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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Automatic ply-specific analyses of CFRP micrographs using shortest-path-based ply distinction

Authors:
Jonas Naumann↗Jonas P. Appels↗Julius Biermann↗Christopher Gorsky↗Timo de Wolff↗Christoph Brauer↗

We present an automated approach to distinguish between ply instances in semantic segmentation masks of high-resolution carbon-fiber reinforced polymer micrographs. Interpreting the segmentation mask as a graph with pixels as vertices, enables us to use a shortest-path algorithm yielding the ply-separating paths. Thereby, we bridge the gap between semantic segmentation and ply instance segmentation using global information. We successfully apply our approach on high-resolution micrographs featuring a broad range of characteristics like artificially added gaps in single or multiple plies, different stacking sequences and ply traversing cracks. Assigning each fiber pixel to a ply based on the calculated paths, allows for a comprehensive, quantitative ply analysis with respect to its microstructural properties like the local fiber volume fraction as well as locally resolved ply and interleaf layer thickness. These insights help to reveal manufacturing-induced inhomogeneities, draw conclusions on manufacturing parameters and link mechanical properties to underlying microstructural imperfections.

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02.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-01

Histology-informed spatial domain identification through multi-view graph convolutional networks

Authors:
Huihui Zhang↗

by Huihui Zhang, Jiaxing Chang, Zirong Li, Yue Sun, Pinli Hu, Haoxiu Wang, Hang Yang, Yonglin Ren, Xingtan Zhang, Zehua Chen, Kok Wai Wong, Haojing Shao Identifying spatial domains is crucial in spatial transcriptomics, yet effectively integrating gene expression, spatial location, and histology remains challenging. We present STESH, a Spatial Transcriptomics clustering method that combines Expression, Spatial information and Histology. STESH extracts histological features using a convolutional neural network and generates expression, histology, spatial, and collaborative convolution modules for a multi-view graph convolutional network with a decoder and attention mechanism. We evaluated STESH on multiple tissue types and technology platforms. STESH consistently outperformed ten state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior clustering accuracy with the highest scores in adjusted Rand index, normalized mutual information, and Fowlkes-Mallows index.

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03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Dual-Stance Evaluation of Sycophancy: The Structure of Agreement and the Limits of Intervention

Authors:
Matthew James Buchan↗

Activation steering can shift LLM behaviour, but standard evaluations do not typically test whether a sycophancy-reduction direction also suppresses agreement with factually correct statements. We introduce dual-stance evaluation, which tests both stances of each topic, and apply it to centroid-difference steering on Llama-3-8B-Instruct. We find a dissociation: the model represents sycophantic and factual agreement in geometrically distinct subspaces, yet the steering direction projects equally onto both and cannot differentially target either. The direction accordingly reduces agreement with factually correct statements (e.g. that the Earth is round) as well as sycophantic ones. All other static properties of the two activation groups are matched, suggesting the behavioural dissociation arises from generation dynamics or from finer-grained structure that residual-stream analysis cannot resolve. The pattern illustrates a general gap: representations that are readable from activations may not be writable through them.

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

EDEN: A Large-Scale Corpus of Clinical Notes for Italian

Authors:
Tiziano Labruna↗Guido Bertolini↗Pietro Ferrazzi↗Bernardo Magnini↗

We present EDEN (Emergency Department Electronic Notes), a new and unique large-scale corpus of clinical notes produced in Emergency Departments of Italian hospitals. The corpus, in its current version, is composed of approximately 4 million clinical notes fully anonymized, covering diverse phases of patient care during the stay in the emergency department. In addition, a subset of about six thousand notes has been manually annotated by clinical experts through a structured Case Report Form (CRF) containing 132 items relevant for two patient situations in emergency departments, dyspnea and loss of consciousness. Items may assume numerical values (e.g., for blood saturation), categorical (e.g., for level of consciousness ), binary (e.g., for presence of traumas), and mixed value types. The annotation process involved multiple clinicians and underwent iterative revision to resolve ambiguities in item formulation, resulting in a richly structured (although high imbalanced) resource. The dataset aims to fill a relevant gap of data able to support both the development and the use of Large Language Models in concrete medical applications. We describe the data collection protocol, the on-site anonymisation pipeline, corpus statistics, and the annotation scheme. Finally, we propose CRF-filling as a novel structured information extraction benchmark, and provide zero-shot baseline resulting from Gemma-27B and MedGemma-27B. To the best of our knowledge, the EDEN dataset is the largest freely available corpus of clinical notes existing for the Italian language.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

