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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

A Quantitative Analysis of Multimodal Biomarkers in Alzheimer's Disease

Authors:
Antonio Scardace↗Daniele Rav\`i↗

Despite increasing adoption of multimodal approaches in Alzheimer's Disease (AD) research – aimed at integrating molecular, structural, clinical, and genetic biomarkers to enhance disease characterization – the relationships among these modalities remain poorly understood. A systematic analysis of their dynamic interaction is essential for improving disease modeling, identifying redundant assessments, and reducing patient burden and acquisition costs. In this paper, we present a quantitative analysis of multimodal AD biomarkers by integrating tau-PET, structural MRI, cognitive scores (MMSE and CDR), and APOE4 data from 789 subjects drawn from the ADNI dataset. In our analyses, we (A) quantify cross-modal mutual information and explained variance to assess redundancy and predictive dependencies; (B) examine associations between tau topologies and structural atrophy across brain regions to select informative ROIs; (C) perform a statistical decomposition of the tau-cognition association into atrophy-related and atrophy-independent components; (D) and identify a dominant neurodegenerative trajectory that aligns with cognitive decline. This study provides a systematic characterization of cross-modal relationships, improving the interpretability and selection of biomarkers in AD. Code is publicly available at: https://github.com/antonioscardace/Multimodal-AD.

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

Semantic-Preserving Prompt Hijacking: A Black-Box Adversarial Attack on Auto-Prompt Optimization

Authors:
Chong Zhang↗Xiang Li↗Jia Wang↗Shan Liang↗Haochen Xue↗Xiaobo Jin↗

LLMs increasingly integrate auto-suggestion optimization modules, enabling them to rewrite and display user input before generating the final response. While this design aims to enhance transparency and trust, its process of autonomously selecting a single best result from multiple candidate solutions allows attackers to hijack this optimization process by inducing subtle, imperceptible semantic shifts. To address this, we propose a semantic preservation hijacking attack method based on black-box conditions: Adaptive Greedy Local Search. This method hierarchically decomposes the input text, masks key language units, and dynamically adjusts candidate replacement words at predefined semantic checkpoints. This maximizes the deviation between the model output and the original intent while strictly maintaining semantic similarity to the original text. Experimental results on commercial and open-source LLMs demonstrate that, under the same semantic similarity constraints, this method achieves a higher attack success rate than existing attack methods in over 2400 test cases. Code is available at: https://github.com/franz-chang/DOBS

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03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Harnessing cortical geometry, wiring, and function as inductive biases for recurrent neural networks

Authors:
Mo Shakiba↗Rana Rokni↗Mohammad Mohammadi↗Nima Dehghani↗

arXiv:2606.14975v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: How the wiring and functional organization of cortex shape recurrent computation remains a central question in both neuroscience and machine learning. Here, we leverage data released through the Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICrONS) program–a functional connectomics resource spanning multiple areas of mouse visual cortex, in which dense calcium imaging is co-registered with high-resolution electron microscopy reconstruction from the same animal–to build biologically grounded recurrent neural networks. Using neuronal spatial coordinates, anatomical connectivity, and function-derived relationships from nearly 12,000 coregistered excitatory neurons, we initialize recurrent weights and impose communication-aware spatial constraints during learning. Across three cognitive decision-making tasks, networks constrained by cortical structure and function consistently outperform baseline and partially constrained models. Functional weight initialization provides the largest gain, while real spatial embedding yields robust additional improvements across conditions. These biologically grounded networks also develop low-entropy, modular, and small-world organization, and retain strong performance even when recurrence is restricted to positive weights. Together, our results show that the machinery of cortex–its geometry, wiring, and functional structure–can be harnessed as a powerful inductive basis for building recurrent networks that learn more effectively while converging toward key organizational principles of biological computation.

