Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

PLOS Medicine 2026-05-11 DOI: HASH:149a28e3ce6ea28b01955dbe0de39e43

Connected or chained by social media? Child and adolescent mental health in a digital era

Authors:

Silja Kosola↗

by Silja Kosola Social media has evolved from connection to compulsion, disproportionately harming children and adolescents. Addictive designs together with developmental vulnerability fuel mental health risks and highlight the urgent need for stricter age limits and stronger protections. In this Perspective, Silja Kosola outlines how social media disproportionately harms child and adolescent mental health, and argues that while recent policy changes aimed at protecting youth from social media are welcome, stricter age limits and greater accountability of social media companies are needed.

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02.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18548

Engagement Intensity as a Learner-Modeling Signal for Adaptive AI Ethics Instruction

Authors:

Yongkyung Oh↗Lynn Talton↗Alex Bui↗

arXiv:2606.18548v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Adaptive AI ethics instruction in graduate research training benefits from intake measures that reflect differences in prior LLM experience. Prior coursework or workshop attendance is an obvious candidate, but it is not clear whether it is associated with pre-instruction ratings on key AI perception items. We compare three candidate intake features, self-reported usage frequency, self-rated LLM familiarity, and prior AI education, across five baseline perception outcomes in 93 bioscience graduate and postdoctoral trainees enrolled in a required research ethics course. Usage frequency shows Holm-corrected associations with all five outcomes, self-rated familiarity with three, and prior AI education with none. A threshold-like pattern at the lower end of the scale is most visible for training interest and accuracy trust rather than appearing as a uniform gradient across all five outcomes. In a short intake survey, reported LLM use is more consistently associated with these perceptions than prior coursework or workshops, with self-rated familiarity serving as a secondary indicator. These results suggest that simple pre-instruction behavioral signals can inform lightweight intake profiling for adaptive AI ethics education.

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03.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12474

SAIGuard: Communication-State Simulation for Proactive Defense of LLM Multi-Agent Systems

Authors:

Ruxue Shi↗Yili Wang↗Mengnan Du↗Qinggang Zhang↗Rui Miao↗Yixin Liu↗Xin Wang↗

arXiv:2606.12474v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) solve complex tasks through inter-agent collaboration, but their communication-driven nature also allows security risks to spread across agents and trigger system-wide failures. Existing MAS defenses mainly follow a reactive paradigm after execution by detecting and isolating harmful agents, which may cause irreversible damage and degrade collaborative utility. To address this, we propose a proactive defense framework for MAS security, namely a Simulation-aware Interception Guard (SAIGuard). SAIGuard performs communication-state simulation over the MAS interaction graph, estimates the impact of incoming messages on local agent states and the global MAS state, and detects risky messages via reconstruction deviations from benign communication patterns. Instead of isolating agents, SAIGuard sanitizes or regenerates suspicious messages before it propagation into system. Experiments across diverse topologies and attack scenarios show that SAIGuard reduces attack success rates while maintaining MAS utility, outperforming reactive defenses.

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04.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2604.16689

The Query Channel: Information-Theoretic Limits of Masking-Based Explanations

Authors:

Erciyes Karakaya↗Ozgur Ercetin↗

arXiv:2604.16689v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Masking-based post-hoc explanation methods, such as KernelSHAP and LIME, estimate local feature importance by querying a black-box model under randomized perturbations. This paper formulates this procedure as communication over a query channel, where the latent explanation acts as a message and each masked evaluation is a channel use. Within this framework, the complexity of the explanation is captured by the entropy of the hypothesis class, while the query interface supplies information at a rate determined by an identification capacity per query. We derive a strong converse showing that, if the explanation rate exceeds this capacity, the probability of exact recovery necessarily converges to one in error for any sequence of explainers and decoders. We also prove an achievability result establishing that a sparse maximum-likelihood decoder attains reliable recovery when the rate lies below capacity. A Monte Carlo estimator of mutual information yields a non-asymptotic query benchmark that we use to compare optimal decoding with Lasso- and OLS-based procedures that mirror LIME and KernelSHAP. Experiments reveal a range of query budgets where information theory permits reliable explanations but standard convex surrogates still fail. Finally, we interpret super-pixel resolution and tokenization for neural language models as a source-coding choice that sets the entropy of the explanation and show how Gaussian noise and nonlinear curvature degrade the query channel, induce waterfall and error-floor behavior, and render high-resolution explanations unattainable.

