Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

Nature (Science) 2026-06-17 DOI: HASH:069862f3d761b178dc6280137b3fcb3e

These ‘master’ proteins protect us from deadly mutations — and could inspire new drugs

Authors:

Philip Ball↗

Biology has clever ways to mask the effects of potentially harmful gene mutations. Scientists are investigating how this ‘buffering’ works — and how to exploit it. Biology has clever ways to mask the effects of potentially harmful gene mutations. Scientists are investigating how this ‘buffering’ works — and how to exploit it.

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02.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17 DOI: HASH:3407e5cceceab8ab2518b7246c75e0f7

In silico characterization of lysis and host-recognition modules in Staphylococcus aureus bacteriophage genomes

Authors:

Hasugian↗I. A↗Alifiyah↗N. I↗

Background/aim: Antimicrobial resistance in methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) requires precision non-antibiotic therapeutics, yet phage lytic efficacy is poorly predicted by phenotypic assays, as shown by paradoxical biofilm responses. This study characterized the genomic architecture of lytic S. aureus bacteriophages, focusing on the conservation of the lysis module and the variability of host-recognition modules, to provide a rational basis for phage candidate selection. Materials and methods: Twenty-two complete S. aureus phage genomes were retrieved from NCBI GenBank. Genomic features were extracted with custom Biopython scripts. Lysis (endolysin, holin) and host-recognition (tail fiber/receptor-binding protein) modules were annotated and validated by InterPro domain analysis, with disrupted endolysins resolved by tBLASTn. Phylogeny was reconstructed from large terminase subunit (TerL) sequences using maximum likelihood. Results: Genome size spanned three classes, from 17.5 to 148.6 kb. The LysK-type endolysin (CHAP, Amidase, SH3b) was highly conserved, whereas tail fiber/RBP genes were detected in only 14 of 22 phages. Domain analysis reclassified two proteins annotated as endolysins as virion-associated peptidoglycan hydrolases, and identified two independent mechanisms, HNH endonuclease insertion and intron splitting, that interrupt lysis-module genes and confound automated annotation. Maximum likelihood analysis recovered a strongly supported, highly conserved core clade with EW and SA13 as divergent lineages. Conclusion: Lysis modules are conserved whereas host-recognition modules are variable, indicating that host recognition rather than the lytic enzyme is the principal determinant of host range and the more rational target for phage selection and engineering.

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03.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20517

Multi-LCB: Extending LiveCodeBench to Multiple Programming Languages

Authors:

Maria Ivanova↗Pavel Zadorozhny↗Rodion Levichev↗Ivan Petrov↗Adamenko Pavel↗Ivan Lopatin↗Alexey Kutalev↗Dmitrii Babaev↗

arXiv:2606.20517v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LiveCodeBench (LCB) has recently become a widely adopted benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs) on code-generation tasks. By curating competitive programming problems, constantly adding fresh problems to the set, and filtering them by release dates, LCB provides contamination-aware evaluation and offers a holistic view of coding capability. However, LCB remains restricted to Python, leaving open the question of whether LLMs can generalize across the diverse programming languages required in real-world software engineering. We introduce Multi-LCB, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs across twelve programming languages, including Python. Multi-LCB transforms Python tasks from the LCB dataset into equivalent tasks in other languages while preserving LCB's contamination controls and evaluation protocol. Because it is fully compatible with the original LCB format, Multi-LCB will automatically track future LCB updates, enabling systematic assessment of cross-language code generation competence and requiring models to sustain performance well beyond Python. We evaluated 24 LLMs for instruction and reasoning on Multi-LCB, uncovering evidence of Python overfitting, language-specific contamination, and substantial disparities in multilingual performance. Our results establish Multi-LCB as a rigorous new benchmark for multi-programming-language code evaluation, directly addressing LCB's primary limitation and exposing critical gaps in current LLM capabilities.

