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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Crypto x AI, AI x Crypto: A Survey

Authors:
Sarah Allen↗Pranay Anchuri↗James Austgen↗Maryam Bahrani↗Samuel Breckenridge↗Aaron Buchwald↗Christian Cachin↗Andr\'es F\'abrega↗Jared Fernandez↗James Hsin-yu Chiang↗Marwa Mouallem↗Roi Bar-Zur↗…

arXiv:2606.13892v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The intersection of crypto x AI is spawning papers, products, online posts, and companies. All the surrounding buzz, though, obscures what exactly has been done, what the opportunities and challenges are, and what open questions deserve attention. This survey paper asks what AI can do for blockchain-based technologies (broadly construed as "crypto") (crypto x AI), and vice versa (AI x crypto). We systematize existing work, summarize key takeaways, highlight open research questions, and offer a perspective on pervasive industry misconceptions, concluding that AI and crypto are still in the very early stages of meaningful integration.

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

Zero-order Parameter-free Optimization for LMO-based Methods: Novel Approach for Efficient Fine-tuning

Authors:
Dmitriy Bystrov↗Daniil Medyakov↗Dmitry Bylinkin↗Aleksandr Beznosikov↗

arXiv:2606.14970v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) has become a central application of modern optimization, enabling pretrained models to adapt to diverse downstream tasks and domain-specific data. A major obstacle in large-scale fine-tuning is the memory overhead of backpropagation, which requires storing activations, gradients, and optimizer states. Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization offers a memory-efficient alternative, but its performance is highly sensitive to the stepsize and smoothing parameter, often requiring costly task-specific tuning. Parameter-free (PF) optimization addresses this issue by adapting algorithmic parameters without prior knowledge of problem-dependent constants. Moreover, large-scale fine-tuning can benefit from geometry-aware updates that account for the heterogeneous structure of parameter blocks, which can be modeled through methods that exploit linear minimization oracle (LMO). In this work, we study PF adaptation for LMO-based ZO optimization and introduce $\texttt{AdaNAGED}$, a method that unifies gradient-free training, adaptive tuning, and non-Euclidean update geometry. We establish convergence guarantees and validate the method on large-scale LLM fine-tuning task with $\texttt{OPT}-1.3\mathrm{B}$ model.

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03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

FedRot-LoRA: Mitigating Rotational Misalignment in Federated LoRA

Authors:
Haoran Zhang↗Dongjun Kim↗Seohyeon Cha↗Haris Vikalo↗

arXiv:2602.23638v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated LoRA provides a communication-efficient mechanism for fine-tuning large language models on decentralized data. In practice, however, a discrepancy between the factor-wise averaging used to preserve low rank and the mathematically correct aggregation of local updates can cause significant aggregation error and unstable training. We argue that a major source of this problem is rotational misalignment, arising from the rotational invariance of low-rank factorizations – semantically equivalent updates can be represented in different latent subspaces across clients since $(B_i R_i)(R_i^\top A_i) = B_i A_i$. When such misaligned factors are averaged directly, they interfere destructively and degrade the global update. To address this issue, we propose FedRot-LoRA, a federated LoRA framework that aligns client updates via orthogonal transformations prior to aggregation. This alignment preserves the semantic update while reducing cross-client subspace mismatch, without increasing communication cost or restricting model expressivity. We provide a convergence analysis that examines the aggregation error induced by factor-wise averaging and shows how rotational alignment yields a tighter upper bound on this error. Extensive experiments on natural language understanding and generative tasks demonstrate that FedRot-LoRA consistently outperforms existing federated LoRA baselines across a range of heterogeneity levels and LoRA ranks.

