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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Marked random graphs with given degree sequence: large deviations on the local topology

Authors:
Rangel Baldasso↗Alan Pereira↗Guilherme Reis↗

arXiv:2401.00351v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate the behavior of the empirical neighborhood distribution of marked graphs in the framework of local weak convergence. Here we extend known results by considering uniform random graphs with given degree sequences and i.i.d. marks on half-edges and vertices. We establish a large deviation principle for such families of empirical measures. The proof builds on Bordenave and Caputo's seminal 2015 paper, and Delgosha and Anantharam's 2019 introduction of BC entropy, relying on combinatorial lemmas that allow one to construct suitable approximations of measures supported on marked trees. Possible applications of these results are in the study of interacting diffusions on top of random graphs.

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02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Association of Digoxin Use at Norwood Discharge with Fontan Completion: A Study from the Pediatric Heart Network Public Dataset

Authors:
Aljiffry↗Jergel↗Xiang↗Oster↗M. E↗Kochilas↗L. K↗

Background: Digoxin use after the Norwood procedure has been associated with improved interstage survival in hypoplastic left heart syndrome and related conditions. Whether this benefit translates into improved longer-term outcomes through staged palliation remains unknown. We aimed to determine the association of digoxin use at Norwood discharge with transplant-free survival and Fontan completion. Methods: We conducted a retrospective cohort study using the Pediatric Heart Network (PHN) Single Ventricle Reconstruction trial public dataset, including 549 infants enrolled at 15 North American centers between 2005 and 2008. Competing risk analysis was used to evaluate Fontan completion and Cox regression to assess death or transplantation within 6 years after the Norwood procedure. Mixed-effects models compared pre-Fontan hemodynamic and echocardiographic right ventricular indices between patients treated with and without digoxin after accounting for center clustering and adjustment for sex, shunt type, heart failure medications at Norwood discharge, and census block poverty level. Results: The 6-year cumulative incidence of Fontan completion was higher among patients discharged on digoxin than among those not receiving digoxin (82% vs 71%; p = 0.013). Competing-risk analysis accounting for death and transplant demonstrated a greater likelihood of Fontan completion among digoxin users (aHR 1.31; 95%CI 1.09-1.58; p = 0.005), without significant difference in the hazard of death or transplant (aHR 0.78; 95%CI 0.53-1.15; p = 0.208). No significant differences in pre-Fontan hemodynamic or echocardiographic indices were observed between groups. Initiation of digoxin post Stage II procedure was not associated with improved survival or likelihood to complete Fontan. Conclusion: Digoxin use at the time of Norwood discharge was associated with a 30% greater likelihood of Fontan completion by 6 years, without accompanying improvement in transplant-free survival. These findings extend prior observations of improved interstage outcomes associated with digoxin use and suggest that treatment may facilitate progression through staged palliation.

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03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Efficacy and safety of semaglutide for obesity and hyperphagia in adults with Prader-Willi syndrome

Authors:
Ahmed↗Bridges↗Goldstone↗A. P↗

Context: Prader-Willi syndrome is a genetic neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by hyperphagia and early-onset obesity from hypothalamic dysfunction with endocrinopathies and learning disability. Management is challenging with strict control of the food environment needed. While newer glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists, such as semaglutide, have efficacy in non-PWS obesity, there have been limited case reports in PWS. Objective/Design/Setting: Retrospective records review of 12 adults with PWS and overweight/obesity treated with semaglutide at a UK academic hospital centre specialist clinic. Patients: mean +/- SD age 28.3 +/- 10.1 years, 83% female, BMI 46.6 +/- 8.2kg/m2, 75% type 2 diabetes mellitus. Intervention: Median follow-up 17.2 months (range 8.7-36.1) with median semaglutide dose 2.4mg once weekly (1.0-2.4). Results: Although there was no significant weight loss on semaglutide, there was stabilisation of the weight gain prior to treatment over previous 12.4 months (7.6-23.0) (post -3.1 +/- 9.9% vs. pre +5.7 +/- 5.6%: d -0.72, P=0.037). There was a significant decrease in hyperphagia on semaglutide from hyperphagia questionnaire for clinical trials (n=11, -7.3 +/- 6.1 (max 36), d -1.19, P=0.003), having been stable before treatment. HbA1c improved in those with elevated baseline levels (n=6, -4.2 +/- 4.9%, d -0.74, P=0.13). Mild gastrointestinal side effects were seen in 25% but did not lead to discontinuation. Conclusions: In adults with PWS, semaglutide produced weight maintenance, reduced hyperphagia, and improved glycaemic control, with good tolerability. Larger placebo-controlled trials are needed to confirm these findings in adults and adolescents with PWS, especially in those without T2DM, where efficacy may be greater.

