Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2601.00793

Voronoi Percolation: Topological Stability and Giant Cycles

Authors:

Benjamin Schweinhart↗Morgan Shuman↗

arXiv:2601.00793v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the topological stability of Voronoi percolation in higher dimensions. We show that slightly increasing p allows a discretization that preserves increasing topological properties with high probability. This strengthens a theorem of Bollobás and Riordan and generalizes it to higher dimensions. As a consequence, we prove a sharp phase transition for the emergence of i-dimensional giant cycles in Voronoi percolation on the 2i-dimensional torus.

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02.

Nature (Science) 2026-06-17 DOI: HASH:fa53abd4fcad6bfbfea0e5906032aa27

A blastoporal organizer in a ctenophore

Authors:

Stanislav Kremnyov↗

In an iconic experiment in 1924, Hilde Mangold and Hans Spemann established that the dorsal blastopore lip of amphibian embryos functions as an organizer and induces a secondary body axis when transplanted into a host embryo1. This discovery demonstrated that specific embryonic regions can regulate embryonic patterning and lead to the establishment of an entire body axis. Subsequent studies have revealed that cnidarians, the sister group to Bilateria, also possess a blastoporal embryonic organizer2,3. However, the evolutionary origin of the organizer remains unclear. Here we report that the blastopore lip of the ctenophore Mnemiopsis leidyi, a member of the evolutionary sister group to all other metazoans4,5, exhibits organizer activity. We show that transplanted fragments of blastopore lip tissue from M. leidyi gastrula induce secondary pharynx and mouth formation. Moreover, transphyletic transplantation experiments show that the blastopore lip of M. leidyi leads to the generation of a secondary body axis in embryos of the cnidarian Nematostella vectensis. Organizer function in M. leidyi requires both β-catenin and TGFβ signalling, and the TGFβ-family ligands probably provide this inductive capacity. These findings reveal the deep homology of the blastoporal organizer in ctenophores, cnidarians and vertebrates, implying the ancestral organizer role of the blastopore lip. We propose that the emergence of the organizer was an essential innovation that facilitated the change from the temporal cell differentiation of unicellular relatives to the spatial cell differentiation of the first multicellular embryo. Experiments using the comb jelly Mnemiopsis leidyi and the sea anemone Nematostella vectensis reveal that the emergence of a core signalling pathway may have been a key innovation enabling the transition to multicellularity in animals.

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03.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17639

ERQA-Plus: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Reasoning in Embodied AI

Authors:

Hong Yang↗Basura Fernando↗

Generalist embodied agents require more than object recognition: they must reason about spatial relations, actions, procedures, human intentions, environmental constraints, and commonsense consequences from situated visual observations. Yet existing visual and embodied question answering benchmarks often provide limited control over the reasoning dependencies being tested, making it difficult to distinguish grounded embodied reasoning from shortcut-driven visual or linguistic pattern matching. We present ERQA-Plus, a diagnostic benchmark for reasoning in embodied AI. ERQA-Plus contains 1,766 question-answer instances grounded in 711 robot-centric images and organized according to a structured taxonomy spanning perceptual, action-centric, social-interaction, navigation-environmental, and contextual commonsense reasoning. The dataset is constructed using a multi-stage generation and validation pipeline that combines taxonomy-guided question generation, automatic quality judging, iterative revision, and human assessment to improve visual grounding, answer validity, and reasoning quality. We benchmark representative general-purpose vision-language models and embodied models, including LLaVA-NeXT-8B, Prismatic-7B, MiniCPM-V-4.5-8B, Qwen3-VL, RoboRefer-8B, and RoboBrain2.5-8B. Although the strongest model, Qwen3-VL-32B, achieves 83.4% overall accuracy and 61.4 SBERT score, category-level results reveal persistent weaknesses in spatial reasoning, procedural reasoning, event prediction, and intention inference. ERQA-Plus therefore provides a fine-grained evaluation framework for measuring not only whether embodied agents answer correctly, but also which forms of embodied reasoning they can and cannot perform reliably. The dataset is available https://huggingface.co/datasets/huggingdas/erqa-plus and the project page at https://github.com/LUNAProject22/erqa-plus.

