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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Testing Catability and Coherent Superposition of $2\mathcal{D}$ Graphene Quantum system

arXiv:2605.10967v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We develop a theoretical framework for describing superposed coherent states in graphene quantum systems using the concept of catability as a phase-sensitive metric functional measure. In this case, the formalism quantifies interference stability and coherence structure via phase-dependent contributions of quantum superposition states. Catability is defined as a functional measure sensitive to relative phase variations within coherent state combinations, serving as a diagnostic tool for quantum interference effects in graphene-based systems. Also, the formulation is extended using Lie algebra techniques, where the underlying symmetry structure of graphene quantum states is represented through operator algebras governing state transformations in quantum space. In this context, to describe nonlocal propagation and phase-resolved dynamics, a Green function approach is incorporated, enabling systematic treatment of quantum correlations in a spatially extended structures framework. A unified framework is constructed by combining Lie algebraic symmetry analysis with Green function propagation theory, yielding a consistent description of phase-sensitive catability in complex graphene quantum configurations within the framework approach. Results provide a structured route for testing coherence, interference stability, and quantum state control in low-dimensional quantum materials systems.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

A Biased Nonnegative Block Term Tensor Decomposition Model for Dynamic QoS Prediction

arXiv:2605.04813v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: With the rapid development of cloud computing and Web services, Quality of Service (QoS) has become a key criterion for service selection and recommendation. Tensor latent feature analysis provides an effective way to model multidimensional QoS data, and most existing QoS prediction methods are mainly based on Canonical Polyadic (CP) decomposition or Tucker decomposition. However, constrained by their inherent structural properties, these methods cannot accurately capture the complex and dynamic dependencies in user-service interactions, which limits their prediction performance. To address this issue, this paper proposes a dynamic QoS prediction framework based on the Biased Nonnegative Block Term Tensor Decomposition Model, termed BNBT. Specifically, the proposed framework is developed from three aspects: (1) block term tensor decomposition is employed to enhance the representation capability of latent feature learning; (2) linear bias terms are incorporated to further improve prediction accuracy; and (3) a tensor-oriented single-element-dependent nonnegative multiplicative update algorithm, called SLF-NMUT, is designed for efficient parameter estimation. Extensive experiments on real-world QoS datasets demonstrate that the proposed BNBT framework consistently outperforms several state-of-the-art QoS prediction methods in terms of prediction accuracy.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Finite-Sample Bounds for Expected Signature Estimation under Weak Dependence

arXiv:2605.20541v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The expected signature uniquely determines the law of a random rough path under a moment-growth condition, yet finite-sample bounds for estimating its truncations from a single long dependent trajectory remain unavailable. We study a strictly stationary stochastic process equipped with a geometric rough-path lift, observed in non-overlapping blocks of equally-spaced samples, and prove a non-asymptotic mean-squared error (MSE) bound for the block-averaging estimator of its truncated expected signature. Under moment and stationarity assumptions together with a direct covariance-decay condition on block signatures – strictly weaker than $\alpha$-mixing and applicable to long-range-dependent processes – the error separates into a discretization term and a fluctuation term, with rates determined respectively by path regularity and dependence strength. A levelwise rough-factorial variance analysis keeps finite-truncation constants explicit and yields an optimal allocation rule under a fixed observation budget. We verify the assumptions for independent-coordinate fractional Ornstein–Uhlenbeck processes in three regimes: short-range (Hurst $1/41/2$. Monte Carlo experiments show empirical slopes steeper than the guaranteed upper-bound rates.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

