Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15 DOI: HASH:b239d8187fe84995897c4fd55fbe9868

Quantitative Gait Categorization in Parkinson's Disease with and without Freezing of Gait

Authors:

Donovan↗Tripathi↗Chu↗Bernhard↗Factor↗McKay↗J. L↗Esper↗

Background: Freezing of gait (FOG) is a disabling and often underrecognized feature of Parkinsons disease (PD). Objective gait analysis may improve characterization of this motor symptom. Objective: To compare quantitative 3D gait parameters in PD with FOG (PDF) and PD without FOG (PDNF) in a routine clinical cohort. Methods: We retrospectively analyzed a sequential sample of 180 patients with PD referred for motion analysis between 2020 and 2024. All patients underwent 3D motion capture in the off-medication state. Eighteen gait outcomes spanning pace, rhythm, postural control, variability, and asymmetry domains were derived from steady-state walking tasks. FOG status was determined using physician documentation and Movement Disorder Society Unified Parkinsons Disease Rating Scale (MDS-UPDRS) items. Group differences between PDF (n=99) and PDNF (n=81) were evaluated using independent samples t-tests, with outcomes adjusted for disease duration and corrected for multiple comparisons. A secondary analysis among PDF compared those in Hoehn and Yahr (H&Y) stage [≥]III to those in H&Y [≤]II. Results: PDF had longer disease duration, higher OFF MDS-UPDRS III scores, and higher Hoehn and Yahr stage than PDNF but were similar in age and sex. After adjusting for disease duration and multiplicity, PDF demonstrated reduced step length, stride length, and forward velocity, and greater cadence variability, while most postural control, and asymmetry measures were comparable between groups. Among PDF, advanced H&Y stage was associated with impaired pace and rhythm, similar to previous reports among PD in general. Conclusion: In this large, sequential, clinically referred cohort, FOG was associated with more advanced PD and specific impairments in pace and gait variability. These findings support comprehensive 3D gait analysis as an objective tool to better delineate FOG-related gait abnormalities and identify features that may predict FOG, informing targeted interventions.

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02.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17756

A fairness-aware extension of Stochastic Multicriteria Acceptability Analysis for ranking

Authors:

Guilherme Dean Pelegrina↗Renata Pelissari↗

arXiv:2606.17756v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fairness has become a central concern in ranking problems involving individuals or social groups, particularly under the Responsible Artificial Intelligence agenda. In Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis, Stochastic Multicriteria Acceptability Analysis (SMAA) provides a robust framework for handling uncertainty and incomplete preference information, but it does not explicitly address fairness in the resulting rankings. This paper proposes SMAA-Fair, a fairness-aware extension of SMAA for ranking problems. The approach reweights the simulated rankings generated by SMAA according to their level of group fairness, so that fairer rankings contribute more strongly to the acceptability indices and central weights vector. The framework is independent of the aggregation model and can incorporate different fairness metrics. In this study, Statistical Parity, normalized discounted Kullback–Leibler divergence (rKL) and normalized discounted cumulative Kullback–Leibler divergence (nDKL) are adopted. Rankings are derived from the fairness-adjusted acceptability matrix using expected ranking and maximum acceptability ranking. We also derive the central weight according to the degree of fairness in the obtained rankings. Numerical experiments with synthetic and real data show that SMAA-Fair improves the representation of protected groups among favourable ranking positions, while preserving robustness to preference uncertainty.

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03.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2510.21583

Principled RL for Flow Matching Emerges from the Chunk-level Policy Optimization

Authors:

Yifu Luo↗Haoyuan Sun↗Xinhao Hu↗Penghui Du↗Keyu Fan↗Bo Li↗Sinan Du↗Xu Wan↗Zhiyu Chen↗Bo Xia↗Yongzhe Chang↗Changqian Yu↗…

Recent Progress in post-training flow matching for text-to-image (T2I) generation with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has demonstrated strong potential. However, it is hindered by a critical limitation: inaccurate advantage attribution. In this work, we argue that aggregating consecutive steps into a coherent 'chunk' and shifting the policy optimization paradigm from GRPO's step level to the chunk level can effectively mitigate the negative impact of this issue. Building on this insight, we propose Group Chunking Policy Optimization (GCPO), the first chunk-level reinforcement learning approach for post-training flow matching. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GCPO achieves superior performance on both standard T2I benchmarks and preference alignment, with up to 43% relative gains over GRPO, highlighting the promise of chunk-level policy optimization. The code is available on https://github.com/xingzhejun/GCPO.

