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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

FFinRED: An Expert-Guided Benchmark Generation and Evaluation Framework for Financial LLM Red-Teaming

arXiv:2606.19887v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing safety benchmarks target general adversarial scenarios but miss finance-specific risks. Financial LLMs face regulatory compliance violations, fraud facilitation, and systemic trust erosion that require targeted evaluation. We introduce FinRED, an expert-guided red-teaming framework for financial LLM safety evaluation developed with financial experts. FinRED uses a novel two-level taxonomy mapping global standards (e.g., FATF and EU DORA) to threats ranging from regulatory evasion to complex fraud, integrated with a scalable pipeline that converts real financial documents into context-rich red-teaming Behavioral Prompts (seeds) through an expert-defined schema. Rigorous expert validation confirms seed plausibility and realism for meaningful LLM safety evaluation. We also provide an expert-validated, finance-specific rubric that goes beyond disclaimer checks, aligns more closely with human experts than static one-size-fits-all rubrics, and reduces critical false negatives from 28 to 12. Aligned with internationally adopted risk-management and information-security standards (e.g., ISO/IEC 27001), FinRED is deployed in South Korea's Financial Security Institute (FSI) regulatory sandbox for generative AI security evaluation in real financial services. To mitigate dual-use risks, the dataset, generation pipeline, prompt template, and evaluation framework are gated for qualified researchers at https://github.com/selectstar-ai/FinRED-paper and https://huggingface.co/datasets/datumo/FinRED.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Optimal Calibration of Quantum Network Links

arXiv:2606.18167v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The reliable distribution of entanglement is essential for the effective operation of quantum networks. Due to fundamental differences between quantum and classical communication systems, it is necessary to develop specialised algorithms and protocols that also account for quantum-specific constraints. In this work, we focus on the issue of recalibration. As suggested by recent experimental studies, the process of local entanglement generation in a quantum link degrades over time due to environmental changes that have to be estimated and compensated via a calibration operation, during which the link is not available. Therefore, in such a quantum network, every link alternates between an activation period, during which it operates normally, and a calibration period, during which it cannot participate in the end-to-end entanglement distribution, thereby creating a trade-off between link quality (the fidelity of generated pairs, which decays during activation) and availability (the fraction of time the link is usable, which calibration reduces). We develop analytically a protocol for optimally assigning activation periods to each link in linear quantum repeater chains, subject to any general end-to-end fidelity requirements and local initial fidelity thresholds. Building on this foundation, we extend to general quantum networks, where multiple paths may cross at common links, proposing a heuristic approach evaluated in simulations and compared with a benchmark, numerical approach, and theoretical bounds.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Random Schrödinger operators on manifolds and abstract bounds for multiplier-type operators

arXiv:2606.19075v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study random Schrödinger operators on closed Riemannian manifolds with Anderson-type potentials. We prove high-probability spectral inclusion bounds showing that eigenvalues remain close to those of the Laplacian, with deviations controlled by a norm of the potential coefficients. Compared with deterministic bounds, this yields a square-root cancellation gain. The proof is based on a general principle showing that randomisation improves operator norm bounds for multiplier-type operators, which we formulate in both discrete and continuous settings.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

On the Benefits of Weight Normalization for Overparameterized Matrix Sensing

arXiv:2510.01175v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While normalization techniques are widely used in deep learning, their theoretical understanding remains relatively limited. In this work, we establish the benefits of (generalized) weight normalization (WN) applied to the overparameterized matrix sensing problem. We prove that WN with Riemannian optimization achieves linear convergence, yielding an exponential speedup over standard methods that do not use WN. Our analysis further demonstrates that both iteration and sample complexity improve polynomially as the level of overparameterization increases. To the best of our knowledge, this work provides the first characterization of how WN leverages overparameterization for faster convergence in matrix sensing.

