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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Quantum Metric Bound State of Light

Authors:
Jinchao Zhao↗Rongning Liu↗Xue-Yang Song↗K. T. Law↗

arXiv:2606.22479v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The spatial confinement of defect-induced bound states is conventionally governed by the effective mass in dispersive bands. More recently, Compact Localized States (CLSs) arising from exact destructive interference have been utilized to achieve confinement in flat bands. However, CLSs rely on pristine lattice symmetries and fine-tuned defect profiles. The introduction of a generic local impurity inevitably breaks these strict phase-matching conditions, resulting in extensive bound states whose fundamental length scale has remained an open question. Here, we establish a third regime of confinement: the quantum metric bound state. We provide a rigorous mathematical proof demonstrating that in the absence of kinetic energy and CLS protection, the exponential decay length of these states is lower-bounded by the quantum metric of the unperturbed flat band. We demonstrate the tightness of this geometric limit by constructing a family of highly tunable flat-band generators, and we verify its universality across diverse realistic architectures. Ultimately, this classification establishes the independently measurable quantum metric as a predictive design principle for engineering confined modes in synthetic wave platforms.

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02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Ranking-optimized survival models can underperform fixed-horizon clinical prediction: a SUPPORT2 reanalysis of machine learning, attending-physician judgment, and the original SUPPORT model at 60- and 180-day mortality

Authors:
Truong↗Q. H↗Hoang↗D. C↗Luu↗D. T↗

Machine-learning survival models are increasingly proposed for intensive-care mortality prediction and are almost always selected and reported using the concordance index, a ranking metric averaged over follow-up. Yet most bedside decisions hinge on a probability at a specific time, such as 60- or 180-day mortality. We asked whether ranking-optimized models remain competitive at fixed clinical horizons against two reference points clinicians actually rely on: unaided attending-physician judgment and the original 1995 SUPPORT logistic model. Reanalyzing the SUPPORT2 cohort (9,105 critically ill adults from five United States centers, 1989-1994) under a stratified 70/15/15 split, we compared a gradient-boosted survival model, the physician's recorded prognosis, and the 1995 model at 60 and 180 days, alongside several alternative learners. The survival model achieved competitive ranking concordance (0.705) yet underperformed both comparators at fixed horizons: at 60 days its area under the ROC curve was 0.750, against 0.808 for physicians on the matched sample and 0.827 for the 1995 model, a gap that held across eight independent data splits and remained statistically reliable after multiplicity correction. The shortfall was not miscalibration, since post-hoc recalibration left discrimination unchanged, nor limited capacity, since neural networks, a deep ranking model, and two timepoint-aware discrete-time models also failed to close it; replacing the ranking objective with timepoint-matched binary training recovered roughly half the gap, pointing to an objective-horizon mismatch. Discrimination was equitable across sex, race, and age, but leave-one-disease-out validation exposed severe failure for disease groups absent from training, and the physician advantage was conditional on a physician electing to provide an estimate. We recommend reporting timepoint-specific discrimination alongside concordance, timepoint-matched training when fixed-horizon predictions drive care, leave-one-subgroup validation, and distribution-free prediction intervals to support selective deployment.

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03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

VFACamou: View-Fused Adversarial Camouflage for Environment-Adaptive Physical Evasion

Authors:
Shihui Yan↗Hu Liu↗Junyu Shi↗Zihui Zhu↗Ziqi Zhou↗Yufei Song↗Youming Geng↗Minghui Li↗Shengshan Hu↗

Adversarial camouflage in the physical world remains highly challenging, particularly under UAV reconnaissance where targets undergo continuous geometric changes and extreme illumination variations. Existing methods either optimize 2D digital perturbations that fail to generalize to dynamic viewpoints or produce visually unnatural textures that cannot be deployed in real scenarios. Therefore, we propose an end-to-end framework for adversarial camouflage generation that automatically produces wearable adversarial patterns and maintains stable attack performance in real physical environments with changing viewpoints, poses, and lighting conditions. Our method integrates UV-volume rendering with a diffusion-based texture generator, enabling consistent appearance under varying scales, poses, and lighting conditions. To ensure environmental realism, we propose an illumination color consistency estimator that extracts dominant background attributes and guides a natural texture loss to align the generated UV texture with the surrounding environment. A multi-scale dynamic training strategy further enhances robustness against viewpoint shifts and body deformation. Extensive experiments across multiple mainstream detectors demonstrate that our method achieves strong and stable physical attack performance while maintaining high perceptual naturalness, reducing human detection rates without introducing unnatural artifacts.

