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02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

FeVOS: Foresight Expression Video Object Segmentation

Authors:
Kehan Lan↗Kaining Ying↗Henghui Ding↗

Existing Referring Video Object Segmentation tasks focus on referring expressions describing events, actions or appearances of relevant objects within the observed frames, lacking evaluation in scenarios that require pre-decisive spatio-temporal reasoning, thereby limiting their applicability. To address this, we propose Foresight Expression Video Object Segmentation, a task that queries future events in upcoming video segments and requires masks of the objects in the observed frames as visual answers. For example, in ego-centric scenes, the question "What tool will be used?" demands reasoning over spatio-temporal cues to predict the masks of the next tool to be used, which helps with the understanding of future actions and decisions. To support this task, we introduce FeVOS, a dataset with 968 video clips, 14,525 foresight expressions, and 2,904 chain-of-thought annotations to provide explicit and interpretable reasoning steps. We further develop FeVOS-R1, an MLLM-based model trained on our dataset via a two-stage pipeline of supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. FeVOS-R1 not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on FeVOS, but also demonstrates strong generalization to existing RVOS benchmarks. We hope this work can inspire more research on predictive reasoning in video perception.

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03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

A non-invasive liquid biopsy resolves the diagnostic blind spot in chronic kidney disease

Authors:
Nishimura↗Harita↗Hirakawa↗Takizawa↗Fujishiro↗Ogawa↗Kajiho↗Kanda↗Kushima↗Omori↗Hamasaki↗Gotoh↗…

Chronic kidney disease is a major global health burden, and its early detection is critical for delaying progression to kidney failure using recently developed targeted therapies. However, current diagnostic screening relies heavily on blood markers that are confounded by muscle mass, and on urine tests that frequently miss structural damage occurring without protein leakage. This creates a critical diagnostic blind spot that hinders timely intervention. Here we show a non-invasive liquid biopsy platform that quantifies a specific protein marker, MUC1, on urinary extracellular vesicles to accurately assess renal parenchymal integrity. By bypassing the systemic metabolic noise of traditional blood tests, our assay provides a remarkably stable, person-specific functional signature. Following extensive validation across diverse cohorts, our longitudinal analysis demonstrated that the discrepancy between this novel urine-based readout and standard blood tests unmasks hidden renal vulnerability, successfully predicting rapid functional decline. By comprehensively evaluating both tubular and glomerular integrity from a single spot urine sample, these findings establish a completely non-invasive, highly scalable prescreening tool that resolves the diagnostic blind spot, enabling broader early detection strategies and ushering in a new era of proactive risk management.

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04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Bid Farewell to Seesaw: Towards Accurate Long-tail Session-based Recommendation via Dual Constraints of Hybrid Intents

Authors:
Xiao Wang↗Ke Qin↗Dongyang Zhang↗Xiurui Xie↗Shuang Liang↗

arXiv:2511.08378v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Session-based recommendation (SBR) aims to predict anonymous users' next interaction based on their interaction sessions. In the practical recommendation scenario, low-exposure items constitute the majority of interactions, creating a long-tail distribution that severely compromises recommendation diversity. Existing approaches attempt to address this issue by promoting tail items but incur accuracy degradation, exhibiting a "see-saw" effect between long-tail and accuracy performance. We attribute such conflict to session-irrelevant noise within the tail items, which existing long-tail approaches fail to identify and constrain effectively. To resolve this fundamental conflict, we propose HID (Hybrid Intent-based Dual Constraint Framework), a plug-and-play framework that transforms the conventional "see-saw" into "win-win" through introducing the hybrid intent-based dual constraints for both long-tail and accuracy. Two key innovations are incorporated in this framework: (i) Hybrid Intent Learning, where we reformulate the intent extraction strategies by employing attribute-aware spectral clustering to reconstruct the item-to-intent mapping. Furthermore, discrimination of session-irrelevant noise is achieved through the assignment of the target and noise intents to each session. (ii) Intent Constraint Loss, which incorporates two novel constraint paradigms regarding the diversity and accuracy to regulate the representation learning process of both items and sessions. These two objectives are unified into a single training loss through rigorous theoretical derivation. Extensive experiments across multiple SBR models and datasets demonstrate that HID can enhance both long-tail performance and recommendation accuracy, establishing new state-of-the-art performance in long-tail recommender systems.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