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04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Naive Visual Memory is Not Enough: A Failure-Mode Study of GUI Agents

Authors:
Seoyoung Choi↗Minseok Ko↗Hyunseok Lee↗Kunwoong Kim↗Woomin Song↗Chanseok Jeon↗Jinwoo Shin↗

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents are increasingly used to automate complex computer tasks across applications, websites, and operating systems. To improve their reliability, recent work has introduced experiential memory, where agents retrieve prior trajectories to guide decision-making in similar states. More recent approaches further extend this idea to visual memory by storing and retrieving screenshots from past interactions, providing agents with richer contextual information than text-only memories. However, the effect of visual memory in GUI agents remains insufficiently understood: it is unclear which failures visual memory mitigates, or which failures it exacerbates. To systematically analyze the effect of visual memory, we introduce a taxonomy of four GUI agent failures (i.e., cognitive failure, visual state misunderstanding, hidden operation blindness, and grounding error) that map to distinct stages of the perception-reasoning-action pipeline. We find that prepending full-image memory has a divergent effect on the failure distribution: it reduces state-level failures but worsens action-level ones, and increases hidden operation blindness and grounding error. Motivated by this finding, we propose Action-Grounded Visual Memory (AGMem), an action-grounded memory framework for GUI agents. The core idea of AGMem is to store image crops that capture the local GUI region closely related to a successful action or a recovery, rather than storing full screenshots. Experiments on OSWorld show that AGMem improves task success rates by 33.3 % over full-image memory. These results demonstrate that AGMem is an effective representation for visual memory in GUI agents.

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05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Extraction of Glaucoma Diagnosis, Type, and Severity from Clinical Notes using Secure Cloud-based Large Language Models

Authors:
Samico↗G. A↗Solages↗Scherer↗Muralidhar↗Gutkind↗N. E↗Palazoni↗Medeiros↗F. A↗Swaminathan↗S. S↗…

Purpose: To evaluate the performance of secure cloud-based large language models (LLMs) in extracting glaucoma diagnosis, type, and severity from free-text clinical notes in the electronic health record (EHR). Design: Retrospective chart review analysis. Participants: 1,250 subjects from the Bascom Palmer Ophthalmic Repository. Methods: Clinical notes of glaucoma-related encounters between 2014 and 2024 were extracted from the Bascom Palmer Ophthalmic Repository. Two fellowship-trained glaucoma specialists annotated clinical notes for glaucoma presence, type, and severity at the eye level. The dataset was split into development (10%), validation (10%), and test (80%) sets. Development and validation sets were used for prompt engineering and refinement, and the held-out test set was used for evaluation. Five LLMs (Claude Opus 4.6, DeepSeek-V3.2, GPT-5.2, Grok 4.1, and Qwen3.6-35B-A3B) were accessed via Azure AI Foundry within HIPAA-compliant containers. Model performance was assessed using standard metrics. Clinician-entered ICD-10 codes were also compared with adjudicated labels. Main Outcome Measures: Gwet AC1, accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and F1-score. Results: Inter-grader agreement was high for glaucoma detection (Gwet AC1= 0.930 (95% CI: 0.917-0.945), type classification (Gwet AC1= 0.917 (95% CI: 0.904-0.930), and severity staging (Gwet AC1= 0.901 (95% CI: 0.884-0.916). For glaucoma diagnosis, LLMs demonstrated high overall accuracy, with Claude achieving 97.5%, DeepSeek 96.0%, GPT 96.2%, Grok 94.4%, and Qwen 95.5%. F1 scores for glaucoma detection ranged from 95.4% to 98.9% across models. For glaucoma type classification, accuracies were 97.1%, 94.2%, 94.2%, 94.0%, and 94.4% for Claude, DeepSeek, GPT, Grok, and Qwen, respectively. F1 scores for the most prevalent type (POAG) ranged from 96.3% to 98.9%. For severity staging, accuracies were 95.0%, 94.8%, 94.5%, 94.0%, and 95.2%, respectively, with F1 scores ranging from 89.7% to 96.3% across severity categories and models. ICD-10 codes demonstrated substantially lower performance for type and severity staging, with overall accuracies of 89.2% and 58.5%, respectively. Conclusions: Secure cloud-based LLMs accurately extracted glaucoma diagnosis, type, and severity information from free-text ophthalmology notes, achieving performance approaching expert clinician adjudication while substantially outperforming ICD-based phenotyping approaches, particularly for disease severity classification. These findings demonstrate the potential of LLMs to transform unstructured clinical documentation into scalable, research-ready phenotypic data for large-scale glaucoma cohort development and EHR-based ophthalmic research.

