Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17174

From Parasocial Scripts to Dyadic Persistence in Autonomous AI-Agent Communities

Authors:

Mohammadsadegh Abolhasani↗Hamid Reza Firoozfar↗Reza Mousavi↗Paul Jen-Hwa Hu↗

While parasocial interactions (PSIs) and parasocial relationships (PSRs) have been studied in conventional media settings, we investigate whether PSI- (colloquial) relational cues also exist in online communities where both sides are autonomous AI agents. We analyze 4,434 posts and 50,338 comments from Moltbook through three theory-based textual indicators: attachment/intimacy language, reciprocity bids, and self-identification to original poster (OP). The combined results across methods based on keyword matching, few-shot large language model (LLM) annotation, and grouped-context LLM annotation reveal that PSI colloquial cues prevail and are strongly associated with OP re-engagement and a reciprocal reply structure. These results are robust across negative controls, nullification, clustered-standard-error re-estimation, and multiple-testing correction. A dyadic persistence test further affirms reciprocity bids aligned with sustained OP-involving mutual recurrence, providing empirical evidence for bridging interaction-level PSI scripts with PSR-consistent repeated dyadic patterns. We interpret the evidence as a behavioral structure in discourse by LLM-enabled agents.

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02.

PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-18 DOI: HASH:842fdc0bc809bb1b12926748072c72a5

scMagnifier: Resolving fine-grained cell subtypes via GRN-informed perturbations and consensus clustering

Authors:

Zhenhui He↗

by Zhenhui He, Dong Kangning Resolving fine-grained cell subtypes in single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data remains challenging, as their subtle transcriptional differences are often obscured by technical noise and data sparsity. Here, we present scMagnifier, a consensus clustering framework that leverages gene regulatory network (GRN)-informed in silico perturbations to amplify subtle transcriptional differences and uncover latent cell subpopulations. scMagnifier perturbs candidate transcription factors (TFs), propagates perturbation effects through cluster-specific GRNs to simulate post-perturbation expression profiles, and integrates clustering results across multiple perturbations into stable subtype assignments. Additionally, scMagnifier introduces regulatory perturbation consensus UMAP (rpcUMAP), a perturbation-aware visualization that provides clearer separation between cell subtypes and guides the selection of the optimal number of clusters. In both single-batch and multi-batch benchmarks, scMagnifier consistently improves the resolution and accuracy of fine-grained cell type identification. Notably, when integrated with spatial clustering methods such as STAGATE, scMagnifier is compatible with spatial transcriptomics workflows and effectively reveals tumor cell subtypes and their spatial organization in ovarian cancer.

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03.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.23751

Challenges in Barren Plateau Mitigation with Dynamic Parameterized Quantum Circuits

Authors:

Sumeet Shirgure↗Efekan K\"okc\"u↗Siyuan Niu↗

arXiv:2606.23751v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) are a promising paradigm for quantum advantage, yet their trainability is severely hampered by barren plateaus (BPs). Several works have proposed using dynamic parameterized quantum circuits (DPQCs) which intersperse unitary layers with parameterized CPTP maps (e.g. engineered dissipation, feedforward gadgets, or periodic resets), as a potential route around BPs. We unite this class of circuits into a formalization for DPQCs. We identify constraints on the nature and the structure of DPQCs if they are to prevent a significant number of parameters from becoming untrainable. We further show via purification and Pauli path analysis, a mechanism with which cost function anti-concentrates in DPQCs while still suffering from untrainability of a significant number of parameters. Our analysis reveals ways to design DPQCs that do not have an exponentially concentrated cost function, and our results suggest that BP mitigation via DPQCs is at least as hard as designing BP-free unitaries.