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04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Federated Bilevel Performative Prediction

Authors:
Liangxin Qian↗Chang Liu↗Xuanyu Cao↗Jun Zhao↗Kwok-Yan Lam↗

arXiv:2606.19734v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated bilevel optimization is widely used for nested learning problems across distributed clients, such as federated hyperparameter tuning and meta-learning under privacy and communication constraints. Most existing formulations assume fixed client data distributions, which can be violated by performativity, where deployed decisions reshape client behavior and data collection, inducing client-specific, decision-dependent distribution shift. We study federated bilevel performative prediction, where both upper-level (UL) and lower-level (LL) objectives are evaluated under client-dependent, decision-dependent distributions. We formalize the federated bilevel performatively stable (FBPS) point under a decoupled-risk perspective and provide sufficient conditions for its existence and uniqueness. We then develop two federated methods to compute the FBPS solution: FBi-RRM, which converges linearly under a contraction condition, and FBi-SGD, a communication-efficient stochastic method based on federated hypergradient estimation with convergence guarantees under diminishing step sizes when sensitivities are sufficiently small. Experiments on strategic regression and meta strategic classification validate the predicted stability thresholds and demonstrate improved meta-generalization over non-performative baselines, and CNN-based classification further demonstrates the practical effectiveness of the proposed methods in nonconvex neural network settings.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Point-Wise Geometry-Aware Transformer for Partial-to-Full Point Cloud Registration in Computer-Assisted Surgery

Authors:
Siyu Zhou↗Zhongliang Jiang↗

Partial-to-full registration remains challenging due to varying overlap ratios, fluctuating point densities, and the presence of noise. While transformers have shown strong potential for point cloud processing, prior methods typically confine them to global context aggregation, overlooking fine-grained local geometry crucial for accurate correspondence. We propose GAPR-Net, a learning-based point cloud registration framework with a coarse-to-fine architecture that combines convolution and transformer modules, in which local and global information is fused between the partial and full point clouds using a cross-attention mechanism. To achieve this, a transformation-invariant point-wise geometric feature representation is proposed, which can robustly capture relative geometric features for individual points with respect to their neighboring points. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, experiments are conducted on four geometrically distinct bones, including the tibia, femur, pelvis, and thoracic cartilage. The overall registration recall reaches 94.2\%, the method results in a low RMSE of 1.992 mm and $R^2$ values of 0.908 and 0.974 for rotation and translation, respectively. The results demonstrate that the proposed method effectively addresses the partial-to-full point cloud registration problem. The proposed method enables highly accurate 3D point cloud registration using partial observation, providing a critical foundation for precise surgical navigation and robotic interventions in computer-assisted surgery. The code will be accessed after the double-blind review process.

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06.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Practical Tests and Witnesses of Fermionic non-Gaussianity

Authors:
Tobias Haug↗Xhek Turkeshi↗Piotr Sierant↗

arXiv:2605.26218v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fermionic Gaussian states describe free fermions and underlie the mean-field picture of matter, from metals to superconductors; they are also efficiently simulable on classical computers. Departures from Gaussianity – the correlations produced by interactions – are therefore what make a fermionic system hard to simulate classically and useful for quantum computation, analogous to the role of magic in stabilizer-based quantum computation. Yet detecting and quantifying such non-Gaussianity at scale has remained challenging. Here we introduce practical tests and witnesses of fermionic non-Gaussianity built on fermionic antiflatness, a measure derived from the two-point covariance matrix. We estimate it with two protocols – a two-copy Bell measurement and a single-copy scheme using commuting Majorana bilinears – that determine whether a state is Gaussian or far from it at lower measurement cost than existing approaches, using only operations native to fault-tolerant hardware. For mixed states, a purity-corrected witness certifies non-Gaussianity and remains robust under strong noise; running it on the IQM quantum processor, we find that noise can both reduce and enhance non-Gaussianity. Finally, we show that preparing pseudorandom fermionic states requires extensive non-Gaussianity. Together, these tools enable the study and certification of non-Gaussian fermionic resources on present-day quantum devices.

