Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12231

Rule Taxonomy and Evolution in AI IDEs: A Mining and Survey Study

Authors:

Guangzong Cai↗Ruiyin Li↗Peng Liang↗Zengyang Li↗Mojtaba Shahin↗

arXiv:2606.12231v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The adoption of AI-powered Integrated Development Environments (AI IDEs) has introduced "Rules" as a novel software artifact, allowing developers to persistently inject project-specific constraints and architectural guidelines into the context of Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite their role in aligning AI behavior with developer intent, the taxonomy, evolution, and practical impact of these rules remain largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we conducted a mixed-methods empirical study on AI IDE rules. By mining 83 open-source projects and extracting 7,310 rules, we established a comprehensive taxonomy comprising 5 primary and 25 secondary categories. We then triangulated these artifacts with survey responses from 99 practitioners. Our analysis identified a contrast between developer priorities and actual configurations: while practitioners rate architectural constraints as highly important, rule files in repositories primarily consist of low-level workflow and code formatting constraints. Furthermore, our analysis of 1,540 rule evolution events revealed that rules are updated frequently. Repository data further indicate that rule evolution is primarily driven by constructive context expansions (29.17%) and enrichments (26.59%). In contrast, surveyed developers reported modifying rules primarily to correct AI errors (77.78%), typically by adding new negative constraints rather than editing existing ones. Finally, an artifact compliance assessment of 160 rule evolution events revealed that updating rules significantly improves the adherence of software artifacts, with the average artifact compliance rate increasing by 22.99% (from 49.14% to 72.13%) following an update. Our study provides empirical insights that can help developers optimize prompting strategies and guide tool builders in designing automated conflict-detection and context-management mechanisms for AI IDEs.

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02.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15664

Synthesizing Arbitrary Non-Hermitian Hamiltonian with Stochastic Floquet Engineering

Authors:

Lingzhen Guo↗Hui Jing↗

arXiv:2606.15664v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The conventional Floquet engineering scheme synthesizes a given target Hamiltonian with a deterministic temporal periodic driving field. In this work, we introduce the stochastic Floquet engineering scheme that can synthesize an arbitrary non-Hermitian target Hamiltonian using a time-periodic driving field with noisy amplitude. Our method is rooted in the Hermitian dynamics taking noise as a valuable quantum resource with no need for loss or gain in prior. We apply our method to engineer a cavity Hamiltonian with dissipative coupling between Fock states, and to prepare a given quantum state from a generally arbitrary quantum state. The stochastic Floqut engineering also provides a way to generate non-unitary quantum gates, which take advantage in certain tasks compared to unitary quantum computing, without the need for ancillae or state-dependent updating.

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03.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16558

ROSA-RL: Uncertainty-Aware Roundabout Optimized Speed Advisory with Reinforcement Learning

Authors:

Anna-Lena Schlamp↗Jeremias Gerner↗Klaus Bogenberger↗Werner Huber↗Stefanie Schmidtner↗

arXiv:2606.16558v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Roundabouts challenge automated driving in mixed traffic, as heterogeneous and non-deterministic human behavior, unknown driving intentions, and high interaction complexity create uncertainty about whether the conflict zone will be blocked or available at the moment of entry. We present ROSA-RL – uncertainty-aware Roundabout Optimized Speed Advisory with Reinforcement Learning. It enables safe and efficient roundabout entry for automated and human-driven vehicles in mixed traffic through probabilistic conflict forecasting. A Transformer-based model predicts conflict zone occupancy over a five-second horizon, capturing multi-agent interactions to anticipate upcoming conflicts and available gaps. The prediction outputs encode uncertainty in future motion and intent, and augment the state of a classical RL framework, enabling uncertainty-aware speed coordination. Evaluated in simulations grounded in real-world data, ROSA-RL can effectively handle uncertainty and outperform a comparable model-based baseline, closing the gap to an ideal setting assuming fully known occupancy while improving traffic efficiency and safety. The source code of this work is available under: github.com/urbanAIthi/ROSA-RL.

