Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10 DOI: HASH:816732fd23ded774c994ddac1db3024b

Cortical activity during narrative discourse production in individuals with post-stroke aphasia and controls measured via functional near-infrared spectroscopy

Authors:

Braun↗E. J↗Carpenter↗E. A↗Gao↗Yucel↗M. A↗Boas↗D. A↗Kiran↗

Introduction: Aphasia is an acquired language disorder with a significant negative functional impact. Much of the research on aphasia has focused on word-level language comprehension and production. Further evaluation of discourse-level tasks, both at behavioral and neural levels, will allow for an ecologically valid understanding of the functional implications of language impairment in this population. Method: This study evaluated bilateral frontal, temporal, and parietal cortical activity during computer-based narrative production in 14 young neurotypical individuals, 17 individuals with post-stroke aphasia, and 15 age-matched neurotypical participants using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Oxygenated hemoglobin (HbO) was measured during narrative production following short video clips and compared to HbO during counting aloud. In addition, behavioral measures quantifying in-task performance were correlated with averaged HbO values. Results: Young neurotypical individuals showed greater cortical activity in bilateral language regions for narrative production compared to counting aloud. In contrast, people with aphasia showed positive condition-related effects in the right frontal ROI and the age-matched group showed positive condition-related effects in the left frontal and right precentral ROIs. Each group showed different patterns in relationships between cortical activity and discourse performance measures. Conclusion: Overall, young participants showing more consistent condition-related effects for narrative discourse production than individuals with aphasia and age-matched controls. This study shows the potential for fNIRS to evaluate cortical activity for ecologically valid language tasks in individuals with post-stroke aphasia.

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02.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12284

Multipartite reference-frame-independent quantum cryptographic communication

Authors:

Donghwa Lee↗Kyujin Shin↗Hyang-Tag Lim↗Yosep Kim↗Yong-Su Kim↗

arXiv:2606.12284v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reference frame mismatch among communication parties introduces errors in quantum cryptographic protocols. As the number of participants increases, aligning reference frames becomes increasingly difficult, complicating multipartite quantum cryptographic implementations. Here, we theoretically and experimentally investigate multipartite reference-frame-independent (RFI) quantum cryptographic communication using Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states. We generalize the bipartite RFI security parameter $C$ to an $N$-party parameter $C_N$ and derive the asymptotic secret key rate expressed solely in terms of experimentally accessible quantities. We analyze the key rate under global and local depolarizing noise models and find that increasing the number of parties $N$ enhances robustness against global depolarizing noise while increasing vulnerability to local channel noise. We also present a proof-of-principle experimental demonstration of four-party RFI quantum cryptographic communication using four-photon GHZ states, confirming the reference-frame invariance of both the $C_4$ parameter and the secret key rate under various reference frame rotations.

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03.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16047

From Argument Components to Graphs: A Multi-Agent Debate with Confidence Gating for Argument Relations

Authors:

Jakub B\k{a}ba↗Jaros{\l}aw A. Chudziak↗

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly assessed and utilized in the field of Argument Mining (AM), thanks to their strong general reasoning capabilities. However, standard training-free models often miss sophisticated details, specifically in contexts where two parts of the text have to be analyzed together. Furthermore, self-correction mechanisms tend to reinforce initial hallucinations in reasoning. Overcoming these limitations typically requires expensive, domain-specific supervised fine-tuning. Recent work has shown that a multi-agent paradigm can address such weaknesses for the component classification task through dialectical refinement with a Proponent-Opponent-Judge architecture, setting a promising direction for training-free approaches in the field. In this paper, we extend and evaluate this framework on the Argument Relation Identification and Classification (ARIC) task, reformulating it as a debate over component pairs. Besides that, we introduce a confidence gating mechanism that enables debating only on the uncertain cases and accepting the initial prediction when confidence is high. On the UKP Argument Annotated Essays v2 corpus, we demonstrate that the selective debate achieves the highest Macro F1 among all training-free methods, while debate over all samples degrades performance below that of one of the baselines. All generative approaches also outperform fine-tuned RoBERTa models on Macro F1, suggesting that the under-representation of the Attack class was more damaging to supervised fine-tuning than to inference-only models. Additionally, our framework produces human-readable debate transcripts, offering interpretability absent from both single-agent and supervised classifiers.