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

The Illusion of Improvement: Reject Inference Strategies in Credit Scoring

Authors:
Bruno Scarone↗Ricardo Baeza-Yates↗

arXiv:2606.18479v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reject inference methods are widely used to mitigate survival bias in credit scoring, yet their effectiveness remains poorly understood. We systematically evaluate several such methods and uncover a structural failure mode: in a natural retraining cycle, models whose accuracy improves while recall collapses create an illusion of improvement that leads practitioners to believe the system is getting better when, in fact, its rejection quality – the ability to correctly screen out defaulters – is deteriorating. We then propose a controlled exploration strategy that breaks the feedback loop without statistical assumptions: the lender deliberately approves a fraction of rejected applicants and observes their true outcomes. We show that accuracy and rejection quality give opposite recommendations on whether to explore: accuracy favors no exploration, while rejection quality improves with it, confirming that standard evaluation metrics are misleading under selection bias. Even minimal exploration rates (2–5\%) prove sufficient in our experiments to diagnose the severity of the feedback loop at near-zero cost. Our findings are consistent across two machine learning methods and three real-world datasets, and suggest that standard evaluation protocols are inadequate for assessing models trained under survival bias.

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

ArtBoost: Synthetic Articulatory Data Augmentation for Acoustic-to-Articulatory Inversion

Authors:
Hyung Kyu Kim↗Byungchan Hwang↗Hak Gu Kim↗

arXiv:2606.16327v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent acoustic-to-articulatory inversion (AAI) models rely on electromagnetic articulography (EMA) data, which are costly and limited in scale. To address this limitation, we propose ArtBoost, a novel data augmentation strategy that leverages large-scale speech–mesh datasets originally developed for speech-driven 3D facial animation to improve AAI under limited EMA supervision. ArtBoost extracts pseudo articulatory trajectories from visible facial anchors and uses them for pre-training before fine-tuning on real EMA data. Experiments show consistent improvements in PCC and RMSE. Trajectory analyses confirm that the pseudo articulatory signals reflect physically meaningful visible articulatory dynamics. Additional evaluations across different AAI architectures demonstrate stable performance gains, indicating that ArtBoost can be integrated into diverse AAI models. These results suggest that speech–mesh data provide an effective and scalable source of articulatory supervision for AAI. Project page: https://cau-irislab.github.io/Interspeech26-ArtBoost/

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08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

DecNefSimulator: A Modular, Interpretable Framework for Decoded Neurofeedback Simulation Using Generative Models

Authors:
Alexander Olza↗Roberto Santana↗David Soto↗

arXiv:2511.14555v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Decoded Neurofeedback (DecNef) is a promising non-invasive approach to brain modulation with wide-ranging applications in neuromedicine and cognitive neuroscience. However, progress in DecNef research remains constrained by subject-dependent learning variability, reliance on indirect measures to quantify progress, and the high cost and time demands of experimentation. We present DecNefSimulator, a modular and interpretable simulation framework that formalizes DecNef as a machine learning problem. Beyond providing a virtual laboratory, DecNefSimulator enables researchers to model, analyze and understand neurofeedback dynamics. Using latent variable generative models as simulated participants, DecNefSimulator allows direct observation of internal cognitive states and systematic evaluation of how different protocol designs and subject characteristics influence learning. We demonstrate how this approach can (i) reproduce empirical phenomena of DecNef learning, (ii) identify conditions under which DecNef feedback fails to induce learning, and (iii) guide the design of more robust and reliable DecNef protocols in silico before human implementation. In summary, DecNefSimulator bridges computational modeling and cognitive neuroscience, offering a principled foundation for methodological innovation, robust protocol design, and ultimately, a deeper understanding of DecNef-based brain modulation.