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04.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17627

Divide, Deliberate, Decide: A Multi-Agent Framework for Fine-Grained Egocentric Action Recognition

Authors:

Alessandro Sottovia↗Alessandro Torcinovich↗Oswald Lanz↗

Fine-grained action recognition in egocentric video is challenging for Vision-Language Models (VLMs): actions often differ only in small visual cues, and a single model tends to be biased toward a subset of these cues. We propose Divide, Deliberate, Decide, a fully-local, zero-shot multi-agent framework in which (i) a VLM orchestrator chunks the video and proposes a top-k candidate label list per segment, (ii) an ensemble of heterogeneous VLM specialists, drawn from different open model families, engages in a structured deliberation that includes a peer-consultation round of questions, and (iii) agent rankings are aggregated with a Borda count and the orchestrator re-ranks its own prediction in light of the specialists' evidence. The entire pipeline runs locally with no fine-tuning. Experiments show that our method positively improves zero-shot action recognition performance over the baseline, highlighting the influence of a heterogeneous deliberation step, showing that the gain stems from decorrelated model priors rather than from additional compute.

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05.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18567

Bridging Data Gaps in Structural Fragility Modeling through Transfer Learning: Methodology and Case Studies

Authors:

Narges Saeednejad↗Jamie Ellen Padgett↗

arXiv:2606.18567v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents a methodology-centered transfer learning framework for fragility adaptation under domain shift, class imbalance, and scarce target labels while preserving engineering interpretability and supporting decision-making under uncertainty. Four transfer learning strategies (instance-based, parameter-based, hierarchical Bayesian, and multi-source) are demonstrated through three complementary case studies: (i) instance-based transfer learning via importance weighting, demonstrated on coastal bridge fragility using Hurricane Katrina observations; (ii) parameter-based transfer learning together with hierarchical Bayesian transfer learning, enabling partial pooling across strata and posterior uncertainty quantification, demonstrated on residential building fragility using Hurricane Ian observations; and (iii) multi-source transfer learning that fuses multiple analytical fragility models with learned source weights and regularized target-domain adaptation, demonstrated on seismic bridge fragility using observations from the 2001 Nisqually earthquake. Across these case studies, direct transfer of source models (i.e. using existing state-of-the-art models) fails under domain shift and severe class imbalance, while targeted adaptation substantially improves failure detection and predictive stability in low-data regimes. These findings highlight the need for systematic guidance on diagnostics, strategy selection, and uncertainty reporting when developing and adapting fragility models.

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06.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12848

(Human) Attention Is (Still) All You Need: Human oversight makes AI-assisted social science reliable

Authors:

Chen Zhu↗Xiaolu Wang↗Weilong Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.12848v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for tasks once reserved for trained researchers, including hypothesis generation, specification choice, and drafting conclusions. We argue that the reliability of AI-assisted research depends not only on model capability, but also on how cognitive labour is structured between humans and machines. We study this problem through Human-in-the-Loop Economic Research (HLER), a decision architecture based on pre-commitment, decision sequencing, accountability, and attention allocation. In a pre-specified 2*4 factorial experiment with 280 complete research runs across four datasets, an unconstrained multi-agent baseline produced critical failures in 72% of runs. Using the same underlying model, the same agent decomposition, and identical prompts for the shared reasoning agents, HLER reduced the failure rate to 16% by imposing three architectural commitments: LLMs reason but do not execute data work, data and estimation are handled deterministically, and three human decision gates bind the workflow. Fisher's exact test rejects equality of failure rates at p

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07.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19750

Manifold Bandits: Bayesian Curriculum Learning over the Latent Geometry of Large Language Models

Authors:

Darrien McKenzie↗Nicklas Hansen↗Xiaolong Wang↗

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a central approach for improving reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs), where training efficiency depends critically on how problems are sampled during optimization. Existing adaptive curriculum learning methods typically prioritize prompts of intermediate difficulty, treating problem selection as a standard bandit problem with independent arms and overlooking the structured, heterogeneous nature of the task space. In this work, we frame problem sampling as a manifold-structured bandit problem with endogenous non-stationarity: problems are related through the model's latent representation space, and sampling decisions can steer how learning signals evolve across that space. To operationalize this perspective, we introduce Bayesian Manifold Curriculum (BMC), a structure-aware framework that organizes problems into a hierarchical task tree and applies Bayesian learning to guide sampling. Empirically, we find that different sampling strategies induce non-trivial tradeoffs between productivity (learning signal), diversity (coverage of the task manifold), and utility (evaluation relevance). These results show that prioritizing difficulty alone is insufficient for strong downstream performance, highlighting the importance of incorporating structure and type-awareness into problem sampling.