DiffCold: A Diffusion-based Generative Model for Cold-Start Item Recommendation

arXiv:2606.12245v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cold-start item recommendation remains a persistent challenge in real-world systems due to the absence of interaction histories. While prior models attempt to bridge this gap using item content features, they universally suffer from the seesaw dilemma: enhancing performance for cold items inevitably degrades performance for warm items, and vice versa. We identify that this dilemma stems from a fundamental distributional disparity: warm item embeddings occupy a complex ``behavioral manifold" shaped by rich interaction signals, whereas cold item embeddings are constrained to a ``semantic manifold" derived solely from auxiliary content. Existing methods often force a rigid mapping between these inconsistent spaces, causing the model to sacrifice the precision of warm representations to accommodate cold ones. To address this, we propose DiffCold, a diffusion-based generative model that unifies warm and cold representations. Unlike GANs or VAEs, DiffCold leverages conditional diffusion to reconstruct warm item embeddings from content, preserving the underlying manifold structure without degradation. We further tailor this paradigm with two specific designs: a Retrieval-enhanced Aggregator that initializes generation using semantically similar warm items to bypass inefficient noise, and a Simulation-based Representation Alignment module that enforces distribution consistency between generated and real embeddings via contrastive learning. Experiments on three benchmarks confirm that DiffCold resolves the seesaw dilemma, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art methods across all metrics.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Branching Flows: Discrete, Continuous, and Manifold Flow Matching with Splits and Deletions

arXiv:2511.09465v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion and flow matching approaches to generative modeling have shown promise in domains where the state space is continuous, such as image generation or protein folding & design, and discrete, exemplified by diffusion large language models. They offer a natural fit when the number of elements in a state is fixed in advance (e.g. images), but require ad hoc solutions when, for example, the length of a response from a large language model, or the number of amino acids in a protein chain is not known a priori. Here we propose Branching Flows, a generative modeling framework that, like diffusion and flow matching approaches, transports a simple distribution to the data distribution. But in Branching Flows, the elements in the state evolve over a forest of binary trees, branching and dying stochastically with rates that are learned by the model. This allows the model to control, during generation, the number of elements in the sequence. We also show that Branching Flows can compose with any flow matching base process on discrete sets, continuous Euclidean spaces, smooth manifolds, and `multimodal' product spaces that mix these components. We demonstrate this in three domains: small molecule generation (multimodal), antibody sequence generation (discrete), and protein backbone generation (multimodal), and show that Branching Flows is a capable distribution learner with a stable learning objective, and that it enables new capabilities.

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

LLMs+Graphs: Toward Graph-Native, Synergistic AI Systems

arXiv:2606.11560v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced rapidly, but their limitations in structured and multi-hop reasoning underscore the need for graph-native, synergistic artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Graph-structured data underpins critical applications across social, biological, financial, transportation, web, and knowledge domains, making it essential to understand how LLMs can leverage graph computation for grounded, context-rich inference. Three complementary synergies are emerging: LLMs augmented with graph computation for retrieval and reasoning; bidirectional integration between LLMs and knowledge graphs (KGs), where LLMs support KG construction and curation while KGs enforce semantic constraints and factual consistency; and AI agents strengthened by graph algorithms for planning, decision making, and multi-step reasoning. In parallel, LLMs introduce new capabilities for graph data management and graph machine learning (ML) through natural language interfaces and hybrid LLM-graph neural network (GNN) pipelines. This tutorial synthesizes the algorithms, systems, and design principles driving these converging directions, offering data science and data mining researchers a unified perspective on integrating LLMs, graph data management, graph mining, graph ML, and agentic computation into next-generation graph-native AI systems.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Non-negative Elastic Net Decoding for Information Retrieval

Dense retrieval has become the dominant paradigm in information retrieval, in which each document is scored against a query by the inner product of their vector embeddings, and the top-$k$ documents by score are retrieved for this query. However, since each document's score depends solely on the embedding of the query and itself, the retrieval process is oblivious to the content of the entire corpus. Therefore, dense retrieval cannot avoid selecting semantically similar documents from the corpus, which may result in a non-diverse, redundant set of retrieved documents. To this end, we approach retrieval as a joint decoding problem, in which documents are selected as a set with regard to the context of the rest of the corpus. To achieve this, we propose Non-Negative elastic Net (NNN) decoding, which selects documents whose embeddings jointly reconstruct the query embedding as a sparse non-negative linear combination. Our main theoretical result establishes a strict separation between dense retrieval and NNN decoding. For any corpus, every query correctly handled by dense retrieval is also handled by NNN decoding, while on corpora containing correlated documents, NNN decoding additionally handles queries that dense retrieval cannot. Experimental results indicate that applying NNN decoding to frozen embeddings trained for inner-product scoring yields consistent improvements across several benchmarks. Moreover, we introduce an end-to-end training procedure which optimizes the embeddings for NNN decoding, producing significant performance gains surpassing in all metrics and benchmarks compared to dense retrieval. Our work establishes a new paradigm for leveraging dense embeddings in information retrieval, beyond the standard practice of inner-product scoring.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

