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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Wildfire pollution exposure during childhood adversely affects cognitive and neural development

Authors:
Judd↗kievit↗

Air pollution has well-documented negative cardiovascular and respiratory consequences. However, the impact of particulate matter pollution (PM2.5) on brain development is unclear. Animal studies suggest that exposure to early-life PM2.5 can cause adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes, but in vivo human work has been hampered by cross-sectional designs and heavily confounded PM2.5 exposure measures. Here we use an innovative natural experimental design to isolate the effects of wildfire pollution on neurocognitive development in a large cohort of children (N>9000, 4 waves, age 9-16). Doing so, we find that greater wildfire PM2.5 exposure is robustly associated with slower brain development and shallower cognitive improvement across early adolescence. Our study underscores the urgent public health concern that wildfire PM2.5 poses for childhood development.

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02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Humor Style Drives Laughter, Topic Shapes Acceptability: Evaluating Bilingual Personal and Political Robot-Delivered AI Jokes

Authors:
Anna-Maria Velentza↗Anne-Gwenn Bosser↗

arXiv:2606.13256v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Humor plays a central role in human social relationships, and recent advances in computational humor create new opportunities for integrating humor into human-robot interaction (HRI). While large language models (LLMs) can generate diverse forms of humor, it remains unclear how humor style, joke content, and language preference shape perceptions of robot-delivered humor in group settings. In this exploratory study, we employed a mixed factorial design in which participants evaluated AI-generated jokes delivered by a robot in a university classroom. We examined the effects of humor type (Affiliative, Self-Enhancing, Aggressive, Self-Defeating) and joke content (person-related vs. political) on perceived funniness and appropriateness, as well as preferred language. Results show that humor type significantly influences funniness, with Aggressive and Affiliative humor rated higher, while joke content primarily affects appropriateness, with person-related jokes preferred over political ones. Language preference was shaped by both joke content and participants' self-reported fluency and humor practices.

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03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

A High-Resolution Landscape Dataset for Concept-Based XAI With Application to Species Distribution Models

Authors:
Augustin de la Brosse↗Damien Garreau↗Thomas Houet↗Thomas Corpetti↗

arXiv:2604.13240v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Mapping the spatial distribution of species is essential for conservation policy and invasive species management. Species distribution models (SDMs) are the primary tools for this task, serving two purposes: achieving robust predictive performance while providing ecological insights into the driving factors of distribution. However, the increasing complexity of deep learning SDMs has made extracting these insights more challenging. To reconcile these objectives, we propose the first implementation of concept-based Explainable AI (XAI) for SDMs. We leverage the Robust TCAV (Testing with Concept Activation Vectors) methodology to quantify the influence of landscape concepts on model predictions. To enable this, we provide a new open-access landscape concept dataset derived from high-resolution multispectral and LiDAR drone imagery. It includes 653 patches across 15 distinct landscape concepts and 1,450 random reference patches, designed to suit a wide range of species. We demonstrate this approach through a case study of two aquatic insects, Plecoptera and Trichoptera, using two Convolutional Neural Networks and one Vision Transformer. Results show that concept-based XAI helps validate SDMs against expert knowledge while uncovering novel associations that generate new ecological hypotheses. Robust TCAV also provides landscape-level information, useful for policy-making and land management. Code and datasets are publicly available.

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04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

A green solvent screening tool for emerging materials via uncertainty aware, transformer enhanced transfer learning

Authors:
Ioannis Kouroudis↗Simon Ternes↗Zhaosu Gu↗Gohar Ali Siddiqui↗Marina Ustinova↗Angelo Lembo↗Alessio Gagliardi↗Aldo Di Carlo↗