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

Learning universal approximations for partial differential equations with Physics-Informed Broad Learning System

arXiv:2606.19754v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Partial differential equations (PDEs) play a central role in modeling complex physical, biological, and engineering systems. While traditional numerical solvers are robust, they often incur prohibitive computational costs due to mesh dependencies, whereas recent Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) offer a mesh-free alternative but frequently suffer from slow convergence and optimization instability. To bridge this gap, this article proposes the Physics-Informed Broad Learning System (PIBLS), a novel backpropagation-free framework that reformulates PDE solving as a direct least-squares optimization. We improved an algorithm within this framework to handle nonlinear PDEs efficiently and provide a rigorous mathematical proof establishing the universal approximation property of PIBLS for these equations. Experiments on linear and nonlinear PDEs demonstrate that PIBLS is one to three orders of magnitude faster than conventional PINNs while achieving significantly higher solution accuracy. This framework provides a computationally efficient paradigm for scientific machine learning, offering a practical, high-speed alternative for real-time simulation and design optimization tasks.

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

MARD: Mirror-Augmented Reasoning Distillation for Mechanism-Level Drug-Drug Interaction Prediction

Mechanism-level drug-drug interaction (DDI) prediction requires identifying which enzyme or pharmacodynamic axis is implicated, in which direction, and with which evidence – not merely whether two drugs interact. We introduce a reproducible mechanism-level DDI labelling and evaluation protocol with a structured 7-family/147-subtype taxonomy, leakage-safe cold-split protocols, and auditable reasoning metrics for evaluating pharmacological prediction beyond flat interaction classification. We propose a pipeline that produces a 7B reasoning MARD (Mirror-Augmented Reasoning Distillation), combining three training innovations: a single-token KL divergence on direction tag that ties the model's prediction, per-loss PRM-weighted DPO with programmatic hard negatives, and a leakage-safe mechanism-aware retrieval channel. Process-reward step labels are automatically verifiable against DrugBank-structured fields, requiring no human or LLM judges. On the April-2026 DrugBank release, our MARD-7B is the only system in a 32-system comparison whose accuracy survives drug-pair novelty, beating the best baseline by +13.9 pp and GPT-4o by +6.7 pp at ~1% of frontier API cost. Further analysis reveals an anti-memorisation signature where accuracy improves on rarely seen drugs, suggesting that gain comes from structured pharmacological reasoning rather than drug-frequency memorisation. We release corpus, DDI-PRM, retrieval index, and training code.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Rigorous extension of semilocal collinear functionals to noncollinear DFT using $SU(2)$ rotations

arXiv:2605.31203v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In the presence of spin-orbit coupling and in geometrically frustrated materials, a noncollinear treatment the magnetization density is essential. However, in density functional theory most exchange–correlation functional approximations were originally developed for locally collinear magnetization. Many practical approaches to noncollinear DFT have emerged over the past decade. However, a first-principles connection between widely used semilocal collinear functionals and their noncollinear generalizations remains lacking. In this work, a locally exact relation between collinear and noncollinear exchange–correlation functionals is derived at the level of gradient expansions within a $u(2)$ matrix representation of the energy functional. Within this framework, collinear semilocal variables naturally acquire distinct dependencies on transverse and longitudinal magnetization gradient components. The widely used Scalmani–Frisch scheme emerges as a first-order approximation. The transformation of collinear functional derivatives to noncollinear space is implemented through numerically robust $SU(2)$ rotations. A consistent description of local magnetic torques is demonstrated for the prototypical spin-frustrated Cr$_3$ cluster. The approach further extends to fully nonlocal functionals and provides a direct route towards numerically stable relativistic response calculations. The influence on magnetic properties in presence of spin-orbit coupling is illustrated through calculations of hyperfine couplings in the high-spin ground states of uranium and the uranium ion.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

County Year Informatics Model for Annual and Cumulative Unique Lung Cancer Screening Eligibility in Maryland, 2026 to 2045