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04.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18713

Trainable Photonic Measurement for Physics-Informed PDE Learning

Authors:

Jiale Linghu↗Hao Dong↗Yangshuai Wang↗

arXiv:2606.18713v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Photonic quantum machine learning offers a route to trainable physical representations built from phase, interference and measurement. However, its role in scientific machine learning remains largely unexplored. Physics-informed neural fields provide a natural setting, because differential equations require trial spaces that preserve phase, frequency and derivative structure. Here we introduce a photonic quantum neural field in which coordinates become trainable optical phases, are mixed by multi-photon Fock-space interference and are decoded from photon-number measurements. The photonic circuit is optimized as the neural-field representation itself, not as a fixed feature map or hardware accelerator. Photonic measurement is therefore a trainable representation on which the physics-informed residual is minimized. Across seven elliptic, wave, nonlinear dispersive and inverse PDE benchmarks, we observe a phase-complexity transition: classical coordinate and Fourier-feature networks suffice in smooth regimes, whereas the photonic field is most accurate when residual derivatives amplify phase mismatch. In the hardest regimes it gives the lowest errors, with margins reaching an order of magnitude and about one quarter of the trainable parameters of classical baselines. Frozen and shuffled controls, together with noise stress tests, attribute this gain to learned interference and stable Fock-probability readout under compound perturbations. These results identify photonic quantum measurement as a representation-learning principle for scientific machine learning.

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05.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2605.03460

FinSTaR: Towards Financial Reasoning with Time Series Reasoning Models

Authors:

Seunghan Lee↗Jun Seo↗Jaehoon Lee↗Sungdong Yoo↗Minjae Kim↗Tae Yoon Lim↗Dongwan Kang↗Hwanil Choi↗Soonyoung Lee↗Wonbin Ahn↗

arXiv:2605.03460v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Time series (TS) reasoning models (TSRMs) have shown promising capabilities in general domains, yet they consistently fail in the financial domain, which exhibits unique characteristics. We propose a general 2 x 2 capability taxonomy for TSRMs by crossing 1) single-entity vs. multi-entity analysis with 2) assessment of the current state vs. prediction of future behavior. We instantiate this taxonomy in the financial domain-where the distinction between deterministic assessment and stochastic prediction is particularly critical-as ten financial reasoning tasks, forming the FinTSR-Bench benchmark based on S&P stocks. To this end, we propose FinSTaR (Financial Time Series Thinking and Reasoning), trained on FinTSR-Bench with distinct chain-of-thought (CoT) strategies tailored to each category. For assessment, which is deterministic (i.e., computable from observable data), we employ Compute-in-CoT, a programmatic CoT that enables models to derive answers directly from raw prices. For prediction, which is inherently stochastic (i.e., subject to unobservable factors), we adopt Scenario-Aware CoT, which generates diverse scenarios before making a judgment, mirroring how financial analysts reason under uncertainty. The proposed method achieves 78.9% average accuracy on FinTSR-Bench, substantially outperforming LLM and TSRM baselines. Furthermore, we show that the four capability categories are complementary and mutually reinforcing through joint training, and that Scenario-Aware CoT consistently improves prediction accuracy over standard CoT. Code is available at https://github.com/seunghan96/FinSTaR.

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06.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17998

AIGS-Net: Compact Illumination Field Modeling via 2D Gaussian Splatting for Fast Low-Light Image Enhancement

Authors:

Yuhan Chen↗Kunyang Huang↗Fuchen Li↗Zhuohan Qin↗Guofa Li↗Wenbo Chu↗Keqiang Li↗

Existing low-light image enhancement methods often face a bottleneck between the representation capacity of illumination-field modeling and computational complexity. To address this issue, this paper proposes an Adaptive Illumination Gaussian Splatting Network (AIGS-Net), an ultra-lightweight architecture for fast low-light enhancement. Unlike conventional static priors, AIGS-Net constructs an input-adaptive 2D Gaussian Splatting illumination field. The opacity of Gaussian basis functions is dynamically modulated by relative luminance statistics of the input image, and spatially varying illumination compensation is rendered through ordered alpha compositing. To guide adaptive illumination compensation efficiently, a zero-parameter nonlinear multiscale contextual encoding module is introduced to extract low-frequency structures and local contrast cues without additional convolutional weights. To suppress noise amplification and sensor-induced color bias, AIGS-Net integrates noise-mask estimation, locked single-channel Gamma mapping, cross-channel consistency regularization, and target color-alignment constraints. Experiments on LOL and LSRW benchmarks show that AIGS-Net improves detail recovery and color fidelity while requiring only approximately 40 learnable parameters, achieving an effective trade-off between enhancement quality and extreme inference efficiency.

