中 EN
Sign In Register

Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

AcademicHub aggregates real-time literature from top journals and preprint platforms. Build your personal research radar and let large language models compile cross-disciplinary analysis briefings automatically.

Sign In Register
01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Verified Detection and Prevention of Concurrency Anomalies in Multi-Agent Large Language Model Systems

Authors:
Sajjad Khan↗

arXiv:2606.17182v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent LLM systems share state through memory stores, vector indices, and tool registries. We model such sharing as long-running read-generate-write operations under deterministic-generation semantics – the regime durable-execution engines enforce by deterministic replay – and formalize four concurrency anomalies in TLA+: stale-generation, phantom-tool, causal-cascade, and tool-effect reordering, structural analogues of classical isolation anomalies, each with a TLC counter-example. The exclusion lattice over these anomalies is trivial; the contribution is the mechanically verified realizability and strict separation of one maximal chain within it, $L_0 \subsetneq \cdots \subsetneq L_4$, to our knowledge the first machine-checked consistency hierarchy for such runtimes. A development of 274 Verus obligations (zero assume, zero admit; trust base: two structural axioms and a mutex correspondence) proves the detectors sound and complete against the specifications and each runtime its avoidance set. Three deployed Rust runtimes realize L0-L1 (pessimistic locking, serializable snapshot isolation, default-SI), each verified against stale-generation and refined to its state machine; L2-L4 are exec-mode-verified with dependency-free prevention twins (A3, A6, A2: 0/1000 versus 1000/1000), and L2 is run live across three model families (A3 prevented in all 120 retracted sessions). We reproduce a silent lost update in ByteDance's deer-flow, formalizing its fix as a verified $L_0 \to L_1$ refinement, and exhibit tool-effect reordering in LangGraph's ToolNode on unmodified output, removed by an L3 commit-order sequencer. The verified detector, refinements, and realizability artifacts are the contribution; the phenomena and lattice are classical.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Hybrid VQE-CVQE algorithm using diabatic state preparation

Authors:
John P. T. Stenger↗C. Stephen Hellberg↗Daniel Gunlycke↗

arXiv:2512.04801v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a hybrid variational quantum algorithm that has variational parameters used by both the quantum circuit and the subsequent classical optimization. Similar to the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE), this algorithm applies a parameterized unitary operator to the qubit register. We generate this operator using diabatic state preparation. The quantum measurement results then inform the classical optimization procedure used by the Cascaded Variational Quantum Eigensolver (CVQE). We demonstrate the algorithm on a system of interacting electrons and show how it can be used on long-term error-corrected as well as short-term intermediate-scale quantum computers. Our simulations performed on IBM Brisbane produced energies well within chemical accuracy.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

How Fragile Are Training-Free AI-Generated Image Detectors? A Controlled Audit of Score Direction, Preprocessing, and Compression

Authors:
Jingwen Zhou↗Mingzhe Wang↗

Training-free detectors of AI-generated images promise generator-agnostic deployment without classifier training, yet their reported numbers are rarely compared under a single controlled protocol. We audit two representative training-free scores – an autoencoder-reconstruction score (AEROBLADE-style) and a noise-perturbation feature-similarity score (RIGID-style) – plus a naive feature-kNN control, on a common 1,500-image GenImage-derived benchmark spanning seven generators and JPEG compression at quality 70 and 50. The audit yields three cautionary findings. (i) Implementation details masquerade as method differences: replacing the LPIPS backbone (AlexNet -> VGG-16) changes overall AUROC by +0.085, and switching between resize-to-512 and native-resolution preprocessing flips per-generator conclusions by up to 0.38 AUROC. (ii) Score direction is not a property of the method but of its hyperparameters: the RIGID-style score is inverted (AUROC < 0.5) on SD1.5 and Wukong at noise level sigma=0.05, recovers to >0.5 for every generator at sigma=0.01, and collapses to 0.15 at sigma=0.3. (iii) Dataset format bias inflates robustness claims: without unified re-encoding, AUROC under JPEG-50 exceeds the clean condition for the AlexNet-backbone reconstruction score; after bias correction the residual anomaly localizes to a single generator (BigGAN). The audited scores have complementary per-generator failure sets, but naive z-score fusion does not beat the best single score, indicating that exploiting complementarity requires direction-aware combination.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Closing the Approximation Gap in Simulation-free Latent SDEs