Purpose: Population-level lung cancer screening programs require denominators that reflect age, smoking history, geography, and changing eligibility over time. We estimated annual prevalent and 20-year cumulative unique low-dose computed tomography screening eligibility for Maryland residents under alternative screening criteria. Methods: We built a deterministic cohort-cell stock-flow simulation using Maryland county-equivalent jurisdiction projections by age, sex, and race/ethnicity, with ACS socioeconomic/nativity covariates and smoking-history priors for ever-smoked status, pack-years, and quit-years. Scenarios included USPSTF 2013 legacy, USPSTF 2021, ACS 2023/2024, a risk-model-expanded sensitivity, and ever-smoked-only capacity stress tests. Cumulative unique eligibility counted people once at first eligibility rather than summing annual prevalent person-years. Results: Under USPSTF 2021, an estimated 238,346 Maryland residents were eligible in 2026 and 245,326 in 2045. The 20-year cumulative unique denominator was 768,668, whereas naively summing annual prevalent counts produced 4,850,735 person-years, a 6.31-fold overcount. ACS 2023/2024 expanded annual eligibility to 314,616 in 2026 and cumulative unique eligibility to 902,796 by adding remote former smokers. Ever-smoked-only adult eligibility was 1,957,699 in 2026 and 3,383,683 cumulative unique over 20 years. Conclusion: A Maryland statewide screening initiative should plan from cumulative unique eligibility and county-equivalent jurisdiction-specific burden rather than annual prevalence alone. Explicit pack-year and quit-year modeling materially changes statewide and county allocation compared with current-smoking proxy models.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Phonikud: Overcoming Phonetic Underspecification for Hebrew Text-To-Speech

Text-to-speech (TTS) for Modern Hebrew is challenged by the language's orthographic complexity, with existing solutions ignoring underspecified phonetic features such as stress. We present a framework for more phonetically accurate Hebrew TTS with four contributions: (1) Phonikud, an open-source Hebrew grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) system that outputs fully-specified International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions, designed by augmenting a base diacritizer. (2) The ILSpeech corpus of paired Hebrew audio, text, and expert IPA annotations. (3) A benchmark for the previously unmeasured task of Hebrew G2P conversion. (4) Hebrew audio-to-IPA models capturing previously disregarded phonetic details for automatic TTS evaluation. Our results show that Phonikud more accurately predicts Hebrew phonemes than prior methods, and that small, local TTS models with phonetic input from Phonikud approach large proprietary systems. We release our code, data, and models at https://phonikud.github.io.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Unifying Acoustic Features and Text with Multimodal LLMs for Neurodegenerative Screening

arXiv:2606.14788v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Voice-based screening offers a scalable and non-invasive way to assess neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Parkinson's disease (PD), but their staging remains challenging due to the difficulty of integrating heterogeneous data. This paper presents NeurMLLM, an efficient multimodal generative framework for neurodegenerative disease staging. NeurMLLM first encodes the spectrograms and Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients of audio data with vision transformers and projects their representations into the embedding space of a large language model (LLM), where they are concatenated with transcript and demographic instruction tokens as a single unified sequence. The LLM is then instruction-tuned via Low-Rank Adaptation using task prompts to autoregressively predict a constrained label token, enabling a generative classification. By evaluating on the Bridge2AI-Voice dataset for fine-grained staging of AD and PD, we observe that NeurMLLM achieves strong performance, consistently outperforming classical machine learning methods and existing LLM-based approaches. The results show the high potential of multimodal LLMs in neurodegenerative disease staging, improving staging accuracy and supporting accessible deployment.

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

AI Receptivity or AI Adoption Breadth? A Tool-Specific Reanalysis of the Lower-Literacy/Higher-Usage Link

arXiv:2606.13734v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent evidence reported by Tully, Longoni, and Appel (2025) suggests that lower artificial intelligence (AI) literacy predicts greater receptivity toward AI. We revisit this claim using the public data from Study 3 of that article, which measures past usage of five AI tool categories on a five-point frequency scale. We first reproduce the negative association between AI literacy and aggregate AI usage using OLS on participant-level averages, binary logit, ordered logit, and multinomial logit specifications. We then show that the aggregate relationship masks substantial heterogeneity by tool type. In our demographic-adjusted primary specification, AI literacy does not significantly predict text AI usage (ordered-logit $\beta$ = -0.090, p = .387), whereas it remains a strong predictor of non-text AI adoption ($\beta$ = -0.377, p < .001). The non-text effect is also robust under Tully et al.'s original Study 3 control specification ($\beta$ = -0.502, p < .001). Binary, ordered-logit, and multinomial specifications suggest that the non-text relationship is primarily an adoption/non-adoption pattern rather than evidence of intensive use: the demographic-adjusted odds ratio of ever having used a non-text AI tool is 0.68. Thus, in the study that measures self-reported past usage rather than stated preferences, the evidence does not support a simple claim that lower AI literacy predicts greater receptivity to AI in general. It points instead to a narrower pattern of broader adoption across lower-penetration, non-text AI tools.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Differential Recovery Trajectories of Emergency Otolaryngologic Conditions across the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Six-year Longitudinal Study from an Urban Emergency Center

