Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20009

The use of Peres lattices in periodically driven systems

Authors:

Luk\'a\v{s} Honsa↗Jan St\v{r}ele\v{c}ek↗Jakub Novotn\'y↗Pavel Cejnar↗

arXiv:2606.20009v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We demonstrate the strength of the method of Peres lattices in periodically driven quantum systems. The method, which has previously been used mostly in stationary systems, enables us to efficiently detect resonances in the driven system, to monitor the onset of chaos, and to recognize critical properties of the Floquet modes. It also allows quick comparisons of the spectra of Floquet modes for various driving Hamiltonians and transparent tests of the iterative approximation techniques based on effective stationary Hamiltonians.

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02.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22 DOI: HASH:a39d6e859f3dc3779e744bb2deb322f2

Climatic Drivers of Malaria risk in Children Under Five: A Large-Scale Analysis of individual-level data for 350,000 children in 26 Sub-Saharan African Countries

Authors:

Martellini O Nocentini↗Pandey↗Olivetti↗Defilippo↗Wybrant↗Worou↗Mazzoleni↗Quiros-Roldan↗Byakika↗Torti↗Magnusson↗Gasparrini↗…

Background Malaria risk is influenced by climatic conditions, and children under five are particularly vulnerable due to their limited acquired immunity. We investigate the association between climatic factors and malaria risk in 350,000 children aged 5-59 months in sub-Saharan Africa over 18 years. Methods We included children aged 5-59 months with malaria tests from Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) in 26 sub-Saharan African countries between 2006 and 2023. We linked these data to high-resolution climate exposures: temperature, precipitation, soil moisture, actual evapotranspiration and specific humidity. We fitted a mixed-effect logistic regression model incorporating Distributed Lag Non-linear Models (DLNM) over 1-6 month lag window for each exposure, controlling for seasonality and long-term trends. We examined effect modification by maternal education, household wealth, residential type, water source, sanitation facility, child age and sex, use of insecticide-treated bed nets (ITNs), and the age of the household head. Results Malaria prevalence was 19.5%. Malaria risk was highest at 24 degrees (OR: 1.45, 95% CI: [1.36, 1.54]), followed by a decline at higher temperatures. This elevated risk was mainly driven by short-term exposures (1-2 months). Precipitation increased risk up to 59 ~ 120 mm (1.10, [1.07, 1.12]), after which heavier rainfall reduced risk, particularly at short- to medium-term lags (1-4 months). Soil moisture was associated with increasing risk up to ~80 mm (1.11, [1.08, 1.14]), with a plateau at higher levels. Evapotranspiration showed a strong, near-linear positive association with malaria risk. Higher specific humidity levels (>14 g/kg) presented a lower risk, reaching a 45% reduction at 17 g/kg (0.55, [0.49, 0.61]), with the strongest protective effects at short-term lags (1-2 months). Elevated malaria risk at low and moderate average temperatures was particularly evident among children who did not sleep under an ITN net. Conclusion Malaria risk in children under five is strongly shaped by climatic factors, with complex and delayed associations. The findings provide evidence to guide targeted interventions and early-warning strategies for vulnerable populations.

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03.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13388

From 2D Yang-Mills to Calogero-Sutherland via a colored particle

Authors:

Marcia Tenser↗Amilcar R. Queiroz↗

arXiv:2606.13388v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study Yang-Mills theory coupled to a particle on a cylinder, where gauge invariance and compactness reduce the dynamics to a finite dimensional quantum system. In the Abelian case, this yields a model equivalent to the Landau problem on a torus, with a degenerate ground state structure. We generalize this construction to non-Abelian gauge groups and show that, for SU(N), the system reduces to a one dimensional quantum many body problem with a singular Calogero-Sutherland-type interaction.