arXiv:2606.13060v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate prediction of solubility remains a central challenge across materials science and sustainable chemistry. In particular due to emerging technologies like organic and hybrid photovoltaics, batteries, and catalysis, solvent usage is expected to increase significantly within the coming years. Therefore, substituting solvents with greener alternatives is vital. This is where machine learning can have substantial impact. However, the limited data on critical parameters of solubility significantly constraints machine learning efficacy. In this work, we transfer a pre-trained foundational model on QM9 targets to our application with minimal data requirements. Additionally, the pipeline integrates uncertainty quantification, allowing the user to gauge the confidence of the predictions. As baseline, we succeed in predicting the Hansen solubility parameters and Dielectric Constant for which extensive databases exist. Importantly, we achieve high model performance on additional targets, such as Gutmann Donor and Acceptor numbers, where the available data is extremely limited. Overall, we augment data on solubility descriptors by orders of magnitude with high quality predictions. For effective dissemination, we deploy easy-to-use, easily integrateable with high throughput labs, customizable tool for ranking and screening possible solvent substitutes. Finally, we rediscovered known green solvent alternatives and proposed new candidates proving its relevance for finding eco-friendly solvents.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Why Commodity WiFi Sensors Fail at Multi-Person Gait Identification: A Systematic Analysis Using ESP32

Authors:
Oliver Custance↗Saad Khan↗Simon Parkinson↗

WiFi Channel State Information (CSI) has shown promise for single-person gait identification, raising interest in its use for contactless biometrics, continuous authentication, and passive identification. However, the feasibility of multi-person identification on low-cost commodity devices remains unclear. A critical question is whether weak multi-person performance is primarily an algorithmic limitation, or whether it reflects a more fundamental sensing ceiling on commodity WiFi hardware. We address this question through a systematic empirical study using commodity ESP32 WiFi sensors. We evaluated six different signal separation methods–FastICA, SOBI, PCA-ICA, NMF, Wavelet, and Tensor decomposition–across seven scenarios spanning 1-10 people in both controlled and realistic indoor environments. To investigate beyond classification accuracy, we introduce three diagnostic metrics: intra-subject variability (ISV), inter-subject distinguishability (ISD), and performance degradation rate (PDR). In all methods, performance remains moderate (39%-56% accuracy), with limited evidence that algorithmic choice alone solves the problem. The best-performing method, NMF, reaches 56% accuracy, while all methods exhibit extremely high feature-space overlap (97%-99%), unstable within-subject representations, and marked environmental sensitivity. These findings suggest that, under commodity ESP32 CSI constraints, dense multi-person gait identification is limited more by sensing quality and spatial diversity than by the chosen separation algorithm. Our results have direct implications for security and privacy: they call into question the practicality of commodity WiFi CSI as a robust multi-user biometric primitive for authentication, while also placing important bounds on the passive identification capabilities achievable with low-cost off-the-shelf WiFi hardware.

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

MBABench: Evaluating LLM Agents on End-to-End Spreadsheet Tasks in Finance

Authors:
Thomson Yen↗Julian Poeltl↗Harshith Srinivas Gear↗Yilin Meng↗Joshua Fan↗Adam Shen↗Yili Liu↗Ali Bauyrzhan↗Siri Du↗Haoyang Liu↗Daniel Guetta↗Hongseok Namkoong↗…

arXiv:2605.22664v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: LLM agents are increasingly expected to carry out end-to-end workflows, producing complete artifacts from high-level user instructions. To meet enterprise needs, frontier AI labs have developed agents that can construct entire spreadsheets from scratch. This is especially relevant in finance, where core workflows such as financial modeling, forecasting, and scenario analysis are commonly conducted through spreadsheets. Yet, existing spreadsheet benchmarks do not measure this advanced capability, focusing instead on question-answering or single-formula edits. To address this gap, we provide one of the first evaluations of agents on end-to-end spreadsheet tasks, focusing on economically critical financial workflows such as modeling and scenario analysis. Since deliverables therein are routinely reviewed and revised by multiple stakeholders, judging their quality necessarily involves high-level criteria such as readability or ease of modification. To reflect the multidimensional nature of solution quality, we develop an evaluation taxonomy comprising three dimensions: Accuracy, Formula, and Format, each comprising fine-grained criteria that reflect professional standards. The Claude family leads the benchmark and produces the most professional-looking outputs in our qualitative review, but even the strongest agents frequently fall short of professional finance standards and degrade sharply as the difficulty increases beyond a few chained calculations. This suggests that current agents are not yet able to reliably produce professional-quality spreadsheets at the level of complexity real-world workflows demand.

