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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

When Retrieval Metrics Mislead: Measuring Policy Signal in Long-Horizon Tool-Use Agents

Authors:
Tianyu Ding↗Juan Pablo De la Cruz Weinstein↗

Exact-match retrieval recall is often used as a proxy for whether a retriever supplies useful policy context to a downstream decision model. We test this proxy for pre-action policy classification in tau-bench using Qwen2.5-3B/7B classifiers. Under gold-policy conditioning, a compact structured state improves macro-F1 over raw trajectories by 0.13-0.17 after tuning. We then replace the benchmark-designated policy clause with the top-ranked clause retrieved from decision-time context. Although the exact governing clause is retrieved at rank 1 for only 7% of airline states, the primary 3B classifier obtains macro-F1 0.58 with retrieved clauses versus 0.60 with gold clauses (Delta=-0.02, task-cluster 95% CI [-0.23,+0.21]); mismatched-policy and no-policy controls score 0.32 and 0.21. We do not detect a macro-F1 difference between retrieved and gold clauses in this configuration, although the interval remains too wide to establish non-inferiority. The same qualitative pattern appears with a second retriever and at 7B, while varying across fine-tuning configurations. These results indicate that exact-match clause recall can underestimate downstream policy utility in this benchmark setting, motivating evaluation with retrieved policies in the classification loop rather than recall alone.

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

When Generator Replay Degrades: Projected Rehearsal Orchestration for Heterogeneous Federated Class-Incremental Learning

Authors:
Thinh T. H. Nguyen↗Khoa D. Doan↗Binh T. Nguyen↗Danh Le-Phuoc↗Kok-Seng Wong↗

arXiv:2606.15695v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated class-incremental learning (FCIL) becomes substantially harder when clients observe different label subsets, progress through tasks at different stages, and provide uneven supervision for the same semantic concepts. Existing FCIL methods often preserve old knowledge through input-space synthesis, but they can be fragile under heterogeneous task streams and difficult to transfer across modalities. To alleviate such issues, we propose PRO, a framework that replaces synthetic input replay with projected rehearsal orchestration. To remove external pretraining, we evaluate all methods under the same warmup. After this, PRO maintains compact class-level projected memories on the server and allows clients perform balanced pseudo multi-task training over current examples and old projected memories. To handle stronger representation drift, we further introduce PRO-MAX, which augments PRO with neighborhood-weighted memory alignment while preserving the same server-light principle that the server only aggregates model updates and memory statistics. Across image, text, and graph benchmarks, PRO and PRO-MAX improve retention and final utility under heterogeneous streams while remaining competitive in homogeneous FCIL. Even when baselines are given expanded replay budgets, they degrade under supervision imbalance and stage misalignment, indicating that replay quantity alone does not resolve replay-quality failures. Additional weak-task diagnostics further show that larger replay mismatch is associated with larger downstream degradation, while our method keeps projected memories better aligned with the evolving representation.

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

The Significance of Style Diversity in Annotation-Free Synthetic Data Generation

Authors:
Zahra Abbasiantaeb↗Zeno Belligoli↗Omar Essam↗Mohammad Aliannejadi↗

arXiv:2606.20400v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generating high-utility synthetic data for intent classification typically requires human-annotated seed data, which is often unavailable in fast-paced industrial settings. In this paper, we propose a framework for synthetic dialogue generation that works entirely without human-annotated data, relying solely on intent definitions. Our proposed dialogue generation framework utilizes two different types of topic and style attributes to improve data diversity. Also, we propose two novel post-hoc stylization models called Univ and Exam to transform synthetic LLM-generated utterances into more varied, human-like linguistic styles. To enhance data quality, we utilize an LLM-as-a-judge filtering process. Experimental results on both industrial and public datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves up to 93.3% of the performance obtained using human-annotated training data. Crucially, the findings reveal that style diversity is more critical than topic diversity for synthetic data utility, as it prevents models from learning spurious stylistic correlations. Furthermore, the study shows that incorporating style attributes during the generation process is more effective than post-hoc style adaptation.