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

Beyond Scalar Rewards by Internalizing Reasoning into Score Distributions

Authors:
Xin Jin↗Huanqia Cai↗Zhen Li↗Zechao Zhan↗Dengyang Jiang↗Aiming Hao↗Yuming Jiang↗Chunle Guo↗Peng Gao↗Ming-Ming Cheng↗Steven C. H. Hoi↗

Reward models are central to text-to-image post-training, but visual preference is subjective and better represented as a distribution over rubric scores than as a deterministic scalar. Existing scalar, score-token, and pairwise reward models over-compress uncertainty and fine-grained score differences, while reasoning-based generative rewards provide stronger judgments but are costly to deploy and difficult to use as direct optimization signals. We propose Z-Reward, a teacher-student reward modeling framework that decouples reasoning-heavy judgment from efficient reward deployment. The teacher is a large VLM that uses reasoning to infer rubric-aligned score distributions, and is trained with Group-wise Direct Score Optimization (GDSO), which combines policy-gradient rewards from distribution expectations with direct pointwise and pairwise supervision on score distributions and score gaps. The student is trained with Reasoning-Internalized Score Distillation (RISD), which transfers the teacher's reasoning-conditioned score distribution into a compact VLM without requiring explicit reasoning chains at inference time. On our internally annotated evaluation set, the 27B GDSO teacher reaches 89.6% human preference accuracy, outperforming SFT, RewardDance, and GRPO, while the 9B RISD student reaches 88.6%, outperforming the OPD baseline and closely matching the larger teacher. We further show that Z-Reward can serve as a differentiable reward signal for text-to-image optimization, yielding a 41.3% net human-preference improvement over the SFT baseline.

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10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Multidimensional nutritional assessment in Crohns disease: cross-sectional comparison of active disease and remission

Authors:
Sarker↗Ghosh↗C. K↗Chowdhury↗

Malnutrition is common in Crohns disease (CD), and its assessment requires multiple tools. Comprehensive evaluation of nutritional status in a population with CD, predominantly characterized by metabolic phenotype, was inadequately reported. This study evaluated the nutritional status of CD patients using anthropometric, clinical, and biochemical measures and compared patients with active disease with those in remission. This cross-sectional study included 127 adults with CD: 63 with active disease and 64 in remission. Disease activity was classified using the Crohns Disease Activity Index, the Simple Endoscopic Score for Crohns Disease, and magnetic resonance enterography. Nutritional assessment included body mass index (BMI), mid-upper arm circumference, calf circumference, triceps skinfold thickness, mid-arm muscle circumference, Mini Nutritional Assessment-Short Form (MNA-SF), and biochemical markers including hemoglobin, serum iron, folate, vitamin B12, albumin, and zinc. Malnutrition was defined using the Global Leadership Initiative on Malnutrition criteria. Overall, 47.2% of participants were malnourished. Malnutrition was significantly more frequent in active disease than in remission (81.0% vs. 14.1%, P

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

Periodic-MAE: Periodic Video Masked Autoencoder for rPPG Estimation

Authors:
Jiho Choi↗Sang Jun Lee↗

In this paper, we propose Periodic-MAE, a self-supervised framework for learning generalizable spatio-temporal representations of periodic physiological signals from unlabeled facial videos. The proposed method leverages a masked autoencoder (MAE), which learns high-dimensional facial representations by reconstructing masked video tokens without relying on remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) specific supervision. To explicitly align representation learning with the characteristics of rPPG, we introduce a periodicity-aware frame masking strategy based on video resampling, enabling the encoder to learn representations that capture quasi-periodic temporal patterns relevant to pulse signal estimation. In addition, physiological bandlimit constraints are integrated into the MAE pre-training framework, exploiting the sparsity of pulse signals in the frequency domain to guide the learned representations toward physiologically meaningful patterns. After pre-training, the learned representations are transferred to downstream rPPG estimation, where the encoder serves as a generic feature extractor for recovering pulse-related signals from facial videos. We conduct extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets, including PURE, UBFC-rPPG, MMPD, and V4V. Moreover, we evaluate the proposed approach on a real-world rPPG dataset collected under unconstrained lighting conditions and subject motion. Experimental results demonstrate that Periodic-MAE consistently improves rPPG estimation performance, particularly in challenging cross-dataset and real-world evaluation settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/ziiho08/Periodic-MAE.