Authors:
Henry D. Smith↗Brian L. Trippe↗Scott W. Linderman↗

arXiv:2606.16138v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recovering dynamical systems from noisy observations is a recurring challenge across scientific domains, including neuroscience and physics. Latent stochastic differential equations (SDEs) address this by modeling the system as an unobserved state that evolves according to a learnable SDE and generates the observations. Variational inference (VI) provides a tractable objective for fitting latent SDEs. Traditional VI algorithms evaluate this objective by numerical simulation over a time discretization, trading fidelity for computational cost. A recent class of algorithms, simulation-free VI, sidesteps this tradeoff by parameterizing the posterior through its instantaneous marginals rather than its drift. In this work, we show that the efficiency of existing simulation-free VI algorithms comes at a price: their parameterizations restrict the approximate posterior to a subset of the SDEs available to simulation-based methods, degrading posterior inference and parameter learning. We propose Helmholtz-SDE, a simulation-free VI algorithm that closes this gap by optimizing over path laws compatible with a prescribed collection of marginals. Helmholtz-SDE recovers dynamics more faithfully than prior simulation-free methods, with the largest gains under high posterior uncertainty. It further matches the performance of simulation-based VI at a fraction of the runtime.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Incremental Residual Reinforcement Learning Toward Real-World Learning for Social Navigation

Authors:
Haruto Nagahisa↗Kohei Matsumoto↗Yuki Tomita↗Yuki Hyodo↗Ryo Kurazume↗

arXiv:2604.07945v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As the demand for mobile robots continues to increase, social navigation has emerged as a critical task, driving active research into deep reinforcement learning (RL) approaches. However, because pedestrian dynamics and social conventions vary widely across different regions, simulations cannot easily encompass all possible real-world scenarios. Real-world RL, in which agents learn while operating directly in physical environments, presents a promising solution to this issue. Nevertheless, this approach faces significant challenges, particularly regarding constrained computational resources on edge devices and learning efficiency. In this study, we propose incremental residual RL (IRRL). This method integrates incremental learning, which is a lightweight process that operates without a replay buffer or batch updates, with residual RL, which enhances learning efficiency by training only on the residuals relative to a base policy. Through the simulation experiments, we demonstrated that, despite lacking a replay buffer, IRRL achieved performance comparable to those of conventional replay buffer-based methods and outperformed existing incremental learning approaches. Furthermore, the real-world experiments confirmed that IRRL can enable robots to effectively adapt to previously unseen environments through the real-world learning.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
06.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Organize then Retrieve: Hierarchical Memory Navigation for Efficient Agents

Authors:
Hao-Lun Hsu↗Nikki Lijing Kuang↗Boyi Liu↗Zhewei Yao↗Yuxiong He↗

Large language model (LLM) agents struggle with long-horizon tasks due to their inherent statelessness, requiring all task-relevant information to be encoded in growing input contexts. The resulting degraded reasoning quality, increased inference cost, and higher latency necessitate efficient working memory mechanisms. However, existing approaches either rely on lossy compression or similarity-based retrieval, which often fail to capture temporal structure and causal dependencies required for multi-step agentic tasks. In this work, we present HORMA, a Hierarchical Organize-and-Retrieve Memory Agent that organizes experience into a file-system-like hierarchical structure, where summarized entities are linked to the corresponding raw trajectories, enabling efficient access without losing detailed information. HORMA decomposes working memory into two stages: structured memory construction and navigation-based retrieval. The construction module iteratively refines how experiences are structured by distinguishing between failures caused by missing information and those caused by misleading or overloaded context. The navigation module retrieves task-relevant context by traversing the hierarchy using a lightweight agent trained with reinforcement learning to select minimal yet sufficient context, thereby reducing latency along the critical execution path. Across ALFWorld, LoCoMo, and LongMemEval, HORMA improves task performance under constrained context budgets while requiring at most 22.17% of the baseline token usage in long conversation tasks. Compared to existing methods, it consistently achieves better efficiency-performance trade-offs and generalizes effectively to unseen tasks.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Learning User Simulators with Turing Rewards

Authors:
Yingshan Susan Wang↗Cedegao E. Zhang↗Linlu Qiu↗Zexue He↗Pengyuan Li↗Alex Pentland↗Roger P. Levy↗Yoon Kim↗

