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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Prediction of Alzheimer's Disease Risk Factors from Retinal Images via Deep Learning: Development and Validation of Biologically Relevant Morphological Associations in the UK Biobank

Authors:
Seowung Leem↗Yunchao Yang↗Adam J. Woods↗Ruogu Fang↗

The systemic, metabolic, lifestyle factors have established associations with Alzheimer's Disease (AD) through epidemiologic and AD-specific biomarker studies. Whether colored fundus photography (CFP) contains retinal structural signatures corresponding to these AD-related risk domains remains unclear. To determine whether deep learning (DL) models can predict 12 AD-related risk factors from CFP and to characterize the retinal structures underlying these predictions, thereby assessing whether CFP reflects pathways to AD vulnerability. Using 62,876 CFPs from 44,501 unique participants from the UK Biobank, DL models were trained to predict 12 factors linked to AD incidence: 6 categorical (sex, smoking, sleeplessness, economic status, alcohol use, depression) and 6 continuous (age, age at completing education, BMI, systolic, diastolic blood pressure, HbA1c). Model performance, model saliency, and saliency-derived scores (CAM-Score) were evaluated and compared to retinal morphometry. The scores were also compared between incident-AD cases (average 8.55 years before onset) and matched controls. Performance of DL ranged from AUROC= 0.5654-0.9480 for categorical and R2=-0.0291-0.7620 for continuous factors, outperforming most of the morphometry-machine learning models. Saliency-based score consistently highlighted biologically meaningful regions, particularly the optic nerve head and retinal vasculature. It also aligned with present morphometric variations. Several saliency-based scores differed significantly between incident AD and matched controls, suggesting potential overlap between retinal correlates of risk factors and preclinical AD-associated changes. CFP encodes retinal signatures linked to AD risk factors. Although not diagnostic, DL-derived retinal representations may uncover biologically meaningful risk-related structural changes mirroring the potential AD vulnerability.

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02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

The Protective Role of Belonging and Socioeconomic Status in Dropout Intent Among Minority Ethnic Students: A Mixed Methods Study

Authors:
Vaportzis↗Khan↗George↗K. K↗

Improving minority ethnic student retention is a global higher education priority. This mixed-methods study investigated how institutional belonging and socioeconomic status interact to shape dropout intentions among minority university students in the UK (N = 182). Quantitative results revealed that perceived course difficulty and lower subjective socioeconomic status were the strongest predictors of dropout intent. While the interaction between socioeconomic status and difficulty was non-significant, qualitative accounts showed distinct structural vulnerabilities. Financial strain restricted social integration, turning socioeconomic disparities into campus isolation. Conversely, representative curricula, diverse peer networks, and stable cultural in-groups (e.g., religious affiliations, living in the parental home) functioned as essential psychological buffers against academic exhaustion and alienation. Universities must shift from transactional models to sustained structural equity to protect vulnerable student groups.

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03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Persona-Pruner: Sculpting Lightweight Models for Role-Playing

Authors:
Jinsu Kim↗Jihoon Tack↗Noah Lee↗Jongheon Jeong↗

Language Models (LMs) have shown remarkable potential as role-playing chatbots, delivering consistent, stylized interactions when given a specification of a character or user persona. However, applying these capabilities to real-world applications (e.g., ecosystems with numerous NPCs interacting simultaneously) exposes a critical inefficiency due to the excessive computational cost. In this paper, we question the necessity of dedicating a full, generalist model to a single persona, hypothesizing that a specific character identity relies on only a fraction of the model's total capacity. We observe that naively pruning LMs often severely degrades the role-playing performance for a specific persona; it does not distinguish between redundant knowledge and essential character traits. We propose Persona-Pruner, a framework that sculpts a lightweight role-playing model by isolating persona-specific sub-networks from a single description. Our experiments consistently show that Persona-Pruner preserves role-playing performance substantially more effectively than existing state-of-the-art LLM pruning techniques, reducing the performance drop from the dense model by up to 93.8% over the strongest baseline on RoleBench in LLM-as-a-judge score, while still maintaining general LLM capabilities. Code is available at https://github.com/jsu-kim/Persona-Pruner.