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07.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-11

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

Authors:
David Adam↗

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

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08.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-29

Availability, appeal, and addictiveness by design: Tobacco and nicotine industry deliberate targeting of youth

Authors:
Raglan Maddox↗

by Raglan Maddox, Becky Freeman, Charlotta Pisinger, Emily Banks Contemporary tobacco and nicotine products, particularly e-cigarettes, are deliberately designed, marketed, and distributed to maximize youth appeal, uptake, dependence, and use. Youth uptake is a predictable outcome of systems designed to maximize product availability, appeal, and addictiveness. In recognition of the World No Tobacco Day 2026 theme, "unmasking the appeal", this Perspective by Raglan Maddox and colleagues discusses how tobacco and nicotine products, particularly e-cigarettes, are deliberately designed and marketed to maximize youth appeal, and highlight the need for policies to ensure greater industry accountability and to tackle concerning uptake trends.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

ttda704 at SemEval-2026 Task 4: Modeling Narrative Structures via Pseudonymization and Multi-View Sentence Alignment

Authors:
Tai Tran Tan↗An Dinh Thien↗

We present our approach to SemEval 2026 Task 4: Narrative Story Similarity and Narrative Representation Learning. Our solution uses contrastive learning with fine-tuned sentence transformers to capture narrative similarity across abstract themes, course of action, and outcomes. We develop two pipelines: (Track A) a single-view method that encodes full narratives with smart layer freezing to reduce overfitting, and (Track B) a multi-view method that models theme, plot, and outcome with view-specific projection heads and self-supervised alignment. Both pipelines build on sentence-transformers models and are trained with contrastive loss on synthetic data. The code is available at the following GitHub repository: https://github.com/dinhthienan33/SemEval2026-Task4-ttda704.

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10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Prompt2Effect: Training-Free Image-to-Video Model Specialization via LoRA Generation

Authors:
Xiaomeng Yang↗Yanyu Li↗Gordon Guocheng Qian↗Ivan Skorokhodov↗Viacheslav Ivanov↗Avalon Vinella↗Xuan Zhang↗Yanzhi Wang↗Sergey Tulyakov↗Anil Kag↗

Personalizing Image-to-Video (I2V) diffusion models with specific visual effects is increasingly demanded for high-end video generation. Current practice requires training a separate Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) module for each effect, incurring substantial data curation and iterative optimization costs that hinder interactive control. We present Prompt2Effect, a weight-driven hypernetwork that amortizes per-effect training by directly synthesizing effect-specific LoRA weights in a single forward pass. Unlike prior hypernetworks that regress adapter weights purely from semantics, Prompt2Effect is explicitly conditioned on the frozen base model weights, grounding weight prediction in the structural geometry of each layer. Furthermore, instead of predicting raw LoRA matrices, we introduce an SVD-canonicalized parameterization that resolves factorization ambiguity and stabilizes large-scale weight synthesis. Together, these design principles enable accurate and scalable LoRA prediction for high-dimensional I2V diffusion models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Prompt2Effect achieves on-par or superior video quality and effect alignment compared to conventional LoRA fine-tuning, while reducing the computational cost from 56 GPU training hours to 3.3 seconds of hypernetwork inference. When used as initialization for subsequent fine-tuning, our predicted weights further improve final performance and accelerate optimization by approximately 10x.

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

A Data-Centric Framework for Detecting and Correcting Corrupted Labels

Authors:
Ha-Linh Nguyen↗Hong-Anh Nguyen↗Minh-Duc La↗Thu-Trang Nguyen↗Son Nguyen↗Hieu Dinh Vo↗

arXiv:2606.11699v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The performance of machine learning and deep learning models largely depends on the quality of the training data. However, the quality of the real-world datasets is often compromised by noisy labels, which can substantially degrade model accuracy and reliability. To address this challenge, we propose Relabeler, an end-to-end data-centric framework for detecting and correcting corrupted labels. For corrupted label detection, Relabeler jointly leverages both local and global relationships among data instances to identify potentially noisy samples. After detecting suspicious instances, Relabeler further performs label correction by estimating the most probable clean label for each instance based on both its input features and observed noisy label. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets, noise types, and noise rates demonstrate that Relabeler consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving up to 58% improvement in label correction precision and 6% improvement in downstream task performance.

