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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Typical geometry of self-repelling polymers in a constant force field

Authors:
Kamil Khettabi↗Yvan Velenik↗

arXiv:2606.24352v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study a general class of self-repelling polymers on $\mathbb Z^2$, including the simple random walk, the self-avoiding walk and the repulsive Domb-Joyce model, in the presence of a constant force field acting on each monomer. Conditioning the polymer to have fixed length and fixed endpoints, we identify the limiting free energy and prove that typical trajectories concentrate exponentially near a deterministic macroscopic shape. This shape is characterized as the unique minimizer of a variational problem and can be interpreted as a geodesic of a height-dependent Finsler metric. We also analyze two limiting regimes with universal features: for small field strength, in the symmetric case, the geodesic is close to a classical catenary, while for large field strength it converges to a universal polygonal shape governed by the nearest-neighbor lattice constraint.

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02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Cognitive and Neuroimaging Biomarker Intra-Individual Variability in Alzheimer's Disease

Authors:
Teo↗M. H↗Taong↗M. R. Q↗Kan↗C. N↗Tan↗C. H↗

Background Greater cognitive intra-individual variability (IIV) reflects increased heterogeneous performance across cognitive domains and has been linked to a higher risk of Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, it remains unclear whether cognitive IIV is linked to heterogeneous dispersion of regional AD pathology. Hence, we aimed to examine the association between cognitive IIV and AD neuroimaging biomarker IIV. Methods This study included participants with normal cognition (CN) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative. Cognitive IIV was computed as the within-person standard deviation of five domain-specific neuropsychological test z-scores. Four neuroimaging biomarker IIV metrics were similarly derived using regional amyloid-{beta} (n = 1,021), tau (n = 719), cortical thickness (n = 2,148), and combined amyloid-tau-neurodegeneration (ATN, n = 258). Associations between cognitive IIV and each biomarker IIV were evaluated using linear regression models, adjusted for relevant covariates. Results Higher cognitive IIV was associated with greater biomarker IIV across amyloid-{beta} ({beta} = 0.039, SE = 0.014, p = .006), tau ({beta} = 0.196, SE = 0.033, p < .001), cortical thinning ({beta} = 0.036, SE = 0.008, p < .001), and ATN ({beta} = 0.176, SE = 0.043, p < .001). Interaction analyses revealed that the associations of cognitive IIV with tau IIV, cortical thickness IIV, and ATN IIV were stronger in MCI than CN individuals. Significant interactions between cognitive IIV and biomarker positivity status showed that the effect with amyloid-{beta} IIV was attenuated in A- ({beta} = 0.004, SE = 0.014, p = .78) but that the effect with tau IIV remained robust even in T- individuals ({beta} = 0.088, SE = 0.022, p < .001). Conclusion Elevated cognitive IIV is associated with greater heterogeneity in cortical dispersion of AD-related pathology, particularly in prodromal AD and in the presence of abnormal pathology. As a novel measure that captures variation in topographical scattering of AD pathological burden across the cortex, AD biomarker IIV may offer research and clinical utility beyond evaluating absolute biomarker load or thresholds.

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03.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

EventHorizon: A Foundation Model for Clinical Flow Cytometry

Authors:
Medina Grespan↗Morrison↗O'Fallon↗Shean↗Spies↗N. C↗Ng↗

Flow cytometry is an essential tool for diagnosis of hematologic malignancies, but existing clinical workflows are highly dependent on expert manual interpretation. Existing machine learning approaches typically require extensive labeled data and are sensitive to variability in panel design, instrumentation, and laboratory workflows, limiting their generalizability. We present EventHorizon, a self-supervised foundation model for clinical flow cytometry that produces unified specimen-level representations from heterogeneous multi-panel data. EventHorizon employs a two-stage hierarchical transformer architecture with marker-aware tokenization, enabling seamless integration of cells measured across different antibody panels into a single shared latent space. We pre-train the model using a DINO-inspired self-distillation strategy with a variety of flow cytometry-specific augmentations on a dataset of more than 100,000 clinical specimens across 17 distinct panels. We evaluate the resulting embeddings on three clinically relevant classification tasks spanning common and rare panels, demonstrating that simple k-nearest neighbor probing of frozen EventHorizon embeddings achieves performance comparable to a fully supervised baseline model and a prior panel-specific self-supervised model. To ensure EventHorizon is not simply shortcut learning on features such as the markers/panels run for a given specimen, we perform a graph-theoretic analysis of EventHorizon's latent space which argues that specimen embeddings are organized primarily by biological diagnosis. Taken together, these results demonstrate that EventHorizon produces biologically meaningful, panel-agnostic specimen representations from clinical flow cytometry data which, with further development and validation, could provide a potential basis for scalable, reproducible diagnostic support across diverse clinical laboratory settings.

