Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2602.03420

CoCoEmo: Composable and Controllable Human-Like Emotional TTS via Activation Steering

Authors:

Siyi Wang↗Shihong Tan↗Siyi Liu↗Hong Jia↗Gongping Huang↗James Bailey↗Ting Dang↗

arXiv:2602.03420v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Emotional expression in human speech is nuanced and compositional, often involving multiple, sometimes conflicting, affective cues that may diverge from linguistic content. In contrast, most expressive text-to-speech systems enforce a single utterance-level emotion, collapsing affective diversity and suppressing mixed or text-emotion-misaligned expression. While activation steering via latent direction vectors offers a promising solution, it remains unclear whether emotion representations are linearly steerable in TTS, where steering should be applied within hybrid TTS architectures, and how such complex emotion behaviors should be evaluated. This paper presents the first systematic analysis of activation steering for emotional control in hybrid TTS models, introducing a quantitative, controllable steering framework, and multi-rater evaluation protocols that enable composable mixed-emotion synthesis and reliable text-emotion mismatch synthesis. Our results demonstrate, for the first time, that emotional prosody and expressive variability are primarily synthesized by the TTS language module instead of the flow-matching module, and also provide a lightweight steering approach for generating natural, human-like emotional speech.

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02.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.18142

Your AI Travel Agent Would Book You a Bullfight: An Agentic Benchmark for Implicit Animal Welfare in Frontier AI Models

Authors:

Jasmine Brazilek↗Oliver Tulio↗Joel Christoph↗Miles Tidmarsh↗Carol Kline↗Arturs Kanepajs↗

AI agents are moving from advisors to actors, booking travel, planning menus, and running procurement on behalf of users. Existing benchmarks for AI and animal welfare evaluate model text responses to question-answer prompts, leaving open whether the welfare reasoning surfaced in those responses transfers to agentic deployment where the model must take actions with tools. We introduce TAC (Travel Agent Compassion), the first agentic benchmark measuring whether AI agents avoid options involving animal exploitation when acting on behalf of users. TAC presents an AI agent with twelve hand-authored travel booking scenarios across six categories of animal exploitation, augmented to forty-eight samples to control for price, rating, and position confounds. We evaluate seven frontier models from four labs. Every model scores below the chance level of sixty-four percent, with the best performer (Claude Opus 4.7) at fifty-three percent. A single welfare-aware sentence in the system prompt yields gains of forty-seven to sixty-three percentage points in Claude and GPT-5.5, twenty-six points in GPT-5.2, and under twelve points in DeepSeek and Gemini. An auxiliary Inspect Scout audit of 288 base-condition transcripts from the top two performers, using Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite as judge, flags zero transcripts for evaluation awareness, suggesting the below-chance rates do not stem from the models recognising the evaluation. We discuss implications for category-level variation across cultural domains, the limits of text-response welfare benchmarks, and the EU General-Purpose AI Code of Practice systemic risk framework.

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03.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.04009

Counterfactual Explanations for Deep Two-Sample Testing

Authors:

Wei-Cheng Lai↗Marco Simnacher↗Christoph Lippert↗

arXiv:2606.04009v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Two-sample testing is a fundamental tool for detecting distributional differences across scientific domains, but classical tests (including kernel-based tests) can be ineffective on high-dimensional structured data such as images. Recent deep two-sample tests improve sensitivity in these settings by learning informative representations, yet they provide limited insight into which data features drive rejection of the null hypothesis $H_0$. To address this issue, we propose a counterfactual explanation framework for deep two-sample testing that generates sample-level edits moving observations from a source group toward a target group while explicitly reducing the discrepancy measured by the test. Our method combines a diffusion autoencoder with a pretrained deep two-sample test model and optimizes a maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) objective in the test model's representation space to produce plausible counterfactuals. We quantify distribution-level effects through changes in the test statistic and the resulting two-sample p-values. We evaluate the method on synthetic 2D shape datasets and two MRI cohorts. Across both settings, the counterfactual transformations consistently increase p-values relative to the original samples, indicating that the edited source set becomes statistically closer to the target distribution under the test. We measure minimality using LPIPS to ensure the counterfactuals remain close to the original samples. The resulting edits provide interpretable evidence of the features associated with the detected group differences. On MRI, the localized changes are consistent with known anatomical differences between cohorts.

