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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Socioeconomic inequalities in smoking prevalence and intensity in Germany: A repeated cross-sectional analysis from 1998 to 2024

Background: Smoking inequalities by socioeconomic status have widened consistently in Germany, but sex-specific trends after 2013 and inequalities in daily cigarette consumption among smokers (intensity) are unknown. We analyzed trends in absolute and relative socioeconomic inequalities in smoking prevalence and intensity among German adults across three decades. Methods: We used 14 waves (1998-2024) of population-representative cross-sectional data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to estimate sex-specific trends in smoking prevalence and intensity in adults aged 25-64. Inequalities were quantified across strata of education, occupation, and equivalized household income using the absolute and relative concentration index with 95% bootstrap confidence intervals. Results: Overall smoking prevalence declined from 35.05% (CI: [33.90%, 36.20%] in 1998 to 22.19% (CI: [21.15%, 23.24%]) in 2024, and mean intensity from 17.49 (CI: [17.09,17.90]) to 13.33 (CI: [12.88, 13.79]) cigarettes/day. Over this period sex-differences in both outcomes narrowed almost completely. Absolute and relative inequalities in smoking prevalence widened across all SES dimensions, particularly for education and occupation. By 2024, inequalities were larger among women than men driven by a stagnating or rising smoking prevalence among low-SES women at least until 2018 alongside continued declines in higher-SES women and for men. Inequalities in smoking intensity, particularly related to income, were generally smaller than those in prevalence. Conclusion: Socioeconomic smoking inequalities in Germany widened from 1998 to 2024 primarily driven by reductions among higher-SES groups and increases in low-SES women. However, recent reductions in low-SES women may indicate a new phase in the smoking epidemic. Health equity considerations should be integrated into a targeted German tobacco control strategy.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

StereoFactory: A Unified Merging Framework for Robust Stereo Matching

Stereo matching has advanced through foundation models trained on large-scale datasets, yet this paradigm suffers from a scalability bottleneck: incorporating new data requires costly joint retraining. Model merging offers a scalable post-hoc alternative by integrating knowledge from specialized models after source checkpoints are available. However, existing merging methods typically retain all available models or rely on greedy inclusion, which can preserve harmful task-vector interference. We propose StereoFactory, a coarse-to-fine evolutionary framework for adaptive model merging. Stage~1 employs a genetic algorithm to search the combinatorial space of model subsets, determining which models should participate. Stage~2 addresses module-level knowledge specialization (different functional modules exhibit distinct preferences for knowledge sources) through CMA-ES optimization of architecture-adaptive routing over the selected task vectors, with optional module-level scaling. Experiments across two architectures and four benchmarks demonstrate that StereoFactory consistently achieves the best four-benchmark average under the same checkpoint pool, reducing the average error from 3.80 to 3.30 on NMRF and from 2.88 to 2.19 on FoundationStereo relative to the strongest controlled baseline. The post-hoc search requires only 2.7–3.7\% of the corresponding joint-retraining wall-clock time. Analysis reveals that knowledge contributions are inherently module-specific, and selected subsets can transfer across architectures with minimal degradation. Code will be publicly released upon acceptance at: https://github.com/XiandaGuo/StereoFactory.

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

DecompSR: A dataset for decomposed analyses of compositional multihop spatial reasoning

arXiv:2511.02627v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce DecompSR, decomposed spatial reasoning, a large benchmark dataset (over 5m datapoints) and generation framework designed to analyse compositional spatial reasoning ability. The generation of DecompSR allows users to independently vary several aspects of compositionality, namely: productivity (reasoning depth), substitutivity (entity and linguistic variability), overgeneralisation (input order, distractors) and systematicity (novel linguistic elements). DecompSR is built procedurally in a manner which makes it is correct by construction, which is independently verified using a symbolic solver to guarantee the correctness of the dataset. DecompSR is comprehensively benchmarked across a host of Large Language Models (LLMs) where we show that LLMs struggle with productive and systematic generalisation in spatial reasoning tasks whereas they are more robust to linguistic variation. DecompSR provides a provably correct and rigorous benchmarking dataset with a novel ability to independently vary the degrees of several key aspects of compositionality, allowing for robust and fine-grained probing of the compositional reasoning abilities of LLMs.