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04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Forced Deferral: Manipulating Routing Decisions in Multimodal LLM Cascades

Authors:
Zhongye Liu↗Yaopei Zeng↗Yurui Chang↗Lu Lin↗

arXiv:2606.15308v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong visual reasoning abilities, serving a large model for every query is computationally expensive. MLLM cascades mitigate this cost by first querying a weak but cheaper model and deferring to a strong model when the weak model's output is unconfident. However, since the weak model's confidence directly controls compute allocation, these systems expose a new attack surface: an adversary can manipulate confidence so that their queries are consistently deferred to the strong model. Motivated by this vulnerability, we introduce the Forced Deferral Attack (FDA), an adversarial image attack that lowers the weak model's confidence and causes cascades to route queries to the strong model. FDA learns a universal border trigger by optimizing a temperature-flattened objective. This objective pushes the weak model's token distribution on triggered inputs toward less concentrated targets constructed from its clean responses. Across datasets, model families, and deferral metrics, FDA consistently increases strong-model routing while outperforming image-perturbation and prompt-injection baselines. These results show that MLLM cascades are vulnerable to attacks that manipulate compute allocation, forcing unintended strong-model usage without directly targeting answer correctness.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

PreUnlearn: Auditing Collateral Knowledge Damage Before Large Language Model Unlearning

Authors:
Bo Su↗Ankit Shah↗Thai Le↗

Machine unlearning for large language models (LLMs) aims to remove specified knowledge while preserving the rest of the model's capabilities. However, the boundary between knowledge to forget and knowledge to retain is often unclear, since related and even distant information may be entangled in the model. In this paper, we study LLM unlearning from a data-centric perspective and measure how unlearning effects propagate from the forget set to same-domain and distant-domain knowledge. We find a consistent decay pattern: collateral damage is strongest near the forget set, weakens with semantic distance, but does not disappear at domain boundaries. We further ask whether such damage can be audited before unlearning is executed. We formulate forget-set auditing as a pre-unlearning prediction task and analyze which data features are most predictive of downstream damage. Our results show that interaction features between the forget set and evaluation set provide the strongest signals, suggesting that collateral damage is partly reflected in data geometry before model updates occur. These findings position forget-set auditing as an early warning tool for identifying risky unlearning runs and designing more reliable unlearning procedures.

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

Toward Preference-aligned Large Language Models via Residual-based Model Steering

Authors:
Lucio La Cava↗Andrea Tagarelli↗

Preference alignment is a critical step in making Large Language Models (LLMs) useful and aligned with (human) preferences. Existing approaches such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback or Direct Preference Optimization typically require curated data and expensive optimization over billions of parameters, and eventually lead to persistent task-specific models. In this work, we introduce Preference alignment of Large Language Models via Residual Steering (PaLRS), a training-free method that exploits preference signals encoded in the residual streams of LLMs. From as few as one hundred preference pairs, PaLRS extracts lightweight, plug-and-play steering vectors that can be applied at inference time to push models toward preferred behaviors. We evaluate PaLRS on various small-to-medium-scale open-source LLMs, showing that PaLRS-aligned models achieve consistent gains on mathematical reasoning and code generation benchmarks while preserving baseline general-purpose performance. Moreover, when compared to models aligned with DPO and SimPO, they perform better with great time-savings. Our findings highlight that PaLRS offers an effective, much more efficient and flexible alternative to standard preference optimization pipelines, offering a training-free, plug-and-play mechanism for alignment with minimal data.