Learning to simulate human users in interactive settings could advance the training of agent assistants, evaluation of personalization systems, research in the social sciences, and more. Existing approaches generally do so by training a large language model (LLM) to match a single ground truth response, either by maximizing the log probability or by using a similarity reward. We instead propose {Turing-RL}: a Turing-Test-based reinforcement learning approach for training user simulator models. {Turing-RL} uses a discriminative Turing reward with an LLM judge to score how indistinguishable a generated response is from the real user's given the user's history, and the user simulator LLM learns to produce responses indistinguishable from what the user could have said with such rewards. Across two different domains–conversational chat and Reddit forum discussion–we find that {Turing-RL} consistently outperforms baseline methods on both LLM and human evaluation metrics. Our study suggests that optimizing for indistinguishability, rather than response matching, is effective for learning user simulators.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

A multi-agent system for spine MRI report generation from multi-sequence imaging

Authors:
Xiao↗Yang↗Sun↗Zhang↗Xu↗Yao↗Miller↗Z. D↗King↗W. E↗Kanani↗M. M↗…

Spinal pathology is a leading cause of pain and disability worldwide. Spine magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is central to clinical evaluation, yet its interpretation remains complex and time-consuming, requiring integration of information across multiple imaging sequences and anatomical regions. Despite recent advances in automated MRI analysis, effectively combining multi-sequence data while preserving sequence-specific diagnostic information remains an open challenge. Here we present SpineAgent, a multi-agent framework for spine MRI report generation built upon a multi-sequence foundation model trained on routine clinical data from 32,047 patients and 453,683 MRI series, comprising a total of 13,441,191 MRI slices. To accommodate diverse modalities of sequences, we first pre-train two DINOv3-based encoders separately on T1- and T2-weighted sequences. We then introduce a continual training strategy that learns a synthesizer to embed images of other sequences using the T1 and T2 encoders, producing patient-level embedding that integrates various signals across MRI sequences. Using these embeddings, SpineAgent achieves state-of-the-art performance, with mean 10.8% AUROC improvement across 17 spinal condition-prediction tasks compared to the best competing method, and demonstrates strong generalizability under cross-manufacturer and cross-cohort evaluation. Beyond classification, SpineAgent enables pathology localization by identifying findings-relevant slices and segmenting pathological regions. It also supports multimodal image-report retrieval, providing a solid foundation for scalable and explainable MRI report generation. We further integrate these validated capabilities of SpineAgent into 37 specialized agents for condition diagnosis, pathological-region localization, and clinically-similar-cases retrieval. Finally, we incorporate their outputs as structured tokens within a Medical Report Agent trained end-to-end for report generation. Through both automated metrics and expert evaluation by five radiologists, SpineAgent achieves leading performance in spine MRI report generation. Together, SpineAgent introduces a continual training approach for multi-sequence spine MRI understanding. By decomposing report generation into clinically grounded subtasks addressed by specialized agents, the SpineAgent framework enables accurate, interpretable and generalizable spine MRI reporting across diverse imaging sequences and anatomical regions.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Experimental violation of a Bell-like inequality for causal order

Authors:
Yu Guo↗Hao Tang↗Bo-Xuan Wang↗Min-Yu Lv↗Jia-Wen↗Fan↗Xiao-Min Hu↗Yun-Feng Huang↗Chuan-Feng Liu↗Guang-Can Guo↗Giulio Chiribella↗Bi-Heng Liu↗…

arXiv:2506.20516v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum mechanics is compatible with scenarios where physical processes happen in an indefinite order. In theory, this feature could be detected through violations of inequalities on the observed correlations, analogous to Bell inequalities. However, experimental demonstrations of such violations have been missing until recently due to the complexity of the required setup. Here we report an experimental violation of a Bell-like inequality involving the correlations of four parties, one of which is spacelike separated from the others. Our demonstration employs 3 km fiber spools to simulate spacelike separation, and achieves high-speed operations in photonic time-bin encoding, nanosecond synchronization, and accurate temperature stabilization. These experimental advances enable a violation by 5.7 standard deviations and open a path towards a certification of indefinite order in conditions that guarantee spacelike separation with existing state-of-the-art devices. However, the certification is not device-independent, as it relies on knowledge about the setup to exclude bidirectional signaling–a loophole inherent to implementations in classical acyclic spacetimes, which may be resolved in future quantum-spacetime tests.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