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04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Attosecond Path Qubits in High-Harmonic Generation: Classical Dephasing and Trace-Out Decoherence

Authors:
A. Marchisio↗C. Granados↗M. F. Ciappina↗O. Cohen↗

arXiv:2606.20372v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: High-harmonic generation (HHG) is governed by interference between electron trajectories. We propose that the dominant short and long trajectories define an experimentally addressable two-level subsystem: an attosecond path qubit (APQ). We formulate a trajectory-resolved density matrix to identify two distinct coherence-loss mechanisms: classical dephasing from ensemble averaging and quantum decoherence arising from the trace-out of unobserved degrees of freedom. By investigating shot-to-shot fluctuations and unresolved transverse momentum, we demonstrate that while dephasing suppresses coherence through averaging, the ``trace-out'' channel produces mixed states even for fixed driving parameters. We explore how these mechanisms modify APQ purity and show that mode selection and conditioning provide operational routes to isolate them. These results establish a reduced-state framework for diagnosing coherence loss in HHG and for engineering trajectory-based quantum states in attosecond interferometry.

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05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

THE SILENT STRUGGLE: EXPLORING THE EFFECTS OF COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWNS IN HEALTHCARE DELIVERY IN THE NORTHERN REGION OF GHANA

Authors:
Salifu↗Abdulai↗Ibrahim↗

Abstract Effective health communication is central to patient-centred care and improved health outcomes, particularly in culturally diverse healthcare settings. In clinical and assistive practice, communication breakdowns may negatively affect diagnosis, treatment adherence, and preventive care. A qualitative phenomenological design was employed, utilizing Semi-Structured interviews with purposively sampled twenty patients and healthcare professionals from Tamale Teaching Hospital, Yendi Hospital, and Bimbilla Hospital. The researchers adopted Content Analysis as the tool of analysis for the data. The findings of this study revealed that language discrepancies Poor attitudes of healthcare providers hinderer patient openness and the quality treatment. Logistical issues, such as inadequate medicines and medical supplies, resulted in delayed treatment and additional financial burden on patients and their relatives. Cultural and social factors discourage patients from discussing certain health conditions with healthcare providers, leading to delayed treatment. These hurdles adversely impact on treatment and assistive practice, specifically in culturally diverse environment and preventive care. The study recommends training and capacity-building programs for healthcare providers in cultural competence, fostering effective and ethical health communication between patients and healthcare providers, and recruiting professional interpreters to bridge the linguistics gap between patients and providers. Abstract Effective health communication is central to patient-centered care and improved health outcomes, particularly in culturally diverse healthcare settings. In clinical and assistive practice, communication breakdowns may negatively affect diagnosis, treatment adherence, and preventive care. A qualitative phenomenological design was employed, utilizing semi-structured interviews with twenty purposively sampled patients and healthcare professionals from Tamale Teaching Hospital, Yendi Hospital, and Bimbilla Hospital. The researchers adopted content analysis as the tool of analysis for the data. The findings of this study revealed that language discrepancies Poor attitudes of healthcare providers hinder patient openness and quality treatment. Logistical issues, such as inadequate medicines and medical supplies, resulted in delayed treatment and additional financial burden on patients and their relatives. Cultural and social factors discourage patients from discussing certain health conditions with healthcare providers, leading to delayed treatment. These hurdles adversely impact treatment and assistive practice, specifically in culturally diverse environments and preventive care. The study recommends training and capacity-building programs for healthcare providers in cultural competence, fostering effective and ethical health communication between patients and healthcare providers, and recruiting professional interpreters to bridge the linguistics gap between patients and providers.

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

FDIO: Frequency Decomposed Inertial Odometry

Authors:
Shanshan Zhang↗Liqin Wu↗Wenying Cao↗Lingxiang Zheng↗Yu Yang↗

Pedestrian inertial odometry (PIO) estimates autonomous pedestrian motion using only acceleration and angular velocity measurements collected by an inertial measurement unit (IMU), making it highly valuable for consumer level localization applications. However, under a dual device acquisition setting, IMU signals collected by a freely carried mobile device are inherently composite signals in which the global motion of the human torso is coupled with perturbations induced by local limb motion. This coupling makes accurate human motion modeling more challenging. To address this issue, this paper proposes frequency decomposed inertial odometry (FDIO). The proposed method first decomposes input IMU signals into low frequency and high frequency components using a Laplacian pyramid. It then adopts a Mamba module to model long range motion information from the low frequency component and uses a multi scale convolution module to extract fine grained local dynamic features from the high frequency component. Experiments on five public PIO datasets show that FDIO achieves an average absolute trajectory error of 3.221~m and an average relative trajectory error of 2.550~m, reducing the errors by 33.3\% and 16.7\% compared with the RoNIN ResNet baseline, respectively. These results validate the effectiveness of the proposed frequency decomposition strategy. To the best of our knowledge, this work is among the first efforts to introduce Mamba and a frequency decomposition architecture into inertial odometry.