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07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Learner-based Concept Drift Detection: Analysis and Evaluation

Authors:
Md Moman Ul Haque Khan↗Samira Sadaoui↗

arXiv:2606.20216v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine learning algorithms deployed for evolving streaming environments must handle the non-stationary data distributions, commonly referred to as concept drift. The presence of concept drift poses a major challenge for many real-world applications because it can severely degrade their predictive performance, hindering their ability to support robust decision-making. Consequently, the timely and efficient detection of drift events is critical for sustaining high accuracy over time. This study examines theoretically the concept drift characteristics and numerous drift detection algorithms across several categories. Furthermore, we evaluate their performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets exhibiting diverse streaming scenarios and drift characteristics, such as abrupt and gradual changes. This study aims to enhance understanding of the complex notion of concept drift characteristics and behavior of drift detectors, along with their applicability to diverse contexts.

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08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Efficient Neural Network Model Selection for Few-Class Application Datasets

Authors:
Bryan Bo Cao↗Abhinav Sharma↗Lawrence O'Gorman↗Michael Coss↗Shubham Jain↗

arXiv:2606.19712v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While much effort has focused on developing and benchmarking high-performance neural networks, less attention has been given to how dataset properties, known to practitioners, can guide efficient model selection. Neural models are typically evaluated on datasets with thousands of classes, yet many real-world applications involve fewer than ten. To address this understudied but common setting, we develop a measure of classification difficulty based on data-side properties and show how it enables more efficient model selection for few-class datasets, where traditional approaches are less effective. We term this phenomenon "few-class distinctiveness". Our metric allows comparison of models and datasets 6 to 29$\times$ faster than repeated training and testing. Leveraging this insight, we extend scaled model families below the smallest published models, achieving greater efficiency at similar accuracy, for example models up to 42% smaller than YOLOv5-nano for a mobile robot task. Targeting resource-constrained applications, we demonstrate few-class model selection across mobile robot, drone, and IoT scenarios, highlighting practical gains in efficiency without sacrificing performance.

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09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

DeepBD: A Grounded Agentic Workflow for Variant Prioritization and Diagnosis of Genetic Birth Defects

Authors:
Shiyu Li↗Ziqi Yan↗Zhihao Wu↗Jielong Lu↗Weiran Liao↗Jiajun Yu↗Genjie Li↗Zeyu Chu↗Jiajun Bu↗Haishuai Wang↗

arXiv:2606.24779v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Birth defects are a major cause of fetal loss, neonatal morbidity and long-term disability. In the subset with suspected genetic etiologies, exome and genome sequencing have moved many cases from variant detection to post-sequencing interpretation: clinicians must rank patient-specific candidate variants under incomplete fetal or infant phenotypes and heterogeneous evidence from population genetics, variant-effect prediction, gene-disease validity, phenotype ontologies, cellular and pathway context, protein structure and clinical literature. We present DeepBD, a grounded agentic workflow for variant prioritization and diagnostic interpretation of genetic birth defects. DeepBD organizes the workflow into LLM-assisted case structuring, a pretrained evidence engine, specialist evidence modules and a grounded diagnostic review layer. The evidence engine learns patient-specific variant scores from structured rule evidence, sequence and variant-effect representations and phenotype-conditioned biological context, whereas specialist modules and the agentic layer provide tool-based refinement, candidate-pool review and diagnosis-oriented synthesis from ranked candidates. Developed using an in-house fetal and infant cohort comprising 18,622 cases, DeepBD achieved Recall@1/3/5/10 of 0.658/0.882/0.912/0.929 on an internal held-out solved-case benchmark, outperforming standalone Exomiser, DeepRare and prompted LLM reranking baselines evaluated on Exomiser-derived top-20 candidate variants. Ablation and overlap analyses show that rule evidence, mechanistic context, and specialist refinement provide complementary signals. These findings support a grounded agentic workflow that separates evidence integration, tool-based refinement, and LLM-assisted diagnostic review for retrospective variant prioritization in genetic birth defects.

