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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Rumination as a cognitive vulnerability factor in perinatal bereavement: evidence from the CARING study

Purpose. Perinatal loss is associated with a high risk of persistent psychological distress, including prolonged grief, depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress symptoms. Cognitive processes such as rumination may play a crucial role in maintaining and amplifying distress following loss, yet their specific contribution in perinatal bereavement remains underexplored. Methods. The CARING (Cognitive Analysis and Rumination INvestigation in perinatal Grief) study employed a cross-sectional design involving 298 parents who experienced perinatal loss within the previous five years. Participants completed an anonymous online survey including measures of depressive rumination (Ruminative Response Scale, RRS), angry rumination (Anger Rumination Scale, ARS), perinatal grief (Perinatal Grief Scale, PGS), general psychopathology (SCL-90), and post-traumatic stress symptoms (NSESSS). Non-parametric analyses were conducted to examine associations between rumination patterns and psychological outcomes. Results. Higher levels of rumination were significantly associated with greater perinatal grief, depressive and anxiety symptoms, and post-traumatic stress. Depressive rumination showed consistently stronger associations with all outcomes compared to angry rumination. Participants presenting both depressive and angry rumination exhibited the highest levels of grief intensity, psychological distress, and PTSD symptoms, suggesting a graded relationship between rumination patterns and severity of distress. Rumination levels were not significantly associated with gestational age at loss or with having received psychological support. Conclusions. Rumination, particularly in its depressive form, appears to function as a transdiagnostic cognitive vulnerability factor in perinatal bereavement. These findings highlight rumination as a potential target for early screening and tailored psychological interventions aimed at reducing long-term distress following perinatal loss.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Towards Anomaly Detection on Relational Data

arXiv:2606.18621v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Relational databases are widely used for managing structured data in real-world systems. Detecting anomalies from such relational data is crucial for identifying fraud, risks, and abnormal behaviors, yet remains under-explored. The key challenges lie in the intrinsic complexity of relational data: multi-table attributes are high-dimensional and heterogeneous, making sparse abnormal clues easy to overwhelm by normal or irrelevant information; and anomalies may further manifest as abnormal connection patterns across different foreign-key relations, which existing tabular and graph anomaly detection methods are ill-suited to capture. To address them, we propose RelAD, a reconstruction-based framework that captures anomalies from both attribute and relational edge reconstruction. RelAD contains two core modules: conditional sparse-gated attribute reconstruction, which suppresses redundant multi-table attributes and emphasizes abnormal semantic blocks, and dual-view multi-relational edge reconstruction, which detects relation-specific abnormal connections from both intrinsic and behavioral entity profiles. The resulting attribute and relational signals are integrated through a lightweight fusion module to produce the final anomaly score. We further construct 6 benchmark datasets with systematic anomalies, on which extensive experiments show that RelAD consistently outperforms other baselines while achieving competitive efficiency.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Learning ground state observables from quantum computing experiments

arXiv:2606.15983v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent theoretical progress has established conditions under which machine learning models can efficiently predict ground-state properties of gapped local Hamiltonians when trained on quantum-generated data. Previous experimental demonstrations in this paradigm, however, have largely been limited to small systems or highly structured states, due to the difficulty of preparing many-body ground states on quantum processors. In this work, we demonstrate learning from experimental quantum data generated from approximate ground states of the two-dimensional Heisenberg XXZ model with system sizes up to 115 qubits. We construct a dataset of single-site expectation values, two-point correlations, and 12-body loop correlations across the antiferromagnetic phase. We then train neural networks on this data and show that they can accurately predict spatially resolved observables for previously unseen Hamiltonian parameters, both within the training distribution and in an out-of-distribution regime approaching the phase boundary. Our results demonstrate the practical realization of learning from quantum data for an interacting two-dimensional many-body system at scale, motivating a path toward regimes where quantum processors could provide training data beyond the reach of classical approximation methods.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Beyond Algorithms: Conceptual Innovation in Medical Imaging AI