CmdNeedle: Measuring the Incompleteness of Command Denylists for AI Agents

arXiv:2606.15549v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The adoption of AI agents is increasing rapidly. Terminal AI agents, i.e., AI agents that run in terminal environments, are a widely used type of AI agents. Terminal AI agents rely heavily on shell command execution to interact with the host systems. They adopt a three-list command-gating mechanism to mitigate security risks introduced by command execution, with denylists serving as the load-bearing component. However, modern operating systems often ship a large, ever-expanding set of shell commands with complex functionalities. Our observation is that even a built-in denylist of Claude Code, well-maintained by its developers, can overlook bypass commands that invalidate its effectiveness. Such negligence leads to fragile command denylists that cannot even block operations that practitioners expect them to block. This paper presents the first systematic characterization of command denylist fragility in terminal AI agents. The paper formalizes the command denylist fragility problem and proposes an LLM-driven pipeline, CmdNeedle, to detect such fragility. It prompts the LLM to propose possible bypasses and iteratively repairs them using feedback from a validator that executes them in a sandbox. In the evaluation, we applied CmdNeedle to 1,709 real-world command denylists (containing 13,332 denylist rules) collected from GitHub. The evaluation shows several key findings, including that 69.0–98.6% of the denylists are fragile, that this fragility occurs consistently across projects and agents, and the validity of several possible root causes for this fragility. Our pipeline and findings will hopefully facilitate future research and practice regarding the command denylists used by AI agents.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Quantum mechanics over real numbers fully reproduces standard quantum theory

arXiv:2604.19482v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Standard quantum mechanics employs complex Hilbert spaces, but whether complex numbers are fundamental or merely convenient has long been debated. For decades, real-valued equivalents were considered mathematically possible but cumbersome. However, a highly cited 2021 result claimed that any quantum theory based on real numbers is experimentally falsifiable via network Bell experiments. Yet, it remains an open question whether this falsification applies to all real-valued theories. Here we show that this conclusion rests on an incomplete real formulation, and we present a rigorous real-valued framework that perfectly reproduces all predictions of standard quantum mechanics. We demonstrate that the standard real tensor product ($\otimes_{\mathbb{R}}$) used in previous no-go theorems is algebraically incompatible with the rich structure of conventional quantum mechanics. We present a real framework based on K\"{a}hler space and prove that it is exactly isomorphic to established quantum mechanics via an explicit bijection $\gamma$. The isomorphism extends to composite systems through a symplectic composition rule $\otimes^{\ks}$ that replaces the Kronecker product. Consequently, our formulation achieves the maximal $\mathrm{CHSH}_{3}$ violation of $6\sqrt{2}$ using purely real variables, demonstrating that the no-go theorem is specific to a particular real representation of states and operators and to the composition rule $\otimes_\mathbb{R}$ built upon it, neither of which extends to the present K\"{a}hler framework. These results demonstrate that complex numbers are not fundamentally required by nature; rather, they encode a deeper real geometric structure that governs quantum interference and entanglement, settling this long debate.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Oops, Wait: Discourse Tokens Matter in Reasoning Model