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10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

ProtoX-AD: Self-Explainable Time Series Anomaly Detection and Characterization

Authors:
Aitor S\'anchez-Ferrera↗Elisabeth Wetzer↗Kristoffer Wickstr{\o}m↗Michael Kampffmeyer↗Robert Jenssen↗

arXiv:2606.13277v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in time series anomaly detection (TSAD) have highlighted the effectiveness of self-supervised classification-based approaches. These methods apply transformations to normal training samples, training a classifier to recognize transformation-specific patterns that help identify anomalies through increased classification errors. Despite their strong performance, a significant challenge is their lack of explainability, as they provide limited insight into the characteristics of flagged anomalies. To address this limitation, we propose ProtoX-AD, a prototype-based self-explainable framework for self-supervised TSAD. ProtoX-AD learns transformation-aware latent representations alongside interpretable prototypes, enabling both accurate anomaly detection and the identification of distinct anomalous profiles through prototype-based explanations. Additionally, it allows for systematic analysis of how transformation design impacts detection performance and explainability. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that ProtoX-AD achieves detection performance comparable to its black-box counterparts while offering more consistent and semantically meaningful explanations than existing explainable baselines. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Aitorzan3/ProtoX-AD.

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

Proximal Policy Optimization for Amortized Discrete Sampling

Authors:
Anna Zykova-Myzina↗Timofei Gritsaev↗Daniil Tiapkin↗Nikita Morozov↗

arXiv:2606.15793v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper explores policy gradient algorithms for training stochastic policies to sample from structured discrete probability distributions under the Generative Flow Network (GFlowNet) framework. Building on extensive theoretical connections between GFlowNets and entropy-regularized reinforcement learning, we derive equivalents of standard policy gradient algorithms for training GFlowNets, as well as experimentally explore their various methodological aspects, including baseline training and advantage estimation. Most importantly, our work is the first to derive and successfully apply proximal policy optimization to GFlowNets, showing its improved convergence speed and data efficiency compared to standard GFlowNet training objectives on benchmarks ranging from synthetic energies to molecular graph generation.

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

K-Prism: A Knowledge-Guided and Prompt Integrated Universal Medical Image Segmentation Model

Authors:
Bangwei Guo↗Yunhe Gao↗Meng Ye↗Difei Gu↗Yang Zhou↗Leon Axel↗Dimitris Metaxas↗

Medical image segmentation is fundamental to clinical decision-making, yet existing models remain fragmented. They are usually trained on single knowledge sources and specific to individual tasks, modalities, or organs. This fragmentation contrasts sharply with clinical practice, where experts seamlessly integrate diverse knowledge: anatomical priors from training, exemplar-based reasoning from reference cases, and iterative refinement through real-time interaction. We present $K-Prism$, a unified segmentation framework that mirrors this clinical flexibility by systematically integrating three knowledge paradigms: (i) $semantic priors$ learned from annotated datasets, (ii) $in-context knowledge$ from few-shot reference examples, and (iii) $interactive feedback$ from user inputs like clicks or scribbles. Our key insight is that these heterogeneous knowledge sources can be encoded into a dual-prompt representation: 1-D sparse prompts defining $what$ to segment and 2-D dense prompts indicating $where$ to attend, which are then dynamically routed through a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) decoder. This design enables flexible switching between paradigms and joint training across diverse tasks without architectural modifications. Comprehensive experiments on 18 public datasets spanning diverse modalities (CT, MRI, X-ray, pathology, ultrasound, etc.) demonstrate that K-Prism achieves state-of-the-art performance across semantic, in-context, and interactive segmentation settings.

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13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Graphical Causal Reasoning for Root Cause Analysis in Cloud Networks

Authors:
Fabien Chraim↗Dominik Janzing↗John Evans↗

arXiv:2606.13532v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cloud-computing relies on large-scale networks which are inherently complex systems. In this paper, we present a novel approach to root cause analysis (RCA) of cloud network incidents, leveraging graph-based causal discovery techniques. Our method addresses the limitations of rule-based automation by introducing a spatiotemporal grouping strategy and an automation ontology to reduce the dimensionality of the problem. We construct a causal graph from binary time series data using bivariate Granger causality and conditional independence tests. For inference, we introduce a probabilistic method that assigns edge-specific conditional probabilities as a function of time lag, allowing for interpretable, time-aware root cause scoring via causal graph traversal. We evaluated the system using a labeled dataset of 35 production incidents from a major cloud provider. The model successfully recalled the correct root cause in 85.7% of incidents and produced an exact match in 74.3%. In production, the deployed system has been used in over 800 real-world incidents, with positive qualitative feedback from network engineers. These results highlight the practicality of a data-driven, causal approach to RCA in dynamic and large-scale operational environments.