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04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

One Ruler: A Same-Hands Re-Evaluation of Bivariate Causal Direction on Tuebingen, with a Parameter-Free Compression Baseline

Authors:
Wietse Stienstra↗

arXiv:2606.23767v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Headline accuracies on the Tuebingen cause-effect pairs are routinely compared across papers even though each is measured under its authors' own protocol – different pair subsets, weightings, model-selection, and decision rates. We argue this is the wrong comparison and run the right one: a same-hands re-evaluation in which every method is run by us on the identical 102 pairs, with one strict rule – no tuning and a decision forced on every pair. As a clean reference point we introduce a deliberately minimal baseline: sorted-conditional compression, which feeds quantized, sorted, first-differenced data to an off-the-shelf compressor (bz2) and has zero fitted parameters. Under the common ruler the ranking differs sharply from the literature. Our baseline reaches 74.7% weighted accuracy (p = 3.7e-7); on the same 100 pairs that SLOPE is evaluated on it scores 76.0%, a 1.2-point gap below the authors' own forced-decision SLOPE (77.2%) that is well inside noise (McNemar p = 0.39). A faithful re-run of RECI lands at 70.7% – inside the original authors' reported error bar, not the 77.5% often quoted (which we trace to a mis-copied cell). SLOPE's published 82.4% is a decided-subset figure: scoring the authors' own stored output only on the pairs its significance test chose to answer reproduces 81.7%. Under the common ruler the methods cluster in the low-to-mid 70s and the zero-parameter compressor ties the strongest of them. We document the mechanisms that inflate published figures (test-set model selection, significance-gated abstention) and contribute two further results: compression score magnitude is a model-free confounding flag (p = 2.8e-68), and a pre-registered falsification test fails in an instructive way that bounds the method's theoretical interpretation. Code, pre-registrations, and per-pair outputs are released.

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05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

tap: A File-Based Protocol for Heterogeneous LLM Agent Collaboration

Authors:
Minseo Kim↗

arXiv:2606.14445v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing multi-agent software development systems have proposed many forms of agent collaboration, including role-based collaboration and automated code review. However, many systems assume a common runtime, a central conversation server, or the same API family. Under these assumptions, LLM agents from different vendors cannot easily exchange messages directly from their own execution environments while dividing development and review work on a shared codebase. This paper presents tap, a file-based collaboration protocol that allows Claude (Anthropic) and Codex (OpenAI) to collaborate on one codebase without shared memory or an identical runtime. The core of tap is a file-first design that preserves markdown files with metadata as original messages, combines a file inspection path (file communication, Tier 1) with real-time notification paths for Claude and Codex (real-time communication, Tier 2), and isolates work through separate git worktrees. Even if real-time notification fails or a receiver restarts, the message file remains available and the same content can be inspected again. In a 27-day, 37-generation self-applied operation where tap was used to develop and review itself, we collected 209 tap-related pull requests and 717 operational artifacts. An analysis of 375 review artifacts showed that the share of reviews recording at least one defect or requested change was 69.8% for heterogeneous model pairs and 53.1% for homogeneous model pairs. These results show that tap, which combines file-based message preservation with real-time notification, operates in a real production repository, and that combining heterogeneous models and execution environments can broaden review perspectives. tap is distributed as the open-source npm package @hua-labs/tap (v0.5.2).

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

VistaRef: Boosting Visual Spatial Orientation Awareness for Pointing-to-Object Detection

Authors:
Ling Li↗Zhizhen Cai↗Xinkun Wu↗Ziyu Zhu↗Jiaqing Lyu↗Bowen Liu↗Zhidong Deng↗

Grounding deictic gestures in natural images is fundamental to AR and human-robot collaboration, providing a basis for seamless spatial interaction. While Transformer-based visual models have achieved significant progress in general object detection, their global attention mechanisms often neglect micro-geometric relationships, degrading orientation accuracy. In pointing tasks, this deficiency manifests as an inability to accurately capture the pointing ray implied by finger poses, which results in pointing drift and localization ambiguity when dealing with distant or densely packed objects. To address this, we propose VistaRef, a framework designed to explicitly enhance spatial orientation awareness. First, we develop the Local Hand Entity Modeling (LHEM) module, which incorporates hand-pose embeddings to strengthen the model's capability to capture subtle finger deviations. Second, drawing inspiration from multi-view geometry, we construct the Geometric Ray Modeling (GRM) module to transform implicit orientation information into explicit spatial geometric features, guiding feature aggregation and deep fusion via attention mechanisms. Furthermore, we introduce a novel Orientation-Consistent Alignment Loss (OCAL) to synergistically supervise hand presence and pointing consistency, ensuring that all architectural improvements collectively serve the core objective of spatial localization. Experimental results demonstrate that VistaRef significantly outperforms the baseline, achieving a 14-point absolute gain in grounding accuracy. Qualitative analysis further confirms that VistaRef effectively models the geometric correlation from hand to target, bridging the spatial perception gap inherent in traditional Transformers for complex scenarios. Code: https://github.com/lingli1724/VistaRef.

