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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

GLARE: A Natural Language Interface for Querying Global Explanations

arXiv:2606.19735v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While global explanations are crucial for understanding vision models across datasets, classes, and decision contexts, their complex and monolithic nature often hinders practical exploration. Because users typically seek targeted answers to specific questions rather than static artifacts, we present an LLM-based interactive interface that provides natural language access to global explanations for black-box image classifiers. The system's core LLM acts as a mediator, translating natural language questions into structured SQL queries over local explanation data. This enables flexible aggregation without exposing users to low-level representations. For each query, the interface outputs statistics-augmented natural language responses, supporting local explanations, and intent-aligned visualizations. We evaluate the system on intent interpretation, query mapping accuracy, generalization to novel queries and datasets, and robustness to linguistic errors. Our results demonstrate that LLM-mediated querying substantially improves the accessibility and usability of global explanations for human-centered XAI.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Fractional squeezing: spectra and dynamics from generalized squeezing Hamiltonian with fractional orders

Authors:

arXiv:2601.15693v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We generalize the generalized-squeezing problem to include fractional values of the squeezing order $n$. This approach allows us to determine the locations of critical points at which qualitative changes in behaviour occur and accurately predict the behaviour at these critical points, which are challenging for conventional computational methods. Based on our numerical calculations, we identify with a high degree of confidence the point at which the spectrum turns from continuous to discrete and the point at which oscillations turn from having asymptotically infinite amplitudes to having finite amplitudes. Furthermore, we numerically investigate the behaviour in the large $n$ regime and provide an intuitive explanation for the numerical results.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Decentralised AI Training and Inference with BlockTrain

Authors:

arXiv:2606.24722v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Frontier AI training is increasingly shaped by access to dense, centrally controlled accelerator clusters. This creates a structural advantage for hyperscalers and large centralized laboratories, and makes open or independent AI efforts depend on scarce capital, privileged infrastructure, and data-center geography. We present Spheroid BlockTrain, a decentralized training protocol in which a model is partitioned into independently trainable blocks, each optimized on a local objective derived from the same global target and composed at inference into one model. On byte-level WikiText, BlockTrain reaches cross entropy 1.359 (perplexity 3.89), within about 0.04 CE of a same-setup end-to-end Transformer reference, while each active worker trains only one block and avoids full-model optimizer state. A shared six-worker block training run reaches CE 1.385 by averaging same-block updates into one assembled model. HTTP/TCP transport experiments move real serialized checkpoints and updates, including a public-IP three-host run that improves CE from 5.580 to 1.811 while moving 15.22 GB. For inference, the current BlockTrain path uses one block-stack traversal per full output and serves over direct TCP across three public-network GPU hosts up to a 75.80B-parameter logical fp16 shape, outperforming a matched plain-autoregressive TCP pipeline baseline because it emits a full sequence per WAN pipeline traversal rather than one token per traversal.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Metabolic quantum limit to the information capacity of magnetoencephalography

arXiv:2511.06401v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Magnetoencephalography measures the magnetic fields generated by neural currents using quantum sensors such as superconducting quantum interference devices and atomic magnetometers. Here we combine the energy resolution limit of magnetic sensing with the metabolic power available to neural currents to derive a technology-independent bound on the information capacity of MEG. The bound factorizes into geometry, metabolism, and Planck's constant, and gives an estimated maximum information rate of 2.2~Mbit/s for representative human-brain parameters. Further, we show that the externally measurable magnetic field has a finite angular bandwidth, with high multipole components being geometrically attenuated and falling below the quantum-limited noise floor. This yields an information-limited spatial scale of order $1~cm$ and renders the accessible measurement space effectively finite-dimensional. The energy resolution limit therefore defines an information-theoretic Nyquist scale for magnetoencephalography, beyond which denser spatial sampling provides redundant measurements rather than additional recoverable information. Since the energy resolution limit also makes the noise variance grow linearly with measurement bandwidth, temporal and spatial bandwidths compete, producing a fundamental spatio-temporal trade-off. These results show how quantum-limited measurements constrain the observable complexity and information content of noninvasive brain imaging, providing a quantitative link between fundamental physics and neuroscience.