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04.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-15

Nanocrystal-tailored recombination for all-perovskite tandem solar modules

Authors:
Ke Xiao↗

The commercialization of all-perovskite tandem solar modules is hindered by the reliance on the conventional gold-based tunnel recombination junction (TRJ)1,2. Specifically, this TRJ introduces substantial near-infrared parasitic absorption3 and suffers from interfacial instability4, limiting both photocurrent generation and operational durability. Here, we develop a solution-processed interconnecting layer based on surface-engineered indium oxide (In2O3) nanocrystals featuring high optical transparency, wherein controlled nanocrystal morphology and tailored ligand chemistry enable smooth interfacial contact and favorable energy level alignment. Critically, we introduce a phosphonic acid additive into the lead–tin (Pb–Sn) perovskite precursor, which synergistically improves the electronic contact with the In2O3 recombination layer, thereby enhancing hole extraction. In addition, the additive regulates perovskite crystallization to mitigate residual strain during film formation, ensuring high-quality large-area deposits. This coordinated interfacial and crystallization engineering strategy simultaneously enhances carrier recombination efficiency at the interconnection layer, improves carrier extraction, and promotes large-area film uniformity in all-perovskite tandems. As a result, a 65-cm2 all-perovskite tandem solar module achieves a certified power conversion efficiency of 26.2%5, with an open-circuit voltage of 2.182 V, a fill factor of 77.4%, and a short-circuit current density of 15.6 mA cm-2 in terms of averaged subcell performance, measured by Japan Electrical Safety and Environment Technology Laboratories (JET). This marks a significant advance toward scalable perovskite tandem photovoltaics.

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05.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-13

Contribution of nosocomial transmission to <i>Klebsiella pneumoniae</i> neonatal sepsis in Africa and South Asia: An observational study of infection clusters inferred from pathogen genomics and temporal data

Authors:
Erkison Ewomazino Odih↗

by Erkison Ewomazino Odih, Jabir A. Abdulahi, Anne V. Amulele, Matthew Bates, Eva Heinz, Weiming Hu, Kajal Jain, Rindidzani Magobo, Courtney P. Olwagen, John M. Tembo, Tolbert Sonda, Jonathan Strysko, Caroline C. Tigoi, Kyle Bittinger, Jennifer Cornick, Ebenezer Foster-Nyarko, Wilson Gumbi, Steven M. Jones, Chileshe L. Musyani, Carolyn M. McGann, Ahmed M. Moustafa, Patrick Musicha, James C. L. Mwansa, Moreka L. Ndumba, Thomas D. Stanton, Donwilliams O. Omuoyo, Oliver Pearse, Laura T. Phillips, Paul J. Planet, Charlene M. C. Rodrigues, Fatou Secka, Kirsty Sands, Erin Theiller, Allan M. Zuza, Sulagna Basu, Grace J. Chan, Kenneth C. Iregbu, Jean-Baptiste Mazarati, Semaria Solomon Alemayehu, Timothy R. Walsh, Rabaab Zahra, Angela Dramowski, Sombo Fwoloshi, Appiah-Korang Labi, Lola Madrid, Noah Obeng-Nkrumah, David Ojok, Boaz D. Wadugu, Andrew C. Whitelaw, Anudita Bhargava, Atul Jindal, Ramesh K. Agarwal, Alexander M. Aiken, James A. Berkley, Susan E. Coffin, Nicholas A. Feasey, Nelesh P. Govender, Davidson H. Hamer, Shabir A. Madhi, Mari Jeeva Sankar, Kelly L. Wyres, Kathryn E. Holt Background Klebsiella pneumoniae is the leading cause of sepsis among neonates in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Africa and Asia, contributing substantially to the overall burden of antimicrobial-resistant infections and mortality among neonates globally. Pathogen sequencing has been used to investigate case clusters and confirm nosocomial transmission in a small number of neonatal units. Here we utilise pathogen sequence data to estimate the fraction of K. pneumoniae neonatal sepsis attributable to nosocomial transmission in African and South Asian countries. Methods and findings We estimated the proportion of invasive K. pneumoniae disease involved in nosocomial transmission clusters in a given neonatal unit, using single-linkage clustering based on pairwise temporal and genetic distances estimated from bacterial whole-genome sequences aggregated from 10 contributing studies. Analysing 1,523 K. pneumoniae isolates from 27 units in 13 countries in Africa and South Asia between 2013 and 2023, we inferred 156 nosocomial transmission clusters, ranging from 2 to 188 neonates each (83 of the clusters comprised ≥3 cases). Overall, we estimated that 1,035 neonatal infections (68.0%) were part of nosocomial transmission clusters. Excluding the first infection in each cluster as a potential index case, we estimate at least 879 (57.7%) infections were acquired via nosocomial transmission. Sensitivity analyses showed that results were robust to the choice of genetic distance estimation methods and thresholds used to define clusters, and cluster estimates were stable over temporal distance thresholds ranging from 2 to 8 weeks. Isolates were mostly extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL) producers (90.9%) and included 172 multi-locus sequence types (STs). Fourteen STs, including several globally recognised multidrug-resistant lineages, were associated with transmission clusters at multiple units, and these were collectively responsible for two-thirds of all infections. Carriage of carbapenemase genes (adjusted odds ratio, aOR = 2.08 [95% confidence interval, CI: 1.04, 4.14]; p = 0.04) and ESBL genes (aOR = 2.48 [95% CI: 1.26, 4.90]; p = 0.006) were significantly positively associated with transmission in a logistic regression model with site as a covariate. Limitations of this study include the lack of sufficient clinical data to allow high-resolution investigation of transmission dynamics and lack of facility-level data to investigate contributors to the observed differences in transmission burden across sites. Conclusions Nosocomial transmission contributes to a substantial proportion of K. pneumoniae sepsis in neonatal care units in Africa and South Asia. Reducing transmission within these settings through improved infection prevention and control and other measures could substantially reduce the neonatal sepsis burden. A high burden of transmission clusters is associated with the same drug-resistant lineages that are recognised as high-risk clones associated with hospital outbreaks in high-income countries, indicating global connectivity of the antimicrobial-resistant pathogen population.