DSP-SLAM++: A Unified Framework for Multi-Class, High-Fidelity Object SLAM in the Wild

Authors:
Ahmad Kourani↗Ghina Daoud↗Daniel Asmar↗Imad Elhajj↗

Existing object-aware SLAM systems force a trade-off between real-time performance, multi-class support, and the generation of high-fidelity, semantically coherent object models. To address this trade-off, we present DSP-SLAM++, which extends the DSP-SLAM framework with an asynchronous mapping pipeline for real-time performance and dedicated sensor fusion adaptations for a monocular fisheye-LiDAR suite. Experiments demonstrate that our system generates fine-grained, geometrically-complete shapes for multiple object classes while eliminating severe mapping thread bottlenecks by reducing maximum object processing latency by up to 70\% compared to the state-of-the-art baseline, enabling robust, real-time performance on a challenging 25 Hz multi-class datasets. This work makes high-fidelity, multi-class object SLAM more practical for real-world applications like autonomous driving and robotic manipulation by enabling its use on platforms with common fisheye-LiDAR sensor setups. The open-source code is available at: [github.com/AUBVRL/DSP-SLAMpp].

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

Binary Tracking for Spatial QA and Navigation with Open Vision-Language Models

Authors:
Dongbin Na↗Chanwoo Kim↗Soonbin Rho↗Giyun Choi↗Gangbok Lee↗Dooyoung Hong↗

arXiv:2606.16902v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work addresses spatial question answering for service robots traversing long egocentric routes. Given a query such as "where can I find a dry cleaner on the way back home?", the system returns a metric coordinate that downstream navigation components can act on. Prior Spatial Question Answering approaches leverage retrieval-augmented agents built on closed-source models such as GPT-4o for path exploration. However, robots operating in the real world often cannot reliably depend on online closed-source models due to network instability, communication latency, and deployment cost. It creates a need for open-source based Spatial Question Answering approaches that can run onboard the robot, yet prior research in this direction remains limited. This work proposes BinTrack, a simple yet effective, fully open-source spatial-localization agent that leverages the temporal ordering of a robot's trajectory. BinTrack performs a binary search over the trajectory segments between two anchor landmarks identified from a query. It improves overall accuracy by up to 22.8% over other open-source implementations and even matches the reported closed-source model result on the global category of the SpaceLocQA benchmark, the most challenging setting that has so far required strong reasoning agents such as GPT-4o. Furthermore, its optimized inference strategy consistently yields more than a 1.5x inference speedup over previous approaches. Finally, this work releases GangnamLoop, a novel and practical multi-trip outdoor benchmark collected by deploying a real quadruped robot on public streets with the anonymization policy. It revisits the same locations under different outdoor conditions and pairs the robot's low viewpoint with the human owner's. The source codes and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/ndb796/BinaryTracking

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

Generative causal testing to bridge data-driven models and scientific theories in language neuroscience

Authors:
Richard Antonello↗Chandan Singh↗Shailee Jain↗Aliyah Hsu↗Sihang Guo↗Jianfeng Gao↗Bin Yu↗Alexander Huth↗

Representations from large language models are highly effective at predicting BOLD fMRI responses to language stimuli. However, these representations are largely opaque: it is unclear what features of the language stimulus drive the response in each brain area. We present generative causal testing (GCT), a framework for generating concise explanations of language selectivity in the brain from predictive models and then testing those explanations in follow-up experiments using LLM-generated stimuli.This approach is successful at explaining selectivity both in individual voxels and cortical regions of interest (ROIs), including newly identified microROIs in prefrontal cortex. We show that explanatory accuracy is closely related to the predictive power and stability of the underlying predictive models. Finally, we show that GCT can dissect fine-grained differences between brain areas with similar functional selectivity. These results demonstrate that LLMs can be used to bridge the widening gap between data-driven models and formal scientific theories.

