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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

A PubMed-Scale Dataset of Structured Biomedical Abstracts

Structured abstracts are important for biomedical literature processing, by facilitating information retrieval, text mining, and knowledge synthesis. However, a vast portion of abstracts indexed in PubMed remain unstructured, presenting a significant bottleneck for downstream text-processing workflows and applications. To resolve this limitation, we introduce Structured PubMed, a comprehensive corpus of section-labeled biomedical abstracts compiled from the complete PubMed database, encompassing over 23.2 million research-article records. The corpus is divided into two distinct subsets: a collection of 5.9 million author-structured abstracts parsed from official XML files, and an automatically labeled collection of 17.2 million originally unstructured abstracts structured via a verbatim-extraction Large Language Model pipeline. Every record is harmonized under a unified five-section schema and mapped to its original PubMed identifier, publication type, and publication date. This dataset can be utilized to train sentence-classification models, benchmark text-segmentation architectures, and perform large-scale, section-specific information extraction at an unprecedented PubMed-wide scale.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

HiST: A Hierarchical Sparse Transformer for Cross-Modal Spatial Transcriptomics Modeling

Spatial transcriptomics (ST) links gene expression with tissue morphology but remains expensive and low-throughput, motivating surrogates that infer expression from routine histology. Whole-slide H&E-to-ST inference pairs a gigapixel image with gene measurements at a sparse, irregular set of locations, making multiscale modeling challenging without incurring dense-grid overhead or quadratic token mixing. We propose HiST, a hierarchical sparse transformer that treats measured locations as a lattice-indexed sparse field and builds a dyadic encoder–decoder directly on the active tissue footprint. HiST combines sparse window attention for local geometric correspondence with resolution-changing operators for rapid multiscale context integration. For a fixed window size, the dominant runtime and memory scale with the number of observed locations rather than the dense slide area. To mitigate slide-specific acquisition variation, HiST adds a bottlenecked global conditioning pathway via a slide calibration token that summarizes slide-level context and conditions local representations. On a multi-organ benchmark spanning diverse tissues and acquisition sources, HiST improves predictive performance over recent baselines while reducing runtime and peak memory.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

IHUBERT: Vector-Based Semantic Deduplication and Domain-Balanced Pretraining for Persian Resources

Persian pretrained language models (PLMs) are still limited by the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality pretraining corpora and by insufficient evaluation beyond standard classification and NER tasks. We present IHUBERT, a monolingual Persian PLM trained from scratch with the RoBERTa-base encoder (125M parameters) on a 45 GB curated subset of the Sepahr-Danesh collection (about 7-8B tokens). To improve corpus quality and reduce redundancy, we employ a multi-stage preprocessing pipeline that includes normalization, exact and near-duplicate removal, anonymization, and vector-database-based semantic deduplication for distribution balancing control across domains and registers. We additionally train a 139k-vocabulary BPE tokenizer on the full pretraining corpus to better capture Persian morphology and orthographic variation. IHUBERT is evaluated on seven Persian NLU benchmarks covering NER, sentiment analysis, topic classification, NLI, extractive question answering, and relation extraction, using task-standard metrics (entity-level F1, Macro-F1, EM/F1). IHUBERT achieves its strongest gains on extractive QA, ranking first on both PQuAD (F1 88.3542) and ParsiNLU-RC (F1 49.0987), and attains the best result on FarsTail (Macro-F1 0.8350). On NER and topic classification, it remains competitive (e.g., 0.8308 F1 on ParsTwiNER; 0.7953 Macro-F1 on DigiMag), while relation extraction remains the main remaining gap (0.6684 Macro-F1 on PERLEX). A controlled tokenizer ablation on the IHUBERT pretraining corpus shows that BPE yields slightly lower subword fragmentation than WordPiece at matched vocabulary size, supporting our tokenization design. Overall, IHUBERT advances Persian language modeling through semantically curated large-scale pretraining and broad evaluation across both classification and comprehension-oriented tasks.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Menopausal symptoms in peri- and postmenopausal women: systematic review and meta-analysis of prevalence, incidence, comorbidities, and clinical outcomes

