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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-09

Don’t compete, collaborate: why collective funding applications are the future

Authors:
Sajedeh Rasti↗

Scientists with disparate expertise writing grants together can identify knowledge gaps and drive progress — but systems must change to incentivize them. Scientists with disparate expertise writing grants together can identify knowledge gaps and drive progress — but systems must change to incentivize them.

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02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

QIAS 2026: Overview of the Shared Task on Islamic Inheritance Reasoning

Authors:
Abdessalam Bouchekif↗Somaya Eltanbouly↗Samer Rashwani↗Shahd Gaben↗Mutaz Al-Khatib↗Heba Sbahi↗Emad Mohamed↗Mohammed Ghaly↗

This paper presents a comprehensive overview of the QIAS 2026 shared task, organized as part of the OSACT7 Workshop and co-located with LREC 2026. The shared task was designed to evaluate the ability of large language models to perform complex reasoning in the religious and legal domain of Islamic inheritance. Unlike conventional question-answering benchmarks, QIAS 2026 focuses on end-to-end reasoning from natural language cases, requiring systems to perform the full inheritance calculation process, from identifying the eligible heirs to assigning the correct share to each beneficiary. To support this evaluation, the task was based on the MAWARITH benchmark, a dataset of $12{,}500$ Arabic inheritance cases annotated with intermediate reasoning steps and final answers. System submissions were evaluated using MIR-E, a multi-step metric that measures performance across the main stages of inheritance reasoning. A total of $16$ teams participated in the shared task, investigating a range of approaches, including prompting-based methods, retrieval-augmented generation, and fine-tuning strategies. The results show that Islamic inheritance remains a highly challenging benchmark for current language models, especially in stages that require precise legal interpretation and structured numerical reasoning. This overview summarizes the task design, dataset, evaluation framework, participating systems, and main results.

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03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Characteristics and Outcomes of Gene-Elusive Dilated Cardiomyopathy

Authors:
Cannie↗Bakalakos↗Syrris↗Protonotarios↗Lorenzini↗Guttmann↗O'Mahoney↗Savvatis↗Sekhri↗Mohiddin↗S. A↗Kaski↗…

Background and Aims Genetic testing in dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) guides risk stratification and family screening. Likely pathogenic or pathogenic (LP/P) variants are identified in approximately one-third of patients, leaving many without a genetic diagnosis. Cohort studies suggest that "gene-elusive" patients have a lower risk of adverse events. This study aims to better characterise this group and identify factors associated with adverse outcomes. Methods Consecutive and unrelated DCM patients undergoing genetic testing and returning no LP/P variants were retrospectively recruited and compared to two control cohorts of DCM patients carrying LP/P variants in LMNA and TTN for a primary composite endpoint of end-stage heart failure (ESHF) or malignant ventricular arrhythmia (MVA). Results Among patients without prior MVA, the composite endpoint occurred in 36/423 (8.5%) gene-elusive, 14/39 (35.9%) LMNA and 11/100 (11%) TTN cardiomyopathy patients (log-rank p

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04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Cramér-Type Moderate Deviations for Engel's Series via a Martingale Approach

Authors:
Shaochen Wang↗Guangyu Yang↗

arXiv:2606.18866v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Let $x$ be uniformly distributed on $(0,1)$, and let $(q_n)_{n\geq1}$ be the digits of its Engel series expansion. We establish a Cramér-type moderate deviation expansion for $(\log q_n-n)/\sqrt n$. The proof is based on a martingale decomposition and asymptotic results for martingales. As consequences, we obtain a moderate deviation principle over the full range of scales between the central limit theorem and the law of large numbers, without the additional lower rate restriction required in several earlier works. We also derive a uniform Berry–Esseen bound of order $(\log n)/\sqrt n$.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Classifying by Proxy: Explainable and Reproducible Ensemble of Proxy Tasks for Child Sexual Abuse Imagery Classification

