Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10 DOI: HASH:5d0ae04c51ec98eb834b2532a731682a

Assessment of the accuracy of lung lesions diagnosis in adolescents with osteosarcoma using artificial intelligence

Authors:

Uskova↗N. G↗Gombolevskiy↗V. A↗Chernina↗V. Y↗Burenchev↗D. V↗Akhaladze↗D. G↗Panina↗E. V↗…

Background. Lung metastases in osteosarcoma (OS) are the main cause of the death. The accuracy of the diagnosis of nodules by computed tomography (CT) of the lungs is critically important for determining the disseminated stage of the disease and planning surgical treatment. The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the search for lung nodules increases the accuracy of diagnosis and reduces the chance of missing metastases. Objective: to evaluate the accuracy of lung nodules diagnosis in adolescents with OS using AI. Methods. A retrospective assessment of CT scans of adolescents with OS was performed. A pathological nodule with an average size of [≥]4 mm was considered a target finding. The diagnostic accuracy of an AI algorithm previously trained on an adult dataset was evaluated, and the number of false positives (FP) and false negatives (FN) was determined. Sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, area under the ROC curve (AUC), positive predictive value, negative predictive value, and F1-measure were calculated. Based on the obtained results, the effectiveness of the algorithm was assessed. Results. 248 CT scans of adolescents with OS were evaluated. The following results were obtained: in 5 cases, the AI algorithm showed a FP result (2.02%), in 34 cases, it showed a FN result (13.71%), and in 209 cases, a correct result (both true positive and true negative) (84.27%). The diagnostic accuracy of the algorithm was 0.843 (95% CI 0.794-0.887). The application of the AI algorithm in the practice of an X-ray doctor in a specific clinical task would allow to increase the sensitivity from 0.805 to 0.891, while ensuring an absolute decrease in the number of FN results by 8.59% and a relative decrease by 44%. Conclusion. The obtained results confirm the practical value of the application of the AI algorithm and justify the implementation of AI-assisted systems in the diagnostic protocols for lung metastases in adolescents with OS.

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02.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14415

CSPO: Constraint-Sensitive Policy Optimization for Safe Reinforcement Learning

Authors:

Ayoub Belouadah↗Sylvain Kubler↗Yves Le Traon↗

arXiv:2606.14415v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe reinforcement learning (Safe RL) aims to maximize expected return while satisfying safety constraints, typically modeled as Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs). While primal-dual methods scale well to deep RL, they often suffer from delayed constraint correction, leading to oscillatory behavior and prolonged safety violations. In this paper, we propose Constraint-Sensitive Policy Optimization (CSPO), a first-order primal-dual method that incorporates local constraint sensitivity into policy updates. CSPO augments the primal objective with a constraint-sensitive correction derived from the shortest signed distance to the safety boundary, enabling smarter recovery steps back to safety, compensating for delayed Lagrange multiplier updates, reducing oscillations near the boundary, and preserving the KKT solutions of the original constrained problem. Experiments on navigation and locomotion benchmarks demonstrate that CSPO achieves faster safety recovery and high reward preservation, resulting in higher constrained returns compared to state-of-the-art primal-dual and penalty-based methods

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03.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2606.25307

Measuring Research Difficulty of Academic Papers: A Case Study in Natural Language Processing

Authors:

Haochuan Li↗Jingyuan Li↗Yi Zhao↗Heng Zhang↗Yukai Yang↗Zile Hu↗Chengzhi Zhang↗

With the rapid growth of the number of academic papers, systematically evaluating the difficulty of research and its relationship to academic impact offers important significance for research topic selection and resource allocation. However, current studies lack quantitative assessments of research difficulty and its correlation with academic impact. This paper proposes a comprehensive evaluation system for research difficulty, incorporating factors such as academic collaboration, content, and references. Taking the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) as a case study, we extract both internal and external features from academic papers, compute multiple research difficulty indicators. We assign their weights using the entropy weight method and perform a weighted sum to obtain the research difficulty score of academic papers. This paper uses the citation frequency of academic papers to measure academic impact. To validate our approach, NLP experts assessed the difficulty of a sample of papers, and correlation analyses confirmed the reliability of our measurement. Empirical results reveal that in NLP, factors such as the number of pages, reference count, and participation of high-level institutions are significantly associated with academic impact. Moreover, we identify an inverted U-shaped relationship between research difficulty and academic impact. It suggests that moderately difficult research tends to achieve greater academic impact.

