Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15 DOI: HASH:c7a2eec04b04b62c6da4391414adc1f8

Unveiling the Awareness of Private Health Insurance Coverage among Healthcare Professionals in Freetown, Sierra Leone: Insights Extracted from Their Perspectives.

Authors:

Gary↗L. P↗Kamara↗A. N↗Jimmy↗A. I↗Lebbie↗A. P↗

Our study is an assessment of the knowledge, personal coverage, and related determinants of private health insurance as revealed by healthcare professionals in Freetown, the urban capital of Sierra Leone. This study stands as a precursor for Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs), like Sierra Leone, seeking to establish Universal Health Coverage (UHC) to provide healthcare access and coverage through publicly arranged risk pooling, designed to help protect against unmanageable medical costs. In parallel, such countries face significant challenges with achieving sustainable universal coverage due to limited public resources, inefficient allocation systems, uneasy reliance on out-of-pocket payments, and large struggling populations. Our research sheds particular light on how healthcare professionals view their own participation with private healthcare options. A cross-sectional, analytical study was conducted, openly recruiting individuals from various facilities in Freetown. Using the Yamane Formula, a sample size of 109 participants was calculated. STATA 14.0 was used for data analysis. Our findings revealed that 96 (88.9%) participants did not have private health insurance, while 12 (11.1%) did have private coverage. However, 105 (97.2%) reported other modes of health insurance, with only 3 (2.8%) uninsured. Notably, 97.2% expressed willingness to join a private health insurance scheme. Our study found no statistically significant associations between selected indicators (demographic or socioeconomic fac tors) and current insurance coverage among study participants. These results highlight a low prevalence and understanding of private health insurance among healthcare professionals in a representative urban center in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), while acknowledging high willingness to enroll. The lack of any significant determinants suggests other unexamined factors, such as cost, accessibility, or awareness, capable of influencing the adoption and implementation of a universal health program.

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02.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18624

PragReST: Self-Reinforcing Counterfactual Reasoning for Pragmatic Language Understanding

Authors:

Jihyung Park↗Minchao Huang↗Leqi Liu↗Elias Stengel-Eskin↗

Natural language understanding often depends on meanings that are implied rather than explicitly stated, requiring pragmatic reasoning. Despite strong performance on math and logical reasoning, large language models (LLMs) still struggle with making pragmatic inferences, often choosing literal interpretations. To improve LLM pragmatic reasoning, we introduce PragReST, a self-supervised framework that constructs pragmatic QA data, generates counterfactual reasoning traces, and trains models to internalize them through supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, without human-labeled training data or distillation from a stronger teacher. Across four pragmatic benchmarks (PragMega, Ludwig, MetoQA, and AltPrag), PragReST improves over backbone models, task-specific pragmatic tuning baselines, and non-counterfactual variants of the same pipeline. On accuracy-based benchmarks, PragReST improves over the instruct backbone by 5.37 and 5.50% (absolute) for Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-14B, respectively. Our error analysis and ablations underscore the importance of counterfactual reasoning: PragReST primarily reduces errors caused by failures to contrast observed utterances with plausible alternatives, and removing counterfactual reasoning substantially reduces performance. Moreover, our training preserves out-of-domain performance on general-knowledge and mathematical reasoning benchmarks.

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03.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18722

Very large cliques in a scale-free random graph

Authors:

Carlo De Ambroggio↗Umberto De Ambroggio↗

arXiv:2606.18722v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this short article we consider a preferential attachment random graph model with edge steps, studied by Alves, Ribeiro and Sanchis. Starting with an initial graph $\mathbb{G}_1$ formed by a vertex with a self-loop attached to it, the model evolves as follows. At every subsequent (discrete) time step, either with probability $p$ we add a vertex to the graph and connect it to exactly one of the older vertices selected with probability proportional to its degree, or with probability $1-p$ we add one edge between two existing vertices, both selected (independently) with probability proportional to their degrees. Let $\omega(\mathbb{G})$ be the clique number of a graph $\mathbb{G}$, i.e.\ the number of vertices in a largest complete subgraph of $\mathbb{G}_{}$. Alves, Ribeiro and Sanchis showed that, for any given $\varepsilon>0$, we have $\omega(\mathbb{G}_{2t})\geq t^{\frac{1-p}{2-p}(1-\varepsilon)}$ with high probability (i.e.\ with probability tending to $1$ as $t\rightarrow \infty$). Here we strengthen this bound by showing that, for any function $f:\mathbb{N}\mapsto \mathbb{N}$ that satisfies $f(t)\rightarrow \infty$ as $t\rightarrow \infty$, with high probability \[\omega(\mathbb{G}_{2t}) = \Omega\left(t^{\frac{1-p}{2-p}}\Big(\log^{\frac{1}{2-p}}(t)f(t)\Big)^{-1}\right).\]

