Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11 DOI: HASH:4c8c0a13a41006cf7f26663ef02442c3

Malaria Risk among Internally Mobile Individuals and Heterogeneous Mobility Patterns in Two Hypoendemic Communities: Implications for Malaria Elimination in the Peruvian Amazon.

Authors:

Ramirez Saavedra↗Acosta↗Rodriguez↗Cabrera-Sosa↗Escalente↗A. A↗Vinetz↗J. M↗Torres↗Gamboa↗

Background: Human mobility is increasingly recognized as a key factor influencing malaria transmission dynamics, particularly in low-transmission settings approaching elimination. This study aimed to assess mobility patterns and their association with malaria risk in two hypoendemic communities in the Peruvian Amazon. Method: A longitudinal study was conducted in the communities of Libertad and Urcomirano (Mazan River basin). Monthly population screenings were combined with weekly active and passive case detection. A total of 678 individuals were enrolled. Mobility patterns were assessed through structured questionnaires, and social network analysis was used to characterize travel connections. Log-binomial regression analysis was applied to identify risk factors associated with malaria infection. Result: Internally, mobile individuals in Libertad showed a higher malaria incidence (>32.47 cases per 1,000 person-months) than those in Urcomirano (

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02.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12333

Integrated expectile-based measures of inequality

Authors:

Ignacio Cascos↗Marco Tarsia↗

arXiv:2606.12333v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Expectiles provide a class of asymmetric location functionals that incorporate the magnitude of deviations and admit a natural geometric interpretation. Building on their structural consistency with the convex stochastic order, this paper introduces a family of integrated expectile functionals for measuring risk, dispersion, and inequality. The proposed functionals admit analytical representations as integrals of expectiles across asymmetry levels. For a distinguished subclass of these constructions, a geometric representation is available: the resulting quantities can be expressed as weighted areas of star-shaped sets encoding the distributional asymmetry of a random variable. This approach yields a new class of expectile-based inequality indices, constituting a natural counterpart to classical Gini-type measures while preserving desirable monotonicity and consistency properties. Empirical counterparts are derived in closed form and admit explicit decompositions over finite samples. The framework extends naturally to multivariate settings through directional expectile constructions, leading to measures capable of capturing genuinely joint forms of multivariate dispersion and inequality.

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03.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12 DOI: HASH:95473ade798c97b3fafacf364f2b54e4

Computational Design of Optimal Sequences for Targeted Hypermutagenesis Using Recombination-Coupled Diversity-Generating Retroelements

Authors:

Regnier↗Rochette↗Laurenceau↗Monasson↗Bikard↗Cocco↗

Diversity-generating retroelements (DGRs) are natural systems that accelerate evolution via targeted hypermutation at adenines. We previously developed DGRec, a system combining DGRs and recombineering for programmable mutagenesis in Escherichia coli. We here address two important issues with DGRec: the dependence of mutagenesis efficiency on the dgrRNA secondary structure and the variability of the reverse-transcription biases with sequence context and position. First, we introduce and validate a method to recode non-functional templates, i.e. with low mutagenesis efficiency, into highly functional ones through synonymous mutations. Second, we develop a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model to predict DGRec mutational profiles for any given template sequence. By integrating this LSTM model with our recoding method, we establish a comprehensive workflow for customized directed evolution, enabling researchers to precisely fine-tune DGRec in vivo mutagenesis to their engineering needs.

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04.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2511.08288

The central heat trace on large compact classical groups

Authors:

Thibaut Lemoine↗Myl\`ene Ma\"ida↗

arXiv:2511.08288v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the large-$N$ asymptotics of the central trace of the heat kernel on compact classical groups. For every classical family $G_N\subset \mathrm{GL}_N(\C)$, we prove a full large-$N$ asymptotic expansion, using a highest weights/partitions correspondence adapted to the large-rank regime, under which the eigenvalues of the Laplace–Beltrami operator stabilize as observables in the algebra of shifted symmetric functions. Then, we prove a random surface representation of the trace in terms of ramified coverings of the torus. We provide two independent applications: an explicit large-rank counting law for the Casimir spectrum, with exponential Hardy–Ramanujan-type growth in contrast with the polynomial behavior of Weyl's law at fixed rank, and a rigorous probabilistic formulation of the Yang–Mills/Hurwitz duality on a two-dimensional torus initiated by Gross and Taylor, completing a previous work of the authors. We also extend this duality to a Yang–Mills/Gromov–Witten duality by expressing the coefficients of the central heat trace as explicit functionals of the generating function of Gromov–Witten invariants.

