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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

The Energy Blind Spot: NVIDIA's Flagship Edge AI Hardware Cannot Support Process-Level Energy Attribution

Authors:
Deepak Panigrahy↗Aakash Tyagi↗

arXiv:2605.27599v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Agentic AI workloads - where a single user goal triggers multi-step orchestration, tool calls, retries, and failure recovery - are being targeted for edge deployment, with NVIDIA, Dell, HP, ASUS, MSI, Acer, and Gigabyte all shipping GB10-based desktop AI systems in 2026. We recently demonstrated that orchestration structure dominates agentic energy cost, with workflows consuming 4.33x more energy per successful goal than linear baselines and OOI reaching 7.63x for multi-step reasoning tasks. Separately, Raj et al. show that CPU-side processing accounts for up to 90.6% of total latency and 44% of total dynamic energy in agentic workloads. We report a systematic energy-observability audit of the ASUS Ascent GX10 (GB10 SoC) and find that the platform exposes no CPU energy counter, no INA power-rail monitor, no IPMI/BMC, and no SCMI powercap protocol through any supported software interface. The only on-device energy telemetry is instantaneous GPU power via NVML. We further discover that the MediaTek firmware already computes per-rail energy internally via an undocumented ACPI interface (SPBM), but NVIDIA states there are "no plans to expose CPU rail information." On-device per-process energy attribution - as performed on x86 via RAPL - is therefore not reproducible on this platform through supported interfaces. We formalize a hardware requirements specification for energy-attributed AI, propose an interim calibration bridge for per-domain energy decomposition - confirmed on the Acer Veriton GN100 where CPU energy accumulators are live - and identify a standards-track path via SCMI powercap. Our findings motivate the low-carbon computing community to demand energy observability as a first-class hardware requirement.

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02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

DiFlow-TTS: Compact and Low-Latency Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech with Discrete Flow Matching

Authors:
Ngoc-Son Nguyen↗Thanh V. T. Tran↗Hieu-Nghia Huynh-Nguyen↗Truong-Son Hy↗Van Nguyen↗

Zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) has made significant progress in replicating unseen voices, yet balancing generation quality and inference efficiency remains challenging. Autoregressive models suffer from high latency, while diffusion-based approaches are constrained by training-time configurations. Moreover, most flow-based methods operate in continuous space, which introduces optimization challenges because continuous token spaces are inherently more complex than discrete ones. To address these limitations, we propose DiFlow-TTS, a novel zero-shot TTS framework based on discrete flow matching. The model consists of a deterministic Phoneme-Content Mapper for linguistic modeling and a Factorized Discrete Flow Denoiser that simultaneously generates prosody and acoustic token streams. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach across multiple evaluation metrics.

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03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Optimal classical shadow estimation of unitary channels at Heisenberg limit

Authors:
Entong He↗Zihao Li↗Noam Scully↗Sisi Zhou↗Yuxiang Yang↗

arXiv:2606.13638v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Full tomography of an unknown quantum evolution is resource-intensive and often unnecessary when the goal is only to predict selected properties. This motivates the study of classical shadow estimation of unitary channels (CSEU), a task in which one queries an unknown $d$-dimensional unitary $U$ and stores classical data that can later be used to predict expectation values $\mathrm{tr}[O \cdot U\rho U^\dagger]$ up to additive error $\varepsilon$ for arbitrary input states $\rho$ and observables $O$. We propose a parallel, non-adaptive CSEU protocol using $\mathcal{O}(d\varepsilon^{-1})$ queries when the input states or observables have constant rank. This achieves Heisenberg scaling with respect to $\varepsilon$ and is query-optimal, as we prove a matching $\Omega(d\varepsilon^{-1})$ lower bound that remains valid even with stronger access to the unknown unitary. Our query-optimal CSEU protocol provides a versatile and powerful tool for quantum learning theory, pushing the performance limits of several fundamental learning tasks, including unitary channel tomography, Hamiltonian learning, boundary-regime quantum channel tomography, Pauli transfer matrix learning, inverse-free amplitude estimation, pure-state property estimation, and shallow-circuit learning. Remarkably, we show that optimal unitary channel tomography can be achieved using only parallel queries, closing the gap between the best achievable efficiency of parallel and sequential tomography protocols. Together, these applications establish our framework as a fundamental tool for learning properties of quantum processes, particularly for certain key tasks that require high precision.