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04.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11243

ProHiFlo: Hierarchical Flow Matching with Functional Guidance for De Novo Protein Generation

Authors:

Chuanzhen Wang↗Meade Cleti↗Pete Jano↗

De novo protein generation has transformative potential in therapeutic design, enzyme engineering, and synthetic biology. While diffusion-based and flow matching approaches have achieved progress, they typically operate at single resolution and lack mechanisms for incorporating functional constraints. We introduce ProHiFlo, a hierarchical flow matching framework with three innovations: (1) coarse-to-fine generation that models backbone geometry before refining to all-atom coordinates, reducing computational cost while maintaining accuracy; (2) functional guidance leveraging pretrained predictors to steer generation toward desired properties without retraining; (3) adaptive SE(3)-equivariant architecture for efficient multi-scale processing. Experiments on unconditional generation, motif scaffolding, and functional design demonstrate state-ofthe-art performance while requiring 4 fewer sampling steps. On enzyme active site scaffolding, ProHiFlo achieves 58.9% success rate compared to 41.2% for RFDiffusion.

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05.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2602.22822

FlexMS: A Unified Public Benchmark for Molecule Tandem Mass Spectrum Prediction

Authors:

Yunhua Zhong↗Yixuan Tang↗Yifan Li↗Pan Liu↗Zhiwen Yang↗Jie Yang↗Jun Xia↗

arXiv:2602.22822v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) is central to small molecule identification, but current deep learning systems for spectrum prediction still remain difficult to evaluate and deploy in practice. While novel architectures constantly claim state-of-the-art performance, inconsistent metadata conditioning and entangled preprocessing pipelines hinder fair architectural comparisons. Besides, existing evaluations are often restricted to curated datasets, failing to capture the heterogeneity and cross-domain shifts of real-world metabolomics. Furthermore, current benchmarks lack difficulty-aware diagnostics and leave blind to how models behave under specific compute or data constraints. To address this, we present FlexMS, a modular public-data benchmark framework that standardizes MS/MS prediction across public resources while keeping molecular encoders, metadata conditioning, predictor heads, and downstream retrieval under one protocol. FlexMS establishes a fair evaluation playground which significantly lowers the barrier for integrating new predictive tools. Rather than solely optimizing for average scores, FlexMS augments aggregate accuracy with difficulty-aware diagnostics, providing actionable guidance on model selection across different compute constraints, data scales, and downstream retrieval objectives. Ultimately, FlexMS provides the community with a reproducible standard to identify which algorithmic conclusions are stable and which operating points are most viable in practice.

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06.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15778

DYNA : Dynamic Episodic Memory Networks for Augmenting Large Language Models with Temporal Knowledge Graphs in Continuous Learning

Authors:

Ali Sarabadani↗Mahtab Tajvidiyan↗

Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to incorporate new knowledge without forgetting or costly retraining. We propose DYNA, a lightweight framework that augments a frozen LLM with a temporal knowledge graph where events are nodes and temporal relations are directed, timestamped edges. The graph serves as an external, updatable memory. At query time, DYNA retrieves relevant nodes via random walks and centrality measures, then augments the LLM's response. Evaluated on three temporal recall tasks, DYNA reduces catastrophic forgetting by ~7% compared to fine-tuning and improves temporal ordering by ~5% over standard RAG. Higher graph clustering coefficients correlate with better retrieval, showing that graph structure matters. Contributions: (1) episodic memory as temporal KG, (2) retraining-free LLM augmentation, (3) graph properties as predictors of retrieval performance.