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10.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

High-Order Talagrand and Eldan–Gross Inequalities via Besov-Type Variance Functionals

Authors:
Guangyue Han↗Peijie Li↗

arXiv:2606.14876v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: By introducing high-order Besov-type variance functionals that generalize the canonical variance, we develop a unified framework for proving high-order Talagrand-type inequalities that relate high-order energies to Fourier weights. Applying this machinery, we establish high-order Poincaré-type, $L^p$–$L^q$, isoperimetric-type, Falik–Samorodnitsky and Eldan–Gross inequalities, all with explicit constants, in both the Boolean and Gaussian settings. Fundamentally, our semigroup-based framework relies primarily on hypercontractivity and high-order Bismut-type derivative estimates, and is broadly applicable.

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

On the Energy Distribution of the Galactic Center Excess' Sources

Authors:
Florian List↗Yujin Park↗Nicholas L. Rodd↗Eve Schoen↗Florian Wolf↗

arXiv:2507.17804v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Galactic Center Excess (GCE) may yet herald the discovery of annihilating dark matter. Weighing against that conclusion are analyses showing evidence for dim point sources within the spatial structure of the emission. Due to technical limitations these analyses are purely spatial with all spectral information that could disentangle the excess from astrophysical backgrounds discarded. Here, we demonstrate that a neural network simulation-based inference approach can jointly analyze the spatial and spectra data. The addition is profound: energy information drives the putative point sources to be significantly dimmer, indicating either the GCE is truly diffuse in nature or made of an exceptionally large number of sources. Quantitatively, for our best fit background model, the excess is essentially consistent with Poisson emission as predicted by dark matter. If due to point sources, our median prediction is $\mathcal{O}(10^5)$ sources, or more than 35,000 at 90\% confidence, both orders of magnitude larger than the hundreds preferred by earlier point-source analyses of the GCE, although variations allowed by background systematics could reduce the required number of sources by roughly an order of magnitude.

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12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Improving Zero-Shot Offline RL via Behavioral Task Sampling

Authors:
Nazim Bendib↗Nicolas Perrin-Gilbert↗Olivier Sigaud↗

arXiv:2604.25496v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Offline zero-shot reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn agents that optimize unseen reward functions without additional environment interaction. The standard approach to this problem trains task-conditioned policies by sampling task vectors that define linear reward functions over learned state representations. In most existing algorithms, these task vectors are randomly sampled, implicitly assuming this adequately captures the structure of the task space. We argue that doing so leads to suboptimal zero-shot generalization. To address this limitation, we propose extracting task vectors directly from the offline dataset and using them to define the task distribution used for policy training. We introduce a simple and general reward function extraction procedure that integrates into existing offline zero-shot RL algorithms. Across multiple benchmark environments and baselines, our approach improves zero-shot performance by an average of 20%, highlighting the importance of principled task sampling in offline zero-shot RL.

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13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Structuring and Tokenizing Distributed User Interest Context for Generative Recommendation

Authors:
Ruizhong Qiu↗Yinglong Xia↗Dongqi Fu↗Hanqing Zeng↗Ren Chen↗Xiangjun Fan↗Hong Li↗Hong Yan↗Hanghang Tong↗

arXiv:2606.20554v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative recommendation is an emerging paradigm that has shown promise in industrial recommendation systems, aiming to predict users' next interactions from their historical behaviors. At the core of generative recommendation lies item tokenization, which bridges item semantics and recommendation models. However, existing methods often struggle to effectively organize and inject complex user-behavioral and item-semantic contexts into recommendation models simultaneously. On the one hand, existing graph-based integration methods, such as graph serialization and graph neural networks, either suffer from scalability issues or exploit only local graph information. On the other hand, existing semantic tokenization methods typically rely on heuristics and lack explicit supervision signals, which may lead to inaccurate or suboptimal semantic representations. To address these limitations in user interest context modeling, we propose G2Rec, a scalable framework that unifies holistic graph-based user co-engagement modeling with semantic tokenization for industrial-scale generative recommendation. Overall, G2Rec enables recommendation models to capture holistic and semantically grounded user interest prototypes without requiring ground-truth user interests, thereby providing more comprehensive and accurate modeling of user behavior contexts in industrial sequential recommendation. Online deployment across product surfaces and extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate the superiority of G2Rec over existing methods.