04.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Gen Z scepticism towards AI is a wake-up call — universities must take it seriously

Authors:

The challenge for universities is not adopting artificial intelligence, but doing so in ways that the current generation of students can trust. The challenge for universities is not adopting artificial intelligence, but doing so in ways that the current generation of students can trust.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Applications of quantum annealing to magnetic dipole hyperfine structure constants: First results beyond energies for atoms

arXiv:2606.20166v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We report the first results of the magnetic dipole hyperfine structure (HFS) constants of neutral $\mathrm{Li}$, Li-like $\mathrm{Be}$, neutral $\mathrm{Na}$, and Na-like $\mathrm{Mg}$ using a modified version of the Quantum Annealer Eigensolver (QAE) algorithm on D-Wave's quantum hardware. The results are benchmarked against relativistic configuration interaction with multiconfiguration Dirac Hartree-Fock (MCDHF) calculations using the General-purpose Relativistic Atomic Structure Package (GRASP), and simulated annealing. In our modified QAE, a zooming-and-sigma-annealing approach with a floating-point encoding scheme is adopted to estimate the ground-state eigenvalue and eigenvector of the relativistic Dirac-Coulomb Hamiltonian matrices ($H_{\mathrm{DC}}$) constructed from 11 or fewer configuration state functions (CSFs). For calculations with extended correlation orbital sets, we applied a CSF truncation scheme, retaining only CSFs (up to 12) that make significant contributions to the ground-state wavefunction. Our modified QAE precision is kept limited to three decimal places (up to 10 qubits). Hardware demonstrations on the D-Wave quantum processing unit (QPU) yielded results that were completely consistent with GRASP (at the chosen precision) in determining the magnetic dipole HFS constants, with accuracy varying across systems and $H_{\mathrm{DC}}$ matrix dimensions.

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

Urdu Katib Handwritten Dataset: A Historical Document Dataset for Offline Urdu Handwritten Text Recognition with CRNN-Based Baseline Evaluation

Automatic Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) is inherently a challenging task, and its complexity is further increased when dealing with cursive scripts. Although significant efforts have been made on various cursive scripts, research regarding Urdu Handwritten Text Recognition (UHTR) has been relatively limited. This lag of research is primarily due to the unique challenges posed by its script, and the scarcity and unavailability of benchmark datasets. Therefore, to advance research in UHTR, this study presents a specialized real dataset called the Urdu Katib Handwritten Dataset (UKHD). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first offline Urdu handwritten text lines dataset specifically curated from the materials written by Katibs in historical times. It encompasses a diverse range of flat nib writing variations in the Nastalique calligraphic style. Additionally, the effectiveness of different CRNN-based hybrid models has been evaluated to identify the optimal architecture for Urdu Katib Handwriting Recognition (UKHR). Among the analyzed models, the CNN-BGRU-CTC model showed more robust performance, with low Character Error Rate (CER) and Word Error Rate (WER). This research work aims to support and encourage the research community in developing a robust recognition system for preserving Urdu handwritten literature.

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

Hierarchical Attention via Domain Decomposition

arXiv:2606.18525v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a hierarchical attention mechanism based on two-level overlapping Schwarz domain decomposition. The method is motivated by the observation that two-level Schwarz domain decomposition methods combine local subdomain corrections with a coarse level that communicates global, long-range information. We test its usefulness in the context of finite-dimensional operator learning using a simple, one-dimensional diffusion problem with homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions. Although elementary, this problem provides a controlled sequence-to-sequence setting in which the exact nonlocal solution operator is known. After discretization, learning the solution operator amounts to approximating the inverse of a symmetric positive definite matrix. As a baseline, we use a global softmax-free low-rank attention operator of the form $QK^T$. The proposed construction replaces this dense global factorization by a two-level additive structure: local low-rank attention blocks on overlapping subdomains are combined with a coarse attention block. The resulting operator has the form $$M_{\theta}^{-1} = \Phi Q_0 K_0^T \Phi^T + \sum_{i=1}^{N} R_i^T D_i^{1/2} Q_i K_i^T D_i^{1/2} R_i.$$ Here $R_i$ restricts to an overlapping subdomain, $D_i$ is a partition-of-unity weight, and $\Phi$ is a coarse interpolation (or prolongation) matrix. Numerical experiments for synthetic Fourier right-hand sides indicate that the domain-decomposition attention operator is able to train faster and can give more accurate approximations than a global low-rank attention baseline while using significantly fewer parameters.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