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05.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11990

Time-Series Foundation Model Embeddings for Remaining Useful Life Estimation

Authors:

Amir El-Ghoussani↗Michele De Vita↗Ronald Naumann↗Valiseios Belagiannis↗

arXiv:2606.11990v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Remaining Useful Life (RUL) prediction is essential for industrial predictive maintenance, yet many learning-based approaches rely on extensive feature engineering or large labeled datasets to train task-specific sequence models. In this work, we introduce a lightweight learning approach, in which we leverage a frozen pretrained time-series foundation model (TSFM) and combine it with a small regression head for RUL estimation from multivariate sensor streams. More specifically, we use Chronos-2 as a frozen backbone to extract context window features and train a lightweight regression neural network for RUL prediction. Experiments on real-world industrial sensor data from two device types show that Chronos-2 features consistently improve over recurrent, convolutional, Transformer-based, and gradient-boosting baselines under the same preprocessing and evaluation protocol. We further analyze the impact of context length and find that performance improves significantly with longer histories, indicating that TSFM representation offer a practical and data-efficient alternative for RUL estimation in industrial settings.

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06.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2505.06589

Optimal Transport for Machine Learners

Authors:

Gabriel Peyr\'e↗

arXiv:2505.06589v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern machine learning repeatedly manipulates probability measures: empirical datasets, generated samples, latent distributions, class-conditional laws, particle systems, weights of wide networks and attention patterns. Optimal transport is useful in this setting because it compares such objects by asking how mass should move. It therefore combines a statistically meaningful notion of discrepancy with a geometry of interpolation, dual certificates and variational dynamics. This makes OT a common language for losses, generative modeling, domain adaptation, robust learning, barycenters, gradient flows and mean-field descriptions of learning algorithms. This book presents the main OT techniques with these machine-learning uses in mind. It starts from finite assignment and the Monge map viewpoint, passes to Kantorovich couplings and dual potentials, and then explains the algorithmic ideas that make transport usable: linear programming, semi-discrete cells, Sinkhorn scaling and low-dimensional projections. The same objects are then reused as a geometry of measures, giving Wasserstein distances, barycenters, gradient flows, dynamic formulations and Gaussian/Bures formulas. The final chapters emphasize the variants most relevant to modern ML: divergences and adversarial losses, entropic and unbalanced relaxations, robust or spectral ground geometries, Gromov and quantum extensions, and transport-based views of generative models, mean-field networks and attention dynamics. The goal is to keep the mathematics explicit while exposing the computational and geometric intuitions needed to turn OT into a working toolbox for machine learners.

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07.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14489

Physics-Informed Variational Quantum Classifier for Phase Detection in Strongly Correlated Matter

Authors:

Hugo Catal\'a↗Ezequiel Valero↗Germ\'an Rodrigo↗

arXiv:2606.14489v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The characterisation of quantum phases in strongly correlated systems is a crucial milestone for the deployment of quantum sensors. In this work, we present a Physics-Informed Variational Quantum Classifier (VQC) designed to detect the topological phase transition between the Fermi polaron quasiparticle and the molecular bound state. Unlike conventional Machine Learning approaches, our quantum architecture is constructed via the Trotterised time-evolution of an effective Hamiltonian, ensuring that the learnable parameters correspond to interpretable physical quantities. We show that the VQC efficiently discovers the optimal interferometric protocol, specifically the evolution time and effective bath interactions required to maximise the visibility of Ramsey fringes, thereby clearly distinguishing the Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) and Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) regimes. Furthermore, we report the validation of this classifier on the QRed superconducting quantum processor (BSC-CNS). Despite the intrinsic hardware noise and decoherence, the VQC preserves the relative ordering of the topological phases. We demonstrate that the physics-informed architecture achieves a linear gate complexity $\mathcal{O}(N)$, bypassing the exponential memory wall of classical simulation and ensuring scalability to many-body regimes.