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04.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2512.02318

COGNITION: From Evaluation to Defense against Multimodal LLM CAPTCHA Solvers

Authors:

Junyu Wang↗Changjia Zhu↗Yuanbo Zhou↗Lingyao Li↗Xu He↗Mingkui Wei↗Junjie Xiong↗

arXiv:2512.02318v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper studies how multimodal large language models (MLLMs) undermine the security guarantees of visual CAPTCHA. We identify the attack surface where an adversary can cheaply automate CAPTCHA solving using off-the-shelf models. We evaluate 7 representative MLLMs on 18 real-world CAPTCHA task types, measuring single-shot accuracy, success under limited retries, end-to-end latency, and per-solve cost. We further validate our findings through a supplemental external dataset and an adaptive-attacker setting with session memory, while also analyzing the impact of task-specific prompt engineering and few-shot demonstrations on solver effectiveness. We reveal that MLLMs can reliably solve recognition-oriented and low-interaction CAPTCHA tasks at human-like cost and latency, whereas tasks requiring fine-grained localization, multi-step spatial reasoning, or cross-frame consistency remain significantly harder for current models. By examining the reasoning traces of such MLLMs, we investigate the underlying mechanisms of why models succeed/fail on specific CAPTCHA puzzles and use these insights to derive defense-oriented guidelines for selecting and strengthening CAPTCHA tasks. To validate these principles, we present a proof-of-concept by hardening a vulnerable CAPTCHA type using our guidelines. We demonstrate that incorporating fine-grained localization and implicit counting reduces the success rate of state-of-the-art MLLMs from over 95\% to 0\%, confirming that structural changes can effectively mitigate the threat. We conclude by emphasizing the urgent need for CAPTCHA redesign as MLLM capabilities increasingly threaten existing defenses. Code Availability (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20406852).

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05.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15080

AdaMame: A Training Recipe for Adaptive Multilingual Reasoning

Authors:

Dayeon Ki↗Kevin Duh↗Marine Carpuat↗

While Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) show strong performance in English, they often fail to reason in the language of the query, a phenomenon known as language collapse. Existing RL-based fixes typically add a binary language fidelity reward to the accuracy objective, yet still incur trade-off in accuracy, mid-trace code-switching, and excessive token usage. In this work, we propose AdaMame, a two-stage training recipe for multilingual mathematical reasoning that addresses these limitations by adaptively aligning the reasoning language to the query language without compromising accuracy. The first SFT stage fine-tunes on naturally occurring reasoning traces across five languages to establish multilingual reasoning capability. In the subsequent RL stage, we introduce AdaMame-GRPO, an adaptation of Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) in which a query-conditioned alignment factor grows progressively during training, guiding the model to first explore diverse reasoning languages before exploiting reasoning in the query language. Evaluated across two benchmarks, two LRMs, and 12 languages, AdaMame-GRPO achieves Pareto-optimal performance across reasoning accuracy, language fidelity, and token efficiency over all baselines, with the strongest gains on out-of-domain, lower-resource languages.

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06.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2112.04573

Application of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Libraries: A Systematic Review

Authors:

Rajesh Kumar Das↗Mohammad Sharif Ul Islam↗

arXiv:2112.04573v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As the concept and implementation of cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning has become relevant, academics, researchers and information professionals involve research in this area. The objective of this systematic literature review is to provide a synthesis of empirical studies exploring application of artificial intelligence and machine learning in libraries. To achieve the objectives of the study, a systematic literature review was conducted based on the original guidelines proposed by Kitchenham et al. (2009). Data was collected from Web of Science, Scopus, LISA and LISTA databases. Following the rigorous/ established selection process, a total of thirty-two articles were finally selected, reviewed and analyzed to summarize on the application of AI and ML domain and techniques which are most often used in libraries. Findings show that the current state of the AI and ML research that is relevant with the LIS domain mainly focuses on theoretical works. However, some researchers also emphasized on implementation projects or case studies. This study will provide a panoramic view of AI and ML in libraries for researchers, practitioners and educators for furthering the more technology-oriented approaches, and anticipating future innovation pathways.