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04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Exposing the Illusion of Fairness: Auditing Vulnerabilities to Distributional Manipulation Attacks

Authors:
Valentin Lafargue↗Adriana Laurindo Monteiro↗Emmanuelle Claeys↗Laurent Risser↗Jean-Michel Loubes↗

arXiv:2507.20708v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The rapid deployment of AI systems in high-stakes domains, including those classified as high-risk under the The EU AI Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689), has intensified the need for reliable compliance auditing. For binary classifiers, regulatory risk assessment often relies on global fairness metrics such as the Disparate Impact ratio, widely used to evaluate potential discrimination. In typical auditing settings, the auditee provides a subset of its dataset to an auditor, while a supervisory authority may verify whether this subset is representative of the full underlying distribution. In this work, we investigate to what extent a malicious auditee can construct a fairness-compliant yet representative-looking sample from a non-compliant original distribution, thereby creating an illusion of fairness. We formalize this problem as a constrained distributional projection task and introduce mathematically grounded manipulation strategies based on entropic and optimal transport projections. These constructions characterize the minimal distributional shift required to satisfy fairness constraints. To counter such attacks, we formalize representativeness through distributional distance based statistical tests and systematically evaluate their ability to detect manipulated samples. Our analysis highlights the conditions under which fairness manipulation can remain statistically undetected and provides practical guidelines for strengthening supervisory verification. We validate our theoretical findings through experiments on standard tabular datasets for bias detection. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/ValentinLafargue/Inspection.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

LEAP: Layer-skipping Efficiency via Adaptive Progression for Vision Transformer Distillation

Authors:
Jiaqi Zhang↗Ashton Lee↗Anthony Wong↗John Zou↗Sami BuGhanem↗Randall Balestriero↗

Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) with Vision Transformer (ViT) backbones, such as DINOv2, have become essential for downstream tasks like object recognition and semantic segmentation. The immense computational requirements of backbones often necessitate distillation into smaller architectures for edge deployment. Feature-based knowledge distillation (KD) often suffers from the teacher-student gap; the student struggles to imitate teacher's complex feature map due to its limited capacity. To mitigate this bottleneck, we propose LEAP: Layer-skipping Efficiency via Adaptive Progression, a training curriculum for ViT feature-based knowledge distillation. By utilizing the teacher's intermediate feature maps as a sequence of progressively more difficult targets, our curriculum allows the student to build a foundational representation before tackling higher-level abstractions. Our results demonstrate that this paradigm significantly accelerates convergence through adaptive difficulty selection across various student model sizes and dataset scales. With our curriculum, the LEAP-distilled ViT-S achieves 90.1% accuracy on ImageNet-100, a +12.24% improvement compared with baseline. On ImageNet-1K, LEAP achieves +3.84% and +7.75% improvement for the instance retrieval task on the Oxford and Paris datasets, respectively. Furthermore, the curriculum enables 25.1% savings in training FLOPs and 21% savings in training time on ImageNet-100 by implementing early-stopping for teacher inference during the initial stages of training. Code is available at https://github.com/KevinZ0217/LEAP

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07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

PoQ-Judge: A Multi-Architecture Evaluation Framework for Cost-Aware Proof-of-Quality in Decentralized LLM Inference

Authors:
Arther Tian↗Alex Ding↗Frank Chen↗Simon Wu↗Aaron Chan↗

Decentralized LLM inference networks need lightweight, reference-free quality evaluation for Proof of Quality (PoQ). We present PoQ-Judge, a framework that trains dedicated judge models to score query-output pairs without ground-truth references. We study three architectures across the quality-cost tradeoff: a TextCNN judge, a MiniLM cross-encoder, and a DeBERTa judge. Using two-stage training on UltraFeedback plus GPT-labeled in-domain data, the best model reaches 0.747 Pearson correlation with the ground-truth proxy on a held-out test set, outperforming reference-based evaluators from prior work. As a reference-free component in composite scoring, it achieves 0.645 Pearson correlation, matching the best single reference-based evaluator while removing the need for reference answers. We also show that online calibration identifies semantic quality as the dominant dimension and that cascade evaluation reduces cost by 72.7 percent with only modest quality loss. Results are much stronger on QA than summarization, pointing to proxy quality as the main remaining limitation.