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04.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15038

Fusion is not one-size-fits-all: Cross-Modal Representation Alignment for Time-to-Event Modeling

Authors:

Zhemin Zhang↗Weijie Chen↗David Le↗Amara Tariq↗Alex Wallace↗Matthew Stib↗Juan Maria Farina↗Chadi Ayoub↗Reza Arsanjani↗Imon Banerjee↗

arXiv:2606.15038v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate time-to-event (TTE) prediction from multimodal clinical data remains challenging due to modality imbalance and distribution shift. We introduce a foundation model-driven framework for cross-modal representation alignment between CT imaging and longitudinal EHR data, designed to generalize across tasks and institutions. CT and EHR modalities are encoded independently using domain-specific foundation models and aligned in a shared latent space through four principled fusion strategies: late fusion, contrastive alignment, cross-attention, and co-attention. We evaluate two clinically distinct TTE tasks: pulmonary embolism (PE) mortality and cardiovascular disease (CVD) outcomes, on large-scale multi-institutional cohorts (PE: N=3,099 train; 1,098 internal; 435 external; CVD: N=2,951 train; 837 internal; 682 external). Fusion consistently improves concordance index by 1.5-5.4% over unimodal baselines when modalities contribute comparably. Overall, contrastive multimodal fusion, particularly with CLMBR representations, provided the most consistent and statistically robust improvements, especially for PE mortality prediction. For MACE, cross-attention (one-hot) achieved the highest internal performance and image-guided co-attention achieved the best external performance. We therefore introduce a generalizable foundation model-based cross-modal alignment framework and provide the first systematic analysis of fusion behavior under modality imbalance in TTE prediction. Our results establish task-aware multimodal alignment as a necessary design principle for robust generalization and scalable clinical deployment.

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05.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11272

Federated continual learning: A comprehensive survey on lifelong and privacy-preserving learning over distributed and non-stationary data

Authors:

Masoume Gholizade↗Fabrizio Ruffini↗Pietro Ducange↗Francesco Marcelloni↗

arXiv:2606.11272v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative and privacy-preserving model training across distributed clients, but most existing FL systems implicitly assume data stationarity. In real-world settings-such as healthcare, industrial IoT (IIOT), cybersecurity, and smart cities-data streams are inherently non-stationary, leading classical FL methods to suffer from performance degradation, instability, and catastrophic forgetting. Continual Learning (CL) addresses learning under evolving data distributions but has been largely studied in centralized settings, overlooking key constraints of federated systems, including privacy, limited communication, and client heterogeneity. Federated Continual Learning (FCL) emerges at the intersection of FL and CL, aiming to support lifelong, adaptive, and privacy-aware learning over distributed and non-stationary data. This survey provides a comprehensive and systematic overview of FCL. We first present a formal definition of the FCL problem and clarify its distinctive characteristics. We then analyze the limitations of classical FL under non-stationary conditions, highlighting how CL principles support long-term adaptation. To organize the rapidly growing literature, we propose a multi-dimensional taxonomy of FCL approaches. Furthermore, we review representative application domains and data modalities, summarize commonly used evaluation metrics, and discuss experimental perspectives for assessing long-term performance and forgetting. Finally, we highlight key open challenges, including handling extreme heterogeneity under temporal drift, designing scalable and privacy-preserving memory mechanisms, and establishing standardized benchmarks. This survey aims to serve as a reference and a roadmap for advancing FCL toward robust and deployable real-world systems.

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06.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.19306

On two overlooked stick-breaking constructions of the normalized inverse Gaussian process

Authors:

Annalisa Cerquetti↗

arXiv:2606.19306v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We shed light on two alternative stick-breaking constructions of the normalized inverse Gaussian (NIG) random discrete distribution which appear to have been overlooked so far in the Bayesian nonparametric setting. The first is derived from a result in Aldous and Pitman (1998) for the conditional Brownian excursion partition, mixing over the local time at zero up to time one. The second arises as a particular case of a result in James (2013) for priors obtained by a random spatial and temporal change of the normalized generalized Gamma subordinator. Both constructions are in terms of straightforward transformations of standard random variables and can be easily generalized to provide the stick-breaking construction of any element, respectively, in a) the family of mixed Poisson-Kingman models driven by the $1/2$ stable Lévy measure and b) the family of Poisson-Gamma processes driven by the Inverse Gaussian subordinator.

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07.

Nature (Science) 2026-06-17 DOI: HASH:927db696468852bac567e79855d39df4

Optical metasurfaces for general vision processing on the edge

Authors:

Jiayong Peng↗

Large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) models achieve notable performance in computer vision but require substantial computational resources, limiting their deployment on edge devices1,2. Optical neural networks (ONNs) promise reduced latency and energy consumption by making use of the inherent parallelism of light3. However, present ONNs struggle to scale and are confined to simple tasks, owing to the challenges of replicating exact algebraic operations of digital models using physical (analogue) systems. This work introduces a new paradigm that directly embeds core computer vision principles, including similarity-based recognition, attention-guided perception and detail–context fusion, into a large-scale optical metasurface. By unifying optical physics with these computer vision fundamentals, we develop a photonic–electronic engine that overcomes scalability and generality barriers, enabling high-accuracy, general-purpose computer vision at the edge. The resulting system combines a 41-million-parameter optical metasurface front end with a co-designed, ultraefficient 87,000-parameter digital back end, outperforming many digital models with tens of millions of parameters across object detection, segmentation, 3D reconstruction and video understanding. We build a deployable prototype and demonstrate real-time edge visual processing in natural scenes. This work represents a path towards practical optical computing for general vision tasks in complex natural environments, enabling a new paradigm for low-energy, low-latency, real-time on-device vision intelligence. By embedding core computer vision principles into a large-scale optical metasurface, an efficient vision processing system using far fewer parameters is demonstrated to outperform many digital models and enables deployment on edge devices.