AI Coding Agents in Social Science: Methodologically Diverse, Empirically Consistent, Interpretively Vulnerable

Authors:
Meysam Alizadeh↗Fabrizio Gilardi↗Mohsen Mosleh↗Enkelejda Kasneci↗

The deployment of LLM-based agents in scientific analysis raises opposing concerns: that agents may reduce methodological diversity, or that they may amplify the analytic flexibility through which researchers reach motivated conclusions. We argue these worries target two empirically separable layers: a design layer of methodological choices, and a verdict layer in which a decision rule maps estimates to a substantive claim. We test both by running 20 independent executions of Claude Code and Codex on a prominent immigration and social-policy against a many-analysts human baseline. At the design layer, Codex matches human methodological diversity and Claude Code produces nearly three times as many specifications; both agents' effect estimates remain broadly aligned with the human consensus, and no agent model exactly matches any human model. A prompt-induced anti-immigration researcher prior reorganizes each agent's methodological decisions but, unlike for biased human analysts in the same data, does not shift aggregate estimates or final verdicts; nor do agents reroute along the methodological axes humans use to bias their estimates. At the verdict layer, an explicit confirmatory prompt flips Claude Code's verdicts from 10% to 90% support while leaving its coefficient distribution essentially unchanged, operating through rule omission rather than rule softening. AI agents can rival or exceed human methodological diversity at the design layer while remaining vulnerable at the verdict layer. In our setting, the locus of AI bias is not estimation but interpretation.

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06.
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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07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Policy Regret for Embedding Model Routing: Contextual Bandits with Low-Rank Experts

Authors:
Yan Dai↗Negin Golrezaei↗Patrick Jaillet↗

arXiv:2606.14929v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern recommendation systems increasingly rely on dynamically routing diverse queries to multiple embedding models. Despite its practical significance, this problem remains poorly understood under realistic conditions like adversarial queries, bandit feedback, and limited observability of models. We formalize embedding model routing as an adversarial contextual linear bandit with low-rank experts, where contexts are queries, actions are items, and experts are the embedding models working on low-rank latent representation spaces. We first establish that standard regret notions suffer from structural misspecification or statistical intractability, and we identify a log-quadratic policy class that is expressive enough to capture query-dependent model routing, yet structured enough to allow efficient online learning. Second, we propose a policy gradient algorithm called Hypentropy Policy Gradient (HPG). It provably adapts to the unknown low-rank structure under incomplete information and attains $\tilde{\mathcal O}(s\sqrt{M T})$ linearized policy regret – where $s, M$, and $T$ are the intrinsic rank of the experts, the number of models, and the number of rounds – thus avoiding a curse of dimensionality. Finally, we also provide an computationally efficient and parameter-free implementation of HPG.

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08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Automatic Part-of-Speech Tagging of Arabic-English Dictionary Senses through WordNet

Authors:
Diaa M. Fayed↗Aly A. Fahmy↗Mohsen A. Rashwan↗Wafaa K. Fayed↗

This paper proposed an algorithm for part-of-speech (POS) tagging senses of a bilingual dictionary. The algorithm is applied on the Al-Mawrid Arabic-English dictionary. The tagging task is accomplished by transferring the POS tags of the English translation equivalences (TEs) to the dictionary senses after dis-ambiguities process. The English POS tags of senses are acquired from the Princeton WordNet. POS tagging of bilingual dictionary senses is prerequisite to link a bilingual dictionary to WordNet and/or standardizing that dictionary into WordNet-LMF format where the synset (set of synonyms), not word, is the basic brick. The registered accuracy is high though the cost is little. Building NLP/HLT tools needs linguistic experts, large investments, and long time. For statistical approach, we need large annotated corpora and for rule-based approach, we need large lexicon that contains rich linguistic and world knowledge. That motivates the appearance of what are called resource-light approaches to develop natural language processing (NLP) tools for poor-resource languages.