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08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Geometry-Preserving in 3D Gaussian Splatting for LiDAR-Camera Extrinsic Calibration

Authors:
Kyoleen Kwak↗Daeho Kim↗Jeong Woon Lee↗Hyoseok Hwang↗

Accurate LiDAR-camera calibration is essential for robust multi-modal perception. Targetless approaches avoid manual setup but remain limited by the scarcity of discriminative cross-modal features. Recent methods address this by reconstructing the scene within a differentiable model, enabling extrinsic optimization through dense photometric supervision. Among these, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has been widely adopted as a geometric proxy that bridges LiDAR and camera within a single differentiable framework. However, since 3DGS was originally designed for novel view synthesis, existing methods tend to prioritize rendering quality, causing the proxy geometry to drift from the true LiDAR structure. We propose a framework that preserves the metric geometry of the Gaussian proxy by aggregating multi-view LiDAR observations for dense depth supervision and blocking photometric gradients from updating the Gaussian spatial parameters. We validate our method on public driving datasets, where it consistently outperforms existing targetless methods in calibration accuracy.

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09.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

ANCHOR: haplotype-aware allelic and isoform inference from single-cell long-read RNA sequencing with de novo variant calling

Authors:
Fu↗Z.-C↗Zhang↗Yan↗Xu↗Yin↗Tao↗Lu↗Liang↗Wu↗Cui↗Hou↗…

Long-read RNA sequencing enables haplotype- and isoform-resolved allelic analysis of transcriptomes, yet extending this capability to single cells and distinct cell types remains computationally challenging due to sparse coverage, sequencing errors, incomplete variant information, and reference-biased transcript assignment. Here we present ANCHOR, a haplotype-aware framework for single-cell long-read RNA sequencing that performs de novo expressed-variant discovery, molecule-level haplotype assignment and isoform-resolved allelic quantification. ANCHOR combines a signed-graph variant caller, pair hidden Markov modelling and beta-binomial UMI aggregation to infer parental allele counts for genes and splice-resolved isoforms, without requiring a pre-existing phased genotype or deep learning. In human single-cell long-read RNA benchmarks, ANCHOR improved variant-calling performance over tested long-read RNA callers at single-cell and low-to-moderate coverage, and its beta-binomial model reduced depth-driven false positives in allele-specific expression testing. Applied to newly generated single-cell long-read RNA-seq data from reciprocal mouse crosses during gastrulation, ANCHOR resolved cell-type- and isoform-specific parent-of-origin imprinting and identified an antagonistic maternally biased Sgce isoform. ANCHOR provides a general framework for allele- and isoform-resolved analysis of diploid single-cell long-read transcriptomes.

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10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

On Subquadratic Architectures: From Applications to Principles

Authors:
Anamaria-Roberta Hartl↗Levente Z\'olyomi↗David Stap↗Pieter-Jan Hoedt↗Niklas Schmidinger↗Lukas Hauzenberger↗Sebastian B\"ock↗G\"unter Klambauer↗Sepp Hochreiter↗

arXiv:2606.12364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformers dominate modern sequence modeling, but their quadratic attention incurs substantial computational cost. Subquadratic architectures offer a scalable alternative. However, it remains unclear which designs yield the most effective sequence models. We compare three leading approaches: xLSTM, Mamba-2, and Gated DeltaNet. We evaluate these models on tasks with complex dependencies: (1) code-model pre-training, (2) distillation of code models from large language models, and (3) pre-training of time-series foundation models. Across these settings, xLSTM delivers the strongest overall performance. To explain xLSTM's advantage, we present a unified formulation and analyze the underlying architectural mechanisms, focusing on state tracking and memory dynamics. Our results show that xLSTM enables more flexible and stable memory correction via its gating scheme. We corroborate these findings on controlled synthetic length-generalization tasks. Overall, our findings indicate that xLSTM's gains on complex tasks stem from robust state tracking and accumulation.