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07.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-13

Contribution of nosocomial transmission to <i>Klebsiella pneumoniae</i> neonatal sepsis in Africa and South Asia: An observational study of infection clusters inferred from pathogen genomics and temporal data

Authors:
Erkison Ewomazino Odih↗

by Erkison Ewomazino Odih, Jabir A. Abdulahi, Anne V. Amulele, Matthew Bates, Eva Heinz, Weiming Hu, Kajal Jain, Rindidzani Magobo, Courtney P. Olwagen, John M. Tembo, Tolbert Sonda, Jonathan Strysko, Caroline C. Tigoi, Kyle Bittinger, Jennifer Cornick, Ebenezer Foster-Nyarko, Wilson Gumbi, Steven M. Jones, Chileshe L. Musyani, Carolyn M. McGann, Ahmed M. Moustafa, Patrick Musicha, James C. L. Mwansa, Moreka L. Ndumba, Thomas D. Stanton, Donwilliams O. Omuoyo, Oliver Pearse, Laura T. Phillips, Paul J. Planet, Charlene M. C. Rodrigues, Fatou Secka, Kirsty Sands, Erin Theiller, Allan M. Zuza, Sulagna Basu, Grace J. Chan, Kenneth C. Iregbu, Jean-Baptiste Mazarati, Semaria Solomon Alemayehu, Timothy R. Walsh, Rabaab Zahra, Angela Dramowski, Sombo Fwoloshi, Appiah-Korang Labi, Lola Madrid, Noah Obeng-Nkrumah, David Ojok, Boaz D. Wadugu, Andrew C. Whitelaw, Anudita Bhargava, Atul Jindal, Ramesh K. Agarwal, Alexander M. Aiken, James A. Berkley, Susan E. Coffin, Nicholas A. Feasey, Nelesh P. Govender, Davidson H. Hamer, Shabir A. Madhi, Mari Jeeva Sankar, Kelly L. Wyres, Kathryn E. Holt Background Klebsiella pneumoniae is the leading cause of sepsis among neonates in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Africa and Asia, contributing substantially to the overall burden of antimicrobial-resistant infections and mortality among neonates globally. Pathogen sequencing has been used to investigate case clusters and confirm nosocomial transmission in a small number of neonatal units. Here we utilise pathogen sequence data to estimate the fraction of K. pneumoniae neonatal sepsis attributable to nosocomial transmission in African and South Asian countries. Methods and findings We estimated the proportion of invasive K. pneumoniae disease involved in nosocomial transmission clusters in a given neonatal unit, using single-linkage clustering based on pairwise temporal and genetic distances estimated from bacterial whole-genome sequences aggregated from 10 contributing studies. Analysing 1,523 K. pneumoniae isolates from 27 units in 13 countries in Africa and South Asia between 2013 and 2023, we inferred 156 nosocomial transmission clusters, ranging from 2 to 188 neonates each (83 of the clusters comprised ≥3 cases). Overall, we estimated that 1,035 neonatal infections (68.0%) were part of nosocomial transmission clusters. Excluding the first infection in each cluster as a potential index case, we estimate at least 879 (57.7%) infections were acquired via nosocomial transmission. Sensitivity analyses showed that results were robust to the choice of genetic distance estimation methods and thresholds used to define clusters, and cluster estimates were stable over temporal distance thresholds ranging from 2 to 8 weeks. Isolates were mostly extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL) producers (90.9%) and included 172 multi-locus sequence types (STs). Fourteen STs, including several globally recognised multidrug-resistant lineages, were associated with transmission clusters at multiple units, and these were collectively responsible for two-thirds of all infections. Carriage of carbapenemase genes (adjusted odds ratio, aOR = 2.08 [95% confidence interval, CI: 1.04, 4.14]; p = 0.04) and ESBL genes (aOR = 2.48 [95% CI: 1.26, 4.90]; p = 0.006) were significantly positively associated with transmission in a logistic regression model with site as a covariate. Limitations of this study include the lack of sufficient clinical data to allow high-resolution investigation of transmission dynamics and lack of facility-level data to investigate contributors to the observed differences in transmission burden across sites. Conclusions Nosocomial transmission contributes to a substantial proportion of K. pneumoniae sepsis in neonatal care units in Africa and South Asia. Reducing transmission within these settings through improved infection prevention and control and other measures could substantially reduce the neonatal sepsis burden. A high burden of transmission clusters is associated with the same drug-resistant lineages that are recognised as high-risk clones associated with hospital outbreaks in high-income countries, indicating global connectivity of the antimicrobial-resistant pathogen population.