The Algorithmic-Human Manager: AI, Apps, and Workers in the Indian Gig Economy

Authors:
Omir Kumar↗Krishnan Narayanan↗

arXiv:2606.19975v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper examines the impact of artificial intelligence and digital technologies on the blue-collar gig economy in India, focusing on algorithmic management. This paper examines the impact of artificial intelligence and digital technologies on the blue collar gig economy in India, focusing on algorithmic management he use of automated systems to allocate, monitor, and evaluate work in location-based services such as ride sharing and delivery. Using a social justice framework and a mixed-methods approach comprising interviews with 16 gig workers and 21 key stakeholders, the study uncovers a dual reality: while AI-powered systems expand access to work and generate operational efficiencies, they simultaneously introduce significant challenges related to fairness, transparency, and worker dignity. Key findings reveal that algorithmic systems are opaque by design, produce inequitable outcomes, and are not structured to reward additional labour with proportionate pay. The study advocates for a pragmatic hybrid governance model an Algorithmic Human Manager framework in which technological efficiency and human accountability operate together rather than in opposition. The findings carry implications for policymakers, platform companies, and civil society organizations working to design equitable AI governance frameworks for the gig economy in India and across the Global South.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Teacher-Student Structure for Domain Adaptation in Ensemble Audio-Visual Video Deepfake Detection

Authors:
Elham Abolhasani↗Maryam Ramezani↗Hamid R. Rabiee↗

The rapid advancement of generative AI models is leading to more realistic deepfake media, encompassing the manipulation of audio, video, or both. This raises severe privacy and societal concerns. Numerous studies in this area have yielded promising intra-domain results; however, these models frequently exhibit decreased efficacy when faced with data from dissimilar domains. Consequently, recent deepfake detection approaches focus on enhancing the generalization ability through multiple techniques that incorporate all input modalities, including audio, images, and their interactions. In this regard, we propose the EAV-DFD method, a generalized deep ensemble audio-visual model (EAV-DFD) combined with a domain adaptation mechanism utilizing a teacher-student framework to enhance the model's ability to perform and generalize effectively across unseen domains. To evaluate the model's performance, we used the FakeAVCeleb dataset as the primary domain and the DFDC, Deepfake_TIMIT, and PolyGlotFake datasets as an unseen domain. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework is efficient in domain adaptation, improving AUC performance of the model by 4.09%, 17.94%, and 0.5% on three unseen datasets, using only a small portion of them to train the student model. This leads to a novel deepfake detection model capable of adapting to new domains and interpreting which modality has been manipulated, highlighting the potential of our approach for real-world applications.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Cross-Model Disagreement as a Label-Free Correctness Signal

Authors:
Matt Gorbett↗Suman Jana↗

arXiv:2603.25450v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Detecting when a language model is wrong without ground truth labels is a fundamental challenge for safe deployment. Existing approaches rely on a model's own uncertainty – such as token entropy or confidence scores – but these signals fail critically on the most dangerous failure mode: confident errors, where a model is wrong but certain. In this work we introduce cross-model disagreement as a correctness indicator – a simple, training-free signal that can be dropped into existing production systems, routing pipelines, and deployment monitoring infrastructure without modification. Given a model's generated answer, cross-model disagreement computes how surprised or uncertain a second verifier model is when reading that answer via a single forward pass. No generation from the verifying model is required, and no correctness labels are needed. We instantiate this principle as Cross-Model Perplexity (CMP), which measures the verifying model's surprise at the generating model's answer tokens, and Cross-Model Entropy (CME), which measures the verifying model's uncertainty at those positions. Both CMP and CME outperform within-model uncertainty baselines across benchmarks spanning reasoning, retrieval, and mathematical problem solving (MMLU, TriviaQA, and GSM8K). On MMLU, CMP achieves a mean AUROC of 0.75 against a within-model entropy baseline of 0.59. These results establish cross-model disagreement as a practical, training-free approach to label-free correctness estimation, with direct applications in deployment monitoring, model routing, selective prediction, data filtering, and scalable oversight of production language model systems.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