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04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

DarkVGGT: Seeing Through Darkness Using Thermal Geometry without Daylight Tax

Authors:
Minseong Kweon↗Wenyuan Zhao↗Nuo Chen↗Lulin Liu↗Huiwen Han↗Zihao Zhu↗Srinivas Shakkottai↗Chao Tian↗Zhiwen Fan↗

Recent feed-forward 3D reconstruction methods have demonstrated strong performance and flexibility in efficient end-to-end scene geometry estimation from image streams. However, their reliance on visible-light appearance makes them vulnerable in dark and low-visibility environments, where RGB cues are severely degraded and geometric evidence becomes ambiguous. To address this challenge, we propose DarkVGGT, an RGB-T feed-forward geometry framework that uses physics-aware thermal modeling for robust 3D estimation in low-light scenes. DarkVGGT introduces two complementary modules. First, physics-inspired thermal factorization extracts emissive-dominant, geometry-consistent thermal cues while isolating sparse reflective residuals that may introduce geometric ambiguity. Second, geometry-shared thermal routing isolates modality-invariant geometric structures from thermal-specific patterns, selectively injecting reliability-aware structural guidance into the RGB stream. Together, these components enable accurate thermal-informed geometry estimation under degraded RGB conditions while largely preserving performance in well-lit environments. Experiments on low-visibility RGB-T benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements in both depth and camera pose estimation over existing feed-forward geometry baselines.

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

RATS! Patches Talk Through Registers: Emergent Parts in Register Attention Transformers

Authors:
Timing Yang↗Predrag Neskovic↗Jansen Seheult↗Wenchao Han↗Anand Bhattad↗Alan Yuille↗Feng Wang↗

When humans see a bird, they recognize far more than just "bird" – they see a head, wings, and talons, a structured assembly of reusable parts that can be identified across every bird they have ever seen. We ask whether a self-supervised visual model can discover the same compositional structure on its own. To this end, we propose RATS (Register Attention Transformers), which decomposes the classification token into N learnable register tokens that route patch information through an L->N->N->L bottleneck via a three-step compress-communicate-broadcast attention. The N registers are partitioned across the H attention heads, so that registers assigned to different heads do not interact with each other. Without auxiliary losses or part annotations, each register spontaneously specializes into a proto-semantic region whose emerging structure resembles object parts. RATS surpasses all baselines by +12 mIoU on average across five segmentation benchmarks, with consistent gains on ADE20K (+1.11 mIoU) and COCO (+0.2 AP^m). Its register dictionary further exhibits part-level consistency and semantic proximity across related categories. Our results suggest that RATS may provide a useful architectural prior for structured and interpretable visual representation learning.

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

VietMed-MCQ: A Consistency-Filtered Data Synthesis Framework for Vietnamese Traditional Medicine Evaluation

Authors:
Huynh Trung Kiet↗Dao Sy Duy Minh↗Nguyen Dinh Ha Duong↗Le Hoang Minh Huy↗Long Nguyen↗Dien Dinh↗

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in general medical domains. However, their performance significantly degrades in specialized, culturally specific domains such as Vietnamese Traditional Medicine (VTM), primarily due to the scarcity of high-quality, structured benchmarks. In this paper, we introduce VietMed-MCQ, a novel multiple-choice question dataset generated via a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline with an automated consistency check mechanism. Unlike previous synthetic datasets, our framework incorporates a dual-model validation approach to ensure reasoning consistency through independent answer verification, though the substring-based evidence checking has known limitations. The complete dataset of 3,190 questions spans three difficulty levels and underwent validation by one medical expert and four students, achieving 94.2 percent approval with substantial inter-rater agreement (Fleiss' kappa = 0.82). We benchmark seven open-source models on VietMed-MCQ. Results reveal that general-purpose models with strong Chinese priors outperform Vietnamese-centric models, highlighting cross-lingual conceptual transfer, while all models still struggle with complex diagnostic reasoning. Our code and dataset are publicly available to foster research in low-resource medical domains.