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04.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.14755

Where Does Texture Evidence Live in SAM? Features, Proposal Masks, and Texture Segmentation

Authors:

Nadav Orenstein↗Aviad Cohen Zada↗Shai Avidan↗Gal Oren↗

Texture segmentation stresses foundation segmentation because meaningful regions are defined by material or repeated appearance rather than object identity. Segment Anything Models (SAMs) often fail by default on such texture-defined partitions, but this failure is ambiguous: the texture evidence may be absent, missing from the proposal bank, or present but selected or assembled incorrectly by an object-centric readout. We ask what texture-relevant evidence is already preserved in frozen SAM before adaptation. We study two frozen evidence spaces: multiscale features, probed with a minimal clustering readout, and the automatic proposal bank, treated as evidence for a supervised consolidation readout. SAM is frozen throughout; we do not fine-tune the backbone or retrain the proposal generator. Across RWTD, STLD, an ADE20K-selected refined-crop complement, and a ControlNet-stitched PTD bridge archive, frozen SAM is not a texture segmenter by default, but its failures are not simple texture blindness. Coarse frozen features preserve texture organization, and proposal banks often contain texture-aligned masks or fragments. Natural scenes more often require assembly and commitment over fragments, while cleaner synthetic cases more often reduce to selecting an already coherent proposal. Default mask failure should therefore be decomposed into representation evidence, proposal-bank support, readout mismatch, and commitment failure.

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05.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2604.13302

A simple approach to the L{\o}kka-Zervos dichotomy for absolutely continuous dividend strategies

Authors:

Tommy Mastromonaco↗Nacer Fendri↗Jean-Fran\c{c}ois Renaud↗Clarence Simard↗

arXiv:2604.13302v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We revisit the optimization problem solved in L{\o}kka & Zervos (2008), i.e., the maximization of dividends, in a Brownian risk model, with the possibility (not the obligation) of making capital injections. Following the approach introduced in Alvarez & Shepp (1998), Renaud & Simard (2021), Renaud et al. (2023), we consider instead absolutely continuous (AC) dividend strategies with an affine bound on the payment rates, while singular capital injections are still allowed. In addition, we incorporate a parameter for the cost of ruin or, said differently, a penalty at ruin in the performance function. We show that the solution is a so-called L{\o}kka-Zervos dichotomy: the surplus is never ruined by making bail-out payments, or no capital is injected and bankruptcy can occur; in either case, dividends are paid at full rate when the surplus is above a threshold. Our framework allows us to provide explicit conditions to express the dichotomy, either using the cost of capital injections or the cost of ruin as a criterion, which also exposes the underlying structure of the solution. In particular, for some values of the parameters, we show that it is optimal to liquidate. Moreover, we perform a numerical analysis highlighting the range of values generated under this AC affine-bound structure.

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06.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16586

LOCUS: Local Visual Cue Search for Enhancing Fine-Grained Perception in Multimodal Large Language Models

Authors:

Zhou Tao↗Fang Zhang↗Zewen Ding↗Shida Wang↗Xiaokun Sun↗YongXiang Hua↗Haoyu Cao↗Linli Xu↗

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) remain unreliable on fine-grained visual perception, even when high-resolution inputs preserve the necessary local details. We identify this limitation as visual context rot: decisive evidence may exist in the full image, yet fail to be reliably selected and used amid redundant visual context. We propose LOCUS (LOcal visual CUe Search), a training framework that teaches MLLMs to internalize local evidence search through a verifiable proxy task. During training, LOCUS provides a local crop as a visual cue and optimizes the model to recover its spatial support in the full image using an IoU-based reward. The visual cue is used only during training, leaving the standard image-question inference interface unchanged. Experiments across fine-grained perception, hallucination, general understanding, and reasoning benchmarks show that LOCUS improves localization-sensitive visual understanding while preserving broad capabilities. Attention analyses further indicate stronger focus on task-relevant evidence regions, suggesting that training-time visual cue search provides an effective route to internalized fine-grained evidence selection.