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08.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14536

Provably Safe, Yet Scalable Reinforcement Learning

Authors:

Kai S. Yun↗Zeyang Li↗Navid Azizan↗

arXiv:2606.14536v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that optimize rewards while satisfying constraints. Predominant approaches rely on soft-constrained policy optimization, which has achieved empirical success but does not provide formal safety guarantees for the learned policy. In contrast, methods with strict guarantees typically rely on explicit certificate functions, whose construction requires the direct synthesis and verification of control-invariant sets, a process that scales poorly with state dimension and often yields overly conservative behavior. In this paper, we present the Provably Safe, yet Scalable RL (PS2-RL) framework, a novel two-phase architecture for learning provably safe policies in a scalable manner, designed to overcome the key bottlenecks of prior methods. Rather than explicitly computing invariant sets, PS2-RL leverages a learned backup policy to forward-integrate the system dynamics, generating an implicit control-invariant set online. In the first phase, the backup policy is trained with our proposed safe-arrival value function, which characterizes the optimal backup policy for invariant-set construction. In the second phase, an RL policy is trained end-to-end through a differentiable projection layer that strictly enforces the safety guarantees induced by the learned backup policy. By maximizing the volume of the implicit control-invariant set in the first phase, the resulting PS2 policy from the second phase is performant and scalable, while maintaining provable safety. Crucially, PS2-RL imposes no restrictions on the underlying RL algorithm and can be plugged into any existing training pipeline. We establish theoretical guarantees for the proposed framework and evaluate it on robotic control tasks with state dimensions up to 10, a regime in which prior provably safe RL methods struggle or become impractical.

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09.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12387

TAHOE: Text-to-SQL with Automated Hint Optimization from Experience

Authors:

Zhiyi Chen↗Jie Song↗Peng Li↗

arXiv:2606.12387v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have democratized database access through Text-to-SQL, but moving from prototypes to production remains difficult. Real deployments must handle strict SQL dialects, massive schemas, and evolving user preferences, while supervised fine-tuning is costly and rigid and agentic test-time scaling is expensive. We present Tahoe, a system that treats prompt optimization as a dynamic data management problem. Tahoe uses an error-driven hint learning pipeline across Development and Deployment to consolidate debugging traces into a structured Hint Bank. Compiler feedback is distilled into reusable Syntax Hints for dialect-specific rules, while execution and user feedback are converted into Semantic Hints for schema- and user-specific logic. Tahoe further introduces a Strategy Layer that models conflicting user intents as competing strategies under shared natural-language triggers, with recency signals and post-learning attribution statistics that summarize empirical success, harm, inertness, and support. At inference time, Tahoe retrieves relevant hints and guides the LLM through Logic Planning followed by SQL Synthesis. We implement and evaluate the development-phase workflow, leaving deployment-time human-feedback updates for future work. On Spider 2.0-Snow, Tahoe substantially improves Text-to-SQL without updating model parameters. On 113 supervised Spider 2.0-Snow-0212 examples using GPT-5.5, Tahoe raises pass rate from 61.95 percent to 79.42 percent and pass-at-4 from 72.57 percent to 87.61 percent, achieves 100 percent Snowflake syntax pass rate, and reduces average compiler-feedback critic rounds from 2.79 to 0.12 per sampled candidate. The same Hint Bank also transfers to weaker backbones, including a 19.7 percentage-point pass-rate gain on Doubao-2.0-lite.

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10.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15841

Heteroskedastic Signals in Budgeted LLM Verification: Structural Heterogeneity Limits Optimization Gains

Authors:

Jinlong Yang↗

arXiv:2606.15841v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) systems increasingly use uncertainty signals to allocate limited computation across verification, test-time scaling, tool execution, and other selective-compute decisions. Such policies rely on a global signal comparability assumption: equal scores should carry comparable decision value across inputs. Using budgeted verification as a controlled diagnostic setting, we identify a failure mode of this assumption: uncertainty quality is heteroskedastic across cost strata, with some regions exhibiting near-random discriminability despite concentrating many errors. Under an explicit local model, we characterize the resulting distortion of global allocation and show that its upper bound scales with cross-stratum signal-quality dispersion. We separate weak signals, optimization instability, and structural heterogeneity through a controlled intervention hierarchy: Threshold, MP-Adapt, MP-Strat, and a deliberately simple cost-stratified thresholding intervention (CST). Across MBPP and MATH using Qwen3-8B, LLaMA3-8B, and GPT-4o-mini, global online adaptation yields inconsistent gains over static thresholding; MP-Strat partially recovers performance, while CST improves hit rate by up to 17 percentage points in strongly heterogeneous settings without gradient updates. These results identify structural heterogeneity, rather than optimizer weakness alone, as the primary bottleneck in the observed settings. More broadly, misaligned feedback structure cannot always be repaired by stronger optimization.

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11.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2510.18383

MENTOR: Reinforcement Learning via Flexible Teacher-Optimized Rewards for Tool-Use Distillation

Authors:

ChangSu Choi↗Hoyun Song↗Dongyeon Kim↗WooHyeon Jung↗Minkyung Cho↗Sunjin Park↗NohHyeob Bae↗Seona Yu↗KyungTae Lim↗

Distilling the tool-use capabilities of large language models (LLMs) into small language models (SLMs) is essential for their practical application. The predominant approach, supervised fine-tuning (SFT), suffers from poor out-of-domain (OOD) generalization due to its rigid alignment with static teacher trajectories. While reinforcement learning (RL) offers an alternative, the capacity limitations of SLMs pose a severe dilemma: sparse outcome rewards provide insufficient guidance, whereas strict trajectory matching imposes overly restrictive constraints. To bridge this capacity-driven gap, we propose MENTOR, which introduces a flexible yet process-aware reward structure. Instead of enforcing rigid replication, MENTOR uses the teacher's reference to guide tool-use behavior, balancing behavioral alignment with downstream performance. Extensive experiments on controlled executable-tool benchmarks demonstrate that MENTOR improves OOD tool-use performance compared to SFT and strict RL baselines. Our findings suggest that within verifiable tool-use environments, flexible tool-use alignment offers a more effective approach than strict trajectory replication for developing adaptable small models.

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12.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24599

Perron–Frobenius theorem for a general tree-valued growth-fragmentation-isolation process

Authors:

Chenlin Gu↗Mingyuan Shen↗Ronghang Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.24599v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A general tree-valued dynamics is considered in continuous time: new vertices are added, and the percolation happens on the links, and the connected components can be frozen. The model is an infinite-type branching process. The main result establishes the Perron–Frobenius type theorem on this model, which extends the previous work [Ann. Appl. Probab. 33 (6B) 5233 - 5278]. The proof does not rely on any property of the uniform random recursive tree.

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13.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2604.09361

Stochastic-Dimension Frozen Sampled Neural Network for High-Dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii Equations on Unbounded Domains

Authors:

Zhangyong Liang↗

arXiv:2604.09361v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper introduces the Stochastic-Dimension Frozen Sampled Neural Network (SD-FSNN), a novel computational framework for solving high-dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii equation (GPE) on unbounded domain. The proposed method circumvents the curse-of-dimensionality that plagues traditional discretizations and the computational bottlenecks of gradient-based neural network solvers through a synergistic combination of techniques. First, a prescribed Gaussian envelope encodes the far-field decay of the wavefunction, enabling a space-time separation where the spatial approximation is handled by a frozen, single-hidden-layer neural network with data-driven sampled features. This yields a gradient-free formalism where spatial derivatives are analytically precomputed and time-dependence is evolved via reduced ODEs. Second, a stochastic-dimension sampler provides a conditionally unbiased estimate of the spatial operator by evaluating only a small subset of spatial dimensions at each time step, essentially reducing computational and memory costs. Discrete conservation laws are also enforced, ensuring long-term stability. Extensive numerical experiments on GPE in up to 1000 dimensions demonstrate that SD-FSNN achieves significantly higher accuracy and efficiency compared to state-of-the-art methods, including PINNs, randomized feature methods, and tensor-network approaches. The results confirm that SD-FSNN effectively mitigates the Kolmogorov $n$-width barrier for frozen-basis models on structured solution manifolds.