Recent studies suggest that even data-efficient training with ($\simeq$1K) reasoning trajectories can induce non-trivial reasoning capabilities in large language models through post-training. Such training corpora often contain iconic tokens such as "wait", "so", and "alternatively", which frequently appear in reasoning trajectories and may play a role in this process. This paper focuses on characterizing observable token-level patterns in post-training and a case study of how data-efficient supervised fine-tuning (SFT) differs from, and falls short of, large-scale post-training. To this end, we first identify tokens that correlate with correct answers along reasoning trajectories across models and training setups. We then focus on the distribution and (functional) roles of the "wait" token to primarily study the model trained in a data-efficient manner compared with the counterpart. Our study finds that discourse tokens are associated with correctness and a reasoning accuracy jump, even in data-efficient SFT. This suggests data-efficient SFT can partially reproduce discourse-token patterns to mimic meaningful reasoning behavior, but the patterns are less aligned with high-confidence answer transitions than those from large-scale post-training.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Assessment of adaptive functioning in Angelman syndrome using the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales, Third Edition

Purpose: This study examined longitudinal trajectories of adaptive functioning in 331 individuals with Angelman syndrome (AS) using the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales, Third Edition (Vineland-3) and examined differences by molecular subtype. Methods: A total of 331 individuals (156 females, 47%) with genetically confirmed AS (ages 6 months to 52 years) were assessed between 2018 and 2025, including 207 with a deletion subtype, 63 with uniparental disomy or imprinting defect, and 61 with a UBE3A point mutation. Growth scale values were analyzed using linear mixed-effects models with log2-transformed age. Results: Individuals with deletion subtypes demonstrated significantly lower adaptive functioning across domains compared to those with non-deletion subtypes. Adaptive skills across all Vineland-3 subdomains increased nonlinearly with age, showing faster growth early in life that slowed over time, with largely parallel trajectories across subtypes. Conclusion: Individuals with AS demonstrate slow but steady growth in adaptive functioning that continues into adulthood, with progress varying by molecular subtype. These findings provide updated natural history benchmarks and demonstrate the utility of the Vineland-3 for clinical trials.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

MMRINet: Efficient Mamba-Based Segmentation with Dual-Path Refinement for Low-Resource MRI Analysis

Automated brain tumor segmentation in multi-parametric MRI remains a critical yet underserved challenge in resource-constrained clinical settings, where deep 3D networks requiring high-end GPUs are not viable. This is particularly acute across sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), where low-field scanners, heterogeneous patient demographics, and severe data scarcity compound the difficulty of applying standard deep learning pipelines. We present MMRINet, a lightweight segmentation architecture purpose-built for these constraints. At its core, MMRINet replaces quadratic-complexity self-attention with linear-complexity Mamba state-space models, enabling efficient long-range volumetric context modeling without the computational overhead of Transformer-based approaches. We combine two lightweight refinement components:Dual-Path Feature Refinement (DPFR), which extracts complementary detail and contextual representations to improve feature diversity under limited data, and Progressive Feature Aggregation (PFA), which hierarchically fuses multi-scale decoder outputs for sharper segmentation boundaries. Evaluated on the BraTS-Lighthouse SSA 2025 challenge dataset, comprising 3D MRI scans from Nigerian clinical sites, MMRINet achieves an average Dice score of 0.752 and an average HD95 of 12.23 mm with only ~2.5M parameters, outperforming all evaluated baselines, including UNETR, Swin-UNETR, SegMamba, and SegResNet3D. These results indicate that strong validation-set segmentation performance can be achieved with substantially reduced computation, offering a practical step toward AI-assisted neuro-oncology in low-resource clinical environments. Our GitHub repository can be accessed here: BioMedIA-MBZUAI/MMRINet.