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09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Multi-floor generalization of TASEP

Authors:
Yuliy Baryshnikov↗Alexander Stolyar↗

arXiv:2603.13610v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider an interacting particle system, which generalizes the classical totally asymmetric simple exclusion process (TASEP), in that each site can contain up to a fixed finite number of particles, and the particle movement is governed by a back-pressure (BP) algorithm (also often called MaxWeight). There are $N$ sites (with $N$ finite or infinite), each may contain at most $c$ particles, $1 \le c < \infty$. New particles enter the system at the left-most site $1$ as a Poisson process of rate $\alpha\le 1$, unless site $1$ has $c$ particles. Particles (if any) are removed from the right-most site $N$ as a Poisson process of rate $\beta \le 1$. The left-to-right movement of particles between neighboring sites is governed by the BP rule: one particle moves from site $n$ to $n+1$ at epochs of a rate $1$ Poisson process, as long as the former site has strictly more particles than the latter. When $c=1$, this is the standard TASEP. Our main results address the asymptotics of the stationary distribution of a finite system, and especially the limit of the flux (current) as $N\to\infty$. In particular, we prove that interesting non-trivial phase transitions take place in a system with $c>1$. For example, if $c>1$ and $1/2 \le \beta \le 1$, the maximum limiting flux $1/4$ is achieved as long as $\alpha \ge \alpha_c^*$, where $\alpha_c^* < 1/2$ is some non-trivial threshold. (For the standard TASEP the threshold is $1/2$.) We also put forward a general conjecture about the stationary distribution asymptotics under an arbitrary parameter setting. We illustrate our formal results and the conjecture by simulations, and identify interesting directions for further research.

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10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

JustDiag!: A Diagnostic Justification Engine for Accountable Root Cause Analysis

Authors:
Tingzhu Bi↗Xinrui Jiang↗Xun Zhang↗Pengcheng Su↗Congjie He↗Jinglin Li↗Ping Wang↗Meng Ma↗

arXiv:2606.19407v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models can produce fluent root cause analyses, but fluent final answers alone are insufficient evidence for accountability in high-stakes operations. In real incident response, engineers need to know what evidence supported a diagnosis, which alternatives were considered, where contradictions remained, and whether the system resolved the case or preserved uncertainty. We address this gap with JustDiag, a diagnostic justification engine for RCA that maintains an explicit process state over evidence, findings, competing hypotheses, conflicts, and next checks. We evaluated the system on 66 real-world incidents using a two-layer protocol that separately scores final-answer quality and process quality. Relative to a matched control without diagnostic justification, JustDiag achieved stronger outcome and process scores, while accepting slightly lower terminal completion due to more calibrated non-closure. These results suggest that accountable RCA requires explicit diagnostic justification artifacts and process-aware evaluation, not only fluent final answers.

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11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Simulating Students' Java Programming Errors with Large Language Models

Authors:
Ali Keramati↗Jie Cao↗Iman Mohammadi↗Mark Warschauer↗Yang Shi↗

Understanding student errors in the programming is a cornerstone of programming education, yet obtaining a representative set of student errors for any newly designed task remains slow and costly, since authentic submissions only accumulate after extensive classroom deployment. This paper explores whether large language models (LLMs) can serve as scalable proxies for students by simulating realistic logical errors in code submissions. Using the CodeWorkout dataset of 74,000+ unique student Java submissions across 37 problems, we evaluate five LLMs under three mainstream prompting strategies: Input-Output (IO), Chain-of-Thought (CoT), and iterative Self-Refine. We assess performance along two key dimensions: diversity (the range of distinct error patterns) and alignment (alignment with authentic student mistakes), and examine how these vary by struggling level of programming tasks. Our quantitative findings reveal that while all models generate diverse errors, their alignment to human submissions diverges: Claude Sonnet 4 achieves the most balanced performance. In addition, we conducted a blinded expert annotation study (N = 401) comparing synthetic and authentic errors. This qualitative analysis confirms that the generated errors are functionally indistinguishable from authentic student errors. Moreover, higher-struggling-level problems elicit more diverse but less student-like errors. These results highlight trade-offs in using LLMs to simulate human learners and suggest design considerations for integrating synthetic errors into teachable agents, intelligent tutoring systems, and large-scale learning analytics.

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12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Limiting partition function for the Mallows model: a conjecture and partial evidence

Authors:
Soumik Pal↗

arXiv:2406.18855v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Let $S_n$ denote the set of permutations of $n$ labels. We consider a class of Gibbs probability models on $S_n$ that is a subfamily of the so-called Mallows model of random permutations. The Gibbs energy is given by a class of right invariant divergences on $S_n$ that includes common choices such as the Spearman foot rule and the Spearman rank correlation. Mukherjee in 2016 computed the limit of the (scaled) log partition function (i.e. normalizing factor) of such models as $n\rightarrow \infty$. Our objective is to compute the exact limit, as $n\rightarrow \infty$, without the log. We conjecture that this limit is given by the Fredholm determinant of an integral operator related to the so-called Schrödinger bridge probability distributions from optimal transport theory. We provide partial evidence for this conjecture, although the argument lacks a final error bound that is needed for it to become a complete proof.