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07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Beyond Similarity: Temporal Operator Attention for Time Series Analysis

Authors:
Jevon Twitty↗Vinh Pham↗Nitiwith Rotchanarak↗Viresh Pati↗Yubin Kim↗Shihao Yang↗Jiecheng Lu↗

arXiv:2605.11287v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A persistent paradox in time-series forecasting is that structurally simple MLP and linear models often outperform high-capacity Transformers. We argue that this gap arises from a mismatch in the sequence-modeling primitive: while many time-series dynamics are governed by global temporal operators (e.g., filtering and harmonic structure), standard attention forms each output as a convex combination of inputs. This restricts its ability to represent signed and oscillatory transformations that are fundamental to temporal signal processing. We formalize this limitation as a simplex-constrained mixing bottleneck in softmax attention, which becomes especially restrictive for operator-driven time-series tasks. To address this, we propose $Temporal Operator Attention (TOA)$, a framework that augments attention with explicit, learnable sequence-space operators, enabling direct signed mixing across time while preserving input-dependent adaptivity. To make dense $N \times N$ operators practical, we introduce Stochastic Operator Regularization, a high-variance dropout mechanism that stabilizes training and prevents trivial memorization. Across forecasting, anomaly detection, and classification benchmarks, TOA consistently improves performance when integrated into standard backbones such as PatchTST and iTransformer, with particularly strong gains in reconstruction-heavy tasks. These results suggest that explicit operator learning is a key ingredient for effective time-series modeling.

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

Mitigating Object Hallucinations in LVLMs via Attention Imbalance Rectification

Authors:
Han Sun↗Qin Li↗Peixin Wang↗Min Zhang↗

Object hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) severely compromises their reliability in real-world applications, posing a critical barrier to their deployment in high-stakes scenarios such as autonomous driving and medical image analysis. Through systematic empirical investigation, we identify that the imbalanced attention allocation, both across modalities (i.e., vision and language) and within modalities (among individual tokens), exhibits a strong causal correlation with the occurrence of object hallucination. Leveraging this insight, we introduce a novel concept termed attention imbalance, which not only quantifies the degree of attention disparity but also visually delineates the underlying patterns (e.g., over-attentiveness to irrelevant language tokens or under-attentiveness to discriminative visual features) that drive object hallucination. To mitigate object hallucination, we further propose Attention Imbalance Rectification (AIR), a lightweight decoding-time intervention method that reallocates attention weights and adjusts attention distributions to rectify modality-wise and token-wise imbalances. Extensive evaluations on four mainstream LVLMs and three benchmarks (CHAIR, POPE, and MM-Vet) with seven baselines demonstrate that AIR consistently reduces object hallucination rates, achieving up to a 35.1% reduction compared to the baselines, while improving up to 15.9% of LVLMs' general capability across diverse vision-language tasks.

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09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

A complexity theory for non-local quantum computation

Authors:
Andreas Bluhm↗Simon H\"ofer↗Alex May↗Mikka Stasiuk↗Philip Verduyn Lunel↗Henry Yuen↗

arXiv:2505.23893v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Non-local quantum computation (NLQC) replaces a local interaction between two systems with a single round of communication and shared entanglement. Despite many partial results, it is known that a characterization of entanglement cost in at least certain NLQC tasks would imply significant breakthroughs in complexity theory. Here, we avoid these obstructions and take an indirect approach to understanding resource requirements in NLQC, which mimics the approach used by complexity theorists: we study the relative hardness of different NLQC tasks by identifying resource efficient reductions between them. Most significantly, we prove that $f$-measure and $f$-route, the two best studied NLQC tasks, are in fact equivalent under $O(1)$ overhead reductions. This result simplifies many existing proofs in the literature and extends several new properties to $f$-measure. For instance, we obtain sub-exponential upper bounds on $f$-measure for all functions, and efficient protocols for functions in the complexity class $\mathsf{Mod}_k\mathsf{L}$. Beyond this, we study a number of other examples of NLQC tasks and their relationships.