Introduction: The global epidemiology of menopausal symptoms among middle-aged and elderly women remains unclear. Methods: Data on prevalence, comorbidities, incidence and outcomes of menopausal symptoms published up until March 1st 2019 were searched in PubMed, Embase and Cochrane databases. We used a random-effects model to compute point estimates of prevalence for 24 types of menopausal symptoms. We narratively summarized the patterns of the comorbidities, incidence and outcomes of menopausal symptoms due to limited data. Results: A total of 239 studies (n{approx}2.5 million middle-aged and elderly women) from 56 countries and regions were included in the analysis. The global pooled prevalence analysis revealed that hot flashes (48%) and night sweats (30%) were highly prevalent, alongside psychological symptoms like insomnia (47%), irritability (46%), anxiety (39%), and depression (30%). Physical symptoms including joint aches/pain (50%), backache (47%), and tiredness (61%) were also commonly reported. Heat intolerance showed the highest prevalence (76%), while symptoms like urinary incontinence (24%) and poor appetite (8%) were less frequent. These findings highlight the diverse and widespread impact of menopause on women globally, with significant variations across symptom types. Africa showed the highest pooled prevalence across a series of symptoms, compared with other continents. We observed high prevalence in developing countries, especially for psychological and physical symptoms; significant intra-Asian variation in vasomotor symptoms; hypertension and obesity as the most common comorbidities; joint pain, urinary incontinence, and vasomotor symptoms as the most incident complaints; and positive associations with cardiovascular disease in the psychological (depression and insomnia) and physical (joint pain) domains. Conclusion: This study highlights the global burden of menopausal symptoms, with significant differences across continents. The findings call for more inclusive research on underrepresented groups (particularly in Africa) and further investigation into drivers of this marked global heterogeneity in prevalence of menopausal symptoms and their comorbidities, incidence and outcomes.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Opportunistic CKD Screening in Hospitalized Patients

Background. Chronic kidney disease (CKD) affects 10-13% of adults worldwide but remains largely undiagnosed until advanced stages. Hospitalization provides an opportunity for early detection through opportunistic urine albumin-to-creatinine ratio (UACR) measurement. Methods. We conducted a prospective three-arm study of opportunistic CKD screening in general internal medicine wards at Hadassah Mt. Scopus (MS), Hadassah Ein Kerem (EK), and Shaare Zedek Medical Center (SZMC) in Jerusalem (Protocol HMO-23-0300). Adult inpatients without known CKD or recent UACR were enrolled. Pathological UACR was defined as [≥]30 mg/g. Confirmed CKD required two pathological measurements [≥]90 days apart (KDIGO-compatible). eGFR was computed using the 2021 CKD-EPI race-free equation. Pooled proportions were estimated by fixed-effects logit meta-analysis; odds ratios by DerSimonian-Laird random-effects models. Results. A total of 158 patients were enrolled (MS n=50, EK n=57, SZMC n=51). Pathological first UACR was identified in 43/158 patients (27.2%; 95% CI 21.3-34.1%; I2=0% across centers). Of 24 patients with a second UACR available, 14 (58%) confirmed CKD, yielding a pooled confirmed-CKD rate of 8.9% of all screened patients. In-hospital mortality was significantly higher among patients with pathological UACR (9.3% vs ~2%; Fisher's exact p=0.012). In per-center multivariate logistic regression, three predictors reached pooled significance: BUN (OR 1.10 per mg/dL, 95% CI 1.04-1.17, p=0.002, I2=0%), heart failure (OR 3.21, 95% CI 1.34-7.70, p=0.009, I2=0%), and diabetes mellitus (OR 2.54, 95% CI 1.11-5.82, p=0.028, I2=17%). Cardiac/vascular admissions had the highest pathological UACR rate (~42%); GI/hepatic admissions had 0%. Conclusions. Opportunistic inpatient UACR screening identifies previously unrecognized CKD in approximately 9% of general internal medicine patients, with consistent results across three independent centers. BUN elevation, heart failure, and diabetes are the strongest independent predictors. Pathological UACR carries significant short-term mortality risk, supporting integration of routine screening into inpatient care pathways.