arXiv:2606.19270v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Artificial intelligence has driven rapid progress in medical imaging research, producing increasingly sophisticated algorithms and steady improvements on benchmark tasks. However, this algorithm-centric trajectory has also revealed a growing imbalance: while computational methods advance rapidly, the conceptual foundations that define imaging tasks, evaluation metrics, and clinical meaning sometimes remain underexamined. In this Perspective, we distinguish algorithmic innovation, which focuses on improving computational implementations and performance within a fixed problem definition, from conceptual innovation, which reframes what problems are posed, how success is measured, and why an approach is clinically relevant. We argue that prevailing incentive structures, training pathways, and publication norms disproportionately reward algorithmic novelty, particularly for early-career researchers, while at times undervaluing conceptual contributions that are essential for scientific maturation and clinical translation. Through representative examples from medical imaging AI, we show how insufficient conceptual grounding can lead to misaligned objectives, fragile generalization, and limited real-world impact. We conclude with actionable recommendations for researchers, mentors, reviewers, and journals to better recognize, support, and integrate conceptual innovation alongside algorithmic advances.

05.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

The Amazon can be saved — with concerted action inside and outside Brazil

Authors: Unknown Author

As deforestation in the Amazon falls, fresh evidence shows that the rainforest can withstand global warming, but only if there is a worldwide effort to stop cutting it down. As deforestation in the Amazon falls, fresh evidence shows that the rainforest can withstand global warming, but only if there is a worldwide effort to stop cutting it down.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Toward a National Registry for Inborn Errors of Immunity in Peru: A Qualitative Implementation Study

Background: Peru lacks an integrated information system for patients with Inborn Errors of Immunity (IEI). Although disease registries are essential tools for data management and health planning, their success depends on implementation science approaches that account for local contextual factors. This study reports Phase I of a three-phase mixed-methods implementation project to design and develop a national IEI registry. Methods: Phase I consisted of a phenomenological qualitative study exploring stakeholder perspectives. Semi-structured focus groups and in-depth interviews were conducted with 29 key stakeholders across four groups: policy-makers, clinical experts, end-users (immunologists, residents, allied health personnel), and patient organization representatives. Interviews followed a guide structured around four a priori domains (structure, navigation, feasibility, and perception of existing systems). Discussions were conducted in Spanish, audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and coded using ATLAS.ti. A hybrid thematic analysis combining deductive and inductive coding was performed. Data elements proposed for the registry were triangulated with qualitative findings. Results: Thirty-six initial codes were consolidated into 15 categories, which were further integrated into four overarching themes conceptualized as pathways toward intention to use: (1) Environment, where governance, regulatory backing, and sustainable financing were identified as key enablers, while limited interoperability emerged as a structural barrier; (2) Technical Dimension, emphasizing usability, alignment with clinical workflow, and a hierarchical data architecture (demographic, clinical, therapeutic); (3) Users, highlighting clinical leadership, protected time, digital readiness, and perceived usefulness as stronger motivators than financial incentives; and (4) Patients, underscoring data protection, transparency, trust, and advocacy as essential for legitimacy and sustainability. Conclusions: A national IEI registry in Peru is perceived as necessary and feasible if implemented with strong regulatory foundations, interoperable design, robust data security, and user-centered architecture. These findings informed the development of an initial functional prototype and the operational plan for Phase II, focused on usability evaluation.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Comparative Performance Analysis of NIST PQC Standards: From STM32 Software Limitations to FPGA-SoC Acceleration

arXiv:2606.15744v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rapid advancement of quantum computing poses a significant threat to classical public-key cryptographic systems, necessitating the transition to Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC). This study investigates the implementation challenges of NISTstandardized signature schemes on resource-constrained embedded hardware. We present a comparative analysis of SPHINCS+ and CRYSTALS-Dilithium on an ARM Cortex-M4 (STM32F407G) microcontroller. Our findings reveal that SPHINCS+ is practically unusable in this software-only environment, with impractical execution times. Furthermore, the reference Dilithium implementation failed to execute entirely on the MCU due to severe RAM and timing constraints. To overcome these hardware limitations, we integrated a hardware-accelerated Dilithium core onto a Xilinx Zynq-7000 ZedBoard SoC. By implementing a specialized Number Theoretic Transform (NTT) accelerator in the FPGA fabric, we achieved successful execution with performance rates for key generation and signature generation at millisecond levels. These results demonstrate that while pure software PQC is non-viable for standard microcontrollers, a hardware-software codesign approach provides the necessary efficiency for quantumresistant embedded systems.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