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04.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.02493

Not What, But How: A Framework for Auditing LLM Responses across Positioning, Generalization, Anthropomorphism, and Maxims

Authors:

Siddhesh Milind Pawar↗Sarah Masud↗Haneul Yoo↗Alice Oh↗Isabelle Augenstein↗

Large language models (LLMs) are being increasingly used to answer subjective, information-seeking questions, where users are sensitive to how responses are communicated, not just whether the answers are correct. Existing LLM evaluations for subjective cultural queries largely focus on factual correctness, ignoring how the response is framed. To this end, we introduce FRANZ, an automated FRAmework for respoNse characteriZation to conduct communicative audit of LLM responses along four dimensions: cultural positioning, use of generalizing language, anthropomorphic cues, and adherence to conversational maxims. To enable this evaluation, we contribute SQUARE - a corpus of 376k subjective questions sourced from 57 subreddits, and mapped to 7 countries and 19 question categories. We demonstrate FRANZ's applicability by scoring responses from three open-weight LLMs. We observe that LLMs show statistically significant differences in the frequency with which they employ each response characteristic. Unlike single-dimensional audits, FRANZ reveals that insider positioning and anthropomorphism are positively coupled, with the degree of coupling varying by country, providing a diagnostic lens for identifying framing divergences.

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05.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22 DOI: HASH:f937e1ca1a25fe6f05229a98b39eb22f

Understanding and Usefulness of Effect Size and Certainty of Evidence: A Cross-sectional Survey of Evidence-Based Practice Competencies Among Registered Dietitians

Authors:

Ghosh↗N. R↗Neale↗E. P↗Hand↗R. K↗Ball↗G. D. C↗Riddle↗Klatt↗K. C↗Riviere↗…

Introduction: Understanding of absolute and relative estimates (i.e., effect size), and certainty of evidence corresponding to those estimates, is a fundamental evidence-based practice competency to promote informed clinical decision-making. While research has been conducted in the medical profession, there is no published research on these competencies in the nutrition and dietetics profession. Methods: Among registered dietitians, our main objectives were to assess (1) their understanding and perceived usefulness of three absolute and two relative estimate approaches to assess effect size, (2) their perceived usefulness of certainty of evidence, and (3) factors influencing their understanding and perceived usefulness. We conducted a web-based, cross-sectional survey among dietitians recruited from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (United States). Participants received effect estimates based on hypothetical dietary interventions vs. usual diet for reducing myocardial infarction risk. Results: Of the 11,050 dietitians who received the survey link, 210 participated (2.0% response rate), and only completers (n=114) were included in the analysis. Participants demonstrated a similar understanding of the relative (27.6%) and absolute (27.5%) estimates, with Risk Difference (30.7% correct responses) being the best understood approach and Number Needed to Treat (24.6%) being the least. The understanding of five approaches was not different than random guessing (p>0.05). While perceived usefulness scores were similar between five approaches, they were highest when data was presented as Relative Risk [mean (SD): 4.82 (1.50)]. Dietitians rated the usefulness of certainty of evidence favorably [mean (SD): 5.07 (1.83), on a 7-point scale), and no factors were associated with correct understanding. Conclusion: Dietitians may have limited understanding of how to interpret effect sizes, a finding consistent with surveys of other health professionals. To optimize informed decision-making between dietitians and clients, dietetic programs and continuing education platforms should consider additional training on interpreting effect sizes and certainty of evidence for effect sizes.

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06.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2505.16319

FreshRetailNet-LT: A Stockout-Annotated Censored Demand Dataset for Latent Demand Recovery and Forecasting in Fresh Retail

Authors:

Yangyang Wang↗Jiawei Gu↗Li Long↗Xin Li↗Li Shen↗Zhouyu Fu↗Xiangjun Zhou↗Xu Jiang↗

arXiv:2505.16319v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate demand estimation is critical for the retail business in guiding the inventory and pricing policies of perishable products. However, it faces fundamental challenges from censored sales data during stockouts, where unobserved demand creates systemic policy biases. Existing datasets lack the temporal resolution and annotations needed to address this censoring effect. To fill this gap, we present FreshRetailNet-50K, the first large-scale benchmark for censored demand estimation. It comprises 50,000 store-product time series of detailed hourly sales data from 898 stores in 18 major cities, encompassing 863 perishable SKUs meticulously annotated for stockout events. The hourly stock status records unique to this dataset, combined with rich contextual covariates, including promotional discounts, precipitation, and temporal features, enable innovative research beyond existing solutions. We demonstrate one such use case of two-stage demand modeling: first, we reconstruct the latent demand during stockouts using precise hourly annotations. We then leverage the recovered demand to train robust demand forecasting models in the second stage. Experimental results show that this approach achieves a 2.73% improvement in prediction accuracy while reducing the systematic demand underestimation from 7.37% to near-zero bias. With unprecedented temporal granularity and comprehensive real-world information, FreshRetailNet-50K opens new research directions in demand imputation, perishable inventory optimization, and causal retail analytics. The unique annotation quality and scale of the dataset address long-standing limitations in retail AI, providing immediate solutions and a platform for future methodological innovation. The data (https://huggingface.co/datasets/Dingdong-Inc/FreshRetailNet-50K) and code (https://github.com/Dingdong-Inc/frn-50k-baseline}) are openly released.