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07.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13669

Agents-K1: Towards Agent-native Knowledge Orchestration

Authors:

Zongsheng Cao↗Bihao Zhan↗Jinxin Shi↗Jiong Wang↗Fangchen Yu↗Zhijie Zhong↗Zijie Guo↗Tianshuo Peng↗Zhuo Liu↗Yi Xie↗Xiang Zhuang↗Yue Fan↗…

arXiv:2606.13669v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current LLM-based research agents have advanced through agent orchestration, yet largely overlook scientific knowledge orchestration. Existing works often reduce papers to abstracts, surface mentions, and flat \texttt{cites} edges, omitting key entities, claims, evidence, mechanisms, and method lineages essential for scientific reasoning. To this end, we introduce Agents-K1, an end-to-end knowledge orchestration pipeline that converts raw documents into agent-native scientific knowledge graphs. Agents-K1 integrates three components under a unifying theoretical foundation: a multimodal parser whose five-module schema captures entities, multimodal evidence, citations, and typed inter-entity relations across the full paper rather than abstracts alone; a 4B information-extraction backbone trained with GRPO under a rule-based reward; and a graphanything CLI, a tri-source agent interface that unifies web search, multimodal graph retrieval, and cross-document traversal. On top of this, we process 2.46 million scientific papers across six subjects to produce Scholar-KG, of which we release a one-million-paper subset, and the full Scholar-KG is accessible via the SCP link below. The same pipeline can be extended to general-domain corpora and to schema-conformant data synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Agents-K1 achieves superior performance in scientific information extraction, knowledge graph construction, and multi-hop scientific reasoning.

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08.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2412.15557

MORTAR: Multi-turn Metamorphic Testing for LLM-based Dialogue Systems

Authors:

Aaron Guoxiang Guo↗Aldeida Aleti↗Neelofar Neelofar↗Chakkrit Tantithamthavorn↗Yuanyuan Qi↗Tsong Yueh Chen↗

With the widespread application of LLM-based dialogue systems in daily life, quality assurance has become more important than ever. Recent research has successfully introduced methods to identify unexpected behaviour in single-turn testing scenarios. However, multi-turn interaction is the common real-world usage of dialogue systems, yet testing methods for such interactions remain underexplored. This is largely due to the oracle problem in multi-turn testing, which continues to pose a significant challenge for dialogue system developers and researchers. In this paper, we propose MORTAR, a metamorphic multi-turn dialogue testing approach, which mitigates the test oracle problem in testing LLM-based dialogue systems. MORTAR formalises the multi-turn testing for dialogue systems, and automates the generation of question-answer dialogue test cases with multiple dialogue-level perturbations and metamorphic relations (MRs). The automated MR matching mechanism allows MORTAR more flexibility and efficiency in metamorphic testing. The proposed approach is fully automated without reliance on LLM judges. In testing six popular LLM-based dialogue systems, MORTAR reaches significantly better effectiveness with over 150\% more bugs revealed per test case when compared to the single-turn metamorphic testing baseline. Regarding the quality of bugs, MORTAR reveals higher-quality bugs in terms of diversity, precision and uniqueness. MORTAR is expected to inspire more multi-turn testing approaches, and assist developers in evaluating the dialogue system performance more comprehensively with constrained test resources and budget.

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09.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-13 DOI: HASH:06b4c248f30250cdded45c1a9bb0b039

Projected population level impact and cost-effectiveness of clinic and community-based tuberculosis screening approaches

Authors:

McCreesh↗Khan↗P. Y↗Yoon↗Govender↗Sithole↗Houben↗R. M↗White↗R. G↗Grant↗A. D↗…

The South Africa National Department of Health have set ambitious targets to scale up TB testing, focusing primarily on clinic attendees. In the context of declining funding for TB care and prevention, the most cost-effective approaches for targeting testing should be identified. We developed a mathematical model of TB in South Africa, explicitly incorporating clinic attendance by sex and HIV/ART status. We simulated six screening approaches over 2026-2035 (individually and in combination): three clinic-based (symptom screening, intensified targeted universal TB testing [TUTT, symptom-agnostic sputum testing of clinic attendees in key risk groups], and intensified TUTT allowing saliva samples) and three targeted community-based (community radiographic screening, symptom screening, and universal Xpert Ultra testing), each implemented at a range of coverage levels. Model outputs were combined with a mechanistic cost function to estimate potential impact and cost-effectiveness from a societal perspective. The most cost-effective standalone approach was community radiographic screening at 10% annual population coverage, with an incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) of $421 per disability-adjusted life year (DALY) averted. 10/11 scenarios along the expansion path included community radiographic screening at progressively higher coverage, combined with a clinic-based approach. Combining complementary approaches to reach both groups at increased risk of TB (e.g. clinic-based screening) and groups with lower screening coverage (e.g. community-based screening) may increase cost-effectiveness of TB screening, compared to standalone approaches. When designing TB screening strategies, both population risk and existing screening coverage should be considered.