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08.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2511.12193

MMRINet: Efficient Mamba-Based Segmentation with Dual-Path Refinement for Low-Resource MRI Analysis

Authors:

Abdelrahman Elsayed↗Ahmed Jaheen↗Mohammad Yaqub↗

Automated brain tumor segmentation in multi-parametric MRI remains a critical yet underserved challenge in resource-constrained clinical settings, where deep 3D networks requiring high-end GPUs are not viable. This is particularly acute across sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), where low-field scanners, heterogeneous patient demographics, and severe data scarcity compound the difficulty of applying standard deep learning pipelines. We present MMRINet, a lightweight segmentation architecture purpose-built for these constraints. At its core, MMRINet replaces quadratic-complexity self-attention with linear-complexity Mamba state-space models, enabling efficient long-range volumetric context modeling without the computational overhead of Transformer-based approaches. We combine two lightweight refinement components:Dual-Path Feature Refinement (DPFR), which extracts complementary detail and contextual representations to improve feature diversity under limited data, and Progressive Feature Aggregation (PFA), which hierarchically fuses multi-scale decoder outputs for sharper segmentation boundaries. Evaluated on the BraTS-Lighthouse SSA 2025 challenge dataset, comprising 3D MRI scans from Nigerian clinical sites, MMRINet achieves an average Dice score of 0.752 and an average HD95 of 12.23 mm with only ~2.5M parameters, outperforming all evaluated baselines, including UNETR, Swin-UNETR, SegMamba, and SegResNet3D. These results indicate that strong validation-set segmentation performance can be achieved with substantially reduced computation, offering a practical step toward AI-assisted neuro-oncology in low-resource clinical environments. Our GitHub repository can be accessed here: BioMedIA-MBZUAI/MMRINet.

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09.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20445

Space-time duality approach to (inhomogeneous) integrable quenches

Authors:

Riccardo Travaglino↗Pasquale Calabrese↗Katja Klobas↗Bruno Bertini↗

arXiv:2606.20445v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Characterising the universal aspects of non-equilibrium quantum many-body dynamics is one of the key goals of this century's physics research. Progress, however, is hindered by the lack of general theoretical frameworks for studying interacting quantum matter far from equilibrium. A recent breakthrough has been the realization that several key non-equilibrium quantities, such as the rate of growth of entanglement or the fluctuations of conserved charges within finite subsystems, can be related to equilibrium properties through a space-time duality that effectively exchanges the roles of space and time. This observation effectively enables the study of non-equilibrium phenomena using tools and concepts borrowed from equilibrium statistical mechanics and thermodynamics. A first proof of principle of this framework, dubbed space-time duality approach (SDA), was provided by interacting integrable systems, where thermodynamic properties can often be characterized exactly, while dynamical quantities typically remain beyond analytical reach. Subsequent developments, however, revealed that the SDA suffered from an intrinsic ambiguity, restricting its applicability to homogeneous quenches and to charge fluctuations arising from symmetric initial states. Here we resolve this ambiguity from first principles and derive closed-form predictions for entanglement growth and charge fluctuations after general quantum quenches. We benchmark our results against the exact analytical solution of the Rule 54 quantum cellular automaton and extensive TEBD simulations of the XXZ chain. Moreover we show that, when specialised to the entanglement entropy, our framework naturally reproduces the predictions of the quasiparticle picture.

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10.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13082

sebis at CRF Filling 2026: A Two-Stage Local LLM Pipeline for Medical CRF Filling

Authors:

Katharina Sommer↗Tristan Till↗Florian Matthes↗

The extraction of structured clinical information from unstructured EHR notes is a persistent bottleneck in healthcare informatics. While large language models (LLMs) offer high performance, their deployment in clinical settings is hindered by privacy risks, inference costs, and the tendency to hallucinate beyond textual evidence. We address these challenges for the CL4Health 2026 Case Report Form (CRF) filling task by proposing a fully local, domain-adapted pipeline using the MedGemma-27B model. Our two-stage architecture, which separates binary presence classification from value extraction, enforces strict adherence to textual evidence and ensures deterministic outputs for negated, uncertain, or unknown states. By leveraging item-specific, few-shot in-context learning without external API calls or fine-tuning, our approach achieves a macro-F1 score of 0.55 on the official English test track. This result secures second place among all locally-hosted, open-source submissions. Our work demonstrates that privacy-preserving, on-premise LLM pipelines can achieve near-competitive performance with proprietary frontier models, providing a practical, data-sovereign framework for clinical NLP.