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07.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18275

A physical adaptive material motor unit neural network: a hygromorph composite material machine

Authors:

Charles de Kergariou↗David Correa↗Adam W. Perriman↗Helmut Hauser↗Fabrizio Scarpa↗

arXiv:2606.18275v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Advances in novel materials science enable structures to function as intelligent machines by embedding memory and learning capabilities directly into materials. Our work introduces a physical adaptive material motor unit neural network,leveraging a new generation of controllable actuators composed of wood- and carbon black-based composites, sensitive to temperature and relative humidity. These material actuators are assembled into a motor unit-like structure inspired by muscle contraction trigger, forming an intelligent machine capable of dynamic shading control that can be used, for example, in buildings. The machine is governed by a neural network trained on over 350 experimental data points collected under diverse environmental conditions. By establishing a new data-aware backpropagation training, we show that the machine predicts shading responses and learns to predict appropriate behaviour incrementally as the database expands. We also demonstrate the ability of the machine to optimise configurations to achieve similar shading outputs under two distinct conditions.

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08.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13544

Adaptive Turn-Taking for Real-time Multi-Party Voice Agents

Authors:

Soumyajit Mitra↗Prabhat Pandey↗Abhinav Jain↗Shanmukha Sahith↗K V Vijay Girish↗

Turn-taking in multi-party spoken conversations remains a fundamental challenge for voice-based agents, particularly under dynamic floor competition and varying user expectations. We propose ModeratorLM, a role-playing voice agent that conditions turn-taking behavior on an explicitly assigned role in multi-party settings. The system is built on a speech large language model operating in chunk-wise streaming manner. We further introduce a reasoning-augmented variant that incorporates chain-of-thought reasoning over conversational context and the assigned role. We construct RolePlayConv, a large-scale synthetic dataset of spoken multi-party conversations with diverse assistant roles. Experiments on real-world meeting data and RolePlayConv show improved turn-taking precision by over 40% and recall by more than 70%, while substantially reducing false-positive interruptions compared to non-role-conditioned baselines.

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09.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2509.14969

Stochastic Adaptive Gradient Descent Without Descent

Authors:

Jean-Fran\c{c}ois Aujol↗J\'er\'emie Bigot↗Camille Castera↗

arXiv:2509.14969v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a new adaptive step-size strategy for convex optimization with stochastic gradient that exploits the local geometry of the objective function only by means of a first-order stochastic oracle and without any hyper-parameter tuning. The method comes from a theoretically-grounded adaptation of the Adaptive Gradient Descent Without Descent method to the stochastic setting. We prove the convergence of stochastic gradient descent with our step-size under various assumptions, and we show that it empirically competes against tuned baselines.

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10.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12765

Rigel: Reverse-Engineering the Metal 4.1 Tensor Compute Path on the Apple M4 Max GPU

Authors:

Ramchand Kumaresan↗

Apple's Metal 4.1 exposes a tensor compute path: the Metal Performance Primitives (MPP) matmul2d operation over cooperative_tensor fragments, whose interface is documented but whose hardware behavior is deliberately hidden. The specification states which data-type rows are supported, never whether they are hardware-accelerated, where the operation physically executes, what its accumulator width is, or how it partitions matrix fragments across threads. We present Rigel, an empirical characterization of this path on a single Apple M4 Max (a pre-neural-accelerator generation). Using a checksum-gated, provenance-tracked microbenchmark harness, Rigel recovers eleven facts the v4.1 specification hides or contradicts. The headline finding: the Metal 4.1 fp8 (E4M3) matmul2d is emulated, not accelerated: it sustains 0.94x the throughput of fp16 despite reading half the operand bytes, so on M4 it is a memory-footprint feature, not a performance feature. We further show, via a three-signal triangulation (throughput ceiling, comparison against simdgroup_matrix, and per-rail power attribution), that matmul2d executes entirely on the GPU shader cores with no dedicated matrix datapath and no evidence of Apple Neural Engine routing; that it accumulates in >=fp32; and we reconstruct the opaque 8x8 cooperative_tensor fragment layout Apple documents nowhere. Acting on the characterization, a hand-fused GEMM + bias + GELU kernel beats the decomposed path by +6.5-12.9% in the cache-resident regime. All findings are reproducible from committed MIT-licensed code and per-cell CSVs.