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07.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2602.03420

CoCoEmo: Composable and Controllable Human-Like Emotional TTS via Activation Steering

Authors:

Siyi Wang↗Shihong Tan↗Siyi Liu↗Hong Jia↗Gongping Huang↗James Bailey↗Ting Dang↗

arXiv:2602.03420v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Emotional expression in human speech is nuanced and compositional, often involving multiple, sometimes conflicting, affective cues that may diverge from linguistic content. In contrast, most expressive text-to-speech systems enforce a single utterance-level emotion, collapsing affective diversity and suppressing mixed or text-emotion-misaligned expression. While activation steering via latent direction vectors offers a promising solution, it remains unclear whether emotion representations are linearly steerable in TTS, where steering should be applied within hybrid TTS architectures, and how such complex emotion behaviors should be evaluated. This paper presents the first systematic analysis of activation steering for emotional control in hybrid TTS models, introducing a quantitative, controllable steering framework, and multi-rater evaluation protocols that enable composable mixed-emotion synthesis and reliable text-emotion mismatch synthesis. Our results demonstrate, for the first time, that emotional prosody and expressive variability are primarily synthesized by the TTS language module instead of the flow-matching module, and also provide a lightweight steering approach for generating natural, human-like emotional speech.

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08.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.04101

UltraEP: Unleash MoE Training and Inference on Rack-Scale Nodes with Near-Optimal Load Balancing

Authors:

Xinming Wei↗Chao Jin↗Tuo Dai↗Yinmin Zhong↗Shan Yu↗Chengxu Yang↗Bingyang Wu↗Zili Zhang↗Jing Mai↗Qianchao Zhu↗Zhouyang Li↗Yuliang Liu↗…

arXiv:2606.04101v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large-scale expert parallelism (EP) is becoming pivotal for training and serving frontier MoE models, but it also amplifies device-level expert load imbalance into compute stragglers, token all-to-all bottlenecks, and activation-memory spikes. Existing balancers redistribute experts periodically based on historical load, which becomes unreliable for production deployments with non-stationary load patterns. We present UltraEP, the first exact-load, real-time balancer for large-EP MoE training and serving prefill on rack-scale nodes (RSNs). Leveraging the extended scale-up connectivity among dozens of GPUs within RSNs, UltraEP rebalances every microbatch and layer on critical paths, which requires nontrivial co-design of plan solving and expert replication communication to minimize exposed overhead. To this end, UltraEP eagerly reacts to post-gating load with an efficient quota-driven planner, and executes the resulting irregular expert-state transfers with RSN-native persistent tile streaming and relay-based fan-out mitigation. We evaluate UltraEP in a multi-RSN deployment of up to 256 GPUs, using cutting-edge MoE models from 106B to 671B parameters. Averaged across training and serving, UltraEP achieves 94.3% of the force-balanced ideal throughput, delivering 1.49$\times$ improvement over no-balancing, while reducing the final inter-rank imbalance from 1.30$-$4.01 to 1.01$-$1.04.

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09.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14302

Retrospective Progress-Aware Self-Refinement for LLM Agent Training

Authors:

Xinbei Ma↗Congmin Zheng↗Jiyang Qiu↗Jiale Hong↗Yao Yao↗Xiangmou Qu↗Jiaxin Yin↗Xingyu Lou↗Jun Wang↗Weiwen Liu↗Weinan Zhang↗Zhuosheng Zhang↗…

LLM-based agents trained with reinforcement learning optimize step-wise action prediction but lack metacognitive awareness of task progress, inducing a gap that hinders long-horizon scaling. A pilot study reveals that online progress prompting hurts performance while retrospective demonstrations help, yet this capability cannot emerge from outcome-reward training alone. We present RePro, Retrospective Progress-Aware Training, a framework that trains agents to self-generate progress signals via a forward-then-reflect rollout paradigm: the agent executes actions online, then retrospectively reassesses its step-wise progress given the completed trajectory and known outcome. RePro initializes with a Retrospection Warmup that teaches reflection format from minimal external demonstrations, then further trains through RePro-PO with a composite reward that produces self-generated signals without continuous external supervision. Experiments on WebShop, ALFWorld, and Sokoban show that RePro enhances the Qwen family's performance, with up to $12\%$ absolute success rate gains.