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07.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.13852

Hybrid Classical-Quantum Variational Autoencoder for Neural Topic Modeling

Authors:

Ivan Kankeu↗

Neural topic models enable scalable semantic discovery, but their integration with quantum hardware remains largely unexplored. We present a proof-of-concept hybrid classical-quantum variational autoencoder (VAE) for topic modeling, embedding parameterized quantum circuits within the VAE inference network while retaining a classical topic-word decoder. To address the resource constraints of quantum hardware, we propose a modified Gaussian Softmax posterior that decouples latent space dimensionality from the number of topics to be extracted, enabling the model to operate with a low-resource 10-qubit quantum device. On the AgNews dataset, the hybrid VAE outperforms state-of-the-art neural topic models (NTMs), reaching a $C_v$ coherence score of 0.71 and an NPMI score of 0.20 while preserving high topic diversity. For comparison, we also construct a fully classical variant, which also outperforms state-of-the-art models on AgNews and exhibits clear class separation in the latent space. These results demonstrate that hybrid VAEs are computationally viable even on NISQ-era devices and represent a promising direction for quantum-enhanced topic modeling.

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08.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2308.06035

Attention, not scale, drives human-AI alignment in multimodal language prediction

Authors:

Viktor Kewenig↗Andrew Lampinen↗Samuel A. Nastase↗Christopher Edwards↗Quitterie Lacome D'Elascombe↗Akilles Rechardt↗Jeremy I Skipper↗Gabriella Vigliocco↗

Humans routinely draw on visual context to predict upcoming words. To what extent current vision-language models produce comparable behaviour is unclear. Here we placed five state-of-the-art pretrained systems side-by-side with 600 human participants in a web-based Visual-World Paradigm. On each of 100 six-second movie clips, models and participants received either text only or synchronised video and text and judged how likely a specified target word was to appear next; human eye movements were tracked throughout. Adding visual context increased model-human alignment in predictability ratings across all architectures (average Delta r = 0.18) with no impact of parameter size. When visual context was informative, transformer attention significantly increased alignment. Attention maps from two transformer models corresponded with human gaze, explaining up to 70% of the inter-participant variance when the scene contained informative cues. Notably, cross-modal attention reliably tracked anticipatory human fixations on semantic cues. These results suggest that current transformer-based vision-language models can approximate human behaviour exploiting visual context during language prediction - and that selective attention to informative cues, not sheer model scale, is the principal driver of this alignment.

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09.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2604.06961

Auditing Demographic Bias in Facial Landmark Detection for Fair Human-Robot Interaction

Authors:

Pablo Parte↗Roberto Valle↗Jos\'e M. Buenaposada↗Luis Baumela↗

Fairness in human-robot interaction critically depends on the reliability of the perceptual models that enable robots to interpret human behavior. While demographic biases have been widely studied in high-level facial analysis tasks, their presence in facial landmark detection remains unexplored. In this paper, we conduct a systematic audit of demographic bias in this task, analyzing the age, gender, and race biases. To this end, we introduce a controlled statistical methodology to disentangle demographic effects from confounding visual factors. Our analysis demonstrates that visual confounders, particularly head pose and face resolution, heavily outweigh the impact of demographic attributes. Notably, after accounting for these confounders, performance disparities across gender and race vanish. However, we identify a statistically significant age-related bias, with higher localization errors for older individuals. This shows that fairness issues can emerge even in low-level vision components and can propagate through the HRI pipeline. We argue that auditing and correcting such biases is a necessary step toward trustworthy and equitable robot perception systems.

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10.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2605.07121

AdaTKG: Adaptive Memory for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning

Authors:

Seunghan Lee↗Jun Seo↗Jaehoon Lee↗Sungdong Yoo↗Minjae Kim↗Tae Yoon Lim↗Dongwan Kang↗Hwanil Choi↗SoonYoung Lee↗Wonbin Ahn↗

arXiv:2605.07121v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs) represent time-stamped relational facts and support a wide range of reasoning tasks over evolving events. However, existing methods produce entity representations that are static at the entity level, in that each representation is a function of learned parameters only and retains no trace of the interactions in which the entity has participated. In this paper, we depart from this static view and propose that each entity be modeled as an adaptive process whose representation is refined every time the entity participates in a fact. To this end, we propose AdaTKG, which maintains a per-entity memory that is updated with every observed interaction, with the memory accumulating online and predictions improving as more interactions arrive. Specifically, we instantiate the memory update as a learnable exponential moving average governed by a single shared scalar instead of using learnable parameters for each entity, enabling AdaTKG to handle entities unseen during training. Extensive experiments confirm consistent gains over TKG baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of adaptive memory. Code is available at: https://github.com/seunghan96/AdaTKG

