steadily reducing per-image annotation time as labeled data accumulate. In the flowchart scenario, fine-tuning a VLM yields 76.1% average accuracy, which is a 35.1% point absolute gain. Our code is available at: https://github.com/WnQinm/Annotator.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

ROVE: Unlocking Human Interventions for Humanoid Manipulation via Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.17011v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Human interventions provide crucial corrective signals for post-training Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. However, enabling seamless humanoid interventions is a formidable systems challenge due to complex whole-body kinematics and dexterous-hand control. Consequently, the collected intervention trajectories are often suboptimal, and methods that rely on human interventions as expert supervision can absorb hesitant, inefficient, or even erroneous behaviors. To address both the system and algorithmic challenges, we propose ROVE, a reinforcement learning framework for humanoid VLA post-training with imperfect human interventions. First, ROVE introduces a human-in-the-loop pipeline capable of collecting deployment and intervention data for humanoid manipulation. Second, it utilizes Optimistic Value Estimation (OVE) to prioritize high-value behaviors from mixed-quality trajectories. To further robustify value estimation, we incorporate cross-embodiment human experience videos to provide rich supervision for long-tailed failure and recovery modes. The resulting critic yields informative advantage signals, steering the VLA actor to focus on high-value behaviors rather than indiscriminately imitating all actions. On challenging real-world contact-rich and fine-grained humanoid manipulation tasks, ROVE outperforms experience-learning baselines and consistently improves across multiple rollout-intervention iterations.

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

Intrinsic Computational Functionalism and Simulated Consciousness

arXiv:2606.15348v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A common objection to artificial or simulated consciousness is that a simulated brain is no more conscious than simulated water is wet. We address this from the perspective of Intrinsic Computational Functionalism (ICF): if consciousness is computationally constituted, it depends not on externally imposed descriptions but on the computational structures a system physically realizes in virtue of its own causal-dynamical organization. In previous work we developed Canonical Functionalism as a mathematically precise special case of this anti-interpretivist program, identifying functional states by their complete future input-output roles under a fixed interface. Here we argue that this input-output construction, though important, is incomplete: as a behavioral boundary case of ICF, it makes lookup tables and unfolded systems that preserve the same boundary behavior canonically equivalent. A consciousness-relevant canonical representation must instead include internal mechanisms, interventions, and joint readouts belonging to the relevant intrinsic organization. We therefore define a mechanism-enriched canonical structure and use it to formulate Intrinsic Causal-Computational Realization (ICCR), a realization relation preserving physical implementation, intrinsic state individuation, transition structure, intervention profiles, and the relevant agent-body-world boundary. The central result is conditional: if conscious properties are invariants of intrinsic causal-computational organization, then any system satisfying ICCR realizes the same consciousness-relevant properties, whether biological, artificial, or simulated. We discuss objections including biological naturalism and integrated information theory. We conclude that to deny consciousness to a simulation, one must identify a consciousness-relevant intrinsic causal-computational structure that the simulation fails to realize.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Machine Unlearning for the XGBoost Model with Network Intrusion Datasets

arXiv:2606.19220v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine Unlearning (MU) has emerged as an important technique for removing specific data points from trained models without requiring full retraining. However, most existing MU research focuses on deep learning and image data, leaving a gap in the domain of network intrusion detection, which relies heavily on tabular data. This work introduces XGBoost-Forget, an unlearning approach for the XGBoost model, to address this gap. The approach is evaluated on two tabular Network Intrusion (NI) datasets, IoT-23 and GeNIS, using multiple metrics to assess model performance, unlearning efficiency, and forgetting quality. The results show that XGBoost-Forget maintains predictive performance close to the original model while providing significantly faster unlearning, demonstrating its potential for MU in tabular NI settings.