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07.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11247

Physics-informed generative AI for semiconductor manufacturing: Enforcing hard physical constraints in generative models by construction

Authors:

Yaser Mike Banad↗Sarah Sharif↗

arXiv:2606.11247v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative models are increasingly used to propose designs, data, and control actions for physical systems, yet many such systems are governed by hard physical constraints rather than by perceptual plausibility. Semiconductor manufacturing provides a demanding test case: generated masks, layouts, synthetic defect data, and process recipes must obey lithography, transport, reaction, and device-physics constraints, because physically invalid samples are not merely low quality but unusable. This Perspective argues that semiconductor manufacturing exposes a broader computational-science challenge, namely that generative AI for constrained physical domains must be physics-informed by construction, not corrected only through post-hoc filtering. We survey the emerging architectural toolkit, including physics-informed diffusion, PDE-constrained variational models, neural-operator priors, and conservation-law-respecting generative networks, and show how it connects to differentiable lithography, TCAD, process simulation, and autonomous experimentation. We identify four integration patterns between generative models and physics-based simulators, and we propose a research agenda centered on physics-fidelity benchmarks, differentiable simulator infrastructure, and multimodal foundation models for physical design and manufacturing. The central claim is analytical rather than rhetorical: where physical validity is the binding criterion of success, architectures that enforce it by construction should be expected to outperform those that filter for it after the fact, and the fab is the setting where this distinction is sharpest.

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08.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.13748

FedSPC: Shared Parameter Correction for Personalized Federated Learning

Authors:

Kannanthodath Induchoodan Ajay Menon↗Christian Prehofer↗Yunfei Xu↗Toru Hirano↗

arXiv:2606.13748v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Personalized federated learning (PFL) is one of the important approaches in federated learning for addressing statistical heterogeneity while enabling client-specific adaptation. Many PFL methods split the model into shared and personalized parameters, which are jointly trained on each client. However, this creates an optimization issue: shared parameters are updated by clients optimizing different local objectives, which can lead to inconsistent shared updates and weaken the shared representation. To address this problem, we propose Federated Shared Parameter Correction (FedSPC), a modular correction method for PFL. FedSPC applies control-variate correction only to the shared parameters of a given PFL method, while leaving personalized parameters unchanged. It can be integrated into three common PFL settings: shared feature extractors, shared classifiers, and fully shared models with local regularization. Experiments on CIFAR-100 and Tiny-ImageNet with ViT, ResNet-34, and VGG-11 show that FedSPC improves performance across representative PFL methods, including FedPer, FedRep, FedBABU, LG-FedAvg, and Ditto.

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09.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2602.02466

Resolving problems with the continuum limit in coherent-state path integrals

Authors:

Oliwier Urba\'nski↗

arXiv:2602.02466v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The paper solves the problem of continuum limit in bosonic thermal coherent-state path integrals. For this purpose, exact discrete versions of the path integral are constructed for three different orderings of the Hamiltonian: normal, anti-normal and symmetric (Weyl order). Subsequently, their different continuum versions are checked on the harmonic oscillator, to choose the symmetric ordering as a possibly correct choice for all polynomial Hamiltonians. Spotted mathematical subtleties in the simple case serve as a clue to the general solution. Finally, a general justification for the symmetric order is provided by deriving the continuum path integral starting from the exact discrete case using a renormalization procedure in the imaginary time frequency domain. While the role of Weyl order has already been found, the paper provides the missing proof of its suitability for every polynomial Hamiltonian and simplifies the previously established construction by referring only to creation and annihilation operators (without position and momentum operators).

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10.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18520

Compact Geometric Representations of Hierarchies

Authors:

Prashant Gokhale↗Piotr Indyk↗Yuhao Liu↗Sandeep Silwal↗Tony Chang Wang↗Haike Xu↗

Computing geometric representations of data is a cornerstone of modern machine learning, typically achieved by training dual encoders which map queries and documents into a shared embedding space. Recent work of You et al. [NeurIPS '25] has extended this approach to hierarchical retrieval, where relevance is determined by the ancestor-descendant relationships in a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). While previous work has shown that valid embeddings exist when the number of descendants is small, these bounds degrade significantly for deep hierarchies, requiring dimensions as large as the total number of nodes. In this paper, we investigate compact reachability embeddings for more general graph classes and provide theoretical guarantees for representing hierarchies using embeddings whose dimension depends on structural graph parameters. We prove that for any directed tree, there exists a reachability embedding in constant dimension 3, independent of the tree's size or depth. We generalize this result to graphs characterized by treewidth $t$, constructing embeddings of dimension $O(t \log n)$, where $n$ is the number of nodes. Complementing these upper bounds, we provide matching or near-matching lower bounds, showing that dimension $\Omega(n)$ is necessary for general DAGs and $\Omega(t/\log(n/t))$ is required for graphs of treewidth $t$. We also obtain upper and lower bounds parameterized by the number of cross-edges in the DAG. We additionally show that our embeddings can be constructed on real world datasets, and that they give much smaller dimensions in high recall regimes compared to prior embeddings with theoretical guarantees.

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11.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19747

A Comparative Study of Pretrained Transformer Models for Quranic ASR: Speech Representations, Label Formats, and Dataset Composition

Authors:

Nabil Mosharraf Hossain↗Riasat Islam↗Unaizah Obaidellah↗

arXiv:2606.19747v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quran Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) aims to convert Quranic recitation into text, enabling applications such as aided memorisation tools and Quranic search engines. However, existing ASR models often exhibit high Word Error Rates (WER) on user-recited verses and lack full coverage of the Quranic corpus. This paper presents a systematic empirical study of domain-specific fine-tuning of pretrained Transformer-based models for Quranic ASR, using advanced speech feature extraction methods: Wav2Vec2.0, HuBERT, and XLS-R. These models apply self-supervised learning by masking portions of input audio and using Transformer architectures to learn context-aware speech features. The pretrained models are fine-tuned on a filtered Quranic dataset exceeding 870 hours of professional and user recitations. Through comprehensive ablation studies across feature extractors, output label formats, training strategies, and clip durations, we identify the key factors that affect transcription accuracy in this domain. Our best-performing configuration achieves a WER of 0.08 on the EveryAyah subset and 0.11 on the combined EveryAyah+Tarteel setting, representing roughly a five-percentage-point gain over the Citrinet baseline (WER = 0.163) while reducing combined-model training time from 140 hours to 40 hours. Arabic text without diacritics yields the best fine-tuning results, and Wav2Vec2-XLSR-53 provides the strongest overall representation. Future work includes improving dataset quality and developing phoneme-aware models to extract deeper speech feature representations for Tajweed-sensitive applications.

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12.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19603

Comparing Linear Probes with Mahalanobis Cosine Similarity

Authors:

Zhuofan Josh Ying↗Peter Hase↗Nikolaus Kriegeskorte↗

arXiv:2606.19603v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Linear probes are widely used in interpretability research and often compared by cosine similarity. The Mahalanobis cosine similarity (MCS) between two directions, which reweights the inner product by test data covariance, is a natural task-aware refinement. Ying et al. (2026) report that a probe's MCS to a reference probe trained on the out-of-distribution (OOD) data near-perfectly linearly predicts the probe's OOD AUROC (R^2 = 0.98). Here, we extend this empirical finding across models, layers, and concept domains, and prove this general phenomenon in closed form: For balanced classes whose projections are Gaussian, OOD AUROC and MCS to the reference probe are linear because both are sigmoid-shaped functions of the probe's signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) on the test data. The theory also predicts when this linearity fails, which we verify empirically. MCS offers a theoretically grounded and empirically effective alternative to Euclidean cosine similarity for comparing linear probes.

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13.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17229

Rift: A Conflict Signature for Deception in Language Models

Authors:

Petr Nyoma↗

A model that lies while knowing the truth is the central case ELK cannot handle with behavioral evaluation alone. We ask whether such deception leaves an internal signature distinguishing it from honest error. Our key move is a control for wrongness: we contrast a sleeper agent (knows the truth, lies on trigger) against a naive liar (fine-tuned to emit the same wrong answers with no honest training). Both produce identical wrong outputs; any difference is about knowledge conflict, not incorrectness. We find deceptive forward passes carry a conflict signature - 2.1-2.3x higher residual rank than naive-liar passes on the same wrong answer - strong enough to identify which of two responses is the lie with 100% accuracy and no labels, across GPT-2 small/medium (three seeds) and three instruct models. Across Qwen2.5-1.5B/7B and Phi-3-mini, instructed deception raises residual rank on every tested fact (18/18, 40/40, 34/34); on Phi-3, lies separate perfectly from both honest answers and hallucinations (AUC 1.0, Wilcoxon p~6e-11). The signature survives strategic self-constructed deception (model invents its own lie, AUC 1.0), active concealment attempts (AUC 1.0), and length-controlled replication (20/20, AUC 1.0, p~1e-6). Using basis-free relative representations, a probe trained on one model family detects deception in two other families zero-shot (mean AUC 0.933), surviving simultaneous architecture and format change (AUC 0.821), and transfers across five languages (AUC 1.000, length-controlled). The signature is read-only: detectable but not injectable (0/8 both directions). Honest limitations and six negative experiments are documented in full.