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14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

SED:Lightweight Saliency prediction for Event-based data via Distillation

Authors:
Romaric Mazna↗Jean Martinet↗Michele Magno↗

Event-based saliency prediction has gained attention recently, as combining event cameras with saliency estimation can act as an upstream stage that naturally improves the efficiency of downstream eventbased perception at the edge. However, current approaches are either neuromorphic, underperforming on event-based saliency benchmarks, or too heavy for resource-constrained edge applications due to their reliance on transformers or 3D convolutions. Drawing inspiration from efficient convolutional modules, SED and aiming to exploit the temporal information in event data, we propose a lightweight network, trained through knowledge distillation, built on a Depthwise Spatio-Temporal Block (DSTconv) – a factorization of the 3D depthwise separable convolution. Relative to its teacher, our model reduces the model size from 180 MB to 0.32 MB (562x) and the parameter count from 45M to 81k (554x), while matching or outperforming it on the N-DHF1K and N-UCF Sports datasets. Moreover, it generalizes strongly beyond its training distribution, transferring from synthetic to real event data where a model trained from scratch fails.

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15.
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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16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

The Degeneracy Distillery

Authors:
T. Lucas Makinen↗Deaglan J. Bartlett↗Niall Jeffrey↗Benjamin D. Wandelt↗

arXiv:2606.23838v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When two or more parameters or labels produce similar data, they are degenerate, or hard to distinguish. Degeneracies render both label prediction and inverse problems difficult, since both machine learning algorithms and probabilistic samplers rely on the distinguishability of data and its gradients with respect to parameters. However, identifying degeneracies in physical models or real-world datasets can be elucidating about the choice of model or the underlying process that produces the data. We present the degeneracy distillery, a method that (1) detects and (2) resolves degenerate parameter combinations (a) automatically and (b) symbolically, from parameter-data (or parameter-simulation) pairs alone, through estimation and flattening of the Fisher information matrix. By exploring the information geometry of the likelihood, we characterize degeneracies as an intrinsic property of the physical model, requiring no realised data observation. We demonstrate our approach on a range of synthetic and real-world problems, discovering symbolic coordinate transformations that identify the combinations of parameters of a model which yield independent effects on the data. The resulting coordinates flatten the Fisher information in expectation globally, in contrast to posterior-based methods that flatten only at a single point, and substantially reduce the simulation budget required for downstream neural posterior estimation. In test cases we require up to $10\times$ fewer simulations for posterior estimation at matched validation calibration whilst simultaneously gaining physical insight on the system.

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17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

A Computational Audit of Demographic Association Encoding in ClinicalBERT Language Predictions

Authors:
Kehinde Temitayo Soetan↗

Transformer-based clinical language models are increasingly integrated into high-stakes clinical decision support pipelines, yet the computational mechanisms through which demographic associations encoded in medical documentation propagate into model probability distributions remain empirically underspecified. We present a systematic computational audit of representational bias in ClinicalBERT (Alsentzer et al., 2019), a BERT-based model pretrained on MIMIC-III discharge summaries, employing two complementary probing methodologies: Log Probability Bias Analysis (LPBA), which quantifies demographic descriptor-induced shifts in masked token probability distributions across behavioral and evaluative semantic categories, and Masked Language Model-based analysis (MLM), which probes internal representational structure for demographic agency attribution encoding across 98 real clinical sentence templates and eight intersectional race-gender combinations. Corpus frequency analysis operationalizes the distinction between statistical disparity and bias amplification by benchmarking model outputs against empirical term frequencies in the MIMIC-III training corpus. Of 32 statistically significant findings, 65.6% contradict observed corpus distributions, rising to 80% for Black patients and 87.5% for agency attribution under MLM probing, providing direct empirical evidence that representational bias in ClinicalBERT operates predominantly through model-internal amplification rather than training data inheritance. Keywords: natural language processing, clinical documentation, algorithmic auditing, representational bias, health equity 1