05.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Detection of anisotropic cosmic structures on a gigaparsec scale

Galaxy redshift surveys map the cosmic web and provide a key observational test of whether the Universe becomes statistically homogeneous and isotropic on sufficiently large scales, as assumed by the cosmological principle underpinning the standard cosmological model1. In this framework, beyond the nonlinear regime of structure formation, inhomogeneous and anisotropic features are expected to fade rapidly, reflecting the near-isotropic primordial density field and its subsequent gravitational evolution. Although supported by the small amplitude of cosmic microwave background anisotropies2, this view is increasingly challenged by the complex network of large-scale structures and voids in the galaxy distribution3–6, as well as by independent probes reporting possible large-scale deviations from statistical homogeneity7 and isotropy8,9. Here we show that the galaxy distribution exhibits persistent anisotropic structures extending to scales on the order of one gigaparsec. Using the Angular Distribution of Pairwise Distances (ADPD)10, a parameter-free statistic that measures directional correlations, we detect anisotropy signals exceeding those in isotropic controls and geometry-matched ΛCDM mock catalogues with conservative significance greater than 3σ. These results provide direct evidence that directional coherence persists to larger scales than predicted in the standard framework, challenging the assumption of large-scale isotropy. They call for a reassessment of how homogeneity and isotropy are realized in the observed Universe and motivate new tests of cosmological models based on directional statistics. Using the parameter-free Angular Distribution of Pairwise Distances for measuring directional correlations, evidence is found for coherent anisotropic structures extending over gigaparsec scales, challenging the assumption that the Universe becomes statistically isotropic on sufficiently large scales.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Associations Between Social Responsiveness and Sleep Disruption are Modulated by Chronotype in Early Adolescence: Cross-Sectional and Prospective Findings from 10,108 Participants of the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study

Background: Sleep disruption is prevalent in people with neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism but is not clear whether it occurs as an endophenotype or secondary to other behaviours. The ABCD Study is a population-based longitudinal study that monitors the health, demography and lifestyle of over 11,000 children in the US. In this study we leverage these data to investigate whether traits consistent with autism (social responsiveness) are associated with sleep disruption independent of lifestyle and other behavioural measures. Methods: Autistic traits were assessed using the Social Responsiveness Scale at age 11, and sleep disruption and behavioural outcomes were assessed at ages 11 and 13 years using the Sleep Disturbance Scale, and the Child Behaviour Check List, respectively. Demographic, health and lifestyle-related variables were assessed by caregiver questionnaires. Regression models were applied to investigate associations between autistic traits and sleep outcomes. Results: There was a significant cross-sectional association between sleep disturbance and SRS at age 11 years old that was independent of sex, ethnicity, socioeconomic position, physical activity, sedentary behaviour and anxiety/depression ({beta} = 0.12, 95% CI (0.07, 0.17); p < 0.001), that persisted at age 13, and that was modulated by chronotype, with evening types showing a stronger association. Discussion: Social responsiveness assessed in early adolescence (age 11) were associated with sleep disruption independent of multiple confounding factors and were prospectively associated with sleep disruption at age 13 years. These findings contribute to the evidence that disruption of sleep and circadian timing may have a primary role in the neurobiological mechanisms that mediate autistic traits.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Surrogate Assisted Pedestrian Protection Design via a Foundation Model Orchestrated Workflow

arXiv:2606.17577v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI-driven engineering workflows face particular challenges in crash safety design: unlike aerodynamics, crash events involve highly nonlinear contact dynamics, material nonlinearity, and discrete state transitions that are difficult to capture with data-driven surrogate models. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first foundation model–orchestrated workflow for crash safety design that enables surrogate-assisted exploration for pedestrian protection, reducing evaluation time from hours per CAE simulation to seconds. The workflow integrates four components: (1) a surrogate trained on CAE crash simulations to predict pedestrian leg injury metrics from design parameters, achieving an average $R^2=0.87$ and providing distribution-free conformal prediction intervals; (2) multiobjective evolutionary search (NSGA-II) to discover diverse feasible parameter sets under user-specified constraints; (3) a morphing-based geometry generator that maps parameters to topology-preserving 3D shapes; and (4) a natural-language interface in which an LLM orchestrates the workflow and a vision–language model supports semantic comparison of generated designs. In an automotive front-bumper case study, the workflow produces 35 distinct safety-compliant alternatives from a single exploration, a process that would require weeks with conventional CAE iteration. These results suggest that foundation models can serve as integration layers between ML surrogates and physics-based simulation, helping bring AI capabilities to safety-critical engineering domains.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Maturing Markov Decision Processes: Decision Making under Increasing Information and Shrinking Action Sets