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10.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12720

On McDiarmid's Inequality under Dependence via Approximate Tensorization of Entropy

Authors:

Valentin Roth↗

arXiv:2606.12720v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We argue that dependent versions of McDiarmid's inequality are a useful but underutilized tool in mathematical statistics, learning theory and theoretical computer science. To make this point, we first highlight that approximate tensorization of entropy (ATE) implies McDiarmid's via the Entropy Method. Second, we derive McDiarmid's inequality for non-isotropic Gaussian random vectors $X \sim \mathcal N(\mu, \Sigma)$ through ATE with a constant of the order of the condition number of $\Sigma$. We both independently obtain this ATE through a simple application of stochastic localization and also discuss how a more general ATE for the Gibbs sampler due to Ascolani et al., 2026 generalizes McDiarmid's-like concentration to strongly log-concave and log-smooth probability measures. We then apply the resulting concentration inequalities to resolve a question on the concentration of $\operatorname{sign}(X)$ posed by Simone Bombari, investigate Erdős-Rényi graphs under dependence and prove a Dvoretzky-Kiefer-Wolfowitz-type inequality for observations from a joint measure fulfilling ATE and continuous marginal CDFs. For the class of strongly log-concave and log-smooth measures, this result improves upon a prior Dvoretzky-Kiefer-Wolfowitz-type inequality for non-i.i.d. observations due to Bobkov and Götze, 2010, by establishing the expected $1/\sqrt{n}$-rate of convergence under weak dependence instead of $n^{-1/3}$.

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11.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2605.17131

A Survey on Deep Learning Architectures for Point Cloud Classification and Segmentation

Authors:

Minhas Kamal↗Hiranya Garbha Kumar↗Balakrishnan Prabhakaran↗

Point cloud stands as the most widely adopted format for representing 3D shapes and scenes due to its simplicity and geometric fidelity. However, its inherent unordered and irregular nature, exacerbated by sensor noise and occlusions, introduces unique challenges for machine learning based methodologies. To combat these issues, diverse strategies have been developed, including converting to a format that has orderliness, extracting local geometry, and permutation-invariant or self-attention-based processing. In this paper, our focus is directed towards deep learning models for three fundamental tasks in 3D vision: point cloud classification, part segmentation, and semantic segmentation. We begin by formally defining point cloud data, followed by an in-depth discussion on its structural characteristics. Then, we categorize notable works based on their backbone structure and evaluate their performance on popular benchmarks. Beyond empirical comparison, we offer insights into architectural innovations and limitations. We also outline open challenges and promising future directions for 3D point cloud understanding.

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12.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12666

CAPED: Context-Aware Privacy Exposure Defense for Mobile GUI Agents

Authors:

Siyu Shen↗Fenghao Xu↗Wenrui Diao↗Kehuan Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.12666v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Screenshot-based mobile GUI agents can operate ordinary smartphone apps through the same visual interface as a human user, but this capability also turns every screen observation into a privacy boundary. During normal task execution, screenshots may expose contacts, messages, photos, files, recommendations, health cues, and other sensitive context that is unrelated to the user's request. We call this problem incidental visual privacy exposure. It is difficult to address with existing defenses: text anonymization misses many visual and inferential cues, while generic privacy masking can remove the evidence and controls that a GUI agent needs to complete the task. This paper presents CAPED, a context-aware pre-upload exposure control layer for mobile GUI agents. CAPED is designed as a phone-side protection layer: before screenshots are released to a remote multimodal agent, it extracts task requirements, uses screen context as a privacy prior, parses visible UI elements, and selectively exposes only content needed for the current task while masking incidental private content. We evaluate CAPED on AndroidWorld for broad task utility and with a controlled 28-task seeded privacy evaluation used as a measurement instrument for trajectory-level incidental leakage. In this seeded evaluation, Full CAPED reduces success-conditioned weighted seeded leakage from 0.766 under raw screenshots to 0.268 while preserving high task utility. A broader AndroidWorld run shows a remaining prototype-level utility cost, but the results support the central claim that screenshot upload should be treated as an explicit device–cloud boundary decision, governed by task-driven selective exposure rather than all-or-nothing screen sharing.

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13.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12774

Agentic MPC for Semantic Control System Resynthesis

Authors:

Yuya Miyaoka↗Masaki Inoue↗

While MPC effectively handles structured, diverse, and low-level specifications, it lacks the capability to dynamically incorporate high-level contextual information such as social norms, user intent, or natural language instructions. To address this limitation, this manuscript introduces an agentic MPC framework that enables context-aware, semantically adaptive control synthesis by integrating with large language model-based agents. The agent interprets heterogeneous inputs, including natural language messages, environmental observations, and external knowledge, to resynthesize the control specifications. The effectiveness of the framework is demonstrated in an autonomous driving scenario, where the system aligns with personal preferences or responds to social situations such as emergency vehicle yielding.