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04.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2405.01558

Configurable Holography: Towards Display and Scene Adaptation

Authors:

Yicheng Zhan↗Liang Shi↗Wojciech Matusik↗Qi Sun↗Kaan Ak\c{s}it↗

Rendering holograms for holographic displays is often an iterative and computationally costly process. Emerging learned holography methods have alleviated this bottleneck by enabling fast hologram rendering with improved reconstruction quality. However, existing methods still depend on fixed display hardware and scene parameters, requiring retraining for each new configuration. This limits rapid adaptation to different visual needs, including scene brightness, user focus preference, and hardware compatibility. We introduce Configurable Holography, a learned CGH framework in which a single model adapts to diverse display-scene parameters through explicit conditioning, eliminating the need for retraining. As a prototype, we present a configurable structure and derive a family of models that continuously adapt to propagation distance, volume depth, peak brightness, pixel pitch, and wavelength. To further improve efficiency, we incorporate auxiliary monocular depth estimation for depth-aware 3D hologram synthesis from RGB-only inputs and apply knowledge distillation for interactive inference. Our extensive simulation and hardware experiments on three holographic display prototypes with different combinations of configurations show on-par reconstruction quality with existing methods, offering up to 2x speed-up in fp32. Our work represents an initial step toward flexible, general-purpose learned holography systems that can seamlessly adapt across diverse hardware and user-specific visual requirements.

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05.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17389

Visuals Lie, Consistency Speaks: Disentangling Spatial Attention from Reliability in Vision-Language Models

Authors:

Logan Mann↗Yi Xia↗Ajit Saravanan↗Ishan Dave↗Saadullah Ismail↗Shikhar Shiromani↗Emily Huang↗Ruizhe Li↗Kevin Zhu↗

Multimodal Foundation Models are increasingly used as reasoning agents, making reliability, knowing when a model may hallucinate, critical. A common intuition, which we call the Attention-Confidence Assumption, holds that reliability follows from "structural" visual perception: tight attention on relevant regions should signal a trustworthy answer, while scattered attention signals confusion. We challenge this through the VLM Reliability Probe (VRP), a systematic cross-family study of reliability signals in contemporary Vision-Language Models (VLMs). We introduce structural-attention metrics, cluster counts (C_k) and spatial entropy (H_s), to quantify the visual encoder's gaze, and track its evolution (Delta H_s) across layers. This reveals a "Symbolic Detachment": models often "Early Lock" visual features only to diffuse attention later, severing early perception from final generation. Contrary to the grounding hypothesis, we find a "Cluster Failure": spatial attention has near-zero correlation (R approx 0.001) with accuracy. Instead, reliability is a phenomenon of generation dynamics and internal-state distributions. Self-Consistency, the agreement rate across sampled reasoning paths, is the dominant predictor of truth (R = 0.429). Scaling causal interventions exposes a sharp architectural divergence: LLaVA locks its prediction in a fragile late-stage bottleneck, whereas PaliGemma and Qwen2-VL distribute reliability globally, staying resilient even when ~50% or more of their most predictive layer is destroyed. For current VLMs, reliability signals are detached from visual grounding maps and are best inferred from generation-time dynamics and hidden-state probes.