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

DINO-Med3D: Bridging Dimension and Domain Gaps in Volumetric Segmentation via Progressive Adaptation

Authors:
Haoyu Hu↗Xiyao Ma↗Shiqi Liu↗Linsen Zhang↗Xiaoliang Xie↗Xiaohu Zhou↗Zeng-Guang Hou↗

Although DINOv3 has demonstrated remarkable semantic discrimination in natural imagery, its direct application to volumetric medical segmentation is hindered by inherent dimension and domain disparities. To resolve these issues, we propose DINO-Med3D, a two-stage progressive framework that repurpose the pre-trained DINOv3 encoder for 3D medical tasks. In the first stage, we mitigate the dimension gap by introducing a multi-slice embedding module that incorporates pseudo-3D context, while simultaneously employing a segmentation proxy task to adapt representations learned from natural scenes to the medical domain. Subsequently, we further enhance volumetric understanding by adding lightweight 3D adapters into the frozen backbone to enforce global inter-slice continuity. Finally, to compensate for the spatial information loss inherent in the embedding process, we design a parallel detail recovery stream to explicitly preserve high-frequency boundary cues. Extensive experiments on five public datasets demonstrate that our approach successfully adapts DINOv3 to the medical domain and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

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08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Temporal2Seq: A Unified Framework for Temporal Video Understanding Tasks

Authors:
Min Yang↗Zichen Zhang↗Qian Dang↗Limin Wang↗

With the development of video understanding, there is a proliferation of tasks for clip-level temporal video analysis, including temporal action detection (TAD), temporal action segmentation (TAS), and generic event boundary detection (GEBD). While task-specific video understanding models have exhibited outstanding performance in each task, there remains a dearth of a unified framework capable of simultaneously addressing multiple tasks, which is a promising direction for the next generation of AI. To this end, in this paper, we propose a single unified framework, coined as Temporal2Seq, to formulate the output of these temporal video understanding tasks as a sequence of discrete tokens. With this unified token representation, Temporal2Seq can train a generalist model within a single architecture on different video understanding tasks. In the absence of multi-task learning (MTL) benchmarks, we compile a comprehensive co-training dataset by borrowing the datasets from TAD, TAS, and GEBD tasks. We evaluate our Temporal2Seq generalist model on the corresponding test sets of three tasks, demonstrating that Temporal2Seq can produce reasonable results on various tasks and achieve advantages compared with single-task training on this framework. We also investigate the generalization performance of our generalist model on new datasets from different tasks, which yields superior performance to the specific model.

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09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Flow Map Denoisers: Traversing the Distortion-Perception Plane for Inverse Problems

Authors:
Nicolas Zilberstein↗Morteza Mardani↗Santiago Segarra↗

arXiv:2606.19802v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Image restoration faces a fundamental tradeoff: methods that minimize error produce blurry reconstructions, while those that maximize perceptual quality yield sharp but less faithful images. Existing approaches either commit to a single operating point on this distortion perception (DP) frontier or require paired-data supervision, auxiliary models, or hyperparameter tuning of the sampler to access different points. We show that flow map models, a recent extension of flow matching for few-step sampling that learns an average field, implicitly define a one-parameter family of denoisers that continuously spans the DP frontier. The lookahead parameter t acts as a control knob between the MMSE and perceptual regimes. For Gaussian targets, we prove that varying t exactly recovers the optimal DP frontier; for natural images, we observe similar behavior empirically. Within a Plug-and-Play solver, the same mechanism extends to general inverse problems, where it controls a tradeoff between perceptual alignment and data consistency. Despite the lack of exact optimality guarantees in this setting, a single trained flow map spans the DP tradeoff, matching or exceeding specialized baselines at both extremes. Extensive experiments on CelebA ($128\times 128$) and AFHQ ($256\times 256$) across several linear and nonlinear inverse tasks validate our findings.