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10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Quantum repeater segment with free-space coupled co-trapped ions using telecom photon interference

Authors:
Max Bergerhoff↗Pascal Baumgart↗Christian Haen↗Jonas Meiers↗Tobias Bauer↗Jonas Haferkamp↗Christoph Becher↗J\"urgen Eschner↗

arXiv:2606.12313v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A quantum repeater segment is a basic building block of a quantum repeater, generating buffered entanglement of quantum memories to connect quantum repeater cells. It also enables the connection between quantum computers. In the implementation we present here, photons emitted from two co-trapped free-space coupled $^{40}$Ca$^+$ ions are converted to the telecom-C band and interfered after transmission over 440$\,$m of optical fiber (220$\,$m per arm), where a photonic Bell measurement is performed to create entanglement between the memories. With this scheme we generate an entangled $\left|\Psi^+\right\rangle$ Bell state with $\ge 68(8)\,$% fidelity, highlighting trapped $^{40}$Ca$^+$ ions as a promising quantum repeater hardware platform.

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11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

CogGuard: Cognitive and Operational Profiling for Proactive Warning in Edge Intelligent Services

Authors:
Zhi Yao↗Weihao Chen↗Zhiqing Tang↗Hanshuai Cui↗Qianli Ma↗Weijia Jia↗Wei Zhao↗

arXiv:2606.15199v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Proactive warning is an important capability for edge intelligent services, where the system predicts whether a subject will successfully complete an incoming task under strict latency and privacy constraints. Such prediction depends on both long-term static attributes and short-term dynamic states derived from historical interaction logs. Recent Large Language Models (LLMs) offer strong long-context reasoning for constructing structured profiles from these logs, but existing solutions face two challenges for edge deployment: (1) profiling methods are typically domain-specific and lack a reusable abstraction across service scenarios, and (2) fine-tuning alignment models on heterogeneous edge clusters incurs high synchronization overhead due to the variance in input sequence lengths. To address these challenges, we propose CogGuard, a proactive-warning framework for edge intelligent services. CogGuard decouples offline LLM-based profile construction from online Small Language Model (SLM)-based score prediction through a shared static-dynamic profile-to-score pipeline, and instantiates it in two representative scenarios: educational performance warning and operational task outcome warning. For efficient profile construction, we design scenario-specific profiling methods with prefix-aligned KV-cache reuse to reduce repeated encoding overhead. For edge-side model alignment, we propose a length-aware distributed fine-tuning strategy with contrastive regularization to mitigate workload imbalance on heterogeneous clusters. Experiments on education and operation datasets show that CogGuard reduces profile construction time by up to 48% and distributed fine-tuning time by 19%, while achieving MAEs of 13.4 and 5.9, respectively, on 100-point-scale warning tasks. In the largest educational setting, CogGuard reduces prediction error by 15.4% compared with the strongest baseline.

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12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Logarithmic Large Deviations for Heavy-Tailed Sums

Authors:
Jos\'e M. Zapata↗

arXiv:2606.16487v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We establish logarithmic large-deviation bounds for sums of independent nonnegative random variables with regularly varying tails. The normalization is chosen at the extreme-value scale and the speed is $\log n$. In contrast with Cramér's theorem, the resulting rate function is determined only by the tail index. The proof transfers a maximum large-deviation principle to sums in the one-big-jump region.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Battery detection of XRay images using transfer learning

Authors:
Nermeen Abou Baker↗David Rohrschneider↗Uwe Handmann↗

The need for detecting and sorting batteries is drastically increasing for many applications. This study proves the potential of transfer learning in predicting whether the image contains a battery or not, the location and identifying three types of batteries, namely: prismatic, pouch, and cylindrical Lithium-Ion Batteries (LIB). Particularly, it focuses on the transfer learning method in two applications: Training a large-scale dataset to detect electronic devices using a pre-trained YOLOv5m, then using these latter trained weights to detect and classify the batteries. The precision of battery detection achieves 94%, which outperforms the pretrained YOLOv5m weights with 5%, in 22 ms inference time.