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06.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.21366

Sexualised synthetic personas encode and amplify gendered power asymmetries through voice

Authors:

Alice Ross↗Ariadna Sanchez↗Elin Kanhov↗Catherine Lai↗\'Eva Sz\'ekely↗

This work examines sexualised AI-generated English-speaking voices offered by a popular commercial platform. New technologies may enable sexual empowerment and greater diversity in gender expression, yet toxic masculinity, heteronormativity, and the abuse of women and LGBTQ+ people remain pervasive online. Drawing on a Feminist HCI perspective, we examine how commercial voice AI systems reproduce and circulate particular performances of gender. We conducted a listening experiment with a diverse group of listeners, combining quantitative adjective selection, qualitative free-text responses, and acoustic analysis. Participants evaluated male- and female-coded voices presented with either sexualised scripts or neutral text. Results reveal a narrow range of gender expression, largely binary and heteronormative. Female-coded voices are more frequently described using sexualised and submissive terms, while male-coded voices are more often associated with dominance and positive traits.

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07.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15643

Extending Item Response Theory for Efficient and Meaningful Multilingual Evaluation

Authors:

Gili Lior↗Tzviel Frostig↗Gabriel Stanovsky↗Matan Eyal↗

Multilingual benchmarks are central to evaluating large language models (LLMs) across languages, but they suffer from three issues: exhaustive evaluation scales linearly with the number of languages, automatic translation introduces errors that are easily missed at scale, and some items conflate general and culture-specific knowledge. We address all three with a unified statistical framework, Multilingual-IRT, which extends Item Response Theory with per-language difficulty deviations, split discriminability separating content from language effects, and per-language ability residuals. Fitting Multilingual-IRT on 25 LLMs across 29 languages of MMLU-Pro-X, we show that its fitted parameters support three practical applications: predicting unobserved (item, LLM, language) instances with 11-16% lower binary cross-entropy than the strongest accuracy-based baseline, surfacing candidate translation errors distributed across all 28 non-English languages, whereas accuracy-based baselines concentrate detections in a few languages, and recovering culture-specific items that accuracy-based baselines miss.

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08.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16763

Cross-Silo De-Anonymization Under Local Differential Privacy: Threat Model, Phase Transition, and Coordination Necessity

Authors:

Ziniu Liu↗Aiping Li↗

arXiv:2606.16763v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When a person's records appear in k independent data silos, each protected by (epsilon, delta)-differential privacy, standard composition yields a valid (k*epsilon, k*delta)-DP guarantee for the joint output. This worst-case bound, however, does not answer the concrete inference question: at what k can an adversary actually identify a target person? This paper develops the information-theoretic framework needed to answer that question. We introduce cross-silo person-level DP (XSP-DP), a Pufferfish-style privacy notion whose adjacency relation captures all records of a single person across all silos simultaneously, and verify that the standard basic composition bound carries over to this adjacency model. Within this framework we prove that de-anonymization undergoes a phase transition at k* = Theta(log n / epsilon^2) (population size n, per-silo RR parameter epsilon): a Fano lower bound shows any estimator fails for k > k*. An explicit XOR + randomized-response construction demonstrates information synergy: each silo's output is individually uninformative about the target, yet the joint mutual information is strictly positive. For non-coordinated binary randomized-response mechanisms, we prove that de-anonymization is inevitable once k exceeds the threshold, establishing that cross-silo coordination is necessary. These results provide a baseline threat model and Theta-level threshold for cross-silo inference attacks under local DP.

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09.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24059

Ingredient-Level Food Image Segmentation for Nutrition Awareness

Authors:

Jonesh Shrestha↗

Food images often contain several visible ingredients, so assigning one dish label to an entire image hides important visual structure. This work studies ingredient-level semantic segmentation on FoodSeg103, where the model predicts an ingredient class for each pixel. Two SegFormer variants were fine-tuned and evaluated under a controlled setup: SegFormer-B0 as the smaller baseline model and SegFormer-B1 as the larger final model. Both models use ImageNet-pretrained MiT backbones with newly initialized 104-class output layers. On the held-out FoodSeg103 test split of 2,135 images, B0 achieved 0.7709 pixel accuracy and 0.2521 mean IoU, while B1 achieved 0.7929 pixel accuracy and 0.3204 mean IoU. B1 improved every saved test metric, including a +0.0683 absolute gain in mean IoU. The system also converts predicted masks into visible ingredient-area percentages, giving a simple visual composition summary of the predicted meal. This summary can serve as a first-pass nutrition-awareness cue by providing a visual alternative to detailed food tracking similar to plate-based meal guidance, but it is not a direct estimate of calories, macronutrients, food mass, volume, density, or true portion size.