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13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Exploring Information Seeking Agent Consolidation

Authors:
Guochen Yan↗Jialong Wu↗Zhengwei Tao↗Bo Li↗Qintong Zhang↗Jiahao Xu↗Haitao Mi↗Yuejian Fang↗Qingni Shen↗Wentao Zhang↗Zhonghai Wu↗

arXiv:2602.00585v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Information-seeking agents have emerged as a powerful paradigm for knowledge-intensive tasks, yet today's systems remain specialized for the open web, documents, or local knowledge bases, hindering scalable and cross-domain deployment. We present the first systematic empirical study of consolidating these information-seeking agents into a single foundation agentic model. We compare two paradigms – data-level mixing, which trains a unified model on a mixture of datasets, and parameter-level merging, which merges independently trained experts in parameter space – across 3 training scenarios, evaluating 26 representative parameter-level methods on 10 benchmarks. To compare across heterogeneous benchmarks, we introduce a geometric Composite Score and an Imbalance Score that describe overall performance and task skew. Our analysis shows that (i) well-designed parameter-level merging attains parity with data mixing at a fraction of its training cost and is order-agnostic; (ii) parameter-level merging structurally preserves out-of-domain capabilities that data mixing universally forgets; and (iii) cross-scenario stability is strongly tied to consolidation quality. We distil our observations into a method-selection guide and design principles for next-generation merging operators.

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14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quantum Horizon: An evaluation of quantum computing as a threat to Bitcoin and Ethereum

Authors:
Iosif M. Gershteyn↗Jacob A. Alber↗

arXiv:2606.14484v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum computing poses a real, broad-based, but bounded and substantially mitigable threat to Bitcoin and Ethereum. We separate the two quantum algorithms that public discussion routinely conflates: Shor's algorithm breaks the elliptic-curve signatures (ECDSA over secp256k1, BLS over BLS12-381) that authorize spending, whereas Grover's algorithm does not meaningfully threaten proof-of-work mining, which is protected by a merely quadratic speedup, fault-tolerant per-operation costs, a square-root parallelization wall, and difficulty adjustment. Folding hardware scaling, the falling resource requirement, a fault-tolerance readiness lag, and expert surveys into a single Monte-Carlo forecast yields a wide, bimodal arrival distribution for a cryptographically relevant quantum computer: about a one-in-six chance by 2035, near 30% by 2040, and about 60% by 2050. Exposure is concentrated and mostly migratable: of Bitcoin's roughly six million quantum-exposed coins only about 2.3 million are irreducibly at risk, while 50 to 65% of Ether sits at key-revealed accounts that can adopt post-quantum signatures. A timely migration beats even an optimistic 2035 machine, so the binding constraint is governance, not technology. A survey of the top twenty cryptocurrencies finds none fully post-quantum. Reproducible models accompany every quantitative claim.

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15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

TimeVista: Exploring and Exploiting Vision-Language Models as Judges for Time Series Forecasting

Authors:
Zhi Chen↗Yuxuan Wang↗Jialong Wu↗Yong Liu↗Haoran Zhang↗Xingjian Su↗Jianmin Wang↗Mingsheng Long↗

arXiv:2606.16173v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-quality time series forecasting is pivotal for real-world decision-making. However, traditional point-wise metrics often fail to reveal complex temporal patterns and align poorly with human intuitive preferences. While the ''LLM-as-a-Judge'' paradigm has revolutionized text evaluation by providing flexible, human-aligned judgment, its application to time series remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we leverage Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as judges for time series forecasting, harnessing their ability to comprehend time series plots grounded in textual information. Specifically, we propose a novel framework integrating micro- and macro-level judgments informed by contextual information to evaluate time series forecasting. To this end, we introduce TimeVista, a comprehensive VLM-as-a-Judge benchmark comprising 5563 time series samples paired with detailed evaluation rubrics. Extensive meta-evaluations demonstrate that VLMs are highly reliable judges, achieving significantly higher consistency with human preferences than conventional metrics. Building upon our benchmark, we comprehensively assess recent Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) under the VLM-as-a-Judge paradigm. Our results demonstrate that VLMs serve as robust and interpretable judges, providing a comprehensive, human-aligned standard for evaluating time series models.