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14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Binary Tracking for Spatial QA and Navigation with Open Vision-Language Models

Authors:
Dongbin Na↗Chanwoo Kim↗Soonbin Rho↗Giyun Choi↗Gangbok Lee↗Dooyoung Hong↗

arXiv:2606.16902v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work addresses spatial question answering for service robots traversing long egocentric routes. Given a query such as "where can I find a dry cleaner on the way back home?", the system returns a metric coordinate that downstream navigation components can act on. Prior Spatial Question Answering approaches leverage retrieval-augmented agents built on closed-source models such as GPT-4o for path exploration. However, robots operating in the real world often cannot reliably depend on online closed-source models due to network instability, communication latency, and deployment cost. It creates a need for open-source based Spatial Question Answering approaches that can run onboard the robot, yet prior research in this direction remains limited. This work proposes BinTrack, a simple yet effective, fully open-source spatial-localization agent that leverages the temporal ordering of a robot's trajectory. BinTrack performs a binary search over the trajectory segments between two anchor landmarks identified from a query. It improves overall accuracy by up to 22.8% over other open-source implementations and even matches the reported closed-source model result on the global category of the SpaceLocQA benchmark, the most challenging setting that has so far required strong reasoning agents such as GPT-4o. Furthermore, its optimized inference strategy consistently yields more than a 1.5x inference speedup over previous approaches. Finally, this work releases GangnamLoop, a novel and practical multi-trip outdoor benchmark collected by deploying a real quadruped robot on public streets with the anonymization policy. It revisits the same locations under different outdoor conditions and pairs the robot's low viewpoint with the human owner's. The source codes and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/ndb796/BinaryTracking

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15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Predicting gestational age at birth in the context of preterm birth from multi-modal fetal MRI

Authors:
Diego Fajardo-Rojas↗Megan Hall↗Daniel Cromb↗Mary A. Rutherford↗Lisa Story↗Emma C. Robinson↗Jana Hutter↗

arXiv:2606.20172v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Preterm birth is associated with significant mortality and a risk for lifelong morbidity. The complex multifactorial aetiology hampers accurate prediction and thus optimal care. A pipeline consisting of bespoke machine learning methods for data imputation, feature selection, and regression models to predict gestational age (GA) at birth was developed and evaluated from comprehensive multi-modal morphological and functional fetal MRI data from 333 control cases and 93 preterm birth cases. The GA at birth predictions were classified into term and preterm categories and their accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity were reported. An ablation study was performed to further validate the design of the pipeline. Performance was evaluated using stratified 10-fold cross-validation. The pipeline achieves an R2 score of 0.13 and a mean absolute error of 2.74 weeks. It also achieves a 0.77 accuracy, 0.59 sensitivity, and 0.82 specificity across folds. The predominant features selected by the pipeline include cervical length and statistics derived from placental T2* values. The confluence of fast, motion-robust and multi-modal fetal MRI techniques and machine learning prediction allowed the prediction of the gestation at birth. This information is essential for any pregnancy. To the best of our knowledge, preterm birth had only been addressed as a classification problem in the literature. Therefore, this work provides a proof of concept. Future work will increase the cohort size to allow for finer stratification within the preterm birth cohort. Our code is available at https://github.com/dfajardorojas/ml-for-preterm-birth-.

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16.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

Children's DNA Methylation and Family Dynamics in a Congo Basin Subsistence Community: Links with Parental Conflict and Fathers' Caregiving

Authors:
Chan↗M. H.-M↗Merrill↗S. S↗Zhuang↗B. C↗Lin↗D. T. S↗Macisaac↗J. L↗Miegakanda↗Lew-Levy↗…

Family environments may contribute to children's long-term health through biological processes, including epigenetic regulation such as DNA methylation (DNAm). However, most studies in this area focus on Euro-American populations while also rarely including fathering data. The current study investigated children's blood DNAm associations with positive (father caregiving) and negative (parental conflict) family dynamics in a smaller-scale subsistence society living in the Congo Basin rainforest. We measured DNAm from dried blood spots of 54 children (mean age=8.48 years) and conducted three epigenome-wide association studies aimed at discovering differential co-methylated regions (CMRs) associated with family dynamics. Via path models, we investigated the health implications and shared contribution of family factors of the identified CMRs. Differential DNAm associated with family dynamics was localized to genes related to stress, immunology, development, and aging, thus possibly linking to children's physical health and were simultaneously connected to other family factors such as number of siblings. Our findings suggested similarities in biological embedding of family factors across socio-ecologically diverse contexts.