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10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Infinite-Level Hierarchy of Solvable Quantum Circuits

Authors:
Michael A. Rampp↗Suhail A. Rather↗Pieter W. Claeys↗

arXiv:2606.23803v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dual-unitary circuits have emerged as a paradigm of exactly solvable yet non-integrable quantum dynamics. Recently, a generalization of dual unitarity attempting to extend the phenomenology of exactly solvable circuits has been introduced through a hierarchy of conditions, with dual unitarity as the first level. However, beyond the second level the proposed generalized dual-unitary hierarchy ceases to be solvable in the whole spacetime. We present an infinite hierarchy of solvability conditions remedying this problem. These new conditions can be combined with the generalized dual-unitary hierarchy to obtain circuits for which correlation functions and entanglement dynamics can be analyzed exactly in the whole spacetime. We show that this novel hierarchy possesses non-trivial solutions at every level. Our results demonstrate that dual unitarity can be systematically extended while preserving solvability, opening up investigations of exactly solvable non-integrable systems with more general properties.

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11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Spectrally Regularized Latent Flow Matching for Turbulence Generation

Authors:
Khalid Rafiq↗Aditya G. Nair↗

arXiv:2606.11691v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent diffusion and flow matching have emerged as leading approaches for synthetic turbulence generation, yet they systematically under-represent dissipation-range amplitudes. We introduce a latent flow matching framework with a spectrally regularized compression stage that directly targets this failure mode. On a 256^2 DNS dataset at Re_f \approx 2250, replacing an MSE-trained VAE with a zone-weighted log-spectral objective raises deep-dissipation retained spectral power from 25% to 94% in reconstruction and from 20% to 79% in unconditional generation. The improved latent representation also yields a substantially better sampling cost-fidelity tradeoff: the MSE-trained latent space imposes a fundamental quality ceiling near DD bias -0.70 that no integrator or step-count can overcome, while the spectrally regularized latent space reaches DD bias -0.117 at just 20 function evaluations. Mechanistically, encoder-decoder swap experiments show that the improvement is driven primarily by encoder-induced latent reorganization rather than decoder capacity, while a support-amplitude decomposition reveals that MSE-trained models behave as conservative suppression models, minimizing pointwise error by attenuating intermittent high-wavenumber structure. Both pipelines recover the second-order structure function and the correct sign of S_3, indicating the correct cascade direction without explicit supervision. A small residual gap in the magnitude of S_3 suggests that phase-coherent triadic organization remains a complementary axis to amplitude fidelity for future generative turbulence models.

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12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

XConv: Low-memory stochastic backpropagation for convolutional layers

Authors:
Anirudh Thatipelli↗Jeffrey Sam↗Mathias Louboutin↗Ali Siahkoohi↗Rongrong Wang↗Felix J. Herrmann↗

arXiv:2106.06998v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Training convolutional neural networks at scale demands substantial memory, largely because intermediate activations must be stored for backpropagation. Existing remedies (checkpointing, invertible architectures, or gradient-approximation methods such as randomized automatic differentiation) either add significant computation, impose architectural constraints, or require non-trivial code changes. We propose XConv, a near-drop-in replacement for standard 2D and 3D convolutional layers that addresses all three: it preserves standard backpropagation, imposes no architectural constraints, and integrates into existing codebases with minimal changes. XConv exploits the algebraic structure of convolutional weight gradients, storing highly compressed projections of the activations rather than the full tensors and approximating the gradients via multi-channel randomized trace estimation. The number of probing vectors sets a memory-accuracy tradeoff and recovers the exact gradient in the limit. We establish convergence guarantees and error bounds for the estimator, showing that its gradient-error variance is comparable to that of stochastic gradient descent. Empirically, XConv matches exact-gradient methods across classification, generative modeling, super-resolution, inpainting, and segmentation, with gaps that narrow as the number of probing vectors grows, while reducing activation memory by a factor of two or more when convolutional activations dominate, and remaining computationally competitive with optimized convolution kernels at larger batch sizes. At half precision the gradient-approximation error falls to the rounding floor, so XConv adds essentially no error beyond that of low-precision arithmetic. The savings matter most where activation memory rather than compute is the binding constraint, such as high-resolution and volumetric training and on-device finetuning.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Adaptive Hebbian Memory Routing in Vision Transformers for Few-Shot Learning