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11.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16613

CoffeeBench: Benchmarking Long-Horizon LLM Agents in Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Economies

Authors:

Issa Sugiura↗Daichi Hattori↗Kazuo Araragi↗Keita Ogawa↗Shota Onose↗Taro Makino↗Teppei Usuki↗Takashi Ishida↗

arXiv:2606.16613v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As LLM agents become capable of increasingly long-horizon tasks, evaluating their performance in economic systems is becoming increasingly important. Unlike existing benchmarks that primarily evaluate a single agent interacting with a passive environment, economic systems are inherently multi-agent, requiring autonomous agents to communicate, negotiate, and transact while pursuing their own objectives over extended periods. We introduce CoffeeBench, a benchmark for evaluating LLM agents in a long-horizon multi-agent economy composed of heterogeneous firms. In CoffeeBench, two farmers, two roasters, and two retailers autonomously operate their businesses over a 90-day simulation, each seeking to maximize cumulative net income through communication and transactions while managing cash, inventory, and pricing. The evaluated model controls one coffee roaster, while the remaining firms are controlled by fixed reference agents. Across several recent open-weight and proprietary LLMs, all models outperform a passive baseline that takes no actions, with most achieving positive net income. Analysis of agent behavior reveals substantial differences in long-horizon economic interaction: higher-performing models communicate more actively with other firms, whereas Claude~Haiku~4.5 exhibits an idle-drift failure mode, repeatedly choosing inaction despite producing coherent assessments and plans. We release our code and agent trajectories to support future research.

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12.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19353

Quantifying Aleatoric Uncertainty of In-Context Learning for Robust Measure of LLM Prediction Confidence

Authors:

Jinseok Chung↗Minkyoung Song↗Hyunji Jung↗Namhoon Lee↗

In-Context Learning (ICL) allows LLMs to adapt to new tasks from a few demonstrations, but its reliability remains a concern: predictions are highly sensitive to both prompt design and the model's ability to understand the context, obscuring whether failures arise from data properties or model limitations. Uncertainty decomposition-separating aleatoric from epistemic sources-is particularly crucial in this setting, yet existing methods, designed for standard generation tasks, fail to capture the unique dynamics of ICL. To address this, we introduce a concept of self-function vectors, built upon Bayesian views and the mechanistic interpretability of ICL. These vectors leverage internal model representations to model the latent concept learned during in-context prompting, thereby enabling a direct estimation of aleatoric uncertainty within a Bayesian framework and circumventing the reliance on brittle input or decoding manipulations. Given the lack of established benchmarks and suitable evaluation protocols, we also propose the first and rigorous evaluation protocol, in which data is manipulated in controlled ways so as to quantify aleatoric uncertainty precisely and separately from epistemic uncertainty. With this new evaluation framework, initially grounded in synthetic tasks for conceptual development and subsequently extended to real-world datasets, we show that our proposed methodology can measure uncertainty of LLM predictions made under ICL more reliably than existing alternative methods. Moreover, we show it can be used as a practical tool for trustworthy-related applications, such as hallucination detection. Our findings pave a new direction for connecting the quantitative view of uncertainty with the mechanistic understanding of model behavior.

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13.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2601.03112

DiT-JSCC: Rethinking Deep JSCC with Diffusion Transformers and Semantic Representations

Authors:

Kailin Tan↗Jincheng Dai↗Sixian Wang↗Guo Lu↗Shuo Shao↗Kai Niu↗Wenjun Zhang↗Ping Zhang↗

Generative joint source-channel coding (GJSCC) has emerged as a new Deep JSCC paradigm for achieving high-fidelity and robust image transmission under extreme wireless channel conditions, such as ultra-low bandwidth and low signal-to-noise ratio. Recent studies commonly adopt diffusion models as generative decoders, but they frequently produce visually realistic results with limited semantic consistency. This limitation stems from a fundamental mismatch between reconstruction-oriented JSCC encoders and generative decoders, as the former lack explicit semantic discriminability and fail to provide reliable conditional cues. In this paper, we propose DiT-JSCC, a novel GJSCC backbone that can jointly learn a semantics-prioritized representation encoder and a diffusion transformer (DiT) based generative decoder, our open-source project aims to promote the future research in GJSCC. Specifically, we design a semantics-detail dual-branch encoder that aligns naturally with a coarse-to-fine conditional DiT decoder, prioritizing semantic consistency under extreme channel conditions. Moreover, a training-free adaptive bandwidth allocation strategy inspired by Kolmogorov complexity is introduced to further improve the transmission efficiency, thereby indeed redefining the notion of information value in the era of generative decoding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DiT-JSCC consistently outperforms existing JSCC methods in both semantic consistency and visual quality, particularly in extreme regimes.