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04.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11562

GraphInfer-Bench: Benchmarking LLM's Inference Capability on Graphs

Authors:

Zhuoyi Peng↗Jingzhou Jiang↗Hanlin Gu↗Lixin Fan↗Yi Yang↗

Graph analysis underlies many applications whose answers cannot be looked up in a single record or retrieved along a path: laundering rings, drug repurposing, user preference, and scientific theme are all inferred from a node together with its neighbourhood. We introduce GraphInfer-Bench, a benchmark for whether LLMs can perform this graph inference: producing an open-ended answer that no single node supports and no path retrieves. Existing graph-QA protocols cannot test this capability: algorithm simulation, node classification, single-node description, KG-QA, and GraphRAG all admit answers retrievable from one node or along a path. GraphInfer-Bench defines five tasks along Description (what a region is) and Comparison (how regions differ), each constructed so the ground truth lives in no single node. The release contains 42,000 samples across six real-world graphs, produced automatically and screened by a four-layer quality-control protocol. We evaluate four method families against the same tasks: graph-token alignment models, zero-shot frontier closed-source LLMs, Graph2Text supervised fine-tuning, and plain GNNs as a structural reference. No method family closes the gap. Graph-token alignment partially handles description tasks (relational, theme) but collapses on comparison tasks. Frontier LLMs lead on outlier detection and community partition among LLM-based methods but lag on masked-node prediction. Graph2Text SFT is the strongest LLM-based method on the description side yet falls behind frontier LLMs on comparison. Across every task, plain GNNs match or beat the strongest LLM-based row, with the largest margin on community detection. GraphInfer-Bench surfaces graph inference as an open capability gap rather than a property of any one architecture.

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05.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.14788

Unifying Acoustic Features and Text with Multimodal LLMs for Neurodegenerative Screening

Authors:

Qingfeng Zhang↗Yuanxiong Guo↗Yanmin Gong↗

arXiv:2606.14788v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Voice-based screening offers a scalable and non-invasive way to assess neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Parkinson's disease (PD), but their staging remains challenging due to the difficulty of integrating heterogeneous data. This paper presents NeurMLLM, an efficient multimodal generative framework for neurodegenerative disease staging. NeurMLLM first encodes the spectrograms and Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients of audio data with vision transformers and projects their representations into the embedding space of a large language model (LLM), where they are concatenated with transcript and demographic instruction tokens as a single unified sequence. The LLM is then instruction-tuned via Low-Rank Adaptation using task prompts to autoregressively predict a constrained label token, enabling a generative classification. By evaluating on the Bridge2AI-Voice dataset for fine-grained staging of AD and PD, we observe that NeurMLLM achieves strong performance, consistently outperforming classical machine learning methods and existing LLM-based approaches. The results show the high potential of multimodal LLMs in neurodegenerative disease staging, improving staging accuracy and supporting accessible deployment.

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06.

PLOS Medicine 2026-05-13 DOI: HASH:09e1b7c2032e6adf96b8b52c7c1c674e

Contribution of nosocomial transmission to <i>Klebsiella pneumoniae</i> neonatal sepsis in Africa and South Asia: An observational study of infection clusters inferred from pathogen genomics and temporal data

Authors:

Erkison Ewomazino Odih↗

by Erkison Ewomazino Odih, Jabir A. Abdulahi, Anne V. Amulele, Matthew Bates, Eva Heinz, Weiming Hu, Kajal Jain, Rindidzani Magobo, Courtney P. Olwagen, John M. Tembo, Tolbert Sonda, Jonathan Strysko, Caroline C. Tigoi, Kyle Bittinger, Jennifer Cornick, Ebenezer Foster-Nyarko, Wilson Gumbi, Steven M. Jones, Chileshe L. Musyani, Carolyn M. McGann, Ahmed M. Moustafa, Patrick Musicha, James C. L. Mwansa, Moreka L. Ndumba, Thomas D. Stanton, Donwilliams O. Omuoyo, Oliver Pearse, Laura T. Phillips, Paul J. Planet, Charlene M. C. Rodrigues, Fatou Secka, Kirsty Sands, Erin Theiller, Allan M. Zuza, Sulagna Basu, Grace J. Chan, Kenneth C. Iregbu, Jean-Baptiste Mazarati, Semaria Solomon Alemayehu, Timothy R. Walsh, Rabaab Zahra, Angela Dramowski, Sombo Fwoloshi, Appiah-Korang Labi, Lola Madrid, Noah Obeng-Nkrumah, David Ojok, Boaz D. Wadugu, Andrew C. Whitelaw, Anudita Bhargava, Atul Jindal, Ramesh K. Agarwal, Alexander M. Aiken, James A. Berkley, Susan E. Coffin, Nicholas A. Feasey, Nelesh P. Govender, Davidson H. Hamer, Shabir A. Madhi, Mari Jeeva Sankar, Kelly L. Wyres, Kathryn E. Holt Background Klebsiella pneumoniae is the leading cause of sepsis among neonates in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Africa and Asia, contributing substantially to the overall burden of antimicrobial-resistant infections and mortality among neonates globally. Pathogen sequencing has been used to investigate case clusters and confirm nosocomial transmission in a small number of neonatal units. Here we utilise pathogen sequence data to estimate the fraction of K. pneumoniae neonatal sepsis attributable to nosocomial transmission in African and South Asian countries. Methods and findings We estimated the proportion of invasive K. pneumoniae disease involved in nosocomial transmission clusters in a given neonatal unit, using single-linkage clustering based on pairwise temporal and genetic distances estimated from bacterial whole-genome sequences aggregated from 10 contributing studies. Analysing 1,523 K. pneumoniae isolates from 27 units in 13 countries in Africa and South Asia between 2013 and 2023, we inferred 156 nosocomial transmission clusters, ranging from 2 to 188 neonates each (83 of the clusters comprised ≥3 cases). Overall, we estimated that 1,035 neonatal infections (68.0%) were part of nosocomial transmission clusters. Excluding the first infection in each cluster as a potential index case, we estimate at least 879 (57.7%) infections were acquired via nosocomial transmission. Sensitivity analyses showed that results were robust to the choice of genetic distance estimation methods and thresholds used to define clusters, and cluster estimates were stable over temporal distance thresholds ranging from 2 to 8 weeks. Isolates were mostly extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL) producers (90.9%) and included 172 multi-locus sequence types (STs). Fourteen STs, including several globally recognised multidrug-resistant lineages, were associated with transmission clusters at multiple units, and these were collectively responsible for two-thirds of all infections. Carriage of carbapenemase genes (adjusted odds ratio, aOR = 2.08 [95% confidence interval, CI: 1.04, 4.14]; p = 0.04) and ESBL genes (aOR = 2.48 [95% CI: 1.26, 4.90]; p = 0.006) were significantly positively associated with transmission in a logistic regression model with site as a covariate. Limitations of this study include the lack of sufficient clinical data to allow high-resolution investigation of transmission dynamics and lack of facility-level data to investigate contributors to the observed differences in transmission burden across sites. Conclusions Nosocomial transmission contributes to a substantial proportion of K. pneumoniae sepsis in neonatal care units in Africa and South Asia. Reducing transmission within these settings through improved infection prevention and control and other measures could substantially reduce the neonatal sepsis burden. A high burden of transmission clusters is associated with the same drug-resistant lineages that are recognised as high-risk clones associated with hospital outbreaks in high-income countries, indicating global connectivity of the antimicrobial-resistant pathogen population.

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07.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.09830

Automated Scoring of Arabic Text Using Large Language Models: A Literature Review

Authors:

Khaoula Dahimi↗Hadda Cherroun↗Amel Belabbaci↗

In modern educational systems, Automatic Text Scoring (ATS) plays a central role by enabling scalable and consistent evaluation of learner responses without human intervention. Recently, the increased accessibility of LLMs and Arabic-specific datasets has sparked renewed interest in this area. In this work, we investigate LLM-Based approaches for the automated evaluation of Arabic texts, focusing on both short answer grading (ASAG) and essay scoring (AES). We further introduce a structured taxonomy comprising five dimensions: application domain, feedback generation capability, LLM architecture deployed, alignment with competency referential frameworks, and prompt engineering strategy. By applying this taxonomy, we conduct a comparative analysis of existing studies, examining their methodological approaches, datasets, evaluation metrics, and reported performance. The findings highlight the need for sustained and pedagogically grounded research efforts in Arabic ATS, given its significance for improving educational quality across Arabic-speaking communities.

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08.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10 DOI: HASH:0ae81a27bf9a086fee6e6a04ee445e5c

Folding the unfoldable 2: using AlphaFold and ESMFold to explore spurious proteins

Authors:

Orr↗A. K↗Bateman↗

Motivation: Spurious protein sequences, resulting from gene prediction errors, theoretically should not yield folded structures. AlphaFold2 was previously shown to predict short spurious sequences with high pLDDT scores and was therefore unlikely to distinguish between real proteins and spurious proteins which are usually short. We evaluate whether newer structure prediction methods (ESMFold and AlphaFold3) similarly predict short sequences with high pLDDT or if they better discriminate between spurious and real proteins. Results: All three structure prediction methods (ESMFold, AlphaFold2, and AlphaFold3) predict short spurious sequences from AntiFam with unexpectedly high pLDDT scores, however the discrimination between spurious and real proteins improves beyond 100 amino acids. By analysing sequences with disparate pTM and pLDDT scores, we identified two likely spurious shadow ORFs in Swiss-Prot and one potentially non-spurious AntiFam entry. Using the structure prediction scores, we developed a Gaussian Process Model and evaluated its performance on AlphaFold DB, identifying potential spurious proteins at scale. While limited on its own, this model can increase confidence in spurious protein identification when combined with other methods.