Authors:

Objective: The COVID-19 pandemic markedly altered social activity patterns, healthcare utilization, and the epidemiology of infectious diseases. However, its long-term impact on emergency otolaryngologic conditions remains incompletely understood. This study investigated long-term trends in emergency otolaryngologic conditions before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic using comprehensive data from a large urban emergency clinic in Osaka, Japan. Methods: All new otolaryngologic outpatients who visited the Chuo Emergency Medical Clinic (CEMC) in Osaka City between 2019 and 2024were retrospectively analyzed. Annual trends in absolute numbers and relative proportions of emergency otolaryngologic conditions were examined by anatomical region and disease category, using 2019 as the pre-pandemic baseline. Results: A total of 99,324 new otolaryngologic outpatients were analyzed. Overall emergency visits declined sharply to approximately half of baseline in 2020, followed by a gradual but incomplete recovery toward pre-pandemic levels by 2024. Most anatomical categories declined to 45-61% of baseline in 2020 and exhibited gradual yet incomplete recovery through 2023; in stark contrast, laryngeal conditions diverged sharply, surging beyond pre-pandemic levels after 2022. Acute infectious otorhinolaryngologic diseases fell to 23-50% of baseline in 2020 and showed variable recovery (69-103%) by 2024. Notably, laryngitis exceeded the baseline, reaching 132% in 2023, whereas epiglottic edema exhibited only a transient increase approaching the baseline in 2021. Non-infectious emergency conditions generally showed only a marginal decrease in 2020 and remained relatively stable throughout the study period, except for sudden sensorineural hearing loss (SSNHL), which dropped sharply to 39% of the baseline in 2020 and remained persistently reduced through 2024. Traumatic emergencies declined variably to 53-81% of the baseline in 2020, followed by an incomplete recovery, reaching only 55-69% by 2024. Conclusion: Emergency otolaryngologic conditions demonstrated heterogeneous recovery trajectories following the COVID-19 pandemic. While most infectious and traumatic conditions gradually but incompletely normalized, laryngeal conditions showed a distinct post-pandemic surge, and SSNHL remained persistently suppressed. These findings reveal heterogeneous, condition-specific recovery trajectories that reflect both genuine shifts in community pathogen burden, true traumatic incidence, and persistent alterations in healthcare-seeking behaviors, insights essential for resource allocation during future public health emergencies.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Robust Transformer-Based One-Step Stock Index Forecasting via Shifted Data Augmentation

arXiv:2606.15701v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformers have shown remarkable success in sequence modeling, yet their direct application to financial time series remains challenging due to noisy signals, short-memory dynamics, and distributional shifts. This paper proposes a modified Transformer architecture for one-step stock index forecasting, combined with advanced learning-rate scheduling and a novel Shifted Data Augmentation (SDA) technique. We evaluate the proposed framework on two benchmark stock index datasets, VN30 and S&P 500. Experimental results demonstrate that cosine annealing with warmup consistently improves forecasting accuracy over the generalized inverse-power scheduler. Furthermore, SDA substantially reduces forecasting errors and run-to-run variability while improving robustness to hyperparameter selection. The combination of cosine annealing scheduling and SDA achieved the best performance on both datasets, indicating that data augmentation can play a more important role than increasing model complexity in Transformer-based financial forecasting. These findings provide a practical and computationally efficient approach for robust stock index forecasting in noisy financial environments.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