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

ActWorld: From Explorable to Interactive World Model via Action-Aware Memory

Interactive world models aim to simulate environment dynamics under real-time user actions. However, their action vocabulary is largely confined to navigation: most actions correspond to motion (e.g., walk, turn, look around), while interaction with objects in the scene (e.g., pick up plates, open doors, or trigger physical responses) is either absent, restricted to game domains, or relegated to prompt-to-full-video scenarios. The resulting worlds are visually explorable but not truly actionable. In this work, we present ActWorld, an interactive world model that extends prior navigation-centric generators to support mid-rollout object interaction within a chunk-autoregressive framework. We argue that the navigation-interaction gap stems from two bottlenecks. First, a data bottleneck: the lack of human-object interaction data with accurate, dense labels. Second, a memory bottleneck: recency-biased history compression in existing world models discards the event-transition frames that causally determine subsequent object states, leading to an action-forgetting pathology. On the data side, we construct a 100K interaction video dataset, each annotated with per-chunk captions via chain-of-thought reasoning. On the model side, we introduce a hierarchical action-aware memory design that routes history compression by interaction importance, complemented by a persistent memory bank that maintains event-update and object-identity tokens across long rollouts. Experiments show that ActWorld supports both flexible navigation and rich object interaction within a single model, substantially improving interaction fidelity over navigation-only baselines without sacrificing viewpoint control. Project page is available at https://interactwm.github.io/ActWorld.

14.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-13

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

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

15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

novelBGC: An interactive dual-score framework for biosynthetic gene cluster novelty assessment and candidate prioritisation

Genome mining now yields tens of thousands of putative biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) per project, yet, separating genuinely novel candidates from rediscoveries of known compounds remains the rate-limiting step before experimental validation. Single-axis prioritisation tools, antiSMASH similarity, BiG-FAM GCF distance, and self-resistance-enzyme (SRE) filters such as ARTS, each surface a different facet of evidence, yet their isolated use systematically over-ranks rediscovery-prone BGCs and overlooks genuinely orphan clusters. We present novelBGC, a web-hosted framework that converts these disparate outputs into two deliberately non-inverse continuous metrics per BGC, a Novelty (N) and a Reference Similarity (RS) score which together define a 2D decision plane that resolves rediscoveries, divergent family members, contig-edge artefacts, and uncharted chemistry with interactive visualisations, with all component weights user-tuneable at submission. Retrospective validation across three independent experimental datasets demonstrates the utility of the framework for candidate prioritization. Within the first 186-BGC SRE-guided cloning study, every confirmed bioactive product fell within the low-to-mid N band whereas 55 high-N (N [&ge;] 0.50) BGCs were never selected. Moreover, in the other two studies, it correctly prioritised the fully orphan lariocidin BGC of Paenibacillus sp. M2 and the divergent within-family indanopyrrole-A idp BGC of Streptomyces sp. CNX-425. Together, these case studies demonstrate that the joint (N, RS) space facilitates prioritization decisions that are difficult to achieve using any single criterion alone. from identical input data. novelBGC requires no command-line expertise, no local tool installation, and no manual integration of intermediate output formats, addressing a well-documented accessibility barrier for wet-laboratory researchers engaging with genome-mining workflows. novelBGC is freely available at https://project.iith.ac.in/sharmaglab/novelbgc/.

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

Decoupling Semantics from Distortions: Multi-Scale Two-Stream Vision-Language Alignment for AI-Generated Image Quality Assessment

Authors:

Existing vision-language model (VLM)-based AI-generated image quality assessment (AIGIQA) methods suffer from a fundamental semantic-distortion dimensional conflict: monolithic representations optimized for semantic discrimination inherently entangle compositional understanding with low-level perceptual sensitivity, rendering them blind to fine-grained quality degradations. We introduce MST-CLIPIQA, a multi-scale two-stream framework that achieves hierarchical vision-language alignment through explicit representational decoupling. Our architecture leverages dual CLIP encoders with complementary patch granularities: coarse-grained streams capture global semantic coherence while fine-grained streams preserve textural signatures and artifact patterns. An information bottleneck-inspired gated fusion mechanism performs adaptive cross-scale distillation, with optional cross-attention enabling prompt-anchored correspondence evaluation when generation prompts are available. Extensive experiments across five benchmarks establish new state-of-the-art results, achieving average improvements of 1.11 percent SRCC on quality and 2.35 percent SRCC on text-image correspondence prediction, while maintaining efficiency with only 0.8M trainable parameters. Our project is available at https://github.com/YMlinfeng/MST-CLIPIQA.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II