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14.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.03489

Learn from Your Mistakes: Tree-like Self-Play for Secure Code LLMs

Authors:

Wenqi Chen↗Ziyan Zhang↗Bin Wang↗Lin Liu↗Hengheng Zhang↗Zhengsu Chen↗

arXiv:2606.03489v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in code generation, they remain prone to replicating subtle yet critical vulnerabilities endemic to their training data. Current alignment techniques, such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), typically apply coarse-grained optimization at the sequence level. This approach often fails to address the localized nature of security flaws, where a single incorrect token choice can compromise an entire program. To bridge this gap, we introduce Tree-like Self-Play (TSP), a framework that reframes secure code generation as a fine-grained sequential decision process. Unlike standard methods that blindly maximize likelihood, TSP constructs a decision tree where the model explores branching trajectories–generating both secure "golden paths" and vulnerable variants. By treating code generation as a self-play game, the model learns to strictly discriminate against its own localized errors. This provides a dense, on-policy learning signal that forces self-correction precisely at the critical decision nodes where vulnerabilities typically emerge. Our experiments demonstrate that TSP fundamentally enhances model reliability. In Python security benchmarks, TSP boosts CodeLlama-7B's pass rate (SPR@1) to 75.8%, significantly outperforming SFT (57.0%) and unstructured self-play baselines. Crucially, TSP induces robust out-of-distribution generalization: the model not only reduces vulnerabilities in unseen categories (CWEs) by 24.5% but also successfully transfers security principles learned from C/C++ to diverse languages, including Python, Go, and JavaScript. This suggests that TSP does not merely memorize patches, but internalizes abstract, language-agnostic security logic.

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15.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12 DOI: HASH:59e8e7eadc0abc57799ee142dd79edc1

Deconvolution-based cell-type specific DNA methylation-wide and transcriptome-wide association studies identify risk CpG sites and genes associated with colorectal cancer risk

Authors:

Li↗Xu↗Wang↗Wen↗Shu↗Yang↗X.-o↗Cai↗Long↗Singh↗Lau↗K. S↗…

Bulk tissue-based DNA methylation-wide (MWAS) and transcriptome-wide association studies (TWAS) have identified CpG sites and genes associated with colorectal cancer (CRC) risk, but do not account for cellular heterogeneity. To address this, we developed a deconvolution-informed framework to infer cell-type specific DNA methylation and gene expression profiles from bulk normal colon tissues using reference single-cell epigenomic and transcriptomic datasets. We performed cell-type specific MWAS (ctMWAS) using deconvoluted DNA methylation data from 293 normal colon samples and conducted cell-type specific TWAS (ctTWAS) using deconvoluted gene expression data from 707 normal colon samples. Genetically predicted methylation and expression models were integrated with CRC GWAS summary statistics (78,473 cases and 107,143 controls) to identify risk-associated CpG sites and genes. Through ctMWAS, ctTWAS, and colocalization analyses, we identified 178 significant cell-type-specific CpG sites in 106 loci and 68 risk genes in 40 loci, including 26 previously unreported loci. Through additional integrative methylation-gene analysis, we prioritized 132 candidate risk genes, the majority of which were supported by multi-omics evidence and stage-specific dysregulation across the adenoma-carcinoma and serrated-carcinoma progression pathways. Pathway enrichment analyses implicated pathways involved in DNA double-strand break repair, TP53 regulation, TGF-{beta} signaling, and innate immune responses. Among prioritized genes, 14 were identified as putative druggable targets linked to 90 FDA-approved or clinical-stage drugs. Experimental validation supports an oncogenic role for SF3A3. These findings demonstrate that deconvolution-informed integrative analyses enable cell-type-resolved identification of epigenetic and transcriptional mechanisms underlying CRC susceptibility and provide insights into disease biology, prevention, and therapeutic target discovery.

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16.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2508.18166

PCR-CA: Parallel Codebook Representations with Contrastive Alignment for Multiple-Category App Recommendation

Authors:

Bin Tan↗Wangyao Ge↗Yidi Wang↗Xin Liu↗Jeff Burtoft↗Hao Fan↗Hui Wang↗

arXiv:2508.18166v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern app store recommender systems struggle with multiple-category apps, as traditional taxonomies fail to capture overlapping semantics, leading to suboptimal personalization. We propose PCR-CA (Parallel Codebook Representations with Contrastive Alignment), an end-to-end framework for improved CTR prediction. PCR-CA first extracts compact multimodal embeddings from app text, then introduces a Parallel Codebook VQ-AE module that learns discrete semantic representations across multiple codebooks in parallel – unlike hierarchical residual quantization (RQ-VAE). This design enables independent encoding of diverse aspects (e.g., gameplay, art style), better modeling multiple-category semantics. To bridge semantic and collaborative signals, we employ a contrastive alignment loss at both the user and item levels, enhancing representation learning for long-tail items. Additionally, a dual-attention fusion mechanism combines ID-based and semantic features to capture user interests, especially for long-tail apps. Experiments on a large-scale dataset show PCR-CA achieves a +0.76% AUC improvement over strong baselines, with +2.15% AUC gains for long-tail apps. Online A/B testing further validates our approach, showing a +10.52% lift in CTR and a +16.30% improvement in CVR, demonstrating PCR-CA's effectiveness in real-world deployment. The new framework has now been fully deployed on the Microsoft Store.