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05.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2505.08036

Extreme value theory for geometric Brownian motion and pricing of short maturity options

Authors:

Ze-An Ng↗

arXiv:2505.08036v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate the limiting distribution of geometric Brownian motion conditional on its running maximum taking large values. The Freidlin-Wentzell large deviations theory predicts that the conditional distribution of the sample paths converge weakly to a deterministic exponential curve. We complement this result by showing that the conditional sample paths in fact converge in strong sense, and obtain quantitative bounds on the rate of convergence. As an application of our results to financial mathematics, we obtain new closed form asymptotic formulae for the fair price of barrier options with general path dependent payoff in the short maturity limit, with quantitative error estimates. We provide exact formulae for Asian and lookback style payoffs.

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06.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19 DOI: HASH:5f0a834997952017071bcad401de397e

SteerAF: Distogram-based Steering of AlphaFold2 toward Alternative Conformations

Authors:

Tang↗Zhu↗Yang↗Song↗

End-to-end structure predictors, such as AlphaFold2, typically output only the dominant conformational state of a given protein, which is biased by the training data set. Existing strategies for recovering alternative conformations are often computationally expensive and offer limited biological interpretability. Here, we present SteerAF, an inference-time optimization framework based on AlphaFold2 that leverages information encoded in the distogram derived from deep multiple sequence alignments (MSAs) to predict alternative protein conformations. Across four benchmark datasets, SteerAF matches or surpasses existing methods in predicting alternative conformations for the majority of systems. Sparse MSA-feature modifications generated via block gradient ascent exhibit a strong correlation with experimentally characterized functional residues, recovering them with approximately 50% precision in the tested proteins. Furthermore, SteerAF enables effective decoy selection in the absence of experimental structures, and its predictions can serve as seed structures for molecular dynamics simulations to map conformational landscapes. Thus, SteerAF provides an efficient and interpretable approach for predicting alternative conformations, offering a framework that can be extended to other similar predictors and problems.

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07.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2605.30837

Send a SCOUT First: Pre-hoc Reasoning for Adaptive Detector Allocation in Prompt-Injection Defense

Authors:

Shuhao Zhang↗Jiarui Li↗Qi Cao↗Ruiyi Zhang↗Pengtao Xie↗

arXiv:2605.30837v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Prompt-injection detectors are heterogeneous: each is strong on a different slice of attacks, and none is always reliable. Yet existing systems still treat detection as a fixed single-detector pipeline, committing every request to one detector's blind spots. We reframe defense as detector allocation: given a heterogeneous pool, decide per request which detectors to run and whether to escalate to an LLM judge. Our framework SCOUT (Scalable and Controllable Outcome-prediction for Uncertainty-aware Triage) makes this decision dynamic by predicting each detector's per-sample reliability and latency from how it behaved on similar past inputs, and exposes a single safety-utility threshold to the operator (where utility bundles benign-pass rate and wall-clock). To evaluate this setting, we build SCOUT-450, a benchmark that captures the structurally complex, agent-facing injections that older prompt-injection sets under-represent. On SCOUT-450, a safety-oriented operating point reduces attack-success rate by 46% and total wall-clock by 40% relative to an always-on GPT-4o judge, at a 5.1-point benign-utility drop. SCOUT also transfers to three external benchmarks (BIPIA, IPI, and IHEval), improving the safety-utility frontier.