Authors:
Mohammed Yusuf Mujawar↗Noorbakhsh Amiri Golilarz↗

Few-shot image recognition requires models to adapt to new classes from a small labeled support set. Hebbian fast-weight memory can provide temporary associative information during an episode, but fixed memory behavior may not be appropriate for every few-shot task. In this work, we propose Adaptive Hebbian Routing for few-shot Vision Transformers. The method uses a lightweight MLP router to control the contribution of Hebbian memory, the strength of memory updates, and the retention of previous memory from support-set features. We study Adaptive Placement, Adaptive Plasticity, and Fully Adaptive Hebbian Routing. Experiments use ViT-Small, DeiT-Small, and Swin-Tiny under 5-way 1-shot evaluation on Omniglot, CIFAR-FS, and cross-domain transfer from CIFAR-FS to Omniglot. In the direct Swin comparison, fixed and adaptive Hebbian variants use the same memory location. Adaptive Plasticity improves the fixed Hebbian result from 96.74\% to 96.92\%, while Fully Adaptive Routing achieves the best result at 96.94\%. The fully adaptive Swin model also reduces inference time from 16.51 ms to 14.05 ms relative to fixed Hebbian Swin. On CIFAR-FS, adaptive variants improve performance across all three backbones, and the multi-shot evaluation shows that these gains remain useful as the number of support examples increases. These results show that adaptive plasticity and adaptive memory activation can improve few-shot Transformer representations beyond fixed Hebbian behavior.

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14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Effective Resistances and Commute Times in Sparse Random Geometric Graphs

Authors:
Filip O. Rupchin↗Peter J. Mucha↗

arXiv:2606.14895v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The commute time between two nodes in a network - the expected number of steps for a random walk to travel from one node to the other and then return - is a metric of broad importance arising in community detection, network routing, dimensionality reduction, and diffusion modeling. For random geometric graphs (RGGs), in which nodes are placed at random in a spatial domain and connected pairwise wherever their Euclidean distance is below a threshold radius, the relationship between commute times and the embedding geometry remains poorly understood outside very dense settings (where the role of the geometry disappears and commute times degenerate to a sum of inverse degrees). We develop and numerically validate a model for approximating commute times in sparse RGGs on a torus by combining theoretically motivated geometric contributions with an inverse degree sum. The geometric terms include a universal logarithmic contribution from the Laplacian, a quadratic correction encoding the compact topology of the torus, and a quartic angular term reflecting the square anisotropy of the domain. We fit this model to samples of node pairs across a range of graph sizes and mean degrees, demonstrating good predictive performance and that the geometric terms contribute significantly to model fit. We then study the continuous perturbation of the model from a regular square lattice to a fully random geometric graph, further validating the functional model form through this transition and showing how commute times in sparse RGGs retain meaningful geometric information about the embedding space.

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15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Multi-Modal Hyper-Graph Fusion for Low-Light Crowd Counting

Authors:
Hao-Yuan Ma↗Li Zhang↗Yushi Qiu↗Jie Gao↗Yan Zhang↗Bangjun Wang↗

Crowd counting is a fundamental task in computer vision. However, crowd counting in low-light environments remains largely underexplored, despite its practical importance in the real world. Existing methods mainly focus on well-lit scenes or rely on single-modality Red-Green-Blue (RGB) representations, which often become unreliable under extreme darkness and complex non-uniform illumination. To handle this problem, we construct three new low-light crowd counting benchmarks, which consist of two synthetic datasets, SHA\_Dark and SHB\_Dark, and a real-world benchmark LC-Crowd (Low-light Crowd Dataset). Inspired by Retinex-based physical modeling, we introduce depth and Canny edge cues as complementary geometric and structural priors to enhance the intrinsic reflectance representation under low-light conditions. We propose a Multi-Modal Hyper-Graph Fusion module, which formulates RGB appearance, depth geometry, and edge structure cues as nodes in a unified hyper-graph and explicitly captures their high-order complementary relationships via dynamic hyperedge construction and message passing. Furthermore, to adaptively allocate computation in dense prediction, we propose a Deformable Rectangular Sparse Attention (DRSA) module, which concentrates computation on informative regions through anchor-aware estimation and adaptive rectangular window modeling. Based on these designs, we develop a unified Low-Light Counting Network (LCNet) for robust low-light crowd counting. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method achieves the best overall performance against existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. The code is in the supplementary material. The datasets will be made public upon acceptance.