arXiv:2606.18820v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sequential decision problems often exhibit an asymmetric evolution of information and decision flexibility: as a decision cycle unfolds, the agent receives richer information while feasible actions expire due to operational cutoffs, commitments, or resource constraints. Standard MDP formulations typically flatten this structure into stage-dependent state descriptions and action masks, thereby obscuring the nested information–action asymmetry that determines which decisions are urgent and which can be deferred. We introduce Maturing Markov Decision Processes (MMDPs), a formulation built around this information–action asymmetry. We characterize one of its key consequences through an expiring-action priority principle, which identifies the actions that must be resolved before the next stage. Motivated by this structure, we develop a structure-aware reinforcement learning framework with stage-aware policy design, expiring-action abstraction, and search-augmented learning with distillation. Experiments on a controlled multi-supplier replenishment problem, simplified cash-management environments of increasing complexity, and a production-scale simulator show that explicitly modeling this asymmetry improves learning efficiency and becomes increasingly valuable as decision problems scale.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Reading between the Lines: Leveraging Large Language Models for Global Dementia and Depression Assessment from Clinical Interviews

Dementia and depression are the most prevalent neuropsychiatric disorders in geriatric populations, and their overlapping symptoms pose major challenges for differential diagnosis. In this study, we investigate open-weights Large Language Models (LLMs) for predicting dementia and depression severity from speech samples collected during standardized history taking interviews with 154 German-speaking subjects. We introduce an observer-based Global Depression Scale (GDS-D) aligned with the established Global Deterioration Scale (GDS), enabling parallel global staging of affective and cognitive symptoms. We compare three LLMs (Mistral 3.1, DeepHermes, Qwen3) in two settings: (1) zero-shot prediction and (2) LLM-based feature extraction for Support Vector Regression, using human and pause-enriched transcripts. Results show that LLMs effectively predict depression severity in zero-shot settings (best MAE of 0.60), while dementia assessment benefits substantially from structured feature extraction (best MAE of 0.78), reducing errors by up to 35% over zero-shot baselines. Pause-enriched transcripts achieve competitive performance with human transcriptions, demonstrating the viability of fully automatic screening pipelines for differential neuropsychiatric assessment.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

How Seemingly Inconsequential Design Choices Dictate Performance of LLMs in Pathology

General-purpose large language models (LLMs) are routinely used as baselines when evaluating specialized pathology models on whole-slide images (WSIs). Because WSIs exceed contemporary model context limits, LLM baselines routinely use small, high-magnification patches processed independently via majority voting, without systematic evaluation of seemingly inconsequential design choices such as patch size, patch count, and magnification. Generalist LLMs have consistently underperformed specialized systems, reinforcing the perception that domain-specific training or architectural adaptation is necessary for pathology tasks involving WSIs. Here, we conduct a systematic factorial analysis of four input design factors: inference mode, patch size, magnification, and patch count. We demonstrate that prior studies have overstated the gap between specialized models and general-purpose LLMs by choosing non-optimized input configurations. On the MultiPathQA benchmark, switching to a single balanced configuration (large patches at lower magnification, processed jointly) raises GPT-5 from 15.1% to 39.5% on cancer-type classification (TCGA) and from 38.1% to 62.9% on organ classification (GTEx). Per-task optimization yields further gains up to 43.9% (TCGA) and 71.6% (GTEx). The same configuration generalizes to two other models and to a fully held-out CPTAC cohort, where it improves Gemini 3 Flash by 23.4 percentage points without any task-specific tuning.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Training-Free Metrics for Synthetic Object Detection Data: A Proxy for Detector Performance