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14.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12234

On The Effectiveness-Fluency Trade-Off In LLM Conditioning: A Systematic Study

Authors:

Iuri Macocco↗Pau Rodr\'iguez↗Arno Blaas↗Luca Zappella↗Marco Baroni↗Xavier Suau↗

Controlling the output of Large Language Models (LLMs) is a central challenge for their reliable deployment, yet a clear understanding of the involved trade-offs remains elusive. Current approaches to conditioning are often evaluated with a narrow focus on their effectiveness at injecting or removing a target concept, neglecting generation quality. We systematically investigate a range of conditioning methods in both injection and removal scenarios. We find that efficient steering methods frequently achieve conditioning at a steep cost to fluency. Furthermore, we identify a critical yet previously overlooked interaction with the training paradigm: activation steering methods are far less effective on instruction-tuned models than on their base counterparts. Simple prompting and full-fledged supervised fine-tuning, on the other hand, are viable options for concept injection, but are not as good at concept removal. Finally, cheaply computed textual metrics highly correlate to costly LLM-as-judge scores, and provide insights on the behavior of conditioning methods.

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15.

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

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

Authors:

Antonio Pelusi↗Stefano Braghin↗Alberto Trombetta↗

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

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16.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.14778

FactCheck: Feasibility-aware Long-term Action Anticipation with Multi-agent Collaboration

Authors:

Rui Cao↗Jiannong Cao↗Bo Yuan↗Zhiyuan Wen↗Mingjin Zhang↗

Long-term action anticipation (LTA) aims to predict an ordered sequence of future verb-noun actions from a partially observed video. While this task serves as the foundation for embodied intelligence, anticipating physically feasible long-term actions remains a critical challenge. Existing methods, which operate in an open-loop manner, often hallucinate non-existent objects, violate object affordances, or disregard object states, as they lack explicit mechanisms to verify action feasibility against the physical environment. To address this, we propose FactCheck, a novel multi-agent collaboration framework that improves feasibility through a closed-loop "Observe-Plan-Verify" mechanism. FactCheck decomposes the complex LTA task into specialized roles: an Observer that recognizes historical actions from video observations and constructs a dual-form structured memory, comprising a History Action Abstract that captures high-level human intentions and environmental status, and a History Action Graph that encodes object states and temporal dependencies; a Planner that generates draft future actions conditioned on both low-level historical actions and high-level History Action Abstract; and a Verifier that rigorously validates the draft against the History Action Graph and refines infeasible actions. Extensive experiments on the EPIC-Kitchens-55 and EGTEA Gaze+ benchmarks demonstrate that FactCheck consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Our work establishes a new paradigm for feasibility-aware long-term action anticipation, effectively closing the loop of action recognition, action prediction and action verification.

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17.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18583

Aerial-ground LiDAR place recognition with patch-level self-supervised learning and expanded reciprocal re-ranking

Authors:

Yandi Yang↗Xianghong Zou↗Jianping Li↗Haofeng Xie↗Saurav Uprety↗Hongzhou Yang↗Naser El-Sheimy↗

LiDAR place recognition determines one's position on a prior point cloud map. The most studied ground-level LiDAR place recognition suffers from pre-visit requirements, incomplete coverage, and limited perspectives. Using pre-acquired, full-coverage Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) data as an aerial prior map overcomes these drawbacks, making cross-view place recognition necessary and advantageous. However, aerial-ground LiDAR place recognition faces significant challenges, including the domain gap between aerial and ground point clouds, and false positives during initial retrieval. To address these challenges, we present a novel retrieval and re-ranking framework for aerial-ground LiDAR place recognition. Based on the priors that neighboring point cloud patches share similar semantics with anchor patch, our retrieval network introduces patch-level self-supervised learning modules at multiple scales and integrates with scene-level learning to improve global feature discriminativeness between aerial and ground point clouds. Furthermore, leveraging the structured spatial distribution of ALS point clouds, we introduce an Expanded Reciprocal (ER) re-ranking algorithm to exploit neighborhood information maximally and refine each feature based on neighbor features, which are then used to update the similarity matrix for final ranking. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our retrieval network outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, achieving a 9.8\% improvement in average Recall@1 and a 3.2\% improvement in average Recall@1\% on the CS-Urban-Scenes, while also showing the best performance on the CS-Campus3D dataset. Additionally, our ER re-ranking algorithm further boosts the average Recall@1 by 4.9\% on CS-Campus3D and 10.2\% on CS-Urban-Scenes without additional training.