OrthoReg: Orthogonal Regularization for Hybrid Symbolic-Neural Dynamical Systems

Authors:
Till Richter↗Niki Kilbertus↗

arXiv:2606.19145v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dynamical systems are fundamental to modeling the natural world, yet modeling them involves a persistent trade-off: manually prescribed mechanistic models are interpretable by design but often overly simplistic and misspecified; in contrast, flexible data-driven neural methods lack physical insight. Hybrid modeling aims for the best of both worlds by combining a prescribed or symbolic, physics-based component with a flexible neural network. A critical challenge, however, is that the neural component may relearn mechanistic parts, yielding redundant and uninterpretable models, especially when the symbolic structure itself is discovered from data. Existing methods based on standard $L^2$ regularization rely on a projection argument that breaks when the symbolic component is learned through sparse discovery, allowing the neural augmentation to overlap with symbolic structure. We introduce OrthoReg (Orthogonal Regularization), which directly penalizes overlap between the symbolic and neural components, preventing symbolic structure from being absorbed by the neural residual. This yields a complementary decomposition: the symbolic part captures what the library can express, and the neural part captures what remains. On benchmark dynamical systems with partial library mismatch, OrthoReg improves symbolic recovery and out-of-distribution behavior.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Privacy Vulnerabilities of Attention Layers in Tabular Foundation Models and Protection of High-Risk Queries

Authors:
T\^ania Carvalho↗Maxime Cordy↗

arXiv:2606.26021v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tabular foundation models are commonly assumed to present limited privacy concerns as they are often pre-trained on large collections of synthetic data. However, these models leverage in-context learning, where sensitive records may be provided directly at inference time as labelled context examples. In this paper, we demonstrate that predictions generated via the attention mechanism leak sufficient information to enable effective Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs). To highlight this vulnerability, we propose AMIA (Attention-based Membership Inference Attack), a shadow-model-free attack that exploits the concentration of transformer attention patterns. Our results show that attention mechanisms reveal strong membership signals, which exceed classical confidence-based attacks, achieving an average gain of 7.7\%, specially in low false-positive regimes. To mitigate this risk, we introduce an inference-time defence inspired by $k$-anonymity principles. This approach reduces the uniqueness of context-key representations without introducing random noise or retraining the model. By targeting only high-risk queries identified through AMIA scores, the defence substantially reduces membership leakage of this attack by an average of 50\% and 25\% against confidence-based attacks, while preserving predictive utility with only 3.9\% performance degradation. Beyond showing that context examples are vulnerable, we further demonstrate that fine-tuning introduces an additional source of privacy risk. In particular, samples whose prediction confidence increases after fine-tuning become more susceptible to MIAs, indicating that fine-tuning can amplify memorisation and expose sensitive training information through confidence shifts.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Sharing quantum indistinguishability with multiple parties

Authors:
Lemieux Wang↗Hanwool Lee↗Joonwoo Bae↗Kieran Flatt↗

arXiv:2512.15199v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum indistinguishability of non-orthogonal quantum states is a valuable resource in quantum information applications such as cryptography and randomness generation. In this article, we present a sequential state-discrimination scheme that enables multiple parties to share quantum uncertainty, in terms of the max relative entropy, generated by a single party. Our scheme is based upon maximum-confidence measurements and takes advantages of weak measurements to allow a number of parties to perform state discrimination on a single quantum system. We review known sequential state discrimination and show how our scheme would work through a number of examples where ensembles may or may not contain symmetries. Our results will have a role to play in understanding the ultimate limits of sequential information extraction and guide the development of quantum resource sharing in sequential settings.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

A Controlled Human Malaria Infection model for relapsing Plasmodium vivax

Authors:
Duncan↗A. D. S↗Geraedts↗T. J. M↗Manlutac↗Baker↗E. C↗van Heerden↗J. K↗Roberts↗T. W↗Rigby↗…