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08.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17082

ParkingTransformer: LLM-Enhanced End-to-End Trajectory Planning for Autonomous Parking

Authors:

Hauteng Wu↗Xu Li↗Dong Kong↗Zihang Wang↗Xieyuanli Chen↗Benwu Wang↗Wenkai Zhu↗

arXiv:2606.17082v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: End-to-end autonomous parking has emerged as a critical task within the realm of autonomous driving. However, existing methods suffer from black-box characteristics, lacking high-level semantic understanding and interpretability, which impedes the realization of seamless long-distance autonomous parking from the road to the target spot. To address these limitations, we propose ParkingTransformer, a novel framework that leverages multi-view perception and the scene understanding capability of Large Language Models (LLMs). By combining trajectory queries with LLMs implicit state features, our method interacts directly with historical information and raw sensor data to output planning trajectories, eliminating the need for dense Bird's-View (BEV) representations. To compensate for the inadequate spatial reasoning ability of LLMs, we introduce 3D positional encoding to explicitly inject spatial geometric awareness. Furthermore, a fixed-window streaming mechanism is designed for historical information processing, significantly improving long-term temporal processing efficiency and inference speed. Additionally, a coarse-to-fine decoding strategy is employed to progressively enhance trajectory precision. Extensive closed-loop experiments are conducted on the CARLA simulator and real-world vehicle platforms. The results demonstrate that our method achieves a driving score of 61.32 in CARLA simulator and an average success rate of 88.70% in real-world experiments, validating the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.

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09.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19821

TelcoAgent: A Scalable 5G Multi-KPM Forecasting With 3GPP-Grounded Explainability

Authors:

Geon Kim↗Dara Ron↗Sukhdeep Singh↗Suyog Moogi↗Pranshav Gajjar↗V V N K Someswara Rao Koduri↗Een Kee Hong↗Vijay K. Shah↗

arXiv:2606.19821v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Key Performance Measurement (KPM) forecasting is essential for proactive network management of 5G and next-generation telecom networks. However, existing machine learning (ML) approaches face significant limitations in scalability and explainability, restricting their effectiveness in real-world deployments. We propose TelcoAgent, a foundation model-based framework that enables accurate, scalable, and explainable forecasting of multiple KPMs across diverse network cells without the need for site-specific training. Specifically, the framework comprises three key components: (i) an automated three-agent pipeline that constructs a 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) knowledge graph directly from specification documents, (ii) a scalable, time-series foundation model (TSFM)-based prediction pipeline to deliver accurate, zero-shot forecasting, and finally (iii) a reasoning and explanation pipeline that provides actionable, domain-grounded diagnostics. Evaluated using a 3-month, real-world, city-scale 5G KPM dataset from a U.S.-based network operator, TelcoAgent demonstrates high forecasting accuracy for all 7 considered KPMs per cell across 200 cells, while delivering explainable insights and actionable instructions to address network degradations.

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10.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11 DOI: HASH:7d877a310c7064fcfc6915949d100b91

DeePEn - A Depth sensitive benchmark for Protein Engineering

Authors:

Schmirler↗Brenner↗Franz↗Heinzinger↗Rost↗

Recent progress in modeling techniques and high-throughput screening has significantly enhanced the accessibility of protein engineering. Nevertheless, further progress gets hindered by the lack of robust benchmarks that capture the practical challenges for real-world protein engineering. Here, we introduced DeePEn, a Depth-sensitive benchmark for Protein Engineering that quantifies a models generalization capabilities when predicting protein fitness at increasing mutational distance from the wildtype or training data. We defined distance as the number of simultaneous point mutations, i.e., single amino acid variants (SAVs), moving from wild-type to mutant (edit distance in computer science jargon). Specifically selecting four deep mutational scanning (DMS) datasets with sufficient multi-mutation data points from ProteinGym, we assessed recent predictive models, including general and biophysics-informed protein Language Models (pLMs), and a non-transformer neural network. Our results highlight how the performance of all models deteriorates with increasing mutational distance and that no single metric sufficiently captures the diverse requirements of protein engineering. To overcome these shortcomings, DeePEn provides a readily available resource for multi-metric benchmarking that focuses on the prediction of distant variants.

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11.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17922

On Injectivity of Phase Retrieval

Authors:

Zhangsong Li↗

arXiv:2606.17922v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this short note, we prove that if $A \in \mathbb C^{N \times M}$ with $N=4M-5$ has i.i.d.\ standard complex Gaussian entries, then the probability that the phase retrieval map generated by $A$ is not injective is positive. This proves Part (1) of a conjecture of Cynthia Vinzant, which was later restated by Afonso S. Bandeira in [BDL+26]. The main result of this paper was obtained using generative AI, in particular the Rethlas system.