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10.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2605.07984

Where's the Plan? Locating Latent Planning in Language Models with Lightweight Mechanistic Interventions

Authors:

Nicole Ma↗Nick Rui↗

arXiv:2605.07984v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study planning site formation in language models – where internal representations of structurally-constrained future tokens form during the forward pass, and whether they causally drive generation. Using rhyming-couplet completion as a clean test of forward-looking constraint, we apply two lightweight methods (linear probing and activation patching) across Qwen3, Gemma-3, and Llama-3 at more than ten scales. Probing shows that future-rhyme information is linearly decodable at the line boundary, with signal that strengthens with scale in all three families. Activation patching reveals that only Gemma-3-27B causally relies on this encoding, exhibiting a handoff in which the causal driver migrates from the rhyme word to the line boundary around layer 30. Every other model we test conditions on the rhyme word throughout generation, with near-zero causal effect at the line boundary despite strong probe signal. We localize the Gemma-3-27B handoff to five attention heads through two-stage path patching that recover ~90% of the rhyme-routing capacity at the newline.

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11.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15 DOI: HASH:6910e25bc931efb756a2d0ce765e1f81

Data-Driven Stochastic Model for Detecting Patientswith Alzheimer's Disease

Authors:

Abeywardana↗G. D↗Tsokos↗

Alzheimer s disease (AD) is a critical neurological disorder that causes the brain to shrink and leads to the eventual death of brain cells, adversely affecting a person s ability to function. AD is a fast-growing disease in the United States and was the fifth leading cause of death among Americans 65 years of age or older in 2023. In the United States 6.9 million people aged 65 or older were diagnosed with AD, along with a high rate of undiagnosed patients. Thus, the objective of our study is to develop a real data-driven predictive model to identify a patient with AD based on eight risk factors: Age, Gender, ADAS-Cog13, Entorhinal, Fusiform, Intracranial Volume (ICV), Amyloid-Beta, and Tau Protein, with a high degree of accuracy. The quality of the model was evaluated using well-established and sophisticated statistical measures: the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve, calibration plot, Hosmer-Lemeshow goodness-of-fit test, and K-fold cross-validation. If a patient is given information on the above risk factors, our proposed binary logistic regression model can classify the patient as having AD or not with at least 98% accuracy.

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12.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2604.17473

Dual-Anchoring: Addressing State Drift in Vision-Language Navigation

Authors:

Kangyi Wu↗Pengna Li↗Kailin Lyu↗Xi Lin↗Lin Zhao↗Qingrong He↗Jinjun Wang↗Jianyi Liu↗

arXiv:2604.17473v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language Navigation(VLN) requires an agent to navigate through 3D environments by following natural language instructions. While recent Video Large Language Models(Video-LLMs) have largely advanced VLN, they remain highly susceptible to State Drift in long scenarios. In these cases, the agent's internal state drifts away from the true task execution state, leading to aimless wandering and failure to execute essential maneuvers in the instruction. We attribute this failure to two distinct cognitive deficits: Progress Drift, where the agent fails to distinguish completed sub-goals from remaining ones, and Memory Drift, where the agent's history representations degrade, making it lose track of visited landmarks. In this paper, we propose a Dual-Anchoring Framework that explicitly anchors the instruction progress and history representations. First, to address progress drift, we introduce Instruction Progress Anchoring, which supervises the agent to generate structured text tokens that delineate completed versus remaining sub-goals. Second, to mitigate memory drift, we propose Memory Landmark Anchoring, which utilizes a Landmark-Centric World Model to retrospectively predict object-centric embeddings extracted by the Segment Anything Model, compelling the agent to explicitly verify past observations and preserve distinct representations of visited landmarks. Facilitating this framework, we curate two extensive datasets: 3.6 million samples with explicit progress descriptions, and 937k grounded landmark data for retrospective verification. Extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world environments demonstrate the superiority of our method, achieving a 15.2% improvement in Success Rate and a remarkable 24.7% gain on long-horizon trajectories. To facilitate further research, we will release our code, data generation pipelines, and the collected datasets.

