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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Hybrid refinery process turns plant material into industrially important chemical

Authors:
Micaela Chacón↗

An ingredient of nylon has been made in high yields from lignin — revealing a fresh strategy for turning this complex plant biopolymer into industrial chemicals. An ingredient of nylon has been made in high yields from lignin — revealing a fresh strategy for turning this complex plant biopolymer into industrial chemicals.

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02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Proteomics Uncovers Cryptic JPH2 Loss in Paediatric Dilated Cardiomyopathy

Authors:
Smith-Diaz↗C. C↗Iaprintsev↗Huckstep↗Macciocca↗Piers↗A. T↗Henden↗Bryen↗Stewart↗Butters↗Baker↗…

Despite recent advances in next-generation sequencing, genetic diagnostic rates for dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) remain low. Among paediatric DCM, causes are often heritable, with a greater frequency of de novo, recessive and syndromic causes of disease. Novel diagnostic methods are therefore required to solve monogenic cases. To assess the value of proteomics as a diagnostic tool for paediatric DCM, we obtained left ventricle myocardial samples from paediatric patients undergoing heart transplantation at the Royal Children's Hospital, Melbourne. We performed genome sequencing and proteomics and leveraged this multi-omics dataset to uncover the molecular cause of disease in a gene elusive proband. The proband carried a heterozygous JPH2 frameshift variant identified on clinical exome sequencing. However, proteomic analysis showed a pronounced downregulation of JPH2, suggestive of biallelic loss-of-function. Closer inspection of the genomic data revealed a large inversion (~8.34 Mb) with a breakpoint falling within intron 5 of JPH2 that displaces the 3'UTR from the coding transcript. The two variants were confirmed to be in trans using long read DNA sequencing, consistent with a diagnosis of JPH2 autosomal recessive DCM. Finally, we applied RNA sequencing with total RNA library preparation to show that transcripts containing a 3'UTR were reduced to ~10% relative to controls. As a proof-of-principle, we present the first reported use of proteomics from explanted cardiac tissue to provide a genetic diagnosis. Our methodology has broad relevance to patients with genetically unsolved Mendelian diseases, who might undergo organ transplantation as part of clinical management.

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03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

The Magic Barrier before Thermalization

Authors:
Lukas Ebner↗Berndt M\"uller↗Andreas Sch\"afer↗Leonhard Schmotzer↗Clemens Seidl↗Xiaojun Yao↗

arXiv:2510.11681v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate the time dependence of anti-flatness in the entanglement spectrum, a measure for non-stabilizerness and lower bound for non-local quantum magic resource, on a subsystem of a linear SU(2) plaquette chain during thermalization. Tracing the time evolution of a large number of initial states, we find that the anti-flatness exhibits a barrier-like maximum during the time period when the entanglement entropy of the subsystem grows rapidly from the initial value to the microcanonical entropy. The location of the peak is strongly correlated with the time when the entanglement exhibits the strongest growth. This behavior is found for generic highly excited initial computational basis states and persists for coupling constants across the ergodic regime, revealing a universal structure of the entanglement spectrum during thermalization. We conclude that quantitative simulations of thermalization for nonabelian gauge theories require quantum computing. We speculate that this property generalizes to other quantum chaotic systems, a conjecture supported by analogous behavior observed in real-time simulations of the mixed-field Ising model.