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12.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16733

A First-Principles Derivation of LLM Policy Optimization: From Expected Reward to GRPO and Its Structural Extensions

Authors:

Jianghan Shen↗Siqi Luo↗Yue Li↗Jiyao Liu↗Wanying Qu↗Yi Zhang↗Ziyan Huang↗Tianbin Li↗Ming Hu↗Xiaohong Liu↗Yirong Chen↗Junjun He↗…

arXiv:2606.16733v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Policy gradient algorithms for language models optimize the same objective $J(\theta) = \mathbb{E}*{\tau \sim p*\theta(\tau)}[R(\tau)]$, which has exactly two factors: the trajectory probability $p_\theta(\tau)$ and the reward $R(\tau)$. Every method from REINFORCE to PPO to GRPO and their descendants modifies one or both factors to address a specific failure in the preceding formulation. Existing surveys organize these methods by domain or chronology, which obscures the rationale behind each design choice and the precise location of its intervention within the gradient estimator. This survey revisits the landscape of LLM policy optimization from $J(\theta)$ on first principles and uses the trajectory side, induced by $p_\theta(\tau)$, and the reward side, induced by $R(\tau)$, as the two axes along which methods are located. It covers the path from REINFORCE and PPO to GRPO, as well as post-GRPO variants, Agentic RL, and GRPO-OPD. The resulting framework is unified, diagnostic, and extensible: it analyzes methods from a shared objective, identifies which side each method modifies and why, and applies the same trajectory and reward axes across these settings. Across these settings, the framework also exposes compound failures that no single-side fix resolves and that therefore require joint design of the trajectory side and the reward side. The boundary cases and coupled failures identified by this map mark where existing solutions run out and provide a principled starting point for designing the next generation of LLM policy optimization algorithms.

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13.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16465

When Agent Automation Becomes Profitable: Quantifying and Insuring Autonomous AI Risk through Trace-Economic Underwriting

Authors:

Binyan Xu↗Xilin Dai↗Fan Yang↗Kehuan Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.16465v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents can now take irreversible actions in operational systems, but agent-caused losses are still not clearly assigned, priced, or transferred. Providers often disclaim consequential damages, users are left with uncompensated losses, and default human review limits the efficiency gains of automation. We ask when autonomous AI deployment can become economically acceptable despite failure risk. Our answer is to quantify risk at the customer-task-trace episode level and transfer it through insurance. Automation is acceptable when its expected benefit exceeds the premium, control cost, and remaining risk. This requires a defined role with bounded permissions and comparable traces. We introduce trace-economic underwriting, which maps tool-use traces to customer exposure and claimable loss, then uses this representation for pricing, control, and risk transfer. It uses deterministic economic labels rather than an LLM judge. In our trace-to-loss testbed, trace-economic pricing reduces pricing MAE from $17.7K to $569 and removes regressive cross-subsidy. A 300-trace expert audit accepts 295 labels unchanged. On 1,000 real SWE-smith traces, trace-conditioned controls reduce CVaR95 by 72%. Theorem~1 gives a finite-sample scope condition. We release code, labels, and audit sheets.

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14.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15219

Can Neural Networks Achieve Optimal Computational-statistical Tradeoff? An Analysis on Single-Index Model

Authors:

Siyu Chen↗Beining Wu↗Miao Lu↗Zhuoran Yang↗Tianhao Wang↗

arXiv:2606.15219v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, we tackle the following question: Can neural networks trained with gradient-based methods achieve the optimal computational-statistical tradeoff in learning Gaussian single-index models? Prior research has shown that any polynomial-time algorithm under the statistical query (SQ) framework requires $\Omega(d^{s^\star/2}\lor d)$ samples, where $s^\star$ is the generative exponent representing the intrinsic difficulty of learning the underlying model. However, it remains unknown whether neural networks can achieve this sample complexity. Inspired by prior techniques such as label transformation and landscape smoothing for learning single-index models, we propose a unified gradient-based algorithm for training a two-layer neural network in polynomial time. Our method is adaptable to a variety of loss and activation functions, covering a broad class of existing approaches. We show that our algorithm learns a feature representation that strongly aligns with the unknown signal $\theta^\star$, with sample complexity $\widetilde{O} (d^{s^\star/2} \lor d)$, matching the SQ lower bound up to a polylogarithmic factor for all generative exponents $s^\star\geq 1$. Furthermore, we extend our approach to the setting where $\theta^\star$ is $k$-sparse for $k = o(\sqrt{d})$ by introducing a novel weight perturbation technique that leverages the sparsity structure. We derive a corresponding SQ lower bound of order $\widetilde{\Omega}(k^{s^\star})$, matched by our method up to a polylogarithmic factor. Our framework, especially the weight perturbation technique, is of independent interest, and suggests potential gradient-based solutions to other problems such as sparse tensor PCA.