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

Exposing the Unsaid: Visualizing Hidden LLM Bias through Stochastic Path Aggregation

Authors:
Matteo Pelossi↗Rita Sevastjanova↗Thilo Spinner↗Mennatallah El-Assady↗

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit representational and syntactic biases that are difficult to evaluate due to the stochastic nature of text generation. Standard auditing methods rely on a single output inspection or static automated metrics. These approaches obscure the underlying probability distributions and fail to capture biases hidden in lower-probability generation branches. This paper introduces TreeTracer, a visual analytics tool designed to evaluate LLM bias through aggregated comparison. Using a systematic perturbation analysis pipeline, the tool replaces ontology-defined terms in each input prompt, aggregates hundreds of stochastic generations into a syntax-aligned hierarchical structure, and then performs classification-aware node merging with an auxiliary language model. The resulting structure is visualized through a custom Sankey diagram. By juxtaposing two ontology-driven trees, the workspace enables direct comparison between semantic contexts and supports systematic bias detection. Because any visualization reflects only a subset of the model's learned behavior, the system further applies contrastive inference to compute and directly display counterfactual token probabilities across contexts, reducing the risk of misinterpreting the presence of bias. We validate the workspace through case studies comparing an unaligned baseline model GPT-2 XL against the constitutionally aligned Apertus models. The visual aggregation successfully exposes hidden representational harms, such as counterfactual pronoun suppression and conversational marginalization of individuals. A preliminary user study confirms that the aggregated comparative interface reduces cognitive load and effectively supports analysts in detecting systemic biases.