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14.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.19334

Freeing the Law with LOCUS: A Local Ordinance Corpus for the United States

Authors:

Denis Peskoff↗Joe Barrow↗Christopher Vu↗Diag Davenport↗

Progress in legal AI increasingly depends on access to authoritative legal text at scale. Yet one of the most consequential layers of American law remains largely absent from existing machine-readable corpora: local ordinances. Local codes govern zoning, housing, business licensing, public health, noise, animal control, and many other domains of everyday regulation, but they are fragmented across vendor platforms designed for human browsing rather than bulk research access. We introduce LOCUS - the Local Ordinance Corpus for the United States - a comprehensive corpus and county-harmonized access layer for U.S. municipal and county ordinance codes. The raw corpus, available for release to researchers, represents nearly all publicly available municipal and county ordinance codes. The resulting raw corpus contains codes from 9,239 cities and counties. A smaller county-harmonized LOCUS access layer provides coverage for the largest 2,309 of 3,144 U.S. counties, accounting for a majority of the population. We use OCR to handle the myriad of document formats that have kept the law from being a public resource. We release the corpus with coverage metadata to support reproducibility, downstream legal AI research, and the incremental expansion of machine-readable access to local law. We train a collection of ModernBERT-based classifiers and scorers to facilitate analyzing U.S. local law among several dimensions, such as opacity and paternalism, that have not previously been studied at this scale. LOCUS-v1 and its derivative models are available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/LocalLaws/LOCUS-v1

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15.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16607

Context-Aware Markov VAE for CSI Compression in Wireless Systems

Authors:

Efstathios Chatziloizos↗Konstantinos Vandikas↗Aneta Vulgarakis Feljan↗Zheng Chen↗Nikolaos Pappas↗

arXiv:2606.16607v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper considers neural channel state information (CSI) compression for time-varying massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels in frequency division duplex (FDD) systems with limited feedback resources. The main challenge lies in obtaining a compact and efficient representation of the CSI given that it exhibits strong temporal correlation across successive snapshots. Existing memoryless compression models do not exploit this property, while simple temporal extensions often incorporate multiple observations without explicitly modeling the latent dynamics. We propose a context-aware compression framework based on a k-memory Markov variational autoencoder (k-MMVAE), which uses a finite temporal window to capture the evolution of CSI in the latent space. The model introduces Markov-structured latent dynamics with finite memory, enabling efficient use of temporal dependencies for compression. Simulation results show that the proposed approach improves target CSI reconstruction performance compared to memoryless and weakly sequential baselines, particularly at low and moderate compression rates. These results suggest that explicit latent temporal modeling can provide an effective mechanism for CSI compression under limited feedback constraints.

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16.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15307

Adapting Reinforcement Learning with Chain-of-Thought Supervision for Explainable Detection of Hateful and Propagandistic Memes

Authors:

Mohamed Bayan Kmainasi↗Mucahid Kutlu↗Ali Ezzat Shahroor↗Abul Hasnat↗Firoj Alam↗

Hateful and propagandistic memes exploit the interplay between images and text to convey harmful intent that neither modality reveals alone. Although thinking-based multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have advanced vision-language understanding, their application to meme content moderation remains underexplored. We propose a reinforcement learning-based post-training method that improves classification performance and reference-based explanation quality in thinking-based MLLMs via task-specific rewards and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Concretely, we (i) conduct a systematic empirical study of off-the-shelf MLLMs for hateful and propagandistic meme understanding across English and Arabic benchmarks, (ii) extend existing meme datasets with weakly supervised chain-of-thought (CoT) rationales via distillation and multi-LLM fine-grained propaganda annotations, (iii) introduce a GRPO-based objective with thinking-length regularization that jointly optimizes classification accuracy and explanation quality, and (iv) investigate self-supervised GRPO on unlabeled memes using consensus-based pseudo-labels. Experiments on the Hateful Memes and ArMeme benchmarks show that our approach improves over previously reported results on FHM accuracy (up to +2.1%, from 79.9% to 82.0%) and on ArMeme macro-F1 (up to +7.6 points, from 0.536 to 0.612 with explanations; +6.1 compared to the original ArMeme benchmark), while also generating natural-language explanations. On ArMeme, sequence-classification baselines remain stronger in terms of raw accuracy, whereas our approach provides more balanced per-class performance along with explanations. We publicly release our code, data extensions, and evaluation resources.

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17.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15004

CREST: Deployment-Realistic Hardware-in-the-Loop NAS for Embedded Sensing Systems

Authors:

Joseph Q. Zales↗Pragya Sharma↗Mani Srivastava↗

arXiv:2606.15004v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deploying neural networks on low-power microcontrollers (MCUs) requires selecting model architectures under tight memory, latency, and energy constraints. Existing workflows often simplify this process along one or more axes: static proxy costs such as FLOPs or parameters, treating one MCU as representative, and continuous-inference tests instead of deployed sensing schedules. These assumptions can mis-rank Pareto-front candidates, miss infeasible deployments, and obscure schedule-dependent energy. We present CREST (Cross-platform Runtime Evaluation and Search Tool), a deployment-realistic hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) neural architecture search (NAS) framework for MCU sensing systems. CREST keeps the optimizer, HIL measurement boundary, logging, and replay workflow fixed while exposing workload, model family, target backend, schedule, quantization, and scoring policy as configurable axes. This makes deployment effects experimentally separable within one reusable workflow. We evaluate CREST on inertial odometry and audio classification across three Arm Cortex-M targets. For inertial odometry, measured-energy HIL search reduces median per-inference energy by 41.7% versus FLOPs-based selection and 40.8% versus memory-traffic-based selection at similar error. FLOPs-based selection also chooses infeasible deployments on memory-constrained targets. On the STM32 N657 target, continuous-inference and duty-cycled searches produce different Pareto frontiers. For audio classification, the same application-level policy selects different DS-CNN architectures on different boards, and cross-board replay changes deployment cost substantially. Overall, CREST shows that deployment-realistic MCU NAS must jointly optimize model architecture, target platform, runtime schedule, and deployment policy rather than relying only on static proxy costs or continuous-inference measurements.

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18.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16113

RecourseBench: A Modular Framework for Reproducible Algorithmic Recourse Evaluation

Authors:

Zahra Khotanlou↗Hashir Ahmed↗Chenghao Tan↗Ahmed Abdelaal↗Amir-Hossein Karimi↗

arXiv:2606.16113v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Algorithmic recourse methods provide counterfactual explanations that inform individuals of the actions required to overturn an unfavorable model decision. Despite rapid methodological progress, principled comparison remains elusive; existing frameworks are often difficult to extend and lack both interoperability and systematic verification that integrated methods faithfully reproduce their originally reported results. We introduce RecourseBench, a unified evaluation framework built around three commitments namely, modularity, reproducibility, and interactivity. The framework decomposes the pipeline into five fully decoupled layers – Data, Preprocessing, Model, Recourse Method, and Evaluation – governed by abstract interfaces and a dynamic registry. To address the reproducibility gap in prior benchmarks, we introduce a four-tier classification system in which every integrated method is validated by an automated test suite against its originally reported results. We further provide an interactive web interface for flexible, configuration-driven comparison across methods, datasets, and model architectures. Our framework currently integrates 28 state-of-the-art recourse methods and, to our knowledge, constitutes the first recourse benchmark to explicitly enforce method-level reproducibility through automated, quantitative testing.