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17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Aligning Implied Statements for Implicit Hate Speech Generalizability with Context-Bounded Semi-hard Negative Mining

Authors:
Wicaksono Leksono Muhamad↗Yunita Sari↗

Classifying implicit hate speech remains a challenge, as intent is often masked through insinuation and context rather than explicit slurs. Prior supervised contrastive approaches improve in-domain detection but can overfit surface cues and struggle to transfer across datasets. We propose ImpSH, a triplet-based framework that aligns posts with implied statements when available and uses context-bounded semi-hard negatives to focus learning on near confusions. We also examine AugSH, which forms positives via data augmentation. In controlled evaluations on IHC, SBIC, and DynaHate with BERT and HateBERT, ImpSH is a viable alternative to standard supervised contrastive baselines and often improves cross-domain performance under matched preprocessing and tuning budgets. Representation analysis using alignment and uniformity indicates tighter positive pairs with balanced global spread, and qualitative nearest-neighbor case studies illustrate typical false negatives under domain shift. These results demonstrate that aligning posts with their implied statements via context-bounded mining provides a more stable, bijective-like mapping to related insinuations, overcoming the volatility inherent in traditional clustering-based representation learning.

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18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

A More-Than-Human Approach to Designing for Mental Health: Remixing Prototypes for the Contexts of Complex Healthcare Infrastructures

Authors:
Allen↗Stasiak↗Lottridge↗

Digital mental health tools (DMHTs) often fail to be successfully implemented in clinical settings. While user- and human-centred design frameworks are frequently proposed for developing effective tools, they are insufficient to address the sociotechnical complexity of healthcare environments. This paper addresses this limitation by detailing the application of a more-than-human design framework to incorporate wider contextual factors into design decisions. To demonstrate the application of this more-than-human design framework, we present a case study showcasing the design of one specific feature within a DMHT intended to support Health Improvement Practitioners (HIPs) in New Zealand's Integrated Primary Mental Health and Addictions (IPMHA) service. Our process blends usage-context storyboards with interface prototypes, using think-aloud interviews to test the contextual fit of our prototypes. The initial design concept failed due to contextual factors such as inconsistent wait times and the administrative burden on clients and clinic staff. This led to a pivot to a more context-appropriate, practitioner-focused, in-session concept for digital psychometric administration and automated scoring. This case study demonstrates that for DMHTs to be viable within complex healthcare environments, design must focus on more than the needs of a single user, incorporating multiple stakeholders and contextual variables across the wider service-delivery context.

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19.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

Adhesion and polarity-driven morphogenesis: Mechanisms and constraints in tissue formation

Authors:
Yoshiyuki T. Nakamura↗

by Yoshiyuki T. Nakamura, Chikara Furusawa, Kunihiko Kaneko Embryonic development in multicellular organisms exhibits diverse morphogenetic patterns, which can generally be categorized into fundamental types such as monolayer and multilayer spheres, as well as cell masses. Furthermore, we identify two distinct processes for the formation of spherical structures. These basic patterns are thought to be governed by the microscopic properties of intercellular adhesion. However, the specific mechanisms linking the microscopic factors to the emergence of distinct macroscopic morphogenetic patterns remain poorly understood. In this study, we explore how different morphogenetic patterns arise by employing a computational model that incorporates intercellular adhesion and polarity. Our results demonstrate that all fundamental morphogenetic patterns can be generated through the interplay of two key parameters: the polarity strength of the cell and the regulation of polarity via mechanical signals. Furthermore, analytical considerations reveal key mechanisms underlying the formation of these patterns. These findings highlight the critical role of physical constraints in morphogenesis and suggest potential applications to the design of artificial tissues and organoids.