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

PT-WNO: Point Transformer with Wavelet Neural Operator for 3D Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation

Point cloud semantic segmentation requires architectures that capture both fine-grained local geometry and broad global scene structure. Transformer-based networks have demonstrated strong performance by focusing on detailed local feature aggregation; however, global context is conveyed primarily through skip connections across encoder-decoder stages, which we argue is insufficient for full scene understanding. We hypothesize that augmenting skip connections with a learnable global feature extraction module allows the network to acquire scene-level knowledge before descending into local detail, leading to richer and more contextually grounded representations. To this end, we propose Point Transformer with Wavelet Neural Operato (PT-WNO), which integrates a shared Wavelet Neural Operator (WNO) branch alongside the skip connections of a point cloud transformer backbone. At each encoder-decoder transition, point features are projected onto a dense 3D volumetric grid where the WNO captures multi-scale global spectral context through learnable wavelet decomposition and reconstruction. These global features are fused back into the network via lightweight adapters, complementing rather than replacing the existing skip connections. Experiments on four large-scale 3D point cloud benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of PT-WNO. On S3DIS (Area 5), PT-WNO achieves 71.59% mIoU, outperforming the Point Transformer v3 (PTv3) baseline by +1.03 points. On DALES it achieves 81.05% mIoU (+1.47 over the baseline). On ScanNet~v2, PT-WNO obtains 76.19% mIoU, remaining competitive with the baseline (76.36%).

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

Sumi: Open Uniform Diffusion Language Model from Scratch

Diffusion models have become a promising alternative to autoregressive models. Among these, uniform diffusion language models (UDLMs) permit any token to be updated at any step, in principle enabling more flexible generation. However, no UDLM has yet been pretrained from scratch at both large parameter scale and large token budget. Both autoregressive modeling and masked diffusion modeling already have capable models at scale that the community can study and build on; uniform diffusion has none. A scratch-pretrained UDLM at scale would provide a clean reference point for studying scaling behavior, generation dynamics, controllability, and trade-offs against established autoregressive and masked diffusion models. To this end, we introduce Sumi ("ink" in Japanese), a fully open 7B uniform diffusion language model pretrained from scratch on 1.5T tokens. Sumi performs competitively with autoregressive models trained at comparable token budgets on knowledge, reasoning, and coding benchmarks, while under-performing on commonsense benchmarks, where our education-heavy data mixture is a likely contributor. We release our model weights, checkpoints, and full training recipe, including a complete specification of the data mixture over publicly available corpora. We hope this release enables the community to study native uniform diffusion at scale and catalyzes work on its as-yet poorly understood aspects.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

A saturation-absorption rubidium magnetometer with multilevel optical Bloch-equation modeling for intermediate-to-high fields

arXiv:2601.09115v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present SASHMAG (Saturated Absorption Spectroscopy High-field MAGnetometer), an atomic sensor designed for precision magnetic-field measurements in the intermediate-to-high field regime ($>0.2\,T$) using Rubidium-87 ($^{87}Rb$). The sensor operates in the hyperfine Paschen-Back regime, where the hyperfine and Zeeman interactions decouple, and utilizes counter-propagating pump-probe configuration in Faraday geometry to resolve isolated, Doppler-free Zeeman transitions. To interpret the resulting spectra in this strongly field-dependent regime, we developed a comprehensive multilevel optical Bloch-equation model solved explicitly in the uncoupled $\ket{m_I, m_J}$ basis, capturing state mixing and nonlinear saturation dynamics. This model reproduces measured spectra at sub-Doppler resolution and is consistent with analytical expectations for power broadening and thermal Doppler scaling. Magnetic field estimation is performed using a physics-constrained optimization routine that infers the magnetic field by minimizing the residual between experimentally extracted line centers and calculated transition frequencies from the field-dependent Hamiltonian. We demonstrate magnetic field retrieval from $0.2\,T$ to $0.4\,T$ with a precision of $\pm 0.0017 \,T$). Furthermore, the validated simulation establishes a foundation for generating synthetic training datasets, paving the way for autonomous, Machine Learning-enhanced magnetometry in applications ranging from MRI to fusion reactors.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