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14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Energy-Efficient On-Device RAG on a Mobile NPU: System Design and Benchmark on Snapdragon X Elite

Authors:
Zhiyuan Cheng↗Longying Lai↗

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines are compute-intensive, combining embedding, retrieval, reranking, and large language model (LLM) generation. Running them entirely on-device benefits privacy, latency, and offline use, but the energy cost of CPU inference is a major barrier. We present what is, to our knowledge, the first end-to-end RAG pipeline that runs all neural stages – embedding, reranking, and LLM generation – on the Qualcomm Hexagon NPU of the Snapdragon X Elite. Profiling on a Dell XPS 13 laptop, we compare NPU-accelerated RAG against CPU and OpenCL/Adreno GPU baselines on indexing and query workloads. On indexing, the NPU achieves 9.1x higher embedding throughput and 12.3x less system energy. On a 120-query Wikipedia-passage benchmark, it delivers 18.1x faster LLM prefilling, 4.0x lower end-to-end query latency, and 4.0x less system energy than the CPU baseline; the same workload on the integrated GPU is 1.7x slower than CPU and uses 6.5x more energy than the NPU. A GPT-4.1 LLM-as-judge evaluation finds NPU answer quality on par with CPU and GPU within evaluator noise (mean 9.32 vs. 8.95 vs. 9.03 on a 1-10 rubric), with 86.7% of queries scoring identically across all three backends. On the Snapdragon X Elite / Hexagon class of laptop SoC, the NPU thus enables practical, energy-efficient on-device RAG without quality regression – a sustainable path toward green edge intelligence that we expect to generalize to comparable mobile NPUs (Apple Neural Engine, Intel NPU, MediaTek APU) as their software stacks mature.

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15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

FENNEC: Fine-Tuned Ensemble Neural Networks Accelerate Chemically Modified siRNA Design and Screening

Authors:
Larsen↗A. W↗Butnaru↗Braun↗Rotrattanadumrong↗Berninger↗Yonchev↗Gagneur↗Marsico↗

Small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) are a clinically validated therapeutic modality, yet designing potent chemically modified siRNAs remains a costly and iterative process, limited by scarce public data. Computational prediction of siRNA efficacy is therefore essential for rational design and accelerated preclinical development. However, despite the critical role of chemical modifications in therapeutic performance, current state-of-the-art machine learning methods either are not designed to model the chemical diversity of therapeutic siRNAs, or exhibit poor generalization performance. Here, we present FENNEC (Fine-Tuned Ensemble of Neural Networks for siRNA Efficiency Characterization), a machine-learning framework for predicting siRNA activity across chemically diverse design spaces. To support this effort, we curated the largest patent-derived dataset to date of chemically modified siRNAs from 42 patents using OCR-based table extraction and stringent filtering. FENNEC combines temporal convolutional networks with thermodynamic descriptors, experimental covariates, and embeddings from RNA foundation models to capture both local chemical determinants and broader target-context information. Importantly, we show that language-model-derived embeddings provide meaningful higher-order representations of target transcripts, particularly in data-scarce settings. FENNEC achieved robust predictive performance across both gene-level and scaffold-level validation settings, with additional experimental validation on a novel AHSA1-targeting dataset further supporting its generalizability across chemically modified siRNAs. In benchmarking, FENNEC outperformed classical machine-learning and state-of-the-art deep learning models, demonstrating generalization to unseen chemistry. Model interpretation recovered established design principles, including position-specific effects of glycol nucleic acid, 2'-fluoro modifications, and phosphorothioate backbones. Furthermore, in silico perturbation analyses suggest that FENNEC can serve not only as a predictive model, but also as an oracle for the design and optimization of chemically modified siRNAs. Together, our work addresses a key gap in the field by enabling chemically aware deep learning for siRNA design, supported by a large and diverse collection of chemically modified siRNA measurements.