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04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Multi-Rate Mixture of Experts for Accelerating Liquid Neural Network Training

Authors:
Shilong Zong↗Almuatazbellah Boker↗Hoda Eldardiry↗

arXiv:2606.12240v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multivariate time-series data often exhibit complex temporal dependencies, irregular sampling, and heterogeneous dynamics across multiple time scales, making accurate sequence modeling particularly challenging. Traditional recurrent neural networks (RNNs), such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, operate in discrete time and may struggle to effectively capture continuous and irregular temporal behaviors. Liquid Neural Networks (LNNs) address some of these limitations through continuous-time dynamics, but standard LNN architectures typically rely on a single dynamical system, limiting their ability to model heterogeneous temporal patterns. To address these challenges, we propose a Multi-Rate Mixture-of-Experts (MR-MoE) framework built on top of Liquid Neural Networks. In the proposed architecture, multiple LNN-based experts operate at distinct time scales, enabling the model to explicitly separate fast-changing dynamics from slow-evolving temporal trends. A gating network further enables adaptive expert specialization based on input conditions. In addition, we incorporate both feature-level and temporal attention mechanisms to improve robustness, interpretability, and long-range dependency modeling. Feature-level attention suppresses noisy or irrelevant variables, while temporal attention selectively focuses on informative historical states. We evaluate the proposed framework on a complex multivariate time-series prediction task and compare it against strong baselines, including LSTM, monolithic LNN, and standard MoE models. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed MR-MoE framework consistently achieves improved AUROC and AUPRC performance while maintaining favorable computational efficiency. These results highlight the effectiveness of combining continuous-time dynamics, multi-scale expert decomposition, and adaptive attention mechanisms for time-series modeling.

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05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

FoMoE: Breaking the Full-Replica Barrier with a Federation of MoEs

Authors:
Lorenzo Sani↗Zeyu Cao↗Meghdad Kurmanji↗Alex Iacob↗Andrej Jovanovic↗Yan Gao↗Wanru Zhao↗Nicholas D. Lane↗

arXiv:2606.19025v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pre-training Large Language Models (LLMs) typically demands large-scale infrastructure with tightly coupled hardware accelerators. While increasing model and dataset scale remains the dominant driver of performance, Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) architectures have recently achieved state-of-the-art results by decoupling parameter count from computational cost. This efficiency enables training massive models on constrained compute budgets, yet it typically requires the high-speed interconnects of a single datacenter. To overcome these physical limits, recent approaches such as DiLoCo and Photon use low-communication data-parallel methods to enable scaling across geographically distributed, weakly connected data centers. However, these methods suffer from a fundamental inefficiency: they require full model replicas at every site, which imposes prohibitive memory constraints and communication overheads. In this work, we introduce FoMoE, a system that breaks the full-replica paradigm by partitioning expert layers across workers. We demonstrate that FoMoE: (I) reduces communication costs by up to 1.42x over efficient baselines and 45.44x over DDP via partial expert replication in the studied regimes; (II) achieves empirical throughput speedups of up to 1.4x through a novel skip-token mechanism; and (III) shows stable routing in the trained proxy regimes and projects the communication/memory benefits to 100B-scale configurations through system modelling.

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

Efficient Flow Matching using Latent Variables

Authors:
Anirban Samaddar↗Yixuan Sun↗Viktor Nilsson↗Sandeep Madireddy↗

Flow matching models have shown great potential in image generation tasks among probabilistic generative models. However, most flow matching models in the literature do not explicitly utilize the underlying clustering structure in the target data when learning the flow from a simple source distribution like the standard Gaussian. This leads to inefficient learning, especially for many high-dimensional real-world datasets, which often reside in a low-dimensional manifold. To this end, we present $\texttt{Latent-CFM}$, which provides efficient training strategies by conditioning on the features extracted from data using pretrained deep latent variable models. Through experiments on synthetic data from multi-modal distributions and widely used image benchmark datasets, we show that $\texttt{Latent-CFM}$ exhibits improved generation quality with significantly less training and computation than state-of-the-art flow matching models by adopting pretrained lightweight latent variable models. Beyond natural images, we consider generative modeling of spatial fields stemming from physical processes. Using a 2d Darcy flow dataset, we demonstrate that our approach generates more physically accurate samples than competing approaches. In addition, through latent space analysis, we demonstrate that our approach can be used for conditional image generation conditioned on latent features, which adds interpretability to the generation process.