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11.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.00947

Silent Failures in Federated Personalization of Foundation Models

Authors:

YongKyung Oh↗Alex Bui↗

arXiv:2606.00947v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Foundation models are increasingly personalized on decentralized private data through federated learning and are now deployed at scale under growing regulatory requirements for post-market monitoring. We argue that this convergence creates a distinct and under-recognized class of trustworthiness failures, which we term "Silent Failures." These include amplified bias, fairness collapse, and alignment erosion that may remain difficult to detect because federated learning's privacy constraints limit visibility into model behavior. A landscape analysis of existing benchmarks reveals a structural divide. Federated benchmarks evaluate system performance but provide limited insight into model behavior, whereas centralized trustworthiness benchmarks assess behavior but require model access incompatible with federated privacy. We introduce a taxonomy of six silent failure modes arising from the interaction of foundation model personalization, dataset shift, and core federated constraints. Our analysis shows that privacy-preserving training alone is insufficient for trustworthy deployment. We conclude with a research agenda for privacy-preserving behavioral evaluation and propose that silent failures become a standard diagnostic category for trustworthy federated artificial intelligence.

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12.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2601.02177

Why Commodity WiFi Sensors Fail at Multi-Person Gait Identification: A Systematic Analysis Using ESP32

Authors:

Oliver Custance↗Saad Khan↗Simon Parkinson↗

WiFi Channel State Information (CSI) has shown promise for single-person gait identification, raising interest in its use for contactless biometrics, continuous authentication, and passive identification. However, the feasibility of multi-person identification on low-cost commodity devices remains unclear. A critical question is whether weak multi-person performance is primarily an algorithmic limitation, or whether it reflects a more fundamental sensing ceiling on commodity WiFi hardware. We address this question through a systematic empirical study using commodity ESP32 WiFi sensors. We evaluated six different signal separation methods–FastICA, SOBI, PCA-ICA, NMF, Wavelet, and Tensor decomposition–across seven scenarios spanning 1-10 people in both controlled and realistic indoor environments. To investigate beyond classification accuracy, we introduce three diagnostic metrics: intra-subject variability (ISV), inter-subject distinguishability (ISD), and performance degradation rate (PDR). In all methods, performance remains moderate (39%-56% accuracy), with limited evidence that algorithmic choice alone solves the problem. The best-performing method, NMF, reaches 56% accuracy, while all methods exhibit extremely high feature-space overlap (97%-99%), unstable within-subject representations, and marked environmental sensitivity. These findings suggest that, under commodity ESP32 CSI constraints, dense multi-person gait identification is limited more by sensing quality and spatial diversity than by the chosen separation algorithm. Our results have direct implications for security and privacy: they call into question the practicality of commodity WiFi CSI as a robust multi-user biometric primitive for authentication, while also placing important bounds on the passive identification capabilities achievable with low-cost off-the-shelf WiFi hardware.

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13.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15569

A Decision-Theoretic View of Test-Time Training: When, How Far, and Which Directions to Adapt

Authors:

Tomoya Wakayama↗

arXiv:2606.15569v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Test-time training (TTT) adapts a pretrained model to each prompt via parameter updates, improving accuracy under pretraining-to-test distribution shifts. Yet, its performance often suffers from instability and sensitivity to hyperparameters such as update steps and subspace. We explain this behavior through a decision-theoretic lens, treating TTT as implicit Bayesian inference in the kernel regime. Under a Gaussian process benchmark, we show that TTT reduces prediction error when updates are spectrally matched to the prompt's signal-to-noise ratio and aligned with query-relevant eigen-directions. This perspective underpins the following results: (1) we show when fixed update steps and subspaces fail under distribution shifts, motivating adaptive strategies; (2) we prove that selecting update steps via prompt evidence admits a PAC-Bayes guarantee against overfitting; and (3) we characterize the Bayes-optimal update subspace under a linear-Gaussian correction model, yielding a scoring rule for selecting Transformer blocks and heads. Our theory helps explain the empirical instability of TTT, taking a step toward principled guidance for when, how far, and which directions to adapt.