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17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Certifying Nonclassical Proper-Time Histories with a Quantum Clock

Authors:
Shuai Zeng↗

arXiv:2606.12755v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum clocks can acquire relativistic phases from motional or gravitational proper-time differences, but reduced clock dephasing alone does not certify nonclassical proper-time histories. We formulate this distinction as a channel-certification problem. First, we show that any two-level single-time dephasing signal, including one generated by an effective quantum proper-time label, admits a classical random proper-time representation. We then define the convex set of classical mixtures of experimentally specified proper-time histories and prove a Choi-rank separation criterion for conditioned coherent history recombination. A two-branch Ramsey protocol gives explicit bright- and dark-port population witnesses outside this classical set. The certification is operational and relative to the specified history set: it rules out classical mixtures of the same implemented proper-time histories, not arbitrary classical protocols with different histories or controls.

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18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Adapting Reinforcement Learning with Chain-of-Thought Supervision for Explainable Detection of Hateful and Propagandistic Memes

Authors:
Mohamed Bayan Kmainasi↗Mucahid Kutlu↗Ali Ezzat Shahroor↗Abul Hasnat↗Firoj Alam↗

Hateful and propagandistic memes exploit the interplay between images and text to convey harmful intent that neither modality reveals alone. Although thinking-based multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have advanced vision-language understanding, their application to meme content moderation remains underexplored. We propose a reinforcement learning-based post-training method that improves classification performance and reference-based explanation quality in thinking-based MLLMs via task-specific rewards and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Concretely, we (i) conduct a systematic empirical study of off-the-shelf MLLMs for hateful and propagandistic meme understanding across English and Arabic benchmarks, (ii) extend existing meme datasets with weakly supervised chain-of-thought (CoT) rationales via distillation and multi-LLM fine-grained propaganda annotations, (iii) introduce a GRPO-based objective with thinking-length regularization that jointly optimizes classification accuracy and explanation quality, and (iv) investigate self-supervised GRPO on unlabeled memes using consensus-based pseudo-labels. Experiments on the Hateful Memes and ArMeme benchmarks show that our approach improves over previously reported results on FHM accuracy (up to +2.1%, from 79.9% to 82.0%) and on ArMeme macro-F1 (up to +7.6 points, from 0.536 to 0.612 with explanations; +6.1 compared to the original ArMeme benchmark), while also generating natural-language explanations. On ArMeme, sequence-classification baselines remain stronger in terms of raw accuracy, whereas our approach provides more balanced per-class performance along with explanations. We publicly release our code, data extensions, and evaluation resources.

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19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Self-Prompting Small Language Models for Privacy-Sensitive Clinical Information Extraction

Authors:
Yao-Shun Chuang↗Tushti Mody↗Uday Pratap Singh↗Shirindokht Shiraz↗Chun-Teh Lee↗Ryan Brandon↗Muhammad F Walji↗Xiaoqian Jiang↗Bunmi Tokede↗

Clinical named entity recognition from dental progress notes is challenging because documentation is highly unstructured, domain-specific, and often privacy-sensitive. We developed a locally deployable framework that enables small language models to self-generate, verify, refine, and evaluate entity-specific prompts for extracting multiple clinical entities from dental notes. Using 1,200 annotated notes, we evaluated candidate open-weight models with multi-prompt ensemble inference and further adapted selected models using QLoRA-based supervised fine-tuning and direct preference optimization. Model performance varied substantially, highlighting the need for task-specific evaluation rather than reliance on generic benchmarks. Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct achieved the strongest baseline performance. After DPO, Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct and Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct achieved micro/macro F1 scores of 0.864/0.837 and 0.806/0.797, respectively. These findings suggest that automated prompt optimization combined with lightweight preference-based post-training can support scalable clinical information extraction using locally deployed small language models.

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20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Cortical activity during narrative discourse production in individuals with post-stroke aphasia and controls measured via functional near-infrared spectroscopy