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16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

VISA: VLM-Guided Instance Semantic Auditing for 3D Occupancy World Models

Authors:
Ruiqi Xian↗Yuehan Xian↗Jing Liang↗Xuewei Qi↗Dinesh Manocha↗

Semantic 3D occupancy provides a voxelized world state for autonomous driving and robot decision making, but object and rare-class errors can affect free-space interpretation, collision checking, and temporal state propagation. We show that a common VLM strategy, aligning 3D voxel or object features with crop-caption embeddings, improves text-space similarity without reliably improving closed-set occupancy mIoU. Motivated by this mismatch, we propose VISA, a training-time semantic auditing approach for existing occupancy world models. VISA queries an offline VLM on a representative crop of each physical object instance, obtains a structured audit with class hypotheses, plausible confusions, reliability, attributes, and evidence, and propagates it along the object track. The audit is grounded to matched 3D object voxels and distilled into semantic logits through reliability-weighted taxonomy, attribute-factor, and scene-level audit graph losses, while inference remains unchanged and requires no VLM. On nuScenes, averaged across three runs, VISA improves OccWorld from 19.06 to 20.05 mIoU and GaussianWorld from 21.36 to 21.91 mIoU; on GaussianWorld, object mIoU improves from 18.18 to 19.16 and rare-class mIoU from 15.60 to 16.79. These results suggest that VLMs are better suited to closed-set occupancy as reliability-aware semantic auditors than as generic caption-embedding targets.

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17.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

HOMED enables hierarchical and multimodal optimization of DNA methylation deconvolution across tissues

Authors:
Liu↗Chen↗Du↗Garmire↗

Cellular heterogeneity is a major confounder in bulk DNA methylation data for epigenome-wide association studies. Existing reference-based DNAm deconvolution methods often ignore hierarchies among related cell types and may generalize poorly across datasets due to limited variability in reference profiles. We developed HOMED (Hierarchically Optimized Methylation Deconvolution), a framework that integrates cell-lineage hierarchies, single-cell RNA sequencing-guided deconvolution, and paired bulk RNA-seq/DNAm data for CpG signature optimization. Across simulated and real peripheral blood mononuclear cell, lung, and placental datasets, HOMED consistently yielded the highest PCCs and lowest RMSEs, outperforming existing scRNA-seq-guided DNAm deconvolution methods, improving accuracy, resolution, and cross-tissue generalizability.

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18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Hyper3D-lite: count-preserving representation auditing for long-read multi-contact genome data

Authors:
Zhang↗

Long-read and single-molecule sequencing technologies are rapidly increasing molecule-level data, with platforms such as Oxford Nanopore, PacBio HiFi, and Roche sequencing-by-expansion advancing at different technology readiness levels. In the specific context of Pore-C and HiPore-C multi-contact chromatin-conformation assays, long-read multi-contact 3D genome assays preserve molecule-level contact context, but common downstream pairwise projections can expand one multi-contact molecule into many pair records. This creates a representation problem: apparent contact evidence can increase through the counting frame before biological interpretation begins. Hyper3D-lite addresses this problem as a representation-first audit tool for read-to-fragment-style long-read multi-contact inputs. It compares all-pair projection with CPB, a count-preserving statistical accounting reference point, and separates broad software outputs from conservative higher-order candidate calls.

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19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

CrossAccent-TTS: Cross-Lingual Accent-Intensity Controllable Text-to-Speech via Disentangled Speaker and Accent Representations

Authors:
Ram Annamdevula↗Ankit Tatawat↗Ashishkumar P. Gudmalwar↗Nirmesh J. Shah↗Pankaj Wasnik↗

arXiv:2606.25403v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accent conversion and controllability remain fundamental challenges in cross-lingual text-to-speech (TTS), particularly for low-resource and phonetically diverse Indic languages. While recent large language model (LLM)-based TTS systems exhibit strong cross-lingual generalization, they provide limited explicit control over accent characteristics and intensity. In this paper, we propose CrossAccentTTS, a framework that enables both accent control and conversion while preserving speaker identity. Specifically, we introduce an Accent Intensity Controller (AIC) that injects weighted language embeddings into the accent subspace, allowing smooth interpolation between accents and fine-grained modulation of accent strength at inference time. Experiments on the Indic Multilingual and L2-arctic datasets shows that CrossAccent-TTS achieves precise control of accent intensity, outperforming strong baselines in accent similarity and controllability by maintaining speaker similarity and naturalness.