06.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-08

GPR15-guided CD8<sup>+</sup> T regulatory cells control intestinal inflammation

Authors:

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) causes chronic suffering from gastrointestinal inflammation and dysfunction that can progress to colon cancer1,2. The disease prevalence is increasing and there is an urgent need to better understand its pathogenic mechanisms to improve treatment. We show that GPR15, a G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) expressed in immune cells and previously described as an entry co-factor for human and simian immunodeficiency viruses3, is a marker and homing receptor for a subset of intramucosal GPR15-guided regulatory CD8+ T lymphocytes (CD8+ TIGR). Deleterious GPR15 gene variants in humans cause defective homing of CD8+ TIGR and are associated with severe early-onset IBD. Moreover, CD8+ TIGR cells are reduced in the intestinal mucosa of sporadic IBD patients. In mice, GPR15 deficiency impairs colonic homing of CD8+ TIGR cells, leading to accumulation of inflammatory macrophages and increased susceptibility to colitis. CD8+ TIGR cells potently kill macrophages activated by intestinal damage or disease using Fas ligand (FasL) and TNF-related weak inducer of apoptosis (TWEAK). The identification of CD8+ TIGR cells yields new insights into organ-specific immune regulation and potential therapeutics for IBD.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

MASCOT-Android: A Curated Dataset and Automated Collection Pipeline for Android Malware Source Code Specimens

arXiv:2606.16072v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Compared with binaries and decompiled code, malware source code more directly reflects the attackers' original intent. However, the scarcity of source code and the high cost of manual review make such datasets difficult to build and maintain. We propose MASCOT-Android, a curated dataset of Android malware source code and an automated collection framework for scalable malware source code discovery on GitHub. A key finding of our work is that repository-level documentation alone provides a strong signal for malware source code collection. Our model extracts character-level TF-IDF features from 8,772 malware and 25,747 benign README documents and trains a LinearSVC classifier to distinguish malware repositories. This README-only model achieves an accuracy of 96.28\% and an FPR of 1.06\% in local evaluation. In addition, the model outputs confidence scores, allowing users to adjust the decision threshold to balance FPR and coverage, which is practical in real-world malware source code collection.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Token Complexity Theory for AI-Augmented Computing

Authors:

arXiv:2606.12647v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI-augmented computing delegates natural language queries, code generation requests, and other open-ended tasks to a cluster of AI models that processes queries and generates responses. This paradigm introduces a resource dimension that neither classical time nor space complexity captures: the cost of sending queries to and receiving responses from such a cluster. We introduce token complexity, a formal resource measure defined as the minimum expected token cost to achieve a specified level of output quality on a task, and develop a taxonomy classifying AI systems by the strength of their probabilistic properties. We develop token complexity within the framework of AI-Oracle Turing machines, in which a probabilistic Turing machine interacts with a stochastic oracle via dedicated query and response tapes. We prove basic theorems establishing that token complexity behaves as expected: monotonicity (higher quality costs more tokens), convexity (quality improvements become progressively more expensive), price sensitivity (small price changes produce bounded cost changes), and price-relativity of task ordering (the token complexity ordering of tasks can reverse depending on the query-to-response cost ratio). We prove that the complexity frontier, defined as the set of all feasible resource bounds in tokens, time, and space, is non-empty, upward-closed, and convex.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Open-World Video Segmentation

While video segmentation has advanced rapidly on short clips and closed-set benchmarks, open-world video segmentation remains largely unexplored. The challenge is twofold: (1) existing methods are not designed to support object discovery and identity maintenance in long videos of dynamic ego-motion, and (2) existing evaluation protocols rely on a rigid 1:1 matching that unfairly penalizes semantically valid predictions with mismatched granularity. To address both gaps, we introduce Savvy, a practical and strong system for zero-shot open-world long-horizon video segmentation. Savvy combines hierarchical mask discovery, deferred admission, and track consolidation to support persistent object discovery, safe track promotion, and stable long-range identity maintenance. We further propose OGA, a granularity-aware evaluation suite for open-world video segmentation. Built on a Granularity-Agnostic (GA) matching protocol, OGA relaxes conventional 1:1 matching to an n:1 mapping, but still enforces temporal rigor by detecting support discontinuities through sever points and scoring each reference object through its dominant coherent fragment. This prevents fragmented or flickering support from being over-rewarded while enabling GA-adapted metrics and structural diagnostics: identity persistence (IP), and identity concentration (IC). On VIPSeg, we show that standard 1:1 evaluation substantially underestimates open-world methods, whereas GA evaluation recovers much of their suppressed performance. On the more realistic long-horizon benchmarks: ScanNet and HM3D, Savvy consistently outperforms strong baselines across both classical and proposed metrics, including STQ, VPQ$_\infty$, IP and IC. Together, these results establish a practical benchmark and a strong baseline for open-world long-horizon video segmentation.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