With the recent advent of image generative models, synthetic data are increasingly being used to supplement limited real datasets for training computer vision models. However, not all synthetic datasets improve performance equally, and their effectiveness can only be assessed by training a downstream model, which is computationally expensive and time-consuming. This problem is pronounced in the task of object detection, where the required annotations are much more dense due to bounding boxes. In this paper, we propose a pre-computable metric family, dubbed Conditional-Composition Domain Match (CCDM), which serves as a proxy for the relative utility of candidate synthetic training sets for downstream detection. Experiments on the VisDrone-DET dataset show that the CCDM metric families achieve a Spearman correlation of 1.0 with the downstream performance of YOLOv8, clearly outperforming existing metrics for synthetic image evaluation.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

ObsGraph: Hierarchical Observation Representation for Embodied Reasoning and Exploration

Embodied reasoning and exploration are increasingly considered crucial abilities for robots operating in complex and unfamiliar environments. To accomplish tasks in such settings, an agent must identify and acquire the information necessary for the task through exploration. We propose ObsGraph, an observation-centric hierarchical scene graph that unifies scene representation, retrieval, and exploration. It retains visual evidence and organizes it into room-view-object layers: rooms provide coarse semantic anchors, views preserve contextual object covisibility, and objects store fine-grained details. On top of this representation, we perform coarse-to-fine hierarchical retrieval under a bounded budget, and crucially use retrieval outcomes to structure the exploration candidate space–activating room-level exploration, view refinement, or frontier exploration–thereby tightly coupling representation, retrieval, and adaptive multi-scale exploration. Experiments across embodied reasoning and exploration benchmarks demonstrate improved success and efficiency, highlighting the benefits of structured scene representation and more targeted information gathering driven by identified evidence gaps.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Recurrence After Hepatic Hydatid Cyst Surgery: Scolicidal Agent Application Technique and the Effect of Cystopiliary Fistula

Objective: This study aimed to evaluate long-term outcomes in patients who underwent surgical treatment for hepatic hydatid cyst (HCC) disease and, in particular, to investigate the effect of scolicidal agent (SA) application method and the presence of cystobiliary fistula (CBF) on the development of recurrence. Materials and Methods: This single-center, retrospective study included 197 patients who underwent surgical treatment for HCC disease. Hypertonic saline was used as SA in all patients and was classified as intracystic or pericystic application according to the application method. The presence of CBF was evaluated according to intraoperative and postoperative findings. Patients were followed for 86 months, and the development of recurrence was identified by radiological methods. Comparisons were made between the groups with and without recurrence in terms of SA application method and the presence of CBF. Results: The median age of the patients was 38 years, and the median follow-up period was 86 months. SA application was performed into the cyst in 51.3% of the patients and around the cyst in 48.7%. The presence of CBF was detected in 49.7% of the patients. No statistically significant difference was found between the recurrent and non-recurrent groups in terms of SA application method (p = 0.344). Similarly, no significant relationship was found between the presence of CBF and the development of recurrence (p = 0.721). Conclusion: This study showed that the SA application method and the presence of CBF are not determinants of recurrence in HCC disease. It is thought that recurrence rates can be kept low with appropriate surgical technique and effective biliary tract management.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Lifelong In-Context Learning with Transformers Requires Parametric Forms of Attention

arXiv:2606.25342v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Lifelong continual learning remains an obstacle on the path to human-like intelligence. Modern transformers show sparks of intelligence with in-context learning. The quadratic nature of attention, however, prohibits transformers from performing this process on arbitrarily long sequences. In this work, we argue that extending in-context learning to lifelong settings is a practical solution for continual learning in AI agents. In particular, we argue that parametric forms of attention are needed to understand a lifetime of context with transformers on a fixed hardware budget. These attention mechanisms learn the relationship between keys and their associated values at test-time with parametric regression. Our generalization of parametric approaches (linear attention, state-space models, fast weight programmers, and test-time training layers) contrasts with nonparametric counterparts like softmax attention. They replace the ever-growing key-value cache with an online-trainable neural network, maintaining a constant memory footprint. We highlight how parametric attention currently fall short of lifelong learning due to limited memory capacity or costly online updates. To address these issues, we pose a set of open questions with novel insights to guide the field toward long-horizon agents.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Quantum Correlations of Neutrinos in the Kerr-Newman Space-time