PCA-Enhanced Adaptive NVAR Framework for High-Resolution Sea Surface Temperature Forecasting in the East Sea

arXiv:2606.12141v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate forecasting of sea surface temperature (SST) in regional seas such as the East Sea is crucial for monitoring marine ecosystems, assessing climate risks, managing fisheries, and conducting naval operations. Traditional numerical ocean models provide reliable predictions but are computationally expensive and often unsuitable for real-time forecasting. Many deep learning methods also struggle with high-dimensional spatiotemporal ocean data and experience error accumulation over longer forecasting periods. This study builds on our previously proposed Adaptive Next-Generation Reservoir Computing (Adaptive NVAR) framework, initially introduced and tested on synthetic dynamical systems, and extends it to ocean forecasting. We present a reduced-order forecasting framework that combines Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) with Adaptive NVAR to predict SST dynamics in the East Sea. SST fields are compressed into a low-dimensional representation using SVD, which extracts dominant modes of ocean variability. Adaptive NVAR models the temporal evolution of these latent states, and the predicted states are reconstructed into SST forecasts. We evaluate the framework using regional ocean datasets and compare it with the standard NG-RC/NVAR. Results show that Adaptive NVAR consistently achieves lower forecasting errors across multiple prediction horizons. In addition, SVD reduces computational complexity, resulting in a fast and scalable framework suitable for real-time ocean forecasting.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Foresight: Iterative Reasoning About Clues that Matter for Navigation

arXiv:2606.12550v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open-world mapless navigation from sparse language instructions requires resolving underspecified goals and inferring which environmental cues are relevant for reaching the goal. For instance, reaching an out-of-view destination may require interpreting ramps, signs, or detours that reveal where to go or which route to take. Prior works are limited by their reliance on known navigation factors and closed-set factor categories, or identify cues before motion planning and miss plan-dependent cues. We argue that pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can discover novel instruction-relevant cues, but require adaptation to focus on which cues matter and how they should influence motion planning. We realize these ideas in Foresight, a test-time framework in which a finetuned VLM alternates between proposing image-space motion plans and critiquing them using the language goal and visual context. Subsequent plans are conditioned on prior critiques, enabling iterative motion refinement before execution. To align plan critiques and refinements with open-set behavior preferences, we learn a reward model from human feedback and use it to post-train the VLM with reinforcement learning in the plan-critique loop. In offline evaluations and 6 real-world environments, Foresight improves average task success by 37% and reduces interventions per mission by 52% relative to state-of-the-art test-time reasoning and foundation-model baselines, while running in real-time on a Jetson AGX Orin. We will release code, data, and training details to support future work on test-time reasoning for robot motion refinement. Additional videos at: https://amrl.cs.utexas.edu/foresight

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Observation of alignment tensor effects in metastability-exchange collisions with highly polarized 3He ensembles

arXiv:2606.20330v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Highly polarized 3He ensembles prepared by metastability-exchange optical pumping (MEOP) have been widely used in precision measurements and fundamental physics. Metastability-exchange (ME) collisions, serving as the basis of MEOP, are traditionally described in terms of atomic orientation, while the significant contributions of metastable alignment tensor at high polarization remain unexplored. In this work, we develop a linearized model under mean-field approximation to investigate alignment tensor effects in highly polarized 3He , which originate from the metastable F = 3/2 manifold and are revealed through ME-induced relaxation and frequency shift. By means of free-induction-decay (FID) measurements, a pronounced dependence on nuclear polarization is experimentally observed in the response of the ground-state-metastable hybrid 3He ensembles to the external magnetic field. Furthermore, after obtaining the characteristics of tensor-induced phenomena, we demonstrate good agreement between the experiment and the theory. This work advances the understanding of nuclear spin dynamics in highly polarized 3He using MEOP. It further provides applications in systematic error correction of high-accuracy magnetometry, as well as in optimal protocol for the generation of nuclear spin-squeezed states.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Minimum Distance Summaries for Robust Neural Posterior Estimation