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08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Quantum turbulence in the many-body regime

Authors:
Sayak Bhattacharjee↗Mahendra K. Verma↗Alexander V. Balatsky↗Srinivas Raghu↗

arXiv:2606.23822v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We discuss phenomenology associated with turbulent hydrodynamics in quantum fluids from a condensed-matter perspective. We begin with weakly-interacting superfluids, often modeled by a mean-field theory governed by the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. Considering the effect of quantum fluctuations beyond the mean-field approximation, we propose a study of many-body quantum effects in turbulent hydrodynamics, especially near zero temperature. We motivate examples of quantum many-body systems where such effects may be uncovered. These include bosons confined in a periodic potential in low spatial dimensions (one and two), and the associated quantum critical point of the superfluid-insulator transition, realized in present-day ultracold-atom and quantum computing platforms. We conclude by listing a set of (open) questions that may be answered using modern quantum many-body techniques. This article is part of the theme issue 'Frontiers of turbulence and statistical physics'.

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09.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-02

Assessing the importance of sex and disease-specific anatomy in electrophysiology and mechanical simulations with a newly developed public virtual cohort of four-chamber heart models

Authors:
José Alonso Solís-Lemus↗

by José Alonso Solís-Lemus, Rosie K. Barrows, Cristobal Rodero, Marina Strocchi, Natalie Montarello, Nishant Lahoti, Cesare Corrado, Abdul Qayyum, Shahrokh Rahmani, Caroline Roney, Gernot Plank, Christoph Augustin, Hao Xu, Alistair Young, Pras Pathmanathan, Ronak Rajani, Steven A. Niederer This work presents a study on how differences in cardiac anatomy attributed to sex and disease can influence cardiac electrophysiology and mechanics using a virtual cohort of four-chamber heart models. Patient anatomy varies across sex and disease. However, capturing this variation in in-silico studies remains poorly accounted for, with studies often using either single representative cases or imbalanced virtual cohorts. Whole-heart electromechanics models incorporate the patient’s anatomy, electrophysiology and mechanics across different scales, from molecular, tissue and whole-heart and circulatory system levels. However, cardiac models are typically built from one or a small number of anatomies, with sex rarely reported and the effects of anatomical variability, which include those due to sex or disease, largely unexplored. This limits clinical translation and reduces regulatory credibility. We developed fifty patient-specific anatomical models of 25 male and 25 female hearts in heart failure and control cases. We ran benchmark passive inflation and paced activation simulations with consistent parameters and boundary conditions across cases to isolate the impact of anatomical variations with sex and disease. Heart failure models exhibited increased chamber volumes, larger volume changes during inflation, and delayed activation times relative to controls. These trends were consistent across sexes, although right ventricular activation showed a significant sex-based difference. Variations in anatomy with sex and disease have a significant impact on cardiac simulations, which support the inclusion of multiple heart anatomical models in in-silico trials. The resulting virtual cohort captures key anatomical variability and is publicly available, along with the underlying code (see Data Availability statement).

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10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

ExTra: Exploratory Trajectory Optimization for Language Model Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Wenyang Hu↗Junxiang Jia↗Zhen Shu↗Daniel Dahlmeier↗See-Kiong Ng↗Bryan Kian Hsiang Low↗

arXiv:2606.24994v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) for language-model reasoning can fail at both extremes of task difficulty: easy prompts often produce all-correct, low-diversity rollout groups with little gradient signal, while hard prompts can produce all-incorrect groups with no positive reward. We introduce ExTra (Exploratory Trajectory Optimization), a GRPO-compatible framework that extracts exploration signals from the model's own rollouts. ExTra combines two mechanisms: (i) a novelty reward that adds embedding-based diversity bonuses after GRPO normalization, rewarding diverse correct solutions; and (ii) entropy-guided prefix regeneration, which scores partial trajectories using entropy signals and continues exploration from promising intermediate steps. Across six mathematical reasoning benchmarks, ExTra improves Qwen3-1.7B over GRPO by about +5 points on pass@1 and +7 points on pass@16, showing that trajectory-level exploration signals can improve both single-sample accuracy and inference-time coverage.