Much research has been carried out on large language models (LLMs) and LLM-powered agentic workflows. However, many works within the field state emergence of, ascribe to, or assume, generalised anthropomorphic attributes to them (e.g., morality or understanding of natural language). Our goal is not to argue in favour or against the existence of these attributes, but to point out that these conclusions could be incorrect. For this we build and train a simple neural network on the videogame Age of Empires II, and note that any entity in a sufficiently-powerful substrate, such as LEGO or the Greater Boston Area, could also present such attributes. Hence, the purported anthropomorphic attributes of LLMs are empirically non-unique: although some properties (e.g., responses to prompts) could remain invariant, others, such as the interpretation of their perceived behaviour, might change with the substrate. Thus, any empirically-grounded discussion on these attributes requires explicit measurement criteria; otherwise the interpretation is left to the representation. We then show that assuming that these attributes exist or not in a system, independent of the substrate and in a generalised way, leads to either circular or uninformative conclusions. This is regardless of the experimenter's viewpoint on the subject, or whether the outcome shows existence or non-existence. Finally we propose a 'null' assumption, where one assumes LLM non-uniqueness instead of assuming anthropomorphic attributes to set up an experiment, along with examples of it. We also discuss potential objections to our work, briefly survey the field, and prove that Age of Empires II is functionally- and Turing-complete.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

EfficientRollout: System-Aware Self-Speculative Decoding for RL Rollouts

arXiv:2606.18967v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a representative post-training paradigm for LLMs, enabling strong reasoning and agentic capabilities. However, rollout generation remains a dominant latency bottleneck because autoregressive sampling decodes responses sequentially and a small number of long-tailed generations often determine completion time. Speculative decoding (SD) offers a natural way to address this bottleneck, as it is a well-established technique for serving fixed LLMs that reduces latency by rapidly drafting tokens and accepting them through parallel verification while preserving the target-model distribution. However, its practical speedups do not directly carry over to RL rollouts: (i) the evolving target policy makes any fixed drafter increasingly mismatched with the policy's output distribution; and (ii) active batch sizes shrink throughout rollout decoding, shifting decoding from compute-bound to memory-bound regimes where parallel verification can exploit underutilized compute. Therefore, accelerating RL rollouts requires both a drafter that remains effective under long, high-temperature generations from an evolving policy and system-aware use of SD that avoids compute-bound regimes. We present EfficientRollout, a system-aware self-SD framework designed to address this gap for RL rollouts. EfficientRollout induces a quantized drafter from the target model (i.e. self-speculative decoding), keeping it coupled to the evolving policy without separate drafter pretraining or online adaptation. It further coordinates a system-aware SD toggle policy with acceptance-aware draft-length adaptation, enabling speculation only in beneficial regimes while matching the drafting budget to evolving drafter quality. EfficientRollout reduces rollout and end-to-end latency by up to 19.6% and 12.7%, respectively, over an accelerated AR rollout baseline, while preserving final model quality.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Breaking the Filter Bubble: A Semantic Pareto-DQN Framework for Multi-Objective Recommendation

arXiv:2606.24042v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recommender systems often induce filter bubbles and semantic homogenization by monolithically optimizing for immediate user engagement. Standard single-objective models, including traditional Deep Q-Networks, are ill-equipped to navigate the trade-offs between platform retention and critical societal values like information diversity and provider fairness. To address these limitations, we introduce a multi-objective reinforcement learning framework that formalizes recommendation as a semantic multi-objective Markov decision process. By integrating high-fidelity semantic embeddings with a Pareto-DQN agent, our architecture treats engagement, diversity, and fairness as distinct, non-aggregable reward signals, avoiding the pitfalls of static reward scalarization. Empirical evaluations on the MovieLens small dataset shows that our hypervolume based action selection disrupts the feedback loops responsible for semantic collapse. By sustaining high state-trajectory variance, the Pareto-DQN effectively maps the Pareto frontier, achieving gains in auxiliary societal objectives with only marginal impacts on engagement. This work provides a path toward intrinsically aligned, responsible recommender systems.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Random Rule Forest (RRF): Interpretable and Manageable Ensembles of LLM-Generated Questions for Predicting Success from Unstructured Data