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15.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16807

Connecting Speech to Words through Images

Authors:

Gabriel Pirlogeanu↗Dan Oneata↗Horia Cucu↗Herman Kamper↗

How can we learn the mapping between written words and their spoken counterparts in the absence of explicit textual supervision? We present a visually grounded method for building a vocabulary of spoken words using only images and their spoken descriptions. First, image captioning systems are used to build a vocabulary of written words representing salient visual concepts in the images. For each word, we then find utterances whose image captions contain that word. Then we use an unsupervised word discovery technique to align these utterances to locate instances of the target word. The result is spoken word segments that are linked to written words – all accomplished without any text supervision. In spoken word retrieval and keyword spotting experiments, the proposed approach outperforms a strong neural baseline while being more interpretable. These results demonstrate the feasibility of the approach in English and motivate future work on low-resource languages without transcripts.

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16.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2509.08965

Retrocausal capacity of a quantum channel: Communicating through noisy closed timelike curves

Authors:

Kaiyuan Ji↗Seth Lloyd↗Mark M. Wilde↗

arXiv:2509.08965v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the capacity of a quantum channel for retrocausal communication, where messages are transmitted backward in time, from a sender in the future to a receiver in the past, through a noisy postselected closed timelike curve mathematically represented by the channel. We completely characterize the one-shot retrocausal quantum and classical capacities, and we show that the corresponding asymptotic capacities are equal to the average and sum, respectively, of the channel's max-information and its regularized Doeblin information. This endows these information measures with a novel operational interpretation. Furthermore, our characterization can be generalized beyond quantum channels to all completely positive maps. This imposes information-theoretic limits on transmitting messages via postselected-teleportation-like mechanisms with arbitrary initial- and final-state boundary conditions, including those considered in various black-hole final-state models.

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17.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14598

Realizing Native INT8 Compute for Diffusion Transformers on Consumer GPUs: A Fused INT8 GEMM Kernel for Ideogram 4.0

Authors:

Ali Asaria↗Tony Salomone↗Deep Gandhi↗

arXiv:2606.14598v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training INT8 (W8A8) quantization of diffusion transformers is widely deployed as a speed optimization, yet on consumer Ampere GPUs it is frequently slower than the FP8 and NF4 alternatives it is meant to beat. We trace this to a software artifact: the production "INT8" forward quantizes weights and activations only to immediately dequantize them back to bf16 and run a bf16 matrix multiply, never engaging the GPU's INT8 tensor cores, so the hardware's compute advantage is left entirely unrealized. We close this gap with a single fused Triton INT8 GEMM (int8xint8->int32 on Ampere tensor cores, with per-token x per-channel dequantization and bias folded into the epilogue, autotuned per GEMM shape) dropped into the Ideogram 4.0 diffusion transformer's linear layers in place of the dequantize-to-bf16 path. In the kernel, the int8xint8->int32 accumulation is bit-exact against torch._int_mm and the dequantized output matches the reference at cosine similarity 1.0 with no NaNs, running 2.8-4.2x faster than bf16 per GEMM. End to end it delivers a ~1.1x (~9-10%) speedup at 768px, and at 1024px it generates an image in 156.5 s on a single RTX 3090, faster than the single-card NF4 (164.5 s) and FP8 (172.9 s) baselines, at no measurable quality cost on these point estimates (PickScore/CLIPScore). INT8 thus goes from the slowest variant to the fastest, and 1024px becomes single-GPU feasible. The primary speed criterion (beat FP8, by ~9.5%) is comfortably met; the NF4 margin (~4.9%, single-run n=4) is within run-to-run variance we did not quantify and is best read as consistent with meeting the stretch target. We close with an honest deployment map: the win is specific to consumer Ampere, and on A100 and B200 the same kernel loses to those cards' fast native bf16/FP8 paths.