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17.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2601.19093

Residual-Squeezing Mechanism of Mismatch in Inverse-Squeezing Kennedy Receivers

Authors:

Enhao Bai↗Fengkai Sun↗Tianyi Wu↗Yang Ran↗Zichao Zhou↗Huankai Zhang↗Jian Peng↗Chen Dong↗Laiyuan Tong↗Zhenrong Zhang↗Yaping Li↗

arXiv:2601.19093v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The discrimination of quantum states is fundamental to quantum information processing. Inverse-squeezing Kennedy (IS-Kennedy) receivers can outperform the coherent-state BPSK Helstrom benchmark at the same energy by converting transmitter-side squeezing into an effective coherent-state separation gain, without violating the Helstrom bound for the squeezed-state alphabet. This work investigates how squeezing mismatch degrades this mechanism. We show that imperfect inverse squeezing transforms the ideally nulled output into a residually squeezed state, thereby altering the photon-number statistics before detection. This residual-squeezing picture reveals a strong physical asymmetry between squeezing-magnitude and squeezing-phase mismatches. Magnitude mismatch produces an energy-independent error floor in the high-signal-energy regime, whereas phase mismatch generates a residual squeezing term that grows with signal energy. In the small-residual-squeezing regime, this leads to a polynomial growth of the leading error contribution and a rapid collapse of the SQL advantage. We also identify a parity-step effect in photon-number-resolving detection: because the nulled residual squeezed vacuum contains only even photon numbers, increasing detector resolution improves the high-energy robustness only when the effective saturation threshold crosses the next even photon number. These results identify phase locking as the dominant bottleneck for IS-Kennedy-type non-Gaussian receivers under unitary squeezing mismatch and provide design guidelines for robust squeezed-state quantum receivers.

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18.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13529

Ride, Track, and Recover: Pilot Randomized Trial of a Wearable Digital Self-Management Intervention During a Veteran Endurance-Cycling Program

Authors:

Alan Ta↗Nilsu Salgin↗Caleb Armstrong↗Kala Phillips Reindel↗Farzan Sasangohar↗

arXiv:2606.13529v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in veterans is characterized by persistent hyperarousal and comorbid anxiety and depressive symptoms that are difficult to monitor and manage outside clinical settings. Thirteen veterans participating in a Project Hero cycling event in Texas were randomized by computer-generated sequence in a naturalistic setting to two arms: (1) digital intervention plus physical activity, or (2) physical activity only, plus a third at-home monitoring control cohort consisting of 7 veterans selected from the broader Project Hero veteran community. Continuous smartwatch sensing combined heart rate and accelerometer features to detect hyperarousal events, which were confirmed in real time by participants. Weekly self-report measures of anxiety, depression, and PTSD severity were collected. Generalized additive mixed models characterized nonlinear trajectories over time. Baseline-normalized hyperarousal trajectories differed significantly across conditions, with the digital intervention group (n=7) showing structured stabilization compared to late-study escalation in the physical-only group (n=3). Both cycling groups exhibited acute symptom improvements during the endurance event; however, the digital intervention group demonstrated a higher overall maintenance of gains. The at-home control group (n=4) showed gradual symptom declines. Perceived precision of ML detections varied substantially across individuals and was positively associated with symptom severity, with higher-severity participants confirming a greater proportion of detected events. These results suggest that coupling wearable detection with digital self-management tools may support stabilization of hyperarousal and symptom improvement while emphasizing the importance of personalization and human-centered design in wearable mental health systems.

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19.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12286

CellNet – Localizing Cells using Sparse and Noisy Point Annotations

Authors:

Benjamin Eckhardt↗Dmytro Fishman↗Stuart Fawke↗Andrew Curtis↗Bo Fussing↗Constantin Pape↗

Counting living cells is an important step in many biological research workflows. Our collaborators at the Wellcome Sanger Institute study vital genes in humans via large scale saturation genome editing screening, which requires repeatedly counting cells a great number of times. Computer Vision based automation is crucial for high throughput and resource efficiency. In this work, we develop a regression-based deep learning computer vision algorithm to detect and count cells in phase-contrast microscopy images. To reduce annotation effort, which in practice often becomes a bottleneck, we focus on counting cells only using sparse point annotations, which are fast and easy to acquire. By comparison to state-of-the-art 0-shot methods, we show that regression-based counting is a promising alternative in low data regimes. Through developing methods to automatically count living cells in microscopy images, we contribute to valuable research on the human genome. The code is available at https://github.com/beijn/cellnet.