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18.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2601.14033

Private Prediction via PAC Privacy

Authors:

Xiaochen Zhu↗Mayuri Sridhar↗Srinivas Devadas↗

arXiv:2601.14033v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Machine learning models are increasingly served behind APIs. This renders private prediction, i.e., privatizing a model's outputs rather than its parameters, a natural privacy target: model outputs are lower-dimensional and far more stable to training-data changes than weights. While differential privacy (DP) cannot effectively exploit this as it calibrates noise to worst-case sensitivity that is intractable to bound for non-convex models, we argue that PAC privacy is a natural fit for private prediction. It is instance-based, and calibrates noise to a black-box function's empirical stability to control mutual-information (MI) leakage. The missing ingredient is efficient, adaptive composition. Serving predictions means answering a long stream of adaptively chosen queries from untrusted users; existing composition either fails under adaptivity, grows quadratically, or reverts to input-independent, DP-like noise. We close this gap with a new adversarial composition result via adaptive noise calibration and prove that MI accumulates only linearly under adaptive and adversarial querying. Experiments across modalities show that prediction stability enables high utility even at a tiny per-query budget: on CIFAR-10, we achieve 87.79% accuracy with a per-query MI budget of $2^{-32}$. This enables serving one million queries while provably bounding membership-inference success to 51.08% – the same guarantee as $(0.04, 10^{-5})$-DP. Further, in the presence of auxiliary public data, the large volume of PAC-private predictions enables us to distill a publishable model that can be queried without limit. Concretely, 210,000 private labels on an ImageNet subset distill into a student reaching 91.86% accuracy on CIFAR-10 with membership inference success bounded by 50.49%, comparable to $(0.02, 10^{-5})$-DP.

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19.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2604.26740

Rendering-Aware Sparse Sampling for BRDF Acquisition

Authors:

W. Cao↗D. J\"onsson↗Z. Huang↗J. Unger↗

Accurate BRDF acquisition is essential for realistic rendering, but dense gonioreflectometer measurements are slow and expensive. We study how to select a small set of BRDF measurements that is most informative for reconstructing material appearance under a learned BRDF prior. Existing sparse-acquisition methods often optimize samples for BRDF-space reconstruction for all materials, while the perceptual importance of a adaptive measurement ultimately depends on its effect on each rendered appearance. We therefore formulate sparse adaptive acquisition as a rendering-aware optimization problem. Our method combines a set encoder for sparse coordinate–value observations, a pretrained hypernetwork-based/PCA-based BRDF reconstructor, and a differentiable renderer. During sampler training, the reconstructor remains fixed, and gradients from a rendered-image loss optimize the measurement locations. This separates acquisition design from prior fitting and encourages the sampler to choose directions that are informative under the learned material distribution. To make the comparison controlled, we evaluate the uniform baseline, meta-learning method, HyperBRDF method, and our learned sampler under matched sample numbers, train/test split, rendering scene, object mask, image mapping, and metrics. Our central claim: rendering-aware sampling improves extremely sparse BRDF acquisition when final rendered appearance is the target. BRDF-space and combined losses are reported only as ablations, together with joint refinement and image-only latent fitting for unseen materials.

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20.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12036

Vision Transformers for Face Recognition Need More Registers

Authors:

Tahar Chettaoui↗Guray Ozgur↗Eduarda Caldeira↗Naser Damer↗Fadi Boutros↗

Recent advances in Vision Transformers (ViTs) for face recognition (FR) have moved beyond the standard CLS-token paradigm. In this paradigm, a special classification token (CLS) is prepended to the patch embeddings and used as a representation of the input for downstream tasks. An alternative approach, Concatenated Patch Embeddings (CPE), instead leverages all patch tokens by concatenating them into a single vector, which is then projected into a compact face representation. CPE has been shown to improve recognition performance in comparison to CLS-based ones, but our qualitative analysis of attention maps showed the presence of artifacts that limit their interpretability. To address this issue, we incorporate register tokens, learnable tokens concatenated to the initial patch embeddings, and processed jointly through the ViT encoder blocks. This mechanism has been shown to produce more structured and interpretable attention maps compared to baseline ViT. We empirically demonstrate that these artifacts consistently appear across various ViT backbones, including small and large models, and that introducing register tokens effectively mitigates them. Adding four or eight registers significantly enhances interpretability, with eight registers providing the highest verification accuracies and smoothest attention structures. Our resulting model, ViT-8R, corresponds to a CPE-based ViT-B architecture augmented with eight register tokens achieves state-of-the-art performance among ViT-based FR models on large-scale IJB-B and IJB-C benchmarks. Also, ViT-8R produces substantially clearer attention maps compared with the baseline model, which offer deeper insight into the model's attention behavior (https://github.com/TaharChettaoui/ViT-FR-Registers)