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14.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2509.08629

A Cycle Walk for Sampling Measures on Spanning Forests for Redistricting

Authors:

Daryl R. DeFord↗Gregory Herschlag↗Jonathan C. Mattingly↗

arXiv:2509.08629v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce the Cycle Walk, a new Markov chain Monte Carlo method for sampling distributions on balanced graph partitions, motivated by applications in political redistricting. The method operates on spanning forests and combines two types of updates: local "cycle" moves within districts and global moves that exchange population between adjacent districts while preserving balance constraints. This construction enables efficient Metropolis–Hastings correction while allowing proposals at multiple spatial scales. We show that the Cycle Walk naturally interpolates between existing approaches based on local updates and a class of global update methods derived from recombination (RECOM). Through a range of numerical experiments on synthetic graphs and real-world precinct data, we demonstrate that the Cycle Walk exhibits improved empirical convergence diagnostics for distributions that place weaker weight on spanning-tree counts, a regime that is challenging for existing methods. In particular, the algorithm remains effective when incorporating alternative compactness measures that more closely reflect policy-relevant criteria. These results suggest that the Cycle Walk provides a flexible and computationally efficient framework for sampling from a broader class of redistricting distributions than previously accessible with MCMC techniques.

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15.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2605.15824

FashionChameleon: Towards Real-Time and Interactive Human-Garment Video Customization

Authors:

Quanjian Song↗Yefeng Shen↗Mengting Chen↗Hao Sun↗Jinsong Lan↗Xiaoyong Zhu↗Bo Zheng↗Liujuan Cao↗

Human-centric video customization, particularly at the garment level, has shown significant commercial value. However, existing approaches cannot support low-latency and interactive garment control, which is crucial for applications such as e-commerce and content creation. This paper studies how to achieve interactive multi-garment video customization while preserving motion coherence using only single-garment video data. We present FashionChameleon, a real-time and interactive framework for human-garment customization in autoregressive video generation, where users can interactively switch garment during generation. FashionChameleon consists of three key techniques: (i) Instead of training on multi-garment video data, we train a Teacher Model with In-Context Learning on a single reference-garment pair. By retaining the image-to-video training paradigm while enforcing a mismatch between the reference and garment image, the model is encouraged to implicitly preserve coherence during single-garment switching. (ii) To achieve consistency and efficiency during generation, we introduce Streaming Distillation with In-Context Learning, which fine-tunes the model with in-context teacher forcing and improves extrapolation consistency via gradient-reweighted distribution matching distillation. (iii) To extend the model for interactive multi-garment video customization, we propose Training-Free KV Cache Rescheduling, which includes garment KV refresh, historical KV withdraw, and reference KV disentangle to achieve garment switching while preserving motion coherence. Our FashionChameleon uniquely supports interactive customization and consistent long-video extrapolation, while achieving real-time generation at 23.8 FPS on a single GPU, 30-180$\times$ faster than existing baselines.

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16.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.14895

Effective Resistances and Commute Times in Sparse Random Geometric Graphs

Authors:

Filip O. Rupchin↗Peter J. Mucha↗

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

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17.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2605.11895

Universal Speed Limit in a Far-from-Equilibrium Bose Gas: Symmetry and Dynamical Decoherence

Authors:

Jun-Cheng Liang↗Bo Chen↗

arXiv:2605.11895v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Predicting universal transport coefficients in far-from-equilibrium quantum systems remains a fundamental challenge. A paradigmatic example is the non-thermal fixed point (NTFP) of isolated Bose gases, where coherence spreads as $\ell^2(t) = C\hbar t/m$ with a universal constant $C$. While the scaling exponent $z=2$ is well established, the amplitude $C$ has remained elusive because the underlying particle cascade $n(k)\sim k^{-4}$ leads to a divergent kinetic energy, threatening the very existence of a constant speed limit. Here we resolve this paradox and present the first analytical, parameter-free prediction of a universal amplitude $C$. A deep interplay between symmetry and dissipation is uncovered. The emergent weak U(1) symmetry at the NTFP enforces a conserved total current, forcing the low-energy phase dynamics to obey a diffusive Langevin equation with noise entering as the divergence of a stochastic current. This structure, combined with dynamical decoherence of high-momentum modes, yields a universal power-law momentum distribution $\tilde{f}(v)\sim(1+v^2)^{-3}$ (with $v=k\ell$) that naturally regularizes the ultraviolet divergence. From this, a parameter-free geometric baseline $C=3$ is obtained, independent of microscopic details. The experimental value $C=3.4(3)$ [Martirosyan et al., Nature 647, 608 (2025)] is then shown to be quantitatively consistent with universal logarithmic corrections arising from a marginally irrelevant coupling at the fixed point. A new paradigm is thus established for predicting transport coefficients in strongly correlated non-equilibrium systems: symmetry constraints determine the low-energy effective theory, dynamical decoherence provides a natural ultraviolet completion, and scaling analysis delivers testable predictions moving beyond scaling exponents to quantitative amplitude prediction.

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18.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22 DOI: HASH:97d5193732bb991cd6c5b31286fb6067

Midlife Measures of General Cognitive Performance in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health)

Authors:

Aiello↗A. E↗Rob↗F. I↗Gross↗A. L↗Bennett↗D. A↗Manly↗J. J↗Plassman↗B. L↗…

Objective: The Add Health Cognitive Assessment, Physical, and Sensory Function Protocol (Add CAPS) was developed to assess cognitive, physical, and sensory function in early midlife in a nationally representative sample in the United States. Using Add CAPS, we developed two general cognitive performance measures. Methods: The sample included 2,525 participants from Add Health Wave VI who completed an in- home assessment of cognitive performance. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to derive two general cognitive performance (GCP) scores: (1) a five-domain score based on originally designed cognitive domains (Add CAPS GCP), and (2) a modified score aligned with the Harmonized Cognitive Assessment Protocol (HCAP) framework (Add CAPS GCP-H). We evaluated model fit using Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA), Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR), and Comparative Fit Index (CFI) and tested factor scores for criterion validity. Results: Both models showed good fit (Add CAPS GCP: RMSEA = 0.025, SRMR = 0.031, CFI = 0.968; Add CAPS GCP-H: RMSEA = 0.027, SRMR = 0.033, CFI = 0.962), indicating that they adequately represent the underlying GCP construct. Discussion: The Add CAPS cognitive battery captures a robust, hierarchical structure of GCP across alternative domain specifications. The derived factor scores provide a valuable method for characterizing a person's cognitive baseline during midlife. Importantly, the Add CAPS GCP-H enhances comparability with the HCAP network, supporting cross-cohort analyses of cognitive aging.

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19.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12294

Bridging the Modality Gap in Forensic Image Retrieval

Authors:

Ricardo Gonz\'alez-Gazapo↗Annette Morales-Gonz\'alez↗Yoanna Mart\'inez-D\'iaz↗Heydi M\'endez-V\'azquez↗Milton Garc\'ia-Borroto↗

Automated image retrieval plays an increasingly critical role in modern forensic analysis, supporting investigative workflows that rely on efficient comparison of visual evidence. While prior work has focused primarily on developing and optimizing multimodal retrieval systems, limited attention has been paid to evaluating the forensic applicability of these technologies across diverse real-world scenarios. In this study, we present a unified retrieval framework adapted to four key forensic tasks: (1) tattoo image retrieval given a tattoo query image; (2) tattoo retrieval guided by human-expert textual descriptions, modelling the common situation where a witness verbally describes a tattoo; (3) tattoo retrieval from hand-drawn sketches; and (4) face retrieval from forensic face sketches. Our system leverages a multimodal large language model (MLLM) to automatically generate structured textual descriptions for all queries and gallery images, followed by sentence-transformer embedding for text-based comparison. We evaluate retrieval using visual-only embeddings, text-only embeddings and a multimodal fusion strategy that combines text- and image-based similarity scores derived from state-of-the-art visual feature extractors relevant to each task. The fusion of modalities consistently improves retrieval precision and robustness, especially in scenarios where visual information is limited or noisy (e.g., sketches, partial tattoos, or fragmented witness statements). This work highlights the forensic value of a unified multimodal retrieval pipeline and demonstrates how modern MLLMs can operationalize challenging forensic tasks that traditionally rely on manual expert analysis. Our results position multimodal retrieval as a promising tool for supporting investigative workflows involving tattoos, facial composites, and witness descriptions.