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08.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19 DOI: HASH:8d9bcc8969e61939289cca4a14c3af3f

StickForStats: automated statistical assumption validation for reproducible computational biology

Authors:

Bharti↗Chakraborty↗

Reproducible computational biology depends on statistical decisions that routine workflows often skip: verifying that a differential-expression test's assumptions hold across all genes, that a strategy-comparison ANOVA is robust to non-normality, or that a meta-analysis is not distorted by publication bias. Surveys consistently find that fewer than 20% of published biomedical studies report checking these assumptions, and existing statistical software leaves validation to the analyst as an optional step. We present StickForStats, an open-source web platform that reframes assumption validation as a default precondition for every analysis. Its Guardian system–a middleware pipeline of eight validators (normality, variance homogeneity, independence, outliers, sample size, modality, linearity, homoscedasticity)–checks assumptions before execution and, on critical violations, reroutes to an appropriate nonparametric alternative with a documented decision trail. At genome scale, applying Guardian to a 91-sample synovial-sarcoma RNA-seq study (GSE271517) cascaded 90.6% of 27,221 genes to a rank-based test and flipped the differential-expression verdict for 553 genes–479 rescued from an under-powered t-test and 74 outlier-driven false positives rejected–materially changing the gene list a biologist would act on. The same automatic validation generalizes across domains: a CRISPR editing-strategy comparison (ANOVA F = 1122, with Guardian recommending Kruskal-Wallis H = 36.6), an ordinal correlation (Pearson r = 0.476 corrected to Spearman {rho} = 0.479), and a sixteen-trial clinical meta-analysis revealing severe publication bias (Egger's t = -5.78, p < 0.001); a complementary module extends the same validators to published manuscripts, checking claims against CONSORT, STROBE, ICH-E9, and JARS-Quant reporting standards. By making assumption validation automatic and transparent, StickForStats targets a tractable, under-served contributor to irreproducibility. The platform is MIT-licensed, validated against SciPy and R, and freely available at https://github.com/visvikbharti/stickforstats_new.

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09.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11201

To Intervene or Not: Guiding Inference-time Alignment with Probabilistic Model Blending

Authors:

Jin Gan↗Xin Li↗Jun Luo↗

The wide deployment of LLMs has made model alignment necessary to make newly trained models safely and effectively respond to user instructions. Among different methods, inference-time alignment is often cheaper as it intervenes (i.e., offers guidances) only during output generation. Existing proposals apply guidances extracted from certain aligned models without properly assessing their reliability. Nonetheless, our systematic evaluation reveals that guidance effectiveness varies drastically across models; since ineffective guidances lead to further confusion and thus further interventions, the resulting excessive interventions typically indicate poor performance. To make interventions more effective and thus more efficient, we introduce BlendIn, an inference-time alignment framework that shifts from binary decisions to creating hybrid distributions integrating both models' knowledge. BlendIn stabilizes inference-time alignment by performing quality-aware alignment and proportionally weighting each model's contribution based on reliability. Compared with existing works, it preserves beneficial guidance while downweighting unreliable suggestions. BlendIn provides both diagnostic signals and mitigation strategies for misaligned guidance, achieving consistent and up to 50% performance improvement on challenging model pairs. Our code is available at: https://github.com/DecayingSeart/BlendIn.

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10.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2504.15501

Mapping molecular polariton transport via pump-probe microscopy

Authors:

Piper Fowler-Wright↗Michael Reitz↗Joel Yuen-Zhou↗

arXiv:2504.15501v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We demonstrate how the transport properties of molecular polaritons in optical cavities can be extracted from a microscopic modeling of pump-probe spectroscopy. Our approach combines a mean-field treatment of the light-matter Hamiltonian with a perturbative expansion of both light and matter components, along with spatial coarse-graining. This approach extends semiclassical cavity spectroscopy to multimode light-matter interactions, providing full access to spatially resolved transient spectra. By simulating a microscopy experiment with counter-propagating pump and probe pulses, we compute the differential transmission and show how molecular dephasing and persistent dark exciton populations drive sub-group-velocity transport of the root-mean-square displacement. We analyze transport across the polariton dispersion, showing how velocity renormalization correlates with excitonic weight, consistent with experimental observations, and further its dependence on the rate of molecular dephasing. Our results highlight the need to consider measured spectroscopic observables when characterizing transport in polaritonic systems.