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18.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2605.18848

Exact Linear Attention

Authors:

Weinuo Ou↗

arXiv:2605.18848v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper introduces Exact Linear Attention (ELA), a mechanism that achieves linear computational complexity for Transformer attention by exploiting the exact decomposition property of kernel functions, thereby eliminating approximation error. We identify and address two key limitations of prior linear attention – gradient explosion and token attention dilution – by imposing kernel constraints that ensure non-negativity, discriminability, and geometric interpretability. Several kernel functions are proposed, including the Hadamard Exp Kernel, Summation Squared Euclidean Distance Kernel, and Subtraction Squared Euclidean Distance Kernel, each tailored for specific attention behaviors. Beyond the core attention formulation, the paper presents three engineering innovations: (1) a Hyper-Link structure that replaces traditional residual connections to mitigate gradient degradation; (2) a Memory Lobe module based on bidirectional linear attention, which captures "transformation flow" across layers to implement qualitative memory and an implicit reinforcement learning paradigm; and (3) a routing-score-based bias mechanism for Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) to improve interpretability and semantic alignment. Experimental results demonstrate that ELA achieves up to 6x faster decoding speed and 75% reduction in KV cache memory usage compared to full attention, while maintaining comparable or superior training performance. The proposed memory module accelerates convergence and enhances generalization. Furthermore, we extend the linear attention principle to vision models, yielding YOLO-LAT, which attains up to 4.3x GPU inference speedup and 7.9x parameter reduction with competitive detection accuracy. These results underline the broad applicability of exact linear attention for scaling Transformer models to ultra-long sequences and efficient visual tasks.

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19.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2602.15851

Narrative Theory-Driven LLM Methods for Automatic Story Generation and Understanding: A Survey

Authors:

David Y. Liu↗Aditya Joshi↗Paul Dawson↗

Applications of narrative theories using large language models (LLMs) deliver promising methods in automatic story generation and understanding tasks. Our survey examines how natural language processing (NLP) research uses LLM methods to engage with diverse concepts from narrative studies. We use established distinctions from narratology to categorise ongoing efforts and discover the following: \redtext{(a) narrative texts come from diverse sources beyond just literature, (b) theoretical synthesis and validation are potential outcomes, (c) generation tasks lag behind understanding in several ways: theoretical application, post-training methods, exploring non-fiction narratives and addressing narrative levels beyond fabula and discourse.} For future directions, instead of the pursuit of a single, generalised benchmark for `narrative quality', we believe that progress can benefit from efforts that focus on the following: defining and improving theory-based metrics for individual narrative attributes; continue conducting large-scale, theory-driven literary/social/cultural analysis; generating narratives in situated contexts; and continuing experiments where outputs can be used to validate or refine narrative theories. This work provides a contextual foundation for more systematic and theoretically informed narrative research in NLP by providing an overview to ongoing research efforts and the broader narrative studies landscape.

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20.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16626

Using AI in engineering education: a balancing act, driven by clear purpose

Authors:

Olya Kudina↗

arXiv:2606.16626v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Based on a questionnaire of 100 higher-education students, predominantly from engineering-related fields, and a critical review of recent literature, this chapter examines how students use and perceive Large Language Models (LLMs) in engineering education. Students primarily value LLMs for writing support, conceptual clarification, coding assistance, and brainstorming, while simultaneously expressing concerns about inaccuracies, bias, overreliance, academic integrity, and the burden of verification. Through an analysis of two dominant metaphors, namely LLMs as an "oracle" and as a "tutor," the chapter shows how these systems cultivate expectations of authority, expertise, and personalized learning that often exceed their actual capabilities. The chapter further argues that students' attachment to the promises of efficiency and personalized support reflects a form of "cruel optimism," where the perceived benefits of LLMs often depend on the very skills, vigilance, and expertise that students are still developing. Overall, the chapter argues for a purpose-driven and context-sensitive approach to AI integration in engineering education, emphasizing critical AI literacy, reflective assessment design, pedagogical caution, and consideration of broader ethical and environmental impacts.