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20.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

MorphoStat: A Statistics-Aware Pipeline for Morphological Profiling Analysis

Authors:
Altobi↗Heo↗

High-content imaging produces thousands of morphological measurements per cell. Interpreting these measurements requires normalization to remove plate effects, statistical tests selected on the basis of data distribution, and control over false discoveries across many features tested at once. MorphoStat is an open-source Python pipeline that applies this sequence of steps automatically. Given a CSV file from CellProfiler or a compatible imaging platform, it removes low-quality wells, normalizes each plate against DMSO controls using a MAD-scaled z-score, routes each feature to a parametric or nonparametric test based on a distributional check, applies Benjamini Hochberg correction, and writes out results and publication-ready figures. On the BBBC021 benchmark (MCF-7 breast-cancer cells, 632 wells, 473 features), MorphoStat recovered 12 of 13 known mechanism-of-action classes in principal component space, confirming that the normalization and statistical routing work as intended. The tool is available at https://github.com/Almunthir334/morphostat (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20354069) under the MIT license.

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21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Landscape-Similarity-Guided Optimization in Divide-and-Conquer QAOA

Authors:
Sokea Sang↗Leanghok Hour↗Sanghyeon Lee↗Aniket Patra↗Hee Chul Park↗Moon Jip Park↗Youngsun Han↗

arXiv:2602.21689v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Divide-and-conquer strategies mitigate hardware constraints for the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices by partitioning large interaction graphs into smaller, hardware-compatible sub-problems. However, this approach introduces a severe classical training bottleneck: a decomposition across $m$ boundary nodes generates $2^m$ distinct sub-problems that typically require independent optimization. In this work, we demonstrate that across diverse synthetic and real-world interaction graphs, the variational landscapes of these reduced QAOA instances actually exhibit a robust universality. Adapting the replica-overlap framework of spin-glass physics, we define a landscape-overlap order parameter $q$ to quantify geometric correlations between energy landscapes, revealing a sharp landscape-similarity transition as graph connectivity is tuned. Exploiting this, we introduce Doubly Optimized QAOA (DO-QAOA), an adaptive pipeline that collapses the sub-problems from $2^m$ distinct sub-problems into $K=\mathcal{O}(1)$ effective landscape classes. By performing optimization on a single representative sub-problem and dynamically transferring parameters to remaining sub-problems, DO-QAOA lowers runtime and quantum measurement overhead by orders of magnitude while maintaining a competitive Approximation Ratio Gap (ARG).

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22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Root-Selecting Fixed-Point Inversion for Rectified Flows via Trajectory Straightness

Authors:
Semin Kim↗Jihwan Yoon↗Seunghoon Hong↗

Finding the initial noise that generates a given data sample, known as inversion, is a key component for downstream applications such as training-free image editing. Existing fixed-point inversion methods improve inversion accuracy by formulating each inversion step as a fixed-point problem, but they lack a principled mechanism for selecting among multiple fixed-point solutions that can arise in practice. We observe that different selections induce different inversion trajectories, leading to substantial variation in reconstruction and editing quality. For rectified flows, we further find that this variation is closely associated with trajectory straightness, motivating straightness as a principled selection criterion. We propose SelFix, a fixed-point inversion method that selects fixed-point solutions inducing straighter inverse trajectories while retaining convergence to an exact inverse root under standard local assumptions. Experiments on FLUX.1-dev and PIE-Bench show that SelFix improves fixed-point inversion, achieving stronger real-image reconstruction and better source-preserving prompt-based editing than prior inversion baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/seminkim/selfix.

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23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

The Autonomy Tax: Defense Training Breaks LLM Agents

Authors:
Shawn Li↗Yue Zhao↗

arXiv:2603.19423v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external tools (file operations, API calls, database transactions) to autonomously complete complex multi-step tasks. Practitioners deploy defense-trained models to protect against prompt injection attacks that manipulate agent behavior through malicious observations or retrieved content. We reveal a fundamental capability-alignment paradox: defense training designed to improve safety systematically destroys agent competence while failing to prevent sophisticated attacks. Evaluating defended models against undefended baselines across 97 agent tasks and 1,000 adversarial prompts, we uncover three systematic biases unique to multi-step agents. Agent incompetence bias manifests as immediate tool execution breakdown, with models refusing or generating invalid actions on benign tasks before observing any external content. Cascade amplification bias causes early failures to propagate through retry loops, pushing defended models to timeout on 99\% of tasks compared to 13\% for baselines. Trigger bias leads to paradoxical security degradation where defended models perform worse than undefended baselines while straightforward attacks bypass defenses at high rates. Root cause analysis reveals these biases stem from shortcut learning: models overfit to surface attack patterns rather than semantic threat understanding, evidenced by extreme variance in defense effectiveness across attack categories. Our findings demonstrate that current defense paradigms optimize for single-turn refusal benchmarks while rendering multi-step agents fundamentally unreliable, necessitating new approaches that preserve tool execution competence under adversarial conditions.