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07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

m2sv: A Scalable Benchmark for Map-to-Street-View Spatial Reasoning

Authors:
Yosub Shin↗Michael Buriek↗Igor Molybog↗

Vision–language models (VLMs) achieve strong performance on many multimodal benchmarks but remain brittle on spatial reasoning tasks that require aligning abstract overhead representations with egocentric views. We introduce m2sv, a scalable benchmark for map-to-street-view spatial reasoning that asks models to infer camera viewing direction by aligning a north-up overhead map with a Street View image captured at the same real-world intersection. We release m2sv-20k, a geographically diverse benchmark with controlled ambiguity, along with m2sv-sft-11k, a curated set of structured reasoning traces for supervised fine-tuning. Despite strong performance on existing multimodal benchmarks, the best evaluated VLM achieves only 65.2% accuracy on m2sv, below human annotators who reach 72.0% on average (and 95% for an expert) with strong inter-annotator agreement ($\kappa$ up to 0.76). While supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning yield consistent gains, cross-benchmark evaluations reveal limited transfer. Beyond aggregate accuracy, we systematically analyze difficulty in map-to-street-view reasoning using both structural signals and human effort, and conduct an extensive failure analysis of adapted open models. Our findings highlight persistent gaps in geometric alignment, evidence aggregation, and reasoning consistency, motivating future work on grounded spatial reasoning across viewpoints.

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

Standardized Methods and Recommendations for Green Federated Learning

Authors:
Austin Tapp↗Holger R. Roth↗Ziyue Xu↗Abhijeet Parida↗Hareem Nisar↗Marius George Linguraru↗

arXiv:2602.00343v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training over privacy-sensitive, distributed data, but its environmental impact is difficult to compare across studies due to inconsistent measurement boundaries and heterogeneous reporting. We present a practical carbon-accounting methodology for FL CO2e tracking using NVIDIA NVFlare and CodeCarbon for explicit, phase-aware tasks (initialization, per-round training, evaluation, and idle/coordination). To capture non-compute effects, we additionally estimate communication emissions from transmitted model-update sizes under a network-configurable energy model. We validate the proposed approach on two representative workloads: CIFAR-10 image classification and retinal optic disk segmentation. In CIFAR-10, controlled client-efficiency scenarios show that system-level slowdowns and coordination effects can contribute meaningfully to carbon footprint under an otherwise fixed FL protocol, increasing total CO2e by 8.34x (medium) and 21.73x (low) relative to the high-efficiency baseline. In retinal segmentation, swapping GPU tiers (H100 vs.\ V100) yields a consistent 1.7x runtime gap (290 vs. 503 minutes) while producing non-uniform changes in total energy and CO2e across sites, underscoring the need for per-site and per-round reporting. Overall, our results support a standardized carbon accounting method that acts as a prerequisite for reproducible 'green' FL evaluation. Our code is available at https://github.com/Pediatric-Accelerated-Intelligence-Lab/carbon_footprint.

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09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

The Optimal Rate Function in Covariant Quantum State Tomography

Authors:
Arick Grootveld↗Alexander Maloney↗Jason Pollack↗Peixue Wu↗

arXiv:2606.16948v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The problem of quantum tomography is to estimate an unknown quantum state $\rho$ from a measurement of $n$ copies of $\rho$. One can ask which tomography protocol, i.e.\ which choice of multi-copy measurement, gives the best possible estimate of $\rho$. To do so, we characterize tomography protocols by their rate function, which governs the exponential rate at which a protocol assigns probability to a particular estimate $\sigma$ of the true state $\rho$. This rate function is a quantum mechanical generalization of the classical relative entropy between the true state and its estimate, and depends on the choice of protocol. It is bounded by the quantum relative entropy, and we show that this bound is sharp: for any $\rho$ and $\sigma$ we construct a family of protocols whose rate functions converge to the quantum relative entropy $D(\sigma\|\rho)$. We consider the family of covariant tomography protocols; these are the basis independent state estimation schemes that assume no prior information about $\rho$ and $\sigma$. Keyl described a specific tomography protocol based on Schur sampling, and conjectured that among all covariant tomography protocols it has the largest possible rate function for all $\sigma$ and $\rho$. We prove this conjecture. The resulting rate function is an annealed version of quantum relative entropy, due to the cost of learning the eigenbasis in covariant quantum state tomography.