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21.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15931

DeepRoot: A KG-Coordinated Multi-Agent System for Therapeutic Reasoning over Historical Medical Texts

Authors:

Zijian Carl Ma↗Sean J. Wang↗Sijbren Kramer↗Li Erran Li↗

arXiv:2606.15931v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Historical medical archives and traditional medicines hold immense potential for drug discovery and remain a primary source for current drug development. However, pre-ontological prose and idiosyncratic taxonomies prevent the standardization and medical modernization of the data for use in current biomedical pipelines. Furthermore, no existing LLM agent system, whether tool-calling, retrieval-augmented, or agentic deep-research, can convert such text into verifiable drug-discovery leads at scale. We close this gap with DeepRoot, a multi-agent LLM system that jointly builds and utilizes a verified knowledge graph, showing that grounding and reasoning – often conflated – are separable axes the system can compose for therapeutic reasoning. Applied to the Shen Nong Ben Cao Jing, DeepRoot recovers $10$ of $21$ held-out compound-disease treatment pairs at R@$20$ ($47.6\%$ vs $4.8\%$ for a raw corpus LLM and $\sim\!2.4\%$ random) and dominates an LLM-as-judge audit for reasoning quality over baseline LLMs and LLMs with direct tool-call access to the same APIs DeepRoot itself queries. Tool-using LLMs hallucinate evidence on $87\%$ of claims, versus 7-10% for DeepRoot. Graph-only inference hallucinates $0\%$ but ranks lowest on reasoning coherence; DeepRoot KG+LLM is the only condition to win on both axes, pointing toward a route for systematic mining and repurposing of historical medical knowledge.

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22.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18894

Automatic ply-specific analyses of CFRP micrographs using shortest-path-based ply distinction

Authors:

Jonas Naumann↗Jonas P. Appels↗Julius Biermann↗Christopher Gorsky↗Timo de Wolff↗Christoph Brauer↗

We present an automated approach to distinguish between ply instances in semantic segmentation masks of high-resolution carbon-fiber reinforced polymer micrographs. Interpreting the segmentation mask as a graph with pixels as vertices, enables us to use a shortest-path algorithm yielding the ply-separating paths. Thereby, we bridge the gap between semantic segmentation and ply instance segmentation using global information. We successfully apply our approach on high-resolution micrographs featuring a broad range of characteristics like artificially added gaps in single or multiple plies, different stacking sequences and ply traversing cracks. Assigning each fiber pixel to a ply based on the calculated paths, allows for a comprehensive, quantitative ply analysis with respect to its microstructural properties like the local fiber volume fraction as well as locally resolved ply and interleaf layer thickness. These insights help to reveal manufacturing-induced inhomogeneities, draw conclusions on manufacturing parameters and link mechanical properties to underlying microstructural imperfections.

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23.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12824

Acquisition state behaves as a structured, measurable variable governing lung-nodule AI: kernel-driven measurement instability and noise-driven detection fragility, invisible to DICOM metadata

Authors:

Daniel Soliman↗

AI governance for medical imaging is formalizing: the 2026 ACR-SIIM Practice Parameter recommends local acceptance testing and ongoing drift monitoring, and the ACR Assess-AI registry monitors AI outputs using DICOM metadata for context. We argue that a necessary, currently unmonitored layer sits beneath output metrics: whether incoming studies remain within the acquisition envelope a model was validated on. Using a LUNA16-trained MONAI RetinaNet lung-nodule detector, we test whether acquisition state behaves as a structured, measurable variable. On real paired CT differing only in reconstruction kernel (NLST B30f vs B80f), kernel alone shifted AI-measured diameter and flipped a Fleischner size category in 5.2% (8 of 155) of nodules at fixed patient and acquisition, while detection confidence was unchanged (Wilcoxon p=0.22). Under controlled LIDC-IDRI perturbations the effects dissociated by axis: the noise axis degraded detection confidence (p=5.9e-32, concentrated in nodules under 6 mm) but not measurement, while the frequency/kernel axis corrupted measurement (p=8.6e-13) but not detection. A 4-feature pixel fingerprint recovered reconstruction identity (patient-level AUC about 0.95 on real CT, 0.995 on a QIBA phantom) where the ConvolutionKernel DICOM tag was uninformative (identical labels across reconstructions). The kernel axis transported across four manufacturers (leave-one-vendor-out AUC 0.94-0.98, matching the within-vendor ceiling). Acquisition state thus maps to distinct AI failure modes, frequency content to measurement reliability and noise to detection sensitivity, and is not recoverable from metadata. Acquisition-aware, input-side validation is the missing layer for the acceptance-testing and drift-monitoring requirements now entering imaging-AI accreditation.