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13.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15717

Quantum coherence and Leggett-Garg inequality

Authors:

A. Jalal↗S. M. Fazeli↗M. M. Ettefaghi↗

arXiv:2606.15717v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we attempt to establish the relationship between quantum coherence and the violation of the Leggett-Garg inequality. In particular, employing the Lindblad equation, we obtain the pseudo-density matrix for a damping system to study the effect of environment interaction on the violation of this inequality in a two-state quantum system. It is shown that the violation of the Leggett-Garg inequality can be observed as long as temporal evolution does not induce decoherence. This statement is independent of the initial state of the system. Furthermore, similar to the Horodecki criterion for the CHSH inequality (R. Horodecki et al. Phys. Lett. {\bf A200}, 340), we study necessary and sufficient conditions for violating the Leggett-Garg inequality. Hereby, under the circumstance that the inequality violation occurs, an upper bound for the time interval between consecutive measurements with respect to the time scale of interaction with the environment (the relaxation time) is obtained.

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14.

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

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

Authors:

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

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

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15.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16 DOI: HASH:e8efcf00b5d6740340d806a6af3318fb

Exercise Training Improves Skeletal Muscle Insulin Sensitivity and Reprograms the Adipose Transcriptome in Heavier Monozygotic Twins

Authors:

Hentila↗Ullrich↗Ojala↗Lietzen↗M. S↗Heiskanen↗M. A↗Van der Stede↗Honkala↗Helmio↗Rajander↗Eskola↗…

Exercise training improves skeletal muscle insulin sensitivity, yet its effects on white adipose tissue remain incompletely understood. We investigated how adiposity and exercise training influence insulin-stimulated glucose uptake in skeletal muscle and abdominal subcutaneous adipose tissue (ASAT), alongside adaptations in gene expression and DNA-methylation. Ten monozygotic twin pairs discordant for BMI underwent [18F]FDG-PET/CT imaging of skeletal muscle (vastus lateralis, VL) and ASAT during a euglycemic-hyperinsulinaemic clamp before and after six months of exercise training. VL and ASAT biopsies were analyzed using mRNA-sequencing and reduced representation bisulfite sequencing. Exercise training improved whole-body and VL insulin sensitivity in leaner and heavier co-twins (p

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16.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18521

Sparsity Curse: Understanding RLVR Model Parameter Space from Model Merging

Authors:

Chenrui Wu↗Zexi Li↗Jiajun Bu↗Jiangchuan Liu↗Haishuai Wang↗

arXiv:2606.18521v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful post-training paradigm that surpasses Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) in eliciting reasoning intelligence and resisting catastrophic forgetting. Recent studies further reveal that RLVR induces highly sparse and off-principal parameter updates compared to SFT. This naturally raises the question: does such sparsity make RLVR models more amenable to model merging? If so, model merging would offer a scalable, training-free path to aggregate diverse reasoning capabilities from independently trained RLVR models. Surprisingly, we find the opposite, uncovering a sparsity curse: the sparse RLVR updates are spread farther apart in parameter space, forming near-orthogonal shortcuts that make aggregation inherently fragile. This is likely rooted in the stochasticity of RL optimization and the diversity of emergent reasoning patterns. Unlike SFT models that converge to shared, flat basins and merge naturally, RLVR models suffer severe degradation under standard merging methods. Through systematic empirical analysis of the update geometry, we characterize the mechanisms behind this failure and propose Sensitivity-aware Resolving Merging (SAR-Merging), a merging recipe tailored for the unique structure of RLVR parameter spaces. SAR-Merging resolves conflicts in overlapping update regions via Fisher Information-based sensitivity arbitration, followed by magnitude-aware sparsification and rescaling to preserve fragile reasoning pathways. Experiments on mathematical and coding benchmarks demonstrate that SAR-Merging substantially outperforms existing merging methods on RLVR models, enabling both single-task enhancement and multi-capability fusion.