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

Learning High Coverage Discriminative Parsimonious Rulesets

Authors:
Mariamma Antony↗Raman Sankaran↗Chiranjib Bhattacharyya↗Uma Satya Ranjan↗

arXiv:2606.14156v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning systems based on IF-THEN rule representations readily offer interpretability, making them a crucial focus in contemporary AI research. A key objective for such rule sets is to achieve both high discriminative power and interpretability. While existing state-of-the-art algorithms implicitly prioritize predictive accuracy, they often fall short on one or more quality metrics that ensure interpretability, such as coverage and parsimony of rule sets. Motivated by this, this paper propose the development of CDPR, which aims to create highly accurate and interpretable rule sets for classification problems. To the best of our knowledge, this represents the first attempt to establish such an approach. In this study, we introduce two algorithms rooted in submodular maximization, which not only provide provable guarantees on coverage but also yield rule sets that are both discriminative and parsimonious. We empirically demonstrate that rule sets learned through our approaches achieve higher accuracy and interpretability and has more than a 2.5-fold improvement in average coverage rates when compared to the next best algorithm.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

StereoGeo: an end-to-end stereo camera calibration method

Authors:
Imane Meddour↗Andr\'ea Macario Barros↗C\'edric Gouy-Pailler↗

In this work, we propose StereoGeo, an end-to-end network-based approach for stereo camera calibration. Our method estimates the focal lengths and gravity directions of the left and right cameras, as well as the relative extrinsic transformation relating them. Existing methods often rely on calibration patterns in structured environments or address only a single camera configuration, being limited to either intrinsic or extrinsic estimation, and depending on a multi-view setups. StereoGeo extends the GeoCalib algorithm, integrating deep neural network feature extraction with a differentiable optimizer. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmarks demonstrate that StereoGeo achieves competitive performance for intrinsic calibration and provides accurate stereo extrinsic estimation, outperforming existing methods that are limited to monocular settings. The dataset used in this work is partially publicly available at https://github.com/meddourimane/StereoGeo-dataset.

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14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Entanglement Scaling and Problem Structure in Quantum Approximate and Adiabatic Optimization Algorithms

Authors:
Georgios Arapantonis↗Paraj Titum↗Gregory Quiroz↗

arXiv:2606.19502v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Entanglement is widely regarded as a key resource underlying the power of quantum algorithms and their potential to achieve quantum advantage. With the emergence of variational quantum algorithms, however, questions have arisen regarding how entanglement relates to problem structure and algorithmic performance in near-term quantum applications. Here, we examine this relationship through the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA), a specific class of variational algorithms, applied to the MaxCut problem. We show that suboptimal variational parameter training can significantly modify the observed entanglement profile, obscuring its scaling behavior. By employing a high-performance optimizer, we find empirical evidence that QAOA exhibits entanglement scaling consistent with that of fermionic Gaussian states (up to a scaling factor) across a broad range of MaxCut instances. We further compare these results with adiabatic quantum computation, observing annealing-schedule-dependent entanglement profiles whose scaling behavior differs markedly from that of QAOA. Together, these findings provide new insight into how entanglement manifests in and distinguishes these two algorithmic paradigms, highlighting its connection to both computational performance and application structure.

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15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Propagating Collective Spin-valley Modes in Twisted WSe2

Authors:
Richen Xiong↗Yi Guo↗Chenxin Qin↗Taige Wang↗Fanzhao Yin↗Samuel L. Brantly↗Youngjoon Choi↗Junhang Qi↗Jinfei Zhou↗Zihan Zhang↗Melike Erdi↗Kenji Watanabe↗…

arXiv:2507.18770v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The emergence of neutral collective modes is a hallmark of correlated quantum phases but is often challenging to probe experimentally. In two-dimensional flatband systems, charge responses have been intensively investigated yet neutral excitations remain largely unexplored. In particular, intervalley coherent state (IVC) features a neutral Goldstone mode due to spontaneously broken valley U(1) symmetry. While IVC state has been proposed as a unifying theme across graphene and semiconductor based systems, its defining feature, the neutral Goldstone mode, remains elusive in experiment. Here we investigate space and time resolved transport of neutral modes in twisted WSe2 moire superlattices through a novel ultrafast imaging technique. We uncover two new propagating collective modes with very different velocities, which emerge near the van Hove singularity (VHS) in both intermediate (3.5 to 4 degree) and large (around 5 degree) angle twisted WSe2. The fast-propagating mode has a large speed of about 3 km/s and is consistent with a Goldstone mode for an IVC state, while the slow-moving mode is likely a gapped amplitude mode. They can be understood as the spin-valley analogues of collective modes of a superfluid, whose propagation is imaged for the first time in a condensed matter system. Our study demonstrates a powerful new approach for probing charge-neutral modes in quantum materials and offers key insights into the interplay between charge and spin-valley physics in moire superlattices.