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04.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2503.19947

Vanishing Depth: Training Generalized Depth Adapters with Sinusoidal Depth Preprocessing for Pretrained RGB Encoders

Authors:

Paul Koch↗J\"org Kr\"uger↗

Generalized metric depth understanding is critical for precise vision-guided robotics, which current state-of-the-art (SOTA) vision-encoders do not support. To address this, we propose a self-supervised training approach that extends pretrained RGB encoders with a depth adapter to incorporate and align metric depth into a combined latent space without interfering with the pretrained RGB feature extraction. In combination with our sinusoidal depth encoding, the depth adapter enables generalized and robust depth density and distribution invariant feature extraction. Our depth adapters improve a wide set of generalized RGB baselines across a spectrum of relevant RGBD downstream tasks in segmentation, pose estimation, and depth completion – without the necessity of finetuning. Most importantly, we achieve 56.05 mIoU in the SUN-RGBD segmentation, while outperforming SOTA depth-aware and multi-modal encoders in our experiments. When no depth is present, one can activate our depth adapter with an empty map, use single pixel depth clues, or monocular depth estimation to include the depth aware feature extraction into subsequent downstream tasks.

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05.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15782

Mitigating Visual Hallucinations in Multimodal Systems through Retrieval-Augmented Reliability-Aware Inference

Authors:

Pratheswaran Hariharan↗Haiping Xu↗Donghui Yan↗

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in vision-language understanding and natural-language response generation. However, these systems can still produce overconfident predictions and hallucination-like outputs, particularly when the visual evidence is weak, ambiguous, or semantically inconsistent. Most existing approaches focus on improving multimodal representation alignment or retrieval-augmented generation, while providing limited mechanisms to quantify instance-level prediction reliability or identify incorrect visual outputs. This work proposes a retrieval-augmented reliability-aware inference framework for trustworthy multimodal visual understanding. The proposed framework constructs an external visual evidence database using pretrained visual embeddings and nearest-neighbor retrieval over normalized feature representations. Retrieved evidence is used to estimate prediction trustworthiness through multiple reliability indicators, including similarity strength, class-support agreement, evidence margin, entropy-based uncertainty, and an aggregate reliability score. Based on these signals, a decision gate determines whether the system should accept the prediction, answer with caution, or abstain/fallback when evidence is insufficient. A multimodal response-generation layer then produces a final user-facing response conditioned on the reliability decision. Experiments on ImageNet-100 demonstrate that the proposed reliability-aware framework improves accepted prediction accuracy from 85.84\% to 88.88\% at 89.04\% coverage. The hallucination-like accepted wrong-answer rate is reduced from 14.16\% to 11.12\%. These results show that integrating retrieval evidence, reliability estimation, and selective decision gating can improve calibration and reduce overconfident visual errors without retraining large multimodal models.

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06.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11814

Sparsified Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks for Interpretable Quantum State Tomography

Authors:

Xinge Wu↗Huaxin Wang↗Jiajun Liu↗Ruiqing He↗Jiandong Shang↗Hengliang Guo↗Qiang Chen↗

arXiv:2606.11814v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine-learning approaches to quantum state tomography can achieve high reconstruction fidelity, but the physical structure used by the trained model often remains implicit. Here we ask whether a sparsified Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) can be used not only as a regressor, but also as an inspectable reconstruction rule whose internal organization can be checked against known Pauli structure. We study a controlled three-qubit GHZ-family benchmark in which all 63 non-identity Pauli expectation values are used to reconstruct three GHZ-subspace variables: the population imbalance $z$, the real off-diagonal component $c$, and the imaginary off-diagonal component $s$. Under finite-shot sampling and depolarizing noise, external ablation identifies the extended 12-channel GHZ-relevant Pauli set from the 63 measurements, with exact top-12 recovery across the tested shot counts and depolarizing-noise strengths. These support patterns remain stable across multi-seed random-initialization and noise-level analyses, and collapse under random-label controls. The dominant pruned input-hidden-output pathways organize Z-type population observables and X/Y off-diagonal observables in a pattern consistent with the analytic GHZ Pauli grouping, and sparse formula recovery recovers the canonical signed Pauli relations. The contribution of the KAN is therefore pathway-level structural interpretability within a neural reconstruction model, rather than superior sparse regression. Together with negative controls, these probes provide a consistency chain for auditing learned reconstruction rules against known physical structure.

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07.

PLOS Medicine 2026-05-15 DOI: HASH:48fbfe16e5e0277eedd419e3b41ee93e

Spatial transcriptomic-metabolic features of tumor foci and tumor capsule in microvascular invasion with hepatocellular carcinoma: A spatial multi-omics study

Authors:

Zhi-Hui Luo↗

by Zhi-Hui Luo, Na Wang, Jingwei Zhao, Fei Long, Si Wu, Wei Zhong, Wei-Ming Chen, Bicheng Wang, Kun Wang, Yufeng Yuan, Jingjiao Zhou, Chunhui Yuan, Fubing Wang Background Microvascular invasion (MVI) is closely related to the recurrence and metastasis of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), but the underlying cellular mechanism remains largely elusive. This study aims to elucidate the regional cellular discrepancy between MVI-positive (MVI+) and MVI-negative (MVI−) HCC by integrating Spatial transcriptomics (ST) and spatial metabolomics (SM). Methods and findings ST and SM were performed on six tissue samples from four patients (including 2 MVI+, 2 MVI−, and 2 paratumor tissues), with the integration of 79 public single-cell RNA sequencing datasets of HCC. Patient identity was used as a covariate in the linear equation for regional differentially expressed gene analysis with the ST data. Clinical validation was conducted through multiplex immunofluorescence staining in 79 patients, together with external validation in the cancer genome atlas (TCGA)-liver hepatocellular carcinoma (LIHC) cohort (n = 299) and an independent microarray dataset (n = 62). For cell-type-specific metabolic profiling, spatial transcriptomic-metabolic registration was performed. The functional roles of key metabolites were further validated in vitro using inflammatory cancer-associated fibroblasts (iCAFs) derived from hepatic stellate cells (HSCs) and primary CAFs through co-culture models and various functional assays assessing cell proliferation, migration, and invasion. In the tumor lesion, a malignant STMN1+HMGN2+GPC3+ cell subtype enriched in MVI+ HCC was identified, which exhibited enhanced proliferative activity and was associated with poor prognosis. This finding was further confirmed in a local cohort of 79 patients, where multiplex immunofluorescence staining for the three genes (STMN1, HMGN2, and GPC3) showed significantly higher expression in the MVI+ group than in the MVI− group (p = 0.046). Integrated SM analysis further revealed that this cell population underwent metabolic reprogramming characterized by suppressed glycerolipid metabolism. In the tumor capsule, iCAFs-related genes were downregulated in MVI+ cases, and iCAFs were located distally from the tumor boundary. Spatial metabolite mapping showed a strong correlation between taurine and iCAFs, and functional assays demonstrated that taurine promotes HCC proliferation and migration by suppressing iCAF activity. One limitation of this study is the small sample size of spatial omics data, which hinders a more complete molecular functional analysis of the STMN1+HMGN2+GPC3+ cell subtype and iCAFs in MVI+ HCC. Larger-scale ST cohorts are required to further validate and expand the findings of this study. Conclusions This integrative spatial atlas proposes a hypothesis that there exists a highly proliferative and metabolically reprogrammed malignant cell subtype in the tumor lesion of MVI+ HCC, and that taurine in the tumor capsule modulates iCAF activity to influence tumor progression. The exploratory results provide mechanistic insights into MVI-related HCC progression and offer potential avenues for targeted therapeutic intervention of MVI+ HCC.

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08.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2603.02234

Structured vs. Unstructured Pruning: An Exponential Gap

Authors:

Davide Ferre'↗Fr\'ed\'eric Giroire↗Frederik Mallmann-Trenn↗Emanuele Natale↗

arXiv:2603.02234v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Strong Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (SLTH) states that large, randomly initialized neural networks contain sparse subnetworks capable of approximating a target function at initialization without training, suggesting that pruning alone is sufficient. Pruning methods are typically classified as unstructured, where individual weights can be removed from the network, and structured, where parameters are removed according to specific patterns, as in neuron pruning. Existing theoretical results supporting the SLTH rely almost exclusively on unstructured pruning, showing that logarithmic overparameterization suffices to approximate simple target networks. In contrast, neuron pruning has received limited theoretical attention, despite its practical appeal for direct hardware speedups. In this work, we consider the problem of approximating a single bias-free ReLU neuron by pruning hidden units of a randomly initialized two-layer ReLU network, effectively isolating the intrinsic limitations of neuron pruning. We show that achieving an $\varepsilon$-approximation requires a starting network size of $\Omega(1/\varepsilon)$ for neuron pruning, whereas weight pruning succeeds with only $O(\log(1/\varepsilon))$ hidden units, revealing an exponential separation between the two approaches.

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09.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2603.09715

Does the Question Really Matter? Training-Free Data Selection for Vision-Language SFT

Authors:

Peng Sun↗Yi Yang↗Huawen Shen↗Yi Ban↗Tianfan Fu↗Yanbo Wang↗Yuqiang Li↗

arXiv:2603.09715v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Visual instruction tuning is crucial for improving vision-language large models (VLLMs). However, many samples can be solved via linguistic patterns or common-sense shortcuts, without genuine cross-modal reasoning, limiting the effectiveness of multimodal learning. Prior data selection methods often rely on costly proxy model training and focus on difficulty or diversity, failing to capture a sample's true contribution to vision-language joint reasoning. In this paper, we propose CVS, a training-free data selection method based on the insight that, for high-quality multimodal samples, introducing the question should substantially alter the model's assessment of answer validity given an image. CVS leverages a frozen VLLM as an evaluator and measures the discrepancy in answer validity with and without conditioning on the question, enabling the identification of samples that require vision-language joint reasoning while filtering semantic-conflict noise. Experiments on Vision-Flan and The Cauldron show that CVS achieves solid performance across datasets. On Vision-Flan, CVS outperforms full-data training by 3.5% and 4.8% using only 10% and 15% of the data, respectively, and remains robust on the highly heterogeneous Cauldron dataset. Moreover, CVS reduces computational cost by 17.3% and 44.4% compared to COINCIDE and XMAS.