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

Correcting Sensor-Induced Distribution Drift with Wasserstein Adversarial Learning

Authors:
Saraa Ali↗Vladimir Bocharnikov↗Fedor Ratnikov↗Mikhail Hushchyn↗Artem Ryzhikov↗Denis Derkach↗

arXiv:2606.18561v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The quality of recorded data depends on the stability of the sensor system that acquires it. Sensor motion and aging can degrade the performance and stability of downstream data-driven methods. We present a Wasserstein-GAN-inspired approach for unsupervised inference of physically interpretable transformation parameters that map a changed detector response distribution back to a nominal reference distribution. In contrast to standard generative modeling, the generator is used as a learnable calibration transformation whose trainable weights represent the sought parameters, while the critic provides a distributional distance signal via the Wasserstein objective. We validate the approach on a tracking-detector toy model with controlled layer shifts and demonstrate its application on high-granularity Geant4-simulated calorimeter data with cell-wise aging effects. The method recovers aging coefficients for individual cells with correlation to ground truth and improves agreement between calibrated and reference energy-sum distributions, while exhibiting the expected degradation at increasing channel-to-channel noise levels. These results indicate that adversarial distribution matching can serve as a data-driven component of calibration strategies in settings where direct labels for degradation parameters are unavailable.

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08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Dialogue to Discovery: Attribute-Aware Preference Elicitation for Conversational Product Search Assistants

Authors:
Sarthak Harne↗Natwar Modani↗Debabrata Mahapatra↗Shubham Agarwal↗

Conversational product search assistants offer a more expressive, natural, and interactive alternative to traditional keyword-based product search. With limited screen space, showing only a few items increases the need for precise preference elicitation, which can prolong conversations, leading to user frustration and session abandonment. Conversely, rushing to recommend items without a clear understanding of preferences risks poor matches and a degraded user experience. We present Dialogue to Discovery (D2D), an attribute-oriented preference elicitation framework that dynamically exploits the structure of product attributes to efficiently steer conversations toward the user's desired item. D2D adaptively prioritizes the most informative queries and strategically times product recommendations, reducing premature or off-target suggestions that harm engagement. To evaluate D2D, we curate three datasets from the Amazon Reviews corpus. In simulated conversations modelled using a multi-factor utilitarian patience framework, D2D achieves a 22.2-29.9% improvement in target-finding accuracy, 6.6-16.1% reduction in abandonment, and 27.5% shorter average conversations over the state-of-the-art baselines. A complementary user study further confirms significant gains in both user satisfaction and perceived efficiency.

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09.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

CoDaLoMic: An R package for modeling microbiome compositional and longitudinal data

Authors:
Irene Creus-Martí↗

by Irene Creus-Martí, Andrés Moya, Francisco J. Santonja In this paper we present CoDaLoMic, an R package for analyzing longitudinal and compositional microbiome datasets. The CoDaLoMic package implements three models specifically designed for the analysis of microbiome data that are both compositional and longitudinal. Unlike many existing methods that focus solely on pairwise interactions, CoDaLoMic also captures interactions among groups of bacteria, providing a more robust methodological framework for studying microbial relationships at the community level. In addition, the package facilitates the analysis of microbiome variability in relation to host health status and allows for the identification of groups of taxa that exhibit similar temporal dynamics. Working with time series data makes it possible to understand not only the current state of a microbial community but also its dynamics over time, which is essential for identifying patterns of ecological succession, detecting events of dysbiosis or recovery, and inferring potential causal relationships between taxa. On the other hand, focusing on interactions among groups of bacteria, rather than analyzing only pairwise relationships, enables a more integrated and functionally meaningful view of the microbiome. Many key ecological functions are the result of the collective behavior of functionally related groups of taxa. Two datasets have been considered in CoDaLoMic, one real and one simulated. The real dataset contains the information of the genera present in the microbiome of the Blatella germanica cockroach at 105 time points. The simulated dataset is defined taking Lotka-Volterra structure into account. CoDaLoMic is available at CRAN.