MGI: Member vs Generated Inference

arXiv:2606.23872v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As generative models increasingly produce samples that are indistinguishable from human-created content, it becomes difficult to determine whether a given data point was part of a model's natural training set or was generated by the model itself, especially when models memorize and reproduce training data. We formalize this challenge as Member vs Generated Inference (MGI): given a sample and a target generative model, infer whether the sample is a true training member or a generated output of that model. Focusing on image generation, we show that existing membership inference methods systematically misclassify generated samples as training members, while attribution-based methods often misclassify true members as generated. This failure arises because both approaches rely on likelihood-related signals that are similarly elevated for training examples and for the model's own outputs. To address MGI, we propose Data Circuit Breaker (DCB), a three-stage method that combines complementary signals from a generative model's autoencoder and latent generator to distinguish training members from generated samples. Across multiple generative models, including image autoregressive and diffusion models, DCB consistently addresses the shortcomings of membership inference and attribution methods, remains effective even when models reproduce near-duplicates of training samples, and generalizes to challenging model derivative settings in which new models are trained on generated data.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Mask Proposal Voting Based on Geodesic Framework for Robust Image Segmentation

Despite great advances, finding accurate segmentation remains a challenging task, especially in scenarios with cluttered backgrounds, complex intensity variations and topology appearance. Minimal path models have exhibited their strong ability in addressing image segmentation tasks. However, the performance of minimal paths-based segmentation approaches is heavily influenced by model initialization, hence limiting their application scope in practice. In this work, we propose a novel mask proposal voting framework that overcomes the major drawback of classical approaches, allowing robust segmentation even in complicated scenarios. Firstly, we introduce an efficient method for constructing adaptive domain cuts as a constraint for initializing the region-based min-cut evolution, by which diverse and reliable mask proposal candidates can be generated, substantially increasing the possibility of accurately covering the objective region by these proposals. Secondly, we propose a new mask voting scheme to build a voting score map encoding the final segmentation information. In contrast to classical path voting methods, our model allows incorporating priors to assign different importance to each individual mask. As a consequence, the proposed segmentation model is capable of accurately delineating object boundaries under complex scenarios, and is insensitive to initialization. Experiments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art minimal path-based approaches in both accuracy and robustness.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

When to Skip Syndrome Extraction in Surface-GKP Codes

arXiv:2606.24469v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fault-tolerant quantum error correction requires repeated syndrome extraction to address errors induced by the syndrome-extraction circuit itself. However, repeated syndrome extraction incurs significant overhead in terms of gate count and ancilla consumption (e.g., Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) states). Moreover, noisy syndrome extraction can itself inject additional errors into the data qubits. To address these issues, we propose a concrete adaptive skipping scheme for the surface-GKP code, a representative GKP-concatenated architecture, that uses analog information naturally generated during inner GKP correction. At each round, the scheme selects one of four actions: measuring both Z-type and X-type surface-code stabilizers, measuring only one type, or skipping both types and reusing previous syndromes. The decision is based on a reliability comparison between reusing the previous syndrome value and performing a new noisy syndrome extraction. Using circuit-level simulations, we show that the adaptive skipping scheme can reduce the number of surface-code stabilizer measurements while maintaining logical error rates comparable to or lower than those of the full-measurement baseline. The improvement is most pronounced when gate and measurement noise are larger than idle noise, so that avoiding unnecessary syndrome extraction reduces the noise injected into the code. These results indicate that analog information from inner GKP correction can be used not only to improve decoding but also to reduce the measurement overhead of outer-code syndrome extraction.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Detecting AI-Generated Content on Social Media with Multi-modal Language Models

Generative AI has enabled the creation of photorealistic images and videos that are increasingly disseminated on social media, often used for spam, misinformation, manipulation, and fraud. Existing AI-generated content (AIGC) detection methods face challenges including poor generalization to new generation models, reliance on single modalities, and lack of interpretable explanations. We present our pipeline that mitigates these issues by continuously curating diverse multi-modal social media data and training a compact vision-language model for detection and explanation. Our model achieves state-of-the-art detection performance on public benchmarks and demonstrates robust detection and explanation capabilities on internal social media datasets across multiple platforms. We deployed our model for post recommendation on social media platforms and observed positive downstream impacts on user engagement, demonstrating that it is feasible to perform effective AIGC detection in dynamic, real-world social media environments.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