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11.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2605.30208

Automating Low-Risk Code Review at Meta: RADAR, Risk Calibration, and Review Efficiency

Authors:

Chris Adams↗Arjun Singh Banga↗Parveen Bansal↗Souvik Bhattacharya↗Payal Bhuptani↗Rujin Cao↗Pedro Canahuati↗Nate Cook↗Brian Ellis↗Prabhakar Goyal↗Gurinder Grewal↗Tianyu He↗…

arXiv:2605.30208v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI-assisted coding tools have altered software production. At Meta, significant lines of code per human-landed diff grew by 105.9% year over year and per-developer diff volume rose 51%, with agentic AI responsible for over 80% of that growth. Meanwhile, the share of diffs receiving timely review has declined, exposing a widening gap between code supply and reviewer bandwidth. We ask three questions that progress from feasibility through calibration to impact: (1) can risk-stratified automation operate at scale across diverse organizations, (2) how does tuning the risk threshold affect the trade-off between automation yield and safety, and (3) to what extent does automated review reduce end-to-end latency for AI-generated changes? We deployed RADAR (Risk Aware Diff Auto Review), a multi-stage funnel that classifies each diff by authorship and source type, applies eligibility gates, static heuristics, a machine-learned Diff Risk Score, LLM-based Automated Code Review, and deterministic validation before landing qualifying changes. We evaluate RADAR through telemetry covering 535K+ RADAR-reviewed diffs, observational before-after comparisons for policy changes, and difference-in-differences analysis of efficiency outcomes. RADAR has reviewed 535K+ diffs and landed 331K+. Relaxing the Diff Risk Score threshold from the 25th to the 50th percentile increased the approve rate to 60.31%. The revert rate for RADAR-reviewed diffs is 1/3 that of non-RADAR diffs, and the Production Incident rate is 1/50 that of non-RADAR diffs. RADAR reduces median time to close by over 330% and median diff review wall time by 35%. Risk-aware layered automation can materially reduce review bottlenecks created by AI-driven code growth without compromising production safety.

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12.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11643

Improving Cross-Format Robustness in Language Models with Multi-Format Training

Authors:

June M. Liu↗Shaomian Zheng↗He Cao↗Dingnan Jin↗Qing Cui↗Jun Zhou↗

Large language models often remain sensitive to answer format: a question solved correctly in one form may fail in another semantically equivalent form. To study this gap, we define cross-format robustness as the extent to which a model answers the same underlying question consistently across formats. We then compare full-format training with FormatMix, which expands only a subset of training items into multiple equivalent formats using either random or targeted selection. Across GLM4 and Llama-3.1, multi-format supervision consistently improves both task performance and cross-format robustness, whereas Multiple-choice question (MCQ)-only supervision alone brings little benefit and can even reduce robustness. We further find that expanding only about 30% of the training set into multiple formats often recovers most of the gain from full-format training, and this effect appears across the model families and sizes we study. These results suggest that format diversity, rather than additional supervision alone, is the key driver of robustness. That lightweight multi-format augmentation is a practical way to make LLMs less sensitive to answer format without changing the base model.

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13.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2512.12266

Coulomb crystallization of xenon highly charged ions in a laser-cooled Ca+ matrix

Authors:

Leonid Prokhorov↗Aaron A. Smith↗Mingyao Xu↗Kostas Georgiou↗Vera Guarrera↗Lakshmi P. Kozhiparambil Sajith↗Elwin A. Dijck↗Christian Warnecke↗Malte Wehrheim↗Alexander Wilzewski↗Laura Blackburn↗Matthias Keller↗…

arXiv:2512.12266v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We report on the sympathetic cooling and Coulomb crystallization of xenon highly charged ions (HCIs) with laser-cooled Ca$^+$ ions. The HCIs are produced in a compact electron beam ion trap, then charge selected, decelerated, and finally injected into a cryogenic linear Paul trap. There, they are captured into $^{40}$Ca$^+$ Coulomb crystals, and co-crystallized within them, causing dark voids in their fluorescence images. Fine control over the number of trapped ions and HCIs allows us to realize mixed-species crystals with arbitrary ordering patterns. By investigating Xe$^{q+}$–Ca$^+$ strings, we confirm the HCI charge states, measure their lifetime and characterize the mixed-species motional modes. Our system effectively combines the established quantum control toolbox for Ca$^+$ with the rich set of atomic properties of Xe highly charged ions, providing a resourceful platform for optical frequency metrology, searches for signatures of new physics, and quantum information science.