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11.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15303

Inverted Dirac oscillator

Authors:

Mustapha Maamache↗

arXiv:2606.15303v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Dirac oscillator is obtained from the Dirac Hamiltonian $H^{\mathrm{D}} = \left( c\vec{\alpha}\cdot \vec{p} + mc^{2}\beta \right)$ by modifying the momentum through a non-Hermitian substitution $\overrightarrow{p} \rightarrow \overrightarrow{p} \pm i\omega \beta \overrightarrow{q}$. Despite the non-Hermitian nature of this momentum operator, the full Hamiltonian remains Hermitian due to the presence of the Dirac matrix $\vec{\alpha}$. However, if one instead introduces a Hermitian modification of the form $\vec{p} \rightarrow \vec{p} \pm \omega \beta \overrightarrow{q}$, the resulting Hamiltonian is no longer Hermitian. In this case, the system corresponds to an inverted Dirac oscillator $H^{\mathrm{r}}$, where the potential becomes unbounded from below, the energy spectrum becomes continuous, and the eigenfunctions fail to be square-integrable, leading to normalization difficulties. We show that the Hamiltonian $H^{\mathrm{r}}$ is a pseudo-$\mathcal{PT}$-symmetric operator, and we introduce an unbounded, non-unitary transformation that establishes a connection between $H^{\mathrm{r}}$ and $H^{\mathrm{D}}$. The purpose of this work is to analyze this relativistic quantum system – known as the Dirac inverted oscillator – which, despite its various applications, admits an exact analytical solution

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12.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15134

Beyond Scalar Distances: Semantic Attribute Gradients from Frozen MLLMs for Visual Embeddings

Authors:

Shubhang Bhatnagar↗Dheeraj Baiju↗Narendra Ahuja↗

Vision encoders for retrieval are typically trained with class-label supervision: each training pair reduces to a scalar that uniformly pushes the embedding apart or pulls it together, as if every visual attribute either differed or matched. A multimodal large language model (MLLM), shown the same pair, can articulate those attributes and use them to predict whether the images share a class. We propose SAGA, a framework that turns this language-grounded, attribute-aware perception into a training signal for the encoder itself. Specifically, we use Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to reward the MLLM for correct predictions on the vision encoder's tokens. Since correct predictions require those tokens to expose the specific attributes that differ or match between the pair, the gradient pushes the encoder to encode them, replacing the uniform pair-level scalar with attribute-resolved supervision. An auxiliary attention-distillation loss anchors the encoder's embedding to tokens the MLLM attended to, and a standard metric-learning loss shapes the embedding geometry for nearest-neighbour retrieval. The MLLM is frozen throughout and discarded at inference, matching the deployment cost of a metric-learning baseline. SAGA improves Recall@1 by 3 to 6 points over state-of-the-art baselines on CUB-200-2011, Cars-196, FGVC-Aircraft, and iNaturalist Aves on zero-shot image retrieval.

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13.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13380

An LLM System for Autonomous Variational Quantum Circuit Design

Authors:

Kenya Sakka↗Wataru Mizukami↗Kosuke Mitarai↗

arXiv:2606.13380v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The design of high performing quantum circuits remains largely dependent on human expertise. We introduce an autonomous agentic framework that employs large language models (LLMs) to conduct iterative quantum circuit designs under explicit design constraints. Our system integrates seven components: Exploration, Generation, Discussion, Validation, Storage, Evaluation, and Review. These components form a closed-loop workflow that combines web-based knowledge acquisition, literature-grounded critique, executable code generation, and experimental feedback. We evaluate the framework on two tasks: quantum feature map construction for quantum machine learning and ansatz generation for variational quantum eigensolver applications in quantum chemistry. In image classification benchmarks, the best generated feature map outperforms representative quantum feature maps and, when scaled to larger qubit counts, surpasses the classical radial basis function kernel. In molecular ground state estimation across seven molecules, the generated ansatz attains competitive accuracy with widely used chemically inspired and hardware-efficient constructions while satisfying the imposed scaling constraints. These results establish LLM driven agentic system as a viable paradigm for automated quantum circuit design and illustrate how AI systems can participate in iterative scientific optimization workflows across scientific domains.