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14.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18598

Optimizing Lithium Production Decisions under Geological, Demand, and Pricing Uncertainties: A POMDP Framework for Multi-Objective Decision Making

Authors:

Anna C. Edmonds↗Mansur M. Arief↗Robert J. Moss↗Mykel J. Kochenderfer↗Jef Caers↗

arXiv:2606.18598v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Decision making in lithium production is challenging, whether from an investor's perspective or a strategic production standpoint. Determining which mines to open and when to open them involves not only geological and price uncertainties, but also complexities around the choice of extraction method, from direct lithium extraction to hard rock mining. Prior work explored models of this problem and different methods to optimize mining decisions; these models did not account for uncertainty in pricing, uncertainty in demand, or different mining technologies to extract lithium. Incorporating different pricing models and extraction technology into these models enables more robust strategies for determining not only when and where to open a mine, but also which method of production to pursue. We frame the problem as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) and solve using belief state planning methods to get optimal decision making. In our study, we show that POMDP solvers outperform human inspired heuristics by dynamically adapting to shifting lithium price regimes (static, linear, exponential, and stochastic) through belief state planning and explicit uncertainty management. By optimally sequencing exploration, production, and technology choice, the framework achieves higher demand fulfillment and more balanced economic environmental outcomes over the projects lifetime in all different pricing and deposit scenarios.

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15.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2605.15824

FashionChameleon: Towards Real-Time and Interactive Human-Garment Video Customization

Authors:

Quanjian Song↗Yefeng Shen↗Mengting Chen↗Hao Sun↗Jinsong Lan↗Xiaoyong Zhu↗Bo Zheng↗Liujuan Cao↗

Human-centric video customization, particularly at the garment level, has shown significant commercial value. However, existing approaches cannot support low-latency and interactive garment control, which is crucial for applications such as e-commerce and content creation. This paper studies how to achieve interactive multi-garment video customization while preserving motion coherence using only single-garment video data. We present FashionChameleon, a real-time and interactive framework for human-garment customization in autoregressive video generation, where users can interactively switch garment during generation. FashionChameleon consists of three key techniques: (i) Instead of training on multi-garment video data, we train a Teacher Model with In-Context Learning on a single reference-garment pair. By retaining the image-to-video training paradigm while enforcing a mismatch between the reference and garment image, the model is encouraged to implicitly preserve coherence during single-garment switching. (ii) To achieve consistency and efficiency during generation, we introduce Streaming Distillation with In-Context Learning, which fine-tunes the model with in-context teacher forcing and improves extrapolation consistency via gradient-reweighted distribution matching distillation. (iii) To extend the model for interactive multi-garment video customization, we propose Training-Free KV Cache Rescheduling, which includes garment KV refresh, historical KV withdraw, and reference KV disentangle to achieve garment switching while preserving motion coherence. Our FashionChameleon uniquely supports interactive customization and consistent long-video extrapolation, while achieving real-time generation at 23.8 FPS on a single GPU, 30-180$\times$ faster than existing baselines.

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16.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18624

PragReST: Self-Reinforcing Counterfactual Reasoning for Pragmatic Language Understanding

Authors:

Jihyung Park↗Minchao Huang↗Leqi Liu↗Elias Stengel-Eskin↗

Natural language understanding often depends on meanings that are implied rather than explicitly stated, requiring pragmatic reasoning. Despite strong performance on math and logical reasoning, large language models (LLMs) still struggle with making pragmatic inferences, often choosing literal interpretations. To improve LLM pragmatic reasoning, we introduce PragReST, a self-supervised framework that constructs pragmatic QA data, generates counterfactual reasoning traces, and trains models to internalize them through supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, without human-labeled training data or distillation from a stronger teacher. Across four pragmatic benchmarks (PragMega, Ludwig, MetoQA, and AltPrag), PragReST improves over backbone models, task-specific pragmatic tuning baselines, and non-counterfactual variants of the same pipeline. On accuracy-based benchmarks, PragReST improves over the instruct backbone by 5.37 and 5.50% (absolute) for Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-14B, respectively. Our error analysis and ablations underscore the importance of counterfactual reasoning: PragReST primarily reduces errors caused by failures to contrast observed utterances with plausible alternatives, and removing counterfactual reasoning substantially reduces performance. Moreover, our training preserves out-of-domain performance on general-knowledge and mathematical reasoning benchmarks.