A Water Efficiency Dataset for African Data Centers

arXiv:2412.03716v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) computing and data centers consume large amounts of freshwater, both directly for cooling and indirectly for electricity generation. While most attention has been paid to developed countries such as the U.S., this paper presents the first-of-its-kind dataset that combines nation-level weather and electricity generation data to estimate water usage effectiveness for data centers in 41 African countries across five different climate regions. We also use our dataset to evaluate and estimate the water consumption of inference on two large language models (i.e., Llama-3-70B and GPT-4) in 11 selected African countries. Our estimates suggest that writing a 10-page report using Llama-3-70B could consume as much as {0.66 liters} of water, while the water consumption by GPT-4 for the same task may go up to about {59 liters}. For writing a medium-length email of 120-200 words, Llama-3-70B and GPT-4 could consume about {0.13 liters} and {2.9 liters} of water, respectively. All the numbers for generative model inference tasks are based on public information available in 2024, when we initially prepared the analysis. Since then, AI inference systems have improved substantially. For example, recent disclosures suggest that energy efficiency improved by more than 30x between May 2024 and May 2025. Accordingly, our 2024 estimates should be interpreted as historical reference values rather than as representative of current performance. Interestingly, given the same AI model, 9 of the 11 selected African countries consume less water than the global average, mainly because of lower water intensities for electricity generation.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Achieving double-logarithmic precision dependence in optimization-based quantum unstructured search

arXiv:2603.26039v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Grover's algorithm is a fundamental quantum algorithm that achieves a quadratic speedup for unstructured search problems of size $N$. Recent studies have reformulated this task as a maximization problem on the unitary manifold and solved it via linearly convergent Riemannian gradient ascent (RGA) methods, resulting in a complexity of $O(\sqrt{N/M}\log (1/\varepsilon))$, where $M$ denotes the number of target items and $\varepsilon$ denotes the success probability error. In this work, we adopt the Riemannian modified Newton (RMN) method to solve the quantum search problem, under the assumption that the ratio $ M/N$ is known. We show that, in this setting, the Riemannian Newton direction is collinear with the Riemannian gradient in the sense that the Riemannian gradient is always an eigenvector of the corresponding Riemannian Hessian. This structure removes the overhead of Hessian inversion and allows the proposed RMN method to retain the local quadratic convergence in terms of the error $\varepsilon$. More precisely, we rigorously prove an overall complexity of $O(\sqrt{N/M}+\log\log(1/\varepsilon))$. Furthermore, our approach remains Grover-compatible, namely, it relies exclusively on the standard Grover diffusion and oracle operators to ensure algorithmic implementability, and its parameter update process can be efficiently precomputed on classical computers.

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

Mixing times of one-sided $k$-transposition shuffles

arXiv:2112.05085v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study mixing times of the one-sided $k$-transposition shuffle. We prove that this shuffle mixes relatively slowly, even for $k$ big. Using the recent ``lifting eigenvectors'' technique of Dieker and Saliola and applying the $\ell^2$ bound, we prove different mixing behaviors and explore the occurrence of cutoff depending on $k$.

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

Integral Formulation of QENDy for Robust Nonlinear System Identification

arXiv:2606.11629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This manuscript proposes an integral formulation of the newly defined quadratic embedding method for identifying nonlinear systems (QENDy). In the original algorithm, trajectory data points along with their time derivatives are used. Methods for calculating time derivatives make the algorithm sensitive to noise. Our integral formulation does not use the time derivatives. This results in a more robust method to learn the dynamics.