arXiv:2605.10424v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Quantum phases provide a connection between gravitation and quantum information, which proposes a novel avenue to explore the properties of space-time. In this paper, we investigate the quantum correlations (QCs) of neutrinos in the Kerr–Newman space-time. Both radial and non-radial propagations are considered under the weak-field approximation. The results show that, for inward propagations, the oscillation probabilities and QCs differ significantly from those obtained in the Schwarzschild metric. In the case of radial outward propagation, the larger angular momentum $a$ increases the oscillation period of the survival probability $P_{ee}$, entanglement, and monogamy of nonlocality, whereas the larger charge $Q$ decreases the corresponding periods. For non-radial propagations, $M$ and $a$ can noticeably modulate the amplitudes of the considered QCs, which is not observed in the case of radial propagations. Furthermore, we find that, despite differences in their variation ranges, entanglement and coherence exhibit highly consistent oscillation behaviors in both radial and non-radial propagation cases. These findings provide a comprehensive understanding for the neutrinos-based relativistic quantum information.

16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

PORTER: Language-Grounded Event Representations for Portable Structured EHR Foundation Models

Most electronic health record (EHR) foundation models encode clinical events as discrete event tokens from a fixed vocabulary and therefore cannot directly represent events containing unseen concepts or new combinations of concepts and attributes such as numeric values. This limits transfer across institutions and even across deployment pipelines within the same institution. We introduce PORTER, a language-grounded structured EHR foundation model that decouples event representation from this fixed vocabulary. PORTER represents events through their descriptions using a frozen text encoder, integrates numeric values through a dedicated pathway, and learns clinical dynamics over patient timelines with an autoregressively pretrained temporal backbone. Across 74 clinical prediction tasks at a pediatric hospital, PORTER matched the mean AUROC of a fixed-vocabulary model with the same temporal backbone and pretraining objective. When the same patient timelines were rendered using event descriptions not seen during pretraining, PORTER transferred without retraining or vocabulary mapping, recovering 97.1% of the mean AUROC of a model trained directly on the target vocabulary. When transferred to MIMIC, PORTER outperformed the fixed-vocabulary model, which dropped 69% of events because their tokens were unseen. Mechanistic analyses showed cross-vocabulary transfer tracked preservation of patient-level representation geometry rather than the scale of the text encoder, and the numeric pathway improved sensitivity to magnitude without disrupting clinical concept identity. PORTER also achieved higher AUROC than a task-specific text serialization comparator, at 329-fold lower amortized compute. PORTER is a step toward vocabulary-independent EHR foundation models that reduce the need for vocabulary harmonization while preserving in-domain performance and enabling efficient cross-task reuse.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Reform of the intermediate level of the health system in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: Adaptations and limits in the stabilization of the personnel of the Provincial Health Division: A cohort study.

Background: Human resources are one of the pillars of health systems. Since the World Health Organization's report on human resources issues, several countries have integrated this component into the various reforms aimed at strengthening their health systems. This study aims to explore the effects of reforming the intermediate level of a health system operating in a fragile state context. Methodology Our study was conducted in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It was a cohort study of the staff of the 14 Provincial Health Divisions (PHD) out of the 26 existing in the DRC. We established a database of the staff of these 14 PHD from 2016, just after the implementation of the intermediate level reform and the allocation of this staff by the Ministry of Health. We did a recall in 2021, in each of these PHD to survey this staff through a structured questionnaire and supplemented by the files of the agents available in each PHD. Sociodemographic, economic and academic variables were collected and analyzed. Data were entered into an Excel 2016 database and processed with SPSS software version 25. The chi-square test was used for comparison of proportions with a statistical significance level of p < 0.05. Risk ratios ratios (RR) and their 95% confidence intervals were calculated as measures of association. The error threshold was set at 5%. Results A total of 657 agents with an average age of 45.2 years had been identified in 2016 at the start of the survey and in 2021, 118 or 18% of them were no longer part of the PHD agents. Among the causes of absence noted: 48% of agents placed on leave, 16% promoted to other functions within the health system, 16% desertion and dismissal and 11% cases of death. 19.8% of absentees are executives, 19.5% men against 10.3% women; 22.3% of absentees in unstable provinces against 16.6% in stable ones. The factors associated with the absence of agents in the PHD remain the reaching of retirement age [RR (95% CI) = 5.5 (1.2-24.9) ]and male agents [RR (95% CI) = 3.2 (1.3-7.9)]. Among the agents who remained, 92% kept their initial position, 6% were subject to an internal permutation accompanied by a promotion. The factors associated with the stability of human resources at the level of the Provincial Health Division are: female gender, manager with experience or seniority > 5 years, Age > 35 years, Stable province, Presence of a partner bonus. Conclusion Even in a crisis and fragile context, health system reform is possible. It is possible to organize staff recruitment through a selection process independent of the political authorities of the Ministry of Health and supported by the technical services of the Ministry and partners . Experience and the presence of a financial bonus are motivating factors for staff stability. The involvement of Technical and Financial Support Partners in the recruitment process helped the Ministry of Health to minimize political influence in the recruitment of middle-level executives.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Neural ARFIMA model for forecasting BRIC exchange rates with long memory