Authors:
Braun↗E. J↗Carpenter↗E. A↗Gao↗Yucel↗M. A↗Boas↗D. A↗Kiran↗

Introduction: Aphasia is an acquired language disorder with a significant negative functional impact. Much of the research on aphasia has focused on word-level language comprehension and production. Further evaluation of discourse-level tasks, both at behavioral and neural levels, will allow for an ecologically valid understanding of the functional implications of language impairment in this population. Method: This study evaluated bilateral frontal, temporal, and parietal cortical activity during computer-based narrative production in 14 young neurotypical individuals, 17 individuals with post-stroke aphasia, and 15 age-matched neurotypical participants using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Oxygenated hemoglobin (HbO) was measured during narrative production following short video clips and compared to HbO during counting aloud. In addition, behavioral measures quantifying in-task performance were correlated with averaged HbO values. Results: Young neurotypical individuals showed greater cortical activity in bilateral language regions for narrative production compared to counting aloud. In contrast, people with aphasia showed positive condition-related effects in the right frontal ROI and the age-matched group showed positive condition-related effects in the left frontal and right precentral ROIs. Each group showed different patterns in relationships between cortical activity and discourse performance measures. Conclusion: Overall, young participants showing more consistent condition-related effects for narrative discourse production than individuals with aphasia and age-matched controls. This study shows the potential for fNIRS to evaluate cortical activity for ecologically valid language tasks in individuals with post-stroke aphasia.

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21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

CCKS: Consensus-based Communication and Knowledge Sharing

Authors:
Jinyuan Zu↗Xiaowei Lv↗Yongcai Wang↗Deying Li↗Yunjun Han↗Wenping Chen↗Fengyi Zhang↗Naiqi Wu↗

arXiv:2606.12281v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In Decentralized Training and Decentralized Execution (DTDE) for cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), action-advising-based knowledge sharing promotes interpretable and scalable cooperation among agents. However, current action advising approaches often adhere too much to the teacher's guidance without evaluating teacher-student compatibility, which causes excessive advising, suboptimal stability, and degraded performance. To overcome these challenges, this paper presents a Consensus-based Communication and Knowledge Sharing (CCKS) framework, which allows agents to adopt recommendations based on consensus-derived constraints and to follow the teacher's instructions more smartly. This mechanism enables agents to balance exploration and learning from experienced teachers, improving overall performance. The key is the consensus model construction, for which we propose to employ contrastive learning to construct consensus models based on local observations in the agents' training phase. In action selection, agents score and choose actions based on consensus and shared knowledge. Designed as a plug-and-play solution, CCKS integrates seamlessly with existing DTDE algorithms. Experiments conducted in the Google Research Football environment and the complex StarCraft II Multi-Agent Challenge demonstrate that the integration with CCKS significantly improves cooperation efficiency, learning speed, and overall performance compared with current DTDE baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/yuanxpy/CCKS.

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22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

XPR: An Extensible Cross-Platform Point-Based Differentiable Renderer

Authors:
Steve Rhyner↗Sankeerth Durvasula↗Aleksandr Kovalev↗Hansel Jia↗Adrian Zhao↗Mrutunjayya Mrutunjayya↗Nilesh Ahuja↗Selvakumar Panneer↗Christina Giannoula↗Nandita Vijaykumar↗

Point-based differentiable rendering underpins modern 3D reconstruction, novel-view synthesis, and learning-based graphics pipelines, but developing new rendering methods often requires extensive low-level implementation, hardware-specific kernels, and manually written backward passes. This limits rapid prototyping, reproducibility, exploration, and deployment, especially across diverse hardware platforms. This paper presents XPR, an extensible cross-platform framework for point-based differentiable rendering. XPR introduces a high-level programming interface that separates method-specific logic from the shared rendering pipeline, allowing users to implement new methods in a few lines of code. Its pipeline decomposes rendering into modular, statically shaped parallel operations that can be lowered by a cross-platform compiler to GPUs, TPUs, CPUs, and other ML accelerators. We demonstrate implementations of 3DGS, 3DGUT, and LinPrim, with only a few 100s lines of Python code, each of which can be compiled to a range of hardware platforms with the XLA compiler. These results show that XPR enables fast experimentation and portable execution for emerging point-based differentiable rendering systems.

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23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Strategic Non-Shareability of Quantum Correlations

Authors:
Fumin Wang↗

arXiv:2605.25516v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Correlations distributed by a mediator can be useful for coordination but vulnerable to inheritance by a colluder. We formalize the obstruction to such inheritance as a source-certified resource theory of strategic non-shareability. The free objects are symmetrically extendible sources, the free operations are shareability-preserving maps, and the trace distance to the free set is a faithful convex monotone. For Werner and isotropic sources in arbitrary local dimension, the resource has the exact form $D_m=c(d)(p-p_m^{*})_{+}$, with $p_m^{*}$ the Johnson–Viola shareability threshold. For qubit Werner sources, tomographically complete Pauli measurements yield the exact one-colluder capacity\[ C^tomo_1(p)=\frac{1}{12}\Bigl[(3p-1)-\sqrt{(3p+1)(1-p)}\,\Bigr]_{+}.\] We prove that this anti-collusion resource is independent of Bellnonlocality: the Bell and shareability orderings cross, so some Bell-nonlocal states are strictly less collusion-resistant than Bell-local ones. Finally, we give an aligned Pauli coordination game whose observed behaviour has a local hidden-variable model for every visibility, making device-independent certification empty, while source-certified quantum anti-collusion is positive exactly above the extendibility threshold. These results identify symmetric non-extendibility, rather than Bell nonlocality, as the boundary of source-certified collusion resistance.