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16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

ICD-10 Code Ambiguity Obscures Treatment-Eligible Adults with Spinal Muscular Atrophy: A Single-Center Chart Review and Patient Outreach Study

Authors:
Holly↗Bean↗Beshay↗Edwards↗Streicher↗N. S↗

Background. Three disease-modifying therapies (DMTs) for spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) have been approved since 2016, yet many adults remain untreated. Identifying them depends on ICD-10 codes that capture SMA but do not reliably distinguish it from other related conditions. We examined, in one U.S. health system, both patients' engagement with therapy and the accuracy of the codes used to find them. Methods. We conducted a retrospective chart review of adults in an academic health system identified by SMA-associated ICD-10 codes, with manual adjudication of diagnosis and DMT status. Confirmed SMA-positive, DMT-naive patients were invited to a structured telephone interview on treatment awareness and barriers. Results. Of 60 charts, 22 (36.7%; 95% CI 25.6-49.3%) were appropriately coded for SMA or a related disorder; only 16 (26.7%) had molecularly confirmed SMA. The other 38 (63.3%) were miscoded, spanning spinal and bulbar muscular atrophy, asymptomatic carriers, prenatal screening, and conditions unrelated to SMA. Ten of the 16 confirmed patients (62.5%) were DMT-naive; one was interviewed, one declined, and eight could not be reached. The non-response is itself a finding: the patients least visible to administrative data are the hardest to reach. Conclusions. ICD-10 ambiguity is a barrier to treatment access in adult SMA, as is loss to follow-up. We make two recommendations: continuous documentation-coding alignment that uses natural language processing to verify the genetic precondition, and type-specific SMA codes (subcodes for Types 0-4) anchored on molecular SMN1 confirmation. Together these would support cohort identification, outreach, and evidence generation without adding to clinician burden.

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17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Data Scale, Not Latency, Shapes Cross-Lingual Encoder Transfer in Streaming ASR

Authors:
Nenad Banfic↗

arXiv:2606.24169v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Adapting a streaming speech recognition model to a new language requires choosing between two plausible warm starts: a multilingual (ML) encoder or an English-only (EN) encoder. The common intuition is that the multilingual encoder should help most at low data, but it is unclear how long that advantage persists, whether tight streaming latency amplifies it, and whether it survives deployment quantization. We answer these questions with a controlled sweep of a 0.6 B-parameter cache-aware FastConformer transducer across eight European languages, up to five target-language data scales (100 h to 2500 h), three streaming tiers plus offline decoding, and up to four public test sets. The main result is that multilingual initialization is a data-limited advantage, not a latency-limited one. On FLEURS at 160 ms, the mean EN-ML word error rate (WER) gap falls from +4.21 percentage points (pp) at 100 h to +0.20 pp at 2500 h; a power-law fit summarizes this decay, with each doubling of target-language data roughly halving the remaining advantage. Across the three streaming tiers, the across-language mean EN-ML gap is approximately stable at each scale from 100 to 1000 h, and is near zero by 2500 h. Finally, 4-bit weight-only encoder quantization at the matched 560 ms streaming tier reduces the encoder footprint by about 3x, with an average FLEURS WER increase of about 0.5 pp. The resulting guideline is simple: use multilingual initialization in low-data regimes, treat the choice as effectively irrelevant at large data, and make latency and quantization decisions independently.

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18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Super Learner Ensemble Modeling of CPTAC Proteomic Data for Survival Prediction in Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Authors:
Park↗Lee↗Oh↗E. J↗Tham↗Ahn↗

Survival analysis in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) is traditionally performed using Cox proportional hazards models, alongside some exploration into black-box machine learning methods. The Super Learner (SL) algorithm addresses this model selection dilemma by combining diverse candidate algorithms into a weighted ensemble to perform comparably to the best candidate method. This study evaluates the performance of SL in HNSCC. Proteomic features as well as clinical covariates from 96 CPTAC HNSCC samples were modeled with three candidate algorithms (Cox LASSO, Cox Ridge, and Random Survival Forest) as well as the ensemble SL method. Models were optimized via Uno's time-dependent Concordance Index (C-index) and tested at 1- and 3-year time horizons using 2000 bootstrap resamples. The Cox Ridge regression model achieved the highest predictive accuracy among the four total methods. However, the SL demonstrated stable performance over both time horizons (1-year C-index: 0.985; 3-year C-index: 0.960). Variable importance analysis of the Cox Ridge model successfully identified malignant proteins (ATR, MAML1, MIEN1) alongside novel potential prognostic indicators (ZNF800, KERA). This analysis emphasizes the statistical necessity for larger cohorts for ensemble learning, while providing a benchmark of proteomic indicators in HNSCC.