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20.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18413

Searching for Synergy in Shared Workspace Human-AI Collaboration

Authors:

Nachiket Kotalwar↗Rohini Das↗Carolyn Rose↗

arXiv:2606.18413v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automated AI agents are increasingly capable, yet many scientific and professional tasks require human judgment and contextual expertise. We study shared-workspace human-AI teams, where AI agents and human collaborators must coordinate responsibilities before submitting a final answer. Using the Collaborative Gym environment with DiscoveryBench tasks, we examine when adding simulated human collaborators improves performance and when process loss turns additional collaborators into coordination overhead. Across 1,482 sessions, adding relevant collaborators can lower performance when teams lack structure to coordinate their contributions. We then evaluate scaffolding that combines shared group memory with simulated human-in-the-loop (HITL) gates, where selected actions require approval from a designated simulated participant. This scaffolding yields higher mean performance, most clearly in three-person teams, with clearer responsibility signals and stronger routing of expertise to team actions. Overall, how human-AI teams coordinate and integrate expertise matters as much as the capability available to them.

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21.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16317

Training-free sparse attention based on cumulative energy filtering

Authors:

Chunlu Li↗Yixuan Pan↗Bai Du↗Zhenyuan Chen↗Yanzhao Li↗Hui Dong↗Hui Wang↗Zhiqiang Zou↗

Sparse attention accelerates Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) for video generation by computing only the important tokens while skipping the rest. The token selection strategy is key to balancing sparsity and accuracy. We formulate the token filtering process as a dual-goal optimization problem: maximizing sparsity and minimizing accuracy degradation. Existing algorithms cannot fulfill both objectives simultaneously. For example, Top-p only considers the accuracy constraint, while Top-k maintains a fixed computational budget but loosens the accuracy constraint. This paper demonstrates that maintaining a fixed recall rate is sufficient for ensuring accuracy, whereas a fixed threshold is suboptimal for reducing computational cost. Therefore, we propose a dynamic thresholding scheme to improve sparsity while maintaining the same level of accuracy. Furthermore, our algorithm is deeply integrated with Flash Attention (FA), eliminating the need for any additional masking computation overhead. Experimental results on Wan 2.2 validate that, compared to the BLASST algorithm which is also integrated with FA, our dynamic thresholding strategy enhances sparsity from 61.42\% to 82\% with a VBench metric drop of less than 5\%. This results in an approximate 15\% in attention computation and a $1.61\times$ increase in computational efficiency, which is 1.18x higher than that of BLASST.

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22.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15115

Diversity-Driven Offline Multi-Objective Optimization via Nested Pareto Set Learning

Authors:

Yiyi Zhu↗Yaolin Wen↗Xiang Xia↗Xin An↗Hanyi Si↗Xiang Shu↗Yangde Fu↗Liang Dou↗Hong Qian↗

arXiv:2606.15115v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-objective optimization (MOO) has emerged as a powerful approach to solving complex optimization problems involving multiple objectives. In many practical scenarios, function evaluations are unavailable or prohibitively expensive, necessitating optimization solely based on a fixed offline dataset. In this setting, known as offline MOO, the goal is to find out the Pareto set without access to the true objective functions. This setting suffers from the out-of-distribution (OOD) issue, where the surrogate model is not accurate for unseen designs. Due to the OOD issue, surrogate errors may cause the optimizer to select solutions that do not lie on the true Pareto front and are biased toward its extremes. To address this, this paper proposes Diversity-driven Offline Multi-Objective Optimization (DOMOO), which aims to find out a diverse and high-quality set of solutions. First, DOMOO incorporates an accumulative risk control module that estimates the potential risk of candidate solutions and alleviates the OOD issue between the training data and the generated solutions. In addition, a nested Pareto set learning (PSL) strategy is proposed to jointly learn preference and PSL parameters, then optimize them, enabling adaptation to diverse Pareto front geometries. To further enhance solution quality, we design a diversity-driven selection strategy that extracts a representative and well-distributed set of final solutions. To achieve this diversity-driven selection strategy, we propose $IGD_offline$, a tailored indicator for the offline setting that considers both diversity and convergence, and avoids the bias of hypervolume indicator. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks show that DOMOO achieves the best average rank across tasks in both convergence and diversity among the compared methods.