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18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Diffusion-based Cumulative Adversarial Purification for Vision Language Models

Authors:
Jia Fu↗Yongtao Wu↗Yihang Chen↗Kunyu Peng↗Xiao Zhang↗Volkan Cevher↗Sepideh Pashami↗Anders Holst↗

Vision Language Models (VLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in multimodal understanding, yet their susceptibility to adversarial perturbations poses a significant threat to their reliability in real-world applications. Despite often being imperceptible to humans, these perturbations can drastically alter model outputs, leading to erroneous interpretations and decisions. This paper introduces DiffCAP, a novel diffusion-based purification strategy that can effectively neutralize adversarial corruptions in VLMs. We theoretically establish a provable recovery region in the forward diffusion process and meanwhile quantify the convergence rate of semantic variation with respect to VLMs. These findings manifest that adversarial effects monotonically fade as diffusion unfolds. Guided by this principle, DiffCAP leverages noise injection with a similarity threshold of VLM embeddings as an adaptive criterion, before reverse diffusion restores a clean and reliable representation for VLM inference. Through extensive experiments across six datasets with three VLMs under varying attack strengths in three task scenarios, we show that DiffCAP outperforms existing defense techniques by a substantial margin. Notably, DiffCAP significantly reduces both hyperparameter tuning complexity and the required diffusion time, thereby accelerating the denoising process. Equipped with theorems and empirical support, DiffCAP provides a robust and practical solution for securely deploying VLMs in adversarial environments. The source code is available at https://github.com/JasonFu1998/DiffCAP.

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19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Modelling the decadal expansion of West Nile virus in Italy: the role of climatic, anthropogenic, and macroecological drivers

Authors:
Marcolin↗Bella↗Del Manso↗Dorigatti↗Pezzotti↗Poletti↗Riccardo↗Di Marco↗

Abstract BACKGROUND West Nile virus (WNV) is a growing health burden in Italy. Anticipating human infection risk is hampered by the pathogen's complex ecology, highlighting the need for comprehensive early-warning tools. AIM We aimed to model municipal-level WNV risk in Italy and characterize its decadal expansion in Italy, providing a comprehensive ecological understanding of viral emergence. METHODS We applied a machine learning framework to annual human WNV case data from 2014 to 2024. The model integrated a suite of environmental, socio-economic, and macroecological predictors to generate risk projections. We evaluated the model's performance through multiple validation settings. We also performed an anticipation test for the 2025 epidemic season, using 2024 environmental data to assess the model's predictive accuracy against observed 2025 human cases. RESULTS Our model achieved robust performance (True Skill Statistic > 0.4) and captured WNV progressive expansion from 184 predicted positive municipalities in 2014 to 2,012 in 2024 (an 11-fold increase in 11 years). Seasonal minimum temperature was the primary risk driver, followed by monitoring year and population density, indicating active spatial spread. Environmental suitability consistently preceded clinical detection. Municipalities with cases in 2023-2024 exhibited significantly higher predicted suitability during 2018-2022 than those without cases (average risk 0.58 vs 0.20). Our model successfully identified emerging risk hotspots along the Adriatic coast and southern Italy before the official human spillover of 2025. CONCLUSION Embedding macroecological drivers into WNV risk modelling provides an improved understanding of drivers of rapid WNV expansion. Our model enables proactive risk mapping, surveillance efforts, and targeted public health measures.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Multimodal Evaluator Preference Collapse: Cross-Modal Contagion in Self-Evolving Agents