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20.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12581

Graph Reduction in Multirelational Networks: A Spreading-Oriented Reduction Benchmark

Authors:

Mateusz Stolarski↗Micha{\l} Czuba↗Piotr Bielak↗Piotr Br\'odka↗

arXiv:2606.12581v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-world networks are inherently incomplete, noisy, and dynamically evolving, making it difficult to capture all actors and their relationships. Their scale often renders direct analysis computationally demanding. While influence maximisation (IM) has been widely studied, the role of graph reduction as a preprocessing step, and its impact on IM accuracy, remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce the Spreading-Oriented Reduction Benchmark (SORB), an open-source, standardised framework for systematically evaluating IM models across diverse task settings. SORB provides an extensible pipeline operating on a representative collection of real-world networks, including single- and multilayer structures, and accounts for graph reduction directly into the evaluation process. This design shifts the focus from analysing IM algorithms in isolation to quantifying how graph reduction alters predictive performance. Using SORB, we study the effects of sparsification and coarsening across multiple IM scenarios. Our results show that the impact of reduction is strongly dependent on both the network type (single-layer vs. multirelational) and the downstream task ($Gain@k$ vs. $\mathrm{AUC}_{\mathrm{cutoff}}$): sparsification preserves seed set quality on single-layer networks, whereas flattened multilayer networks exhibit systematic ranking degradation regardless of reduction strategy. These findings highlight the importance of reduction-aware, multi-task evaluation when studying spreading processes in complex networks.

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21.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2602.22822

FlexMS: A Unified Public Benchmark for Molecule Tandem Mass Spectrum Prediction

Authors:

Yunhua Zhong↗Yixuan Tang↗Yifan Li↗Pan Liu↗Zhiwen Yang↗Jie Yang↗Jun Xia↗

arXiv:2602.22822v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) is central to small molecule identification, but current deep learning systems for spectrum prediction still remain difficult to evaluate and deploy in practice. While novel architectures constantly claim state-of-the-art performance, inconsistent metadata conditioning and entangled preprocessing pipelines hinder fair architectural comparisons. Besides, existing evaluations are often restricted to curated datasets, failing to capture the heterogeneity and cross-domain shifts of real-world metabolomics. Furthermore, current benchmarks lack difficulty-aware diagnostics and leave blind to how models behave under specific compute or data constraints. To address this, we present FlexMS, a modular public-data benchmark framework that standardizes MS/MS prediction across public resources while keeping molecular encoders, metadata conditioning, predictor heads, and downstream retrieval under one protocol. FlexMS establishes a fair evaluation playground which significantly lowers the barrier for integrating new predictive tools. Rather than solely optimizing for average scores, FlexMS augments aggregate accuracy with difficulty-aware diagnostics, providing actionable guidance on model selection across different compute constraints, data scales, and downstream retrieval objectives. Ultimately, FlexMS provides the community with a reproducible standard to identify which algorithmic conclusions are stable and which operating points are most viable in practice.

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22.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15512

Towards Data-Efficient Cross-Device Generalization of Grad-Shafranov Equilibria via Transfer Learning Neural Operator

Authors:

Jay Phil Yoo↗William Howes↗Yashika Ghai↗Kazuma Kobayashi↗Souvik Chakraborty↗Syed Bahauddin Alam↗

arXiv:2606.15512v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real-time reconstruction of magnetohydrodynamic equilibria is essential for plasma shaping, stability assessment and feedback control in magnetic confinement fusion. However, Grad-Shafranov equilibrium calculations remain largely device-specific and iterative, limiting their use in latency-constrained control settings. Existing neural approaches can accelerate individual equilibrium predictions, but they do not generally provide reusable models across changing plasma boundaries or tokamak geometries. Here we show that equilibrium reconstruction can be recast as a cross-device operator learning problem. We develop a domain-specific neural operator framework that maps geometry and profile parameters directly to the poloidal flux field, replacing repeated solve-on-demand computation with amortized operator inference. Using the analytically tractable Solov'ev family as a controlled Grad-Shafranov testbed, we generate equilibria across eight geometrically distinct tokamak-like configurations and benchmark five neural operator architectures under four transfer-learning strategies. Single-geometry pretraining gives poor transfer to unseen devices, whereas multi-geometry pretraining enables data-efficient adaptation. The Wavelet Neural Operator gives the strongest cross-geometry performance, reaching mean relative L2 errors below 4% with 100 labelled target equilibria and below 2% with full fine-tuning. The predicted magnetic fields satisfy the divergence-free constraint to numerical precision, and four architectures achieve millisecond or sub-millisecond inference. These results identify neural operator pretraining as a route towards reusable, real-time equilibrium inference across fusion device configurations.