FloatDoor: Platform-Triggered Backdoors in LLMs

arXiv:2606.19535v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in sensitive settings such as software engineering, where their outputs directly shape downstream artifacts. Recent work has shown that an identical model can produce measurably different outputs depending on the deployment platform, a consequence of non-associative floating-point arithmetic and divergent kernel implementations. We study the security implications of this platform-dependent variability and uncover a novel attack surface on LLM deployments. We introduce FloatDoor, the first input-independent, platform-triggered backdoor attack against generative LLMs. The compromised model exhibits adversary-chosen behavior when served on a target platform and is otherwise benign. FloatDoor is realized through two lightweight LoRA adapters, one that amplifies inter-platform numerical divergence and one that binds the resulting platform signature to a malicious downstream task, while leaving aggregate model utility largely intact. FloatDoor exploits a pronounced time-of-check, time-of-use gap between model auditing and serving. We demonstrate FloatDoor on Qwen3-4B across a broad range of deployment targets, including NVIDIA GPUs, Google TPUs, AWS Graviton, and Alibaba Yitian-710. As a final case study, we show that FloatDoor reliably induces exploitable code vulnerabilities on a chosen target platform. Our results establish a new class of attacks on LLM deployments and underscore the pressing need for trusted model supply chains in sensitive, LLM-powered applications.

19.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-23

Efficient generation of epitope-targeted antibodies with Germinal

Obtaining antibodies to specific protein targets is a widely important yet experimentally laborious process. Meanwhile, computational methods for antibody design have been limited by low success rates that require resource-intensive screening. Here we introduce Germinal, a broadly enabling generative pipeline that designs antibodies against specific epitopes with nanomolar binding affinities while requiring only low-n experimental testing. Our method co-optimizes antibody structure and sequence by integrating a structure predictor with an antibody-specific protein language model to perform de novo design of functional complementarity-determining regions onto a user-specified structural framework. When tested against four diverse protein targets, Germinal designed functional antibodies across all targets and binder formats, testing only 43–101 designs for each antigen. Validated designs also exhibited robust expression in mammalian cells and high sequence and structural novelty. We provide open-source code and full computational and experimental protocols to facilitate wide adoption. Germinal achieves epitope-targeted, de novo complementarity-determining region design with high experimental success rates.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Exotic critical states as fractional Fermi seas in the one-dimensional Bose gas

arXiv:2602.17656v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Critical quantum field theories occupy a central position in modern theoretical physics for their inherent universality stemming from long-range correlations. As an example, the Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid (TLL) describes a wealth of one-dimensional quantum systems at low temperatures. Its behavior is deeply rooted in the emergence of an effective Fermi sea, leading to power-law correlations and Friedel oscillations. A promising direction to realize systems exhibiting novel universal behavior beyond TLL is through the generalization of the underlying Fermi sea. In this Letter, we show that fractional Fermi seas with reduced occupancy arise in an integrable Bose gas driven out of equilibrium by cyclic changes in interactions from repulsive to attractive. The correlation functions feature signatures of criticality incompatible with a conventional TLL, suggesting a novel critical phase. Our predictions, based on Generalized Hydrodynamics, are directly relevant to cold atoms.

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

Active Inference for Adaptive Traffic Signal Control in Noisy Nonstationary IoT Environments

arXiv:2606.13698v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Urban traffic signal control at IoT-instrumented intersections must remain effective under sensor occlusion, weather attenuation, and nonstationary demand. Conventional controllers degrade under these conditions, and learned policies remain difficult to audit. To address these challenges, we propose an active inference controller for a four-arm signalized intersection that dynamically selects phases by minimizing expected free energy (EFE) over Gaussian beliefs about per-direction congestion levels, yielding a fully traceable decision pipeline. We benchmark the controller in a SUMO traffic simulator against a rule-based heuristic and a deep Q-network (DQN) across four scenarios that progressively increase noise and nonstationarity, spanning sensor occlusion, adverse weather, and stochastic accidents. Across 100 independent random evaluations per scenario, active inference attains the lowest idle times and CO2 emissions in the noisiest scenarios (56,977 s and 29.12 kg vs. 71,741 s and 30.56 kg for DQN). These gains come at a modest cost in bus priority service rate and phase switch frequency.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Will AI Agents Free Us From Meaningless Work? A Human-Centered Analysis