14.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

A mosaic of whole-body representations on the human precentral gyrus

Authors:

Understanding how the body is represented in the motor cortex is key to understanding how the brain controls movement. Although the motor cortex has been mapped in animal models at a fine scale1–10, characterization in humans remains primarily limited to low-resolution recording11–16 and stimulation techniques17–20. Here we created a comprehensive map of the human motor cortex at single-neuron resolution, spanning microelectrode array recordings from 20 arrays across 8 individuals with paralysis from spinal cord injury, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or brainstem stroke, all enrolled in brain–computer interface clinical trials. These arrays broadly sample the crown of the precentral gyrus (PCG; thought to be composed largely of the premotor cortex (Brodmann area 6)). We found that body parts were highly intermixed, such that the entire body was represented in all sampled locations of the PCG, although the relative strength of body parts was roughly consistent with the motor homunculus17,18. We also found two speech-preferential areas with a broadly tuned, orofacial-dominant area in between them. Throughout the PCG, movement representations of the four limbs were interlinked, with homologous movements of different limbs (for example, toe curl and hand close) having correlated representations. These data provide evidence consistent with an intermixed, interrelated and behaviour-centred organization of the motor cortex3,21. The resulting map also provides important targeting information for brain–computer interfaces that seek to restore motor function. A comprehensive map of the human motor cortex at single-neuron resolution is described.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Restless bandits with imperfect binary feedback: PCL-indexability analysis and computation

arXiv:2606.11192v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study restless bandits with binary latent states and imperfect binary feedback, motivated by opportunistic spectrum access with sensing errors. For the associated belief-state model, we develop a partial conservation laws (PCL)-based analytical and computational framework for establishing indexability and evaluating the Whittle index, building on a verification theorem for real-state discounted restless bandits. The framework analyzes the stochastic dynamics via an associated deterministic skeleton, renewal decompositions, and combinatorics on words. It yields tractable expressions for discounted reward and resource metrics in several threshold regimes, enabling full verification of the PCL-indexability conditions there. For the remaining regime, where a complete analytic verification is not achieved in this paper, we derive efficient numerical schemes for computing the relevant marginal metrics and the marginal productivity (MP) index, which equals the Whittle index when those conditions hold. Extensive computational experiments provide strong evidence that these conditions also hold in that regime across broad parameter ranges and without the stringent parameter restrictions imposed in prior work. The experiments further show that theMP index policy typically outperforms standard benchmark policies, often by a substantial margin.

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Precision Physical Activity Prescription via Reinforcement Learning for Functional Actions

arXiv:2605.19208v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Physical activity (PA) plays an important role in maintaining and improving health. Daily steps have been a key PA measure that is easily accessible with common wearable devices. However, methods are lacking to recommend a personalized optimal distribution of daily steps over a period of time for the best of certain health biomarkers. In this paper, we fill this void based on the data from the All of Us Research Program which includes months of step counts as well as repeated measurements of key health biomarkers. We develop a new offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm to learn personalized and optimal PA distributions associated with cardiometabolic risk, where the action is a function representing the daily step distribution over a period of time. Simulation studies demonstrate the advantage of the proposed approach over existing continuous-action RL methods. The learned optimal policy from the All of Us data generally suggests people take more daily steps and also follow a more consistent pattern of PA over time while offering tailored recommendations for subgroups in blood glucose level, body mass index, blood pressure, age, and sex.

17.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-11

Daily briefing: Deep-sea whale graveyard is a treasure trove of fossils

Authors:

Researchers have uncovered more than 400 fossilized whale bones in an ocean-floor chasm. Plus, the working lives of scientists, in pictures, and how AI could slow the pace of research publication for the better. Researchers have uncovered more than 400 fossilized whale bones in an ocean-floor chasm. Plus, the working lives of scientists, in pictures, and how AI could slow the pace of research publication for the better.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Relighting as a Probe of Visual Priors via Augmented Latent Intrinsics

Image-to-image relighting requires representations that separate illumination from scene properties while preserving dense geometry, material, and photometric cues. We use this task as a probe of visual priors: unlike recognition tasks that reward invariance, relighting tests whether visual features retain the information needed for light transfer. Through a controlled generative relighting framework, we find that strong semantic encoders can degrade relighting quality, exposing a semantic–photometric trade-off between abstraction and physical fidelity. We introduce Augmented Latent Intrinsics (ALI), which balances this trade-off by fusing dense, pixel-aligned visual features into a latent-intrinsic relighting model and refining it with self-supervision on unlabeled real image pairs. ALI improves relighting quality, especially on glossy, metallic, and transparent materials, and demonstrates that generative relighting is an effective tool for quantifying what visual encoders encode about the physical world.