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14.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11798

Deterministic Policy Gradient for Learning Equilibrium in Time-Inconsistent Control Problems

Authors:

Xin Guo↗Yijie Huang↗Xiang Yu↗

arXiv:2606.11798v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we develop a continuous-time model-free reinforcement learning algorithm to learn deterministic equilibrium policies in general time-inconsistent control problems. Utilizing the extended Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman system, we recast the original time-inconsistent problem into an equivalent two-stage problem. In the first stage, for given auxiliary functions, we employ the deterministic policy gradient approach to learn an optimal policy in an auxiliary time-consistent control problem. In the second stage, given the updated policy, we exploit the inner fixed point iterations and some martingale characterizations to learn the auxiliary functions. As a theoretical contribution, we provide some mild model assumptions and establish the convergence of inner fixed point iterations. By repeating this actor-critic style of iterations across two stages, our algorithm aims to learn the equilibrium under different sources of time-inconsistency in a unified manner. The superior effectiveness of the proposed algorithm are illustrated in two classical financial applications with time-inconsistency: mean-variance portfolio management and optimal tracking portfolio under non-exponential discounting.

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15.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.03827

Conditional Latent Diffusion Model with Fourier-based Motion Modelling for Virtual Population Synthesis

Authors:

Shaokun Lan↗Haoran Dou↗Jinghan Huang↗Arezoo Zakeri↗Fengming Lin↗Zherui Zhou↗Jinming Duan↗Alejandro F. Frangi↗

In-silico trials of medical devices require the generation of virtual populations of anatomies. In cardiovascular applications, virtual anatomy is typically represented as a 3D+t mesh sampled from a generative model. However, most existing mesh generators focus on static anatomy, while sequence models often lack explicit periodicity. To this end, we propose 4D F-MeshLDM, a conditional generative framework comprising a convolutional mesh VAE to encode meshes, a structural latent space that parameterises motion using a truncated Fourier series, and a diffusion prior that learns the latent distribution over Fourier coefficient tokens. By conditioning the diffusion process on clinical covariates via affine modulation, we enable controllable synthesis. Sampling tokens and performing inverse Fourier synthesis yield cycle-consistent latent trajectories, which can be decoded into 3D+t cardiac mesh sequences. Experiments on 5,000 UK Biobank subjects demonstrate that 4D F-MeshLDM outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in anatomical fidelity and achieves near-zero cycle closure error. Furthermore, the generated cohorts accurately preserve clinical functional indices, highlighting the potential of our framework for reliable in-silico cardiac trials.

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16.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.19002

Enhancing Multilingual Reasoning via Steerable Model Merging

Authors:

Zhuoran Li↗Rui Xu↗Jian Yang↗Junnan Liu↗Zhijun Chen↗Qianren Mao↗Hongcheng Guo↗Jiaheng Liu↗Likang Xiao↗Ming Li↗Xiaojie Wang↗

Model merging is an effective technique for composing the capabilities of a multilingual model and a reasoning model. It has achieved promising generalization in multilingual reasoning tasks by aligning feature spaces of different models. However, the merged single model often fails to address the conflicts between source models, leading to suboptimal performance. In other words, the one-size-fits-all merging strategy may not align with the characteristics of different inputs which may require prioritizing certain models over others. To this end, we propose a Steerable Model Merging (ST-Merge) framework to modulate the contribution of each source model. To realize this idea, we introduce a gated cross-attention mechanism to weight or filter the two attended source models in an adaptive manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ST-Merge consistently outperforms multiple strong baselines on four multilingual reasoning benchmarks across 21 different languages.