arXiv:2505.24622v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many high-stakes screening tasks require predicting rare outcomes from unstructured text, where errors are costly and decisions must be auditable. We introduce Random Rule Forest (RRF), an interpretable ensemble that uses a large language model (LLM) not as an end-to-end predictor but as a generator of simple YES/NO questions. Each question acts as a weak learner, and their responses are combined by a plain unit-weight vote into an auditable ``green-flags'' scorecard: enough independent positive signals indicate a higher chance of success. We argue this deliberate simplicity is a robust default when positives are scarce and learned weights are hard to estimate. We evaluate RRF in two low-base-rate domains. On early-stage startup screening from founder profiles, RRF produces a transparent scorecard whose precision is several times the base rate (with light expert input raising it further) and, unlike direct prompting, its operating point can be controlled directly. On an established Phase~I clinical-trial benchmark, RRF outperforms published baselines on the threshold-independent metrics PR-AUC and ROC-AUC. Together these show that LLMs can serve as auditable feature generators for high-stakes text-based decisions, combining transparency with competitive predictive performance.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Hallucination in Medical Imaging AI: A Cross-Modality Analytical Framework for Taxonomy, Detection, and Mitigation under Regulatory Constraints

arXiv:2606.13211v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI systems are being deployed across medical imaging faster than their failure modes are understood. At this point in time, the failure of greatest clinical concern is hallucination: clinically plausible but factually incorrect outputs, including fabricated anatomical structures, missed findings, incorrect laterality, and invented measurements in generated reports, with direct consequences, for example, for biopsy decisions, staging, and treatment planning. This structured narrative synthesizes peer-reviewed studies, benchmark datasets, and FDA regulatory guidance across five imaging modalities to produce a cross-modality analysis of hallucination taxonomy, etiology, detection, and mitigation. Specifically, we address three questions in this study: (1) how can existing taxonomies be unified across modalities?, (2) how do medical-specialized foundation models hallucinate less than general-purpose ones?, and (3) which mitigation strategies are effective and compatible with FDA lifecycle oversight? We note that three taxonomic frameworks together cover the imaging pipeline in a way no single framework does alone. We also highlight that general-purpose foundation models outperform medical-specialized models on hallucination-specific benchmarks, indicating that narrow domain fine-tuning can introduce overfitting-induced confabulation. At the same time, the oversight of radiologists remains essential; for instance, a very high percentage of of AI-generated flags required expert correction before clinical use. Physics-informed architectural constraints, Chain-of-Thought prompting, and human-in-the-loop safeguards each address different failure modes and is effective when combined. All findings are mapped to the FDA's Total Product Lifecycle and Predetermined Change Control Plan frameworks, which treat hallucination management as a lifecycle obligation rather than a pre-deployment checklist.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Peak-Based Nuclide Identification in HPGe $\gamma$-Spectrometry with Machine Learning and SHAP

arXiv:2606.14874v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: High-purity germanium gamma spectra often require time-consuming analyses from subject matter experts. Photopeaks within these spectra are carefully fitted and numerical methods are employed to assist with nuclide identification (NID) and quantification. Amending the list of nuclides identified by analysis software can be nontrivial. When many samples need to be analyzed, it is therefore challenging to make timely and correct decisions. Supervised machine-learning-based NID can serve as an expert-informed, automated tool to improve the initial set of radionuclides suggested to an analyst and more effectively drive subsequent quantification. To that end, we implemented machine learning models that map photopeaks carefully fitted by analysts to NID results for experimental spectra containing various isotopic combinations drawn from a set of 65 isotopes. The best model achieved an F1 score of 0.97, markedly surpassing the F1 score of 0.84 achieved by traditional software when compared using a nuclide library comprising the same 65 isotopes assessed by the models. Finally, we illustrated the most important input features for model predictions using Shapley Additive Explanations. These explanations revealed that the models use physically relevant photopeaks when making predictions for the isotopes in our nuclide library.