Authors:
Clara Ernesto↗Carlos Caetano↗Sandra Avila↗Jo\~ao Macedo↗Camila Laranjeira↗Leo S. F. Ribeiro↗

Child Sexual Abuse Imagery (CSAI) classification systems are needed solutions for lessening the psychological impacts often felt by law enforcement agents responsible for evaluating these materials and for efficient removal of these materials from the web. However, due to the nature of the task, researching and developing such systems is not a trivial endeavor. The images are highly sensitive, and the related datasets are under restrictive access regimes, which means most studies in the area are not reproducible or distributable and are therefore hard to compare and validate. More concerning still, most models for this task today lack an aspect often desired by law enforcement agents: explainability. In this paper, we apply an ensemble of Proxy Tasks – tasks that correlate to CSAI classification – yielding improvements in reproducibility, explainability, and security for distribution. This concept is applied for the first time to real CSAI, with a novel selection of relevant Proxy Tasks (selected from the CSAI literature) and training adaptations to the original framework. Our final model achieves competitive results, yielding 91.9% balanced accuracy on the RCPD dataset with the best Proxy Task combination. We furthermore contrast these results with the best-in-class representation learning model, DINO, and show that our ensemble improves accuracy and provides explanations for its classification results, a feature that a single deep learning model can seldom provide.

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

Models That Know How Evaluations Are Designed Score Safer

Authors:
Katharina Deckenbach↗Haritz Puerto↗Jonas Geiping↗Sahar Abdelnabi↗

The validity of AI safety evaluations depends on models behaving consistently across controlled and deployment settings. Prior work has identified test-time contextual cues, such as hypothetical scenarios, as a source of verbalized evaluation awareness and subsequent behavioral shift. In this paper, we investigate a potential explanation of this phenomenon: evaluation meta-knowledge, defined as parametric knowledge about the structural traits that characterize evaluations. Similar to dataset contamination, where benchmark exposure leads to higher performance through memorization, we hypothesize that models trained on texts describing evaluation practices may implicitly learn to recognize and respond to evaluation-like contexts, for instance, through exposure to scientific articles or social media posts about AI benchmarking. To test this, we fine-tune models on synthetic documents describing evaluation traits such as verifiable structures or moral dilemmas. Evaluating this fine-tuned model on six safety benchmarks, we find that it is significantly safer than the base model and control model. This behavioral shift persists even when restricting the analysis to responses lacking explicit verbalization of evaluation awareness. Our results demonstrate that evaluation meta-knowledge may inflate safety benchmark performance, introducing a novel confounder that is independent of explicit memorization or verbalized evaluation awareness, thus, challenging to detect. These findings have important implications for the design and interpretation of AI safety evaluations. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/compass-group-tue/arxiv2026_evaluation_meta_knowledge.

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07.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

These ‘master’ proteins protect us from deadly mutations — and could inspire new drugs

Authors:
Philip Ball↗

Biology has clever ways to mask the effects of potentially harmful gene mutations. Scientists are investigating how this ‘buffering’ works — and how to exploit it. Biology has clever ways to mask the effects of potentially harmful gene mutations. Scientists are investigating how this ‘buffering’ works — and how to exploit it.

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08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

No Universal Purification in Quantum Mechanics

Authors:
Zhenhuan Liu↗Zhenyu Du↗Jens Eisert↗Zhenyu Cai↗Zi-Wen Liu↗

arXiv:2509.21111v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many central tasks in fundamental physics and quantum information processing are possible only insofar as mixed quantum states can be made purer. In this work, we prove that the linearity and positivity of quantum mechanics impose general restrictions on quantum purification, unveiling a new fundamental principle of quantum information processing. We first establish that no quantum operation can transform a finite number of copies of an unknown quantum state or channel into an exactly pure output that depends non-trivially on the input, thereby ruling out an important form of universal purification in both static and dynamical settings. Building on this, we show that, upon relaxing the requirement of exact purity, one can establish quantitative sample-complexity lower bounds for approximate purification that hold for arbitrary physically allowed strategies, whose scaling matches the performance of purification-related tasks across several different areas of quantum information processing. Moreover, this lower bound leads to a generalized standard quantum limit for learning arbitrary functions of a quantum state, greatly extending earlier results based on quantum Fisher information and revealing a deep connection between purification and quantum learning. Extending this principle to other important settings, we establish, for the first time, an exponential sample-complexity lower bound for approximate pure dilation state preparation and a no-go theorem for approximate bosonic Gaussian state purification with passive Gaussian operations, establishing much more stringent limitations under practical operational constraints.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