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07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Causal Object-Centric Models for Planning with Monte Carlo Tree Search

Authors:
Rodion Vakhitov↗Leonid Ugadiarov↗Alexey Skrynnik↗Aleksandr Panov↗

arXiv:2606.14418v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce COMET (Causal Object-centric Model for Efficient Tree search), a model-based reinforcement learning algorithm that performs Monte Carlo Tree Search in a slot-structured latent space. COMET pairs a frozen unsupervised object-centric encoder with a transformer-based world model, in which actions are bound to objects through a novel action-slot fusion mechanism that is used in slot transition prediction. Policy and value heads use object-causal attention, modulating token interactions by learned per-slot relevance scores so that decision-making concentrates on task-relevant entities. COMET adds an explicit object-level inductive bias to MuZero-style latent planning. Across eight visually and dynamically diverse tasks from the Object-Centric Visual RL benchmark, ManiSkill, Robosuite, and VizDoom, COMET achieves a higher mean normalized score during the early stages of training compared to object-centric and monolithic baselines.

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08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Task-guided cross-subject latent alignment: a multi-encoder-decoder VAE

Authors:
Angeliki Papathanasiou↗Jascha Achterberg↗Thomas E. Nichols↗Rui Ponte Costa↗

arXiv:2606.15989v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Aligning neural activity across subjects offers the promise of discovering shared computational principles and generalizable decoders. However, traditional alignment methods require shared stimuli across subjects, a constraint that limits applicability to naturalistic paradigms with limited or non-overlapping data. We introduce a Multi-Encoder-Decoder Variational Autoencoder (MED-VAE) that achieves cross-subject alignment without shared stimuli by anchoring representations to a common scaffold provided by a pretrained ANN. Using the Natural Scenes Dataset, we show that MED-VAE creates common latent spaces with superior semantic organisation, achieving higher cross-subject alignment than common methods while maintaining robust generalisation to held-out stimuli where traditional methods degrade. Reconstructing from these common spaces back to each subject's original neural space, MED-VAE preserves equal stimulus-driven signal in its cross-subject latent space. Finally, we show that this superior alignment directly enables cross-subject neural prediction, as demonstrated via cross-subject image decoding. In summary, we introduce a framework to identify generalisable common subspaces for cross-subject predictions and downstream tasks, demonstrated here for visual cortex responses to static images.

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

The Third Challenge on Image Denoising at NTIRE 2026: Methods and Results

Authors:
Lei Sun↗Hang Guo↗Bin Ren↗Shaolin Su↗Xian Wang↗Danda Pani Paudel↗Luc Van Gool↗Radu Timofte↗Yawei Li↗

This paper reports on the NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Image Denoising, specifically focusing on the high-noise regime ($\sigma = 50$). The competition investigates advanced neural architectures designed to restore high-fidelity details from images corrupted by additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). Unlike constrained benchmarks, this track emphasizes peak quantitative performance, measured by Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), without limitations on parameter count or computational overhead. By synthesizing contributions from 20 finalist teams out of 116 registrants, this report benchmarks the latest technical innovations and provides a comprehensive snapshot of the current state-of-the-art in unconstrained image restoration.

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10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

PreLort: Prefix-Nested LoRA for Federated Fine-Tuning under Rank Heterogeneity

Authors:
Muhammad Waseem↗Nurbek Tastan↗Andrej Jovanovic↗Nicholas D. Lane↗Nils Lukas↗Karthik Nandakumar↗Samuel Horvath↗