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10.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16993

DreamX-World 1.0: A General-Purpose Interactive World Model

Authors:

DreamX Team↗Yancheng Bai↗Rui Chen↗Xiangxiang Chu↗Rujing Dang↗Hao Dou↗Bingjie Gao↗Qiwen Gu↗Siyu Hong↗Jiachen Lei↗Geng Li↗Jifan Li↗…

DreamX-World 1.0 is a general-purpose interactive text/image-to-video world model for controllable long-horizon generation. It supports camera navigation, revisits to previously observed regions, and promptable events across photorealistic, game-style, and stylized domains. Our data engine combines camera-accurate Unreal Engine rendering, action-rich gameplay recordings, and real-world videos with recovered camera geometry. For camera control, we introduce E-PRoPE, a lightweight variant of projective positional encoding that retains PRoPE's projective camera geometry while applying camera-aware attention to spatially reduced tokens. We convert a bidirectional video generator into a few-step autoregressive world model using causal forcing, DMD-style distillation, and long-rollout training. Training on self-generated long-horizon contexts exposes the model to its own generated history and reduces the style and color drift that accumulates across autoregressive chunks. Memory-Conditioned Scene Persistence retrieves earlier views through camera-geometry-based retrieval, while residual recycling makes the conditioning path less sensitive to imperfect memory latents. Event Instruction Tuning adds composable event control, and reinforcement learning alignment recovers camera control and visual quality after distillation. With mixed-precision DiT execution, residual reuse, 75\%-pruned VAE decoding, and asynchronous pipeline parallelism, DreamX-World 1.0 reaches up to 16\,FPS on eight RTX\,5090 GPUs. On our 5-second basic evaluation, DreamX-World 1.0 achieves a camera-control score of 73.75 and an overall score of 84.76, outperforming HY-WorldPlay 1.5 and LingBot-World in overall score, which achieve 80.79 and 80.45, respectively.

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11.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.14943

Simplifying the Modeling of Arbitrary Conditionals in Natural Language

Authors:

Yinhan Lu↗Eric Elmoznino↗L\'eo Gagnon↗Sarthak Mittal↗Tejas Kasetty↗Guillaume Lajoie↗

Causal Transformers model sequences through an autoregressive factorization of the joint distribution, which enables efficient left-to-right decoding and conditional likelihood computation. However, they cannot tractably sample from or evaluate arbitrary conditionals – e.g., a block of text conditioned on past and future tokens. Recent work aims to solve this problem through novel architectures, but they often lead to sub-optimal modeling of such conditionals and degraded generations. We propose Arbitrary Conditionals GPT (AC-GPT) which introduces a simple modification to standard causal Transformers to enable evaluating and sampling from arbitrary conditionals – including past, future, and mixed contexts – within a single forward pass. Unlike prior approaches, our method preserves the standard left-to-right ordering and next-token prediction objective essential for both strong performance and efficient training on natural language. Crucially, this compatibility allows existing LLMs to be fine-tuned for arbitrary conditioning. Our empirical results indicate that our method outperforms baselines on modeling arbitrary conditionals, without degrading standard left-to-right performance.

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12.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19964

Low-Energy Reduced RISC-V Instruction Subset Processor for Tsetlin Machine Inference at the Edge

Authors:

Chanda Gupta↗Sanidhya Bhatia↗Shaurya Priyadarshi↗Himani Panwar↗Rishad Shafik↗Sudip Roy↗

arXiv:2606.19964v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tsetlin Machine (TM) is a logic-based machine learning approach that relies on simple bitwise operations and finite-state automata, which makes it attractive for edge AI deployments. Recent work has focused on co-processor and accelerator designs based on Tsetlin Machines (TMs). Although these designs achieve high performance, they typically depend on tightly coupled interfaces, microcode-style programming, and external host processors, limiting flexibility and ease of programming. In this work, we present a domain-specific RISC-V microprocessor architecture and design flow tailored for TM inference. Leveraging the modular structure of RISC-V, we design a reduced instruction subset processor that retains programmability while targeting improved performance and lower energy consumption for TM workloads. Instruction profiling is employed to guide instruction reduction, followed by datapath and control path simplifications tailored to TM inference. Both the baseline RV32IM core and the proposed reduced core are evaluated across multiple datasets and compared with Binarized Neural Networks (BNNs), which serve as a hardware-efficient baseline due to their reliance on bitwise operations during inference. Results show that TM achieves comparable or higher accuracy (e.g., up to 88.18% on CIFAR-2 compared to 60.0% for BNN) while reducing execution time by up to 98% across multiple datasets. Furthermore, the proposed design achieves an average $29.7\times$ reduction in energy consumption, demonstrating its effectiveness for programmable and efficient edge AI systems.