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17.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19700

TerraMARS: A Domain-Adapted Small-Language-Model Pipeline for Mars Terraforming Literature

Authors:

Jyotsna Singh↗Ash Black↗Jeff Larsen↗Scott R. Saleska↗

Researchers are interested in learning about Mars so that it may eventually become habitable for humans. To achieve this, there is a need for comprehensive knowledge of the planet's atmosphere, hydrology, surface chemistry, radiation environment, and spatial features through the scientific literature. These contain valuable information and meaningful quantitative constraints that can be used in other models and studies, such as habitability assessment and future terraforming studies. We present TerraMARS, an end-to-end information extraction pipeline that combines a domain-adapted Small Language Model to answer Mars terraforming-related questions and convert unstructured Mars science text into machine-readable structured outputs in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format. A corpus of open-access papers is collected and processed using a multistage retrieval and chunking framework. Google Gemma 3 1B was adapted to the domain using Quantized Low-Rank Adaptation (QLoRA) fine-tuning on Mars-specific question-answering and information extraction datasets. The resulting pipeline generates both types of output and provides a foundation for integrating knowledge from scientific literature into downstream applications like digital twins and habitability modeling for Mars. The output from this pipeline looks promising, but further improvements are needed to increase extraction accuracy and factual consistency.

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18.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2511.12024

Null-Space Diffusion Distillation Unlocks Speed, Fidelity and Realism in Lensless Imaging

Authors:

Jose Reinaldo Cunha Santos A V Silva Neto↗Hodaka Kawachi↗Yasushi Yagi↗Tomoya Nakamura↗

Lensless imaging reconstructs scenes from highly multiplexed measurements, resulting in a severely ill-posed inverse problem. In this work, we identify a fundamental trade-off between measurement consistency, perceptual quality, and inference speed across lensless reconstruction paradigms. Traditional methods favor consistency but produce perceptually degraded results, supervised approaches achieve high-quality reconstructions with fast inference but may violate physical constraints, and diffusion-prior methods achieve high perceptual quality and consistency–particularly when structured constraints such as range-null decomposition are used–but remain slow due to iterative sampling. Motivated by this observation, we propose Null-Space Diffusion Distillation (NSDD), a single-pass reconstruction model that distills structured diffusion-prior inference into an efficient feed-forward network. NSDD learns to produce high-quality reconstructions that preserve measurement consistency while avoiding costly iterative sampling. Experimental results demonstrate that NSDD achieves perceptual quality and consistency competitive with diffusion-prior methods, while providing significantly faster inference and offering a favorable balance across all three objectives. Furthermore, ablation experiments show that distilling the range–null decomposition improves reconstruction quality and robustness over unstructured full-reconstruction distillation, including on unseen real scenes. These results highlight the potential of structure-aware distillation for efficient lensless imaging. Code is available at github.com/JRCSAVSN/NullSpaceDiffusionDistillation.

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19.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22 DOI: HASH:e44e8a5407379304f0046260ce6c8b00

Age-related changes in acoustic cue use for speech-in-speech perception

Authors:

Fish↗DiNino↗

Acoustic cues such as pitch and spatial location allow listeners to attend to a target speaker and ignore competing talkers, aiding speech recognition in background noise. Diminished ability to utilize acoustic cues for speech stream segregation may thus contribute to older adults' challenges hearing in noise. Adults aged 18-74 completed a speech-in-speech identification task with three conditions containing 1) only pitch cues (fundamental frequency), 2) only spatial cues (interaural time differences; ITDs), and 3) both pitch and spatial cues for segregating a target talker from competing talkers. Hearing thresholds at standard and extended high frequencies (EHFs), auditory brainstem responses (ABRs), and digit span scores were acquired to examine the influence of sensory and cognitive factors on use of each acoustic cue for speech-in-speech recognition. Significant differences were observed between cue condition scores indicating that use of the available cue(s) drove performance. ABR metrics were not a significant predictor but digit span scores significantly predicted scores on all three cue conditions. Working memory abilities therefore set a baseline for participants' speech-in-speech recognition regardless of the acoustic content. Hearing thresholds at standard frequencies significantly predicted scores on the Pitch condition. EHF hearing thresholds better predicted Spatial and Both Cue condition performance, suggesting that EHF thresholds represent auditory processing important for coding ITDs. Age group analysis revealed that older adults (aged 40+) performed significantly more poorly on all cue conditions of the speech-in-speech recognition task relative to younger adults. Age-related changes in auditory sensory processing may therefore impair older adults' speech-in-noise perception by reducing their ability to use acoustic cues for segregating target and competing speech.