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10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

VeriPilot: An LLM-Powered Verilog Debugging Framework

Authors:
Yihan Wang↗Cheng Liu↗Jiazheng Zhang↗Lei Zhang↗Long Cheng↗Xiaowei Li↗Huawei Li↗

arXiv:2606.23759v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Verilog debugging remains one of the most time-consuming stages in digital circuit design. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled automated debugging; however, most existing approaches rely solely on test outputs and compiler feedback in an end-to-end manner, limiting their effectiveness on complex bugs. A key challenge is that the root cause of an error may be far removed from its observable outputs, making it difficult for LLMs to trace long dependency chains in code. This challenge is further exacerbated in large codebases, where long context lengths hinder efficient reasoning. To address these limitations, we propose VeriPilot, an LLM-powered debugging framework that leverages golden reference models to enable fine-grained bug localization and repair. VeriPilot goes beyond output-level comparison by aligning internal variable semantics between the Verilog design and its corresponding golden model through LLM-based analysis. It then performs step-by-step signal tracing using Control-Data-Flow Graphs (CDFGs) derived from static analysis, identifying a minimal set of suspicious code regions along with their correct counterparts from the golden model. These structured insights are subsequently provided to the LLM to guide reasoning and automated code repair. Experimental results on the Comprehensive Verilog Design Problems (CVDP) benchmark from NVIDIA demonstrate that VeriPilot improves the repair success rate of GPT-4o from 54.3\% to 85.71\%, significantly enhancing both bug localization accuracy and repair effectiveness for complex Verilog designs. The source code and benchmark are publicly available at Github https://github.com/YihanWn/VeriPilot.git.

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11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Scribby: A Multi-Level LLM Framework for Semantic Video Analysis

Authors:
Julian Abelarde↗Hugo Garrido-Lestache Belinchon↗

As video content continues to expand across educational platforms, recorded lectures, and live-streamed entertainment, the need for efficient and structured analysis of long-form footage has increased [1]. Although many existing AI programs provide high-level video summaries based on AI-generated transcripts [2,3,4,5], these approaches are often limited to coarse overviews and lack detailed analysis of a video's structure, thematic progression, and semantic relationships, all of which are required for comprehensive video analysis. This paper proposes an LLM-based video summarization framework that balances macro-level comprehension with micro-level semantic analysis [6,12,13]. The first stage of the process indexes the video at a micro level by (1) analyzing the full transcript, (2) analyzing individual transcript sentences, and (3) grouping these sentences by semantic similarity using an LLM as a judge [6,13]. Contextual continuity is retained during sentence-level processing by incorporating both the global transcript analysis and adjacent sentence information into each evaluation prompt. This framework establishes a foundation for video analysis tools that visualize semantic chunking and semantic matching through relevance-based heatmaps. Limitations and future expansions of the framework are also discussed.

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12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Integral Formulation of QENDy for Robust Nonlinear System Identification

Authors:
Nikhil Saran↗Sushant Pokhriyal↗Stefan Klus↗Rushikesh Kamalapurkar↗Joel A. Rosenfeld↗

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

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

Pretraining A Large Language Model using Distributed GPUs: A Memory-Efficient Decentralized Paradigm

Authors:
Jinrui Zhang↗Chaodong Xiao↗Aoqi Wu↗Xindong Zhang↗Lei Zhang↗

Pretraining large language models (LLMs) typically requires centralized clusters with thousands of high-memory GPUs (e.g., H100/A100). Recent decentralized training methods reduce communication overhead by employing federated optimization; however, they still need to train the entire model on each node, remaining constrained by GPU memory limitations. In this work, we propose SParse Expert Synchronization (SPES), a memory-efficient decentralized framework for pretraining mixture-of-experts (MoE) LLMs. SPES trains only a subset of experts per node, substantially lowering the memory footprint. Each node updates its local experts and periodically synchronizes with other nodes, eliminating full-parameter transmission while ensuring efficient knowledge sharing. To mitigate limited per-expert data utilization under sparse expert updates, we introduce an expert-merging warm-up strategy, where experts exchange knowledge early in training, to rapidly establish foundational capabilities. With SPES, we train a 2B-parameter MoE LLM using 16 standalone 48GB GPUs over internet connections, which achieves competitive performance with centrally trained LLMs under similar computational budgets. We further demonstrate scalability by training a 7B model from scratch and a 9B model upcycled from a dense checkpoint, both of which match prior centralized baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/zjr2000/SPES.