The Vector and Canonical Components of the Momentum Operator in 3D Euclidean Space Spanned by General Curvilinear Coordinates

arXiv:2606.24572v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We construct the Hermitian vector and canonical components of the momentum operator in 3D Euclidean space spanned by general curvilinear coordinates (GCC's) using a simple, natural and unified approach based on identifying the momentum operator in any coordinate system as mass times the velocity operator. When this latter is calculated by applying the Heisenberg equation of motion, it returns ($-i\hbar$ times) the gradient operator plus an additional zero-valued sum, which when distributed among the components of the gradient, it makes each the Hermitian vector component of the momentum operator in GCC's. The canonical components follow immediately upon symmetrizing each of these vector components in the corresponding base vector. For accessability by wider audiences, we first develop the formalism for the simple polar coordinates and then we develop the case for GCC's.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Evaluating Large Language Models Abilities for Addressee, Turn-change, and Next Speaker Prediction in Meetings

We investigate turn-taking in multimodal multi-party conversations using large language models (LLMs). We construct an evaluation framework for three tasks: addressee detection, turn-change prediction, and next speaker prediction. We compare supervised models trained for these tasks, text-based LLMs, multimodal LLMs (MM-LLMs), and human subjects. Experiments on the AMI corpus showed that LLMs outperformed supervised models and humans in next speaker prediction, despite not being trained on the target domain and without access to audio or visual information. An MM-LLM performed better than text-based LLMs on addressee detection and turn-change prediction but remained below human performance, indicating difficulty leveraging raw audio-visual signals. Ablation analyses revealed that conversational context was critical, particularly for next speaker prediction. We observed that human and LLM prediction patterns were similar, and intervals with frequent turn changes were difficult for both.

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

Learning in the Recurrent State: Gradient Descent with Linear Recurrent Networks

arXiv:2410.11687v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Linear recurrent networks (LRNNs) offer linear-time sequence modeling, but standard recurrent updates do not directly expose the supervised products needed for in-context gradient descent. We propose a sufficient constructive inductive bias for LRNNs: equip a diagonal recurrent state with multiplicative readout and a short sliding-window cross-product self-attention update. The resulting architecture, Gradient-based Recurrent In-context Learner (GRIL), can implement minibatch gradient descent on a task-specific linear predictor during a single forward pass. The same design extends to multi-step updates and cross-entropy classification, with a limited MLP-based extension to non-linear regression. Empirically, trained GRILs recover the behavior and parameters predicted by the construction on synthetic ICL tasks, and the same architectural bias yields useful performance on Long Range Arena and language modelling. These results present windowed cross-product self-attention as a practical, testable inductive bias for LRNNs that learn in context through gradient-descent-like updates.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

A Plasmodium vivax controlled human infection and transmission model to evaluate interventions across the life cycle

Background Plasmodium vivax is an underappreciated cause of malaria disease burden. No reproducible and standardized full life-cycle controlled human malaria infection (CHMI) model to accelerate development of novel interventions is available. Methods This transmission-CHMI trial was conducted in Nijmegen, Netherlands. Healthy, malaria-naive adults were sequentially enrolled into three cohorts of four and inoculated with the asexual blood-stage isolate PvW1. Primary endpoint was proportion of oocyst-positive laboratory-reared Anopheles stephensi mosquitoes. The sequential design allowed for adaptations between cohorts. At parasitemia >10 parasites/microL or symptom onset, participants received oral gametocyte-sparing treatment (GST): mepacrine (Cohort 1 and 3; 100 mg at 0, 8 16 hours, then once daily for 3 days) or piperaquine (Cohort 3; 480 mg single-dose). Transmission was assessed by direct skin feeding (DSF) and membrane feeding assay (DMFA) with and without enrichment of gametocytes. End-of-study treatment was atovaquone-proguanil (1000/400 mg once daily for 3 days). The trial was registered: NL-OMON57011. Findings Participants were enrolled between September 17, 2024 and March 25, 2025, all (12/12) developed parasitemia and transmitted PvW1 to mosquitoes. No serious adverse events occurred. Most adverse reactions were related to malaria. Mepacrine and piperaquine reduced asexual parasitemia while preserving gametocytemia and transmission. Peak transmission occurred within 3 days after GST and depended on the parasite developmental cycle, with highest gametocyte-infectivity ~48 h post ring-stage. In Cohort 3, mosquito infection reached 100% in all transmission assays. Median peak oocyst counts were 24 (IQR: 14-31) for DSF, 17 (12-19) for DMFA, and 150 (116-199) for enriched DMFA. A two-fold increase in pre-GST maximal parasitemia was associated with 20 additional oocysts (95% CI 8,6-32) in enriched DMFA. Sporozoites were viable in primary human hepatocytes. Interpretation A PvW1 transmission-CHMI is reproducible and safe, enabling P. vivax sporozoite production, relapse models and evaluation of transmission-blocking interventions.