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10.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2510.04212

Why Low-Precision Transformer Training Fails: An Analysis on Flash Attention

Authors:

Haiquan Qiu↗Quanming Yao↗

arXiv:2510.04212v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The pursuit of computational efficiency has driven the adoption of low-precision formats for training transformer models. However, this progress is often hindered by notorious training instabilities. This paper provides the first mechanistic explanation for a long-standing and unresolved failure case where training with flash attention in low-precision settings leads to catastrophic loss explosion. Our in-depth analysis reveals that the failure is not a random artifact but caused by two intertwined phenomena: the emergence of similar low-rank representations within the attention mechanism and the compounding effect of biased rounding errors inherent in low-precision arithmetic. We demonstrate how these factors create a vicious cycle of error accumulation that corrupts weight updates, ultimately derailing the training dynamics. To validate our findings, we introduce a minimal modification to the flash attention that mitigates the bias in rounding errors. This simple change stabilizes the training process, confirming our analysis and offering a practical solution to this persistent problem. Code is available at https://github.com/ucker/why-low-precision-training-fails.

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11.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2508.13438

Towards Quantum Limited Spatial Resolution of NV-Diamond Magnetometry

Authors:

Nico Deshler↗Declan Daly↗Ayan Majumder↗Kasturi Saha↗Saikat Guha↗

arXiv:2508.13438v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Optically addressable ensembles of solid-state defects, such as nitrogen vacancy (NV) centers, are a leading modality for imaging-based magnetometry, thermometry and strain sensing. However, monitoring the fluorescence of individual defects within a sub-diffraction ensemble remains an outstanding challenge that currently limits access to atomic-scale features and dynamics. For compact clusters of NVs, we formulate imaging-based atomic sensing as a low-dimensional multiparameter estimation task in which one seeks to localize each defect and quantify the field strength in its immediate vicinity. In this work, we employ optical spatial mode demultiplexing (SPADE) to enhance localization and brightness estimation accuracy at sub-diffraction scales. Specifically, we develop a two-stage sensing protocol that augments direct imaging by projecting the incoming optical field onto point spread function (PSF)-adapted, i.e., PAD spatial modes and Yuen-Kennedy-Lax (YKL) spatial modes enabling efficient extraction of emitter positions and brightnesses. The YKL-SPADE measurement employed for brightness estimation is shown to be quantum-optimal in the case of two emitters and establishes a new connection between quantum detection and estimation theories. We numerically evaluate the statistical performance of our protocol for sub-diffraction optically detected magnetic resonance (ODMR) and Rabi sensing experiments. Compared to conventional focal plane intensity measurements, our protocol improves emitter localization accuracy by 6$\times$ and brightness estimation accuracy by 2$\times$ for tightly confined ensembles, residing well below the diffraction limit.

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12.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2603.10184

Stabilizing Bandits using Regularization: Precise Regret and A Quantitative Central Limit Theorem

Authors:

Budhaditya Halder↗Ishan Sengupta↗Koustav Chowdhury↗Samya Praharaj↗Koulik Khamaru↗

arXiv:2603.10184v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Statistical inference with bandit data presents fundamental challenges owing to adaptive sampling, which violates the independence assumptions underlying classical asymptotic theory. Recent work has identified stability~\citep{laiwei82} as a sufficient condition for valid inference under adaptivity. This paper first provides a refined stability condition, stated in terms of the iterates of an online algorithm, and shows that a large class of regularized stochastic-mirror-descent-style algorithms satisfy it. This refined condition allows us to strengthen the asymptotic results of~\citet{laiwei82} in several ways. First, we derive a non-asymptotic Berry–Esseen bound for the empirical reward estimates under adaptive sampling. Second, we derive matching non-asymptotic upper and lower bounds on the regret of the proposed algorithm, yielding a precise characterization of its regret. Third, we show that these regularized algorithms preserve asymptotic normality and valid inference under a prescribed level of adversarial corruption. Finally, we show that regularization is necessary rather than incidental: Lai–Wei stability is incompatible with the optimal $O(\sqrt{T})$ regret rate – the rate attained by unregularized algorithms such as EXP3 – so that a controlled, polylogarithmic inflation in regret is the price of valid inference.