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20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Fault Lines: Navigating Ethics and Responsible AI Where National Policy Meets Local Practice in Public Sector Transformation

Authors:
Sitong Lyu↗Shabnam Taghiyeva↗Mohit Kukadia↗Denis Newman-Griffis↗

arXiv:2606.13039v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The UK government has adopted a pro-AI stance to help transform public service delivery in the face of severe financial pressures, but the path to translate this vision into responsible AI practice remains ill-defined. While UK policy is often set at the national level, local authorities are responsible for most public service delivery, and the rapid advance of AI-first narratives in the public sector is exposing fault lines in knowledge and practice at this national-local interface. This paper examines how responsible AI is interpreted and implemented at the interface between the UK's central government and local authorities, taking the high-stakes area of Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) as a case study. We present a thematic analysis of 17 semi-structured interviews with policymakers, practitioners, and third-sector professionals to identify barriers and enabling conditions for responsible AI where national policy meets local practice. We identify five interconnected challenges facing local authorities: shadow usage of AI and data privacy risks, market-government asymmetry in AI provision, insufficient workforce readiness, a lack of standardised definitions and measurements, and gaps in human accountability. For each, participants proposed actionable steps, from strengthening data protection frameworks and rebalancing the market-government relationship to enhancing workforce capacity. Our examination of SEND brings these challenges into sharper focus, showing how high-stakes decisions affecting vulnerable children and families intensify tensions around accountability, fairness, and human oversight, exposing the limits of a principle-based regulatory approach. We argue that responsible public sector AI requires both national policy adjustments and structural reforms to institutional capacity, values, and governance mechanisms at the local level.

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

Enhancing Physics-Informed Neural Networks Through Feature Engineering

Authors:
Shaghayegh Fazliani↗Zachary Frangella↗Madeleine Udell↗

arXiv:2502.07209v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) seek to solve partial differential equations (PDEs) with deep learning. Mainstream approaches that deploy fully-connected multi-layer deep learning architectures require prolonged training to achieve even moderate accuracy, while recent work on feature engineering allows higher accuracy and faster convergence. This paper introduces SAFE-NET, a Single-layered Adaptive Feature Engineering NETwork that achieves orders-of-magnitude lower errors with far fewer parameters than baseline feature engineering methods. SAFE-NET returns to basic ideas in machine learning, using Fourier features, a simplified single hidden layer network architecture, and an effective optimizer that improves the conditioning of the PINN optimization problem. Numerical results show that SAFE-NET converges faster and typically outperforms deeper networks and more complex architectures. It consistently uses fewer parameters – on average, 65% fewer than the competing feature engineering methods – while achieving comparable accuracy in less than 30% of the training epochs. Moreover, each SAFE-NET epoch is 95% faster than those of competing feature engineering approaches. These findings challenge the prevailing belief that modern PINNs effectively learn features in these scientific applications and highlight the efficiency gains possible through feature engineering.

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22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Food Colorings in Child-Targeted Ultra-Processed Foods in Brazil: Market Prevalence and Parental Perceptions

Authors:
Silva Nunes↗Pereira Eberle↗M. F↗F. Grilo↗Zancheta↗C. Sylvetsky↗Duran↗A. C↗

Child-targeted marketing on packaged foods can shape children's food preferences and parents' purchasing decisions, yet many products with child-targeted marketing are ultra-processed foods (UPFs) and contain cosmetic additives such as food colorings, which have raised concerns about adverse effects on children's health and behavior. This mixed-methods study examined the prevalence of food colorings in child-directed UPFs and explored parents' perceptions and knowledge of these additives in beverages commonly consumed by children. Quantitative data were obtained from the Mintel Global New Products Database to identify child-directed products launched in Brazil between 2018 and 2021, measured as having at least one child-targeted marketing strategy in the food package, and whether they contained food colorings. Qualitative data came from seven focus groups with parents of children aged 2-5 and 6-11 years in Brazil, alongside a brief survey assessing participants' ability to identify food colorings on product labels. Among 5,078 UPFs launched during the study period, 23.0% contained child-targeted marketing, and 40.3% of these had food colorings. The highest prevalence was observed in carbonated beverages, candies, and ice creams, in which more than half of products contained food colorings. Parents generally understood that food colorings are used to make products more attractive to children and associated them with potential health risks, but reported difficulties avoiding them. These findings highlight the widespread presence of food colorings in child-targeted UPFs in Brazil and underscore the need for stronger regulatory measures to restrict the use of food colorings and improve labelling on food packages.