18.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

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

Authors:

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

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Simultaneous Latent Budget Trees for Stratified Classification

arXiv:2606.13295v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In the era of Explainable Artificial Intelligence, there is a renewed focus on single trees for their ease of interpretation. This paper introduces Simultaneous Latent Budget Trees, a probabilistic machine learning framework for classification trees in the presence of a stratification factor such as a temporal, spatial, or demographic variable, acting as a control variable or potential confounder. Standard tree growth procedures are not designed to optimize a conditional split rule. A model-based split rule is proposed in which child nodes are interpreted as latent components of a simultaneous mixture model, such as the Simultaneous Latent Budget Model and its constrained versions, fitted to the parent node. Mixing parameters drive the observations, differently for each group, to the child nodes whereas latent budgets parameters update the response classes profile of each level of the control variable. Parameters are estimated by least squares considering a neural network perspective of the model. An informative tree structure can be interactively visualized with interpretation aids on the node and the paths, including visual pruning and decision tree selection procedure. Suitable measures are proposed to handle an unbalanced response class distribution. The proposed methodology is applied to investigate gender-related differences in disease progression of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. The SLBT library with the various tree-based algorithms is available in the linked GitHub repository.

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

Contextual Bandits for Maximizing Stimulated Word-of-Mouth Rewards

arXiv:2606.15146v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Stimulated word-of-mouth is a strategy that promotes information sharing through prompts or incentives. Optimizing stimulated word-of-mouth through social networks requires identifying and targeting connected users who are most susceptible to spillover, a phenomenon where the influence of recommendations extends beyond the immediate audience to impact their connected users. The probability of spillover varies across individuals, and their connections, leading to heterogeneity. Understanding and accurately estimating the spillover probabilities among users in social networks is crucial for improving the effectiveness of stimulated word-of-mouth. To address this, we present a novel contextual multi-armed bandit framework that learns individual spillover probabilities and ranks connected users to maximize rewards from stimulated word-of-mouth. Experiments on real-world network datasets demonstrate that accounting for spillover heterogeneity enhances the targeting precision of top-$k$ connected users, boosting rewards and outperforming baseline methods that do not learn individual spillover effects.

21.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-24

trAIt: Species-by-Trait Data Retrieval using Large Language Models

Biological research often requires information about species' traits. Manual literature collation can be time-consuming and miss parts of the literature. To address this gap, we developed trAIt, a publicly available software for the retrieval of characteristics of species from scientific literature catalogued in the Europe PubMed Central (PubMed) database. trAIt provides a graphical user interface in which users specify species and characteristics of interest. Leveraging a large language model (LLM), trAIt retrieves relevant papers, combines their content through a consensus-based summarization model, and outputs a species-by-characteristic table. For a case study involving frog species, trAIt recovered 47.1% of trait-species combinations in 2.75 hours, while an expert curator independently recovered 62.4% over months. The consensus-based summarization substantially aids accuracy compared to single-source extraction. Across three case studies of vertebrate taxa, an expert confirmed the accuracy of 70.9% of trait-species entries recovered by trAIt. We observed considerable variation across taxa in trAIt's accuracy, which is possibly due to heterogeneity in open-access literature availability and inconsistencies in species and trait terminology. In sum, our analysis suggests that LLM-based tools can accelerate biological data synthesis but should be used to support domain experts' research, rather than replace their judgment.