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19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

The Saturable Electronic Reluctance Switch: Switchable low-power and low-noise generation of magnetic fields using permanent magnets

Authors:
P. D. Taylor-Burdett↗C. A. Burhan↗S. Mason↗F. R. Lebrun-Gallagher↗S. Weidt↗W. K. Hensinger↗

arXiv:2605.05158v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Across many areas of science, there is a need to generate magnetic fields that are both ultra-stable and switchable on and off. Current-carrying wire configurations are switchable but are susceptible to current noise. Existing current-controlled approaches to switching the field produced by a permanent magnet involve altering the magnets magnetisation, which typically requires large field pulses and produces excessive power dissipation in high frequency applications. We present a hybrid technique to switch the field of any arbitrary magnet through use of a non-linear ferromagnetic circuit, named the Saturable Electronic Reluctance Switch (SERS). The circuit achieves a linear and monotonic ramp of the magnetic field up to a current threshold, above which the field becomes constant. Crucially, the applied current has minimal influence on the magnetic field stability and demagnetisation of the magnet is avoided. The power dissipated in each switching cycle is expected to be many orders of magnitude less than for existing permanent magnet switching approaches. SERS is also robust to fabrication errors, suppressing noise in the control current by several orders of magnitude in a non-ideal device. To illustrate its application, a SERS-driven device is proposed for generating ultra-stable magnetic field gradients in a scalable trapped-ion quantum computer. We find this device offers an order of magnitude reduction in power dissipation compared to state-of-the-art current carrying wires, while reducing magnetic field noise originating from current fluctuations by up to five orders of magnitude.

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21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

FedSteer: Taming Extreme Gradient Staleness in Federated Learning with Corrective Projections and Caching

Authors:
Haoran Zhang↗Cain\~a Figueiredo Pereira↗Marie Siew↗Xutong Liu↗Carlee Joe-Wong↗Rachid El-Azouzi↗

arXiv:2606.10124v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated learning (FL) is often subject to aggregation variance if clients do not consistently participate in training rounds. While reusing stale model updates from inactive clients is a common technique to reduce this variance, we find that with skewed client participation, the resulting update staleness can become severe enough to destabilize training. To remedy this, we propose FedSteer, a novel method that constructs a gradient subspace from a cache of recent client gradients to serve as a low-dimensional representation of the current optimization landscape. FedSteer projects an active client's true gradient onto this subspace to find a set of optimal coordinates. For an inactive client, FedSteer reuses these coordinates with the now-evolved subspace drifted by other active clients. This process effectively "steers" outdated gradients toward the current global objective. This is complemented by a selective caching strategy that identifies a representative client subset to form the subspace, reducing server memory. Experiments demonstrate that FedSteer significantly outperforms baselines, preventing performance collapse in challenging scenarios while delivering accuracy gains of over 7% in others.

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22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

A Lightweight Multi-Agent Framework for Automated Concrete Barrier Design

Authors:
Wanting Wang↗Xiye Ma↗Yuyang He↗Minghui Cheng↗Ran Cao↗

arXiv:2606.12040v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The design of reinforced concrete highway barriers is a safety-critical process that requires strict compliance with regulatory provisions such as the AASHTO-LRFD bridge design guidelines. Current engineering practice relies heavily on manual, iterative, and heuristic calculations to satisfy complex nonlinear material and mechanics constraints. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong generative capabilities, their direct application to structural engineering remains limited by hallucination risks and insufficient physical grounding. To address these challenges, this study proposes a novel "generation-evaluation-optimization" closed-loop framework for automated concrete barrier design using the multi-agent orchestration capabilities of AutoGen. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed agentic framework achieves over 98% design accuracy, significantly outperforming standalone general-purpose LLMs. More importantly, the study reveals that design performance is not necessarily correlated with model scale, where an 8B-parameter lightweight model could outperform unconstrained 631B-parameter flagship models. This finding highlights the potential to substantially reduce computational costs while improving the accessibility of AI-assisted engineering tools for industry applications. The source code for the proposed multi-agent design framework is available at the project GitHub repository: https://github.com/MXY820/barrier-design. Keywords: Structural Engineering; Multi-Agent Systems; Large Language Models; Concrete Barrier Design; AutoGen; Design Automation.