arXiv:2509.06697v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Exchange rate forecasting remains a challenging problem, particularly for emerging economies, where the observed time series exhibit pronounced long-memory dependence, nonlinear dynamics, and sensitivity to macro-financial drivers. Classical models such as ARFIMA capture long-range persistence but fail to adequately represent nonlinear relationships, while modern machine learning approaches often neglect the underlying long-memory structure in macroeconomic series. To address this gap, we propose a Neural AutoRegressive Fractionally Integrated Moving Average (NARFIMA) model that integrates ARFIMA-based long-memory modeling with neural networks for nonlinear function approximation, while incorporating exogenous macroeconomic and uncertainty indicators. The framework provides a unified approach for capturing persistence, nonlinear dynamics, and external shocks. We establish asymptotic stationarity of the NARFIMA process and develop conformal prediction intervals for distribution-free uncertainty quantification. Empirical results for BRIC exchange rates show that NARFIMA consistently outperforms a broad range of forecasting benchmarks across multiple horizons, underscoring the importance of explicitly modeling long-memory dependence in exchange rate dynamics. The `narfima' R package provides an implementation of our approach.

19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Rigidity of infinite exchangeable sequences with Gaussian marginals

arXiv:2606.18654v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study infinite exchangeable sequences with Gaussian one-dimensional marginals. We formulate the conjecture that joint Gaussianity of a single pair of coordinates forces the entire sequence to be a Gaussian process. Although this conjecture remains open, we prove that joint Gaussianity of the first four coordinates is sufficient. We also establish the corresponding two-point criterion under the additional assumption that the directing measure is almost surely infinitely divisible.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Quantifying Explainable AI-introduced signal noise on ECG data with Spectral Entropy

arXiv:2606.24974v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Explainability techniques are used to assess the output of various deep learning models. This is especially true in healthcare, where models need to be trusted and decisions justified. Explainability (XAI) tools use heuristics which often add signal noise to the explanation "core". It is not always obvious what is signal from the model and what is noise from the XAI. We propose the use of spectral entropy as a measure of noise in XAI output. We demonstrate its usefulness in the context of classifying arrhythmias in an ECG dataset with different post hoc explainability techniques.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Redirecting the Flow: Image Customization through Attention Distribution Shift

Subject-driven image customization aims to generate images that not only follow textual instructions but also preserve the identity of a given reference subject. Existing approaches, including test-time fine-tuning, encoder-based methods, and token competition in shared attention spaces, suffer from limited efficiency, misalignment between extracted reference features and the generative process, and interference from irrelevant information. To address these limitations, we formulate the customization task as a distribution shift induced by incorporating reference images into text-to-image generation, and derive a Conditional Attention Distribution Shift formulation grounded in maximum entropy theory. Building on this formulation, we propose CustomShift, a dual-branch architecture based on Stable Diffusion 3. The Reference-Alignment Branch leverages self-attention between reference images and subject names to achieve layer-wise alignment with latent representations, while the Cross-Guidance Branch integrates textual and reference cues to guide generation. Experiments on the DreamBooth and Custom101 benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving a better balance between semantic fidelity and subject consistency.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