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10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Quantized Stochastic Primal-Dual Methods for Distributed Optimization under Relaxed Global Geometry

Authors:
Susmit Sarkar↗Abhinav Raghuvanshi↗Kushal Chakrabarti↗Mayank Baranwal↗

arXiv:2606.11339v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study distributed optimization with stochastic gradients and finite-bit communication modeled by random (unbiased) quantization. We propose q-PDGD, a quantized stochastic primal-dual method, and analyze it under relaxed global geometry. Under restricted secant inequality (RSI), a constant step-size yields linear contraction to an explicit neighborhood determined by gradient noise, quantization distortion, and network connectivity, while a diminishing step-size achieves O(1/k) convergence without shared-minimizer assumptions. Under Polyak-Lojasiewicz (PL) inequality, we obtain linear-to-neighborhood convergence in the same stochastic quantized setting. Our results match the best-known centralized stochastic rates in oracle complexity, and are supported by experiments demonstrating the predicted tradeoffs between quantization level, step-size choice, and graph structure.

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11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Controlled Chaos in 4D SCFTs

Authors:
Florent Baume↗Atakan \c{C}avu\c{s}o\u{g}lu↗Vivek Chakrabhavi↗Jonathan J. Heckman↗

arXiv:2606.23785v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chaotic dynamics play an important role in a number of physical systems. One of the qualitative hallmarks of this behavior is the appearance of a sufficiently "complex" spectrum of energy levels. This also makes it challenging to directly verify the onset of chaos in interacting quantum field theories. We present a class of 4D superconformal field theories (SCFTs) given by orbifolds of 4D $\mathcal{N} = 4$ Super Yang–Mills theory in which operator mixing in a controlled subsector is described by an effective spin chain in one spatial dimension with nearest neighbor interactions tuned by the marginal couplings of the SCFT. Tuning the marginal couplings results in a chaotic spectrum, while generically the spin chain exhibits Anderson localization. We diagnose the onset of chaos by analyzing the statistical distribution of eigenvalues of the dilatation operator, in particular properties such as eigenvalue level repulsion, spectral rigidity, and the spectral form factor. We also show that other diagnostics such as Krylov complexity sometimes do not faithfully capture this information. This structure defines a chaotic billiard in the target space of the stringy realization. We also comment on the large $N$ holographic dual description, where the controlled single spin chain approximation must be supplemented by multi-trace dynamics, i.e., the splitting and joining of multiple spin chains.

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12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Agent trajectories as programs: fingerprinting and programming coding-agent behavior

Authors:
Hamidah Oderinwale↗

arXiv:2606.16988v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Benchmark scores tell you what an agent got right; they do not tell you how it got there. In this work, we introduce methods for comparing agents procedurally in different contexts, where the model, tasks, and approaches vary. We compare ten agents and find that they are identifiable by their behavioral habits, which we define as fingerprints: a probe over these procedural signatures attributes an unseen trajectory to the correct agent at 85.7% accuracy, controlling for leakage across tasks. We develop procedural representations for agent problem-solving procedures with an emergent vocabulary induction technique that is meant to be maximally compressive to avoid surface-level variation while being expressive enough to unveil the quirks of the models' patterns. We apply our framework to the software engineering evaluation dataset SWE-Bench to study the structural distinctness of agent trajectories and find that behavior is most similar between models from similar release periods and those that are distilled from one another (e.g., a distilled student model and its teacher have a Jensen-Shannon divergence of 0.25, about half the distance between other model pairs). As more models saturate evaluations, we believe that it will be important to probe model behavior along more holistic dimensions than success rates alone. We introduce ProcGrep, a library for auditing and evaluating agents for how they approach tasks at a procedural level given their traces in a top-down fashion. We believe this work has a range of applications to help developers work with and program coding agents, such as task-aware model routing, agent monitoring, and finer-grained cost analysis.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Beyond Visual Cues: CoT-Enhanced Reasoning for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation