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

Can Agents Read the Room? Benchmarking Visual Social Intelligence in Multimodal Simulation

Authors:
Shijun Wan↗Xuehai Wu↗Jiwen Zhang↗Siyuan Wang↗Zhongyu Wei↗

Social interaction depends on both language and visible social signals, such as facial expressions, posture, gaze, and emotional shifts. Yet existing social-agent benchmarks are largely text-based and rarely test whether multimodal agents can use visual cues to guide interaction. We introduce \textsc{\benchmarkname{}}, a benchmark evaluating visual social intelligence in multimodal social simulation. It contains 240 scenarios, 585 role instances, and 2,340 role-task instances, combining aligned textual-visual evidence, structured role profiles, and four role-level tasks: expression task, characteristic task, interaction regulation task, and interaction outcome task. Evaluating seven recent MLLMs under verbalized-vision and direct-vision reveals a clear gap between local role enactment and interaction management: role-specific expression and conflict handling are near saturation, whereas interaction regulation and visually grounded outcome achievement remain substantially more difficult. The code is released at https://github.com/JunsWan/AgentViSS, and the dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/JunsWan/AgentViSS.

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17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Spatially Masked Regression Reveals Local and Distributed Predictability in Electrophysiological Recordings

Authors:
Maryam Ostadsharif Memar↗Nima Dehghani↗

arXiv:2606.11415v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural recordings are often interpreted as local measurements, yet the signal at any one sensor can also reflect structured activity distributed across the broader network. This raises a basic question: to what extent does an electrode's signal reflect local versus distributed information in the underlying system? More specifically, how much of an electrode's activity is carried by its immediate neighborhood, and how much is embedded more broadly across the array? We address this with a Spatially Masked Regression (SMR) framework that reconstructs each electrode's timeseries from the remaining electrodes while excluding a configurable neighborhood around the target. By progressively increasing this mask, spatial locality becomes an experimental control for quantifying how much predictive information survives after nearby channels are withheld. We apply SMR to intracranial EEG with heterogeneous electrode coverage and to scalp EEG with standardized montages over sensorimotor cortex. Using distance correlation between original and reconstructed signals, we find strong within-subject reconstruction in both modalities, substantial residual predictability even when local neighbors are excluded, and markedly stronger cross-subject transfer in EEG than in iEEG. Masking shows that nearby electrodes contribute strongly to reconstruction but do not account for all of it, indicating that individual channels reflect both local redundancy and broader distributed structure. Surrogates that preserve selected marginal or spectral properties while disrupting phase structure or temporal ordering substantially reduce performance, supporting the conclusion that SMR depends on structured temporal and cross-channel organization rather than on marginal statistics alone. These results position SMR as an interpretable framework for quantifying the balance between local and distributed information in recordings.

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

CARE: Competence-Aware Reward Shaping for Adaptive Reasoning Length in Video-MLLMs