Authors:
Zewen Liu↗

When AI agents use language models to evaluate their own outputs in a feedback loop, systematic biases emerge. We show that Evaluator Preference Collapse (EPC) is dramatically amplified in multimodal settings. Using GPT-4o to evaluate DeepSeek-chat across text and visual tasks, we find that a single strategy (step_by_step) absorbs 48.4% of all weight – 3.2x the collapse observed in text-only self-evaluation – while three visual-domain strategies receive only 9.1% combined weight. We then demonstrate a novel phenomenon we term cross-modal contagion: evaluator preferences acquired on one modality transfer to and corrupt strategy selection on another. Through a four-phase isolation training paradigm, we measure contagion coefficients and document strategy inversion – the optimal strategy for a modality reverses after cross-modal exposure. A Phase 3 statistical validation across four evaluator configurations (N=53 total independent repetitions, 15,592 API calls) reveals a clear hierarchy: cross-model evaluation (GPT-4o, N=8) produces strong but symmetric bidirectional contagion (mean gamma_{T->V}=1.176, gamma_{V->T}=1.089, Delta=-0.088, p=0.575, Cohen's d=0.29); high round counts (DashScope, 50 rounds) cause collapse to single-strategy dominance (70% zero contagion); and self-evaluation provides near-complete immunity – 97% of runs (N=30, DeepSeek-chat) yield exactly zero contagion (mean gamma=0.033, 95% CI [-0.031, 0.010], p=0.642, d=0.07). No evaluator condition shows statistically significant directional asymmetry. We introduce the contagion matrix indexed by evaluator identity, release the MM-EPC experimental framework, and identify cross-model evaluator architecture as the primary risk factor for preference contagion.

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21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Reclaim Evaluation: A Lossy Memory Is Worse Than an Empty One

Authors:
Alex Kwon↗

A language model's memory can be worse than having no memory at all. Give a model a memory that kept a wrong conclusion but dropped the work behind it, and it emits that stale value as a confident answer; give the same model an empty memory and it abstains. Across seven models this direction never reverses, a clean kill condition that none breaks. We call this brittle memory: behavioral, not the near-immediate information bound beneath it; only its magnitude is disposition- and task-dependent, not its direction. We measure it with reclaim evaluation: compress a drifted interaction at a fixed budget, then test whether a correction recovers the known answer, scored against ground truth with no judge. Correctability is bottlenecked by whether the answer-determining source survives, not by capability. A one-line source-first policy (keep the recomputable source, drop the re-derivable conclusion) restores correctability at equal budget where that source is compact and identifiable; a length-matched control rules out added text as the cause. The hand-built oracle reaches 1.00; a one-prompt deployable version reclaims 0.49-0.88. The stake compounds: chained through a memory loop, a single dropped-source error corrupts a growing span of downstream steps and stays uncorrectable, while source-first holds to a bounded budget horizon. The wall and fix replicate across three deployed memory systems and on real dialogue (MultiWOZ), and past the budget where the source no longer fits, the fix fails silently unless the note records completeness. This is a controlled study of a mechanism, not a benchmark: judge-free exact scoring, matched-budget controls, and validators built to come out false. We release the harness, conditions, and validators.

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22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Phase-space microscopes for quantum gases: Imaging conjugate variables and momentum-weighted densities

Authors:
N. R. Cooper↗Y. Yang↗C. Weitenberg↗

arXiv:2603.29568v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Quantum gas microscopes offer unprecedented insights into quantum many-body states of cold atomic gases. Here we introduce concrete protocols for extending quantum gas microscopes to measure in phase space, by mapping momentum onto auxiliary degrees of freedom and using positive operator-valued measures. We distinguish between two distinct operational modes. In the Husimi-Q phase space microscope, position and momentum are jointly measured; in this mode the fundamental quantum noise is distributed between position and momentum. Conversely, the averaged-mode phase space microscope extracts the spatial dependence of averages of the momentum density (and its moments); these averages can be retrieved with arbitrary spatial resolution. We illustrate the utility of these techniques in diverse physical settings.