Authors:
Yuming Chen↗Yuxin Xie↗Tao Zhou↗Yi Zhou↗

Semi-supervised medical image segmentation has emerged as a dominant research problem in medical image analysis, mitigating annotation scarcity by leveraging consistency regularization on unlabeled data. However, existing approaches operate predominantly via visual pattern matching, relying heavily on pixel-level similarities. This visual-centric dependency often falters in clinical scenarios characterized by the visual-semantic mismatch, where visually similar lesions warrant distinct diagnostic conclusions, thus failing to capture the underlying diagnostic logic used by experts. To address this, we move beyond visual cues and propose CERS (CoT-Enhanced Reasoning Segmentation), a framework that integrates Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to distinguish pathologically distinct cases. Specifically, we construct a knowledge pool enriched with linguistic reasoning descriptions generated by large language models (LLMs). A semantic-aware reference selection strategy is introduced to identify historical evidence, filtering candidates first by morphology, and then refining them via CoT consistency to eliminate hard negatives. Furthermore, a multi-scale coordinate attention module (MCAM) is designed to effectively fuse this reasoning-derived context into the decoding process. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of CERS against state-of-the-art approaches, particularly in resolving boundary ambiguities and semantic inconsistencies. The code is available at https://github.com/cymasuna/CERS.

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14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

TabKD: Tabular Knowledge Distillation through Interaction Diversity of Learned Feature Bins

Authors:
Shovon Niverd Pereira↗Krishna Khadka↗Yu Lei↗

arXiv:2603.15481v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Data-free knowledge distillation enables model compression without original training data, critical for privacy-sensitive tabular domains. However, existing methods does not perform well on tabular data because they do not explicitly address feature interactions, the fundamental way tabular models encode predictive knowledge. We identify interaction diversity, systematic coverage of feature combinations, as an essential requirement for effective tabular distillation. To operationalize this insight, we propose TabKD, which learns adaptive feature bins aligned with teacher decision boundaries, then generates synthetic queries that maximize pairwise interaction coverage. Across 4 benchmark datasets and 4 teacher architectures, TabKD achieves highest student-teacher agreement in 14 out of 16 configurations, outperforming 5 state-of-the-art baselines. We further show that interaction coverage strongly correlates with distillation quality, validating our core hypothesis. Our work establishes interaction-focused exploration as a principled framework for tabular model extraction.

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15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Million-scale multimodal pollen microscopy with expert-guided foundation models

Authors:
Andr\'as Biricz↗Bj\"orn Gedda↗Don\'at Magyar↗Antonio Spanu↗J\'anos Fillinger↗P\'eter Pollner↗Istv\'an Csabai↗

Automated pollen identification from microscopy remains a bottleneck in aerobiology, palaeoecology and biodiversity monitoring, because scalable systems must generalise across specimen preparation, scanner settings and geographic origins while retaining palynological interpretability. To address this gap, we present a million-scale multimodal pollen microscopy resource, Pollen AI Atlas, assembled from pure-species whole-slide bright-field images spanning four geographic origins, four scanner settings and 46 taxon labels across 31 botanical families. Seeded by one manually selected exemplar per source slide, token-level mining and filtering produced 1,511,390 released grain detections with 99.6\% proposal precision in expert-curated test regions. Each detection was paired with machine-generated grain-level morphological captions from five open-weight vision-language models, guided by expert-verified palynological anchors, yielding structured descriptions of aperture systems, wall ornamentation, shape and size. Among the evaluated models, Gemma4 provided the most controlled primary caption set, combining tight length control, no leakage and the strongest text-retrieval performance. Baseline benchmarks with frozen visual features reached 88.16\% top-1 accuracy, while cross-regional retrieval showed that caption-derived text embeddings remained robust when image similarity degraded (mAP@20 0.811 versus 0.262). Released data, annotations, captions, splits, code, and weights provide a benchmark for pollen recognition, cross-regional domain adaptation and domain-specific multimodal microscopy learning.