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21.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14259

Beyond a Single Explanation of the Adam–SGD Gap

Authors:

Chenxiang Zhang↗Rustem Islamov↗Enea Monzio Compagnoni↗Jun Pang↗Aurelien Lucchi↗Antonio Orvieto↗

arXiv:2606.14259v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prior work has identified several factors that can contribute to the performance gap between Adam and SGD, spanning data aspects, architecture design, and optimization properties. Yet these explanations are often studied in isolation, leaving their relative importance unclear. In this work, we revisit these hypotheses through a controlled empirical study across vision, language, genomics, and graph tasks, spanning modern and classical architectures, and carefully designed training setups. Our results suggest that no single factor consistently explains the Adam–SGD gap. For instance, the Adam advantage can (1) persist under a uniform vocabulary distribution yet nearly disappear under a heavy-tailed one; (2) reverse in favor of SGD in softmax-attention models; and (3) become larger under soft architectural modifications, e.g., when ReLU is replaced by a GeLU nonlinearity. This suggests that the gap arises from nontrivial data and architecture interactions, rather than from a single common factor. Yet, we observe a pattern across our settings: a crossover batch size at which the relative advantage shifts from SGD to Adam as the batch size scales. These empirical results are captured by our theoretical gap model, which predicts this batch-size-dependent crossover. Our perspective helps reconcile several existing hypotheses while offering practical insights across domains.

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22.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.13827

Approximating Whittle-Matern Fields over Discretized Manifolds

Authors:

Srinivas Nambirajan↗

arXiv:2606.13827v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Markovian Whittle-Matérn fields have been convergently approximated by discrete Gauss Markov Random Fields (GMRFs) with sparse precision matrices using a Finite Element approximation of the two-parameter family, \[ (\kappa^2 - \Delta)^{\alpha/2} u = \mathcal{W}, \;\; \kappa \in \mathbb{R}, \; \alpha \in \mathbb{N}. \] of SPDEs. Using recent developements in the analysis of Discrete Exterior Calculus (DEC), we present a different, yet closely related, convergent GMRF approximation to these Matérn fields over complete, boundaryless Riemannian manifolds discretized as well-centered simplicial complexes. This convergent method (i) is agnostic to $\alpha, \kappa$ and thus allows a universal approximation scheme for the precision and covariance matrices of the entire $(\alpha, \kappa)$-family of GMRFs, so they may be inferred rather than guessed. (ii) inherently models pointwise and piecewise-smoothed measurements of a random field and approximates both equally well (iii) is computationally independent of the interpolants used - it suffers no overhead if one convergent interpolant were replaced with another suitable interpolant over the same mesh. Furthermore, we show that, on discretizations that are well-connected in a precise sense, and volume-concentrated, the precision matrices are spectral functions of a graph-laplacian. We provide a low rank approximator to the family of such Matérn GMRFs and mention a use case: reducing the number of measurements needed to model the GMRF by compressed-sensing.

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23.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18782

RedactionBench

Authors:

Sean Brynj\'olfsson↗Shashvat Jayakrishnan↗Esha Sali↗Diptanshu Purwar↗Madhav Aggarwal↗

Large Language Models are increasingly applied to sensitive domains that require redaction of personally identifiable information (PII). While redacting PII is a data cleaning prerequisite, existing benchmarks conflate extraction mechanics with privacy semantics. A public phone number is not equivalent to a phone number in a medical record. Whether information constitutes a violation depends heavily on who holds it, why, and in what context, fundamentally differentiating redaction from simple entity recognition. Grounded in contextual integrity, we introduce RedactionBench, a manually annotated benchmark comprising 200 diverse documents across 11 domains, mostly seeded from real-world sources. We also introduce R-Score, a novel character-level metric that treats semantically similar redactions equally and nullifies shallow formatting choices, such as varying masking styles for phone numbers. Evaluations across Named Entity Recognition models, entity extraction Small Language Models, and frontier models equipped with agentic tools demonstrate that contextual redaction remains an unsolved problem. A human evaluation with over 80 users on RedactionBench reveals a stark dichotomy in privacy perceptions. Annotators show consensus with target labels for mandatory redactions (89.4 percent) and safe text preservations (94.1 percent), but fail to agree on contextual redactions (47.7 percent). This variance demonstrates the subjective nature of contextual privacy and motivates R-Score, which decouples contextual ambiguity from strict precision. We compare 35 models across families and report their performance in redacting PII. Finally, we release RedactionBench to establish a baseline for future privacy-preserving systems, hoping to inspire efficient model design and standardized evaluations.