Background Plasmodium vivax malaria relapses are a major source of morbidity and onward transmission of infection. The underlying mechanisms are poorly understood and current therapies sub-optimal. We examined the safety and feasibility of a controlled human malaria infection (CHMI) model for relapsing P. vivax. Methods We conducted an open-label, proof-of-concept, CHMI study of relapsing P. vivax. Healthy, malaria-naive, Duffy-positive adults aged 18-45 years with extensive CYP2D6 metaboliser phenotype and normal blood glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD) levels were recruited in Oxford, UK. Mosquito-bite CHMI was performed in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, using Anopheles stephensi mosquitoes infected with PvW1, a clonal isolate of P. vivax from Thailand. All follow-up visits were conducted in Oxford, UK. Primary P. vivax infections (qPCR > 500 genome copies/mL) were treated with artemether-lumefantrine (80mg/480mg at 8, 24, 36, 48 and 60 hours). From Day 28 following CHMI, participants attended a fortnightly clinic for clinical review and qPCR blood sampling, with additional assessments performed for any reported symptoms. P. vivax relapse infections (qPCR > 500 genome copies/mL) were treated with artemether-lumefantrine as per primary infection. Definitive anti-malarial treatment with atovaquone-proguanil (1000mg/400mg once daily for three days) and primaquine (0{middle dot}5 mg/kg/day for 14 days) was administered six months following CHMI, regardless of parasitaemia or symptoms. The primary objective was to assess the safety, feasibility and frequency of relapsing P. vivax after CHMI. Remote follow-up (5 years) is ongoing. The study is registered with ISRCTN registry (ISRCTN48625883). Findings 20 participants were screened for eligibility from 21 January 2025. Five participants (median age 22 years) underwent CHMI (five infected mosquitoes per participant) on 15 April 2025. All participants developed primary P. vivax infection and experienced at least one relapse infection. Two participants experienced a second relapse. Overall incidence rate was 3{middle dot}6 relapse infections per person-year. Solicited adverse events were mild or moderate and there were no serious adverse events. Definitive anti-malarial treatment was administered to all participants. One participant experienced primaquine-induced methaemoglobinaemia, resolving with early discontinuation of treatment (total dose 5{middle dot}3 mg/kg). To date, more than six months after primaquine treatment, no further relapses have been recorded. Interpretation CHMI of relapsing P. vivax is safe and feasible, allowing exploration of the mechanisms underlying relapse infections and providing a platform for future anti-relapse efficacy studies. Funding European Union Horizon Europe programme and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) via OptiVivax consortium; UK National Institute for Health and Care Research Biomedical Research Centre: Oxford; and UK Medical Research Council.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Symmetry Breaking through Superselection by Boundary Conditions

Authors:
Silvester G. A. Borsboom↗Jos\'e P. Dupont↗

arXiv:2606.15272v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB) is central to modern physics but is conventionally defined only for infinite systems, raising challenges for its interpretation in finite, real-world setups. This paper argues that the key to resolving this issue lies in the underappreciated role of boundary conditions in quantum systems. Inspired by both the relational approach to symmetries and the physical mechanism behind symmetry breaking, we formulate a relational interpretation of SSB: a finite system exhibits SSB relative to a reference environment which can induce perturbations across the boundary. This eliminates the need for the thermodynamic limit, offering a more physical picture of SSB that emphasizes the observable consequences of the interactions that real-life systems inevitably have with their environment. We show how, in this relational interpretation, SSB for both lattice systems and (gauge) field theories should be understood as subtle, rather than spontaneous, symmetry breaking, still in contrast to explicit symmetry breaking. We also explain how algebraic definitions of SSB for infinite systems relate to the intuitive picture of SSB in finite systems and illustrate how asymptotic boundary conditions push the environment "to infinity". In this way, our relational interpretation of SSB provides a unified conceptual framework applicable to symmetry-breaking in systems of any size.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Intrapartum Oxytocin and Maternal Outcomes Following Vaginal and Unscheduled Cesarean Delivery

Authors:
Allouche-Kam↗Arora↗I. H↗Lee↗M. C↗Zhang↗Hughes↗Dekel↗

Objective To examine whether intrapartum synthetic oxytocin exposure for labor induction or augmentation is associated with breastfeeding and postpartum depressive and traumatic stress symptoms. Methods We studied 1,296 postpartum women who delivered at a single tertiary care center, with assessments from the third trimester through approximately two months postpartum. Intrapartum oxytocin exposure was obtained from electronic medical records. Outcomes included exclusive breastfeeding, postpartum depression, and childbirth-related traumatic stress. Analyses were stratified by delivery mode and adjusted for key maternal and obstetric covariates. Results Overall, 63.3% of participants received intrapartum oxytocin. Among participants with vaginal delivery, oxytocin exposure was associated with lower exclusive breastfeeding at two months after adjustment (58.2% vs 70.3%; adjusted RR 0.86, 95% CI 0.76- 0.97; p = 0.02), but not with postpartum mental health outcomes. Among participants with unscheduled cesarean delivery, oxytocin exposure was independently associated with higher immediate postpartum depressive symptoms (F = 4.97, p = 0.03), acute childbirth-related stress (F = 4.56, p = 0.03), and two-month childbirth-related posttraumatic stress symptoms (F = 4.30, p = 0.04), but not two-month depressive symptoms. Conclusion Intrapartum oxytocin exposure was associated with lower exclusive breastfeeding after vaginal delivery and modestly higher childbirth-related distress after unscheduled cesarean delivery. These findings suggest that oxytocin exposure may mark or contribute to postpartum vulnerability in specific delivery contexts.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Quantum-enhanced estimation of stimulated Raman optical activity