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13.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17553

SpatioTemporal Causal Network Diagnostics for Geographic Tipping Point Early Warning

Authors:

Zhaoyuan Yu↗Zhangyong Liang↗

arXiv:2606.17553v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Geographic tipping points in ecosystems, climate subsystems, or ice sheets pose severe challenges for localized early warning. Classical spatial indicators such as Moran's I summarize global spatial structure, but they struggle with three issues: spatial dilution, Euclidean assumptions, and correlated noise. This paper introduces SpatioTemporal Causal Network Diagnostics (ST-CND), a framework that addresses these three issues by representing the geographic field as a time-evolving directed causal network. The core workflow is as follows: (1) infer which spatial nodes help predict other nodes via transfer entropy, replacing fixed Euclidean neighborhoods with data-driven information-flow topology; (2) estimate local recovery rates within each candidate subnetwork via dynamic mode decomposition; and (3) identify the most vulnerable subnetwork by combining three signals, namely high internal fluctuation, high internal synchronization, and low external coupling, thereby suppressing false alarms from spatially correlated noise. Validated on synthetic bifurcations and two observational sea-surface temperature benchmarks, namely Indo-Pacific SST and North Atlantic AMOC, ST-CND delivers localized and interpretable warnings. On the AMOC task, it achieves an AUROC of 0.783 and a critical-subnetwork IoU of 0.378, outperforming recurrence-network and lambda-AR1 baselines. The framework provides an interpretable and scalable pipeline for spatial early warning in Earth system science.

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14.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20140

SA-VIS: Sparse frame Annotations for training Video Instance Segmentation

Authors:

Edoardo Mello Rella↗Ajad Chhatkuli↗Shipra Jain↗Ender Konukoglu↗Luc Van Gool↗

Recent online video instance segmentation (VIS) methods have achieved impressive results, thus becoming the preferred approach to segment instances in videos. Despite the resurgence of impressive single image models, the online (or semi-online) VIS approaches outperform single-image models (e.g., based on SAM) by using long sequences of densely annotated frames during training. However,such a training setup of VIS is expensive in the sense of compute as well as dense annotations required. In order to solve these major flaws, we argue that the effective modeling of the instances and their evolution in videos do not require densely annotated frames. To that end, we propose a simple and effective module, called Past-frames Feature Propagation (PFP) which aggregates low-dimensional features from the image encoder of multiple frames. This simple low-compute module provides tremendous learning capability in using sparse video frame labels for end-to-end training. Combined with a light-weight frame-specific Instance Queries, our Sparse frame Annotation VIS (SA-VIS) significantly improves performance over its baseline. Most interestingly, our simple design that avoids complexities effectively bridges the gap in accuracy between training on sparsely and densely annotated video sequences. This translates to a mere 0.4% drop in performance of SA-VIS when using annotations for only 1/5 of the images in the dataset. Empirically, SA-VIS shows strong improvements over the baseline on YouTube-VIS 2019/2021/2022 and Occluded VIS (OVIS) and an over 1% improvement in AP on the state-of-the-art in a limited annotations scenario.

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15.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13156

Iterative Visual Thinking: Teaching Vision-Language Models Spatial Self-Correction through Visual Feedback

Authors:

Animesh Tripathy↗Aswanth Krishnan↗

Vision-language models (VLMs) achieve strong singleshot spatial grounding, yet lack any mechanism to observe and correct their own predictions. We find that naively prompting a VLM to iterate over rendered visualizations of its predictions causes catastrophic failure: Acc@0.5 on referring expression comprehension collapses from 79.6% to 48.7% (a 31 percentage point drop), revealing a fundamental gap between grounding capability and self-correction ability. We propose Iterative Visual Thinking (IVT), a closed-loop framework in which the model predicts a bounding box, observes the prediction rendered on the image, and iteratively refines through visual feedback. A two-phase training recipe closes the self-correction gap: first, we exploit the base model's own predictions as realistic errors and prompt a teacher VLM to generate corrective reasoning traces, yielding supervised data without human annotation; second, we apply Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a simple IoU reward to stabilize multi-step refinement. On a mixed benchmark spanning RefCOCOg, Ref-Adv, and Ref-L4 (505 test samples), SFT warm-up with IVT surpasses the single-shot base model on every metric: Acc@0.5 rises to 82.0% (+2.4pp), Acc@0.7 to 74.1% (+3.2pp), and Acc@0.9 to 48.3% (+2.8pp). GRPO further reduces per-step IoU degradation by 5x, stabilizing the refinement trajectory. All training uses only 2,400 samples on a single GPU, demonstrating that spatial self-correction is a learnable capability that can be instilled at modest scale.