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23.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.07489

How AI Agents Reshape Knowledge Work: Autonomy, Efficiency, and Scope

Authors:

Jeremy Yang↗Kate Zyskowski↗Noah Yonack↗Jerry Ma↗

arXiv:2606.07489v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Frontier AI systems are bridging the gap between intelligence and utility by shifting from conversational assistants to autonomous agents that execute tasks end to end. Using production data from Perplexity's Search and Computer products, we study this transition by examining how AI agents accelerate and reshape knowledge work. Three key empirical findings emerge. First, using sessions with near-identical initial query pairs as natural experiments for the same underlying task attempted with both products, Computer performs 26 minutes of autonomous work per user session, versus 33 seconds for Search. Computer automates task decomposition and execution that Search users might otherwise manually orchestrate and implement. As a result, Computer shifts follow-up query distribution toward higher-order work such as verification and extension. Autonomy also increases execution quality, with per-query dissatisfaction rates 55% lower on Computer than on Search. Second, due to its autonomy advantage, Computer reduces completion time from 269 to 36 minutes on matched tasks, lowering estimated time and cost by 87% and 94%, respectively, compared to humans equipped with Search alone. Third, Computer changes the scope of work that users attempt: Computer queries more often cross occupational boundaries, require higher-order cognition, draw on broader expertise, take the form of composite tasks that bundle interdependent subtasks into a single query, and unlock work activities that are essentially absent from Search usage among the same users. Together, the evidence indicates that AI agents accelerate workflows, enhance output quality, reduce costs, and expand the breadth and depth of automated work.

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24.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2605.13648

Sticky CIR process with potential: invariant measure and exact sampling

Authors:

Tony Shardlow↗

arXiv:2605.13648v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the sticky Cox–Ingersoll–Ross (CIR) process in one dimension, a diffusion on $[0,\infty)$ with a sticky boundary condition at the origin, arising as the marginal process in a sparse Bayesian inference framework based on Hadamard–Langevin dynamics. For the parameter range $\delta\in(1,2)$, in which the origin is accessible but not absorbing, we prove well-posedness of the process and uniqueness of its invariant measure, which is a mixture of a point mass at zero and a weighted gamma-type density on the interior. We derive an explicit Green's function for the resolvent in terms of confluent hypergeometric functions, and use this to construct an exact sampler for the invariant measure in the zero-potential case. For a non-trivial potential $G$, we establish existence and uniqueness of the tilted invariant measure via a Girsanov change of measure, and develop two sampling algorithms: a Metropolis–Hastings corrected sampler that targets the invariant measure exactly, and a cheaper, biased unadjusted Langevin algorithm (ULA) for a boundary-clamped variant of which we prove a first-order expansion of the stationary bias with an explicit constant: the leading error is a rank-one transfer of mass $K_\star h|\log h| $ onto the atom, so the total-variation bias is of exact order $h|\log h | $ – independent of $\delta$ – whenever the potential has nonzero boundary drift. Numerical experiments confirm the predicted behaviour: the Metropolis–Hastings sampler achieves the target invariant measure at all step sizes, while the ULA bias follows the proven first-order law, including its constant.

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25.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.18156

ReAge3D: Re-Aging 3D Faces with View Consistency

Authors:

Libing Zeng↗Li Ma↗Mingming He↗Ning Yu↗Paul Debevec↗Nima Khademi Kalantari↗

We present a novel framework for realistic and controllable 3D face re-aging which produces highly detailed, identity-preserving results. Existing 3D editing methods, while effective for coarse semantic changes, are not well suited for re-aging, as even small inconsistencies across re-aged 2D views can lead to over-smoothing of subtle but perceptually important age-related details. To address this challenge, we first introduce a 2D diffusion-based re-aging model, DiffReaging, trained on synthetically generated image pairs. We further propose a center-out editing propagation strategy that leverages this re-aging model to reconstruct multi-view-consistent re-aged images. Specifically, starting from a re-aged frontal pivot view, we reconstruct the remaining views through warping and our proposed Masked-DiffReaging process. By injecting existing content at every step of the diffusion process, Masked-DiffReaging ensures that the reconstructed regions remain coherent with existing pixels. The resulting consistent set of re-aged views supervises the optimization of the re-aged 3D representation. Our method outperforms existing 3D editing techniques both visually and quantitatively, enabling smooth, fine-grained control over age transformations in 3D face models.

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