SpectralDiT: Timestep-Conditioned Spectral Residual Correction for Flow-Matching DiTs

Authors:
Jiayu Tian↗

We propose SpectralDiT, a lightweight modification to flow-matching Diffusion Transformers that adds timestep-conditioned spectral correction to the MLP residual branch. The module decomposes each residual update into low- and high-frequency components on the patch-token grid, then learns a zero-initialized additive gate so the model initially matches the baseline DiT. On CIFAR-10 pixel-space generation, SpectralDiT improves FID from 20.78 to 19.71 at patch size 1 and reduces the radial Fourier spectrum gap. Furthermore, we scale our method to latent diffusion on ImageNet-100. With 0.6% additional theoretical FLOPs and 1.36% additional parameters, SpectralDiT improves latent flow-matching, achieving an 8.7% relative FID reduction under classifier-free guidance (CFG 2.0). All reported results are averaged over five seeds. Ablations and gate visualizations on CIFAR-10 reveal stable block-specific spectral correction patterns.

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10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Genetic and Shared Environmental Influences on Cancer Risk and Cross-Cancer Associations in Nordic Twins

Authors:
Harris↗J. R↗Clemmensen↗S. B↗Adami↗H.-O↗Mucci↗L. A↗Kaprio↗Hjelmborg↗J. v. B↗

The relative contributions of genetic and shared environmental influences to cancer risk and cross-cancer associations remain poorly understood. We analyzed data from 222,530 same-sex twins from Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden in the Nordic Twin Study of Cancer, including 43,060 incident cancers over a median follow-up of 41.6 years. Using a target trial framework, biometric modeling, and competing-risk adjustment, we estimated familial risk, heritability, and shared environmental contributions across 35 cancer sites. Lifetime cancer risk was 36.5%, increasing to 51.4% in monozygotic (MZ) twins and 45.3% in dizygotic (DZ) twins with an affected co-twin. Overall cancer risk was explained by heritable (28%) and shared environmental (40%) influences. Heritability was highest for prostate (42%), non-melanoma skin (24%), and breast (18%) cancers. Cross-cancer analyses revealed extensive overlap in the genetic and shared environmental factors across sites, consistent with widespread pleiotropy and shared environmental susceptibility. Prostate cancer exhibited the strongest genetic overlap with rectum/anus (12%) and kidney (11%) cancers, whereas co-shared environmental influences were most pronounced for breast-lung (11%), prostate-bladder (11%), and prostate-lung (12%) cancers. These findings show pervasive genetic overlap across cancers at different sites and emphasize the importance of incorporating familial shared environmental exposures into cancer risk prediction and prevention strategies.

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

DemoDiffusion: One-Shot Human Imitation using pre-trained Diffusion Policy

Authors:
Sungjae Park↗Homanga Bharadhwaj↗Shubham Tulsiani↗

arXiv:2506.20668v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose DemoDiffusion, a simple method for enabling robots to perform manipulation tasks by imitating a single human demonstration, without requiring task-specific training or paired human-robot data. Our approach is based on two insights. First, the hand motion in a human demonstration provides a useful prior for the robot's end-effector trajectory, which we can convert into a rough open-loop robot motion trajectory via kinematic retargeting. Second, while this retargeted motion captures the overall structure of the task, it may not align well with plausible robot actions in-context. To address this, we leverage a pre-trained generalist diffusion policy to modify the trajectory, ensuring it both follows the human motion and remains within the distribution of plausible robot actions. Unlike approaches based on online reinforcement learning or paired human-robot data, our method enables robust adaptation to new tasks and scenes with minimal effort. In real-world experiments across 8 diverse manipulation tasks, DemoDiffusion achieves 83.8\% average success rate, compared to 13.8\% for the pre-trained policy and 52.5\% for kinematic retargeting, succeeding even on tasks where the pre-trained generalist policy fails entirely. Project page: https://demodiffusion.github.io/