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17.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14168

MUSE: Agentic 3D Scene Authoring via Memory-Grounded Incremental Requirement Satisfaction

Authors:

Ruijie Xu↗Xinnan Zhu↗Jiayu Ying↗Daoguo Dong↗Yuzhou Ji↗Xin Tan↗

Text-driven 3D scene generation is a promising technique for digital content creation, embodied AI simulation, and interactive design, yet practical workflows often require refining, extending, or correcting existing scenes while preserving non-target content. Existing methods can produce realistic and structurally plausible scenes, but they generally lack editability with requirement-level state tracking, so part-level failures often lead to full-scene regeneration or manual intervention. To tackle this challenge, we formulate controllable 3D scene authoring as incremental requirement satisfaction, unifying construction and editing. In this paper, we present MUSE, a memory-grounded multi-agent framework in which an Architect compiles instructions into structured requirements, a Sculptor executes local scene operations, and an Inspector verifies each step while updating Working, Scene, and Skill Memory. To evaluate requirement-level controllability and preservation-aware editing, we introduce AuthorBench, offering 145 constrained construction cases and a 1,584-case preservation-aware editing pool paired with external structured checks. On full construction cases, MUSE improves All-Goal success from 37.9 to 80.7 and surface-constraint fulfillment from 35.0 to 92.6 over the strongest baseline. On a stratified 240-case editing test split, MUSE achieves 49.6 All-Goal success, 99.9 preservation rate, and only 0.6 unintended change rate. Beyond automated metrics, human evaluations on compared local-editing baselines support stronger alignment with user intent, and downstream navigation-proxy tests indicate stronger spatial stability. Combined with ablations validating our memory designs, these results establish MUSE as an effective framework for controllable 3D scene authoring.

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18.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12904

Trait, Not State: The Durability of Reading Identity in Social Highlighting

Authors:

Kazuki Nakayashiki↗Keisuke Watanabe↗

Prior work on a social web highlighter located individuality in selection – which documents a person chooses to highlight – but measured it cross-sectionally. We ask the temporal question: is a reader's selection signature a trait or a state? We freeze each reader's first six months of highlighting as a profile and track its own-vs-other advantage on their later selections at growing gaps (to 24+ months), with negatives drawn from the same calendar era – so supply drift cannot masquerade as personal drift – at a coarse global level and at a fine level whose negatives and controls come from the reader's own interest neighborhood; the anchor cell reproduces the prior cross-sectional level (+0.188 vs +0.169), validating the harness. Four results. Within the same users, the fine-layer advantage shows no statistically detectable paired decline at any horizon (6-12 month retention R = 1.00 [0.85, 1.18], n = 212; the farthest bin is compatible with a modest decline; the only contrast whose interval excludes zero is the coarse layer at 12-24 months, about 13%). The signal is not reducible to repeated domains (~90% survives excluding all profile sources). Within-person drift is slow (a recent-half profile beats the old half by +0.042). Prospectively, personal profiles – even one built from a reader's earliest documents, median 20 months before evaluation – rank their next reads at roughly 3x the AP of every simple non-personal prior tested. We use "trait" operationally (a stable signature under continued engagement); the scope is heavy, long-tenured readers of one platform, and exposure is not separable from choice.