REALM: A Unified Red-Teaming Benchmark for Physical-World VLMs

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used as perception-reasoning backbones for embodied intelligence in safety-critical physical systems, where perception or reasoning errors can lead to unsafe decisions or actions. Although many red-teaming methods have been developed to probe VLM vulnerabilities, their evaluation remains fragmented across datasets, metrics, and threat models, making direct comparison difficult and obscuring whether observed differences arise from stronger attacks, more vulnerable models, or incompatible evaluation settings. Existing chatbot-centric red-teaming benchmarks mainly standardize jailbreak and content-safety evaluation, but they do not systematically capture physically grounded functional failures or cover red-teaming methods that target physical-world VLMs. This raises the key challenge of comparing diverse attack methods under a unified protocol while targeting the same scenario-specific failures. We introduce REALM, to our knowledge the first unified red-teaming benchmark for physical-world VLMs. REALM integrates 12 red-teaming methods, 3 model-agnostic defenses, and 13 VLMs under a practical black-box threat model with shared datasets and metrics. To align adversarial objectives across attack families, REALM introduces an agentic target-generation pipeline that constructs shared, scenario-specific, and physically grounded attack objectives for each scene, enabling fair comparison of diverse red-teaming methods under aligned adversarial goals. Our evaluation shows that text and typographic injection attacks induce the most failures, multimodal co-optimization yields the strongest visual-perturbation transfer, single-pass attacks approach iterative methods at much lower cost, and model scale alone does not confer adversarial robustness. Code is available at https://github.com/UCF-ML-Research/REALM.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Fast mixing of all-to-all quantum systems at high temperatures

arXiv:2606.26090v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: It is shown that arbitrary quantum $k$-local Hamiltonians with bounded strength interactions admit a quantum Gibbs sampler [CKG23] with a system-size independent spectral gap, at sufficiently high temperatures. This generalizes the existing quantum fast-mixing results beyond the geometrically-local setting. As a consequence, such systems admit fully-polynomial time quantum approximation algorithms for partition functions and global expectation values.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

The Unreliable Judges: Assessing Reproducibility and Self-Preference Bias of LLMs as Free-Text Evaluators

Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming clinical practice and research, but their adoption requires rigorous evaluation. While human assessment is ideal, its cost has driven the widespread use of LLMs as evaluators. We introduce an open-source reciprocal framework comparing 71 human experts against six LLMs. AI evaluators show a strong self-preference bias, yet neither group reliably identified whether a response was human- or AI-generated. AI scores correlated with surface features such as length and lexical diversity, whereas human scores did not. By probing the evaluator's hidden states and applying targeted steering, we show that verbosity is a major causal driver of the bias. Moreover, shuffling question-response pairings shows that long responses keep high scores even when they no longer answer the question, whereas short ones do not, demonstrating that AI judges reward verbosity largely independently of content alignment. Finally, API-based and batch inference inflate stochasticity, underscoring the need for controlled deployment.

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

A Multi-Domain Feature Fusion Framework for Generalizable Deepfake Detection Across Different Generators

Deepfakes are artificially generated images, audio, or videos that threaten privacy, security, and information integrity. Detecting such content is crucial for countering disinformation, as the latest models generate highly realistic content. While spatial- or frequency-based approaches achieve good detection rates on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)-based generated deepfakes, they often struggle with recent diffusion model-generated images. In particular, existing approaches rarely exploit complementary multi-domain representations or systematically evaluate cross-generator robustness. To address these challenges, we propose a multi-domain deepfake detection framework called SGFF-Net (Spatial-Gradient-Frequency Fusion Network) that integrates spatial, gradient, and DWT (Discrete Wavelet Transform)-based frequency representations within a dual residual learning architecture. Experimental results show that the SGFF-Net achieves 98.95\% accuracy in intra-dataset evaluation and improves performance in both cross-model (70.46\%) and cross-paradigm (69.94\%) settings. Incorporating multi-source training and data augmentation further enhances robustness, increasing accuracy from 70.46\% to 79.80\% in cross-model evaluation, from 69\% to 78\% in cross-paradigm evaluation, and from 61.50\% to 75.80\% on real-world data. Unlike single-domain detectors, the SGFF-Net learns complementary forensic cues across spatial, gradient, and wavelet-frequency domains, resulting in greater robustness under cross-generator and cross-paradigm evaluation. The results further show that combining multi-domain representations with data diversity and augmentation substantially improves generalization, providing practical insights for developing more reliable deepfake detection systems.