Authors:
Mahadeva Chanda Durjoy↗Girish S. Agarwal↗

arXiv:2606.23722v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In recent times there has been growing interest in Raman optical activity (ROA) for its label free detection of absolute configuration, conformation, and stereochemical structure in chiral biosamples and drug molecules. Since ROA signals are generally small, techniques such as stimulation by a probe beam can be used to enhance the signal strength. However, with a classical probe, the measurement precision is still fundamentally limited by its shot noise. To solve this problem we propose the use of two-mode squeezed vacuum and show that it can achieve sub-shot noise limited measurement sensitivity. Using quantum estimation theory, we derived the quantum Fisher information and the quantum Cramér-Rao bound (QCRB) for stimulated ROA measurement to quantify the precision enhancement. This improvement comes from photon-number correlations which suppress the intensity fluctuation common to both modes. We further show that balanced detection of the output intensity difference is a practical measurement scheme that approaches the QCRB and becomes optimal in the small-chirality limit. This opens a promising path toward more sensitive Raman chiroptical spectroscopy of weak and photosensitive samples.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Regulating the Machine Contributor: Governance and Policy Alignment in Open Source

Authors:
Jassem Manita↗Aziz Amari↗

arXiv:2606.14594v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI-assisted software development has moved from line-level autocomplete to agents that can plan changes, edit files, and submit pull requests with limited human supervision. Open-source software, however, evolves through a process designed for humans: contributor agreements, codes of conduct, and review norms all assume a legally accountable person who can attest to provenance and answer reviewer questions. Autonomous and semi-autonomous AI contributors strain those assumptions, and the 2025-2026 record of agent-driven incidents, AI-generated nuisance volume, and platform-level shutdowns shows that the gap is operationally consequential. Several open-source organisations have responded with contribution policies, but the result is fragmented, and its alignment with emerging AI governance frameworks (EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF with the UC Berkeley Agentic AI Profile, ISO/IEC 42001 and 23894) is unmapped at the contribution level. We compare policies across six organisations (SymPy, LLVM, matplotlib, OpenInfra, the Apache Software Foundation, and the Linux Foundation) using Most-Similar Systems Design with indicator-based coding and process tracing for SymPy and LLVM. From this we derive a six-dimensional taxonomy (disclosure, responsibility, human oversight, licensing, enforcement, maintainer workload), an ordinal Policy Maturity Score, and a mapping of documented agent incidents onto the dimensions each policy fails to govern. Aligning the dimensions with the regulatory frameworks above identifies overlapping gaps neither side currently closes, and we close by sketching the shape of a harmonised tiered framework and the empirical evaluation needed to calibrate it.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Web-based education on Metabolism and Obesity is associated with improved lifestyle and health behaviours among Brazilian school teachers

Authors:
Evangelista-Silva↗P. H↗Coutinho↗C. P↗Martins Correia↗C. C↗Moraes↗Fernandes Ferreira↗A. F↗Medeiros Komino↗A. C↗Neves Ramos↗…

Background: Obesity is a major global public health challenge, and teachers play a critical role in school-based health promotion. This study examined the perceived impact of a web-based educational program on metabolism and obesity delivered to Brazilian school teachers. Methods: This analytical cross-sectional study included 217 teachers who responded to the evaluation questionnaire after attending the course between 2017 and 2022. Statistical analyses included logistic regression and chi-square tests. Findings: Course completion rate was 81.98%, substantially exceeding the 5-15% typical of global MOOCs. However, ethnic disparities were observed: White respondents were 4.95 times more likely to complete the course than Black respondents (p=0.00097) and Brown respondents were 3.05 times more likely (p=0.0268) than Black respondents. Among non-completers, lack of time (64.7%) was the primary barrier. Participation was concentrated in Sao Paulo (77%), with no respondents from three northern states. Perceived difficulty showed a non-significant trend (p=0.0893) where by Black respondents had the lowest predicted difficulty; the most challenging course material was Scientific Content/Reading papers (50%). Completion was strongly associated with applying learned activities in teaching (p

Read & Discuss → View Source →
22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Hierarchical Successor Representation for Robust Transfer