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13.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2606.25589

Leaking Circuit Secrets: Gradient Leakage Attacks on Graph Neural Networks

Authors:

Rupesh Raj Karn↗Johann Knechtel↗Ozgur Sinanoglu↗

arXiv:2606.25589v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As graph neural networks (GNNs) become standard tools for critical tasks in circuit design and analysis, their security and privacy risks require careful attention. Here, we present the first comprehensive evaluation of gradient leakage attacks (GLAs) on GNNs in circuit-design and hardware-security tasks, a practical threat that has been largely overlooked. We assess state-of-the-art (SOTA) GNNs, including GraphSAGE, GCN, GIN, and GAT, trained on standard netlist benchmarks (ISCAS'85, EPFL, and TrustHub), for their fundamental vulnerability to GLAs. We find that GLAs can expose sensitive information, such as gate types and distinctive properties of hardware Trojans, which may assist adversaries in analyzing logic locking schemes or evading Trojan detection mechanisms. Our analysis shows that these risks are influenced by architectural features, with attention mechanisms (GAT) exacerbating leakage, while injective aggregation (GIN) provides comparatively stronger resilience. We further evaluate several SOTA defense techniques, including differential privacy, gradient clipping, secure aggregation, model compression with quantization, and adversarial training. We find that these techniques improve resilience only in specific settings and can also compromise model performance. Overall, our work provides key insights toward privacy-preserving GNNs and highlights the need for more robust and efficient defenses. We release our full methodology and artifacts.

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14.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.23898

ARIA: Adaptive Region-Based Importance Allocation for Conditional Diffusion Distillation

Authors:

Loay Mualem↗Vinh Tong↗Samir Darouich↗Mathias Niepert↗

arXiv:2606.23898v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Distilling conditional diffusion models aims to transfer the behavior of a large teacher to a smaller student while preserving alignment across conditioning inputs. Unlike recognition tasks, knowledge distillation in conditional diffusion often struggles to transfer knowledge beyond the training distribution, since the predicted noise strongly depends on the conditioning signal. As a result, effective distillation requires exploring a large conditioning space. In practical settings, this creates a major bottleneck. Paired image-condition data may be limited, and generating synthetic images for every available condition is often computationally infeasible, while the pool of conditions, such as text prompts, can be extremely large. Recent work addresses this issue by switching conditions during training, exposing the student to a broader conditioning space without changing the distillation objective. Yet this raises a complementary question: once a large conditioning corpus is available, how should the training effort be allocated? In this work, we introduce ARIA, a framework that adaptively allocates training effort across coarse regions of the conditioning space. By maintaining online estimates of teacher-student discrepancy at the region level, ARIA focuses updates where misalignment persists while preserving the original distillation objective. Empirically, ARIA improves over RC across most architectures and settings, with the clearest gains observed in unseen and underrepresented regimes. We also provide a theoretical analysis showing that the proposed tracking mechanism follows the evolving discrepancy during training under bounded variance and drift assumptions.

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15.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17286

From Democracies to Autocracies: How AI Systems Enable Authoritarianism by Design

Authors:

Jeba Sania↗Marta Ziosi↗Fazl Barez↗

arXiv:2606.17286v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI-enabled authoritarianism is not confined to autocracies. In this paper, we provide greater transparency by investigating and mapping the lifecycles of six AI systems deployed in different political regimes, ranging from the US to China. By drawing on an extensive range of sources (academic publications, investigative research reports, third-party evaluations, media interviews, government procurement notices), we conduct a systematic, qualitative comparison across systems to identify the critical technical and operational features that enable authoritarianism within their respective political contexts. We find that enabling features include the centralization and co-optation of administrative data for law enforcement and political punishment, regulatory gaps that fail to deter misuse, weak user compliance that nullifies human oversight mechanisms, and the encoding of protected group traits that identify members of vulnerable populations. We find that these features are present across systems deployed in autocratic and democratic regimes, albeit in varying configurations. We also find that both centralized and fragmented AI systems can contribute to authoritarianism by exploiting governance gaps: centralized systems directed by executive authorities, particularly within security and military institutions, are often not subjected to formal oversight mechanisms, while fragmented systems diffuse accountability between stakeholders, paving the way for entrenchment. These findings reveal that AI-enabled authoritarianism is distributed, resulting from design and operational choices made by developers, administrators, and users alike. We conclude with recommendations for developers and policymakers to mitigate these risks.