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12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

RooseBERT: A New Deal For Political Language Modelling

Authors:
Deborah Dore↗Elena Cabrio↗Serena Villata↗

The increasing amount of political debates and politics-related discussions calls for the definition of novel computational methods to automatically analyse such content with the final goal of lightening up political deliberation to citizens. However, the specificity of the political language and the argumentative form of these debates (employing hidden communication strategies and leveraging implicit arguments) make this task very challenging, even for current general-purpose pre-trained Language Models (LMs). To address this, we introduce a novel pre-trained LM for political discourse language called RooseBERT. Pre-training a LM on a specialised domain presents different technical and linguistic challenges, requiring extensive computational resources and large-scale data. RooseBERT has been trained on large political debate and speech corpora (11GB) in English. To evaluate its performances, we fine-tuned it on multiple downstream tasks related to political debate analysis, i.e., stance detection, sentiment analysis, argument component detection and classification, argument relation prediction and classification, policy classification, named entity recognition (NER). Our results show improvements over general-purpose LMs on the majority of these tasks, highlighting how domain-specific pre-training enhances performance in political debate analysis. We release RooseBERT for the research community.

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13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Excess mortality in Germany during 2020-2023: A descriptive age-stratified analysis

Authors:
Sauter↗

This study investigates excess mortality in Germany in the years from 2020 to 2023 and its temporal alignment with reported COVID-19 deaths. The analysis uses annual and weekly all-cause mortality data and linear baseline trends derived from pre-pandemic years. Possible effects of demographic and population changes on baseline trends were also examined. Excess mortality was analysed over time and across age groups. Excess mortality was observed in all investigated years, rising from 2020 to its highest value in 2022. In absolute terms, the age group [≥]80 years accounted for the largest proportion of excess deaths throughout the study period. After 2021, elevated mortality relative to baseline was also observed in younger age groups down to 15 years of age, although absolute numbers remained substantially lower than in older groups. No evidence of excess mortality was observed for individuals younger than 15 years. Periods of excess mortality were temporally aligned with waves of reported COVID-19 deaths. In 2020, cumulative excess mortality after calendar week 11 closely matched reported COVID-19 deaths (43 876 vs. 41 835 deaths). Weekly excess mortality, reported COVID-19 deaths and wastewater viral load, when available showed strong temporal synchrony, although excess mortality increasingly exceeded reported COVID-19 deaths during later pandemic waves. Temporal patterns differed from the typical seasonal mortality peaks commonly associated with influenza epidemics during the early months of the year. In 2023, excess mortality declined substantially, possibly indicating a return to mortality levels before the emergence of SARS-CoV-2.

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14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

MaineCoon: Pursuing A Real-Time Audio-Visual Social World Model

Authors:
Lichen Bai↗Tianhao Zhang↗Shitong Shao↗Dingwei Tan↗Qiyu Zhong↗Zhengpeng Xie↗Haopeng Li↗Qinghao Huang↗Dandan Shen↗Tengjiao Ji↗Wei Wang↗Peicheng Wu↗…