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23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

GPT-Based Fast Simulation of CLAS12 Detector Hits via Conditional Autoregressive Generation

Authors:
Cole Granger↗James Giroux↗Richard Tyson↗Maurizio Ungaro↗Cristiano Fanelli↗

arXiv:2606.16035v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern particles physics experiments have demonstrated an increasing need for fast, high-fidelity detector simulation as detector components have improved and subsequent computational requirements approach the limits of available resources. Recently, deep generative models have emerged as a promising alternative to traditional Monte-Carlo methods, with recent works drawing inspiration from large language models (LLMs) and self-supervised next-token prediction methods. In this work, we present an application of a GPT-style autoregressive transformer as a fast surrogate model for the calorimeter inside the CLAS12 experiment at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. The model is conditioned on incident momentum and generates realistic detector hits autoregressively across all nine calorimeter layers as sequences of strip, ADC, and TDC tokens. We demonstrate that the model faithfully reproduces hit multiplicity, spatial distributions, energy deposits, and the energy-momentum response of the electromagnetic calorimeter. The generator achieves inference rates exceeding 700 events per second on a single GPU, providing a substantial speedup over traditional Geant4-based simulations while maintaining physics fidelity essential for high-luminosity experimental programs.

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

From Tokens to Policy: Causal and Interpretable Heterogeneous Treatment Effects Identification

Authors:
Riccardo Cadei↗Frank Otchere↗Nyasha Tirivayi↗Gustavo Angeles Tagliaferro↗Falco J. Bargagli-Stoffi↗Francesco Locatello↗

arXiv:2606.17010v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Heterogeneous Treatment Effect (HTE) identification is crucial to explain the impact of an intervention and optimize our policies accordingly. Existing approaches trade expressivity for interpretability, but, if some active heterogeneity drivers are unmeasured, methods at both ends of this spectrum allow for spurious HTE characterization with no causal reading. In this work, we focus on controlled experiments and argue that an oracle HTE causal characterization via the latent interactors is now within reach, thanks to (i) more extensive pre-treatment measurements, i.e., multi-modal and multi-view, and (ii) scalable representations with minimal human supervision. We then re-frame HTE identification as a Markov-blanket discovery problem on a sufficient and aligned pre-treatment representation, and introduce Neural EXposure Interaction Search (NEXIS), an iterative procedure with provable and empirically validated consistent selection. We deploy NEXIS on two anti-poverty programs in Africa, augmenting each with satellite imagery capturing previously unmeasured environmental effect modifiers, leading to novel, interpretable and prescriptive guidelines to optimize the programs' next iterations.

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25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

AgentArmor: A Framework, Evaluation, \& Mitigation of Coding Agent Failures

Authors:
Kenneth Ge↗Andre Assis↗

arXiv:2606.19380v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Software engineering and deployment are increasingly being delegated to AI coding agents. The scale of their adoption is surfacing rare, but highly destructive, failure modes. In this paper, we study these failure modes as stemming from three distinct mechanisms: underspecification, where default model behavior is unsafe; capability errors, where the safe action is available but the model does not adhere to it due to bias or capability limitations; and agent harness errors, where the model fails to execute the safe action through the harness. We evaluate these across 8 different evaluations, each inspired by real-life deployment failures, totaling 20 coding environments and 59 synthetic transcript templates. Based on this evaluation, we propose AgentArmor, an agent harness modification, to mitigate these errors. By adding an extended system prompt, a separate command classifier, a ``3 strikes'' policy, deterministic guardrails, and tools for the agent to edit its own context, we show that AgentArmor is safer across a statistically significant number of samples. Thus, we suggest concrete mitigations for current coding agents and a design philosophy for future agent harness features.

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