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

CFCamo: A Counterfactual Detect-or-Abstain Framework for Camouflaged Object Detection

Authors:
Suhang Li↗Osamu Yoshie↗Yuya Ieiri↗

Vision-language reinforcement learning has recently shown strong target-present localization for camouflaged object detection (COD). Yet localization is only one side of the decision: when the agent faces an ordinary image with no camouflaged target, will it still claim that a camouflaged object exists? Standard COD training and evaluation data are positive-only, so agents optimized under this setting can acquire an over-detect bias, a task-specific form of object hallucination that standard COD evaluation leaves unmeasured. To quantify this target-absent behavior, we construct Counterfactual COD (CF-COD), a paired benchmark that removes the camouflaged target from each held-out COD evaluation image while preserving a plausible background. CF-COD evaluates whether a model detects the target on the original image and abstains on the target-absent counterfactual, summarized by Pair Accuracy (PA). We further introduce CFCamo, a paired counterfactual framework for COD with abstention. For training, CFCamo optimizes a Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct agent with Counterfactual Sequence Policy Optimization (CSPO), which samples paired original-counterfactual rollouts and uses a Counterfactual Paired Reward (CPR) to couple original-image detection with counterfactual abstention. On CAMO-test, CFCamo improves S_alpha by +3.7 pp over the prior RL-based COD baseline; across CF-COD, it reaches 80.0-90.8% PA. Ablations show that removing counterfactual coupling reduces PA to 1.4-5.2% despite strong target-present COD scores, showing that target-present evaluation alone does not characterize detect-or-abstain behavior. Overall, these results indicate that CFCamo improves COD agents by coupling target-present detection with target-absent abstention, rather than merely strengthening target-present localization. Code and data are available at https://github.com/suhang2000/CFCamo.

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

Learning to Decide with AI Assistance under Human-Alignment

Authors:
Nina Corvelo Benz↗Eleni Straitouri↗Manuel Gomez-Rodriguez↗

arXiv:2605.12646v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: It is widely agreed that when AI models assist decision-makers in high-stakes domains by predicting an outcome of interest, they should communicate the confidence of their predictions. However, empirical evidence suggests that decision-makers often struggle to determine when to trust a prediction based solely on this communicated confidence. In this context, recent theoretical and empirical work suggests a positive correlation between the utility of AI-assisted decision-making and the degree of alignment between the AI confidence and the decision-makers' confidence in their own predictions. Crucially, these findings do not yet elucidate the extent to which this alignment influences the complexity of learning to make optimal decisions through repeated interactions. In this paper, we address this question in the canonical case of binary predictions and binary decisions. We first show that this problem is equivalent to a two-armed online contextual learning problem with full feedback, and establish a lower bound of $\Omega (\sqrt{|H| \cdot |B| \cdot T} )$ on the expected regret any learner can attain, where $H$ and $B$ denote the sets of human and AI confidence values. We then demonstrate that, under perfect alignment between AI and human confidence, a learner can attain an expected regret of $O(\sqrt{|H| \cdot T\log T})$ and, when $\sqrt{|H|} = O(\log T)$ and $B$ is countable, a non-trivial generalization of the Dvoretzky-Kiefer-Wolfowitz inequality improves the regret bound to $O(\sqrt{T\log T})$. Taken together, these results reveal that alignment can reduce the complexity of learning to make decisions with AI assistance. Experiments on real data from two different human-subject studies where participants solve simple decision-making tasks assisted by AI models show that our theoretical results are robust to violations of perfect alignment.

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