REGRID-QAOA: A Resource-Efficient Graph-Reduced Hybrid QAOA Framework for Physics-Constrained Power System Islanding

arXiv:2606.15083v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum computing has rapidly emerged as a powerful paradigm for tackling computationally demanding problems. In particular, quantum optimization shows strong promise for hard combinatorial problems in power systems, where increasing distributed energy penetration heightens the need for intentional islanding to maintain grid reliability and resilience. However, power system islanding is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem that becomes computationally prohibitive for classical solvers as network size grows, motivating the use of quantum computing as a promising alternative pipeline. This study develops a resource-efficient hybrid QAOA islanding framework that brings physics-constrained power-system partitioning into the quantum optimization workflow. The framework combines coherency-informed graph reduction, physics-aware constraint modeling, and structured post-processing to efficiently convert shallow-circuit QAOA samples into high-quality feasible islanding decisions without deep circuits or large shot budgets. The proposed framework is validated on the standard IEEE benchmark systems (9-, 14-, 24-, 30-, 39-, and 57-bus), demonstrating that the hybrid workflow achieves Gurobi-optimal solution quality with a clear quantum resource advantage over vanilla QAOA, while the resulting islanding solutions satisfy all physical feasibility requirements after network separation. This study establishes QAOA-based islanding as a viable quantum approach for critical infrastructure, with structured post-processing as the key enabler of quantum resource efficiency.

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

The Algebra of Units: From Buckingham's Pi-grec Theorem to Latent-Variable Learning

arXiv:2606.16737v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Engineers often measure many quantities-speed, pressure, temperature, length-expressed in different physical units. The Buckingham Pi-grec theorem states that these variables can always be combined into a smaller set of dimensionless numbers whose values fully determine the system's behaviour. Identifying the appropriate dimensionless groups has traditionally required expert knowledge and physical insight. This paper shows that they can instead be discovered automatically from data, without prior knowledge of the governing physics. The key observation is that, after logarithmic transformation, measurements collected under different scalings of the same system lie on a low-dimensional manifold whose geometry is determined by the underlying dimensionless groups. Singular value decomposition (SVD) identifies this manifold directly from data. A subsequent search over integer-exponent combinations recovers candidate dimensionless quantities, while a repeating-variable filter retains only those constructed from the machine's characteristic scales. This procedure recovers familiar engineering groups, including the flow coefficient, head coefficient, and Mach number, while excluding equivalent but less interpretable alternatives. The method is demonstrated on a synthetic compressor dataset containing 16,000 measurements. Starting from raw dimensional variables and no physics input, it recovers the correct dimensionless groups to numerical precision and reproduces the compressor performance map with an error below 0.01%. More broadly, the work reveals a close connection between classical dimensional analysis and modern data-driven learning. Both rely on the same underlying algebraic structure, suggesting new approaches for building physical models that are simultaneously interpretable, scalable, and data-efficient.

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

Beyond the Blood Draw: Explainable Machine Learning for Non-Invasive Dysglycemia Risk Screening

arXiv:2606.16056v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dysglycemia, encompassing both prediabetes and diabetes, affects huge numbers of adults worldwide, yet many of them remain undiagnosed. We developed and validated machine-learning (ML) models for non-invasive screening of dysglycemia risk that require no laboratory tests. Pooling data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 2017–2023 (n=14,352), we trained six ML models with stratified 5-fold cross-validation and compared them with two established clinical risk scores. LightGBM achieved the highest area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC=0.820, 95% CI: 0.806–0.835), outperforming the Finnish Diabetes Risk Score (0.745) and American Diabetes Association Risk Test (0.783). SHAP analysis identified age, race/ethnicity, and waist-to-height ratio as the most influential predictors. Subgroup analyses confirmed consistent performance across demographic strata (AUC: 0.735–0.832). These results demonstrate the feasibility of explainable, laboratory-free dysglycemia screening for deployment in community settings and self-tracking health applications.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Recurrence After Hepatic Hydatid Cyst Surgery: Scolicidal Agent Application Technique and the Effect of Cystopiliary Fistula