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11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

OmniPath: A Multi-Modal Agentic Framework for Auditing Wheelchair Accessibility

Authors:
ASM Mobarak Hossain↗Nadim Mahmud↗Vaskar Raychoudhury↗Md Osman Gani↗

arXiv:2606.24129v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For a wheelchair user, a standard blue line on a map is often a broken promise. While platforms like OpenStreetMap (OSM) successfully capture where a path is, they frequently fail to convey how it physically feels to travel on it. This information barrier is problematic for wheelchair users. To solve this issue, we present OmniPath, a system that moves from passive mapping to proactive environmental auditing. Our framework fuses the network topology of OSM with the submeter precision of high-density aerial LiDAR (USGS 3DEP) to create a high-fidelity 3D model of the pedestrian environment. Rather than simply routing a user, our agent virtually traverses the network, analyzing the surface in 0.5 meter increments. It rigorously quantifies physical friction points specifically running slope, cross slope, and vertical discontinuities against ADA compliance standards, calculating a weighted severity score to categorize hazards from ``Mild'' to ``Critical.'' To ensure real world reliability, we validated the system against 200 physical ground truth field surveys across the National Mall using stratified random sampling. The framework demonstrated strong diagnostic reliability for high-severity hazards, achieving F1-scores of 0.60 for Severe and 0.58 for critical categories. By automating this micro-scale inspection, OmniPath identifies the ``invisible'' barriers that standard maps miss, effectively transforming a static dataset into accessibility data source that anticipates accessibility challenges before the user ever leaves home.

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

A Survey on Agentic Security: Applications, Threats and Defenses

Authors:
Asif Shahriar↗Md Nafiu Rahman↗Sadif Ahmed↗Farig Sadeque↗Md Rizwan Parvez↗

LLM-based agents are now used throughout cybersecurity. While these agents facilitate powerful and autonomous security applications, their autonomy opens up new attack surfaces, and the security community is actively building defenses to secure them. Yet the literature on this subject has grown quickly and unevenly. Existing surveys treat applications, threats, and defenses in isolation, leaving no unified account of how an agent's capabilities, vulnerabilities, and countermeasures interconnect. In this work we present the first holistic survey of the agentic security landscape, structuring the field around the fundamental pillars of Applications, Threats and Defenses. We provide a comprehensive taxonomy of over 260 papers, explaining how agents are used in downstream cybersecurity applications, inherent threats to agentic systems, and countermeasures designed to protect them. In addition, we provide detailed pillar-specific and cross-cutting analyses that show the security-lifecycle coverage of agentic applications, comparison between red-teaming and blue-teaming agents, and the adversarial use of red-teaming applications. On the threat side, we analyze the entry points and agent-loop stages that attacks target, their specificity to the agentic setting, and the threat models they assume. On the defense side, we analyze the prevailing defense strategies, their cost and security trade-offs, and where in the agent lifecycle they are deployed. We further map which defenses cover which attack classes and chart trends in agent architecture, backbone model usage, data modality coverage, and the growth of attack and defense research over time. Taken together, these findings indicate that agentic systems are structurally fragile by default and that securing them will require defenses that span the full agent lifecycle rather than single-layer fixes.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Reload-Mamba: Hierarchical Anti-Dilution State-Space Modeling for Multi-Class Semantic Segmentation