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16.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17901

The Erdős-Hajnal High-Girth Subgraph Conjecture Holds in the Polynomial Chromatic-Sparsity Regime

Authors:

Eric Li↗

arXiv:2606.17901v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For a graph $G$ put $h_r(G)=\max{\chi(H):H\subseteq G,\operatorname{girth}(H)\ge r}.$ Erdős and Hajnal asked whether $h_r(G)\to\infty$ as $\chi(G)\to\infty$, for every fixed $r\ge4$. We prove this in every fixed polynomial edge-density regime: for all $r\ge4$, $k\ge2$, $P,C>0$, there is $M=M_{r,k}(P,C)$ such that $\chi(G)\ge M,\ e(G)\le C\chi(G)^P\Longrightarrow h_r(G)\ge k.$ Quantitatively, after replacing $P$ by $P\vee2$ and $C$ by $C\vee2$, $M_{r,k}(P,C)\le \exp!\left(O_{r,k}\bigl((P+2+\log(C\vee2))^2\bigr)\right),$ and consequently the same conclusion holds throughout the quasi-polynomial range $e(G)\le \exp\bigl(C_0(\log\chi(G))^a\bigr),\ 1 < a < 3/2,$ for all sufficiently large $\chi(G)$. In each fixed polynomial-density regime we also obtain $f_{P,C}(k,r)\le k^{O_{r,P,C}(1)}.$ The proof combines a chromatic-defect random extraction lemma, compact and near-quadratic sparse-core bases, and a peeling/thinning bootstrap increasing the admissible edge exponent by $1/(r-1)$. We also prove structural saturation results for possible counterexamples, including Moore-strength exact-cycle packings and quadratic saturation in projected colour-pair space. Finally, writing $h_r^{\mathrm f}(G)=\max{\chi_{\mathrm f}(H):H\subseteq G,\operatorname{girth}(H)\ge r},$ we develop a fractional random-extraction framework based on Mohar-Wu preservation. We prove sufficient cheap-cycle-killing criteria and verify them for several structured families, including clique-organised families, line graphs of incidence graphs of equal-order generalized quadrangles and generalized hexagons, and the Bohman-Keevash tracking-time triangle-free-process graph. We also isolate a density-free obstruction that any proof using this fractional surgery route must overcome.

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17.

PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-01 DOI: HASH:67b30dfa065d2dbfdf704ee55d59f43e

BeetleAtlas 2: An enhanced <i>Tribolium castaneum</i> web resource for tissue and developmental transcriptomics allowing refinement of gene predictions

Authors:

David P. Leader↗

by David P. Leader, Muhammad T. Naseem, Janina L. Rinke, Kenneth Veland Halberg BeetleAtlas is an online resource for tissue- and stage-specific transcriptomics in the red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum. On updating from the original Tcas5.2 genome assembly to the more recent improved icTriCast1.1 genome assembly it became evident that there were major discrepancies between the gene models of the two genome annotations in use: the OGS3 and the NCBI gene sets. As neither was clearly superior we implemented a new design in BeetleAtlas 2 (beetleatlas.org) comprising two parallel ‘modes’ — one incorporating results using the NCBI gene models and a second incorporating those using the OGS3 gene models. This allows direct comparison where equivalent gene models exist: 50–57% of cases. To aid resolution of discrepancies between the two gene model sets and verification of results, gene models are linked to a custom visualization of RNA-seq read coverage of the genome in the UCSC Genome Browser. This displays reads from 22 tissues and life stages superimposed on the icTriCast1.1 genome assembly. Reference tracks show the NCBI gene models, the OGS3 gene models after translation of their coordinates from the Tcas5.2 assembly, and 1050 discontinued NCBI gene models from the previous assembly after a similar transfer of coordinates. We document various situations in which distinct patterns of expression of the tissues can be used to confirm and extend correlations between the two gene sets, resolve discrepancies between them, make corrections and identify putative genes or exons absent from the current gene sets. BeetleAtlas 2 allows those involved in Tribolium research to avoid the pitfalls inherent in incorrect gene models when planning experiments on specific genes and interpreting the results. It also demonstrates how BeetleAtlas 2 might play an important role in establishing a revised gene set for Tribolium castaneum in the future.

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18.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16273

Generative Modeling on Metric Graphs via Neural Optimal Transport

Authors:

Alessandro Micheli↗Yueqi Cao↗Anthea Monod↗Samir Bhatt↗

arXiv:2606.16273v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce, to our knowledge, the first deep generative modeling framework for probability distributions continuously supported on compact metric graphs. Given source and target measures on a metric graph, our method embeds the graph into a smooth ambient space, solves an entropic Kantorovich problem via a neural semidual parameterization, and projects generated samples back onto the original graph. We study two embedded geometries: an extrinsic Euclidean realization and the intrinsic tropical Abel–Jacobi embedding into the Jacobian torus. In both cases, the resulting generator is graph-supported by construction. We prove that, in the joint limit of increasing neural expressivity, the learned generator converges weakly to a valid transport coupling between the original graph measures. Empirically, across a range of geometrically distinct graphs, our method matches or improves upon heuristic transport baselines based on discrete graph OT, while scaling more favorably. Finally, we demonstrate scalability on real-world urban mobility data by training our model on one million Uber pickup locations in Manhattan, New York City.