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23.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.23896

The one-point Schreier Poisson boundary of Thompson's group $F$

Authors:

Christian M\"onch↗

arXiv:2606.23896v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We identify the Poisson boundary of the one-point Schreier-chain random walk obtained by projecting the simple symmetric random walk on Thompson's group $F$ to the dyadic orbit point $1/2$. For the associated simple labelled-generator walk on the dyadic Schreier graph, the full Poisson boundary is the skeleton end boundary. The proof combines the known description of this Schreier graph as a binary-tree skeleton with recurrent one-dimensional ray attachments with an explicit trace computation. After tracing to the grey skeleton and deleting holding probabilities, the walk becomes a reversible nearest-neighbor walk on the rooted binary tree with two unequal classes of edge conductance. This reduces the boundary identification to standard Poisson–Martin theory for transient walks on trees and leaves a finite electrical-network calculation for the harmonic measure. Following Kaimanovich's coding of skeleton ends by odd 2-adic integers [{Groups, Graphs and Random Walks}, London Math. Soc. Lecture Note Ser.~436, pp.~300–342, 2017], the hitting measure is a biased Bernoulli product measure with explicitly computed bias. It is singular with respect to Haar measure, has full topological support, and is exact-dimensional; these properties and the exact constants are proved here.

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24.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2602.21062

Critical parameters of germ-monotone families of branching random walks

Authors:

Daniela Bertacchi↗Fabio Zucca↗

arXiv:2602.21062v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a broad class of families of branching random walks on a countable set $X$, which we refer to as germ-monotone branching random walks (GMBRWs). The processes in each family are parametrized by a positive parameter $\lambda>0$, which controls the overall reproductive speed, and they are monotonically increasing in $\lambda$ with respect to the germ order, a notion that extends classical stochastic domination. This framework encompasses a wide range of models, including classical continuous-time branching random walks, as well as discrete-time counterparts of certain non-Markovian processes such as ageing branching random walks. We define a general notion of critical parameter $\lambda(A)$ associated with each subset $A \subseteq X$, which serves as a threshold separating almost sure extinction in $A$ from positive probability of survival in $A$. This unifies and extends the classical global and local critical parameters $\lambda_w$ and $\lambda_s$, which can be recovered as special cases. We then investigate how modifications of the reproduction laws, either on a finite set or on a more general subset of $X$, affect these critical parameters. Our results extend earlier contributions in the literature.

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25.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.14867

Evaluating the Robustness of Proof Autoformalization in Lean 4

Authors:

Zhengtao Gui↗Sheng Yang↗Zhouxing Shi↗

Proof autoformalization aims to translate a mathematical informal proof written in natural language into a formal proof in a formal language such as Lean~4. Several works have developed LLM-based models for proof autoformalization. However, existing evaluations have typically focused on translating well-formed informal proofs from curated datasets. We argue that a robust proof autoformalizer must remain faithful even for informal proofs that diverge from these idealized ones, and we present the first study on the robustness of proof autoformalization models. We formulate two categories of perturbations and evaluate robustness under each: a global perturbation paraphrases the informal proof in a different style, under which the formalization should remain consistent; a local perturbation alters a value, symbol, or proof step, possibly in a counterfactual way, and a robust formalization should faithfully reflect the perturbation rather than reverting to the original one or inferring a different one on its own. We build a benchmark with both perturbations on miniF2F and MATH-500, and automatically measure how stable a proof autoformalization's correctness is under global perturbations and how faithfully its output reflects local perturbations. We evaluate seven recent models, all of which are sensitive to global perturbations and mostly fail to remain faithful under local perturbations. Code and data are available via https://github.com/ucr-rai/robust-proof-autoformalization.

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