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14.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12797

The Containment Gap: How Deployed Agentic AI Frameworks Fail Public-Facing Safety Requirements

Authors:

Md Jafrin Hossain↗Mohammad Arif Hossain↗Weiqi Liu↗Nirwan Ansari↗

arXiv:2606.12797v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic large language model systems that autonomously invoke tools, maintain persistent memory, and execute multi-step plans are increasingly deployed in public-facing domains, including government services, healthcare triage, and financial advising. We ask whether the frameworks used to build these systems provide architectural-level structural safety guarantees. Applying six containment principles derived from a compositional model of agentic architectures, we audit three dominant frameworks (LangChain, AutoGPT, and OpenAI Agents SDK) and find no native compliance in any of them. Memory integrity, a defense against one of the most prevalent vulnerability classes, is not observed in any of the three evaluated frameworks. We validate these findings empirically: in a simulated government benefits agent built on LangChain, a single memory-poisoning write induces persistent targeted corruption across all tested seeds and backends, increasing the wrongful denial rate for targeted applicants to 88.9%. Under a complex five-factor policy, the same attack preserves aggregate accuracy while increasing targeted wrongful denials by 3.5x, rendering the corruption difficult to detect through standard monitoring. We then introduce two lightweight containment mechanisms: a memory integrity validator and a policy gate, which eliminate both attack vectors with sub-millisecond overhead (

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15.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.19062

DREAM: Extending Vision-Language Models with Dual-Objective Encoding for Cross-Modal Retrieval

Authors:

Kaleem Ullah↗Altaf Hussain↗Muhammad Munsif↗Sung Wook Baik↗

In today's media-driven world, the exponential growth of video content across domains such as surveillance, education, and entertainment has made retrieving semantically relevant videos via natural language queries increasingly critical. Early video retrieval systems relied on handcrafted features or shallow cross-modal mappings, limiting their ability to capture complex semantics and temporal dynamics. While large-scale vision-language models have improved cross-modal alignment, challenges remain in modeling fine-grained temporal dependencies and nuanced linguistic structures. In this paper, we introduce DREAM: Dual-path Representation Enhancement and Alignment Model, a novel multimodal framework that addresses these limitations through enhanced visual and textual encoding. DREAM incorporates a hybrid language modeling strategy that combines masked and permuted language modeling objectives to capture both local and global linguistic semantics. On the visual side, we design a hierarchical vision encoder with cascaded group attention, which integrates spatial and temporal information through multi-stage token interaction and coarse-to-fine attention refinement. We validate DREAM through comprehensive evaluations on the widely-used MSRVTT, MSVD and LSMDC benchmark datasets, where it achieves new state-of-the-art R1 scores of 49.4%, 49.7% and 27.3%, respectively. Qualitative analyses further show the model's ability to maintain coherent attention across frames and align complex queries with dynamic video content. These findings underscore the effectiveness of hierarchical attention and dual-objective textual modeling in enabling robust, context-aware video retrieval, and pave the way for future research in advancing cross-modal representation learning.

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16.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17312

Quantifying Consistency in LLM Logical Reasoning via Structural Uncertainty

Authors:

Baishali Chaudhury↗Mengdie Flora Wang↗Hyunji Hayley Park↗Rahul Ghosh↗Sungmin Hong↗Jae Oh Woo↗

arXiv:2606.17312v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models can arrive at the same answer through reasoning paths that are unstable, contradictory, or difficult to rank consistently – a failure mode especially prevalent in multi-step deductive reasoning. Existing methods assess reliability primarily through output dispersion – measuring how much sampled answers differ – but this discards a complementary signal: whether the model can consistently rank competing reasoning candidates. We propose structural uncertainty, a consistency-aware framework derived from the stability of self-preference-induced rankings over sampled reasoning solutions. Given a query, we generate multiple candidate solutions and ask the model to judge pairwise preferences among its own outputs. We aggregate self-preferences into ranking distributions via Bradley-Terry modeling with PageRank, and decompose the signal into two entropy-based components: across-trial ranking instability and within-trial candidate ambiguity. Across five LLMs and eight benchmarks, structural signals provide information complementary to answer dispersion: on logical and mathematical reasoning tasks, the combination improves identification of unreliable instances, while on factual retrieval the structural signal collapses toward uniformity, diagnosing a regime boundary where reasoning-level consistency evaluation is uninformative. The two components relate differently to accuracy: within-trial ambiguity correlates positively with correctness – consistent with settings where multiple plausible solution paths remain competitive – while across-trial instability correlates negatively, signaling unreliable reasoning. Structural uncertainty is best understood not as a universal confidence estimator, but as a regime-sensitive evaluator of logical reasoning consistency.