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19.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18383

From Sparse Features to Trustworthy Proxies: Certifying SAE-Based Interpretability

Authors:

Dibyanayan Bandyopadhyay↗Asif Ekbal↗

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are increasingly used to extract interpretable features from language models (LMs), yet a central question remains: when can an SAE-based explanation be treated as a faithful view of an underlying frozen LM We study this through a post-hoc generalization framework that certifies the LM via a sparse proxy, obtained by replacing a native hidden activation with its pretrained SAE reconstruction. Our framework derives an upper bound on the base model's expected risk using four measurable quantities: proxy risk, SAE reconstruction gap, concept-pool mismatch, and sparse complexity. We interpret this certificate as an operational criterion for explanatory faithfulness. In particular, a non-vacuous bound indicates that the extracted sparse features retain meaningful predictive information, while small reconstruction and mismatch errors indicate that the proxy remains behaviorally close to the original model. Empirically, we show that the bound becomes non-vacuous on GPT-2 Small, Gemma-2B, and Llama-3-8B at practical sample sizes. A detailed layerwise analysis of Llama-3-8B reveals a strong depth dependence, with later layers becoming much easier to certify, associated with both stronger local fidelity and weaker downstream error amplification. Finally, through feature-shuffling ablations, we show that the decomposition distinguishes genuine semantic alignment from mere statistical sparsity, providing a useful diagnostic for when SAE-based explanations become less reliable.

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20.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.08898

Few-shot Class-variable Incremental Audio Classification via Prototype Adaptation and Pseudo Class-variable Training

Authors:

Yanxiong Li↗Guoqing Chen↗Qianqian Li↗Sen Huang↗

arXiv:2606.08898v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In the task of few-shot class-incremental audio classification, the number of classes is assumed to always increase without considering the possibility of decrease. However, the number of classes generally increases or decreases in practice. In this paper, we investigate a problem of Few-shot Class-variable Incremental Audio Classification (FCIAC), in which the number of classes increases or decreases. We propose a FCIAC method using prototype adaptation and pseudo class-variable training. The model in our method consists of an encoder and a classifier. The classifier is initialized by a class-variable prototype adaptation network, whose structure dynamically changes with the change of classes. In addition, we design a pseudo class-variable training strategy to enhance the model's adaptability to changing classes. Experiments on three public datasets show that our method exceeds previous methods in average accuracy. The code is at: https://github.com/cgq2971-afk/FCIAC.

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21.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13304

ReFree: Towards Realistic Co-Speech Video Generation via Reward-Free RL and Multilevel Speech Guidance

Authors:

Salaheldin Mohamed↗M. Hamza Mughal↗Rishabh Dabral↗Christian Theobalt↗

Speech-driven talking character animation seeks to generate life-like portrait videos that convey natural conversation behavior, aligning facial motion with spoken audio. Although recent advances in video generation have substantially improved realism in video-based animation, achieving both accurate lip articulation and expressive behavior remains challenging. Existing approaches typically trade off precise phoneme-to-lip synchronization against dynamic facial expressions and head motion, yielding animations that are either accurate yet rigid, or expressive but poorly synchronized. We address this challenge by proposing ReFree-S2V, a flow-matching speech-to-portrait animation framework that builds upon a pretrained video generation model to achieve fine-grained speech articulation and high-level expressive cues in speech-driven portrait animation. This model introduces a multi-level speech representation capturing phonetic and prosodic information at both local and global granularities. These representations are selectively injected into transformer blocks via learnable level selectors, enabling both accurate lip synchronization and natural expressive motion. To achieve natural head movements, we further introduce a novel reward-free reinforcement learning scheme into flow-matching training to discourage perceptually implausible motion without relying on handcrafted synchronization metrics or reward models, or the high cost of human preference annotation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ReFree-S2V achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming existing methods in both quantitative lip-sync accuracy and qualitative human evaluations of naturalness and expressivity.

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22.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12407

How Seemingly Inconsequential Design Choices Dictate Performance of LLMs in Pathology

Authors:

Kian R. Weihrauch↗Thomas A. Buckley↗William Lotter↗Arjun K. Manrai↗

General-purpose large language models (LLMs) are routinely used as baselines when evaluating specialized pathology models on whole-slide images (WSIs). Because WSIs exceed contemporary model context limits, LLM baselines routinely use small, high-magnification patches processed independently via majority voting, without systematic evaluation of seemingly inconsequential design choices such as patch size, patch count, and magnification. Generalist LLMs have consistently underperformed specialized systems, reinforcing the perception that domain-specific training or architectural adaptation is necessary for pathology tasks involving WSIs. Here, we conduct a systematic factorial analysis of four input design factors: inference mode, patch size, magnification, and patch count. We demonstrate that prior studies have overstated the gap between specialized models and general-purpose LLMs by choosing non-optimized input configurations. On the MultiPathQA benchmark, switching to a single balanced configuration (large patches at lower magnification, processed jointly) raises GPT-5 from 15.1% to 39.5% on cancer-type classification (TCGA) and from 38.1% to 62.9% on organ classification (GTEx). Per-task optimization yields further gains up to 43.9% (TCGA) and 71.6% (GTEx). The same configuration generalizes to two other models and to a fully held-out CPTAC cohort, where it improves Gemini 3 Flash by 23.4 percentage points without any task-specific tuning.