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12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Strategic Feature Selection

Authors:
Jivat Neet Kaur↗Pratik Patil↗Divya Shanmugam↗Emma Pierson↗Michael I. Jordan↗Nika Haghtalab↗Meena Jagadeesan↗Ahmed Alaa↗Serena Wang↗

arXiv:2606.18867v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When algorithmic predictors inform resource allocation in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, these predictors must account for strategic manipulation of input features. The typical solution is to redesign the predictor itself to explicitly account for strategic interactions. In practice, however, decision makers are often constrained to adjusting coarser levers within existing prediction pipelines. For example, healthcare organizations often select which features to exclude based on perceived manipulability, while using standard regularization procedures to shrink the coefficients of retained features. In this work, we initiate a formal study of strategic classification through feature selection and its interaction with ridge regularization. Our main finding is that excluding individual features based on their manipulability alone is generally suboptimal. We provide a fine-grained characterization of the performance of a feature subset under optimal regularization, yielding new insights for policy design. Motivated by this characterization, we develop a practical algorithm for jointly choosing the feature set and the level of ridge regularization. Through a real-world case study on a healthcare payments benchmark, we illustrate how our algorithm can guide the design of coarse policy levers in practice. Our results provide a principled, practical framework for mitigating the effects of strategic behavior in algorithmic decision-making systems.

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13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Laws of Large Numbers for Non-Independent Random Variables on Hyperspaces with respect to the Hausdorff Metric

Authors:
Jinping Zhang↗Li Guan↗

arXiv:2011.07199v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper investigates the limit behavior of the Minkowski sums for sequences of set-valued random variables. When the underlying space is finite dimensional, by using the support function, we establish the weak and strong laws of large numbers for non-independent random variables in the hyperspace with respect to the Hausdorff metric $d_H$.

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14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

TRON: Tracing Rays to Orchestrate a Neural Renderer for 3D Gaussian Reconstructions

Authors:
Or Perel↗Hassan Abu Alhaija↗Zian Wang↗Jacob Munkberg↗Matan Atzmon↗Sanja Fidler↗Masha Shugrina↗

We introduce TRON, a rendering framework that combines 3D Gaussian ray tracing with neural rendering to enable realistic and controllable rendering of real-world 3D scenes under novel lighting, dynamic object motion, object insertion, and material editing. Prior approaches that rely solely on physically based rendering (PBR) of Gaussian representations struggle to achieve realistic relighting due to imperfections in reconstructed geometry, material estimates, and light transport estimation. At the same time, neural rendering methods often lack an explicit scene representation, limiting their ability to support interactive editing with fine-grained manipulation. TRON bridges these two paradigms. We use intrinsic decomposition priors from a learned inverse rendering model to regularize the material properties of a Gaussian field, and repurpose a ray tracer to provide radiometric guidance rather than final pixels. By treating this output as a structured 3D scaffold, we empower a lightweight neural renderer to bridge the domain gap between shading-model constrained estimates and photorealistic output. Our key insight is that the combination of explicit 3D knowledge with robust material priors provides speed and controllability, while neural rendering enables the synthesis of photorealistic images. To support real-world scenarios, we train our neural renderer with a multi-stage strategy consisting of large-scale pretraining and targeted fine-tuning on a newly constructed dataset of 2.1M rendered synthetic and real-world frames from 3D reconstructions. TRON outperforms Gaussian-based relighting methods in realism, and prior neural renderers in editability and speed. To the best of our knowledge, TRON is the first method to enable practical interactive applications in captured 3D environments, offering realistic appearance under dynamic geometric, lighting and material conditions.

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

Extending Covariant Fluctuation Theorems into Quantum Regime through Quasiprobability Approach

Authors:
Ji-Hui Pei↗Tingzhang Shi↗Jin-Fu Chen↗H. T. Quan↗

arXiv:2606.14519v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The covariant formulation of stochastic thermodynamics requires treating the stochastic work as a 4-vector, posing significant challenges for quantum systems due to the non-commutativity. We introduce a new quasiprobability distribution for the work 4-vector, which combines the Wigner and Margenau-Hill quasiprobabilities. This extends the covariant fluctuation theorems from classical to quantum regime. We illustrate our findings with a scalar field driven by classical particles with a generalized version of trace formula. Our work establishes a quasiprobability approach to studying relativistic quantum thermodynamics in a covariant way.