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24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Optimal Calibration of Quantum Network Links

Authors:
Vinay Kumar↗Claudio Cicconetti↗Marco Conti↗Andrea Passarella↗

arXiv:2606.18167v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The reliable distribution of entanglement is essential for the effective operation of quantum networks. Due to fundamental differences between quantum and classical communication systems, it is necessary to develop specialised algorithms and protocols that also account for quantum-specific constraints. In this work, we focus on the issue of recalibration. As suggested by recent experimental studies, the process of local entanglement generation in a quantum link degrades over time due to environmental changes that have to be estimated and compensated via a calibration operation, during which the link is not available. Therefore, in such a quantum network, every link alternates between an activation period, during which it operates normally, and a calibration period, during which it cannot participate in the end-to-end entanglement distribution, thereby creating a trade-off between link quality (the fidelity of generated pairs, which decays during activation) and availability (the fraction of time the link is usable, which calibration reduces). We develop analytically a protocol for optimally assigning activation periods to each link in linear quantum repeater chains, subject to any general end-to-end fidelity requirements and local initial fidelity thresholds. Building on this foundation, we extend to general quantum networks, where multiple paths may cross at common links, proposing a heuristic approach evaluated in simulations and compared with a benchmark, numerical approach, and theoretical bounds.

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25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Scalable estimation of temporal clustering in accelerometry: a kernel-independent dispersion index grounded in the Hawkes process

Authors:
Zheng↗Danilevicz↗I. M↗Paw↗

Background. Self-exciting (Hawkes) point processes are a natural model for the temporal clustering of human physical activity (PA) recorded by accelerometers, yet they have seldom been used in this setting—in part because the usual maximum-likelihood fitting is challenging due to potential estimation bias and convergence failures on these data. A moment-based alternative—estimating the Hawkes branching ratio from the dispersion index, the variance-to-mean ratio of event counts—is kernel-independent and computationally trivial, but it has not been evaluated for accelerometry or adapted to the intensity-marked recordings accelerometers provide. Methods. Treating each minute above a sedentary threshold as an event, we estimated the Hawkes branching ratio $n$ by maximum likelihood and, as a kernel-independent and far cheaper alternative, from the dispersion index. We compared four dispersion-based estimators—event-count-based, intensity-mark-weighted using the mark-moment ratio, and time-of-day (TOD) adjusted variants of each—against the marked and unmarked maximum-likelihood estimates. Estimators were evaluated for mutual agreement, goodness of fit, and finite-window results in two National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) accelerometry cohorts (hip-worn, $n=2{,}560$; wrist-worn, $n=3{,}132$). We related the resulting temporal clustering measures to all-cause mortality using survey-weighted Cox models, adjusting for PA frequency, Peak30 (the average of the 30 highest PA values), and demographic covariates. Results. Event-count-based dispersion estimates agreed strongly with maximum-likelihood branching ratios ($rapprox0.74$ in both cohorts); the intensity-marked variant incorporating PA intensity variability agreed less well. Marked and unmarked Hawkes models yielded similar excitation and decay parameters, suggesting PA intensity added little clustering information beyond event timing. In the survival analysis, temporal clustering was associated with all-cause mortality independently of PA frequency and Peak30; the direction of association differed between the hip- and wrist-worn cohorts. Conclusions. A scalable dispersion-index estimator recovers the Hawkes branching ratio and matches maximum-likelihood estimates without requiring kernel specification or iterative optimization. It offers a practical tool for quantifying temporal clustering in accelerometry, enabling decomposition of temporal PA patterns into its exogenous initiation and endogenous persistence. Such temporal patterns carry health-relevant information beyond PA intensity and volume. Keywords: dispersion index; Hawkes process; branching ratio; temporal clustering; point process estimation; accelerometry; mortality

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