As an increasing majority of global video content is consumed on social platforms for interactive social purposes, video generation models built for social worlds are important but largely overlooked by previous studies. In this work, we define the position of social world models and build a prototype model as the first step towards this goal. While previous world models successfully simulate physical environments or gaming world exploration, they remain fundamentally detached from human-centric social dynamics. To bridge this gap as the first step to social world models, we present MaineCoon, the first real-time audio-visual autoregressive model that has 22B parameters and is capable of real-time streaming generation and sub-second interaction, with a record-breaking frame rate of up to 47.5 FPS, on a single GPU. To the best of our knowledge, MaineCoon is also the first real-time audio-visual generation model specifically optimized for social-interactive applications. To enable efficient and stable training, we introduce several novel techniques into MaineCoon, including self-resampling, cross-modal representation alignment, domain-aware preference optimization, and reinforced online-policy distillation (ROPD). We also design the first agentic streaming inference framework that supports thousand-second-scale or even longer generation while mitigating drift with agentic cache management and prompt planing. These innovations significantly accelerate training while optimizing real-time inference performance. We believe this work not only sets a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance benchmark for high-quality, low-latency, and long-horizon audio-visual autoregressive models, but also points out the paradigm shift desired for next-generation AI-native social platforms.

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

Enhancing Fatigue Detection through Heterogeneous Multi-Source Data Integration and Cross-Domain Modality Imputation

Authors:
Luobin Cui↗Yanlai Wu↗Tang Ying↗Weikai Li↗

arXiv:2507.16859v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fatigue detection for human operators is important in safety-related applications such as aviation, mining, and long-haul transport. Reliable estimation of operator fatigue can support timely warnings, adaptive task scheduling, takeover reminders, and other safety-management decisions in human-machine systems. However, the effectiveness of these functions depends on whether fatigue-related signals can be reliably captured in the deployment environment. While many studies have shown the value of high-fidelity sensors in controlled laboratory environments, their performance often degrades when used in real-world settings because of noise, lighting conditions, and field-of-view constraints, thereby limiting their practical use. This paper formalizes a deployment-oriented setting for real-world fatigue detection, where high-quality sensors are often unavailable in practical applications. To address this issue, we use knowledge from heterogeneous source domains, including high-fidelity sensors that are difficult to deploy in the field but commonly used in controlled environments, to assist fatigue detection in the real-world target domain. Based on this idea, we design a heterogeneous and multi-source fatigue-detection framework that uses the available modalities in the target domain while leveraging diverse configurations in the source domains through cross-domain modality imputation based on shared modalities.

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

From Prompts to Tokens: Internalizing Causal Supervision in Vision-Language Model for Multi-Image Causal Reasoning

Authors:
Haoping Yu↗Yuanxi Li↗Jing Ma↗

Visual causal reasoning is essential for understanding and intervening in the physical world, requiring identification of causal variables from visual inputs and reasoning over intervention effects. Despite recent progress, large vision–language models (VLMs) remain brittle at such tasks, especially for interventional and counterfactual queries over multi-image inputs. Most existing explorations inject causal knowledge via textual prompts, leaving causal mechanisms external to model execution and limiting reliable control during inference. To address this problem, we propose BridgeVLM, which internalizes visual causal reasoning by inducing a causal graph from multi-image inputs and converting it into structured Causal Tokens executed by RAMP layers injected into the LLM decoder for causal message passing. We further introduce a unified training interface M3S for fine-grained causal supervision from different granularities (local/global level). BridgeVLM achieves 54.4% accuracy on intervention tasks on CausalVLBench (vs. 33.2% with prompt-level supervision), improves results on Causal3D from 43.6% to 49.0%, and substantially improves causal structure learning on CausalVLBench ($F_1$: 33.4% $\rightarrow$ 75.1%).

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

Unlocking air traffic flow prediction through microscopic aircraft-state modeling