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

Task-Aware Structured Memory for Dynamic Multi-modal In-Context Learning

Authors:
Zhirui Chen↗Ziwei Chen↗Ling Shao↗

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) depend on in-context learning (ICL) for rapid task adaptation, but their scalability is severely limited by finite context windows and the growing cost of key-value (KV) caches in long multi-modal sequences. Existing memory compression approaches typically rely on rigid token removal or sample-dependent importance estimation, which introduces bias, disrupts semantic structure, particularly for visual representations, and yields static memories that cannot adapt to new queries. We introduce TASM (Task-Aware Structured Memory), a training-free framework that addresses these limitations through task-aware, structure-preserving, and dynamically accessible memory construction. TASM employs task-vector guided compression to replace sample-specific signals with a task-level direction that captures shared relevance across demonstrations. To preserve the underlying manifold, it applies semantics-aware token merging via bipartite graph matching, aggregating tokens without destructive pruning. Finally, TASM structures memory into a hierarchy comprising a compact Core Memory and a Latent Bank, facilitating query-adaptive dynamic retrieval. Evaluations confirm TASM maintains high performance under heavy compression, effectively balancing efficiency with adaptability.

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

LibriConvo: Simulating Conversations from Read Literature for ASR and Diarization

Authors:
M\'at\'e Gedeon↗P\'eter Mihajlik↗

We introduce LibriConvo, a synthetic conversational speech corpus for speaker diarization and automatic speech recognition (ASR), built by instantiating the previously proposed Speaker-Aware Simulated Conversation (SASC) framework in a dataset and benchmarking setting. The main contribution of this paper is a corpus construction pipeline and benchmark derived from that framework. To make the data more suitable for downstream ASR and diarization, conversational timing statistics are estimated from English CallHome using external voice activity detection, long pauses are compressed, LibriTTS utterances are grouped by book to improve local semantic continuity, and room impulse responses are selected with a spatial-plausibility heuristic. The resulting corpus contains 240.1 hours of audio across 1,496 dialogues involving 830 speakers, partitioned into speaker-disjoint train, validation, and test splits. We report baseline results for both diarization and ASR. On the test split, Sortformer outperforms the pyannote pipeline in diarization (11.1\% vs.~24.4\% DER). For ASR, a Fast Conformer-CTC XLarge model fine-tuned with Serialized Output Training achieves 7.29\% WER and 6.97\% cpWER, outperforming zero-shot Whisper-large-v3. These results position LibriConvo as a practical benchmark for studying synthetic conversational speech and for evaluating multi-speaker speech processing systems.

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16.
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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17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

LLMs+Graphs: Toward Graph-Native, Synergistic AI Systems

Authors:
Arijit Khan↗Longxu Sun↗Xin Huang↗

arXiv:2606.11560v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced rapidly, but their limitations in structured and multi-hop reasoning underscore the need for graph-native, synergistic artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Graph-structured data underpins critical applications across social, biological, financial, transportation, web, and knowledge domains, making it essential to understand how LLMs can leverage graph computation for grounded, context-rich inference. Three complementary synergies are emerging: LLMs augmented with graph computation for retrieval and reasoning; bidirectional integration between LLMs and knowledge graphs (KGs), where LLMs support KG construction and curation while KGs enforce semantic constraints and factual consistency; and AI agents strengthened by graph algorithms for planning, decision making, and multi-step reasoning. In parallel, LLMs introduce new capabilities for graph data management and graph machine learning (ML) through natural language interfaces and hybrid LLM-graph neural network (GNN) pipelines. This tutorial synthesizes the algorithms, systems, and design principles driving these converging directions, offering data science and data mining researchers a unified perspective on integrating LLMs, graph data management, graph mining, graph ML, and agentic computation into next-generation graph-native AI systems.