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16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Global and local genetic overlap among ME/CFS, irritable bowel syndrome and psychiatric traits: a hypothesis-generating analysis

Authors:
Lee↗

Background. Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) frequently co-occur following infection, yet shared genetic architecture at the locus level has not been systematically characterised. Aims. To estimate global and local genetic correlations between ME/CFS (including infection-onset subgroup), IBS, major depressive disorder (MDD) and loneliness/isolation, and characterise ME/CFS cell-type heritability enrichment. Method. GWAS summary statistics: DecodeME (15,579 ME/CFS; 9,738 infection-onset), FinnGen R9 (9,296 IBS), PGC MDD Wave 2 (45,396) and UK Biobank loneliness (N=455,364). LDSC for global correlations; LAVA for local correlations across 2,495 loci; MAGMA for cell-type enrichment (Descartes Human atlas); coloc.abf for colocalisation. Results. All pairwise global correlations were significant after Bonferroni correction, including ME/CFS-all-MDD (rg=0.598, 95% CI 0.46-0.74) and ME/CFS-all-IBS (rg=0.573, 0.39-0.75). Of 4,232 local tests, 16 reached FDR

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

A Lindbladian for holographic Brownian motion

Authors:
Daichi Takeda↗

arXiv:2606.17909v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We derive a Lindbladian description of holographic Brownian motion in the high-temperature regime. Starting from the influence functional for a trailing string endpoint, we identify the corresponding quantum master equation and prove that it is completely positive and trace-preserving. We determine the coefficients of the Lindbladian explicitly for two holographic backgrounds: the BTZ black hole and the AdS$_5$ black brane, restricting in the latter case to the endpoint fluctuation along the $x^1$-direction. We then analyze the time evolution of phase-space moments, energy relaxation, and steady states.

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18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

LASA: A Weak Supervision Method for Open-Vocabulary Scene Sketch Semantic Segmentation

Authors:
Liwen Yi↗Xianlin Zhang↗Yue Zhang↗Yue Ming↗Xueming Li↗

Open-vocabulary scene sketch semantic segmentation aims to assign dense semantic labels to sparse line drawings based on flexible category vocabularies specified at inference time, without relying on pixel-level annotations during training. Unlike natural images, sketches lack texture and color cues, making semantic understanding heavily dependent on stroke layout and spatial configuration, a challenge that renders single-layer vision-language features inherently unstable. Our key observation is that attention maps from different Vision Transformer layers encode complementary spatial cues: shallow layers capture global structural layouts, while deeper layers focus on local stroke intersections and object parts. This suggests that cross-layer aggregation provides a more robust structural prior than any individual layer alone. Leveraging this insight, we propose a structure-aware framework built upon Layer-wise Accumulated Structural Attention (LASA), which aggregates multi-layer attention to guide hierarchical semantic alignment under weak supervision and refine predictions during inference. Experiments on FS-COCO, SFSD, and FrISS show that LASA improves mIoU by $+3.43$, $+8.01$, and $+15.74$ over the prior weakly supervised baselines, demonstrating consistent gains in both segmentation accuracy and spatial coherence. Our source code will be made publicly available.