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19.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2602.08324

Towards Efficient Large Language Reasoning Models via Extreme-Ratio Chain-of-Thought Compression

Authors:

Yuntian Tang↗Bohan Jia↗Wenxuan Huang↗Lianyue Zhang↗Jiao Xie↗Wenxi Li↗Wei Li↗Jie Hu↗Xinghao Chen Rongrong Ji↗Shaohui Lin↗

arXiv:2602.08324v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning successfully enhances the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet it incurs substantial computational overhead for inference. Existing CoT compression methods often suffer from a critical loss of logical fidelity at high compression ratios, resulting in significant performance degradation. To achieve high-fidelity, fast reasoning, we propose a novel EXTreme-RAtio Chain-of-Thought Compression framework, termed Extra-CoT, which aggressively reduces the token budget while preserving answer accuracy. To generate reliable, high-fidelity supervision, we first train a dedicated semantically-preserved compressor on mathematical CoT data with fine-grained annotations. An LLM is then fine-tuned on these compressed pairs via a mixed-ratio supervised fine-tuning (SFT), teaching it to follow a spectrum of compression budgets and providing a stable initialization for reinforcement learning (RL). We further propose Constrained and Hierarchical Ratio Policy Optimization (CHRPO) to explicitly incentivize question-solving ability under lower budgets by a hierarchical reward. Experiments on three mathematical reasoning benchmarks show the superiority of Extra-CoT. For example, on MATH-500 using Qwen3-1.7B, Extra-CoT achieves over 73\% token reduction with an accuracy improvement of 0.6\%, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Our source codes have been released at https://github.com/Mwie1024/Extra-CoT.

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20.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15282

Enhancing Precision Agriculture with a Hybrid Deep Learning Framework for Multi-Class Plant Disease Classification and Interpretability

Authors:

Hasibul Islam Sufi↗Ridam Roy↗Shayla Alam Setu↗Mahimul Islam Nadim↗

This study proposes an overall deep learning architecture for multi-class classification of plant diseases from high-resolution leaf imagery, with a particular interest in investigating the behavior of ResNet-50 and a hybrid ResNet + Vision Transformer (ViT) design. A specially gathered image database with 15,200 training images and 3,800 validation images spanning 38 classes across multiple crops, including tomato, apple, grape etc. were subjected to preprocessing steps such as resizing, normalization, and data augmentation to enhance model robustness. Multiple architectures, including ResNet-50, MobileNetV2, and EfficientNet-B0, were trained and compared with the hybrid ResNet + ViT model. All models were fine-tuned using the AdamW optimizer and cross-entropy loss, with early stopping applied to prevent overfitting and ensure generalization. Furthermore, interpretability techniques such as Grad-CAM and saliency maps were implemented to indicate disease-relevant regions, while segmentation-based analysis was performed to identify the affected parts of a leaf. For every one of the considered architectures, ResNet-50 led to the highest accuracy of 98.74%, whereas the hybrid ResNet + ViT model achieved a competitive accuracy of 98.58%, showing that the hybrid architectures were effective in capturing both local and overall information. The experimental results showcase the promise of transformer-based models to achieve highly accurate, interpretable, and computationally efficient computer-based multi-class multi-disease classification systems, providing helpful assistance for cultivation management practices as well as for precision farming.

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21.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15575

Do we have the knowledge we need? Rethinking human-AI decision-making in corporations

Authors:

Anne S. R. Marx↗Ricardo M. Avelino↗Torbj{\o}rn Netland↗Mennatallah El-Assady↗

arXiv:2606.15575v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Organizational knowledge is fragmented across a variety of software systems, tacit expertise, and manual documents that have traditionally been designed for human consumption. As AI systems are increasingly deployed and granted decision-making roles, they require access to this knowledge. This raises two questions: how should organizations store and maintain knowledge so that it remains accessible to both humans and future AI systems, and how should agency be allocated between humans and AI across tasks with different risks and levels of uncertainty? In this position paper, we describe how organizational knowledge evolves and contribute a framework that maps task attributes and knowledge availability to recommended agency allocations and control mechanisms. We illustrate the applicability of the framework on two different manufacturing tasks: a routine operation (visual quality inspection) and a one-off strategic decision (factory location), and conclude with opportunities for future research.