Objective: This study aimed to evaluate long-term outcomes in patients who underwent surgical treatment for hepatic hydatid cyst (HCC) disease and, in particular, to investigate the effect of scolicidal agent (SA) application method and the presence of cystobiliary fistula (CBF) on the development of recurrence. Materials and Methods: This single-center, retrospective study included 197 patients who underwent surgical treatment for HCC disease. Hypertonic saline was used as SA in all patients and was classified as intracystic or pericystic application according to the application method. The presence of CBF was evaluated according to intraoperative and postoperative findings. Patients were followed for 86 months, and the development of recurrence was identified by radiological methods. Comparisons were made between the groups with and without recurrence in terms of SA application method and the presence of CBF. Results: The median age of the patients was 38 years, and the median follow-up period was 86 months. SA application was performed into the cyst in 51.3% of the patients and around the cyst in 48.7%. The presence of CBF was detected in 49.7% of the patients. No statistically significant difference was found between the recurrent and non-recurrent groups in terms of SA application method (p = 0.344). Similarly, no significant relationship was found between the presence of CBF and the development of recurrence (p = 0.721). Conclusion: This study showed that the SA application method and the presence of CBF are not determinants of recurrence in HCC disease. It is thought that recurrence rates can be kept low with appropriate surgical technique and effective biliary tract management.

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

Structured Representation Learning with Locally Linear Embeddings and Adaptive Feature Fusion

arXiv:2606.18469v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neuroscientific research has revealed that the brain encodes complex behaviors by leveraging structured, low-dimensional manifolds and dynamically fusing multiple sources of information through adaptive gating mechanisms. Inspired by these principles, we propose a novel reinforcement learning (RL) framework that encourages the disentanglement of dynamics-specific and reward-specific features, drawing direct parallels to how neural circuits separate and integrate information for efficient decision-making. Our approach leverages locally linear embeddings (LLEs) to capture the intrinsic, locally linear structure inherent in many environments, mirroring the local smoothness observed in neural population activity, while concurrently deriving reward-specific features through the standard RL objective. An attention mechanism, analogous to cortical gating, adaptively fuses these complementary representations on a per-state basis. Experimental results on benchmark tasks demonstrate that our method, grounded in neuroscientific principles, improves learning efficiency and overall performance compared to conventional RL approaches, highlighting the benefits of explicitly modeling local state structures and adaptive feature selection as observed in biological systems.

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

CLoVE: Personalized Federated Learning through Clustering of Loss Vector Embeddings

arXiv:2506.22427v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose CLoVE (Clustering of Loss Vector Embeddings), a novel algorithm for Clustered Federated Learning (CFL). In CFL, clients are naturally grouped into clusters based on their data distribution. However, identifying these clusters is challenging, as client assignments are unknown. CLoVE utilizes client embeddings derived from model losses on client data, and leverages the insight that clients in the same cluster share similar loss values, while those in different clusters exhibit distinct loss patterns. Based on these embeddings, CLoVE is able to iteratively identify and separate clients from different clusters and optimize cluster-specific models through federated aggregation. Key advantages of CLoVE over existing CFL algorithms are (1) its simplicity, (2) its applicability to both supervised and unsupervised settings, and (3) the fact that it eliminates the need for near-optimal model initialization, which makes it more robust and better suited for real-world applications. We establish theoretical convergence bounds, showing that CLoVE can recover clusters accurately with high probability in a single round and converges exponentially fast to optimal models in a linear setting. Our comprehensive experiments comparing with a variety of both CFL and generic Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) algorithms on different types of datasets and an extensive array of non-IID settings demonstrate that CLoVE achieves highly accurate cluster recovery in just a few rounds of training, along with state-of-the-art model accuracy, across a variety of both supervised and unsupervised PFL tasks.