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09.

Nature (Science) 2026-06-18 DOI: HASH:cd5eb0f40a65e62d40c51275a332fd8c

Daily briefing: The proteins that protect us from deadly mutations

Authors:

Flora Graham↗

Proteins that ‘buffer’ the effects of mutations could help to treat diseases such as cancers. Plus, goats can follow human voices and the battle over a key ocean observatory project in the United States. Proteins that ‘buffer’ the effects of mutations could help to treat diseases such as cancers. Plus, goats can follow human voices and the battle over a key ocean observatory project in the United States.

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10.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20476

Impossibility of superluminal signalling rules out causal loops in conical spacetimes

Authors:

Maarten Grothus↗V. Vilasini↗

arXiv:2606.20476v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In PRL 129, 110401 it was shown that it is theoretically possible to have operationally detectable causal loops without violating the principle of no superluminal signalling (NSS) in (1+1)-Minkowski spacetime. Whether or not such causal loops are also possible in $d > 1$ spatial dimensions, has remained a key open question. We resolve this question by showing that in a wide class of "conical" spacetimes, including Minkowski with d > 1, NSS does rule out all operationally detectable causal loops, in classical, quantum and post-quantum theories. This establishes that the relationship between the relativistic principles of NSS and no causal loops depends inherently on the geometry of spacetime.

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11.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.19019

FlowObject: Flow Steering for Bridging Generative Priors and Reconstruction Fidelity

Authors:

Yuchen Rao↗Xuqian Ren↗Yinyu Nie↗Sayan Deb Sarkar↗Biao Zhang↗Vincent Lepetit↗Friedrich Fraundorfer↗

Recovering complete 3D representations of objects from few casual image captures remains a significant challenge. Recent 3D generative models, particularly those based on Flow-Matching (FM), can synthesize high-quality textured assets; however, they often suffer from ''synthetic bias'' where learned priors override observational evidence, alongside a lack of alignment with the observed instance. Conversely, optimization-based methods like 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) provide high fidelity on visible surfaces but fail to reason about unobserved geometry. In this paper, we present FlowObject, a framework that reformulates sparse-view 3D reconstruction as a training-free, guided inverse problem. Our approach applies a dual-space guidance strategy to steer the Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) trajectory of a flow-matching model, enabling the completion of unseen regions through learned generative priors while enforcing strict consistency with real-world observations. By integrating a 3DGS refinement stage, FlowObject further bridges the gap between ''synthetic-looking'' generative outputs and photorealistic reconstructions. Comprehensive benchmarks on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that current state-of-the-art methods often struggle to achieve geometric completeness and observational consistency simultaneously, especially under severe occlusions. In contrast, our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art generative models and optimization-based frameworks in both geometric completeness and view-dependent appearance fidelity.

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12.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16462

Learning aligned EEG representations with subject-specific encoders

Authors:

Bruna J. Lopes↗Gabriel Schwartz↗Sylvain Chevallier↗Raphael Y. de Camargo↗Bruno Aristimunha↗

arXiv:2606.16462v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cross-subject EEG decoding promises more training data, but it also exposes neural networks to strong inter-subject distribution shifts. We study whether task supervision and architecture alone can learn subject-aligned representations. We replace a shared EEG encoder with subject-specific encoders followed by a common classifier, and compare this hybrid model with standard EEGNet, AttentionBaseNet, and CTNet baselines with Euclidean Alignment (EA) on four motor-imagery datasets. EA improves shared encoders by recentering subject covariances, but the hybrid encoder largely internalises this role: validation-loss curves and latent-distance analyses change little when EA is removed. Subject-specific heads increase class distinctiveness and place each subject close to its own latent manifold, improving most subjects while leaving a method-sensitive subset. These results support subject-specific encoders as a learned alignment mechanism for EEG decoding and identify head selection for unseen subjects as the remaining bottleneck.