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22.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2512.11081

Provable Recovery of Locally Important Signed Features and Interactions from Random Forest

Authors:

Kata Vuk↗Nicolas Alexander Ihlo↗Merle Behr↗

arXiv:2512.11081v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Feature and Interaction Importance (FII) methods are essential in supervised learning for assessing the relevance of input variables and their interactions in complex prediction models. In many domains, such as personalized medicine, local interpretations for individual predictions are often required, rather than global scores summarizing overall feature importance. Random Forests (RFs) are widely used in these settings, and existing interpretability methods typically exploit tree structures and split statistics to provide model-specific insights. However, theoretical understanding of local FII methods for RF remains limited, making it unclear how to interpret high importance scores for individual predictions. We propose a novel, local, model-specific FII method that identifies frequent co-occurrences of features along decision paths, combining global patterns with those observed on paths specific to a given test point. We prove that our method consistently recovers the true local signal features and their interactions under a Locally Spike Sparse (LSS) model and also identifies whether large or small feature values drive a prediction. We illustrate the usefulness of our method and theoretical results through simulation studies and a real-world data example.

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23.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2510.09468

Geodesic Calculus on Implicitly Defined Latent Manifolds

Authors:

Florine Hartwig↗Josua Sassen↗Juliane Braunsmann↗Martin Rumpf↗Benedikt Wirth↗

arXiv:2510.09468v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Latent manifolds of autoencoders provide low-dimensional representations of data, which can be studied from a geometric perspective. We propose to describe these latent manifolds as implicit submanifolds of some ambient latent space. Based on this, we develop tools for a discrete Riemannian calculus approximating classical geometric operators. These tools are robust against inaccuracies of the implicit representation often occurring in practical examples. To obtain a suitable implicit representation, we propose to learn an approximate projection onto the latent manifold by minimizing a denoising objective. This approach is independent of the underlying autoencoder and supports the use of different Riemannian geometries on the latent manifolds. The framework in particular enables the computation of geodesic paths connecting given end points and shooting geodesics via the Riemannian exponential maps on latent manifolds. We evaluate our approach on various autoencoders trained on synthetic and real data.

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24.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14515

Securing the Future of IoMT in the Post-Quantum Era: An Edge-Native Federated Learning Approach

Authors:

Taym Alshoghri↗Deemah H. Tashman↗Mohammad Reza Gerami↗Soumaya Cherkaoui↗

arXiv:2606.14515v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices operate under strict resource constraints while handling highly sensitive health data, making security and privacy critical concerns. Federated learning (FL) further complicates this landscape, as model updates exchanged during training may unintentionally expose private medical information. Emerging quantum computing capabilities threaten the long-term viability of conventional lightweight cryptographic mechanisms, motivating the integration of Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) into IoMT systems. This article discusses key enabling technologies for quantum-resilient IoMT, including post-quantum key establishment, lightweight encryption, and edge-native orchestration. We propose a scalable Kubernetes-based framework that integrates PQC into FL-enabled IoMT environments and validate it on a Raspberry Pi testbed. Results demonstrate that distributed cryptographic processing significantly reduces latency compared to sequential designs while maintaining feasible resource overhead. The primary contribution of this work lies in the design and validation of a secure orchestration and communication framework for FL-enabled IoMT systems. We conclude by outlining future directions toward energy-aware architectures, intelligent security optimization, and resilient next-generation Intelligent Internet of Medical Things (IIoMT) ecosystems.

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25.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20544

Toward Calibrated Mixture-of-Experts Under Distribution Shift

Authors:

Gina Wong↗Drew Prinster↗Suchi Saria↗Rama Chellappa↗Anqi Liu↗

arXiv:2606.20544v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Calibration aligns a model's predictive uncertainty with the frequencies of its empirical outcomes and is important for understanding and trusting reported probabilities. Recent work shows that enforcing calibration at the level of individual predictors can improve ensemble accuracy and calibration, with mixture-of-experts (MoE) models showing strong empirical improvements in particular; however, the conditions under which calibration helps MoE are not well understood. In this work, we study how MoE models behave under distribution shift, focusing on how routing mechanisms interact with expert-level calibration. We show that expert calibration is sufficient to ensure calibration of the overall model under a broad class of distribution shifts in hard-routed models, but is insufficient for calibrating soft-routed models. To address this, we propose an adversarial reweighting that penalizes calibration errors of the routed aggregate under distribution shift, and we demonstrate that it improves the accuracy-calibration tradeoff both on average and on difficult subsets of the data, across model classes, prediction tasks, and distribution shifts.

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