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17.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15507

Frame-Conditioned Moral Computation in LLaMA 3.1-8B-Instruct: A Mechanistic Interpretability Audit of Ethical Reasoning

Authors:

Ali Dasdan↗Manan Shah↗W. Russell Neuman↗Chad Coleman↗Kund Meghani↗Safinah Ali↗

arXiv:2606.15507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Behavioral audits of Large Language Models on moral prompts measure what the model says, not the internal computation producing it. We use Transluce, an AI-driven mechanistic-interpretability platform, to examine LLaMA 3.1-8B-Instruct on 54 moral prompts in four batteries: 17 dilemmas, policy, and meta-ethical questions (B1); 6 role-playing scenarios (B3); and a controlled trolley contrast varying the switching mechanism with people fixed (B4, 15 prompts) or identity attributes with mechanism fixed (B5, 16 prompts). Two complementary metric families, five cluster-level metrics and a six-metric neuron-level panel, converge on a Situational Anchor Effect: domain-specific representations dominate the top of the activation list across every battery. The model's ethics-labeled capacity stays essentially constant; its salience (rank, priority, top-of-list presence) is highly sensitive to the interpretive frame the prompt selects. The B4-vs-B5 contrast confirms the model attends to whichever surface feature varies: aggregate ethics metrics are indistinguishable, but the dominant non-ethics distractor mirrors the design. A multi-temperature audit identifies a candidate ethics neuron (L16/N3837) stable across temperatures; a cross-model behavioral proxy on two frontier models yields preliminary evidence of divergence in self-reported moral focus, consistent with an Alignment Wrapper in which RLHF re-orders surface text without removing underlying domain-first frames. We unify these as Frame-Conditioned Moral Computation: the prompt's surface vocabulary selects a feature manifold, and the moral conclusion is downstream of that selection. Behavioral alignment must be supplemented by Mechanistic Alignment: a research program asking whether ethics-related features can be shown causally privileged under controlled frame variation, not merely loud in the explanation.

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18.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2601.04203

FronTalk: Benchmarking Front-End Development as Conversational Code Generation with Multi-Modal Feedback

Authors:

Xueqing Wu↗Zihan Xue↗Da Yin↗Shuyan Zhou↗Kai-Wei Chang↗Nanyun Peng↗Yeming Wen↗

We present FronTalk, a benchmark for front-end code generation that pioneers the study of a unique interaction dynamic: conversational code generation with multi-modal feedback. In front-end development, visual artifacts such as sketches, mockups and annotated creenshots are essential for conveying design intent, yet their role in multi-turn code generation remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we focus on the front-end development task and curate FronTalk, a collection of 100 multi-turn dialogues derived from real-world websites across diverse domains such as news, finance, and art. Each turn features both a textual instruction and an equivalent visual instruction, each representing the same user intent. To comprehensively evaluate model performance, we propose a novel agent-based evaluation framework leveraging a web agent to simulate users and explore the website, and thus measuring both functional correctness and user experience. Evaluation of 20 models reveals two key challenges that are under-explored systematically in the literature: (1) a significant forgetting issue where models overwrite previously implemented features, resulting in task failures, and (2) a persistent challenge in interpreting visual feedback, especially for open-source vision-language models (VLMs). We propose a strong baseline to tackle the forgetting issue with AceCoder, a method that critiques the implementation of every past instruction using an autonomous web agent. This approach significantly reduces forgetting to nearly zero and improves the performance by up to 9.3% (56.0% to 65.3%). Overall, we aim to provide a solid foundation for future research in front-end development and the general interaction dynamics of multi-turn, multi-modal code generation. Code and data are released at https://github.com/shirley-wu/frontalk

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19.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12 DOI: HASH:31cd31d1966b33c759bae528f06cf85a

Reduced nighttime smartphone use among cohabiting partners: a longitudinal study under the lens of social control of health behaviors theory

Authors:

Klasson↗T. A↗Rod↗N. H↗Zucco↗A. G↗

Objective: We examined the link between cohabitation with a partner and nighttime smartphone use through the social control of health behavior theory. Background: Nighttime smartphone use is a behavioral risk factor for sleep problems. While previous research has predominantly focused on individual-level risks of sleep disturbances, the role of social context remains underexplored. Theoretical frameworks, specifically the Social Control of Health Behavior, suggest that social relationships regulate health-related behaviors; however, it is unclear how far this regulation extends to modern digital behaviors among couples. Method: We analyzed survey data from three waves of the SmartSleep Study (2018, 2020, and 2023; total N = 25,028), including a longitudinal follow-up subset (N = 1,003). We tested multivariate associations between living with a partner, changes in cohabitation status and frequent nighttime smartphone use by fitting generalized linear mixed-effects models. Additionally, we mapped the complex interplay between indicators of social integration, social support, smartphone use, and sleep quality using hierarchical clustering of non-linear correlations. Results: Cohabiting participants had lower odds of frequent nighttime smartphone use compared to those living alone (OR = 0.66; 95% CI: 0.61, 0.72). This lower risk was driven primarily by cohabitation with a partner (OR = 0.49; 95% CI: 0.36, 0.66). Longitudinal analysis supported these findings, showing that sustained cohabitation was associated with less frequent nighttime use (OR = 0.56; 95% CI: 0.38, 0.82). Clustering analysis revealed that indicators of social integration and support clustered with favorable sleep quality. Conclusion: Our findings suggest that the health-protective effects of cohabitation with a partner extend to digital behaviors. Consistent with social control of health behavior theory, the presence of a partner appears to reduce frequent nighttime smartphone use, highlighting the critical importance of considering social context when addressing digital health hygiene and promoting sleep.

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20.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16 DOI: HASH:62877d9fc8065569508d8fb495ef8d94

Re-evaluating the Cross-Sectional Prevalence of Severe Age-Related Hearing Loss Using Extreme Value Statistics

Authors:

Bleeck↗

Standard demographic models of age-related hearing loss (presbycusis) predominantly utilize symmetric functions, such as log-normal distributions for age-binned thresholds and 4-parameter logistic curves for prevalence estimates. While these models capture early-to-moderate degradation effectively, they structurally struggle to characterize the heavy tails associated with severe clinical impairment. In this study, we present a statistical critique using a secondary analysis of the historical Medical Research Council (MRC) National Study of Hearing (1980-1986) dataset. By applying Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) distribution theory, we demonstrate that as severity increases, the underlying statistical geometry of hearing loss shifts. The asymmetric, heavy-tailed GEV distribution provides a parsimonious description of severe impairment, requiring fewer parameters than standard symmetric models. However, we explicitly acknowledge that utilizing static population data to infer progression introduces an ecological fallacy. Furthermore, the dataset's historical nature embeds unquantified generational cohort effects. We conclude that while extreme value statistics offer a compelling mathematical framework for modeling the variance of severe presbycusis, true longitudinal datasets are required to isolate physiological degradation from historical cohort variance.

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21.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14553

Scaling native entanglement generation in layered semiconductors with quasi-phase matching

Authors:

Benjamin Braun↗Andrea Alessandrini↗Josip Bajo↗Philipp K. Jenke↗Leone di Mauro Villari↗Birui Yang↗Zhi Hao Peng↗P. James Schuck↗Cory R. Dean↗Andrea Marini↗Philip Walther↗Chiara Trovatello↗…

arXiv:2606.14553v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient generation of entangled photons typically relies on spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) in phase-matched macroscopic nonlinear media. However, generating entanglement under phase-matching constraints requires additional bulk optics or interferometers. In contrast, ultrathin van der Waals semiconductors - such as transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) - exhibit strong enough optical nonlinearities for SPDC to be observed from subwavelength-thick media, thereby bypassing conventional phase-matching constraints. In this microscopic domain, the intrinsic crystal symmetry governs the nonlinear optical response, enabling the native generation of polarization-entangled photon pairs. However, generating these states efficiently has been fundamentally restricted by the material's coherence length ($L_c$), which limits the attainable conversion efficiency. Here, we investigate periodically-poled TMDs (PPTMDs) designed to scale up this interaction via quasi-phase matching. We demonstrate that mechanically flipping the sign of the nonlinearity at precise intervals of $L_c$ introduces quasi-phase matching, that scales the pair-production rate while preserving the pristine, symmetry-generated polarization entanglement, with fidelities exceeding 99%. Backed by a rigorous theoretical model, our work clarifies the interplay between crystal symmetry and propagation effects in thin nonlinear media, providing a new avenue for engineering quantum light in nanophotonic systems.

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22.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11447

AI Coding Agents Can Reproduce Social Science Findings

Authors:

Meysam Alizadeh↗Mohsen Mosleh↗Fabrizio Gilardi↗Atoosa Kasirzadeh↗Joshua Tucker↗

Recent anecdotal evidence suggests that AI coding agents can reproduce published findings when provided with original data and code; yet systematic evaluation across social sciences remains limited. Existing evaluation benchmarks are insufficient, either small or conflate agent performance with problems in the reproduction materials themselves, such as code that fails to execute correctly. Here we introduce SocSci-Repro-Bench, a benchmark of 221 tasks spanning four disciplines and 13 substantive domains, constructed from studies whose results are either fully reproducible with available materials or demonstrably non-reproducible due to missing data, allowing us to isolate agents' reproduction capacity. Evaluating two frontier coding agents, Claude Code and Codex, we find that both can reproduce a large share of social science findings, with Claude Code substantially outperforming Codex. These reproduction rates considerably exceed those previously reported for general-purpose LLM-based agents on comparable reproducibility benchmarks. Both agents also perform strongly on a reasoning task requiring identification of underlying research questions, and additional analyses suggest that results are not primarily driven by memorization. Providing the original paper PDF alongside replication materials modestly improves performance but introduces bias on tasks where reproduction is impossible. We also show that agents can be nudged toward confirmatory specification search through subtle prompt framing. Together, these findings suggest that at least some frontier coding agents can serve as reliable executors of computational workflows while underscoring the need for careful benchmarking and prompt design as AI systems assume larger roles in scientific production.

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23.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11997

Dark state spectroscopy in nonlinear waveguide quantum electrodynamics

Authors:

Shay Nadel↗Amir Sivan↗Aviv Karnieli↗

arXiv:2606.11997v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum systems face a fundamental trade-off: they must remain decoupled from the environment to maintain long coherence times, yet they require interactions with the environment to be accessible for measurement. As a prime example, emitter arrays coupled to waveguides facilitate collective modes that, owing to interference, can suppress radiation into the waveguide. While complete destructive interference creates perfectly dark states with infinite lifetimes, their inherent decoupling makes them unmeasurable in standard waveguide quantum electrodynamics. Consequently, current approaches must rely on system non-idealities that permit measurement but limit the coherence times. In this work, we lift this limitation by proposing the use of weakly squeezed light generated in \{chi}(2) nonlinear waveguides for the spectroscopy of completely dark states. We show that the fluorescence spectrum probes transitions between the dressed dark states of the emitter array. This work paves the way towards the measurement and control of dark states, with applications for robust quantum memories, computation, and communication.

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24.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12171

Beyond Dark Knowledge: Mixup-Based Distillation for Reliable Predictions

Authors:

Jos\'e Medina↗Paul Honeine↗Abdelaziz Bensrhair↗Amnir Hadachi↗

Knowledge Distillation (KD) and mixup have proven effective at inducing smoothness in class boundaries; KD captures inherent class relationships in probability distributions, and mixup enforces them through convex combinations of inputs. Their interaction, however, remains poorly understood, particularly when mixup is applied only during student training. In this setting, the teacher is queried on inputs drawn from a vicinal distribution it never saw during training, a controlled mismatch whose effect on knowledge transfer has not been characterised. We show that this mismatch causes the teacher's supervisory signal to be dominated by distributional confusion rather than inter-class structure. Despite it, the student does not merely imitate the teacher: it independently acquires greater linearity in the vicinal region, a structural property that the teacher lacks, and goes beyond dark-knowledge transfer. KD with mixup consistently improves student accuracy and reduces overconfidence by an order of magnitude relative to the baseline, across CIFAR and ImageNet with varying-capacity teachers. Crucially, calibration propagates from teacher to student independently of accuracy transfer, and temperature scaling governs a measurable accuracy-calibration trade-off that becomes more pronounced under vicinal training. These results reframe mixup distillation not as a degraded version of standard KD, but as a richer transfer channel that simultaneously shapes discriminative performance, uncertainty estimation, and representational geometry.

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25.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16900

Factorized Neural Operators Decompose Dynamic and Persistent Responses

Authors:

Hao Tang↗Yuechen Duan↗Jiongyu Zhu↗Zimeng Feng↗Hao Li↗Chao Li↗

arXiv:2606.16900v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Physical systems often exhibit heterogeneous mechanisms, where rapidly evolving dynamics coexist with persistent structures. Capturing such multiscale physical behavior remains challenging for existing neural operators, which typically rely on single dominant inductive bias and therefore couple distinct physical responses into a shared representation. We introduce the Unified Green's Function Framework across domains and propose the Factorized Neural Operators (FaNO), which decompose spectral representations into equivariant dynamic responses and invariant persistent responses, leading to better interpretability and generalization. Mechanistically, we show that the two operator branches spontaneously specialize into distinct physical roles that remain consistent across scales and domains: the equivariant branch captures rapidly varying transient dynamics, whereas the invariant branch extracts coherent persistent structures. This factorized mechanism of FaNO improves prediction accuracy, parameter efficiency and cross-scale generalization across physical systems and domains. In particular, it maintains consistent predictions under long-horizon autoregressive rollout, cross-resolution extrapolation and physical-regime shifts. These findings suggest that scalable physical modeling may benefit from moving beyond single-inductive-bias formulations toward factorized operator representations that better reflect the heterogeneous organization of physical systems, accelerating the reliable deployment of machine learning for scientific computing and discovery.

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