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

Closed-Loop Triplet Synergistic Generation for Long-Form Video

Multi-shot long-form video generation remains challenging due to identity drift and compounding inconsistencies across shots. While storyboard-driven pipelines improve controllability, they are often executed in a feed-forward manner, with limited mechanisms to incorporate generated visual evidence back into subsequent conditioning. We propose CoTriSyGen, an agentic framework that formulates multi-shot long video generation as a closed-loop visual-text-memory synergy process, where planned intent, persistent memory, and generated visuals are jointly leveraged for iterative correction and long-range coherence. A vision-language-model-based analyzer reasons over this triplet and produces updates to both prompts and memory along two pathways: (i) intra-shot refinement, which triggers targeted regeneration when semantic or compositional violations are detected and refines image-to-video prompt for coherent motions; and (ii) inter-shot refinement, which rewrites subsequent-shot prompts to propagate newly manifested entities or attributes and improve prompt quality (e.g., compositional grounding and cinematic fluency) based on generated evidence. The loop is grounded in an entity-centric memory modeled as a mutable visual state that evolves as the story progresses, which is continuously updated by both the generator and the analyzer by adding new and evolved entities to reflect appearance changes, accumulated multi-view evidence, and multi-entity compositions. Experiments on our curated StoryBench benchmark demonstrate substantial improvements in cross-shot consistency, prompt adherence, and cinematic continuity over representative methods.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Demographic Calibration Gaps in Breast Cancer Risk Prediction: Introducing the Demographic Calibration Gap Score

Authors:

ABSTRACT: Most breast cancer prediction studies skip calibration reporting entirely. Fewer still examine calibration by demographic subgroup. Predicted probabilities that are systematically off for specific racial or gender groups produce biased clinical decisions, and aggregate statistics will not catch that. Objective: To introduce the Demographic Calibration Gap Score (DCGS), a metric that measures how much calibration error varies across demographic subgroups, and to show how it performs across five classifiers, four calibration conditions, and two datasets. Methods: Five classifiers were trained on the Wisconsin Diagnostic Breast Cancer dataset (n=569) and evaluated on a breast cancer cohort from MIMIC-IV (n=1,316). Three global calibration methods were applied: no calibration, Platt scaling, and isotonic regression. A fourth condition, subgroup-targeted Platt scaling, was applied to the MIMIC cohort. DCGS was computed as across racial and gender subgroups, with 95% bootstrap confidence intervals. Conformal prediction coverage and Demographic Coverage Gap (DCG) were reported. Results: On Wisconsin, all five models achieved AUROC above 0.98 and ECE below 0.12. Performance fell sharply on the MIMIC external cohort: AUROC dropped to 0.45-0.57 for base and globally calibrated variants, confirming distributional shift. DCGS exceeded the 0.05 clinical significance threshold in 28 of 40 model-calibration combinations on the race axis. Neither global Platt nor isotonic calibration reliably reduced DCGS below that threshold. Conformal coverage collapsed to roughly 25% on MIMIC, and racial DCG exceeded 0.15 for all 20 model-variant combinations. Conclusions: Reducing population-level ECE through global recalibration does not reliably close demographic calibration gaps. DCGS gives researchers a direct, standardized way to detect and report those disparities. Code and the DCGS computation library are released as open-source Python under the MIT License.

16.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Trajectory inference of epithelial-centered neighborhood profiles reconstructs a pseudo-temporal continuum in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis

Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is characterized by complex lung architecture and spatially heterogeneous remodeling, which have hindered integrated analysis of cell-intrinsic activity and intercellular communication during disease progression. Here we profiled six IPF lung specimens comprising more than 630,000 cells using the Xenium 5k panel and developed an epithelial-centered neighborhood profiling framework based on the local cellular composition around each epithelial cell. This approach captured fibrosis-associated variation in epithelial niches without requiring predefined histological regions. Pseudo-temporal continuum inference of these profiles reconstructed a continuous axis that reflected the spatial progression of fibrotic remodeling from relatively preserved alveolar regions to fibrotic and airway-like remodeled regions. Within this spatial dataset, we mapped coordinated changes in epithelial states, local microenvironments, epithelial intracellular pathway activities, and directional interactions with neighboring cell types along the same axis. Our findings provide a spatial framework that generates testable hypotheses for progressive epithelial niche remodeling in IPF.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Hybrid VQE-CVQE algorithm using diabatic state preparation

arXiv:2512.04801v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a hybrid variational quantum algorithm that has variational parameters used by both the quantum circuit and the subsequent classical optimization. Similar to the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE), this algorithm applies a parameterized unitary operator to the qubit register. We generate this operator using diabatic state preparation. The quantum measurement results then inform the classical optimization procedure used by the Cascaded Variational Quantum Eigensolver (CVQE). We demonstrate the algorithm on a system of interacting electrons and show how it can be used on long-term error-corrected as well as short-term intermediate-scale quantum computers. Our simulations performed on IBM Brisbane produced energies well within chemical accuracy.