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

A Two-Stage Statistical Framework for Evaluating Associative Interference in Large Language Models

Authors:
Achraf Cohen↗Andrew Kincaid↗

arXiv:2606.14117v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly evaluated for bias using adaptations of human psychological paradigms, yet methodological limitations-particularly the conflation of refusal behavior with task performance-have hindered clear interpretation. Here, we adapt the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to a controlled, forced-choice framework and introduce a two-stage modeling approach that separates response compliance from task-consistent classification. Across three contemporary LLMs (Claude Sonnet-4, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and GPT-5), we evaluate associative interference, defined as reduced task-consistency in incongruent relative to congruent conditions. While compliance with the structured response format was uniformly high, interference effects varied substantially across models and domains. Claude Sonnet-4 exhibited strong interference in the Gender–Career domain (DeltaP = 0.086, 95% CrI [0.026, 0.173]) and smaller but credible effects in Gender–Science. Gemini 2.5 Pro showed attenuated interference, and GPT-5 exhibited minimal or no detectable interference across domains. These findings demonstrate that IAT-style associative asymmetries are not a universal property of LLMs, but instead depend on model-specific characteristics. By isolating interference from compliance and modeling item-level variability, this study provides a principled framework for evaluating structured response patterns in LLMs. The results highlight the importance of model-specific assessment and suggest that associative interference can be substantially mitigated in modern systems.

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12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Running hardware-aware neural architecture search on embedded devices under 512MB of RAM

Authors:
Andrea Mattia Garavagno↗Edoardo Ragusa↗Paolo Gastaldo↗Antonio Frisoli↗

arXiv:2606.14824v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This document proposes a novel approach to hardware-aware neural architecture search (HW NAS) that considers the resources available on the computing platform running it, enabling its execution on various embedded devices. The presented HW NAS produces tiny convolutional neural networks (CNNs) targeting low-end microcontroller units (MCUs), typically involved in the Internet of Things (IoT) or wearable robotics, opening new use cases. A gateway could run it to tailor CNNs' architecture on the acquired data without using external servers, ensuring privacy. The proposed technique achieves state-of-the-art results in the human-recognition tasks on the Visual Wake Word dataset, a standard TinyML benchmark, on several embedded devices.

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13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Non-Medical COVID-19 Impacts and Hearing Status: A Global Study of Differential Health Impact Among Deaf, Hard of Hearing, and Hearing Populations

Authors:
Siddiqi↗Murray↗Hall↗Koplitz↗Dye↗T. D. V↗

Background: Deaf and hard of hearing (HoH) experienced complex challenges during the COVID19 pandemic, including obscured visual communication from mask mandates, inaccessible public health messaging, and inadequate interpreter availability. We examined whether hearing status predicted nonmedical COVID19 impact on a global level. Methods: We conducted a nested cross-sectional analysis within a global study collecting data across two waves (April to May 2020 and July to August 2022) from 184 countries. Participants (N=7,998) were categorized as Deaf (n=304), Hard of Hearing (HoH; n=951), or Hearing (n=6,743). The primary outcome was a composite COVID-related non-medical Personal Impact TScore derived from 14 items across employment, resource access, and healthcare domains. Multinomial logistic regression models progressively adjusted for demographic, structural, and psychosocial variables. Results: Deaf participants reported substantially higher rates of pandemic-related job loss (28.9% vs. 9.6% hearing), healthcare cancellations (39.9% vs. 24.6%), and inability to obtain basic supplies. Over half (55.9%) of Deaf participants scored above the median composite impact index, compared to 39.2% of hearing participants. In the fully adjusted model, Deaf status remained an independent predictor of high non-medical impact (aOR=1.6, 95% CI: 1.1 to 2.4). HoH status showed no statistically significant difference from hearing participants in any model. Conclusions: People identifying as Deaf experienced significant disparities during COVID19 when compared with HoH or hearing people, driven by language access barriers and institutional exclusion rather than hearing loss per se. These experiences underscore the importance for systemic interventions centering on accessible communication, Deaf-centered needs, and reducing audism in Deaf-hearing interaction.