arXiv:2602.09161v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Simulation-based inference (SBI) enables amortized Bayesian inference by first training a neural posterior estimator (NPE) on prior-simulator pairs, typically through low-dimensional summary statistics, which can then be cheaply reused for fast inference by querying it on new test observations. Because NPE is estimated under the training data distribution, it is susceptible to misspecification when observations deviate from the training distribution. Many robust SBI approaches address this by modifying NPE training or introducing error models, coupling robustness to the inference network and compromising amortization and modularity. We introduce minimum-distance summaries, a plug-in robust NPE method that adapts queried test-time summaries independently of the pretrained NPE. Leveraging the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) as a distance between observed data and a summary-conditional predictive distribution, the adapted summary inherits strong robustness properties from the MMD. We demonstrate that the algorithm can be implemented efficiently with random Fourier feature approximations, yielding a lightweight, model-free test-time adaptation procedure. We provide theoretical guarantees for the robustness of our algorithm and empirically evaluate it on a range of synthetic and real-world tasks, demonstrating substantial robustness gains with minimal additional overhead.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

PaLMR: Towards Faithful Visual Reasoning via Multimodal Process Alignment

Reinforcement learning has recently improved the reasoning ability of Large Language Models and Multimodal LLMs, yet prevailing reward designs emphasise final-answer correctness and consequently tolerate process hallucinations–cases where models reach the right answer while misperceiving visual evidence. We address this process-level misalignment with PaLMR, a framework that aligns not only outcomes but also the reasoning process itself. PaLMR comprises two complementary components: a perception-aligned data layer that constructs process-aware reasoning data with structured pseudo-ground-truths and verifiable visual facts, and a process-aligned optimisation layer that constructs a hierarchical reward fusion scheme with a process-aware scoring function to encourage visually faithful chains-of-thought and improve training stability. Experiments on Qwen2.5-VL-7B show that our approach substantially reduces reasoning hallucinations and improves visual reasoning fidelity, achieving state-of-the-art results on HallusionBench while maintaining strong performance on MMMU, MathVista, and MathVerse. These findings indicate that PaLMR offers a principled and practical route to process-aligned multimodal reasoning, advancing the reliability and interpretability of MLLMs.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

An RRAM-based Hardware Implementation of a Radial Basis Function Neuron for Edge Classifiers

arXiv:2606.14739v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The deployment of modern machine learning (ML) solutions on resource-constrained edge devices highlights implementation challenges. This is especially true for extreme edge applications that include safety-critical components, such as autonomous navigation tasks. This paper demonstrates an artificial neural network (ANN) design leveraging Metal-Oxide Resistive RAM (RRAM) -based Analogue Content Addressable Memory (ACAM) as an efficient hardware substrate for performing metric-based classification and online adaptation on the edge. The proposed design is based on a custom Template piXeL (TXL) cell used for building the ACAM module, where each TXL cell acts as a configurable receptive field neuron. These cells employ a Radial Basis activation function to calculate the distance of an input from the programmed receptive field. The TXL can be organised into dense arrays for calculating the distance of a high-dimensional input against all stored prototypes, effectively performing fast and energy efficient similarity search. This hardware engine enables on-the-fly learning, where the receptive field parameters can be tuned to track domain shift. Through simulation of the proposed TXL-RBF classifier we can achieve 89.1\% accuracy on the MNIST dataset while consuming 185fJ per cell per operation when operating at 100MHz.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Flow Matching for Efficient and Scalable Data Assimilation

arXiv:2508.13313v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Data assimilation (DA) estimates a dynamical system's state from noisy observations. Recent generative models like the ensemble score filter (EnSF) improve DA in high-dimensional nonlinear settings but are computationally expensive. We introduce the ensemble flow filter (EnFF), a training-free, flow matching (FM)-based framework that accelerates sampling and offers flexibility in flow design. EnFF uses Monte Carlo estimators for the marginal flow field, localized guidance for observation assimilation, and utilizes a novel flow path that exploits the Bayesian DA formulation. It generalizes classical filters such as the bootstrap particle filter and ensemble Kalman filter. Experiments on high-dimensional benchmarks demonstrate EnFF's improved cost-accuracy tradeoffs and scalability, highlighting FM's potential for efficient, scalable DA. Code is available at https://github.com/Utah-Math-Data-Science/Data-Assimilation-Flow-Matching.