18.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-17

General-purpose chatbots outperform clinical AI tools on physicians’ real-world questions

Authors: Unknown Author

Specialized clinical AI tools are entering medical practice with little independent testing. In a head-to-head evaluation across two public benchmarks and real questions from physicians, three general-purpose frontier large language models outperformed two leading clinical AI tools, which performed no better than Google search AI overview.

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

Structure Over Nonlinearity: Explicit Interaction Architectures for Dynamical Learning

Authors:

arXiv:2606.19101v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Most learning architectures for dynamical systems rely on generic nonlinear function approximation, often requiring high model complexity to capture structured behaviors. In this work, we propose an alternative paradigm in which modeling capability arises primarily from structure rather than from expressive nonlinearities. We introduce a class of explicit structured dynamical units based on wave-inspired interaction structures with internal state. Inspired by wave-based computational principles, the proposed units adopt a strictly causal organization that eliminates algebraic loops, yielding fully explicit models that can be evaluated without implicit solvers. Stacking such units produces layered dynamical architectures with emergent hierarchical behavior. Through experiments on a nonlinear system identification task, we show that depth improves both representation quality and generalization, even under limited parameter optimization. In particular, the proposed architectures produce informative internal representations even under readout-only fitting, indicating that useful dynamical structure emerges from the organization of interactions prior to substantial parameter optimization. These results suggest that structure-first design provides a viable and effective alternative to conventional black-box approaches for learning dynamical systems, highlighting the role of interaction structure as a primary source of model expressivity.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

LLMs+Graphs: Toward Graph-Native, Synergistic AI Systems

arXiv:2606.11560v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced rapidly, but their limitations in structured and multi-hop reasoning underscore the need for graph-native, synergistic artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Graph-structured data underpins critical applications across social, biological, financial, transportation, web, and knowledge domains, making it essential to understand how LLMs can leverage graph computation for grounded, context-rich inference. Three complementary synergies are emerging: LLMs augmented with graph computation for retrieval and reasoning; bidirectional integration between LLMs and knowledge graphs (KGs), where LLMs support KG construction and curation while KGs enforce semantic constraints and factual consistency; and AI agents strengthened by graph algorithms for planning, decision making, and multi-step reasoning. In parallel, LLMs introduce new capabilities for graph data management and graph machine learning (ML) through natural language interfaces and hybrid LLM-graph neural network (GNN) pipelines. This tutorial synthesizes the algorithms, systems, and design principles driving these converging directions, offering data science and data mining researchers a unified perspective on integrating LLMs, graph data management, graph mining, graph ML, and agentic computation into next-generation graph-native AI systems.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Bag of Dims: Training-Free Mechanistic Interpretability via Dimension-Level Sign Patterns

arXiv:2606.12629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We show that the standard basis of transformer hidden states already provides a training-free, architecture-general feature basis. Individual dimensions encode semantic content via their signs and confidence via their magnitudes, functioning as independent binary registers. We validate this Bag of Dims framework across three model families (Qwen 3.5-4B, Gemma 3-4B, Mistral 7B) through four progressive experiments. Sign patterns alone carry predictive content: replacing all magnitudes with unity achieves 72-93% top-5 next-token accuracy through the LM head, and pure Hamming scoring without any decoder reaches 80-90% top-4096. These sign patterns organize into semantic features: using a single-token type cache (one forward pass per vocabulary token, no context), we discover 175 categories via per-dimension sign consistency (mean AUC 0.80) from 50 anchors with zero training. A trained probe adds only +0.018 AUC and converges to axis-aligned weights, confirming negligible cross-dimension structure. This structure extends to attention: all 175 categories remain discoverable in K and V projections. On the write side, static FFN weight inspection links 20% of features to individual writer neurons (>0.70 agreement; random controls: 0%), with top-200 neuron coalitions achieving >0.70 agreement on 99.9% of prototypes via majority vote. Fully unsupervised discovery (random seeds, no labels) scales to 1500 features at 100% yield and 99% sparsity across all three models, with pairwise MI of 0.0014 bits confirming low inter-dimension coupling. These results establish that the standard basis already suffices for feature reading throughout the transformer compute pathway, requiring no training, no optimization, and no GPU-days beyond a single forward pass per vocabulary token.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