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20.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16502

Active Reference Acquisition in Few-Shot Font Generation

Authors:

Shinnosuke Matsuo↗

Few-shot font generation aims to synthesize the remaining glyphs of a font given one or a few reference glyphs while preserving stylistic consistency, thereby supporting font designers in efficiently completing a typeface. Existing methods primarily focus on improving generation quality given a fixed reference set. However, when the current reference glyphs are insufficient to represent the target style, few-shot font generation may fail to produce satisfactory results. In practical scenarios, additional reference glyphs can often be obtained from the designer when necessary. Accordingly, we propose a new framework, Active Reference Acquisition in Few-Shot Font Generation, in which the model sequentially decides which character to acquire next as an additional reference. Furthermore, we propose a reference part-coverage-based acquisition function to efficiently query the designer. Motivated by the observation that font styles are well characterized by local structural parts, we represent each glyph using a histogram of local features and select query characters that maximize the expected part coverage of the reference set. By prioritizing characters that contain parts not yet covered by the current references, the proposed method progressively expands the diversity of visual parts in the reference set. As a result, generation quality is improved with fewer queries. Experiments on the Google Fonts dataset demonstrate that the proposed method achieves higher generation quality than random querying and reference-agnostic baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/matsuo-shinnosuke/ActiveRef-FontGen.

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21.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11922

Lung-SRAD: Spectral-Aware Regularized Audio DASS with Dual-Axis Patch-Mix Contrastive Learning for Respiratory Sound Classification

Authors:

Hemansh Shridhar↗Miika Toikkanen↗June-Woo Kim↗

arXiv:2606.11922v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent respiratory sound classification (RSC) studies largely rely on CLS-token driven self-attention architectures such as the Audio Spectrogram Transformer (AST). While effective at modeling global context, recent analyses suggest a low-pass filtering behavior that may reduce sensitivity to localized abnormal patterns. In this work, we investigate State Space Models (SSMs) as an alternative backbone for RSC. Using the Distilled Audio State Space model, we analyze intermediate representations through spectral response curves and observe stronger preservation of mid-to-high spatial-frequency components. Based on these observations, we introduce spectral-aware layer regularization using Gaussian convolution applied to selected layers. We further propose Dual-Axis Patch-Mix contrastive learning tailored to SSM-based audio models for robust representation learning. Experiments on the ICBHI benchmark show that our approach achieves 64.48% score, outperforming the AST baseline by 5%. Code is available at https://github.com/RSC-Toolkit/Lung-SRAD.

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22.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2401.14283

Information Leakage Detection through Approximate Bayes-optimal Prediction

Authors:

Pritha Gupta↗Marcel Wever↗Eyke H\"ullermeier↗

arXiv:2401.14283v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In today's data-driven world, the proliferation of publicly available information raises security concerns due to the information leakage (IL) problem. IL involves unintentionally exposing sensitive information to unauthorized parties via observable system information. Conventional statistical approaches rely on estimating mutual information (MI) between observable and secret information for detecting ILs, face challenges of the curse of dimensionality, convergence, computational complexity, and MI misestimation. Though effective, emerging supervised machine learning based approaches to detect ILs are limited to binary system sensitive information and lack a comprehensive framework. To address these limitations, we establish a theoretical framework using statistical learning theory and information theory to quantify and detect IL accurately. Using automated machine learning, we demonstrate that MI can be accurately estimated by approximating the typically unknown Bayes predictor's log-loss and accuracy. Based on this, we show how MI can effectively be estimated to detect ILs. Our method performs superior to state-of-the-art baselines in an empirical study considering synthetic and real-world OpenSSL TLS server datasets.