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

GRACE: Boosting Video MLLMs with Grounded Action-Centric Evidence for Viewer Sentiment Prediction

Viewer sentiment prediction in video advertisements aims to infer the latent affective response evoked in the audience. To bridge the gap between what is shown and what is felt, models must deduce hidden viewer emotions from explicit visual narratives, concrete character-object interactions, and visible textual cues. However, standard Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) typically rely on holistic frame representations, which leave these fine-grained, affect-relevant events implicit and complicate precise emotional reasoning. To address this, we propose a grounded action-centric evidence augmentation framework that enhances video MLLMs' clue extraction and comprehension by introducing explicit event structure and localized visual evidence. Our method extracts temporally ordered subject-verb-object (SVO) triplets and auxiliary visible textual cues from action-centric video descriptions, grounds subject and object entities as visual entity crops, and then enables the MLLM to perform clue-enhanced emotional reasoning based on these extracted structured clues. In this way, action triplets specify "what happens", while grounded visual entity crops anchor "who or what participates in each event" to concrete visual evidence. Experiments on the Pitts dataset show consistent improvements over Qwen2.5-VL and Qwen3-VL baselines. Ablation studies, cross-dataset evaluation on AdsQA, and transfer experiments on an emotion-focused TVQA subset further support the effectiveness and generalization of our approach.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Bridging the Manifold Gap: Riemannian Residual Line Search for One-Step Image Editing

One-step diffusion editors are fast because they avoid inversion and iterative optimization, but a single transport update must be aggressive enough to realize the target prompt and conservative enough to preserve the source image–and no fixed update strength satisfies both demands across edit types. We treat this tension as a post-hoc candidate-selection problem on top of energy-field transport rather than as a new editing model. Our proposed method, Riemannian Residual Line Search, first builds a stronger edit by estimating the local time curvature of the prompt-delta field and projecting the corrected direction back onto the update norm of the original first-order energy-field transport estimation. It then forms a small residual path from the source image to this strong edit, retains the original first-order output as one candidate, and picks the final image by maximizing target-prompt CLIP alignment. On a 700-sample PIE-Bench++ evaluation across 10 edit type IDs, our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance among current one-step update algorithms.

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

Macro Graph of Experts for Billion-Scale Multi-Task Recommendation

arXiv:2506.10520v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Graph-based multi-task learning at billion-scale presents a significant challenge, as different tasks correspond to distinct billion-scale graphs. Traditional multi-task learning methods often neglect these graph structures, relying solely on individual user and item embeddings. However, disregarding graph structures overlooks substantial potential for improving performance. In this paper, we introduce the Macro Graph of Experts (MGOE) framework, the first approach capable of leveraging macro graph embeddings to capture task-specific macro features while modeling the correlations between task-specific experts. Specifically, we propose the concept of a Macro Graph Bottom, which, for the first time, enables multi-task learning models to incorporate graph information effectively. We design the Macro Prediction Tower to dynamically integrate macro knowledge across tasks. MGOE has been deployed at scale, powering multi-task learning for a leading billion-scale recommender system, Alibaba. Extensive offline experiments conducted on three public benchmark datasets demonstrate its superiority over state-of-the-art multi-task learning methods, establishing MGOE as a breakthrough in multi-task graph-based recommendation. Furthermore, online A/B tests confirm the superiority of MGOE in billion-scale recommender systems.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Rare Coding Variants Reveal Distinct Genetic Architectures Across Multidimensional Sleep Phenotypes

Sleep and circadian traits have been widely studied using common variants, but the contribution of rare coding variation remains unclear. We analyzed rare coding variants in 397,065 whole-exome sequenced UK Biobank participants across 36 sleep phenotypes from self-report, diagnoses, sleep medication use and accelerometry, and meta-analyzed results with 171,536 whole-genome sequenced All of Us participants of diverse ancestries, with replication in the Mass General Brigham Biobank (N = 31,275). We identified 260 genes associated with sleep phenotypes, including novel associations with sleep medication use in 29 genes and 24 out of 29 have not previously been reported with any sleep phenotypes. We observed modest but significant rare variant heritability and strong genetic correlations between sleep medication use, insomnia and fatigue. Temporal gene expression trajectory analyses indicate that genes associated with self-reported sleep traits show constant high prenatal expression, whereas genes linked to sleep medication phenotypes exhibit peak expression in the late prenatal period. These findings highlight distinct biological mechanisms captured by different measurement sources of sleep phenotypes and reveal rare-variant-informed targets for therapeutic discovery.