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23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Cluster-Aware Dual-Level Test Specification Generation for Large-Scale Automotive Software Requirements

Authors:
Hazem Ayman↗Menna Sedik↗Kareem Mostafa↗Mahmoud Soliman↗Samer Saber↗Ibrahim Habib↗

arXiv:2606.17197v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generating test specifications that satisfy Automotive SPICE SWE.6 requirements becomes increasingly challenging and time-consuming as projects scale to thousands of requirements. Because this manual process often consumes weeks of engineering effort, automation becomes a critical necessity. However, standard Large Language Model (LLM) approaches struggle at scale: processing requirements individually discards vital inter-requirement dependencies, while feeding entire corpora at once exceeds context-window limits, leading to incomplete integration coverage and redundant test cases. This paper presents a novel "Cluster-then-Summarize" pipeline that addresses these limitations through three-stages. Requirements are embedded using sentence transformers and grouped using UMAP dimensionality reduction followed by HDBSCAN density-based clustering. This grouping utilizes an automatic minimum cluster size selection driven by a quality criterion combining normalized Silhouette and Calinski-Harabasz scores. A multi-level map-reduce summarization algorithm then distills each cluster into concise, domain-conformant descriptions while preserving quantitative thresholds and safety integrity levels. The pipeline exploits the derived cluster topology to generate test specifications at two levels: individual requirement verification and cluster-level integration tests that verify cross-requirement feature behavior. A nearby-cluster context mechanism provides bounded cross-feature awareness during each LLM call, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation grounds all outputs in ISO 26262 and ASPICE standards. Evaluation on automotive requirement datasets of varying scale demonstrates that the cluster-aware approach improves integration test coverage and maintains summarization fidelity compared to baseline methods while scaling efficiently to thousands of requirements.

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24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

FedRot-LoRA: Mitigating Rotational Misalignment in Federated LoRA

Authors:
Haoran Zhang↗Dongjun Kim↗Seohyeon Cha↗Haris Vikalo↗

arXiv:2602.23638v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated LoRA provides a communication-efficient mechanism for fine-tuning large language models on decentralized data. In practice, however, a discrepancy between the factor-wise averaging used to preserve low rank and the mathematically correct aggregation of local updates can cause significant aggregation error and unstable training. We argue that a major source of this problem is rotational misalignment, arising from the rotational invariance of low-rank factorizations – semantically equivalent updates can be represented in different latent subspaces across clients since $(B_i R_i)(R_i^\top A_i) = B_i A_i$. When such misaligned factors are averaged directly, they interfere destructively and degrade the global update. To address this issue, we propose FedRot-LoRA, a federated LoRA framework that aligns client updates via orthogonal transformations prior to aggregation. This alignment preserves the semantic update while reducing cross-client subspace mismatch, without increasing communication cost or restricting model expressivity. We provide a convergence analysis that examines the aggregation error induced by factor-wise averaging and shows how rotational alignment yields a tighter upper bound on this error. Extensive experiments on natural language understanding and generative tasks demonstrate that FedRot-LoRA consistently outperforms existing federated LoRA baselines across a range of heterogeneity levels and LoRA ranks.

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25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Consistency of sleep timing and duration are associated with more physical activity and favorable heart rate metrics in a naturalistic cohort

Authors:
Komilian↗Lee↗Goparaju↗Bianchi↗M. T↗

Background: Regularity of sleep patterns over time has increasingly gained traction as an important axis of sleep health. Since sleep habits are under some degree of behavioral control, understanding such patterns in naturalistic settings is particularly important. We quantified sleep variability and tested the hypothesis that regularity correlates with physical activity, resting heart rate (rHR), and heart rate variability (HRV). Methods: We analyzed real-world digital health data from over 81,000 participants (over 18 million nights) who provided informed consent to participate in the Apple Heart and Movement Study and elected to contribute sleep, activity, and heart rate data to the study. Variability was quantified using the standard deviation (SD) computed from total sleep time (TST), sleep start time (S-start), end time (S-end), and midpoint time (MP), as well as the Sleep Regularity Index (SRI). Results: The SD-based variability metrics correlated with one another (R values 0.74-0.92), and with the SRI metric (R values 0.62-0.64). More consistent sleep, by any metric, was associated with more activity and better rHR and HRV. The most consistent tertile for TST variability had higher median TST (6.9 vs 5.9 hours), more daily exercise (32.8 vs 20.4 minutes), lower rHR (62.4 vs 65.6 beats per minute), and higher HRV (40.6 vs 37.3), all p

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