16.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-02

A comparative study of simulation-based inference methods for epidemic models with identifiability considerations

Authors:

by Geunsoo Jang, K. Selçuk Candan, Gerardo Chowell Epidemic models play a critical role in understanding transmission dynamics, generating forecasts, and informing public health interventions when they are properly calibrated to epidemiological data. Traditional Bayesian inference methods rely on the likelihood function to update prior knowledge using observed data. However, for realistic epidemic models, likelihood functions are often analytically intractable or computationally prohibitive, which can limit the applicability of these methods. Simulation-based inference provides a promising alternative by approximating posterior distributions through forward simulations rather than an explicit likelihood evaluation. In this study, we present a systematic comparison of four approaches: Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC), Neural Posterior Estimation (NPE), a neural method with temporal embedding, and Preconditioned Neural Posterior Estimation (PNPE), which integrates elements of both classical and neural techniques. These methods are evaluated across epidemic models of increasing complexity under fixed simulation budgets and varying levels of observational noise, with explicit attention to both structural and practical identifiability. Our results show that neural methods generally improve posterior fidelity and predictive accuracy compared with ABC under constrained simulation budgets. PNPE achieved strong performance in several simulation settings, whereas temporal embeddings improved inference in models with complex epidemic dynamics by capturing sequential dependencies. These gains come with important trade-offs: PNPE required substantially greater computational resources and, unlike fully amortized NPE-based methods, may require reconditioning for each new observation. In contrast, ABC remained computationally efficient and provided reasonable, though often more conservative, posterior estimates. Overall, our findings highlight trade-offs among computational efficiency, posterior accuracy, uncertainty calibration, and inference reusability, suggesting that method selection should depend on model complexity, data quality, identifiability, and available computational resources.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Building Social World Models with Large Language Models

Understanding and predicting how social beliefs evolve in response to events – from policy changes to scientific breakthroughs – remains a fundamental challenge in social science. Given LLMs' commonsense knowledge and social intelligence, we ask: Can LLMs model the dynamics of social beliefs following social events? In this work, we introduce the concept of the Social World Model (SWM), a general framework designed to capture how social beliefs evolve in response to major events. SWM learns state-transition functions for social beliefs by mining temporal patterns in social data and optimizing the evidence lower bound, without the need for explicit human annotations linking events to belief shifts, or for expensive census data. To evaluate SWM, we introduce a benchmark, SWM-bench, derived from real-world prediction markets, specifically Kalshi and Polymarket. SWM-bench includes over 12k data points for social belief prediction tasks spanning diverse domains such as politics, finance, and cryptocurrency. Our experimental results show that SWM significantly outperforms time-series foundation models, achieving state-of-the-art results on Kalshi data and demonstrating competitive performance on Polymarket data, while offering interpretable insights into the underlying mechanisms of social belief dynamics.

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

Multi-Scale Separable Fourier Neural Networks for Solving High-Frequency PDEs

arXiv:2605.31027v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a novel neural network architecture, termed Multi-Scale Separable Fourier Neural Networks (MS-SFNN), for the accurate and efficient solution of linear and nonlinear high-frequency partial differential equations (PDEs). MS-SFNN exploits a separable representation: given a $d$-dimensional input, it employs $d$ independent subnetworks – each acting on a single coordinate – and constructs basis functions via element-wise multiplication of their outputs. The PDE solution is approximated as a linear combination of these basis functions, with coefficients determined by least squares. Critically, all network weights and biases are randomly initialized once, from a uniform distribution with unit variance, and remain fixed thereafter. To enhance expressivity, a tunable scaling factor is introduced in each subnetwork to modulate the frequency content of the resulting basis functions. Fourier features are explicitly embedded through cosine activations, endowing the method with strong spectral approximation capabilities. To mitigate the memory bottleneck associated with dense collocation in high-frequency or three-dimensional problems, we replace automatic differentiation with analytically derived basis function derivatives and develop a memory-efficient batched QR decomposition algorithm for solving large-scale least-squares systems. Numerical experiments demonstrate that MS-SFNN achieves unprecedented accuracy across a range of challenging PDEs, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods such as Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINN) and Separated-Variable Spectral Neural Networks (SV-SNN).