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16.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.07591

ResearchClawBench: A Benchmark for End-to-End Autonomous Scientific Research

Authors:

Wanghan Xu↗Shuo Li↗Tianlin Ye↗Qinglong Cao↗Yixin Chen↗Hengjian Gao↗Yiheng Wang↗Qi Li↗Kun Li↗Sheng Xu↗Shengdu Chai↗Fangchen Yu↗…

AI coding agents are increasingly used for scientific work, but their end-to-end autonomous research capability remains difficult to verify. We present ResearchClawBench, a benchmark for evaluating autonomous scientific research across 40 tasks from 10 scientific domains. Each task is grounded in a real published paper, provides related literature and raw data, and hides the target paper during evaluation. Expert-curated multimodal rubrics decompose the target scientific artifacts into weighted criteria, enabling evaluation of target-paper-level re-discovery while leaving room for new discovery. We evaluate seven autonomous research (auto-research) agents under a unified protocol and seventeen native LLMs through the lightweight ResearchHarness. Current systems remain far from reliable re-discovery: the strongest autonomous agent, Claude Code, averages 21.5, and the strongest ResearchHarness LLM, Claude-Opus-4.7, averages 20.7, with an LLM frontier mean of only 26.5. Error analysis shows that failures concentrate in experimental protocol mismatch, evidence mismatch, and missing scientific core. ResearchClawBench provides a reproducible evaluation frontier for measuring progress toward autonomous scientific research.

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17.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14022

PostDeg: Placement Beats Parameterization in LayerNorm GNNs

Authors:

Yash Tomar↗Aryav Das↗

arXiv:2606.14022v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LayerNorm-based GNNs routinely erase the topology signals (degree, centrality, $k$-core) that node-selection policies should depend on, but the literature has not located where in the residual block the erasure happens. We answer that question: a positive per-node scalar inserted before LayerNorm is divided out up to a stabilizer term, while the same scalar inserted after LayerNorm reaches the score head as representation magnitude. The surviving slot is the post-LayerNorm position. We instantiate it with PostDeg, a parameter-free post-LayerNorm inverse-degree scale, and pre-register four falsifiers (graphwise scalars, extra LayerNorm, expressive same-slot capacity, backbone-agnostic source) that would reject the rule. PostDeg gains $+3.5\%/+2.5\%/+5.6\%$ over the LN backbone on influence maximization, network dismantling, and maximum independent set, with $10/10$ paired-seed wins per task; none of the four falsifiers fires. The takeaway is that placement, not parameterization, carries the gain – a small invariance check that generalizes to any positive topology scalar in any normalized residual stack.

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18.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2605.21597

Matrix Product Operator Encodings of the Magnus Expansion and Dyson Series

Authors:

Victor Vanthilt↗Maarten Van Damme↗Jutho Haegeman↗Ian P. McCulloch↗Laurens Vanderstraeten↗

arXiv:2605.21597v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a matrix product operator (MPO) encoding of the Magnus expansion and the Dyson series for one-dimensional quantum lattice models with time-dependent Hamiltonians. The MPO construction can be made accurate up to arbitrary order in the time step, it can be applied to both finite and infinite systems, and it can handle long-range interactions. The resulting MPO can be combined with state-of-the-art time evolution algorithms based on matrix product states, allowing for drastic improvements in simulating evolution under time-dependent Hamiltonians. Our MPO construction can also be used for the optimization of quantum circuits in the context of quantum simulation of time-dependent Hamiltonians.

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19.

PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-15 DOI: HASH:09f28af8148ff7a19a7b842a74ca5081

Environmental “knees” and “wiggles” as strong stabilizers of species’ range limits set by interspecific competition

Authors:

Farshad Shirani↗

by Farshad Shirani, Benjamin G. Freeman Whether interspecific competition is a major contributing factor to setting species’ range limits has been debated for a long time. Theoretical studies have proposed that the interactions between interspecific competition and disruptive gene flow along an environmental gradient can halt range expansion of ecologically similar species where they meet. However, the stability of such range limits has not been well addressed. We use a deterministic mathematical model of adaptive range evolution over a continuous habitat to show that the range limits set by interspecific competition are unlikely to be evolutionarily stable if the environmental optima for fitness-related traits vary (almost) linearly in space. That is, in a linear environment without a dispersal barrier or a third (or more) species, the range borders formed between two competing species constantly move towards the weaker species. We demonstrate that environmental nonlinearities such as “knees” and “wiggles”—wherein an isolated sharp change or a step-like change occurs in the steepness of a trait optimum—can strongly stabilize competitively formed range limits. The stabilization mechanism relies on the contrast that such nonlinearities create in the level of disruptive gene flow to the peripheral population of each species, and succeeds when an additional process, such as Allee effects, prevents the establishment of an infinitesimal population in the presence of an abundant competitor. We show that the stability of the range limits at these nonlinearities is robust against moderate environmental disturbances. Whether strong disturbances such as rapid high-amplitude climate changes can destabilize such range limits depends on how the competitive dominance of the species changes across the nonlinearity. Therefore, our findings underscore the importance of assessing species’ competitive ability when predicting responses to climate change, and identify geographic regions where established range limits are likely to persist as well as regions where shifting limits may eventually stabilize.