Federated fine-tuning of large language models using parameter-efficient methods such as LoRA enables privacy-preserving adaptation of foundation models. Heterogeneous hardware resources introduce challenges, as clients with different adapter ranks cannot be directly aggregated. While existing methods enable aggregation under heterogeneous ranks, they fail to control how information is distributed across rank dimensions, leading to suboptimal use of shared low-rank representations. Instead, we propose PreLort: a nested low-rank formulation for federated LoRA that organizes adapter dimensions into a prefix hierarchy. Our approach ensures that lower-rank dimensions encode task-relevant information, while higher-rank dimensions capture additional capacity. Building on this, we introduce (i) a segment-wise aggregation rule that averages only over clients contributing to each rank segment, avoiding dilution from zero-padded lower-rank clients, and (ii) a prefix-nested training strategy that optimizes each adapter under multiple rank truncations, encouraging useful signal to concentrate in low-rank prefix dimensions. Together, these components encourage a consistent low-rank prefix capturing the most task-relevant information, while higher-rank dimensions learn additional capacity. This allows low-rank clients to benefit from richer information contributed by higher-rank clients, as prefix dimensions are consistently learned and aggregated. Experiments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms prior heterogeneous federated LoRA methods in accuracy and ROUGE-L, while achieving lower or comparable perplexity across multiple base models.

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

Consensus-based Agentic Large Language Model Framework for Harmonized Tariff Schedule Code Classification

Authors:
Truong Thanh Hung Nguyen↗Khanh Van Quynh Nguyen↗Hoang-Loc Cao↗Tri Duong↗Phuc Ho↗Van Pham↗Loc Nguyen↗Hung Cao↗

arXiv:2606.16987v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate Harmonized Tariff Schedule (HTS) code classification is essential for customs clearance, duty assessment, trade statistics, and regulatory compliance in maritime logistics. However, exact HTS classification remains challenging because product descriptions are often short, incomplete, or ambiguous, while correct classification depends on hierarchical tariff structures, legal notes, and jurisdiction-specific rules. This paper proposes an agentic large language model (LLM) framework for Canadian 10-digit HTS code classification in smart-port and maritime logistics environments. The framework integrates multi-agent information retrieval, semantic retrieval over official tariff documents, evidence-grounded reasoning, consensus-based validation, element-wise voting across hierarchical code components, confidence estimation, and human-in-the-loop escalation. We evaluate the framework on a private dataset of 3,300 domain-expert-labeled product records collected from logistics and delivery contexts. Experimental results show that exact 10-digit classification remains difficult even for advanced LLMs, with performance decreasing from coarse chapter-level prediction to fine-grained tariff and statistical suffix assignment. These findings demonstrate the need for evidence-grounded, uncertainty-aware, and human-centered classification workflows rather than fully autonomous single-step prediction. The proposed framework supports more interpretable, accountable, and compliance-oriented HTS classification for maritime logistics and smart-port operations. Our code is available at https://github.com/Analytics-Everywhere-Lab/hts.

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

GraphPO: Graph-based Policy Optimization for Reasoning Models

Authors:
Yuliang Zhan↗Xinyu Tang↗Jian Li↗Dandan Zheng↗Weilong Chai↗Jingdong Chen↗Jun Zhou↗Ge Wu↗Wenyue Tang↗Hao Sun↗

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become a standard paradigm for enhancing the capability of large reasoning models. RLVR typically samples responses independently and optimizes the policy using from final answers. This paradigm has two limitations. First, independently responses often contain similar intermediate reasoning steps, causing redundant exploration and wasted computation. Second, sparse final-answer rewards make it hard to identify useful steps. Tree-based methods partly address this problem by sharing prefixes and comparing branches from the same prefix to provide fine-grained signals. However, tree branches are still expanded independently. When different branches reach similar reasoning states, they cannot share information and repeat similar exploration. Moreover, tree-based methods ignore such dispersion and only perform local comparisons within separate branches, which can lead to higher variance in advantage estimation. To address this challenge, we propose GraphPO (Graph-based Policy Optimization), a novel RL framework that represents rollouts as a directed acyclic graph, with reasoning steps as edges and semantic states summarized from the reasoning paths as nodes. GraphPO merges semantically equivalent reasoning paths into equivalence classes, allowing them to share suffixes and reallocating budget away from redundant expansions to diverse exploration. Furthermore, we assign efficiency advantages to incoming edges and correctness advantages to outgoing edges, thereby improving inference efficiency while deriving process supervision from outcome. Theory shows that GraphPO reduces advantage-estimation variance and enhances reasoning efficiency. Experiments on three LLMs across reasoning and agentic search benchmarks show that GraphPO consistently outperforms chain- and tree-based baselines with the same token budgets or response budgets.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Active Sampling for Ultra-Low-Bit-Rate Video Compression via Conditional Controlled Diffusion