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23.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2605.29208

libhmm: A Modern C++20 Library for Hidden Markov Models with Correct MLE Emission M-Steps

Authors:

Gary Wolfman↗

arXiv:2605.29208v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We describe libhmm, a C++20 library for Hidden Markov Model parameter estimation, sequence decoding, and model selection. libhmm addresses two gaps in existing software: the absence of a well-maintained, zero-dependency C++ HMM library suitable for embedding in production systems, and the widespread use of method-of-moments (MOM) approximations in the emission distribution M-step of the Baum-Welch algorithm. The library implements correct maximum likelihood estimators for sixteen scalar emission distributions, including an ECME algorithm for the location-scale Student-t distribution, Newton-Raphson maximization for Gamma, Beta, Weibull, and Negative Binomial distributions, and the von Mises distribution for circular data. All forward-backward and Viterbi calculations operate in full log-space. SIMD acceleration is provided for AVX-512, AVX2, SSE2, and ARM NEON via compile-time dispatch with scalar fallback. Version 4 adds multivariate observation support via the BasicHmm template, with three multivariate emission families (diagonal Gaussian, full-covariance Gaussian, and independent components) each with correct weighted MLE M-steps. Python bindings are available via the companion package pylibhmm. We compare libhmm against established C and C++ HMM libraries and against published R reference packages on seven real-data benchmarks, and discuss the architectural tradeoffs made in the design.

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24.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2502.13889

On the Addressability Problem on CSS Codes

Authors:

J\'er\^ome Guyot↗Samuel Jaques↗

arXiv:2502.13889v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent discoveries in asymptotically good quantum codes have intensified research on their application in quantum computation and fault-tolerant operations. This study focuses on the addressability problem within CSS codes: we ask what circuits might implement logical gates on strict subsets of logical qubits. With some notion of fault-tolerance, we prove several impossibility results: for CSS codes with non-zero rate, one cannot address a logical $H$, $HS$, $SH$, or $\mathsf{CNOT}$ to any non-empty strict subset of logical qubits using a circuit made only from 1-local Clifford gates. Furthermore, we show that one cannot permute the logical qubits in a code purely by permuting the physical qubits, if the rate of the code is (asymptotically) greater than 1/3 and the distance is at least 3. We can show a similar no-go result for $\mathsf{CNOT}$s and $\mathsf{CZ}$s between two such high-rate codes, albeit under a more restrictive assumption on the circuit, which we call "global" (though recent addressable CCZ gates use global circuits). This work pioneers the study of distance-preserving addressability in quantum codes, mainly by considering automorphisms of the code. This perspective offers new insights and potential directions for future research. We argue that studying this trade off between addressability and efficiency of the codes is essential to understand better how to do efficient quantum computation.

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25.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2606.24958

Swarm-Inspired Generation of Collective Behaviors in Graph Dynamical Systems

Authors:

Ji Chen↗Song Chen↗Chengzhang Gong↗Li Fan↗Chao Xu↗

arXiv:2606.24958v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Collective behavior arises when locally interacting units produce coordinated global organization, from synchronization in dynamical systems to task-relevant information flow on graphs. The central challenge is not only to explain how collective behavior emerges, but to design local interaction rules that can produce desired global organization and generalize across graphs, dynamics and tasks.To address this challenge, we introduce the Swarm-Inspired Emergent Synchronizer (SIES), a graph-dynamical framework that learns generalizable local-interaction laws for controllable collective organization. Each node is an agent-like dynamical unit with a state and task cue, and signed source-target-conditioned attention acts as an adaptive coupling term inside an explicit evolution model. Therefore, SIES combines an explicit dynamical engine with local agent intelligence, similar to biological swarms. For synchronization control, SIES learns a generalizable coupling operator that produces prescribed synchronization patterns for CDSs across untrained network scales, target phase relations, and intrinsic node dynamics without retraining. The learned operator also reaches gait-related modes faster than three oscillator baselines and generalizes synchronization-driven locomotion to simulated multi-legged robots of different scales and a physical hexapod after leg disablement. For graph representation learning, SIES applies the same signed interaction principle to message passing and achieves the highest performance among the compared methods on heterophilous node-classification benchmarks. Together, these results position SIES as a generalizable and learnable graph-dynamical interaction framework with promise for synchronization control, adaptive robot coordination, and heterophilous graph representation learning.

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