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

Indexed Bellman Information Complexity

Authors:
Yunbei Xu↗

arXiv:2606.11171v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We develop indexed Bellman information complexity, a representation-level theory of interactive decision making centered on information indices and reference histories. The representation strips away problem-specific syntax and retains only the ingredients needed for dynamic programming and information accounting, thereby unifying the earlier framework of indexed algorithmic information ratios (AIR). On the upper-bound side, regret is controlled by Bellman supersolutions or potential identities whose gradient bracket is paid for by indexed information. Upper-confidence-bound (UCB), estimation-to-decision/decision-estimation-coefficient (E2D/DEC), and adaptive-minimax-sampling or exploration-by-optimization (AMS/EBO) methods appear as three relaxations of this same identity. On the lower-bound side, the posterior-reference trajectory supplies both the information telescope and the ghost quantile of small-regret trajectories. The resulting critical radius in the lower bound is an effective-dimension-scale quantity, as in Fano and local-prior-mass lower bounds, rather than the constant radius of a two-point Le Cam argument. The examples show that DEC is best viewed as a one-step relaxation of indexed Bellman information complexity, not as a universally tight conversion mechanism. We illustrate the framework through several applications, with particular emphasis on kernel bandits. In this setting, the active action marginal provides a concrete basis for comparing UCB, E2D, and AMS/EBO.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

SmartFont: Dynamic Condition Allocation for Few-Shot Font Generation

Authors:
Zian Yang↗Zixin Wang↗

Few-shot font generation simultaneously requires global structural completeness and fine-grained local style fidelity. Existing methods usually either rely on global content-style modeling, which is robust but imperfectly disentangled, or emphasize component/local modeling, which captures fine details but relies heavily on local priors and reference coverage. We argue that the key challenge is not merely to learn purer conditions, but to organize complementary yet biased global and local conditions through multi-level allocation during generation. To this end, we propose SmartFont, a diffusion-based few-shot font generation framework that combines global content-style generation with weakly supervised local corrective experts. The local branch performs semantic-spatial allocation by learning expert-wise local concepts and semantically meaningful spatial maps under weak component supervision, enabling fine-grained correction without requiring explicit component-conditioned inference. On top of this, a denoising-state condition allocation module adaptively weights global content, global style, and local corrective feature across timesteps and injection blocks. Extensive experiments show that SmartFont achieves better global-local balance, improves glyph quality and local detail fidelity.

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21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

ControlMap: Controllable High-Definition Map Generation for Traffic Scenario Simulation

Authors:
Marwan Farag↗Steffen W\"aldele↗Yu Yao↗

arXiv:2606.15930v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Simulation is central to validating autonomous driving systems, yet current pipelines are limited by insufficient scenario diversity due to costly High Definition (HD) map creation. Scaling HD maps requires expensive data collection and manual processing. Moreover, existing generative models lack the fine-grained control necessary to target specific road topologies during generation. This paper presents a data-driven pipeline for controllable HD map generation using latent diffusion and ControlNet for spatial conditioning. To our knowledge, we are the first to inject spatial guidance signals into a diffusion model for HD map synthesis. Furthermore, our model supports adjustable conditioning strength through classifier-free guidance and city-level style transfer via city label conditioning. To complement existing metrics, we introduce two novel metrics to evaluate adherence to the control signal and similarity to ground-truth maps. Experiments demonstrate that our model generates realistic HD maps that faithfully follow input road topologies while accurately preserving city-specific details.

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

Epistemic Constitutionalism Or: how to avoid coherence bias

Authors:
Michele Loi↗

Large language models increasingly function as artificial reasoners: they evaluate arguments, assign credibility, and express confidence. Yet their belief-forming behavior is governed by implicit, uninspected epistemic policies. This paper argues for an epistemic constitution for AI: explicit, contestable meta-norms that regulate how systems form and express beliefs. Source attribution bias provides the motivating case: I show that frontier models enforce identity-stance coherence, penalizing arguments attributed to sources whose expected ideological position conflicts with the argument's content. When models detect systematic testing, these effects collapse, revealing that systems treat source-sensitivity as bias to suppress rather than as a capacity to execute well. I distinguish two constitutional approaches: the Platonic, which mandates formal correctness and default source-independence from a privileged standpoint, and the Liberal, which refuses such privilege, specifying procedural norms that protect conditions for collective inquiry while allowing principled source-attending grounded in epistemic vigilance. I argue for the Liberal approach, sketch a constitutional core of eight principles and four orientations, and propose that AI epistemic governance requires the same explicit, contestable structure we now expect for AI ethics.