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18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

ASymPO: Asymmetric-Scale Policy Optimization for Asynchronous LLM Post-Training Without Behavior Information

Authors:
Zehua Liu↗Yuxuan Yao↗Xiaojin Fu↗Tao Zhong↗Mingxuan Yuan↗

arXiv:2606.03070v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Asynchronous reinforcement learning can improve language-model post-training throughput by decoupling response generation from policy optimization, but stale responses introduce distribution drift. Standard behavior-corrected methods control this drift with behavior-policy probabilities, importance ratios, or clipping, which requires token-aligned, versioned, and numerically consistent behavior log-probabilities across rollout and learner systems. We ask whether asynchronous group-relative RL can instead be stabilized using only current-policy probabilities. We identify a scale-imbalance failure mode: when stale responses are evaluated under the current policy, positive and negative loss terms can appear at different negative log-probability scales, so zero-sum advantages no longer imply balanced loss contributions. We propose Asymmetric-Scale Policy Optimization (ASymPO), which normalizes each response's token loss by its current average token negative log-probability. ASymPO requires no behavior-policy probabilities, restores response-level zero-sum balance, and preserves a nonzero learning signal. We also introduce Scaled Policy Optimization (SPO), a fixed negative-scaling baseline, and evaluate both current-policy-only objectives in asynchronous mathematical reasoning post-training.

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

The Reward Was in Your Data All Along: Correcting Flow Matching with Discriminator-Guided RL

Authors:
Nicolas Beltran-Velez↗Felix Friedrich↗Zhang Xiaofeng↗Reyhane Askari-Hemmat↗Xiaochuang Han↗Adriana Romero-Soriano↗Michal Drozdzal↗

Score- and flow-matching models often rely on preference-based reinforcement learning for two purposes: aligning with subjective preferences and, surprisingly, recovering properties such as visual realism and coherent object structure that matching-based training is intended to learn from the data itself. We argue that this reflects a structural mismatch. Matching losses measure $\ell_2$ regression error on the velocity or score field under training-time marginals, a proxy poorly aligned with the visual and semantic properties that determine sample quality at inference. Given a reward aligned with these properties, RL sidesteps the mismatch by evaluating the model on its own samples and following the reward landscape directly. The challenge is to obtain such a reward without relying on human preferences, which are expensive and conflate data realism with annotator inclinations. We propose Discriminator-Guided RL (DRL). DRL trains a discriminator to separate data from base-model samples in a pretrained representation space and uses its logit as the reward in KL-regularized RL. The pretrained space restricts the discriminator to perceptually meaningful directions, and the logit estimates the log-likelihood ratio between data and model, which is the optimal reward for targeting the data distribution. Across SiT, JiT, REPA, and RAE, DRL reduces guidance-free FID (e.g., $9.38 \to 2.62$ on SiT) and semantic-space FD (e.g., $88.2 \to 19.3$ on DINOv3 for SiT), with consistent gains across all backbones, and improves human-preference rewards without training on them. It also yields a better Pareto frontier between preference reward and image fidelity under subsequent preference-based post-training, increasing alignment while reducing low-level artifacts such as oversaturation and excessive brightness.

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20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Towards a future space-based, highly scalable AI infrastructure system design

Authors:
Blaise Ag\"uera y Arcas↗Travis Beals↗Maria Biggs↗Jessica V. Bloom↗Thomas Fischbacher↗Konstantin Gromov↗Urs K\"oster↗Rishiraj Pravahan↗James Manyika↗

arXiv:2511.19468v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: If AI is a foundational general-purpose technology, we should anticipate that demand for AI compute – and energy – will continue to grow. The Sun is by far the largest energy source in our solar system, and thus it warrants consideration how future AI infrastructure could most efficiently tap into that power. This work explores a scalable compute system for machine learning in space, using fleets of satellites equipped with solar arrays, inter-satellite links using free-space optics, and Google tensor processing unit (TPU) accelerator chips. To facilitate high-bandwidth, low-latency inter-satellite communication, the satellites would be flown in close proximity. We illustrate the basic approach to formation flight via an 81-satellite cluster of 1 km radius, and describe an approach for using high-precision ML-based models to control large-scale constellations. Trillium TPUs are radiation tested. They survive a total ionizing dose equivalent to a 5 year mission life without permanent failures, and are characterized for bit-flip errors. Launch costs are a critical part of overall system cost; a learning curve analysis suggests launch to low-Earth orbit (LEO) may reach $\lesssim$\$200/kg by the mid-2030s.