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20.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11 DOI: HASH:70c5f95d6093c0d505876db360657d06

Electrical signatures of divergent connectivity in the human subgenual cingulate cortex

Authors:

Qianq↗Kerezoudis↗Gregg↗Hermes↗Klassen↗B. T↗Chari↗Tisdall↗M. M↗Baker↗M. R↗Miller↗…

Background: Major depressive disorder remains a leading cause of disability. While subgenual cingulate cortex (sgCC) deep brain stimulation (DBS) shows promise for medically refractory depression, clinical outcomes have been heterogeneous, suggesting that individual differences in neural circuitry engagement may critically influence therapeutic efficacy. We aimed to define the electrophysiological signatures of sgCC efferent connectivity using single-pulse electrical stimulation (SPES) with intracranial stereo-EEG (sEEG) to inform rational targeting and physiological biomarkers for sgCC-DBS. Methods: In four patients undergoing clinically indicated sEEG for seizure mapping, SPES was delivered through sgCC pairs, while distributed brain stimulation-evoked potentials (BSEPs) were recorded across cortical and subcortical sites. Responses were characterized using Canonical Response Parameterization to extract reproducible waveforms and per-trial reliability. Results: sgCC stimulation elicited reproducible, spatially organized BSEPs across frontal, limbic, and paralimbic networks, aligning with known anatomical pathways. Frontal recruitment featured robust, lateralized orbitofrontal activation favoring the ipsilateral central, medial OFC and bilateral ventromedial prefrontal responses. Limbic effects demonstrated bilateral cingulate activation with stronger ipsilateral recruitment and lateralized amygdala and hippocampal responses. Paralimbic engagement included insular responses with subject-specific anterior predominance and bi-hemispheric temporal-polar slow-wave deflections. Conclusion: These findings provide direct electrophysiological evidence of distributed, lateralized sgCC divergent network connectivity in the human brain, offering physiologic confirmation of its role in affective circuitry. The observed topography and laterality have direct applications for sgCC-DBS targeting and implicate BSEP signatures as candidate biomarkers to guide patient-specific therapy.

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21.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.10725

Pre-AF 13: An Interpretable Atrial Fibrillation Risk Score Mined from Discharge Reports

Authors:

Olga Shakhmatova↗Dmitrii Kriukov↗Daniil Larionov↗Nikita Khromov↗Iaroslav Bespalov↗Alexander Zolotarev↗Kirill Grishchenkov↗Ekaterina Ivanova↗Miron Kuznetsov↗Ilya Sochenkov↗Elizaveta Panchenko↗Artem Shelmanov↗…

Background. Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most prevalent cardiac arrhythmia and a major determinant of prognosis. Established AF risk scores rely on factors (older age, hypertension) nearly ubiquitous among patients with cardiovascular disease (CVD), offering limited stratification in this high-risk group. Most target long-term (5-10 year) rather than medium-term prediction. We developed interpretable ML models predicting AF risk over a 24-month and entire follow-up horizon in CVD patients using routinely collected hospital data. Methods. Single-center retrospective study of electronic health records from the National Research Cardiology Center (Russia) for patients aged >=18 with CVD but without pre-existing AF, hospitalized more than once between January 2012 and May 2019. A custom NLP pipeline transformed unstructured discharge reports into 73 structured features, combining a rule-based parser with transformer-based NER. Using LightAutoML we built a full model (73 features), a simple model (reduced subset), and a linear model for a bedside risk score. Performance was assessed by ROC AUC, compared with CHARGE-AF, C2HEST, MHS, and HAVOC, and interpreted via SHAP. Results. Of 80,576 records from 45,000 patients, 17,562 met inclusion criteria; 1,438 (8.19%) developed AF. The full model reached ROC AUC 0.735 (24-month) and 0.696 (entire follow-up); the simple model was nearly identical (0.725, 0.696). All non-linear models outperformed the four clinical risk scores (ROC AUC 0.53-0.64). The simple model uses 13 features and is named Pre-AF 13. SHAP identified age and left atrial volume as dominant predictors. A linear risk score (Pre-AF 9) stratified observed 24-month AF incidence from ~7% to 36%. Conclusion. Interpretable ML models built from routinely collected EHR data identify high-AF-risk CVD patients, outperforming established clinical risk scores.