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

AfriSUD: A Dependency Treebank Collection for Evaluating Models on African Languages

Despite their linguistic diversity and global significance, African languages remain underrepresented in research and resources to support NLP. We aim to bridge this gap by introducing AfriSUD, the first large-scale collection of syntactically annotated treebanks for nine diverse African languages spanning major language families and regions across Sub-Saharan Africa. Using the Surface-Syntactic Universal Dependencies (SUD) framework, our community-led effort provides high-quality, native-speaker verified data that capture typological key features such as agglutination and tone. We evaluate a range of models on AfriSUD for part-of-speech tagging and dependency parsing including non-transformer baselines, multilingual pretrained encoders, and LLMs. Our results reveal a significant syntax gap, where models still show clear limitations across the nine languages, suggesting that existing architectures may not fully capture the structural diversity of African-language syntax.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

OmniOPSD: Rationale-Privileged On-Policy Self-Distillation for Affective Computing

Reinforcement learning for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is often hindered by severe reward sparsity in complex reasoning tasks. This challenge is particularly pronounced in human-centered scenarios involving states, emotions, intentions, and behaviors, where heterogeneous multimodal signals and subjective human factors make high-quality chain-of-thought (CoT) annotations expensive and difficult to obtain. Although many multimodal datasets provide expert-annotated ground-truth labels, directly using these labels for supervised fine-tuning may encourage shortcut learning in multimodal perception and provides limited transparency for safety-critical human–AI interaction. To address these limitations, we propose OmniOPSD, a Rationale-Privileged On-Policy Self-Distillation framework that uses frontier-generated rationales as teacher-side privileged evidence rather than student imitation targets. OmniOPSD uses frontier-generated evidence-aware rationales only as training-time privileged evidence context for a local teacher. The student samples its own rollout from the original multimodal input, while the rationale-privileged teacher scores the same tokens and provides dense token-level supervision. Thus, the student learns on its own trajectory distribution without directly imitating frontier-model completions, and inference requires no labels, rationales, CoT annotations, or closed-source model access. Experiments on MER-UniBench show that OmniOPSD achieves state-of-the-art performance with an average score of $84.19$, and ablations further support the value of rationale-privileged teacher guidance.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Disentangling Dynamical Systems: Causal Representation Learning Meets Local Sparse Attention

arXiv:2603.14483v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Parametric system identification methods estimate the parameters of explicitly defined physical systems from data. Yet, they remain constrained by the need to provide an explicit function space, typically through a predefined library of candidate functions chosen via available domain knowledge. In contrast, deep learning can demonstrably model systems of broad complexity with high fidelity, but black-box function approximation typically fails to yield explicit descriptive or disentangled representations revealing the structure of a system. We develop a novel identifiability theorem, leveraging causal representation learning, to uncover disentangled representations of system parameters without structural assumptions. We derive a graphical criterion specifying when system parameters can be uniquely disentangled from raw trajectory data, up to permutation and diffeomorphism. Crucially, our analysis demonstrates that global causal structures provide a lower bound on the disentanglement guarantees achievable when considering local state-dependent causal structures. We instantiate system parameter identification as a variational inference problem, leveraging a sparsity-regularised transformer to uncover state-dependent causal structures. We empirically validate our approach across four synthetic domains, demonstrating its ability to recover highly disentangled representations that baselines fail to recover. Corroborating our theoretical analysis, our results confirm that enforcing local causal structure is often necessary for full identifiability.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Non-negative Elastic Net Decoding for Information Retrieval