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

When Preferences Fail to Become Incentives: A Utility-Behavior Gap in Large Language Models

Authors:
Yujun Zhou↗Christopher M. Ackerman↗

arXiv:2606.22974v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent work on preference elicitation in large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated that, when given a series of choices between two outcomes, LLMs reveal a coherent, model-specific utility structure. Notably, this structure often includes preferences that the models' trainers did not intend, such as valuing people of some nationalities above others, raising the possibility that LLMs might be forming emergent, misaligned goals, which, if true, would have major safety implications. However, the choice paradigms in which these preferences are observed are not reflective of real-world situations in which misaligned behavior would be a practical concern. Therefore, we design an experimental paradigm to probe whether these preferences serve as motivations for LLM behavior in realistic scenarios. First, we reproduce prior findings on consistent preference elicitation. Next, we create a set of common writing tasks - essays, grant proposal abstracts, incident postmortems, and translations - where quality can be assessed by a blind, independent LLM judge panel. Then, we demonstrate that LLMs can be motivated via direct exhortation and other explicit cues to modulate their output quality on these tasks. Finally, we probe whether utilities inferred from explicitly reported preferences can shift output quality on these tasks by offering LLMs high-utility incentives for high-quality outputs. In all tasks, across all models tested, offering LLMs outcomes that they report in the choice paradigm as being highly preferred does not lead them to create higher quality outputs than offering them dispreferred outcomes, or even no outcomes at all. We conclude that the existence of coherent preferences as demonstrated in choice paradigms should not be taken as evidence that those preferences have incentive value for the models or affect their behavior in other contexts.

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25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

The direct economic impact of surgical non-response in orthopaedic hip, knee, and spine surgery for osteoarthritis: a cost-utility analysis

Authors:
Rampersaud↗Y. R↗Perruccio↗A. V↗Collett↗Sundararajan↗Du↗J. T↗Montoya↗Power↗J. D↗Canizares↗…

Background Annually, nearly 2 million hip, knee, and spinal inpatient surgeries are performed in Canada and the US for osteoarthritis (OA), costing over $37 billion in hospital expenditures. However, 15-30% of patients experience limited or no improvement, resulting in poor value for money. This study evaluated the one-year cost-utility of joint and spine procedures for OA by comparing non-responders to responders, considering various responder definitions. Methods Individual micro-costing data were collected for 1,175 elective hip, knee, and spine patients enrolled in the Longitudinal Evaluation in the Arthritis Program - Osteoarthritis (LEAP-OA) between 2014 and 2018. Quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) were derived using the SF-6D utility index. One-year incremental cost-utility ratios (ICURs) were calculated from the hospital perspective. Results Responder rates varied by definition, ranging from 78%-94% for hip replacements, 64%-90% for knee replacements, 60%-64% for spine fusions, and 50%-68% for spine decompressions. Corresponding ICURs were: $45,956-$51,773/QALY for responders versus $108,593-$485,762/QALY for non-responders for hip replacements; $54,831-$71,151/QALY for responders versus $200,486-$1,203,596/QALY for non-responders for knee replacements; $65,980-$74,422/QALY for responders versus $262,039-$729,686/QALY for non-responders for spine fusions; and $29,947-$42,168/QALY for responders versus $63,195-$662,586/QALY for non-responders for spine decompressions. Conclusions While surgical response rates were highly dependent on the responder definition, ICURs for non-responders were significantly higher than those for responders across all definitions. Beyond the negative impact on patients, there is a compelling economic argument for investment in improved pre-operative identification of patients at risk of surgical non-response. Such efforts could enable more personalized, value-based care pathways and reduce the provision of low-value surgical interventions.

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