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16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

FACTR 2: Learning External Force Sensing for Commodity Robot Arms Improves Policy Learning

Authors:
Steven Oh↗Jason Jingzhou Liu↗Tony Tao↗Philip Han↗Kenneth Shaw↗Satoshi Funabashi↗Ruslan Salakhutdinov↗Deepak Pathak↗

arXiv:2606.12406v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Contact-rich manipulation requires force sensitivity, but many robot arms lack dedicated force sensors due to their high cost. We present Neural External Torque Estimation (NEXT), a data-driven method that estimates external joint torques without needing any dedicated force sensors. NEXT trains in 1 minute from only 10 minutes of free-motion data, yet achieves estimates comparable to dedicated joint-torque sensors. NEXT enables force-feedback teleoperation on low-cost arms and improves policy learning through Force-Informed Re-Sampling Training (FIRST), which up-samples pre-contact and contact segments during behavior cloning. Across five long-horizon tasks, FIRST outperforms prior force-aware policies by over 17% in task progress. Together, NEXT and FIRST bring force-aware teleoperation and policy learning to off-the-shelf robots without additional sensing hardware. Video results and code are available at https://jasonjzliu.com/factr2

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17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

CEVAR: Centerline Embedding Extraction for Endovascular Aneurysm Repair

Authors:
Roman Naeem↗Timo Niiniskorpi↗Charlotte Sandstr\"om↗Naman Desai↗Anders Jeppsson↗Ida H\"aggstr\"om↗Fredrik Kahl↗H{\aa}kan Roos↗Jennifer Alv\'en↗

Long-term mortality rates after endovascular aneurysm repair (EVAR) remain elevated due to post-EVAR rupture caused by loss of seal in stent graft sealing zones. Structured CT review using centerline measurements improves detection, but current workflows require manual centerline editing and expert operators. We propose a transformer framework for automated, protocol-driven sealing zone assessment that combines 3D centerline tracking with embedding-based geometric prediction. Two state-of-the-art image-to-graph models are evaluated for aorto-iliac centerline extraction from follow-up CT and for measurement of stent position, vessel diameters, and seal lengths according to EVAR4C protocol. Across the full test set and a challenging no-contrast subset, the proposed fully automatic method outperforms the commercial semi-automatic workflow.

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18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Geometry of Lightning Self-Attention: Identifiability and Dimension

Authors:
Nathan W. Henry↗Giovanni Luca Marchetti↗Kathl\'en Kohn↗

arXiv:2408.17221v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider function spaces defined by self-attention networks without normalization, and theoretically analyze their geometry. Since these networks are polynomial, we rely on tools from algebraic geometry. In particular, we study the identifiability of deep attention by providing a description of the generic fibers of the parametrization for an arbitrary number of layers and, as a consequence, compute the dimension of the function space. Additionally, for a single-layer model, we characterize the singular and boundary points. Finally, we formulate a conjectural extension of our results to normalized self-attention networks, prove it for a single layer, and numerically verify it in the deep case.

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19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

AthDGC: An Open Diachronic Greek Treebank with Indo-European Parallels

Authors:
Nikolaos Lavidas↗Kiki Nikiforidou↗Dag Haug↗Leonid Kulikov↗Vassiliki Geka↗Vassileios Symeonidis↗Theodoros Michalareas↗Sofia Chionidi↗Anastasia Tsiropina↗Eleni Plakoutsi↗Evangelos Argyropoulos↗

AthDGC ("Athens-PROIEL") is an open, end-to-end workflow and dataset. It is, to the best of our knowledge, the first openly licensed dependency-parsed treebank of Greek that spans eight diachronic periods, namely Archaic, Classical, Koine, Late Antique, Byzantine, Late Byzantine, Early Modern, and Modern Greek, under a single PROIEL XML 2.0 schema, with verse-level cross-alignment of the New Testament to Latin (Vulgate), Gothic (Wulfila), Old Church Slavonic (Marianus), and Classical Armenian. AthDGC builds on the PROIEL Treebank Family (Haug and Johndal 2008; Eckhoff et al. 2018), which established the schema and the Koine-Greek reference set for the project. Annotation uses the Stanford Stanza PROIEL-trained workflow; sentence-level alignment uses LaBSE, a multilingual sentence-embedding model; word-level alignment uses multilingual-BERT attention through the AwesomeAlign procedure. The v0.4 release provides curated samples and the open-source toolkit; the full annotated corpus partitions remain under v0.5 audit on the Greek national HPC. Quantitative scale, per-witness verse counts, and per-period annotated-row counts are reported in the v0.5 release notes, after the audit pass completes. Concept DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20439182.