Authors:
Changmin Yu↗M\'at\'e Lengyel↗

arXiv:2602.12753v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The successor representation (SR) provides a powerful framework for decoupling predictive dynamics from rewards, enabling rapid generalisation across reward configurations. However, the classical SR is limited by its inherent policy dependence: policies change due to ongoing learning, environmental non-stationarities, and changes in task demands, making established predictive representations obsolete. Furthermore, in topologically complex environments, SRs suffer from spectral diffusion, leading to dense and overlapping features that scale poorly. Here we propose the Hierarchical Successor Representation (HSR) for overcoming these limitations. By incorporating temporal abstractions into the construction of predictive representations, HSR learns stable state features which are robust to task-induced policy changes. Applying non-negative matrix factorisation (NMF) to the HSR yields a sparse, low-rank state representation that facilitates highly sample-efficient transfer to novel tasks in multi-compartmental environments. Further analysis reveals that HSR-NMF discovers interpretable topological structures, providing a policy-agnostic hierarchical map that effectively bridges model-free optimality and model-based flexibility. Beyond providing a useful basis for task-transfer, we show that HSR's temporally extended predictive structure can also be leveraged to drive efficient exploration, effectively scaling to large, procedurally generated environments.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Legal Reasoning Is Not Lawyering: Rethinking Legal Benchmarks for Pro Se Access to Justice

Authors:
Andrew Lou↗David Shin↗

arXiv:2606.23716v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Legal AI benchmark research frequently invokes the assumption that large language models can improve access to justice, including for people who cannot access lawyers in order to understand and exercise their legal rights. We argue that current benchmarks are not equipped to support this assumption because they evaluate legal reasoning over inputs that have already been preprocessed by legal experts, which measures the upper bound of model performance. Access to justice depends on a lower bound: how models perform when inputs come from pro se litigants, whose prompts may contain noisy narratives, buried facts, omissions, folk-legal assumptions, and surface-level errors. These degradations are comparable to conditions under which LLMs are known to degrade in the general machine learning literature, including long-context sensitivity, underspecification, hallucination, and typographical perturbations. We connect evidence from pro se literature with this body of machine learning research and present a small perturbation experiment on LEXam, a legal benchmark, to illustrate the gap between these two bounds. If model development continues to focus on benchmarks that measure only the upper bound, this gap may remain hidden or even widen. We conclude by calling for legal benchmarks that directly measure robustness under pro se-like inputs so that access-to-justice claims about legal AI can become empirically testable.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

From Awareness to Adherence: Bridging the Context Gap in Spoken Dialogue Systems via Context-Aware Decoding

Authors:
Che Hyun Lee↗Heeseung Kim↗Sungroh Yoon↗

Despite the success of end-to-end (E2E) spoken dialogue systems, maintaining strict context adherence in multi-round conversations remains a challenge. While prior works attribute these failures to models forgetting dialogue history, we highlight an equally critical but overlooked bottleneck: a gap between latent context awareness and active adherence. Although models internally recognize relevant past utterances, strong parametric priors often overshadow these signals during decoding. To bridge this gap, we propose an audio-adapted Context-Aware Decoding (CAD) approach. By leveraging internal attention mechanisms to isolate key historical rounds, our approach contrasts output distributions with and without this key context during inference, directly amplifying multimodal contextual signals. Evaluations on the Audio MultiChallenge benchmark demonstrate significant improvements in Semantic Memory and Self Coherence subtasks, successfully enforcing strict, context-faithful adherence.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Simplicity Suffices for Parameter Noise Injection in Stochastic Gradient Descent

Authors:
Benjamin Leblanc↗Louis-Jacob Lebel↗Teddy Kana↗Richard Kamel↗

arXiv:2606.12054v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Injecting noise into the optimization process is a well-established technique for improving the training and generalization of deep neural networks. Yet, despite the breadth of existing approaches, it remains unclear which design choices truly matter in practice. In this work, we investigate parameter noise injection for stochastic gradient descent, focusing on two key questions: how to efficiently pair each training example with its own perturbation in mini-batch training, and whether sophisticated noise parameterizations or multi-sample gradient averaging yield meaningful gains over simpler alternatives. To address the first question, we leverage a distributional identity for linear layers that allows per-example noise injection without breaking batched computation. To address the second, we systematically compare several diagonal Gaussian parameterizations against an isotropic baseline across varying noise levels on CIFAR100. Our results consistently show that simple, lightweight strategies, isotropic noise with a single perturbed forward pass per update step, recover most of the benefit of more complex schemes. These findings suggest that simplicity suffices for parameter noise injection, and that practitioners need not resort to elaborate perturbation designs to reap the optimization and generalization benefits of noisy SGD.

Read & Discuss → View Source →