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19.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2503.10973

Learning Patterns and Abstractions from Perceptual Sequences

Authors:

Shuchen Wu↗

arXiv:2503.10973v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Cognition swiftly breaks high-dimensional sensory streams into familiar parts and uncovers their relations. Why do structures emerge, and how do they enable learning, generalization, and prediction? What computational principles underlie this core aspect of perception and intelligence? A sensory stream, simplified, is a one-dimensional sequence. In learning such sequences, we naturally segment them into parts – a process known as chunking. In the first project, I investigated factors influencing chunking in a serial reaction time task and showed that humans adapt to underlying chunks while balancing speed and accuracy. Building on this, I developed models that learn chunks and parse sequences chunk by chunk. Normatively, I proposed chunking as a rational strategy for discovering recurring patterns and nested hierarchies, enabling efficient sequence factorization. Learned chunks serve as reusable primitives for transfer, composition, and mental simulation – letting the model compose the new from the known. I demonstrated this model's ability to learn hierarchies in single and multi-dimensional sequences and highlighted its utility for unsupervised pattern discovery. The second part moves from concrete to abstract sequences. I taxonomized abstract motifs and examined their role in sequence memory. Behavioral evidence suggests that humans exploit pattern redundancies for compression and transfer. I proposed a non-parametric hierarchical variable model that learns both chunks and abstract variables, uncovering invariant symbolic patterns. I showed its similarity to human learning and compared it to large language models. Taken together, this thesis suggests that chunking and abstraction as simple computational principles enable structured knowledge acquisition in hierarchically organized sequences, from simple to complex, concrete to abstract.

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20.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11961

Categorical Prior Lock-in: Why In-Context Learning Fails for Structured Data

Authors:

Antonio Pelusi↗Stefano Braghin↗Alberto Trombetta↗

arXiv:2606.11961v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as conditional generators for structured data, relying on in-context learning (ICL) to adapt to new distributions without parameter updates. We investigate the limits of ICL for structured generation under distribution mismatch, using high-cardinality tabular data as a controlled test case, and identify a structural failure mode we term categorical prior lock-in: the inability of ICL to update the model's prior over token distributions inherited from pre-training. Across two 7B-parameter open-weight models, ICL improves numerical fidelity with additional examples but exhibits a sharp ceiling on categorical distributions, failing to reproduce rare classes entirely. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (LoRA) overcomes these limitations but introduces measurable memorization risk and, in some cases, destabilizes structured output generation, highlighting a fundamental trade-off between adaptability and privacy.

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21.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2312.14889

On Rate-Optimal Partitioning Classification from Observable and from Privatised Data

Authors:

Bal\'azs Csan\'ad Cs\'aji↗L\'aszl\'o Gy\"orfi↗Ambrus Tam\'as↗Harro Walk↗

arXiv:2312.14889v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper we revisit the classical method of partitioning classification and prove novel convergence rates under relaxed conditions, both for observable (non-privatised) and for privatised data. We consider the problem of classification in a $d$ dimensional Euclidean space. Previous results on the partitioning classifier worked with the strong density assumption (SDA), which is restrictive, as we demonstrate through simple examples. Here, we study the problem under much milder assumptions. We presuppose that the distribution of the inputs is a mixture of an absolutely continuous and a discrete distribution, such that the absolutely continuous component is concentrated on a $d_a$ dimensional subspace. In addition to the standard Lipschitz and margin conditions, a novel characteristic of the absolutely continuous component is introduced, by which the convergence rate of the classification error probability is computed, both for the binary and for the multi-class cases. This bound can reach the minimax optimal convergence rate achievable using SDA, but under much milder distributional assumptions. Interestingly, this convergence rate depends only on the intrinsic dimension of the continuous inputs, $d_a$, and not on $d$. Under privacy constraints, the data cannot be directly observed, and the constructed classifiers are functions of the randomised outcome of a suitable local differential privacy mechanism. In this paper we add Laplace distributed noises to the discretisations of all possible locations of the feature vector and to its label. Again, tight upper bounds on the convergence rate of the classification error probability can be derived, without using SDA, such that this rate depends on $2d_a$.

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22.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.13809

Compressing Image Style Training into a Single Model Forward

Authors:

Zhongjie Duan↗Yingda Chen↗

Diffusion-based style transfer must balance inference efficiency with stylization fidelity. Adapter-based methods are efficient, but they inject style as an external condition and can either weaken reference-specific appearance or copy reference semantics into the generated image. Optimization-based personalization methods such as LoRA internalize style more effectively, but require a separate training process for every new style. We introduce i2L (image-to-LoRA), a framework that amortizes style LoRA training into a single forward pass. Given one or more reference images, i2L predicts LoRA weights for a text-to-image model, enabling immediate style instantiation without per-style optimization. The architecture combines an image encoder, learnable LoRA queries, and compressed decoding heads that generate adapted matrices. Training on semantically diverse style pairs encourages the predictor to preserve appearance cues while suppressing reference-content copying. Experiments on Z-Image, FLUX.2, and Hidream-O1 show that i2L improves style fidelity, prompt alignment, and perceptual quality over existing baselines. Because i2L produces explicit LoRA weights, it also supports asymmetric classifier-free guidance, multi-reference style fusion, and composition with controllable-generation modules.