U$^2$Mamba: A Two-level Nested U-structure Mamba for Salient Object Detection

Mamba-based models have emerged as a promising alternative for salient object detection (SOD), offering significant advantages in modeling long sequences. However, existing models often fail to explore contextual information and the depth of the entire architecture. This paper introduces U$^2$Mamba, a powerful and innovative U-structured network for salient object detection. We propose multiscale Mamba U-blocks (MMUBs) that enhance the model depth to improve local feature extraction capabilities. Our newly developed nested U-structure, incorporating MMUBs, enables the network to integrate various receptive fields from shallow and deep layers, thereby collecting richer contextual information and longer-range data without being constrained by resolution. Instead of using the traditional deep supervision scheme and top-level supervised training, we propose a hierarchical training supervision method where the loss is computed at each level during the training process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that U$^2$Mamba achieves highly competitive performance against state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/JL021/U2Mamba}.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Boosting Direct Preference Optimization with Penalization

Authors:

arXiv:2606.12505v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline preference optimization has become a practical substitute for reinforcement learning from human feedback, but pairwise objectives such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants use only the chosen and rejected responses stored in a static dataset. This leaves a useful signal unused: the response that the reference model itself would generate for the same prompt. We propose Direct Preference Optimization with Penalization (DPOP), a simple extension of DPO that augments the base preference loss with a gated penalty on reference-greedy responses. DPOP activates this penalty only when the current policy still assigns a lower likelihood to the preferred response than to the rejected response. On AlpacaEval 2.0, DPOP improves length-controlled win rate over DPO, SimPO, and AlphaDPO on both Llama-3-8b-it and Gemma-2-9b-it, achieving relative gains of 5.3\% and 4.4\% over baselines on the two models, respectively. Ablations further show that a SimNPO-style length-normalized penalty is stronger than NPO and token-level unlikelihood in this setting.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

G-Loss: Graph-Guided Fine-Tuning of Language Models

Traditional loss functions, including cross-entropy, contrastive, triplet, and su pervised contrastive losses, used for fine-tuning pre-trained language models such as BERT, operate only within local neighborhoods and fail to account for the global semantic structure. We present G-Loss, a graph-guided loss function that incorporates semi-supervised label propagation to use structural relationships within the embedding manifold. G-Loss builds a document-similarity graph that captures global semantic relationships, thereby guiding the model to learn more discriminative and robust embeddings. We evaluate G-Loss on five benchmark datasets covering key downstream classification tasks: MR (sentiment analysis), R8 and R52 (topic categorization), Ohsumed (medical document classification), and 20NG (news categorization). In the majority of experimental setups, G-Loss converges faster and produces semantically coherent embedding spaces, resulting in higher classification accuracy than models fine-tuned with traditional loss functions.

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

Progressive Knowledge-Guided Large Language Model Framework for Bearing Fault Diagnosis

Vibration-based bearing fault diagnosis requires resolving three interrelated measurement challenges, including the trade-off between global statistical feature efficiency and local transient signal fidelity, insufficient traceability of measurement features to underlying fault physics, and ineffective multi-source measurement information fusion across diagnostic scales. This paper presents a progressive physics-guided multi-scale vibration signal processing framework that addresses all three challenges within a unified diagnostic pipeline. An 81-dimensional measurement descriptor, derived from bearing kinematic theory and characteristic defect frequencies, establishes a physically traceable feature space enabling real-time fault screening at approximately 20 ms per sample. A fault-adaptive signal segmentation mechanism then directs analytical attention toward fault-relevant waveform regions guided by physics-based priors, without manual feature engineering. Structured fault mechanism knowledge is further encoded implicitly in model parameters during training, enabling autonomous multi-scale measurement fusion without external knowledge dependencies at inference. Validated on four public benchmark datasets under diverse operating conditions, the framework achieves 98.49% diagnostic accuracy with a 12.6-fold reduction in computational cost relative to signal-level baselines. Interpretability analysis confirms that diagnostic feature activations align with established bearing fault mechanics, supporting measurement traceability in safety-critical industrial systems.