Authors:
Bin Wang↗Anqi Liu↗Jiangtao Zhao↗Hina Birahmani↗Yanyong Huang↗Peilan He↗Guiyuan Jiang↗Feng Hong↗Yanwei Yu↗Yuanyuan Hou↗Tianrui Li↗

arXiv:2605.10083v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Short-term air traffic flow prediction in terminal airspace is essential for proactive air traffic management. Existing approaches predominantly model traffic flow as aggregated time series. However, traffic dynamics are governed by aircraft states and their interactions in continuous airspace. Such aggregation obscures fine-grained information, including aircraft kinematics, boundary interactions, and control intent. Here we present AeroSense, a state-to-flow modeling paradigm that predicts future traffic flow directly from instantaneous airspace situations represented as dynamic sets of aircraft states derived from ADS-B trajectories. By establishing an end-to-end mapping from microscopic aircraft states to future regional traffic flow, AeroSense preserves aircraft-level dynamics while naturally accommodating varying traffic density without relying on historical look-back windows. Experiments on a large-scale real-world dataset show that AeroSense exhibits admirable predictive accuracy and robustness over aggregation-based forecasting approaches, particularly during high-density traffic periods. These findings suggest that aircraft-state situation modeling provides a promising alternative to conventional time-series forecasting in air traffic flow management.

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

A polarity-aware multi-relational model for the signed interaction prediction in biological networks

Authors:
Ziye Zhou↗Meijie Wang↗Lun Yu↗

arXiv:2407.07357v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Predicting signed interactions in biological networks is crucial for understanding drug mechanisms and facilitating drug repurposing. While deep graph models have demonstrated success in modeling complex biological systems, existing approaches often fail to distinguish between positive and negative interactions, limiting their utility for precise pharmacological predictions. In this study, we propose a novel deep graph model, PAMR (polarity-aware multi-relational model), designed to predict both polar (e.g., activation, inhibition) and non-polar (e.g., binding, affect) chemical-gene interactions. Our model integrates graph convolutional networks with tensor decomposition to enhance feature representation and incorporates a conflict-aware sampling strategy to resolve polarity ambiguities. We introduce new evaluation metrics, polarity discrimination score (PDS) and CP@100, to assess the model's ability to differentiate interaction types. Experimental results demonstrate that PAMR outperforms baseline models, achieving superior classification accuracy and improved discrimination of polar edges. Specifically, PAMR-CL attains a Macro AUROC of 0.9072 and CP@100 of 0.974, surpassing RGCN, GraphSAGE, TransE, and BioNet baselines. A case study on nicotine further identifies two novel chemical-gene suppression links, S100A6 and SPP1, that are corroborated by independent experimental literature. Furthermore, we analyze the impact of subgraph components on predictive performance, revealing that additional network structures do not always enhance accuracy. These findings highlight the importance of polarity-aware modeling in drug discovery and network pharmacology, providing a scalable computational framework for polarity-aware chemical-gene interaction prediction and network pharmacology analysis.

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19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Multi-User Dueling Bandits: A Fair Approach using Nash Social Welfare

Authors:
Maheed H. Ahmed↗Mahsa Ghasemi↗

arXiv:2605.01961v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning from human preference data is becoming a useful tool, from fine-tuning large language models to training reinforcement learning agents. However, in most scenarios, the model is trained on the average preference of all human evaluators, which, under large variations of preferences, can be unfair to minority groups. In this work, we consider fairness in dueling bandits, a standard framework for online learning from preference data. We assume that each user has a (potentially distinct) Condorcet winner, which is an arm preferred to every other arm. Using these user-specific Condorcet winners as reference points, we evaluate and score arms according to their performance relative to the corresponding winner. To promote fairness across heterogeneous users, we adopt the well-established Nash Social Welfare objective, which maximizes the product of user utilities, thereby inherently penalizing inequality and preventing the marginalization of any single user. Within this framework, we construct a hard instance to establish a regret lower bound of $\Omega(T^{2/3}\min(K,D)^\frac{1}{3})$ for a time horizon $T$, $K$ arms, and $D$ users, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first result quantifying the cost of fairness in dueling bandits with heterogeneous preferences. We then present the Fair-Explore-Then-Commit and Fair-$\epsilon$-Greedy algorithms with a Condorcet winner identification phase. We further derive their regret upper bounds that match the lower-bound dependence on $T$ up to logarithmic factors.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

LASA: A Weak Supervision Method for Open-Vocabulary Scene Sketch Semantic Segmentation