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23.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-20 DOI: HASH:1d1533d50dadea05b1249ee3a67c7593

SAbDab2: The structural antibody database in the age of machine learning

Authors:

Capel↗H. L↗Vavourakis↗Williams↗B. H↗Taylor↗C. R↗Deane↗C. M↗

The Structural Antibody Database (SAbDab) is a publicly available repository of experimentally determined antibody structures, first released in 2013. Explicit support for single-domain antibodies was added in 2021, with SAbDab-nano. Recently, increasing interest in antibodies has led to a proliferation of novel antibody formats, while simultaneous advances in machine learning have increased demand for standardised, high-quality structure data. Here, we present SAbDab2, re-engineered for the machine-learning age. It introduces support for a variety of new formats, and makes it easy to retrieve and compare all known structures of a given antibody. In addition, SAbDab2 provides ready access to ML-grade structures of antibody and antibody–antigen-complexes, with standardised, versioned train/test splits. These will be updated every six months going forward, and are available at https://zenodo.org/records/20083995. SAbDab2 itself is updated weekly and is freely available at https://sabdab2.opig.stats.ox.ac.uk.

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24.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2604.04173

Spatial Localization of Relativistic Quantum Systems: The Commutativity Requirement and the Locality Principle. Part II: A Model from Local QFT

Authors:

Valter Moretti↗

arXiv:2604.04173v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper is the second and final part of a two-part study. We construct positive-energy relativistic spatial localization observables in Minkowski spacetime within standard quantum field theory, using the stress–energy–momentum tensor smeared with suitable test functions. For each fixed timelike direction, the construction gives positive operator-valued measures (POVMs) on spacelike hypersurfaces, well defined on every $n$-particle sector and satisfying a relativistic causality condition excluding superluminal propagation of detection probabilities. The observables are built from local or quasi-local field-theoretic quantities, thus providing a rigorous version of earlier heuristic proposals. In the one-particle sector, the construction reduces to the observable previously introduced by the author, and its first moment gives the Newton–Wigner position operator under appropriate normalization and centering assumptions. Because the Reeh–Schlieder theorem prevents the normally ordered stress–energy–momentum tensor from being positive on the full Fock space, we use quantum energy inequalities to obtain lower bounds controlling deviations from positivity. This leads to regularized operator families, bounded from below, which approximate the localization effects. Finally, we define conditional localization observables for finite laboratories through modified local energy operators. By Haag duality, the corresponding conditional POVMs belong to local von Neumann algebras and commute for causally separated regions, in accordance with the Araki–Haag–Kastler framework. The results show how commutativity of localization observables is recovered for conditional measurements in finite spacetime regions.

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25.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11914

NARRAS: Edge-Triggered Distributed Inference for CSI-Based Localization in Vehicular IoT Networks

Authors:

Rodrigo Oliver↗Ricardo Vazquez Alvarez↗Alejandro Lancho↗Stefano Rini↗

arXiv:2606.11914v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: CSI-based localization with spatially distributed antenna arrays exposes a basic resource trade-off. Each array can provide a rich view of the channel, but forwarding observations from all arrays to a fusion center is wasteful when only a few carry useful information, and the shared uplink supports only a limited number of simultaneous transmissions. We let each array decide locally whether its current observation is worth reporting, subject to a budget on the average number of active transmitters. We refer to this abstraction as Edge-Triggered Distributed Inference (ETDI). It captures a broader class of task-oriented communication problems where resource-constrained devices share an access channel for a common inference task. We instantiate ETDI for CSI-based localization, a common scenario in vehicular IoT networks. Spatially distributed remote antenna arrays (RAAs) encode local channel state information (CSI) from user equipment (UE) transmissions into latent features, and the fusion center estimates the UE position from the subset of reported features. We propose NARRAS, a decentralized reporting policy in which each RAA combines a recurrent summary of its recent observations with a memory of the last latent it transmitted. Training controls an explicit activity budget through differentiable activity penalties and validation-calibrated deterministic thresholds, and uses channel-chart regularization to shape the latent geometry. Experiments show that, at comparable uplink activity, NARRAS improves localization accuracy over learned and heuristic sparse-reporting strategies, while dense full-report models remain useful budget-free references. In low-activity regimes, chart regularization further reduces high-percentile localization errors, suggesting that geometry-aware latent representations are more robust under sparse reporting.

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