Authors:
Sheng-Wei Chan↗Hsin-Jui Pan↗Jen-Shiun Chiang↗

Mamba-based state space models offer linear-time long-range modeling for high-resolution dense prediction, but sequential state-space propagation can attenuate boundary-sensitive and detail-sensitive responses that are critical in multi-class semantic segmentation. We propose Reload-Mamba, a semantic segmentation framework that addresses this propagation-induced response dilution through three segmentation-specific designs: (i) a boundary-supervised local detail prior that is explicitly trained with ground-truth boundary masks to identify regions requiring response restoration; (ii) a class-uncertainty-aware Reload Gate that incorporates per-pixel class entropy from a pre-reload auxiliary head as an additional gating signal, a formulation that is informative only under multi-class dense prediction; and (iii) a hierarchical multi-level Reload mechanism that applies anti-dilution refinement at three decoder levels and fuses the restored representations top-down. Built upon a ConvNeXt-Tiny encoder with a multi-scale decoder and four-directional Mamba scanning with pixel-wise directional attention, Reload-Mamba achieves 47.9% single-scale (48.9% multi-scale) mIoU on ADE20K and 83.2% single-scale mIoU on Cityscapes. With ResNet-101 + COCO pre-training under the standard DeepLab-style protocol, Reload-Mamba reaches 87.8% mIoU on PASCAL VOC 2012 val. Controlled ablations show that each of the three segmentation-specific designs contributes beyond a direct port of the prior anti-dilution architecture proposed for binarization, cumulatively improving over the direct-port baseline by +2.2 mIoU on ADE20K.

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

Right or Wrong, Models Comply: Directional Blindness in LLM Moral Judgment

Authors:
Jihye Kim↗Jeffrey Flanigan↗

As language models take integrated roles across many domains, the response of LLMs to user pushback becomes a critical alignment property. Yet many existing evaluations treat compliance as unidirectional, measuring whether models resist pressure but not whether they resist it selectively. We introduce Compliance Asymmetry (A = BCR/HCR), a bidirectional diagnostic that compares beneficial output change under helpful nudges with harmful change under misleading nudges. Across 9 models and 972,000 nudge-condition responses, we find that this selectivity differs in factual and moral judgments: models follow helpful nudges more than harmful ones on factual questions (A = 1.58), but follow both directions at nearly identical rates on moral questions (A = 1.04). This phenomenon persists across model families, capability levels, and nudging types. Interestingly, we also find that chain-of-thought prompting amplifies helpful and harmful compliance together, while identity-based prompting suppresses both by nearly identical margins. These results identify direction-blind moral compliance as a distinct failure mode in current LLMs and suggest that alignment should target directionally calibrated updating rather than lower compliance alone.

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15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Vacuum photon emission and mean electromagnetic field in pair-creating external backgrounds

Authors:
I. A. Aleksandrov↗E. V. Perelygin↗D. V. Chubukov↗

arXiv:2606.12547v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop a perturbative description of vacuum radiative processes in quantum electrodynamics with a prescribed external electromagnetic background capable of producing electron-positron pairs. Since the initial vacuum is then unstable and the in- and out-vacua are inequivalent, radiative observables require a real-time formulation beyond the ordinary in-out approach of vacuum-stable QED. Using the Keldysh-Schwinger-Fradkin nonequilibrium technique, we derive the mean number density of emitted photons through the second nonvanishing order in the fine-structure constant. The leading term, of order $\alpha$, reproduces the known vertex and tadpole mechanisms, while the complete order-$\alpha^2$ correction contains interference, loop, and induced-current contributions. We also give an independent derivation based on the spectral decomposition of the identity operator in the in-Fock space, where the photon number density is represented as a sum of squared transition amplitudes and vacuum-disconnected terms are canceled by the optical theorem generalized to an unstable vacuum. In addition, we compute the mean electromagnetic field through order $e^3$, including the electromagnetic dressing of the induced vacuum current, and verify it using the corresponding Schwinger-Dyson equations. The final formulas are expressed in terms of exact solutions and propagators of the Dirac equation in the external background and apply to general spacetime-dependent field configurations.

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16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Survival differences and artemisinin resistance in severe malaria among HIV coinfected patients: data from Mozambique

Authors:
Noormahomed↗E. V↗de Sousa↗I. M↗McArthur↗Chambal↗Akrami↗Cowell↗Buene↗T. P↗Schooley↗Ajay↗…

Abstract Background Malaria remains a significant cause of morbidity and mortality, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, where rates of HIV coinfection are high. This study aimed to determine whether Plasmodium falciparum malaria treatment outcomes and rates of antimalarial resistance markers differ according to HIV serostatus in Mozambique. Methodology We conducted an observational study of non-pregnant adults, with and without HIV coinfection, admitted to the Hospital Central de Maputo for treatment of severe malaria. Plasmodium falciparum DNA was extracted from whole blood and sequenced to identify single-nucleotide polymorphisms. Statistical analyses to compare clinical outcomes and rates of nonsynonymous mutations in genes associated with drug resistance were performed in R version 4.2. Results We recruited 149 study participants aged between 18-62 years, 72 (48.3%) were female, and 59 (39.6%) were infected with HIV. Comparing clinical outcomes, we found a significant difference in anemia (hemoglobin