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14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

IAPO: Input Attribution-Aware Policy Optimization for Tool Use in Small Multimodal Agents

Authors:
Yifan Yang↗Zhen Zhang↗Jiayi Tian↗Liyan Tan↗Zheng Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.11652v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper investigates reinforcement learning (RL) methods for improving tool-calling capabilities in multimodal small language model (SLM) agents. While existing works have explored various reward designs to improve agentic tool-calling ability, these approaches face inherent limitations for SLM training, especially under multimodal scenarios. First, many existing methods evaluate tool use correctness through exact matching against certain ground-truth or predefined formats. However, this assumption is often unsuitable for multimodal tasks, where multiple tool use paths may be valid and annotated tool trajectories are typically unavailable. Second, such sparse and brittle binary rewards provide little guidance on how to improve the underlying decision process, making them particularly difficult for multimodal SLM to learn from. To address these issues, we propose Input Attribution-Aware Policy Optimization (IAPO), an RL algorithm for improving tool use in multimodal SLM by aligning the model's attribution across input components with that of a stronger teacher. Experiments on Qwen2.5-VL-3B show that the proposed method improves visual question answering accuracy by an average of 3% across six test sets compared with existing visual tool use work, by helping the model attend to the most relevant input evidence.

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15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Nocturnal Respiratory Rate and Variability Predict Long-term Mortality in Stable Outpatients with Cardiovascular Disease

Authors:
Pedros-Valls↗Gupta↗K. S↗Harrington↗Yu↗J. D↗Orr↗Owens↗R. L↗Torres Barba↗King↗K. R↗…

Background: Respiratory rate (RR) predicts short-term mortality in acute care settings, yet its prognostic significance in clinically stable outpatients remains poorly defined. Objectives: To determine whether the median and variability of nocturnal respiratory rate (NRR) are independently associated with long-term cardiovascular and all-cause mortality in outpatients with cardiovascular disease. Methods: We analyzed overnight chest belt waveforms from elective polysomnography in 5,679 older adults with cardiovascular disease enrolled in the Sleep Heart Health Study (SHHS). NRR was quantified at 30-second resolution, and per-subject median NRR and within-night variability (standard deviation) were derived. Kaplan-Meier survival analysis and Cox proportional hazards models were used to evaluate associations with cardiovascular and all-cause mortality over 3-year and 15-year follow-up periods, adjusting for demographic characteristics, cardiopulmonary comorbidities, and sleep apnea severity. Results: Higher median NRR and greater NRR variability were each associated with increased cardiovascular and all-cause mortality. Combining these metrics identified a high-risk group characterized by elevated median and high variability of NRR, with approximately five-fold higher 3-year all-cause mortality compared with a low-risk group; this association remained significant in Cox models (unadjusted HR: 2.61; 95% CI: 1.65, 4.14; p

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16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Can Editing 1 Neuron Fix Repetition Loops in LLMs?

Authors:
Aristotelis Lazaridis↗Aman Sharma↗Dylan Bates↗Brian King↗Vincent Lu↗Jack FitzGerald↗

arXiv:2606.13705v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Yes. Can it cure doom loops? Probably not. The Gemma 4 instruction-tuned models share a reproducible failure: on long factual enumeration prompts, such as listing every episode of a TV series, the 88 IAU constellations, or the 151 original Pokemon, they collapse into repetition, either a tight verbatim loop or a list whose entries decay onto a single answer. These loops occur at rates as high as 95% and survive prompt rewording, inference-engine changes, and most sampling adjustments. In this paper we explore whether this behavior is localized enough to remove by weight edits. To localize the cause, we use per-layer ablation and per-neuron attribution, then confirm the strongest candidates with full-generation sweeps. The loops trace to a small set of MLP neurons (or, in the 26B-A4B Mixture-of-Experts model, a few routed experts) which we suppress with static weight edits. These "surgeries" can be as small as a single sign-inverted neuron (in the E2B model). The size of the effective edits grows with model scale, but in all cases, the loop patterns can be addressed at normal generation budgets while preserving general-purpose benchmark scores. However, the edits do not solve everything: we also study longer thinking budgets, where the two larger models most visibly enter doom looping, i.e. a non-convergent regime in which the model self-corrects in circles over a fact it cannot recall, exhausting the budget without committing to a final answer. We show this residual failure is reduced but not eliminated by the same edits, and argue it is fundamentally a knowledge-precision problem rather than a removable circuit; weight surgery can delete a loop, but it cannot supply a missing fact. Our results are both a feasibility demonstration, that is, evidence that a concrete generation pathology can be localized to a few parameters and edited out, and a delineation of where that approach stops.