Authors:
Amirhosein Javadi↗Shirin Saeedi Bidokhti↗Tara Javidi↗

Diffusion models provide a powerful generative prior for perceptual reconstruction at ultra-low bitrates, but effective video compression requires controlling the generative process using highly compact conditioning signals. In this work, we present ActDiff-VC, a diffusion-based video compression framework for the ultra-low-bitrate regime. Our method partitions videos into variable-length segments, transmits keyframes only when needed, and summarizes temporal dynamics using a compact set of tracked point trajectories. Conditioned on these sparse signals, a conditional diffusion decoder synthesizes the remaining frames, enabling perceptually realistic reconstruction under severe rate constraints. To support this design, we introduce two mechanisms: content-adaptive keyframe selection and budget-aware sparse trajectory selection, which together enable compact yet effective conditioning for generative reconstruction. Experiments on the UVG and MCL-JCV benchmarks show that ActDiff-VC achieves up to 64.6\% bitrate reduction at matched NIQE, improves KID by up to 64.6\% and FID by up to 37.7\% at comparable bitrates against strong learned codecs, and delivers favorable perceptual rate–distortion trade-offs relative to learned and diffusion-based baselines in the ultra-low-bitrate regime.

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

Rotational Symmetry based Object Pose Estimation from Point Clouds in the Absence of Known 3D Models

Authors:
Weichen Dai↗Ruixun Yu↗Yangjie Tang↗Yifan Du↗Yiyang Zhang↗Donglei Sun↗Hua Zhang↗

Object pose estimation is crucial to many industrial applications, with one example being automated spray painting using a robot. However, confidentiality concerns often limit access to high-quality 3D models, posing a significant challenge for point-cloud-based pose estimation. In such scenarios, rotational symmetry, a readily accessible characteristic of many industrial objects, can provide valuable prior information to facilitate pose estimation.In this paper, we propose a method that leverages the rotational symmetry commonly found in industrial objects to address the challenge caused by the absence of 3D models. The object pose is jointly estimated with point cloud refinement through an iterative optimization process. This optimization relies on a rotational symmetry constraint loss. To construct this loss, each 3D point is rotated according to the currently estimated pose, and multiple correspondences are identified using nearest-neighbor search by exploiting the rotational symmetry property. These correspondences are then used to compute the rotational symmetry constraint loss, which iteratively refines both the pose and the point cloud.By explicitly incorporating rotational symmetry into the optimization process, the proposed method achieves robust pose estimation and generalizes well across diverse object types. The proposed method is evaluated on a dataset specifically created for point clouds without known 3D models, consisting of four categories of synthetic objects and one real wheel hub collected from a production line. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves performance comparable to methods that rely on known 3D models.

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15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Speaking in Self-Assessing Tongues: On the Verbalized Confidence of LLMs in Machine Translation

Authors:
Ali Marashian↗Alexis Palmer↗Katharina von der Wense↗

The rapid rise in popularity of large language models (LLMs) for translation calls for a thorough study of the reliability of their confidence in their own outputs. Unlike many generation tasks, translation errors and confidence levels can be useful at different levels of granularity (tokens, words, or spans). Unsupervised approaches based on internal signals like predicted probabilities can be misleading because they reflect certainty among alternatives rather than correctness. In addition, they require access to such internal signals. Here, we devise five verbalized methods of extracting an LLM's per-token confidence without those shortcomings and compare their reliability with that of the model's internal signals of certainty. We evaluate reliability using two forms of alignment: fine-grained error detection and calibration. For both, internal and verbalized methods perform similarly, although results vary by model. Interestingly, we find little to no correlation between internal and verbalized methods.