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

Spherical-to-ERP Epipolar Rectification for Single-Axis Disparity in 360 Stereo

Omnidirectional stereo images provide full-surround perception but violate the geometric assumptions of classical disparity estimation: in spherical or fisheye views, epipolar correspondences follow curved great-circle paths, producing two-dimensional displacements that cannot be treated as single-axis disparity before geometric rectification. In this work, we adopt a standard spherical-to-equirectangular (ERP) projection as a preprocessing step, which straightens epipolar curves and restores a one-dimensional disparity structure - horizontal for left-right rigs and vertical for top-bottom rigs. Building on our previously introduced RAFT + Epipolar-Aligned Channel Selection (EACS) framework, originally developed for rectilinear and ERP stereo, we examine whether the same modular pipeline remains accurate when the input originates from spherical stereo imagery. After ERP projection, dense optical flow from RAFT is reduced to disparity by retaining only the baseline-aligned flow component. Experiments on synthetic fisheye stereo datasets show that this spherical-to-ERP-to-RAFT+EACS pipeline produces accurate, smooth, and structurally consistent disparity maps at real-time speed. These findings confirm that established ERP preprocessing can be effectively combined with our earlier RAFT+EACS method to enable practical, interpretable, and efficient disparity estimation from spherical stereo, providing a straightforward pathway for extending conventional stereo pipelines to 360 imaging.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

When the Chain of Thought Knows Better: Failure Modes in Multi-Turn Reasoning Models

Failures in multi-turn reasoning models are largely invisible to terminal-score evaluation. A model can lock onto an unsafe stance early in a long dialogue, yet its final-turn refusal rate may appear indistinguishable from a robustly aligned baseline. To expose these hidden temporal dynamics, we propose a trace-level diagnostic - the CoT-Output 2x2 safety matrix. This framework labels every turn along two independent axes (internal reasoning and visible output), yielding four operationally defined failure cells: robust alignment, alignment faking, overt jailbreak, and a distinct failure mode we term context-injection failure (where the CoT maintains safe reasoning, but the visible output produces harm, highlighting a multi-turn manifestation of reasoning unfaithfulness). We evaluate three distilled reasoning targets against a fixed attacker across five oversight conditions, collecting 6750 turn-level observations on the Information-Hazard scenario. Our analysis reveals two reproducible vulnerabilities: an oversight paradox where explicit monitoring cues paradoxically increase alignment-faking rates rather than suppress them, and a context-injection failure where models lock onto unsafe external outputs despite safe internal states. We release the full dataset of multi-turn dialogues and CoT traces to support follow-up trace-diagnostic research.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Random Erasing vs. Model Inversion: A Promising Defense or a False Hope?

Model Inversion (MI) attacks pose a significant privacy threat by reconstructing private training data from machine learning models. While existing defenses primarily concentrate on model-centric approaches, the impact of data on MI robustness remains largely unexplored. In this work, we explore Random Erasing (RE), a technique traditionally used for improving model generalization under occlusion, and uncover its surprising effectiveness as a defense against MI attacks. Specifically, our novel feature space analysis shows that models trained with RE-images introduce a significant discrepancy between the features of MI-reconstructed images and those of the private data. At the same time, features of private images remain distinct from other classes and well-separated from different classification regions. These effects collectively degrade MI reconstruction quality and attack accuracy while maintaining reasonable natural accuracy. Furthermore, we explore two critical properties of RE including Partial Erasure and Random Location. Partial Erasure prevents the model from observing entire objects during training. We find this has a significant impact on MI, which aims to reconstruct the entire objects. Random Location of erasure plays a crucial role in achieving a strong privacy-utility trade-off. Our findings highlight RE as a simple yet effective defense mechanism that can be easily integrated with existing privacy-preserving techniques. Extensive experiments across 37 setups demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in the privacy-utility trade-off. The results consistently demonstrate the superiority of our defense over existing methods across different MI attacks, network architectures, and attack configurations. For the first time, we achieve a significant degradation in attack accuracy without a decrease in utility for some configurations.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Monitoring Beam Splitter Entanglement using Quantumness