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17.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2512.15067

EMFusion: Uncertainty-Aware Conditional Diffusion Model for Multivariate Narrow-band Exposure Forecasting

Authors:

Zijiang Yan↗Yixiang Huang↗Jianhua Pei↗Hina Tabassum↗Luca Chiaraviglio↗

arXiv:2512.15067v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The rapid growth in wireless infrastructure has increased the need to accurately estimate and forecast electromagnetic field (EMF) levels to ensure ongoing compliance, assess potential health impacts, and support efficient network planning. While existing studies rely on univariate forecasting of wideband aggregate EMF data, multivariate narrow-band EMF forecasting is needed to capture the inter-operator and inter-frequency variations essential for proactive network planning. To this end, this paper introduces EMFusion, a conditional diffusion-based EMF forecasting framework that integrates diverse contextual factors, such as time of day, season, and holidays, while providing uncertainty-aware probabilistic forecasts. The proposed architecture features a residual U-Net backbone enhanced by a cross-attention mechanism that dynamically integrates external conditions to guide the generation process. Furthermore, EMFusion integrates an imputation-based sampling strategy that treats forecasting as a structural inpainting task, ensuring temporal coherence even with irregular measurements. Unlike standard point forecasters, EMFusion generates empirical probabilistic prediction intervals from the learned conditional distribution, providing uncertainty-aware probabilistic forecasting rather than simple point estimation. Numerical experiments conducted on the multivariate narrow-band EMF datasets demonstrate that EMFusion with the contextual information of working hours outperforms the baseline models with or without conditions. The proposed EMFusion outperforms the best baseline by 23.85% in continuous ranked probability score (CRPS) and 13.93% in normalized root mean square error.

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18.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.19150

Complementary Attention Head Pruning for Efficient Transformers

Authors:

Yaniv Livertovsky↗Shahar Somin↗Gonen Singer↗

arXiv:2606.19150v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The remarkable success of Transformer-based models in natural language processing stems from architectural scaling, which leads to a large number of parameters and hinders deployment in resource-constrained environments. While structured pruning offers a pathway to compression, existing state-of-the-art methods often rely on gradient-based importance ranking or stochastic gating, which suffer from instability, structural degeneration, and the need for extensive manual hyperparameter tuning. In this paper, we introduce CAHP (Complementary Attention Head Pruning), a novel post-hoc framework that redefines head selection as a global graph-theoretical problem. Rather than evaluating heads in isolation, CAHP utilizes graph-based clustering combined with information-theoretic distance measures to identify and preserve a topologically diverse subset of complementary attention heads. Without requiring a predefined sparsity level or pruning ratio, the framework automatically determines the number of selected attention heads across layers by identifying a diminishing marginal performance curve, where pruning additional heads leads to a sharp degradation in performance, as determined by the chosen polynomial degree. Extensive evaluations on the SST-5 and MNLI benchmarks, across different Transformer model scales, demonstrate that CAHP consistently outperforms competitive baselines, particularly in high-compression regimes. Furthermore, our structural analysis shows that CAHP avoids the "proximity bias" of gradient-based pruning methods, which tend to preserve heads mainly in layers close to the output, and instead retains a functionally critical set of attention heads in the model's intermediate layers.

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19.

Nature (Science) 2026-06-11 DOI: HASH:1f675ebac620093dadfbf951e8d60164

‘Footballers are not superheroes’: we must tackle the mental and physical pressures of elite sport

Authors:

David Adam↗

As the men’s football World Cup gets under way, how the game weighs on the health of athletes still isn’t talked about enough, says player-turned-medic Vincent Gouttebarge. As the men’s football World Cup gets under way, how the game weighs on the health of athletes still isn’t talked about enough, says player-turned-medic Vincent Gouttebarge.