Authors:
Liwen Yi↗Xianlin Zhang↗Yue Zhang↗Yue Ming↗Xueming Li↗

Open-vocabulary scene sketch semantic segmentation aims to assign dense semantic labels to sparse line drawings based on flexible category vocabularies specified at inference time, without relying on pixel-level annotations during training. Unlike natural images, sketches lack texture and color cues, making semantic understanding heavily dependent on stroke layout and spatial configuration, a challenge that renders single-layer vision-language features inherently unstable. Our key observation is that attention maps from different Vision Transformer layers encode complementary spatial cues: shallow layers capture global structural layouts, while deeper layers focus on local stroke intersections and object parts. This suggests that cross-layer aggregation provides a more robust structural prior than any individual layer alone. Leveraging this insight, we propose a structure-aware framework built upon Layer-wise Accumulated Structural Attention (LASA), which aggregates multi-layer attention to guide hierarchical semantic alignment under weak supervision and refine predictions during inference. Experiments on FS-COCO, SFSD, and FrISS show that LASA improves mIoU by $+3.43$, $+8.01$, and $+15.74$ over the prior weakly supervised baselines, demonstrating consistent gains in both segmentation accuracy and spatial coherence. Our source code will be made publicly available.

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21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Coupled-Mode Equations with Arbitrary Mode Combinations for Kinetic-Inductance Superconducting Traveling-Wave Parametric Devices: Theory and Experimental Validation

Authors:
F. Patricio Mena↗Camilo Espinoza↗Ryan O. Berriel↗Ricardo Finger↗David J. Thoen↗

arXiv:2606.17264v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The coupled-mode equations (CMEs) have proven very successful in describing parametric processes in nonlinear optics. More recently, the same formulation has been used to model microwave superconducting parametric amplifiers and frequency multipliers. However, when applied to the microwave regime, not all assumptions remain valid and losses play a more dramatic role. Here, we revisit the CMEs applied to traveling-wave superconducting amplifiers to include losses and provide a formulation that enables their systematic derivation for any combination of traveling waves. As examples, we discuss the impact of unwanted harmonics and intermodulation products on parametric amplification, as well as harmonic generation. We verify that, if not properly accounted for, device performance can deviate considerably from the ideal case. Furthermore, using a superconducting CPW-based artificial transmission line and combining an independent experimental determination of its nonlinear parameter $I'_*$ with simulations of its linear properties, we obtain a parameter-free validation of this formulation. The nonlinear parameter was determined to be $I'_* \approx 27$ mA which, surprisingly, scales with the theoretical depairing current and not with the much smaller critical current of the device. For the validation, we measured multiple-harmonic generation and found excellent agreement between theory and experiment. The fact that $I'_* \gg I_C$ has direct implications for device design.

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22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Filtered ANN as a Phase Transition: When Selectivity-Estimation Error Causes Plan Regret

Authors:
Madhulatha Mandarapu↗Sandeep Kunkunuru↗

arXiv:2606.16341v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A filtered approximate-nearest-neighbor (ANN) query returns the k nearest vectors among those satisfying an attribute predicate P of selectivity s. The best execution strategy – pre-filter, post-filter, or in-filter – changes with s, so a system must estimate s and choose. We model this as an argmax over a landscape with phases (regions where each strategy wins) separated by boundaries, and show that selectivity-estimation error produces plan regret – recall lost versus the oracle strategy – only in the critical regions around those boundaries. The regret is a wedge of log-width equal to the multiplicative estimation error epsilon and height equal to the local cliff |V'(s*)| epsilon; the flip-margin 1/|V'(s*)| is the condition number of a sibling cardinality-estimation study reappearing as the local boundary theory. The two phase boundaries follow from independent mathematics: order statistics place the post-filter cliff at s ~ k/K, and site percolation places the in-filter cliff at s_c ~ 0.83/M for graph degree M (corpus-size independent). Criticality exists only under a constrained budget B < sqrt(k n). Under pre-registered decision rules we confirm, on synthetic sweeps and real SIFT1M, that regret concentrates ~290x at the boundary and that the regret curves obey a finite-size scaling collapse onto one universal wedge across two decades of corpus size. A real approximate index does not mis-locate the boundary, but a biased cost model opens a persistent miscalibration band that estimation-error robustness cannot fix. The contribution is a characterization, not a new index. Code and the full pre-registration are public.