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24.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11596

Model-Based and Data-Driven Hierarchical Control and Topology Co-Design for Robust Networked Systems

Authors:

Shirantha Welikala↗Zihao Song↗Hai Lin↗Panos J. Antsaklis↗

arXiv:2606.11596v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we consider a class of networked systems comprising an interconnected set of linear subsystems, disturbance inputs, and performance outputs. Using dissipativity theory, we first propose a model-based hierarchical control design strategy to ensure the closed-loop networked system is dissipative from its disturbance inputs to performance outputs. This involves designing local controllers for each subsystem to enforce local dissipativity guarantees, which are then exploited to co-design distributed global controllers and the interconnection topology to enforce global dissipativity guarantees while optimizing interconnection topology costs. The overall design process requires only solving a sequence of linear matrix inequality (LMI) problems, thereby retaining compositionality and decentralizability while avoiding non-convex, iterative design processes that are inefficient and centralized. This model-based hierarchical control design strategy assumes the knowledge of the subsystem dynamics, which may not hold in many real-world networked systems. Motivated by this, we also propose a data-driven hierarchical control design strategy that assumes only the availability of rich input-state-output trajectory data from the subsystems. The proposed data-driven design process assumes that the unknown disturbances affecting the subsystem dynamics are bounded by a quadratic matrix inequality (relaxing conventional bounds) and accounts for this by using the matrix S-lemma. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed model-based and data-driven hierarchical control designs is illustrated for a networked system representing a DC microgrid, with the aim of enforcing robust (dissipative) voltage regulation and current sharing.

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25.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.13911

Overhead Wildlife Locator (OWL): Benchmarking Weakly Supervised Learning for Aerial Wildlife Surveys

Authors:

Isai Daniel Chac\'on↗Zhongqi Miao↗Bruno Demuro↗Caleb Robinson↗Rahul Dodhia↗Lasha Otarashvili↗Jason Holmberg↗Kirk Larsen↗Howard Frederick↗Nathan J. Pamperin↗Pablo Arbel\'aez↗Juan M. Lavista Ferres↗…

Automated aerial wildlife surveys increasingly rely on deep learning, yet standard object detectors require bounding-box annotations, reported to be up to seven times slower and three times more expensive to produce than point-level labels. To address this bottleneck, we introduce the Overhead Wildlife Locator (OWL), a weakly supervised density-estimation framework with three variants: OWL-C, a fully convolutional model for high-throughput screening; OWL-T, a Swin-augmented hybrid for heterogeneous, cluttered scenes; and OWL-D, built on a frozen DINOv3 ViT-H+/16 encoder with a DPT-style fusion decoder. We benchmark all three against POLO, YOLOv11n, and YOLOv11l across five public aerial datasets, from sparse fixed-wing savanna surveys to dense UAV paddock imagery, and against the published HerdNet baseline on its native Delplanque split. OWL-D sets a new state of the art on Delplanque (0.934 AP vs. HerdNet's 0.840) and records the highest AP on four of the five datasets. Performance is regime-dependent: on the extreme-density SheepCounter UAV dataset the hybrid OWL-T leads (0.978 AP) and the convolutional variants attain the lowest counting error, whereas the foundation-based OWL-D degrades, indicating which variant suits which survey type. We further validate operational readiness on the Alaska Department of Fish and Game's 2022 Central Arctic Caribou census: under cross-herd and cross-temporal transfer, OWL-C fine-tuned on the 2017 Porcupine Caribou Herd split attains F1 = 0.965 on a held-out patch test set, with a signed count error of +3.1% aggregated across the released test patches. We release the OWL code, model weights, and the annotated Porcupine Caribou Herd 2017 (PCH) and Central Arctic Herd 2022 (CAH) patches, the first open patch-level datasets for large-scale caribou aerial surveys, at https://github.com/microsoft/MegaDetector-Overhead.

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