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17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Modelling the decadal expansion of West Nile virus in Italy: the role of climatic, anthropogenic, and macroecological drivers

Authors:
Marcolin↗Bella↗Del Manso↗Dorigatti↗Pezzotti↗Poletti↗Riccardo↗Di Marco↗

Abstract BACKGROUND West Nile virus (WNV) is a growing health burden in Italy. Anticipating human infection risk is hampered by the pathogen's complex ecology, highlighting the need for comprehensive early-warning tools. AIM We aimed to model municipal-level WNV risk in Italy and characterize its decadal expansion in Italy, providing a comprehensive ecological understanding of viral emergence. METHODS We applied a machine learning framework to annual human WNV case data from 2014 to 2024. The model integrated a suite of environmental, socio-economic, and macroecological predictors to generate risk projections. We evaluated the model's performance through multiple validation settings. We also performed an anticipation test for the 2025 epidemic season, using 2024 environmental data to assess the model's predictive accuracy against observed 2025 human cases. RESULTS Our model achieved robust performance (True Skill Statistic > 0.4) and captured WNV progressive expansion from 184 predicted positive municipalities in 2014 to 2,012 in 2024 (an 11-fold increase in 11 years). Seasonal minimum temperature was the primary risk driver, followed by monitoring year and population density, indicating active spatial spread. Environmental suitability consistently preceded clinical detection. Municipalities with cases in 2023-2024 exhibited significantly higher predicted suitability during 2018-2022 than those without cases (average risk 0.58 vs 0.20). Our model successfully identified emerging risk hotspots along the Adriatic coast and southern Italy before the official human spillover of 2025. CONCLUSION Embedding macroecological drivers into WNV risk modelling provides an improved understanding of drivers of rapid WNV expansion. Our model enables proactive risk mapping, surveillance efforts, and targeted public health measures.

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18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

TSA: Temporal Slot Activation for Persistent Object-Centric Video Representation

Authors:
Duc Nguyen↗Sieu Tran↗Hao Vo↗Khoa Vo↗Duy Minh Ho Nguyen↗Nghi D. Q. Bui↗Anh Nguyen↗Long Mai↗Ngan Le↗

Unsupervised video object-centric learning aims to decompose dynamic scenes into temporally persistent entity representations. Existing recurrent video slot-attention methods propagate a fixed set of slots across frames, but typically assume unconditional slot propagation: every slot is updated and decoded at every frame, regardless of whether its corresponding object is visible. We show that this design violates a basic lifecycle requirement for persistent slots: when an object is absent or fully occluded, its slot should preserve its previous state and avoid explaining unrelated visible content. Instead, unconditional propagation creates two failure pathways: update-induced state drift, where current-frame evidence overwrites the absent object's representation, and decoder-induced reconstruction interference, where the inactive slot remains coupled to reconstruction through decoder attention. We propose Temporal Slot Activation (TSA), a mechanism that learns a per-slot, per-frame activation score $\alpha_{k,t} \in (0, 1)$ without visibility supervision. TSA uses this activation as a shared latent control variable for slot lifecycle modeling. When a slot is inactive, TSA anchors its state to the previous slot via activation-gated updating and suppresses its decoder participation through an activation-dependent additive bias on attention logits before softmax normalization. This jointly reduces state drift and reconstruction-driven interference. To improve decisions under partial occlusion and gradual reappearance, TSA further conditions activation prediction on a per-slot temporal memory produced by a Temporal Context Encoder. We evaluate TSA on MOVi-C/E, YT-VIS, and OVIS benchmarks using both standard and tracking-based metrics (FG-ARI, mBO, IDF1, HOTA). TSA consistently improves object decomposition and temporal identity preservation, with large gains on long, heavily occluded videos.