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23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Human-on-the-Loop Orchestration for AI-Assisted Legal Discovery

Authors:
Anushree Sinha↗Srivaths Ranganathan↗Abhishek Dharmaratnakar↗Debanshu Das↗

arXiv:2606.19812v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed in electronic discovery (e-discovery), where compounding errors across multi-step reasoning chains can constitute legal malpractice. Unlike single-turn retrieval, agentic workflows operating over privileged document corpora exhibit a class of failure we term "trajectory collapse": an early misclassification silently propagates, rendering an entire privilege review invalid. This paper makes three contributions. First, we propose a structured taxonomy of agentic failures in legal information retrieval, organized by functional stage. Second, we introduce a four-layer verification architecture – spanning planning, reasoning, execution, and uncertainty quantification – designed to intercept these failures before they compound. Third, we present a preliminary simulation study on a synthetic e-discovery corpus that demonstrates how mandatory Human-on-the-Loop (HOTL) escalation thresholds reduce privilege-waiver risk relative to fully autonomous baselines. Our results suggest that calibrated uncertainty thresholds can reduce privilege-waiver risk by up to 61% versus fully autonomous deployment, while routing fewer than one quarter of documents to attorney review.

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24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

RepSelect: Robust LLM Unlearning via Representation Selectivity

Authors:
Filip Sondej↗Yushi Yang↗Adam Mahdi↗

Making large language models (LLMs) deeply forget specific knowledge and values without sacrificing general capabilities remains a central challenge in unlearning. However, current methods are easily reversed by fine-tuning or few-shot prompting, suggesting their forgetting is only shallow. We identify the root cause. Existing methods target representations shared with both the retain set and the subspace recovered by a fine-tuning attacker, making unlearning both disruptive to general capabilities and easy to reverse. We propose RepSelect (Representation Selectivity), isolates forget-set-specific representations by collapsing top principal components of weight gradients before each update, leaving general capabilities intact while limiting what fine-tuning can recover. We evaluate across two forget categories, biohazardous knowledge and abusive tendencies, and four model families spanning dense and Mixture-of-Experts architectures (Llama 3, Qwen 3.5, Gemma 4 E4B, DeepSeek V2 Lite). Compared to five popular baselines (GradDiff, NPO, SimNPO, RMU, UNDIAL), RepSelect achieves a 4-50x larger reduction in post-relearning answer accuracy than the strongest baseline, and is near-perfectly robust to few-shot prompting attacks. Targeting selective representations is thus an important step towards deep and robust LLM forgetting.

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25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Propagating Collective Spin-valley Modes in Twisted WSe2

Authors:
Richen Xiong↗Yi Guo↗Chenxin Qin↗Taige Wang↗Fanzhao Yin↗Samuel L. Brantly↗Youngjoon Choi↗Junhang Qi↗Jinfei Zhou↗Zihan Zhang↗Melike Erdi↗Kenji Watanabe↗…

arXiv:2507.18770v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The emergence of neutral collective modes is a hallmark of correlated quantum phases but is often challenging to probe experimentally. In two-dimensional flatband systems, charge responses have been intensively investigated yet neutral excitations remain largely unexplored. In particular, intervalley coherent state (IVC) features a neutral Goldstone mode due to spontaneously broken valley U(1) symmetry. While IVC state has been proposed as a unifying theme across graphene and semiconductor based systems, its defining feature, the neutral Goldstone mode, remains elusive in experiment. Here we investigate space and time resolved transport of neutral modes in twisted WSe2 moire superlattices through a novel ultrafast imaging technique. We uncover two new propagating collective modes with very different velocities, which emerge near the van Hove singularity (VHS) in both intermediate (3.5 to 4 degree) and large (around 5 degree) angle twisted WSe2. The fast-propagating mode has a large speed of about 3 km/s and is consistent with a Goldstone mode for an IVC state, while the slow-moving mode is likely a gapped amplitude mode. They can be understood as the spin-valley analogues of collective modes of a superfluid, whose propagation is imaged for the first time in a condensed matter system. Our study demonstrates a powerful new approach for probing charge-neutral modes in quantum materials and offers key insights into the interplay between charge and spin-valley physics in moire superlattices.

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