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23.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16271

Contrastive Learning for Seismic Horizon Tracking with Domain-Specific Priors

Authors:

Alexandre Thouvenot↗Lionel Boillot↗Vincent Gripon↗

Unsupervised 3D seismic horizon tracking faces a key limitation: signal-based propagators provide accurate trace-level alignment but often fail near faults, whereas texture-driven deep models are more robust to discontinuities, typically at the cost of labeled data requirements and reduced trace-level precision. We propose a self-supervised fusion of both paradigms in which signal-derived local horizon correspondences act as domain-specific priors to train a texture-based deep learning model. Specifically, we estimate reliable trace-to-trace flows from reflector slopes and use them to form positive pairs in a contrastive objective, while restricting training to high-confidence neighborhoods, optionally augmented with a fault mask. The objective is not to infer ambiguous correspondences close to discontinuities, but to preserve horizon identity across them. As a result, the network learns voxel-wise embeddings that preserve local signal continuity while enabling horizon propagation beyond discontinuities through similarity search. Experiments on the public F3 dataset and a faulted synthetic dataset achieve lower mean absolute error (MAE) than unsupervised baselines and competitive performance against a semi-supervised method using a single labeled slice.

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24.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12902

PRISM: Prosody-Integrated Multi-Agent Reasoning Framework for Empathetic Spoken Dialogue

Authors:

Wen Zhang↗Xiaocui Yang↗Zhuoyue Gao↗Shi Feng↗Daling Wang↗Yifei Zhang↗

Empathetic spoken dialogue systems require not only semantically appropriate responses but also emotionally aligned prosodic expression. However, cascade pipelines often discard acoustic cues during speech-to-text conversion, while end-to-end speech models lack interpretable control over emotion and knowledge integration. To address these challenges, we propose PRISM, a multi-agent framework for empathetic spoken dialogue that decouples speech perception, response generation, and speech synthesis into coordinated components. PRISM introduces a prosody-to-language translation mechanism to stabilize large language model reasoning and enables on-demand invocation of external knowledge tools for empathetic dialogue generation. Experimental results demonstrate that PRISM achieves consistent improvements in empathy, prosodic appropriateness, and text response generation quality across objective and subjective metrics. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Bxzfrm/PRISM.

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25.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13663

HyperTool: Beyond Step-Wise Tool Calls for Tool-Augmented Agents

Authors:

Yaxin Du↗Yifan Zhou↗Yujie Ge↗Jiajun Wang↗Xianghe Pang↗Shuo Tang↗Tuney Zheng↗Bryan Dai↗Jian Yang↗Siheng Chen↗

Tool-augmented LLM agents commonly rely on step-wise atomic tool calls, where each invocation, observation, and value transfer is exposed in the main reasoning trace. This creates an execution-granularity mismatch: locally deterministic tool workflows are unfolded into repeated model-visible decisions, consuming context and forcing the model to manage low-level dataflow in the trace. We introduce HyperTool, a unified executable MCP-style tool interface that changes the model-visible unit of tool execution. A model invokes HyperTool with a code block that can call existing tools through their original schemas, manipulate returned values, and pass intermediate results locally, folding deterministic tool subroutines into a single outer call. To train models to use this interface, we synthesize HyperTool-format trajectories from cross-tool compositional tasks and verify them in real MCP environments. On MCP-Universe, HyperTool improves average accuracy from 15.69\% to 35.29\% on Qwen3-32B and from 9.93\% to 33.33\% on Qwen3-8B, and surpass GPT-OSS and Kimi-k2.5 on average accuracy, showing that our HyperTool can substantially improve multi-step tool use.

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