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17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Scaling Laws for Agent Harnesses via Effective Feedback Compute

Authors:
Xuanliang Zhang↗Dingzirui Wang↗Keyan Xu↗Qingfu Zhu↗Wanxiang Che↗

Agent harnesses shape language-model performance by controlling tool use, feedback, verification, memory, and repair. Yet raw test-time expenditure, such as tokens, tool calls, wall time, or cost, cannot distinguish useful feedback from redundant or unstable interaction. We introduce Effective Feedback Compute (EFC), a trace-level scaling coordinate for informative, valid, non-redundant, and retained feedback. We further define Estimated-EFC, NRS-EFC, harness efficiency $\eta$, and task-demand normalization for realistic traces and heterogeneous tasks. Across synthetic, real, held-out, and prospective evaluations, EFC-based coordinates outperform raw-compute baselines and SAS. Oracle-EFC/$D_{\mathrm{task}}$ reaches $R^2=0.99$ in controlled scaling, and NRS-EFC/$D_{\mathrm{task}}$ reaches $R^2=0.93$ on real traces where raw compute has near-zero or negative fit. Finally, \ours uses EFC as a companion control layer for existing harnesses, improving mean pass rate from $61.2\%$ to $68.2\%$ while reducing mean raw cost from $213.8$ to $85.1$ under matched settings. These results suggest that harness scaling depends on durable, task-sufficient feedback rather than raw computation alone.

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19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

On the structure of the sandpile identity element on Sierpinski gasket graphs

Authors:
Robin Kaiser↗Ecaterina Sava-Huss↗Julia \"Uberbacher↗

arXiv:2603.12006v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We consider the identity of the abelian sandpile group of finite approximation graphs of the Sierpinski gasket, and we show that the second-order term in the scaling limit converges to the path distance to the nearest corner on the Sierpinski gasket. The proof relies on a decomposition of the identity of the sandpile group into the sum of a constant function and the Laplacian of the graph distance on the approximating graphs.

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21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Apparent Psychological Profiles of Large Language Models are Largely a Measurement Artifact

Authors:
Jelena Meyer↗David Garcia↗Dirk U. Wulff↗

Psychological instruments designed for humans are increasingly used to assign large language models (LLMs) stable psychological profiles that affect their usability, safety assessment, and use as proxies for human participants in research. Using a formal psychometric framework, we show that these profiles are largely a measurement artifact. Administering a battery of personality and risk-preference instruments spanning self-reports and behavioral tasks to 56 instruction-tuned LLMs alongside large human reference samples, we report four findings. First, differences between models are driven not by the traits an instrument targets but by a directional response bias, a tendency to respond toward one end of the scale, or one labeled option, regardless of item content; a variance decomposition attributes 81-90% of between-model variation to this bias, against 9-16% in humans. Second, the bias declines with model capability but is not eliminated by it. Third, because bias rather than trait drives responding, an instrument's apparent reliability is almost entirely predicted by its response orthogonality, a term we coin for the proportion of items for which trait and bias point in opposite directions. Fourth, the profile a model appears to have shifts with the items used and can be manufactured through item selection. These results demonstrate that the apparent psychological profiles of LLMs are artifacts of the instrument used to measure them, not properties of the models themselves. As instruments borrowed from human psychology are rarely fully orthogonal and may inherently lack validity for LLMs, we call for dedicated assessments centered on response orthogonality.

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22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Multi-entropy in heavy local quenches

Authors:
Kosei Fujiki↗Kenya Tasuki↗

arXiv:2606.12526v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the time evolution of tripartite entanglement in heavy local quenches in two-dimensional holographic conformal field theories. Our diagnostic is the genuine multi-entropy of adjacent intervals, computed from both bulk and boundary perspectives. A perturbative bulk analysis shows that the first-order small-mass perturbation around the vacuum geodesic network cancels identically at any time after the quench. In the fully back-reacted geometry, a vacuum-subtracted genuine multi-entropy arises from a mismatch between the winding selected by the trivalent geodesic network and the windings selected independently by the pairwise geodesics. In the sharp quench limit, the time dependence of genuine multi-entropy is kinematically fixed to logarithms of rational functions of time and is independent of the heavy operator dimension. The CFT calculation reproduces the same formula within the heavy-light vacuum block approximation, where the branch choice in the heavy-background uniformization map corresponds to the winding selection in the bulk. These results indicate that, in this setup, the genuine multi-entropy is controlled by global saddle selection, rather than by a local energy response or quasiparticle propagation.