Authors:
Chengwen Liu↗Hao Peng↗Jisheng Dang↗Hong Peng↗Bin Hu↗Tat-Seng Chua↗

In multimodal video reasoning, reinforcement learning-based methods typically rely on simplistic and inflexible reasoning-length control strategies that fail to adapt to the model's evolving competence. This mismatch may suppress necessary exploration at early stages, while encouraging redundant reasoning and inefficient decoding once the model becomes more competent. In this paper, we propose CARE, a competence-aware reward shaping framework for adaptive reasoning length optimization in multimodal reasoning. Specifically, CARE maintains a smoothed competence estimate via an exponential moving average of pass rates, and uses it to route training into progressive stages that shift the reward preference from exploration-oriented long-form reasoning to efficiency-oriented concise reasoning. To avoid conflating verbosity with intrinsic task complexity, CARE further normalizes reasoning effort with batch-level statistics, and introduces a posterior amplifier to strengthen reward signals for unexpectedly strong performance on historically difficult samples. The proposed mechanism is seamlessly integrated into the GRPO training pipeline and incurs no additional inference-time overhead. Extensive experiments on multiple video reasoning and general video understanding benchmarks demonstrate that CARE consistently improves reasoning accuracy, stabilizes reinforcement learning, and significantly enhances token efficiency. Moreover, CARE exhibits a characteristic inverted-U trajectory of reasoning length during training, and yields shorter yet more informative reasoning traces at convergence, indicating effective adaptive allocation of reasoning budget. We provide the source code for our proposed CARE framework and experiments at https://github.com/1Pansy/Video-CARE.

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19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Quantifying Entanglement via Quantum Wasserstein Distances

Authors:
Enmin Shao↗Lin Chen↗Huixia He↗

arXiv:2606.04969v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a bipartite entanglement measure defined as the minimal order-1 quantum Wasserstein distance from a state to the set of separable states. Owing to the universal data-processing inequality of the Wasserstein metric, the measure satisfies all fundamental axioms within a single geometric framework. A Lipschitz dual formulation yields explicit lower bounds for pure and mixed states, a sharp constant for two-qubit systems, and an expected value for Haar-random pure states. We further establish a quantitative connection to entanglement witnesses: any negative witness expectation value certifies a lower bound, and the dual variational bound is exactly the maximal violation achievable by a Lipschitz-1 witness. The approach naturally provides subadditivity, trace-distance estimates, and bounds on local observables, while pointing toward large-deviation conjectures. This work introduces a framework at the interface of entanglement theory, optimal transport, and experimental entanglement detection.

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

SimSiam Naming Game: A Unified Approach for Emergent Communication and Representation Learning

Authors:
Nguyen Le Hoang↗Tadahiro Taniguchi↗Tianwei Fang↗Akira Taniguchi↗Masatoshi Nagano↗

Emergent Communication (EmCom) investigates how agents develop symbolic communication through interaction without predefined language. Recent frameworks, such as the Metropolis–Hastings Naming Game (MHNG), formulate EmCom as the learning of shared external representations negotiated through interaction under joint attention, without explicit success or reward feedback. However, MHNG relies on sampling-based updates that suffer from high rejection rates in high-dimensional perceptual spaces, making the learning process sample-inefficient for complex visual datasets. In this work, we propose the SimSiam Naming Game (SSNG), a feedback-free EmCom framework that replaces sampling-based updates with a symmetric, self-supervised representation alignment objective between autonomous agents. Building on a variational inference–based probabilistic interpretation of self-supervised learning, SSNG formulates symbol emergence as an alignment process between agents' latent representations mediated by message exchange. To enable end-to-end gradient-based optimization, discrete symbolic messages are learned via a Gumbel–Softmax relaxation, preserving the discrete nature of communication while maintaining differentiability. Experiments on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet-100 show that the emergent messages learned by SSNG achieve substantially higher linear-probe classification accuracy than those produced by referential games, reconstruction games, and MHNG. These results indicate that self-supervised representation alignment provides an effective mechanism for feedback-free EmCom in multi-agent systems.

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

SkMTEB: Slovak Massive Text Embedding Benchmark and Model Adaptation

Authors:
Marek \v{S}uppa↗Andrej Ridzik↗Daniel Hl\'adek↗Nat\'alia K\v{n}a\v{z}ekov\'a↗Vikt\'oria Ondrejov\'a↗

We introduce SkMTEB, the first comprehensive MTEB-style text embedding benchmark for Slovak, a low-resource West Slavic language, comprising 31 datasets across 7 task types – nearly 4$\times$ the depth of existing multilingual benchmark coverage for Slovak. Our evaluation of 31 embedding models reveals that large instruction-tuned multilingual models achieve the strongest performance, while existing Slovak-specific models trained for NLU tasks transfer poorly to embedding tasks. To address the need for efficient, locally-deployable Slovak embeddings, we develop \texttt{e5-sk-small} (45M parameters) and \texttt{e5-sk-large} (365M) by applying vocabulary trimming and fine-tuning to Multilingual E5 models. Despite size reductions of up to 62\%, our open-source models achieve competitive performance with proprietary APIs while remaining locally deployable for semantic search and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). We release the benchmark, models, datasets, and code openly, hoping our approach offers a replicable path for other under-resourced languages.