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

FireRed-Image-Edit-1.0 Technical Report

We present FireRed-Image-Edit, a diffusion transformer for instruction-based image editing that achieves state-of-the-art performance through systematic optimization of data curation, training methodology, and evaluation design. We construct a 1.6B-sample training corpus, comprising 900M text-to-image and 700M image editing pairs from diverse sources. After rigorous cleaning, stratification, auto-labeling, and two-stage filtering, we retain over 100M high-quality samples balanced between generation and editing, ensuring strong semantic coverage and instruction alignment. Our multi-stage training pipeline progressively builds editing capability via pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning. To improve data efficiency, we introduce a Multi-Condition Aware Bucket Sampler for variable-resolution batching and Stochastic Instruction Alignment with dynamic prompt re-indexing. To stabilize optimization and enhance controllability, we propose Asymmetric Gradient Optimization for DPO, DiffusionNFT with layout-aware OCR rewards for text editing, and a differentiable Consistency Loss for identity preservation. We further establish REDEdit-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark spanning 15 editing categories, including newly introduced beautification and low-level enhancement tasks. Extensive experiments on REDEdit-Bench and public benchmarks (ImgEdit and GEdit) demonstrate competitive or superior performance against both open-source and proprietary systems. To support future research, our code, models, and benchmark suite are publicly available at https://github.com/FireRedTeam/FireRed-Image-Edit/ .

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Otters++: A Time-to-first-spike Based Energy Efficient Optical Spiking Transformer

arXiv:2606.13016v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are promising for energy-efficient inference, and time-to-first-spike (TTFS) coding is especially attractive because each neuron fires at most once. In practice, however, this benefit is often reduced by the cost of computing a temporal decay term and multiplying it by the synaptic weight. We address this issue by turning a physical hardware "bug," the natural signal decay in optoelectronic devices, into the main computation of TTFS, named Otters++. Specifically, we use the measured decay of a custom In$_2$O$_3$ optoelectronic synapse to directly realize the TTFS temporal term, removing the need for explicit digital decay computation. To scale this idea to Transformer models, we establish a layer-wise functional equivalence between the Otters++ and a quantized neural network (QNN), and develop a hybrid training method that uses device-faithful SNN computation in the forward pass and QNN straight-through gradients through the equivalent QNN path in the backward pass, together with model distillation. This avoids differentiation through discrete first-spike events and reduces the over-sparsity problem in direct TTFS-SNN training. We further make training aware of measured device noise by sampling run-to-run variation, and refine the system-level energy model by accounting for device sharing and multi-hop communication. On GLUE dataset, Otters++ improves the average score to 84.17\% while maintaining a clear energy advantage over prior spiking Transformer baselines. These results show that physically grounded TTFS computing can be efficient, trainable, and robust under realistic hardware effects.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

X+Slides: Benchmarking Audience-Conditioned Slide Generation

arXiv:2606.19256v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automatically generating slide decks from source documents is an important application of large language models (LLMs). Existing benchmarks primarily assess slide completeness and technical depth, while overlooking the target audience as a critical real-world factor. For instance, specialists demand rigorous proofs, whereas decision-makers prioritize actionable conclusions. To bridge this gap, we introduce X+Slides, a benchmark specifically designed for audience-conditioned slide generation. Built on a diverse corpus spanning 113 topics and seven presentation scenes, X+Slides employs a dynamic evaluation framework constructed from 8,133 deduplicated, source-grounded probes. By assigning audience-specific utility weights to the same source-grounded probes, X+Slides reports four complementary metrics: Audience Coverage measures how much audience-essential information is conveyed, Domain-wise Coverage shows which information types are covered, Efficiency measures delivered utility per unit of attention cost, and Correctness verifies whether slide claims are supported by the source. Experiments on DeepPresenter, SlideTailor, and NotebookLM show that current systems can recover a substantial but still incomplete part of audience-essential information: at $\tau_A=0.7$, DeepPresenter reaches a best Audience Coverage of 0.714, SlideTailor reaches 0.594, and the NotebookLM ablation reaches 0.853 while showing clear grounding differences. These results indicate that visual quality and broad topic coverage should not be treated as evidence support without source-grounded evaluation.