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

To forget is to preserve: Machine Unlearning for 3D medical image segmentation

Authors:
Nitesh Kumar Singh↗Akhilesh Singh↗Arjun Arora↗

With new data privacy laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) [1] that allow individuals to ask that any of their personal information be erased from trained machine learning models, there has been a push to investigate the unlearning of data from models as a way to comply with these laws. In this regard, based on four mechanics, we consider several approximate unlearning strategies applied to the MRBrainS18 dataset [2]. We use a 3D ResNet-50 [3] as a backbone architecture for segmentation that has been pre-trained with the Med3D framework [4]. Considering the pre-trained model as a baseline, we evaluate respective retention accuracy on 2 types of subjects, i.e., retain and forget. We assess these approaches through their Dice similarity coefficient and mean absolute error (MAE) values using two separate training horizons 20 and 50 epochs. The results show that the Noisy Label strategy had the best overall trade-off with a decrease of 93% in the forget set while maintaining 84% accuracy for the retained set after 50 epochs. All other strategies showed extreme levels of forgetting at higher epoch numbers while also demonstrating catastrophic degradation of their retain set performance. The results of this study provide a strict baseline of performance metrics for unlearning on a subject-specific level and provide practitioners with clear criteria for selecting the proper strategies.

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24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

DuoBench: A Reproducible Benchmark for Bimanual Manipulation in Simulation and the Real World

Authors:
Tobias J\"ulg↗Seongjin Bien↗Simon Hilber↗Yannik Blei↗Pierre Krack↗Maximilian Li↗Sven Parusel↗Rudolf Lioutikov↗Florian Walter↗Wolfram Burgard↗

arXiv:2606.11901v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Bimanual robot systems substantially expand manipulation capabilities, but coordinating two arms introduces additional control complexity and failure modes that are not well captured by existing benchmarks. We introduce DuoBench, an extensible benchmarking framework for bimanual manipulation policies on the FR3 Duo platform. DuoBench comprises eleven tasks spanning four coordination categories, implemented in simulation and partially reproduced in the real world through reproducible task recipes with 3D-printable assets. In addition, we propose a stage-based evaluation scheme that supports fine-grained semantic failure analysis beyond binary success and provide human-teleoperated datasets for all benchmark tasks. We benchmark several dual-arm imitation-learning and vision-language-action policies in simulation and on real hardware. Our results show that current policies remain challenged by bimanual manipulation, particularly in early interaction stages, parallel arm execution, and transfer between simulation and real-world settings. DuoBench provides a reproducible testbed for diagnosing these failure modes and studying future methods for dual-arm policy learning. Code, datasets, and videos are available at https://duobench.github.io/

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25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

EMFusion: Uncertainty-Aware Conditional Diffusion Model for Multivariate Narrow-band Exposure Forecasting

Authors:
Zijiang Yan↗Yixiang Huang↗Jianhua Pei↗Hina Tabassum↗Luca Chiaraviglio↗

arXiv:2512.15067v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The rapid growth in wireless infrastructure has increased the need to accurately estimate and forecast electromagnetic field (EMF) levels to ensure ongoing compliance, assess potential health impacts, and support efficient network planning. While existing studies rely on univariate forecasting of wideband aggregate EMF data, multivariate narrow-band EMF forecasting is needed to capture the inter-operator and inter-frequency variations essential for proactive network planning. To this end, this paper introduces EMFusion, a conditional diffusion-based EMF forecasting framework that integrates diverse contextual factors, such as time of day, season, and holidays, while providing uncertainty-aware probabilistic forecasts. The proposed architecture features a residual U-Net backbone enhanced by a cross-attention mechanism that dynamically integrates external conditions to guide the generation process. Furthermore, EMFusion integrates an imputation-based sampling strategy that treats forecasting as a structural inpainting task, ensuring temporal coherence even with irregular measurements. Unlike standard point forecasters, EMFusion generates empirical probabilistic prediction intervals from the learned conditional distribution, providing uncertainty-aware probabilistic forecasting rather than simple point estimation. Numerical experiments conducted on the multivariate narrow-band EMF datasets demonstrate that EMFusion with the contextual information of working hours outperforms the baseline models with or without conditions. The proposed EMFusion outperforms the best baseline by 23.85% in continuous ranked probability score (CRPS) and 13.93% in normalized root mean square error.

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