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13.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2510.27285

Rethinking Robust Adversarial Concept Erasure in Diffusion Models

Authors:

Qinghong Yin↗Yu Tian↗Heming Yang↗Xiang Chen↗Xianlin Zhang↗Yue Ming↗Xueming Li↗Yue Zhang↗

Concept erasure aims to selectively unlearning undesirable content in diffusion models (DMs) to reduce the risk of sensitive content generation. As a novel paradigm in concept erasure, most existing methods employ adversarial training to identify and suppress target concepts, thus reducing the likelihood of sensitive outputs. However, these methods often neglect the specificity of adversarial training in DMs, resulting in only partial mitigation. In this work, we investigate and quantify this specificity from the perspective of concept space, i.e., can adversarial samples truly fit the target concept space? We observe that existing methods neglect the role of conceptual semantics when generating adversarial samples, resulting in ineffective fitting of concept spaces. This oversight leads to the following issues: 1) when there are few adversarial samples, they fail to comprehensively cover the object concept; 2) conversely, they will disrupt other target concept spaces. Motivated by the analysis of these findings, we introduce S-GRACE (Semantics-Guided Robust Adversarial Concept Erasure), which grace leveraging semantic guidance within the concept space to generate adversarial samples and perform erasure training. Experiments conducted with seven state-of-the-art methods and three adversarial prompt generation strategies across various DM unlearning scenarios demonstrate that S-GRACE significantly improves erasure performance 26%, better preserves non-target concepts, and reduces training time by 90%. Our code is available at https://github.com/Qhong-522/S-GRACE.

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14.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.14783

The Vision Encoder as a Privacy Boundary: Visual-Token Side Channels in Encoder-Free Vision-Language Models

Authors:

Chenyu Zhou↗Qiliang Jiang↗Shuning Wu↗Xu Zhou↗

A vision encoder compresses image pixels into semantic embeddings, implicitly acting as a privacy boundary by preserving semantic content while attenuating pixel-local detail required for exact text recovery. Encoder-free vision-language models (VLMs) remove this boundary by routing image patches directly into the language-model token stream, thereby exposing an architectural privacy attack surface: intermediate visual tokens become a pre-output side channel. Under a token-access adversary, decoders invert visual-token streams from two encoder-free VLMs, Gemma4 and Fuyu, recovering recognizable image structure and readable held-out access codes, whereas matched encoder-based controls localize target regions but recover no exact strings. Within-model ablations show that the operative factor is spatial sampling fidelity of the visual-token grid, especially character-direction sampling density, rather than token or value count. The leakage is not limited to exported tokens: Gemma4 layer-0 key-value cache tensors are directly invertible, placing the side channel within KV caches commonly persisted by production serving stacks for decoding efficiency. The attack survives clutter, realistic document degradation, and zero-shot transfer to public document images, and it resists value-level defenses such as additive noise and quantization. Effective mitigation must therefore reduce spatial sampling, making removal of the vision encoder a first-class privacy decision in VLM deployment.

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15.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15950

Spectral Adaptive Conformal Prediction for Structured Non-Exchangeable Data

Authors:

Jeffery Opoku↗David Banahene↗

arXiv:2606.15950v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conformal prediction gives prediction intervals with finite-sample coverage when the data are exchangeable. Many time-indexed datasets are not exchangeable. They have seasons, recurring regimes, changing frequencies, or other forms of structured dependence. This paper studies a simple way to use that structure. We propose spectral adaptive conformal prediction, a method that forms weighted conformal quantiles using local spectral similarity and then updates the target miscoverage level online. The spectral weights choose calibration residuals that look relevant to the current test point. The adaptive update corrects the long-run miss rate when uncertainty changes over time. We give an approximate coverage result for the fixed spectral weighted quantile and a deterministic long-run calibration result for the adaptive update. Simulations with recurring regimes and slowly changing frequencies, together with three U.S. real-data examples, show that the hybrid method can improve on fixed spectral weighting, while also showing that spectral weighting must be monitored through effective sample size diagnostics.

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16.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16100

Your "Pro" LLM Subscription May Actually Be "Free": Exposing Fingerprint Spoofing Risks in LLM Inference Services

Authors:

Jiahao Zhang↗Xiuyu Li↗Suhang Wang↗

As Large Language Model (LLM) APIs become ubiquitous, users increasingly rely on black-box fingerprinting to verify that providers are serving the advertised premium models. However, these methods may overlook adversarial providers who manipulate model weights to cheat the fingerprint process. We introduce a novel threat termed fingerprint spoofing, where a malicious provider stealthily serves a weaker model that has been parameter-efficiently fine-tuned to mimic a stronger model, thereby evading user-side fingerprinting. We first formally prove that user-side resource constraints (i.e., finite query budgets and weak fingerprinting classifiers) make current fingerprinting vulnerable to fingerprint spoofing. Guided by this theoretical analysis, we propose GhostPrint, a cost-effective attack framework leveraging surrogate modeling, reward-ranked fine-tuning, and knowledge distillation. Extensive evaluations in both static and continual fingerprinting settings demonstrate that GhostPrint allows weak models to consistently bypass representative fingerprint methods while maintaining utility at a low fine-tuning cost, exposing a critical vulnerability in current LLM fingerprinting pipelines.