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20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Do Vision-Language Models Understand 3D Scenes or Just Catalogue Objects?

Authors:
Animesh Maheshwari↗Divyansh Sahu↗Nishit Verma↗

arXiv:2605.20448v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-language models reliably name objects in a scene, but do they represent the 3D layout those objects inhabit? We introduce a 3,034-sample human-curated benchmark targeting three components of spatial understanding: depth-ordered occlusion (probed via three independent counterfactual operationalisations), optical-geometry inference over visible reflections, and volumetric rearrangement planning. Six frontier and open-weight VLMs, scored by trained annotators on 18,204 responses with no LLM-as-judge, reveal a sharp dissociation: models that plan rearrangements over visible layouts at 53–97% accuracy and rarely violate collision constraints fall to 6–45% on occlusion and below 7% on reflections. An embodied-reasoning model reproduces the same profile. White-box analysis on Qwen3-VL-8B-Thinking localises the failure to the visual-token merger: spatial information recoverable throughout the vision encoder becomes inaccessible after token compression and only stabilises again when clean post-merger activations are patched into the language decoder.

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21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Universal Crossovers of Stabilizer Entropy Beyond Criticality

Authors:
Reyhaneh Khasseh↗E. A. Ramirez Trino↗M. A. Rajabpour↗

arXiv:2606.13810v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Stabilizer Rényi entropy has emerged as a probe of nonstabilizerness in quantum many-body systems, but its scaling structure beyond critical points remains poorly understood compared with entanglement entropy. Recent field-theory approaches indicate that stabilizer entropy contains universal critical data and boundary-sensitive terms, raising the question of how these structures extend into massive and crossover regimes. We address this problem for a broad class of finite-range spin chains at Rényi index one-half. We derive exact finite-size formulas for both full periodic chains and finite intervals of the infinite chain, making the universal crossover from critical to noncritical behavior analytically accessible. In periodic geometry, the entropy obeys a volume law away from criticality and exhibits a universal finite-size crossover controlled by the competition between system size and correlation length. We also show that the large-scale SRE density develops a cusp across the field-tuned critical line, while the XX endpoint is governed by a distinct scaling regime associated with the saturation point. In the subsystem geometry, the interval entropy separates bulk critical behavior from boundary contributions generated by the way the finite region cuts the infinite chain. The crossover from critical to massive behavior is then encoded in boundary constants and universal functions controlled by the correlation length. Through exact stabilizer-entropy correspondences, the scaling theory extends to internal XY reductions, Finite-range spin chains, and Cluster–Ising representatives. Our results provide an exact lattice benchmark for the emerging QFT description of stabilizer entropy beyond isolated conformal points.

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22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

SpatialClaw: Rethinking Action Interface for Agentic Spatial Reasoning

Authors:
Seokju Cho↗Ryo Hachiuma↗Abhishek Badki↗Hang Su↗Byung-Kwan Lee↗Chan Hee Song↗Sifei Liu↗Subhashree Radhakrishnan↗Seungryong Kim↗Yu-Chiang Frank Wang↗Min-Hung Chen↗

Spatial reasoning, the ability to determine where objects are, how they relate, and how they move in 3D, remains a fundamental challenge for vision-language models (VLMs). Tool-augmented agents attempt to address this by augmenting VLMs with specialist perception modules, yet their effectiveness is bounded by the action interface through which those tools are invoked. In this work, we study how the design of this interface shapes the agent's capacity for open-ended spatial reasoning. Existing spatial agents either employ single-pass code execution, which commits to a full analysis strategy before any intermediate result is observed, or rely on a structured tool-call interface that often offers less flexibility for freely composing operations or tailoring the analysis to each task. Both designs offer limited flexibility for open-ended, complex 3D/4D spatial reasoning. We therefore propose SpatialClaw, a training-free framework for spatial reasoning that adopts code as the action interface. SpatialClaw maintains a stateful Python kernel pre-loaded with input frames and a suite of perception and geometry primitives, letting a VLM-backed agent write one executable cell per step conditioned on all prior outputs, enabling the agent to flexibly compose and manipulate perception results and adapt its analysis to both intermediate text and visual observations and the demands of each problem. Evaluated across 20 spatial reasoning benchmarks spanning a broad range of static and dynamic 3D/4D spatial reasoning tasks, SpatialClaw achieves 59.9% average accuracy, outperforming the recent spatial agent by +11.2 points, with consistent gains across six VLM backbones from two model families without any benchmark- or model-specific adaptation.