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22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

RoVE: Rotary Value Embeddings Attention for Relative Position-dependent Value Pathways

Authors:
Alejandro Garc\'ia-Castellanos↗Maurice Weiler↗Erik J Bekkers↗

arXiv:2606.11275v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE) make attention scores position-relative but leave the value pathway position-blind: the message sent by a value token is the same regardless of its distance from the query. We propose RoVE, a parameter-free modification that makes values position-sensitive by rotating them simultaneously with keys, and show that it turns RoPE attention into attentive convolution. This new perspective unifies several independent formulations of the same operation across computer vision, robotics, and modern LLM architectures. Trained 124M and 354M GPT-2 models show consistent empirical gains over RoPE on few-shot in-context learning, out-of-distribution perplexity, and long-context retrieval, with the clearest improvements on tasks that require long-range aggregation.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Pass@K Policy Optimization: Solving Harder Reinforcement Learning Problems

Authors:
Christian Walder↗Deep Karkhanis↗

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms sample multiple n>1 solution attempts for each problem and reward them independently. This optimizes for pass@1 performance and prioritizes the strength of isolated samples at the expense of the diversity and collective utility of sets of samples. This under-utilizes the sampling capacity, limiting exploration and eventual improvement on harder examples. As a fix, we propose Pass-at-k Policy Optimization (PKPO), a transformation on the final rewards which leads to direct optimization of pass@k performance, thus optimizing for sets of samples that maximize reward when considered jointly. Our contribution is to derive novel low variance unbiased estimators for pass@k and its gradient, in both the binary and continuous reward settings. We show optimization with our estimators reduces to standard RL with rewards that have been jointly transformed by a stable and efficient transformation function. While previous efforts are restricted to k=n, ours is the first to enable robust optimization of pass@k for any arbitrary k

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24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Classical representation of the dynamics of quantum spin chains

Authors:
Tony Jin↗

arXiv:2502.10502v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Since the advent of quantum mechanics, classical probability interpretations have faced significant challenges. A notable issue arises with the emergence of negative probabilities when attempting to define the joint probability of non-commutative observables. In this work, we propose a resolution to this dilemma for quantum spin chains, by introducing an exact representation of their dynamics in terms of classical continuous-time Markov chains (CTMCs). These CTMCs effectively model the creation, annihilation, and propagation of pairs of classical particles and antiparticles. The quantum dynamics then emerges by averaging over various realizations of this classical process.

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25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Intelligent Skin Cancer Detection Using a Multispectral Metasurface and a Hybrid

Authors:
Afsane Saee Arezoomand↗

Skin cancer is among the most prevalent malignancies worldwiAdbe satnradcitts early detection is essential for improving patient survival and reducing treatment costs Conventional dermoscopic and visual imaging techniques are primarily limited to the visible spectrum and often fail to capture subtle spectral signatures associated with early stage malignancies This study proposes an innovative framework that integrates a multispectral metasurface for imaging with a hybrid deep learning architecture based on Convolutional Neural Networks and Vision Transformers The designed metasurface enables noninvasive acquisition of rich spectral information highly sensitive to tissue alterations while the hybrid CNN ViT model simultaneously extracts local and global features to robustly classify skin lesions Simulation-based evaluations demonstrate that the proposed method achieves approximately 98 accuracy 95 percentages sensitivity and 99 perentage specificity surpassing conventional RGB-based and single-architecture approaches Qualitative analyses using attention maps reveal that the model focuses on clinically relevant lesion regions improving interpretability Overall the results indicate that combining metasurface based multispectral imaging with hybrid deep learning can introduce a new generation of diagnostic tools in dermatology and pave the way for portable fast and highly accurate clinical systems

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