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24.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11 DOI: HASH:1ed1599b2761a2f1a327d9d2779cbcf3

Tumour evolution as ground truth for cancer whole-genome sequencing

Authors:

Valeriani↗Gandolfi↗Buscaroli↗Davydzenka↗Santacatterina↗Antonello↗Sadr↗A. H↗Gazziero↗V. A↗Milite↗Rivaroli↗…

Cancer genomes are shaped by evolutionary processes that couple mutagenesis, clonal selection, chromosomal instability, spatial growth and treatment response into structured genomic patterns, yet current benchmarking strategies largely ignore this evolutionary dependency. Here, we present SCOUT, a large-scale synthetic whole-genome sequencing resource of over 200 samples, designed for systematic benchmarking of tumour genomic analysis and evolutionary inference under controlled evolutionary ground truth. Unlike conventional task-specific simulations, SCOUT models tumour evolution as a latent generative process that simultaneously shapes mutations, copy-number alterations, variant allele frequencies, mutational signatures and clonal architectures. SCOUT recapitulates key features of solid and haematological malignancies, including driver mutations, chromosomal instability, intratumour heterogeneity, spatial sampling and treatment-associated evolutionary dynamics in tumour and matched-normal longitudinal and multi-region sequencing designs. Using SCOUT, we benchmarked widely used methods for somatic variant detection, copy-number analysis, mutational signature inference and tumour evolutionary reconstruction. Across analytical tasks, performance deteriorated in low-purity, highly subclonal and structurally complex tumours, while spatial sampling bias and hypermutation generated spurious evolutionary signals that confounded tumour interpretation across multiple inference layers. Evolutionary simulations further distinguished lineage-restricted genetic bottlenecks from multi-lineage resistance dynamics associated with tumour plasticity. Tumour purity consistently exerted a stronger effect on inference accuracy than sequencing depth. Together, our results establish evolutionary ground truth as a prerequisite for reproducible benchmarking and biologically interpretable analysis of cancer whole-genome sequencing data.

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25.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15447

Hierarchical Modeling of ICD Codes in EHR Foundation Models

Authors:

Megha Thukral↗Dong Gyun Kang↗Rudra Pratap Singh↗Shruthi Kashinath Hiremath↗Katrin H\"ansel↗Thomas Pl\"otz↗

arXiv:2606.15447v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Electronic health record foundation models typically treat ICD diagnosis codes as flat tokens, overlooking the clinically meaningful hierarchical structure that captures disease families, subcategories, and fine-grained diagnostic detail. As a result, existing EHR representation learning methods do not explicitly exploit the hierarchical structure already present in the coding system. In this work, we study ICD-10-CM hierarchy as a general inductive bias for clinical representation learning. We investigate two complementary mechanisms for incorporating hierarchy: first, by augmenting diagnosis sequences in a BERT-style transformer with tokens corresponding to different levels of the ICD hierarchy, and second, by injecting hierarchy into graph-based code representations through hierarchy-aware edges combined with diagnosis co-occurrence structure. Across these settings, we evaluate whether explicit hierarchy improves downstream prediction, which levels of the hierarchy are most useful, whether hierarchy encoding improves transfer across datasets, and how hierarchy reshapes embedding similarity structure. We conduct experiments on two large-scale real-world clinical datasets: MIMIC-IV, used for pretraining and in-domain evaluation, and eICU, used to assess cross-dataset transfer via frozen encoder probing. Our findings show that explicitly encoding ICD hierarchy improves over flat code representations in both in-domain and cross-dataset settings, while revealing that the most useful level of hierarchy depends on both the task and the modeling approach. More broadly, we focus on hierarchy-aware EHR representation learning and show that the benefits of encoding hierarchy are generalizable across modeling settings and hierarchy levels.

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