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16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Ferritin across long-term conditions in England: cross-sectional primary care study

Authors:
KATUMBA↗A. M↗Drakesmith↗C. W↗Haynes↗Maynard↗Maharajan↗Erone↗Smith↗Shah↗Roy↗Bankhead↗…

Background Iron deficiency (ID) is a readily treatable condition once identified. Ferritin is the primary diagnostic marker, but cut-offs vary and inflammation complicates interpretation in patients with long-term conditions (LTCs). Aim To describe ferritin distribution and the prevalence of threshold-defined low ferritin in adults with and without LTCs in primary care. Design and setting Cross-sectional observational study using routinely collected electronic health records from a national primary care database in England (1st January 2015 to 31st December 2021). Method Adults with >1 ferritin test in Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) Aurum were included. LTCs were identified using validated primary-care code lists. Outcomes included ferritin distribution and threshold-defined ID prevalence using World Health Organization (WHO) (

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

Hardware-Oriented Inference Complexity of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

Authors:
Bilal Khalid↗Pedro Freire↗Sergei K. Turitsyn↗Jaroslaw E. Prilepsky↗

arXiv:2604.03345v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) have recently emerged as a powerful architecture for various machine learning applications. However, their unique structure raises significant concerns regarding their computational overhead. Existing studies primarily evaluate KAN complexity in terms of Floating-Point Operations (FLOPs) required for GPU-based training and inference. However, in many latency-sensitive and power-constrained deployment scenarios, such as neural network-driven non-linearity mitigation in optical communications or channel state estimation in wireless communications, training is performed offline and dedicated hardware accelerators are preferred over GPUs for inference. Recent hardware implementation studies report KAN complexity using platform-specific resource consumption metrics, such as Look-Up Tables, Flip-Flops, and Block RAMs. However, these metrics require a full hardware design and synthesis stage that limits their utility for early-stage architectural decisions and cross-platform comparisons. To address this, we derive generalized, platform-independent formulae for evaluating the hardware inference complexity of KANs in terms of Real Multiplications (RM), Bit Operations (BOP), and Number of Additions and Bit-Shifts (NABS). We extend our analysis across multiple KAN variants, including B-spline, Gaussian Radial Basis Function (GRBF), Chebyshev, and Fourier KANs. The proposed metrics can be computed directly from the network structure and enable a fair and straightforward inference complexity comparison between KAN and other neural network architectures.

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18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

HLS-GPT: A Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) for Continental-Scale NASA Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 (HLS) Reflectance Reconstruction Across All Bands on Arbitrary Dates

Authors:
Junjie Li↗Hankui K. Zhang↗David P. Roy↗

Recent deep learning methods for Landsat and Sentinel-2 reflectance time series reconstruction remain limited by restricted spectral coverage, limited geographic scalability, or patch-based designs with short temporal contexts. We present HLS-GPT, a large-scale generative pretrained Transformer model for reconstructing NASA Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 30 m surface reflectance for all bands, any date, and any pixel location. HLS-GPT uses a hierarchical Transformer architecture to handle the different spectral band configurations of Landsat and Sentinel-2 and operates on single-pixel 12-month time series. To capture geographic and seasonal variability, the model was trained with nine years of HLS time series from more than 0.25 million training pixels across the conterminous United States. A random cropping and masking strategy extracts 12-month periods with varying start dates across epochs, masks 50% of valid observations, and trains the model to reconstruct the masked reflectance values from the remaining observations. Evaluation using more than 62,000 independent test pixels shows robust reconstruction under diverse land surface conditions, including complex crop phenology and sparse, irregular observations. Leave-one-observation-out evaluation achieved reconstruction RMSE below 0.026 for all HLS spectral bands, with relative RMSE below 35% for visible bands and below 13% for other bands. Red-edge band errors were comparable to red and near-infrared errors despite the absence of red-edge bands on Landsat. Sensitivity analyses that randomly masked 10% to 90% of test observations showed only modest degradation when 10% to 50% of observations were masked, with all-band RMSE below 0.028. Image reconstruction over nine independent 109 by 109 km CONUS HLS tiles further demonstrates that HLS-GPT outperforms two conventional methods and the NASA-IBM Prithvi model.