arXiv:2606.12430v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Some claim that AI agents will free workers from the boring parts of their jobs, yet little is known about how workers themselves identify which tasks should be automated. Prior research focuses on occupations, overlooking that workers experience varying levels of meaning across tasks within the same role. We address this gap with a task-level analysis grounded in Graeber's theory of bullshit jobs. Using ratings from 202 workers on 171 workplace tasks, we (1) validate a five-item scale of perceived bullshitness, (2) show that perceived bullshitness strongly predicts desire for AI delegation, and (3) find that such tasks are also seen as requiring less human oversight. Together, these findings suggest that tasks perceived as bullshit are natural candidates for AI delegation, aligning worker preferences with perceived feasibility.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Mathematical analysis of the overall survival after chemoradiotherapy of limited-stage small cell lung cancer and the effect of dose/fractionation

The purpose of this work is to analyze the 2-year overall survival (OS2y) of limited-stage small cell lung cancer (LS-SCLC) treated with chemoradiotherapy (CRT), aiming at characterizing the response of LS-SCLC, and in particular the /{beta} value and proliferation parameters. Through a systematic analysis of the literature, we collated a dataset containing 57 entries (3363 patients) of response of LS-SCLC treated with CRT. Radiotherapy schedules ranged from hyper- to hypofractionation. Four radiobiological models to describe the OS2y were investigated, with progressive levels of complexity including the effect of radiotherapy, chemotherapy, treatment year and toxicity. The Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) was used to compare models, and the profile likelihood methodology to compute confidence intervals. Model 4, which includes the effect of radiotherapy, chemotherapy, treatment year and dose-dependent toxicity, provided the best fits of the experimental data (lowest AIC value). While being the best model, model 4 still fails to provide a good prediction of the OS2y, in particular failing to predict the survival of the schedules achieving the lower/higher survivals. The radiobiological analysis of the dose-response of LS-SCLC to CRT does not allow to narrowly constrain the value of response parameters. We attribute this limitation to the large heterogeneity of this disease. Nonetheless, our analysis shows a large /{beta} value (>9 Gy, 95% CI), which implies a low fractionation effect in the radiotherapy of LS-SCLC. and an accelerated proliferation of tumor cells, {lambda}' > 1.6 Gy/day (95% CI), after a kick-off time of ~4-5 weeks, which supports the use of accelerated protocols to avoid the effect of tumor proliferation on the clinical outcome.

24.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-18

Daily briefing: The proteins that protect us from deadly mutations

Authors:

Proteins that ‘buffer’ the effects of mutations could help to treat diseases such as cancers. Plus, goats can follow human voices and the battle over a key ocean observatory project in the United States. Proteins that ‘buffer’ the effects of mutations could help to treat diseases such as cancers. Plus, goats can follow human voices and the battle over a key ocean observatory project in the United States.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

MuTRAP: Multi-trigger Trojans Attacking Robot Task Planning Systems

arXiv:2504.17070v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Robots need task planning methods to achieve goals that require more than one action. Recently, large pretrained models have demonstrated impressive performance in task planning. For instance, large language models (LLMs) can generate task plans using action and goal descriptions. Despite the rapid progress of large models in robot intelligence, their security implications remain only partially understood, leaving important gaps in the exploration of potential vulnerabilities in LLM-driven robotic planning systems. To investigate such risks, in this paper, we develop MuTRAP, the first multi-trigger trojan attack specifically designed and targeted for LLM-assisted robot task planners. MuTRAP follows the standard practice of LLM usage in robotics where the backbone LLM is typically frozen and hosted in a central server limiting attacker's reach. In contrast, MuTRAP injects backdoor using a small set of task-specific parameters. In addition, we develop a trigger optimization method for selecting multiple-trigger words that are most effective for different robot applications. For instance, one can use unique trigger word "herical" to activate a specific malicious behavior, e.g., cutting hand on a kitchen robot. Through MuTRAP that demonstrates the vulnerability of current LLM-based planners, our goal is to promote the development of secured robot intelligence. Details and demos are provided in: https://mutrap.github.io/MuTRAP/