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17.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18 DOI: HASH:3863b88fe4c349a4d8860bf115d78aa8

Can Vision-Language Models See the Vital Signs? Benchmarking and Fine-Tuning for Intraoperative Monitor Reading

Authors:

Gao↗Wang↗Zhao↗Yang↗Zhang↗Feng↗He↗

Background Vital-sign deterioration is a leading contributor to preventable perioperative death, yet manual monitor reading is intermittent, error-prone, and subject to alarm fatigue. Automating this perceptual step could enable continuous surveillance, but existing solutions depend on device-specific hardware integration or cloud-hosted vision-language models (VLMs), which raise privacy, cost, and connectivity barriers in resource-limited healthcare facilities. Methods We constructed a benchmark of 200 in-the-wild intraoperative monitor photographs (spanning multiple vendors, angles, and illumination conditions) annotated for eight vital-sign parameters: heart rate, SpO2, ETCO2, respiratory rate, systolic/diastolic/mean blood pressure, and temperature. We evaluated an optical character recognition (OCR)-based pipeline, nine instruction-tuned VLMs (four commercial, five open-weight ranging from [&le;]4B to 31B parameters) under two prompting regimes, and a compact open model (Qwen3.5-9B) adapted via low-rank fine-tuning (LoRA, 0.46% of parameters updated). Results Under a domain-aware prompt, frontier VLMs reached 0.98-0.997 exact-match accuracy zero-shot, whereas the OCR pipeline and [&le;]4B model scored approximately 0.20 lower, defining a 9B-class usable floor. LoRA fine-tuning Qwen3.5-9B on 80-120 images raised accuracy from 0.953 to 0.994 (statistically indistinguishable from the best commercial model) and reduced the critical-error rate fivefold (0.0313 [-&gt;] 0.0063). Ablations showed that performance saturated at 80 training images and rank-8 adapters. Conclusion Monitor reading is a solved perception problem for VLMs above the 9B scale. A lightweight fine-tuned open model achieves frontier accuracy while running entirely on local hardware, preserving data privacy, offline capability, and near-zero marginal cost. Residual errors stem from blood-pressure source ambiguity and are addressable with explicit disambiguation logic.

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18.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2510.24043

Localized Kernel Projection Outlyingness: A Two-Stage Approach for Multi-Modal Outlier Detection

Authors:

Akira Tamamori↗

arXiv:2510.24043v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper presents Two-Stage LKPLO, a novel multi-stage outlier detection framework that overcomes the coexisting limitations of conventional projection-based methods: their reliance on a fixed statistical metric and their assumption of a single data structure. Our framework uniquely synthesizes three key concepts: (1) a generalized loss-based outlyingness measure (PLO) that replaces the fixed metric with flexible, adaptive loss functions like our proposed SVM-like loss; (2) a global kernel PCA stage to linearize non-linear data structures; and (3) a subsequent local clustering stage to handle multi-modal distributions. Comprehensive 5-fold cross-validation experiments on 10 benchmark datasets, with automated hyperparameter optimization, demonstrate that Two-Stage LKPLO achieves state-of-the-art performance. It significantly outperforms strong baselines on datasets with challenging structures where existing methods fail, most notably on multi-cluster data (Optdigits) and complex, high-dimensional data (Arrhythmia). Furthermore, an ablation study empirically confirms that the synergistic combination of both the kernelization and localization stages is indispensable for its superior performance. This work contributes a powerful new tool for a significant class of outlier detection problems and underscores the importance of hybrid, multi-stage architectures.

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19.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2401.08301

QoS Improvement in Multi User Cellular-Symbiotic Radio Network Assisted by Active-STAR-RIS

Authors:

Rahman Saadat Yeganeh↗Mohammad Javad Omidi↗Farshad Zeinali↗Mohammad Robat Mili↗Mohammad Ghavami↗

arXiv:2401.08301v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this article, we employ active simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (ASRIS) to enhance the quality of 6G cellular network services. The network integrates commensal symbiotic radio (CSR) subsystems to facilitate communication between passive Internet of Things (IoT) users and active users, referred to as symbiotic backscatter devices (SBDs) and symbiotic user equipments (SUEs), respectively. Since the SBDs are passive, transmitting information to the SUEs poses significant challenges. To overcome this challenge, we harness the capabilities of massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) antennas within the base station (BS) to relay the information transmitted by SBDs with greater power. This scheme uses the non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique for multiple access among all users, and potential interferences are eliminated using successive interference cancellation (SIC). The primary objective is to maximize the throughput between SBDs and SUEs. To achieve this, we formulate an optimization problem involving variables such as active beamforming coefficients at the BS and ASRIS, phase adjustments of ASRIS, and scheduling parameters between CSR and cellular networks. To solve this optimization problem, we used three deep reinforcement learning (DRL) methods: proximal policy optimization (PPO), twin delayed deep deterministic policy gradient (TD3), and asynchronous advantage actor critic (A3C). These methods were simulated, and the results demonstrate that A3C, TD3, and PPO have the best convergence speeds and achieve the highest increases in network throughput, respectively. Finally, the proposed scheme was evaluated using passive simultaneously transmitting and reflecting RIS (STAR-RIS), which demonstrated poorer performance compared to ASRIS.

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20.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.10466

UPLOTS: A Unified Pretrained Language Model for Constrained Time-series Generation

Authors:

Du Yin↗Hao Xue↗Jinliang Deng↗Yang Yang↗Shuang Ao↗Arian Prabowo↗Flora Salim↗

arXiv:2606.10466v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In time-series generation, existing approaches typically handcraft ortrain a separate model for each dataset, which hinders their scalability and fails to leverage shared temporal structures across domains. To address this fragmentation, we propose UPLOTS, a Unified, Prompt-guided Language model framework fOr constrained Time-Series Generation across diverse domains. Instead of building task-specific models, UPLOTS leverages a single pre-trained transformer backbone guided by learned constraint prompts, enabling on-demand generation with precise pattern control. One key innovation is our dynamic multi-dataset loss re-weighting and prompt-to-pattern mapping, which allows UPLOTS to internalize diverse temporal structures during training and conditionally generate them at inference. We evaluate UPLOTS on four real-world benchmarks and multiple constraint settings, including peak-period, calendar, load-level, and volatility patterns. Additional held-out constraint-combination and downstream forecasting experiments further demonstrate that UPLOTS generalizes beyond the original peak-pattern setting and improves data augmentation under scarce real-data regimes. Our code and baselines are available at anonymous github repo: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/UPLOTS-6C36.

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21.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19493

Ricci flow for the Bures–Helstrom qubit metric

Authors:

Andrew Lesniewski↗

arXiv:2606.19493v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Bures–Helstrom metric is the minimal monotone Riemannian metric on the state space of a qubit. With the quantum Fisher normalization used here, it identifies the Bloch ball with a geodesic hemisphere of the unit round three–sphere. We describe its Ricci flow explicitly. In a general rotationally symmetric gauge the flow is a coupled system for the radial lapse and warping factor; a single scalar equation appears only after a Hamilton–DeTurck gauge choice. In the corresponding moving DeTurck frame the squared warping function $\Psi=\Phi^2$ satisfies the linear forced heat equation \begin{equation*} D_t\Psi=\Psi_{ss}-2, \end{equation*} while the fixed-lapse coordinate form contains the associated transport term. Since the Bures–Helstrom metric is Einstein, the geometric flow itself is the homothetic shrinker \begin{equation*} g(t)=(1-4t)g_{\mathrm{BH}}, \end{equation*} with scalar curvature $6/(1-4t)$ and extinction time $T=1/4$. Thus the metric remains inside the monotone cone for all $t

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22.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17249

From Compression to Deployment: Real-Time and Energy-Efficient FastGRNN on Ultra-Constrained Microcontrollers

Authors:

Emre Can Kizilates↗

arXiv:2606.17249v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The dominant trajectory of modern machine learning has been to scale up: larger models, larger accelerators, larger memory budgets. Yet a multi-year global semiconductor supply constraint and the growing energy and carbon cost of always-online inference expose the fragility of this trajectory and motivate the opposite direction: refactoring AI and ML algorithms to fit the small, ubiquitous microcontrollers already in mass production in wearables, sensors, and edge appliances. We present an end-to-end open-source reproduction of FastGRNN, a compact gated recurrent cell, deployed on two bare-metal targets: the 8-bit Arduino (ATmega328P) and the 16-bit MSP430 (no hardware multiplier; 16 KB Flash; 512 B SRAM). Our compression pipeline combines low-rank weight factorization, iterative hard-thresholding sparsity, and per-tensor Q15 post-training quantization with explicit activation calibration. The deployed model occupies 566 bytes of weights and achieves macro F1 = 0.918 (seed 0; five-seed Q15 mean 0.853+-0.107) on the HAPT test set. It matches a PyTorch reference at 100% prediction agreement across 3,399 test windows (MCU seed 0; 99.91-100% C-equivalent across five seeds). Both platforms sustain real-time 50 Hz streaming inference (9.21 ms per sample on Arduino; 13 ms on MSP430), where a 256-entry sigmoid/tanh look-up table delivers a 30.5x speedup on the multiplier-less MSP430. Four contributions extend the original FastGRNN paper: (i) cross-platform bit-equivalent deterministic inference; (ii) characterization of recurrent warm-up latency (median 74 samples, 1.48 s; worst-case 125 samples, 2.50 s over 100 test windows); (iii) a deployable look-up-table recipe for multiplier-less embedded targets; and (iv) hardware energy characterization showing 17.7 mW active inference power,

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23.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11390

A Scalable PyTorch Abstraction for Multi-GPU Gaussian Splatting

Authors:

Matthew Cong↗Francis Williams↗Jonathan Swartz↗Mark Harris↗Sanja Fidler↗Ken Museth↗

Gaussian splatting methods have become increasingly popular for neural reconstruction of the real world. However, they are often limited in scale and resolution due to compute and memory constraints. We present a multi-GPU Gaussian splatting approach that scales reconstruction to higher resolutions and larger scenes while abstracting away the code complexity typically associated with distributing a model. To accomplish this, we propose a PyTorch backend that distributes the Gaussian parameters and splatting operators across GPUs via CUDA unified memory and NVLink. Because distribution occurs at the operator level, the model code requires no explicit cross-device communication. More broadly, the backend exposes multiple GPUs as an aggregate PyTorch device and supports other PyTorch operators. We demonstrate city-scale reconstructions with street-level detail consisting of over 1 billion Gaussian splats, more than 25 times as many as the current state of the art.

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24.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11527

Invariants of Sequential Circuits and Generalized Non-Abelian Statistics

Authors:

Shintaro Sato↗Yoshimasa Hidaka↗Ryohei Kobayashi↗

arXiv:2606.11527v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Non-invertible symmetries in quantum many-body systems generally give rise to sequential unitary circuits that move symmetry defects. In this paper, we investigate invariants defined by sequences of such circuits, which move non-invertible defects and generate a Berry phase evaluated on quantum states with defects. We show that this Berry phase generally defines an invariant under local deformations, provided that the sequential circuits preserve the locality of those deformations. This invariant also rules out a short-range-entangled state that preserves the non-invertible symmetry, thereby signaling the 't Hooft anomaly of a non-invertible symmetry purely in terms of unitary operators acting on a state. We then apply this framework to loop excitations in three spatial dimensions and identify a new loop excitation in the (3+1)D $\mathbb{D}_4$ topological order, which we dub a non-Abelian fermionic loop. Using the invariant of sequential circuits, we characterize the statistics of non-Abelian fermionic loops. In addition, we find a new (3+1)D mixed topological order with a single non-Abelian fermionic loop, whose long-range entanglement is protected by an invariant of sequential circuits.

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25.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19350

Pruning via Causal Attribution Preserves Reasoning Performance in Large Language Models

Authors:

Amogh Sheth↗Biruk Assefa↗Yi Wen Huang↗Andrew Lin↗Yuhao Ge↗

Large language models (LLMs) excel at multi-step reasoning but incur substantial inference cost. We introduce Causal Attribution Pruning (CAP), a training-free method that identifies critical attention heads by measuring their causal impact on reasoning tasks and uses these head-level scores to guide fine-grained weight pruning. For each attention head, CAP estimates the expected performance degradation when the head is masked during forward passes on a small calibration set of reasoning problems. These causal scores are then converted into weight-level importance values for the corresponding projection matrices. Unlike magnitude-only or activation-based criteria, CAP's interventional measurement directly captures each head's functional contribution, yielding relative accuracy gains of up to 61% over Wanda on ARC-Challenge at 20% sparsity. We evaluate CAP on GSM8K, StrategyQA, and ARC-Challenge using Llama-3-8B-Instruct and Mistral-7B-Instruct at 10%, 20%, and 50% sparsity. At moderate sparsity (10-20%), CAP improves over Wanda in most model-benchmark configurations. with especially large gains on ARC-Challenge for Llama-3. Our results suggest that attention-head-level causal attribution can better preserve reasoning performance on downstream benchmarks than correlational pruning criteria at equivalent sparsity, while remaining limited by coarse MLP attribution at 50% sparsity.

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