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

Refusal Beyond a Single Direction: A Preliminary Comparison of Diff-in-Means and INLP

Authors:
Elisabetta Rocchetti↗Alfio Ferrara↗

arXiv:2606.13720v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Arditi et al. (2024) has shown that refusal in safety fine-tuned chat models is mediated by a single linear direction in the residual stream, recoverable by a difference-in-means (DiM) of harmful and harmless activations. We compare DiM-based interventions (activation addition and directional ablation) with two interventions derived from Iterative Nullspace Projection (INLP) – nullspace projection and counterfactual flipping – on five open-weight chat models, asking whether INLP can match DiM at steering refusal and whether its richer parameterisation yields more tweakable interventions. INLP counterfactual flipping is competitive with DiM directional ablation on refusal suppression, while nullspace projection is consistently weaker. Restricting INLP to the leading directions of the extracted subspace preserves most of the suppression effect at near-baseline perplexity, giving a tunable capability. Geometrically, the two INLP interventions land in qualitatively different regions of activation space: nullspace projection collapses transformed activations between the harmful and harmless clusters, while counterfactual flipping moves them into the opposite cluster, suggesting that the model encodes the absence of a concept differently from its opposite – an intriguing distinction that warrants further investigation in future work.

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20.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

EditorForge: An Active-Site-Aware Framework for Inverse-Folding-Based Protein Redesign

Authors:
Chen↗Siddiqui↗Taucar↗Tiralongo↗Tkachenko↗Xu↗Bawa↗Guo↗Pinska↗Rim↗Shi↗Wang↗…

Inverse-folding models can rapidly generate protein sequences compatible with a supplied backbone, but unconstrained redesign is poorly suited to enzyme and genome-editor-associated domains, where catalytic, substrate-proximal, and conserved structural regions must remain protected. In this paper, we present EditorForge, a modular constraint-and-audit suite for editor-domain protein redesign that wraps fixed-backbone inverse folding with explicit design masks, fixed-position enforcement, active-site-proximity auditing, active-site-shielded regeneration, and downstream structural quality control. Using full-length Moloney murine leukemia virus reverse transcriptase structure 4MH8 (MMLV RT 4MH8) as a demonstration target, EditorForge first restricted redesign to a bounded 25-position envelope while fixing 428 residues. An initial audit detected active-site-proximal failure modes despite fixed-position integrity. Later, the Active Site Shield module then removed five unsafe design positions, replaced them with lower-contact alternatives, and regenerated candidates under stricter constraints. Post Shield Audit evaluated 24 regenerated candidates, all of which satisfied the hard sequence/mask and active-site-shield constraints. For the eight candidates that were selected or returned for structure-prediction/refolding quality control. Enhanced RefoldQC found that all 8 evaluated predicted structures passed the computational structure-QC screen. That said, the selected 8 candidates passed the computational structure-QC screen, with global C RMSD values of 1.2061–1.5555~[A], active-site C RMSD values of 0.4098–1.8397~[A], mutation-neighborhood C RMSD values of 1.3155-1.6848~[A], and average pLDDT-like confidence values of 94.87-95.11. In short, EditorForge provides a reproducible triage layer that converts general inverse-folding output into constrained and editor-specific candidate sets for downstream structural and biological review on top of existing structural prediction tools.

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21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Daily Healthy Eating Index (HEI-2020) scoring reveals diet quality patterns masked by aggregation

Authors:
Singh↗Salathe↗

The Healthy Eating Index (HEI-2020) is conventionally computed by aggregating intake across days before scoring. Digital food logging enables an alternative: scoring each day and averaging daily scores. These methods are not equivalent. The HEI's density-based structure and component caps cause aggregation to inflate adequacy scores when intake is irregular. Using Food & You data, we show daily HEI correlates more strongly with microbiome diversity, and recommend co-reporting both metrics.

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22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Giskard : Byzantine Robust and Confidential Aggregation for Large-Scale Decentralized Learning