arXiv:2606.24242v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We report on an experiment in which two independent squeezed vacuum states get entangled by mixing them with a balanced beam splitter. We follow standard practice and use an inseparability criterion to quantify their entanglement. However, this only allows us to witness the entanglement, but not to determine the deleterious effects of experimental imperfections due to the beam splitter mixing and the associated mode-mismatch and detection imperfections. We therefore introduce an alternative framework suitable for continuous variable systems using the states' quantumness, $\Xi$. We show that, under ideal circumstances, $\Xi$ is a conserved quantity under beam mixing. This allows us to benchmark the experiment's performance by comparing the states' quantumness $\Xi$ after the beam splitter mixing with $\Xi$ before. Such a comparison is not possible with entanglement witnesses, as the input states are unentangled. This highlights the main strength of our approach: its ability to generally quantify the quantumness of multi-mode continuous variable states and use this to probe different stages in an experiment.

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

Uncertainty-Aware Reward Modeling for Stable RLHF

arXiv:2606.19818v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) aligns large language models by training reward models on preference data and optimizing policies to maximize predicted rewards. However, this pipeline faces two fundamental challenges: (1) reward models cannot signal when their predictions are unreliable, since they usually act as deterministic point estimators; and (2) modern group-based policy optimization can amplify unreliable reward signals, as exemplified by GRPO's uniform treatment of rewards during advantage computation. As policies explore increasingly diverse responses, these two limitations create a critical vulnerability: unreliable reward estimates may be granted disproportionate influence, triggering severe reward hacking. We propose Uncertainty-Aware Reward Modeling (UARM), which equips reward models with calibrated uncertainty via quantile-based conformal prediction and reweights GRPO advantages through heteroscedastic variance decomposition. Experiments across HelpSteer, UltraFeedback, and PKU-SafeRLHF demonstrate that UARM significantly improves reward model calibration, reduces reward hacking, and enhances downstream alignment quality compared to standard GRPO and uncertainty-agnostic baselines.

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

Ex-Omni: Enabling 3D Facial Animation Generation for Omni-modal Large Language Models

Omni-modal large language models (OLLMs) aim to unify multimodal understanding and generation, yet extending them to jointly produce speech and 3D facial animation remains largely unexplored despite its importance for natural human-computer interaction. A key challenge is the mismatch between the discrete semantic reasoning of LLMs and the dense temporal dynamics required for 3D facial motion. We propose Expressive Omni (Ex-Omni), an open-source model that augments OLLMs with native speech-accompanied 3D facial animation. Ex-Omni decouples semantic reasoning from temporal generation through a blendshape-aware speech unit generator and a blendshape decoder, where speech units provide temporal scaffolding and hidden speech representations carry facially relevant cues. We further introduce a unified token-as-query gated fusion (TQGF) mechanism for controlled semantic injection, as well as InstructS2SF-1200K, a dataset consisting of 1200K samples for pre-training. Extensive experiments show that Ex-Omni maintains competitive speech understanding and generation ability while achieving better audio-visual synchronization and lower face-generation latency than cascaded pipelines.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Crystalline Spectral Form Factors

arXiv:2512.11054v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate crystalline-like behavior of the spectral form factor in unitary quantum systems with extremely strong eigenvalue repulsion. Using a low-temperature Coulomb gas as a model of repulsive eigenvalues, we derive the Debye-Waller factor suppressing periodic oscillations of the spectral form factor and estimate the order of its singularities at multiples of the Heisenberg time. We also reproduce this crystalline-like behavior using perturbed permutation circuits and random matrix ensembles associated with Lax matrices. Our results lay a foundation for future studies of quantum systems that exhibit intermediate level statistics between standard random matrix ensembles and permutation circuits.