Dense retrieval has become the dominant paradigm in information retrieval, in which each document is scored against a query by the inner product of their vector embeddings, and the top-$k$ documents by score are retrieved for this query. However, since each document's score depends solely on the embedding of the query and itself, the retrieval process is oblivious to the content of the entire corpus. Therefore, dense retrieval cannot avoid selecting semantically similar documents from the corpus, which may result in a non-diverse, redundant set of retrieved documents. To this end, we approach retrieval as a joint decoding problem, in which documents are selected as a set with regard to the context of the rest of the corpus. To achieve this, we propose Non-Negative elastic Net (NNN) decoding, which selects documents whose embeddings jointly reconstruct the query embedding as a sparse non-negative linear combination. Our main theoretical result establishes a strict separation between dense retrieval and NNN decoding. For any corpus, every query correctly handled by dense retrieval is also handled by NNN decoding, while on corpora containing correlated documents, NNN decoding additionally handles queries that dense retrieval cannot. Experimental results indicate that applying NNN decoding to frozen embeddings trained for inner-product scoring yields consistent improvements across several benchmarks. Moreover, we introduce an end-to-end training procedure which optimizes the embeddings for NNN decoding, producing significant performance gains surpassing in all metrics and benchmarks compared to dense retrieval. Our work establishes a new paradigm for leveraging dense embeddings in information retrieval, beyond the standard practice of inner-product scoring.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

SciRisk-Bench: A Risk-Dimension-Aware Benchmark for AI4Science Safety

arXiv:2606.18936v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded in AI for Science (AI4Science) workflows, from scientific question answering and literature analysis to laboratory planning and autonomous discovery. This progress creates an urgent need for safety benchmarks that evaluate not only scientific competence, but also whether models recognize and avoid risks in high-stakes scientific contexts. Existing AI4Science safety datasets cover several disciplines and task formats, leaving the underlying risk dimensions underspecified. We introduce SciRisk-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate AI4Science safety from two complementary perspectives: explicit risk dimensions and scientific disciplines. SciRisk-Bench covers 7 disciplines, 31 subdisciplines and 10 risk dimensions. In the experimental section, we evaluate both mainstream LLMs and science-oriented LLMs across risk dimensions, disciplines, and sub-disciplines, enabling fine-grained diagnosis of where scientific models remain unsafe.

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

Query-Efficient Video Adversarial Attack with Stylized Logo on Service Computing

In service computing, video classification has become fundamental to many intelligent applications. While Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have demonstrated excellent performance in recognizing video content, recent studies have shown that DNNs are highly vulnerable to adversarial examples. Thus, understanding adversarial attacks can better respond to emergency situations. In order to improve attack performance, many style-transfer-based attacks and patch-based attacks have been proposed. However, the global perturbation of the former will bring unnatural global colors, while the latter is difficult to achieve success in targeted attacks due to the limited perturbation space. Moreover, compared to a plethora of methods targeting image classifiers, video adversarial attacks remain relatively underexplored. Therefore, to generate adversarial examples with a low budget and to provide them with a higher verisimilitude, we propose a novel black-box video attack framework, called Stylized Logo Attack (SLA). SLA is conducted through three stages. The first stage involves building a style reference set for logos, which can not only make the generated examples more natural, but also carry more target class features in targeted attacks. Then, Reinforcement Learning is employed to determine the style reference and position parameters of the logo within the video, which ensures that the stylized logo is placed in the video with optimal attributes. Finally, perturbations are optimized in a step-by-step manner so as to improve the fooling rate. Experimental results indicate that SLA can achieve better performance than state-of-the-art methods and still maintain good deception effects when facing various defense methods. We believe SLA can raise awareness among the security community about the reliability and security of video classification systems and serve as a memorandum of possible attack methods.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Efficiency-Performance Trade-offs in Neural Speaker Diarization via Structured Pruning and Low-Bit Quantization

Streaming speaker diarization is crucial for time-critical medical dispatch, but deploying it on resource-constrained hardware requires smaller, faster models. Using SIMSAMU, a dataset of simulated medical-dispatch conversations, we evaluate streaming behavior before compressing the segmentation model with pruning and low-bit quantization. We characterize performance across a range of streaming latency budgets and find that additional buffering is not consistently beneficial, while very low-latency operating points can substantially degrade performance. Our study shows that model compression trades performance for memory footprint, and we highlight an operating point where FP16 reduces model size by half with essentially unchanged real-time factor, at a cost of a 40\% relative DER increase against the baseline. This work characterizes the trade-offs for real-time deployment and contributes to speech technology that can enable reliable human communication in time-critical contexts.