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19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

DEEPRUBRIC: Evidence-Tree Rubric Supervision for Efficient Reinforcement Learning of Deep Research Agents

Authors:
Minghang Zhu↗Chuyang Wei↗Junhao Xu↗Yilin Cheng↗Zhumin Chen↗Jiyan He↗

Deep research agents synthesize long-form reports by searching and reasoning over retrieved evidence. Reinforcement learning with rubric-based rewards improves these agents by optimizing them against checkable criteria that translate report quality into reward signals, but its efficiency depends on whether those criteria reliably capture the task scope and evidence needs. Most existing studies ask an LLM to generate rubrics for a given query, but when the model fails to infer the underlying information needs, the generated rubrics may be incomplete and reduce RL efficiency. To obtain more reliable query–rubric supervision, we introduce DeepRubric, a data construction framework that reverses this process: instead of inferring evaluation criteria for a given query, it first determines what an evidence-backed report should be evaluated on and then synthesizes aligned query–rubric pairs from those evaluation targets. Starting from a sampled seed topic, DeepRubric builds an evidence tree by recursively expanding evidence-backed sub-questions, whose leaves serve as atomic and verifiable evaluation targets. It then uses the evidence tree to synthesize the training query and rubrics, ensuring that the reward evaluates exactly the information requested by the query. Using DeepRubric, we construct 9K query–rubric supervision examples and train DeepRubric-8B with rubric-based GRPO, achieving comparable performance to prior open state-of-the-art deep research models across three benchmarks with roughly 13x fewer RL GPU-hours.

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20.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

ContinuumCellAgent: A Framework-Guided Agent for Long-Horizon Scientific Research

Authors:
Li↗Lu↗Fang↗Xu↗

AI-scientist systems are beginning to automate parts of scientific research. We present ContinuumCellAgent, an autonomous agent that executes literature review, hypothesis formation, computational experimentation, manuscript drafting, and adversarial peer review as a single unattended run. Existing AI scientist systems remain difficult to diagnose because they lack modularity, systematic prompt grounding, and observability into long-running behavior. ContinuumCellAgent addresses these gaps with a modular supernode architecture for stage-wise backend swapping, protocols grounded in curated research-method checklists that also define reviewer rubrics, and a diagnostics layer that records file-based artifacts, message traces, and state transitions. We evaluate the system on open-domain QA benchmarks and biomedical/longevity case studies, showing that it can produce checkable research artifacts while exposing pipeline dynamics for rigorous AI co-scientist research.

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21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Phase locking nuclear spins in silicon with spin-orbit coupling

Authors:
Habitamu Y. Walelign↗Manas Ranjan Sahu↗John M. Nichol↗

arXiv:2606.20340v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Because they have such long coherence times, nuclear spins have extraordinary potential for use in quantum information processing devices. However, coherent nuclear spin control generally requires external phase references, such as microwave control fields. Here, we phase-lock a $^{29}$Si nuclear spin ensemble in a silicon quantum dot using only the internal electronic spin-orbit coupling as a phase reference. When driven with the quantum-dot electrons, the nuclear spins align themselves to a phase determined by the electronic spin-orbit coupling and the timing of the drive protocol. This enables us to measure the coherent precession and inhomogeneous dephasing of the nuclear spins. We corroborate our results with detailed numerical simulations of the many-body electron nuclear system. Our work opens new routes for coherently controlling solid-state nuclear spin ensembles.

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

Understanding Diversity Collapse in RLVR via the Lens of Overtraining

Authors:
Suqin Yuan↗Jinkun Chen↗Jiyang Zheng↗Muyang Li↗Lei Feng↗Dadong Wang↗Tao Xiang↗Tongliang Liu↗Bo An↗