Authors:
Ousmane Touat↗C\'esar Sabater↗Mohamed Maouche↗Sonia Ben Mokhtar↗

arXiv:2606.19129v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dealing simultaneously with confidentiality and Byzantine behaviors in decentralized learning is a challenging problem. Indeed, in decentralized learning, clients train a machine learning model while keeping their data locally and share their model parameters or gradients with a set of neighbors. While enforcing confidentiality calls for hiding the exchanged model parameters/gradients (e.g., by using cryptographic techniques), dealing with Byzantine contributions often requires inspecting the latter. Hence, most research works address these objectives separately. A recent line of work proposes to employ secure multi-party computation (MPC) to implement robust aggregators against model poisoning, thereby enforcing both confidentiality and Byzantine resilience. However, these solutions scale badly: they either require all-to-all communication between participants or delegate the entire computation to a small subset, whose computational and communication load grows proportionally with the size of the network. In this paper, we present Giskard, a protocol for confidential and Byzantine-robust decentralized aggregation. Giskard organizes $n$ parties into a tree of committees of size $O(\log n)$ and evaluates a coordinate-wise approximate median via a committee-adapted distributed binary search over the value domain, using BGW-style MPC within each committee. We assess Giskard both theoretically by proving its security and confidentiality properties and experimentally through extensive experiments involving up to one million participants. Compared to its closest competitors, Giskard reduces per-party communication complexity asymptotically while exhibiting comparable model utility under up to $n/4$ Byzantine parties.

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

Note on the local calculation of decoherence of quantum superposition in the static black holes

Authors:
Ran Li↗Zhong-Xiao Man↗Jin Wang↗

arXiv:2606.14178v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We investigate the decoherence of a quantum spatial superposition of a static particle in Schwarzschild and Reissner-Nordstr\"{o}m black holes. By treating the particle as a localized classical source coupled to a quantum scalar field, we reformulate the decoherence process in the Danielson-Satishchandran-Wald (DSW) gedankenexperiment through coherent state generation and derive the local expression for the decoherence functional in terms of the Wightman function. In the long-time limit, the decoherence rate is shown to be characterized by the low-frequency behavior of the Wightman function. We then employ the asymptotic matching method to calculate the analytical expressions of the Wightman functions in the Boulware, Unruh, and Hartle-Hawking vacua. We show that the decoherence behavior depends on the quantum state of the environmental field. While the Boulware vacuum gives vanishing decoherence for a static superposition, the thermal effects associated with Hawking radiation in the Unruh and Hartle-Hawking vacua can induce nonvanishing decoherence.

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24.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Unbiased Derivative Estimation for Stationary Mean of Parameterized Markov chains

Authors:
Jeffrey Wang↗Chang-han Rhee↗

arXiv:2606.11487v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a new approach to unbiased estimation of the gradients of the stationary means associated with parametrized families of Markov chains. Our estimators are particularly efficient when the Markov chains have slow mixing rate. Our approach does not require a specific parametrization except for an oracle to evaluate the transition density and its gradient at a given data point without any additional knowledge about the density function itself. It makes our estimator suitable for parametrizations associated with neural networks. The estimator can potentially achieve large improvement in terms of efficiency. Numerical experiments confirm the good performance predicted by the theory.

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25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Architectural Wisdom: A Framework for Governing Optimization in AI Systems

Authors:
Edward Y. Chang↗

arXiv:2606.16319v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern AI systems exhibit structural failures that capability scaling alone does not reliably fix: they optimize under-specified objectives with no architectural mechanism to question whether the objective should be optimized at all. Engagement maximization can amplify harmful pathways; tool-using agents can commit irreversible actions; preference-trained language models can become sycophantic. We argue that this failure is a wisdom problem, not an intelligence problem. We use "wisdom" in a deliberately architectural sense, not as a claim about virtue, consciousness, or moral omniscience. Intelligence accepts a goal and optimizes within it; wisdom interrogates whether the goal should be optimized at all. The two are separable architectural properties. We propose architectural wisdom as a corrigible objective-governance layer above the optimization substrate. The layer makes three structural commitments explicit and nondegenerate before any action: temporal horizon, relational boundary, and irreversibility. It is realized by four components (Structural Utility Transform, Moral Admissibility Interface, Arbitration and Escalation Controller, Value Revision Channel) that compute a six-coordinate wisdom tuple over horizon, relational coverage, irreversibility, admissibility, value revision, and auditability. We motivate the architecture by eight cases drawn from contemporary AI failures, secular wisdom traditions, and hard ethical situations, and defend the distinction against the intelligence-completeness thesis using goal-questioning over goal-taking, Bostrom's orthogonality, structural separation in our exemplar cases, and persistent failure modes despite capability scaling. The framework is the conceptual contract for a larger architecture whose formal specifications and empirical validation are developed in subsequent work.

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