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22.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20372

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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23.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13254

Evaluating Pluralism in LLMs through Latent Perspectives

Authors:

Laura Majer↗Jan \v{S}najder↗Martin Tutek↗

The growing need to represent diverse perspectives has increased interest in pluralistic LLM generation. Although difficult to operationalize, identifying perspectives expressed in text would provide clear guidance on pluralistic alignment and more clearly articulate the pluralistic gap in LLM generation. While models have been shown to reduce the diversity of training data and generate homogeneously, this has been demonstrated primarily on multiple-choice questionnaires or using high-level characteristics of free-form text. In this paper, we introduce and implement a domain-agnostic multi-layered framework for unsupervised extraction of perspectives suitable for identifying the pluralistic gap in LLM-generated text. We evaluate our framework on book reviews, a highly opinionated dataset representing diverse perspectives, and compare various prompts and models. Our results show that while some models and prompting techniques come close to covering a broad spectrum of perspectives, rarer perspectives remain disproportionately underrepresented, resulting in distributions that diverge from human text.

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24.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2509.13094

Steady-state entanglement of spin qubits mediated by nonreciprocal and chiral magnons

Authors:

Martijn Dols↗Mikhail Cherkasskii↗Victor A. S. V. Bittencourt↗Carlos Gonzalez-Ballestero↗Durga B. R. Dasari↗Silvia Viola Kusminskiy↗

arXiv:2509.13094v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a hybrid quantum system in which a magnet supporting non-reciprocal magnons, chiral magnons, or both mediates the dissipative and unidirectional coupling of spin qubits. By driving the qubits, the steady state of this qubit-qubit coupling scheme becomes the maximally entangled Bell state. We devise a protocol where the system converges to this entangled state and benchmark it including qubit decay and dephasing. The protocol is numerically tested on a hybrid system consisting of nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers coupled to magnon surface modes of an yttrium iron garnet (YIG) film. We show that the dephasing time of the NV centers forms the bottleneck for achieving the entanglement of NV centers separated by a distance within the magnon coherence length. Our findings identify the key technological requirements and demonstrate a viable route toward steady-state entanglement of solid-state spins over distances of several microns using magnonic quantum networks, expanding the toolbox of magnonics for quantum information purposes.

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25.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.14740

GridVQA-X: A Framework for Evaluating Multimodal Explainability Methods

Authors:

Sujay Belsare↗Sudarshan Nikhil↗Sushant Kumar↗Ponnurangam Kumaraguru↗Chirag Agarwal↗

With the increasing development of Vision-Language Models, it becomes imperative that their predictions are readily explainable to relevant stakeholders. However, the field of explainability has not kept pace with the multimodal surge. While recent Multimodal Explainable AI (MxAI) methods generate explanations to attribute the interaction between different modalities, current evaluation protocols lack the ground truth required to distinguish between true cross-modal reasoning (e.g., spatial composition) and shallow cross-modal shortcuts (e.g., Bag-of-Words attribute matching). It remains unknown whether MxAI methods faithfully capture synergistic interactions or merely hallucinate reasoning on models acting as simple feature detectors. In this paper, we introduce GridVQA-X, the first diagnostic framework specifically designed to evaluate cross-modal explainability. Unlike natural datasets, GridVQA-X leverages a closed-world synthesis logic to generate unique, mathematically guaranteed explanations. We utilize this controlled environment to train paired ground-truth models on identical architectures: $M_{pure}$, which learns robust spatial-relational reasoning and $M_{spur}$, which is structurally forced to rely on cross-modal shortcuts. This behavioral divergence creates a rigorous testbed: a faithful explainer must report distinct reasoning pathways for each model. Our findings reveal that widely used methods fail to distinguish between models relying on genuine spatial-relational reasoning and those exploiting cross-modal shortcuts, highlighting a critical gap in capturing true cross-modal synergy and misrepresenting how multimodal models actually make decisions.

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