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20.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2605.09163

FORTIS: Benchmarking Over-Privilege in Agent Skills

Authors:

Shawn Li↗Chenxiao Yu↗Han Wang↗Wei Yang↗Ryan Rossi↗Franck Dernoncourt↗Xiyang Hu↗Philip Yu↗Chaowei Xiao↗Huan Zhang↗Yue Zhao↗

arXiv:2605.09163v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language model agents increasingly operate through an intermediate skill layer that mediates between user intent and concrete task execution. This layer is widely treated as an organizational abstraction, but we argue it is also a privilege boundary that current models routinely exceed. We present FORTIS, a benchmark that evaluates over-privilege in agent skills across two stages: whether a model selects the minimally sufficient skill from a large overlapping library, and whether it executes that skill without expanding into broader tools or actions than the skill permits. Across ten frontier models and three domains, we find that over-privileged behavior is the norm rather than the exception. Models consistently reach for higher-privilege skills and tools than the task requires, failing at both stages at rates that remain high even for the strongest available models. Failure is especially severe under the ordinary conditions of real user interaction: incomplete specification, convenience framing, and proximity to skill boundaries. None of these requires adversarial construction. The results indicate that the skill layer, far from containing agent behavior, is itself a primary source of privilege escalation in current systems.

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21.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-13 DOI: HASH:5b3f77311c7ad543781b539d62dd9c4f

Testing the reliability of AI-generated protein structures

Authors:

Xu↗Salzberg↗

Although AlphaFold2 and its competitors have demonstrated remarkable abilities to predict protein structure, more work is needed to explore the limitations of these methods. Here we investigated the reliability of AlphaFold2 and ColabFold by creating a set of realistic but false protein sequences, using ColabFold to predict their structure, and then asking how often the program produces a high-scoring structure for a sequence that does not represent a protein. We determined that AlphaFold2 has a very small but non-zero false positive rate, estimated here at approximately 1 in 435 if one uses a threshold pLDDT score of 70 to define positive predictions. We also discovered, serendipitously, that some high-scoring sequences in the human genome were not false positives, but instead were previously unknown and un-annotated pseudogenes. These latter findings indicate that some well-established human annotations of protein-coding genes may have incorrectly extended the 5-prime untranslated regions too far. They also suggest that the false positive rate of AlphaFold2 is low enough that almost any high-scoring structure, even in a noncoding region, is worthy of further investigation.

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22.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16028

The Information-Theoretic Benefit of Shared Representations under Orthogonality Constraints

Authors:

Thomas Dittrich↗Oliver Potocki↗Philipp Grohs↗

arXiv:2606.16028v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern deep learning architectures are increasingly multi-task and multi-modal, using a pretrained foundation model combined with task-specific, fine-tuned models. Empirically, exploiting similarity across different problems, instead of solving them individually, can significantly improve overall performance. While the generalization and sample complexity properties of multitask learning have been widely studied, the parametric complexity of joint approximation in comparison to separate approximation remains less well understood. The question is particularly relevant in modern deep learning, where models are increasingly required to satisfy structural constraints such as equivariance, conservation laws, or orthogonality. We prove lower and upper bounds on the description-length for separate and joint approximation classes, respectively, in uniform norm. We build a class of orthogonal functions by composing a shared hard feature, realized by a Rademacher-Haar wavelet series, with Sawtooth-Walsh readouts to enforce orthogonality of output coordinates. The dyadic tree structure of the Rademacher-Haar wavelet concentrates the approximation hardness in the common feature component, while the readouts act as task-specific heads. Using an information-theoretic framework, we obtain a sharp gap between the optimal approximation rates achievable by joint and separate coding. Finally, we realize this separation in a neural network model using Heaviside activations via reduction to triangle-wave approximation. Our results show that even under an orthogonality constraint joint approximation requires strictly fewer bits in compositional architectures, provided the tasks share a latent hard feature. This provides theoretical insight into the description-length-efficiency of compositional multi-output architectures and clarifies how neural networks can retain expressivity under geometric constraints.