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23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

EFIQA: Explainable Fundus Image Quality Assessment via Anatomical Priors

Authors:
Pengwei Wang↗Jos\'e Morano↗Qian Wan↗Hrvoje Bogunovi\'c↗

arXiv:2606.20108v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Image quality control is vital for a wide range of downstream applications. Deep learning-based image quality assessment methods typically train classifiers on dataset-specific quality labels, inheriting two limitations: (1) generalization is tied to the labeling criteria of the training set and (2) these methods cannot provide spatial feedback on where the quality is degraded, lacking explainability. In this work, we propose EFIQA, a framework that requires no quality-related supervision and produces spatial quality maps by design. Rather than learning ``what is degradation" from human-annotated labels, EFIQA learns ``what should be there" by leveraging anatomical priors. For fundus photography, we instantiate this as a two-stage approach, by first training an unsupervised anomaly detector via masked anatomical inpainting to identify regions of missing vasculature, and then distilling this prior knowledge into a shallow adapter mapping features of a frozen foundation model to precise quality maps. External-dataset evaluation demonstrates that this label-free approach with minimal adaptation achieves better performance and explainability compared with supervised methods across benchmarks with different quality criteria, highlighting its potential for real-world applications.

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24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

TACOMORE: Exploring a replicable prompting protocol for LLM-assisted corpus analysis

Authors:
Bingru Li↗Han Wang↗Nicholas Groom↗

As corpus linguistics continues to scale, researchers are facing a growing methodological bottleneck: while computational tools can easily count billions of words, the qualitative interpretation of these data remains a slow and labor-intensive human task. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising way to automate this process, yet their integration into the field is often hindered by concerns over black-box unpredictability and a lack of replicability. This study introduces TACOMORE, a structured prompting framework designed to transform ad-hoc AI interactions into a standardized linguistic protocol. Built upon four foundational principles (Task, Context, Model, and Replicability), the framework guides LLMs to move beyond generic probability prediction to anchoring their reasoning in the specific co-occurrence patterns of a target corpus. We applied this framework to three core corpus tasks, i.e., the analysis of keywords, collocates, and concordances, using an open corpus of COVID-19 research abstracts. After testing three LLMs, we found that while structured prompting improves accuracy and replicability, inherent limitations regarding hallucination persist. This research offers a critical lens into the role of LLMs in corpus linguistics, highlighting their potential as complementary tools while emphasizing the irreplaceable role of human validation.

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25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Low-Density Lipoprotein Cholesterol and Dementia Risk: Integrating Mendelian Randomization and Target Trial Emulation Within the Heart-Brain Axis

Authors:
Mukumbi↗Liu↗Shi↗Toyli↗Hung↗G.-U↗Chen↗Q.-H↗Sha↗Chiu↗P.-Y↗Zhou↗…

Background: The heart-brain axis links cardiovascular and neurodegenerative disease through shared vascular and inflammatory mechanisms. Although low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) is an established causal factor in atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD), its relationship with dementia remains uncertain, with midlife elevations associated with increased risk but late-life associations often appearing null or inverse. To address this cholesterol paradox, we integrated mendelian randomization (MR) with an active-comparator new-user target trial emulation. Methods: We applied a triangulated causal inference framework integrating two-sample MR with observational target trial emulation. Genetic variants associated with LDL-C were used as instrumental variables to evaluate Alzheimer disease (AD), dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), frontotemporal dementia (FTD), and any dementia (AnyDem), with causal estimates derived using inverse-variance weighted models and sensitivity analyses for heterogeneity and pleiotropy. In parallel, an active-comparator new-user design compared statin versus ezetimibe initiation among adults aged 60 years or older using propensity score (PS) overlap weighting and Cox proportional hazards models to evaluate cardiovascular and dementia outcomes. Results: Genetically predicted LDL-C was associated with increased risk of DLB (OR 1.65, 95% CI 1.30-2.10; p

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