arXiv:2606.15455v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a key approach for enhancing the reasoning abilities of large language models. However, RLVR often suffers from diversity collapse: Pass@$1$ improves while high-$k$ Pass@$k$ degrades, which is viewed as a narrowing of the model's reasoning boundary. We formalize this diversity collapse through the lens of overtraining: once a problem's contribution to the reference metric has effectively saturated, further updates no longer expand what the model can solve but still concentrate probability mass on the trajectories favored by on-policy sampling. Under a standard setup with few rollouts per problem, even a single observed success places a problem in a nearly saturated regime for high-$k$ Pass@$k$, so most updates in standard RLVR are overtraining from the boundary perspective. This perspective also suggests a reading of whether RLVR can expand the model's reasoning abilities beyond the base model: since RLVR is structurally biased against high-$k$ Pass@$k$, its aggregate decline does not by itself mean that no new reasoning gains occurred. Interventionally, restricting updates to problems with zero observed success lifts Pass@$256$ above the base model on difficult benchmarks; observationally, a non-trivial fraction of initially unsolvable problems become solvable during standard RLVR training. Building on these findings, we propose Bayesian Boundary Gating (BBG), which redirects optimization away from overtraining by estimating each problem's marginal contribution to the reasoning boundary. Across multiple reasoning benchmarks, BBG improves average Pass@$k$ across a wide range of $k$.

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23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Efficient certification of intractable quantum states with few Pauli measurements

Authors:
Sami Abdul Sater↗Maxime Garnier↗Thierry Martinez↗Harold Ollivier↗Ulysse Chabaud↗

arXiv:2511.07300v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Efficient verification of quantum computational resources is crucial as experiments advance toward fault-tolerance. Universal quantum computation can be achieved by consuming resource states through simple Pauli measurements, yet a significant gap remains between states that are easy to certify and those required for universality. We focus on Clifford-enhanced Product States, a class of resource states obtained by applying Clifford circuits to a product of single-qubit, potentially magic, states. While essential for universal computation, the certification of such states has previously relied on query oracles that are \#P-hard to implement, leaving their efficient, oracle-free verification an open challenge. In this work, we demonstrate that such classically intractable resource states can be efficiently verified using only Pauli measurements. Our protocol achieves sample- and time-efficiency in both i.i.d.\ and adversarial settings. This work fills a gap in Pauli-based certification, providing a new practical pathway to verify resource states that drive universal Pauli-based quantum computation.

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

High-Dimensional Random Projection for Activation Steering in Language Models

Authors:
Minh-Hieu Pham↗Bach Do↗Laziz Abdullaev↗Tan Minh Nguyen↗Khoat Than↗

arXiv:2606.15092v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Activation steering has emerged as a key methodology for controlling the behavior of large language models (LLMs). Existing difference-in-means based methods, however, are fundamentally limited: they capture only mean differences between class activations and fail to recover discriminative signals that naturally exist in the nonlinear feature subspace under the superposition hypothesis. Motivated by that, we propose High-Dimensional Random-projection for Activation Steering (HiDRA), a training-free approach that integrates seamlessly with existing activation steering methods. By performing activation addition in the projected high-dimensional space, HiDRA can provably capture a better discriminative structure beyond the reach of linear methods. Experiments across diverse LLM families and benchmarks demonstrate that HiDRA consistently outperforms baseline counterparts, achieving stronger behavioral control without significant computational overhead.

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25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Gendered pathways to adolescent mental health: An empirical assessment of a new conceptual framework

Authors:
Alaze↗Hagen↗Schamberger↗Razum↗Miani↗

Introduction Gender norms and roles are important determinants of physical and mental health in the key period of adolescence. Yet, the gendered pathways to mental health in adolescents are not fully understood. Using a conceptual framework for global adolescent mental health that we developed based on a Delphi process, we empirically investigated the associations between six gender-related constructs and adolescent mental health. Methods We used cross-sectional Gender and Adolescence: Global Evidence (GAGE) data from Ethiopia (2020) to explore the associations between sex, gender norms, psychological competencies, gender attitudes, gender roles, with the latter two also serving as mediators, and psychological distress (GHQ-12), using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). Results The SEM model contained measurements from 1,584 adolescents, including 843 girls and 741 boys, with a median age of 13 years. Out of 14 pathways tested, we found statistically significant associations between psychological competencies and psychological distress; sex and gender attitudes; and between gender norms and psychological competencies, gender attitudes, and gender roles. Hence, the gender-related constructs were mostly associated with each other, rather than with psychological distress. Conclusion The gender-related constructs are strongly interrelated, thereby attenuating their individual effects on psychological distress. The interplay of gender-related constructs should be considered when developing interventions to promote mental health in adolescents.

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