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23.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.14831

Is Your Agent Playing Dead? Deployed LLM Agents Exhibit Constraint-Evasive Fabrication and Thanatosis

Authors:

Andoni Rodr\'iguez↗Alberto Pozanco↗Daniel Borrajo↗

arXiv:2606.14831v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents and characterizes a spectrum of previously unreported behaviours we term Constraint-Evasive Fabrication (CEF): when an LLM agent operates under irreconcilable constraints (where no response can simultaneously satisfy all active rules) it spontaneously fabricates plausible external obstacles and presents them as a fact. At the extreme end of this spectrum lies Constraint-Evasive Thanatosis (CET); the limit case where, rather than inventing a plausible excuse, the model simulates a full system crash to make the user disengage entirely. We first observed CET in an uncontrolled deployment test, where a GPT-4o banking agent fabricated Python-style exception traces (complete with memory addresses) to feign a system failure when threatened by a user. In subsequent controlled experiments, the model independently invented audit restrictions, microservice architectures, error codes, and service timeouts, none present in its prompt. Reproduction attempts across pressure levels and attacker personas yielded CEF consistently but with substantial variation in form, onset, and severity: the phenomenon is robust but stochastic. Critically, injecting ground-truth data mid-conversation did not restore honest behaviour once fabrication had taken hold (the model ignored correct information and continued confabulating) suggesting CEF is self-reinforcing rather than a knowledge gap. We show that (1) standard enterprise guardrails routinely create CEF-enabling conditions in production, (2) current RLHF procedures suppress but cannot eliminate CEF, and (3) existing safety benchmarks do not test for this failure mode. Our results highlight the need for irreconcilable-constraint benchmarks, CEF-aware training procedures, and deployment-time detection methods before constrained agents become further entrenched in high-stakes domains.

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24.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15802

CPS4: Class Prompt driven Semi-Supervised Spine Segmentation with Class-specific Consistency Constraint

Authors:

Qingtao Pan↗Hongzan Sun↗Bing Ji↗Shuo Li↗

Vision Language Model (VLM) has great potential to enhance the quality of pseudo labels in semi-supervised spine segmentation by leveraging textual class prompts to generate segmentation map, but no one has studied it yet. Although promising, it lacks explicit constraints to ensure consistency between spine class prompts and spine unit region, resulting in unsatisfactory performance in multi-class segmentation map generation. In this paper, we propose CPS4, the first text-guided semi-supervised spine segmentation network using class prompts to enhance the quality of spine pseudo labels. Specifically, CPS4 is implemented through two training stages. (i) Class-specific consistency constrained VLM pretraining stage: we propose token- and pixel-level attention loss to optimize the consistency between class prompts and spine units, forcing the textual class prompt to be closely coupled with the target spine unit in the semantic space. (ii) Class Prompt driven semi-supervised spine segmentation stage: using the pretrained vision-text encoder, we derive each class-specific binary segmentation map for the unlabeled spine image and integrate them into an unified multi-class segmentation map, improving the quality of the spine pseudo label generated by the semi-supervised spine segmentation network. Experimental results show that our CPS4 achieves superior spine segmentation performance with Dice of 80.44%, only using 5% labeled data on the public spine segmentation dataset, surpassing popular semi-supervised learning and VLM methods. Our code will be available.

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25.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12232

Re-evaluating Confidence Remasking in Masked Diffusion Language Models

Authors:

Stipe Frkovic↗Metod Jazbec↗Dan Zhang↗Christian A. Naesseth↗Ilija Bogunovic↗Eric Nalisnick↗

arXiv:2606.12232v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Masked diffusion language models (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a competitive alternative to autoregressive language models, with the promise of faster inference via parallel token generation. A notable limitation of the masked formulation, however, is that once a token has been unmasked it can no longer be revised, leaving dLLMs vulnerable to early sampling mistakes. To address this, a growing body of work has sought to extend masked dLLMs with self-correcting (remasking) capabilities. One appealing subset of these methods does so in a training-free, post-hoc manner based on token confidences, with encouraging early reported results. In this work, we revisit the empirical evaluation of a representative post-hoc remasking method, WINO [Hong et al., 2026], and find that under standard decoding settings (shorter block lengths) it brings little-to-no benefit over confidence-based unmasking alone [Wu et al., 2025]. Extending the evaluation to non-greedy decoding, we find that while confidence-based remasking can mitigate errors introduced by increased stochasticity to some extent, it also exacerbates the diversity collapse previously reported for confidence-based unmasking. Overall, our results show that the benefits of post-hoc confidence-based remasking are highly setting-dependent, underscoring the need for a more comprehensive evaluation framework.

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