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23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Cost-Optimal LLM Routing with Limited User Feedback under User Satisfaction Guarantees

Authors:
Herbert Woisetschl\"ager↗Arastun Mammadli↗Ryan Zhang↗Shiqiang Wang↗

arXiv:2606.19376v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inference costs for large language model (LLM) applications are rapidly growing, driven by surging demand and rising infrastructure cost. Users expect high-quality responses, and in commercial settings this is formally codified in Service Level Agreements (SLAs), creating a fundamental tension between cost and quality. Recent progress on cost-aware LLM request routing has shown potential to resolve this tension, but existing approaches rely on complete feedback signals, offline training, extensive per-workload tuning, and most lack SLA guarantees or inference-time adaptivity. We introduce SLARouter, an online routing algorithm that learns a cost-optimal policy from the sparse, one-sided user feedback available in production systems. SLARouter provides theoretical guarantees for both cost optimality and strict SLA compliance. Experiments across a wide range of LLM benchmarks show that SLARouter satisfies SLA constraints without the need for per-benchmark tuning, reducing operating cost by up to 2.2x over existing baselines.

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24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

A Multi-Agent system for Multi-Objective constrained optimization

Authors:
Federica Filippini↗

arXiv:2606.20236v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many decision-making problems in computing and networking systems can be naturally formulated as cost-minimization problems under performance constraints. In dynamic environments, reinforcement learning (RL) is often used to solve such problems at runtime by embedding both costs and constraint violations into a single scalar reward through weighted penalty terms, following a Lagrangian-inspired formulation. However, in this context the behavior of the learned policy critically depends on the choice of these weights, which are typically selected manually. This makes it difficult to identify an appropriate trade-off between optimizing the primary objective and effectively avoiding constraint violations, particularly in non-stationary environments where their relative importance may change. This paper presents MAMO (Multi-Agent system for Multi-Objective constrained optimization), an approach to tackle this balancing problem through multi-agent RL. MAMO decouples task execution from objective design by formulating the selection of reward weights as a learning problem, providing a !rst step towards more autonomous and robust RL-based solutions for constrained optimization problems in dynamic environments.

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25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Risk or Replace: Efficient Asymptotics for Data-Driven Maintenance

Authors:
Poulad Moradi↗Joachim Arts↗Melvin Drent↗Collin Drent↗

arXiv:2606.14706v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Condition-based maintenance (CBM) is an approach that plans interventions for deteriorating systems according to their observed operational state. CBM reduces unplanned downtime and extends usable lifetime. We study a heterogeneous population of components that degrade over time according to a stochastic processes with non-negative and i.i.d. increments that are characterized by component-specific parameters that remain unobservable to the decision maker. We rely on degradation data to estimate these parameters and determine replacement actions at equidistant epochs. The goal is to minimize the long-run average cost, which incorporates fixed replacement costs, failure costs, and operating costs. This problem can be formulated as a high-dimensional partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), which is generally intractable. We develop a tractable, data-driven CBM policy that estimates the optimal policy of a hypothetical Oracle that has full information of the underlying degradation parameters and call this policy the Estimated Oracle's Optimal Policy (EOP). We introduce a scaling regime where both the failure thresholds and cost parameters increase proportionally, reflecting practical settings in which component lifetimes and maintenance costs are large relative to the time between two consecutive CBM decision moments. We show that the regret of the EOP, defined as the difference between its long-run average cost and that of the Oracle, converges to zero in the scaling regime when the parameter estimator is consistent. Across extensive experiments using both real and simulated data, the EOP achieves very low regret and, whenever the optimal POMDP policy can be computed exactly, a negligible optimality gap.

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