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21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

A Reproducible Log-Driven AutoML Framework for Interpretable Pipeline Optimization in Healthcare Risk Prediction

Authors:
Rui Huang↗Lican Huang↗

arXiv:2605.21528v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Accurate disease risk prediction is challenged by heterogeneous features, limited data, and class imbalance. This study presents yvsoucom-iterkit, a deterministic AutoML framework that models pipeline optimization as a configuration-level system with full reproducibility and traceable execution logs, enabling systematic analysis of component attribution, interactions, similarity, and cross-seed robustness. Experiments on the Pima Indians Diabetes and Stroke datasets across more than 18,000 pipeline configurations reveal a structured yet partially redundant search space, where performance is dominated by a small subset of interacting components. Ensemble models achieve stable performance, reaching a Weighted-F1 of 0.89 on Pima and 0.94 on Stroke. Macro-F1 reaches approximately 0.88 on Pima but drops to 0.6560 on Stroke due to severe imbalance. Cross-seed experiments show that ensembles reduce variance compared to single models. Friedman testing ($p < 0.05$) confirms significant ranking differences across configurations. Based on analysis of component attribution, interaction, and similarity, optimal configuration design reveals dataset-dependent behavior. For the Pima dataset, computational efficiency benefits from simplified search spaces where redundant components can be removed, with split ratio playing a key role. In contrast, the Stroke dataset requires enhanced imbalance-aware strategies, where RandomOverSampler improves Macro-F1 from 0.6560 to 0.6766. These findings demonstrate that effective AutoML optimization is achieved through optimal configuration design, where carefully constraining the search space to high-impact components can improve performance, stability, and interpretability while reducing unnecessary search complexity.

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22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

NeuroSonic: Conditional Flow Matching for EEG-to-Speech Reconstruction

Authors:
Wenhao Gao↗Yifan Wang↗Yijia Ma↗Carl Yang↗Wen Li↗Chenyu You↗

arXiv:2606.24087v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reconstructing continuous speech from scalp electroencephalography (EEG) remains fundamentally challenging. EEG provides a weak, spatially diffuse, and highly variable measurement of distributed cortical activity, whereas speech is organized as a coherent acoustic trajectory with strong harmonic and temporal structure. The resulting mismatch makes waveform regression unstable and causes stochastic multi-step generation to be sensitive to artifact-dependent conditioning and subject variability. We introduce NeuroSonic, a conditional flow-matching framework for EEG-to-speech reconstruction. Instead of predicting waveforms directly or refining them through stochastic denoising, NeuroSonic learns a deterministic probability-flow velocity field that transports a noise-corrupted acoustic state toward clean speech under EEG conditioning. EEG and audio are embedded into a shared token space and processed by a time-conditioned gated Transformer that parameterizes the transport ordinary differential equation. This formulation models trajectory evolution explicitly while avoiding iterative stochastic sampling. We evaluate NeuroSonic on the CineBrain and EAV benchmarks under cross-subject evaluation. Across both datasets, the proposed method improves distributional realism, spectral fidelity, and perceptual quality over representative GAN-, diffusion-, and mean-flow baselines, with up to a 26.3\% gain in overall perceptual quality. The performance gap is most evident in artifact-heavy segments, where conditioning variability is strongest. These findings indicate that deterministic conditional transport provides a stable and effective formulation for EEG-driven speech reconstruction. Code is available at https://github.com/Y-Research-SBU/NeuroSonic/ .

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23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

AFFORDABILITY OF INTOXICATION FROM CHEAP ETHANOL: EVIDENCE FROM RETAIL ALCOHOL MARKETS IN UGANDA

Authors:
Muhamudu↗Niwagaba↗Rwakahangi↗S. P↗Kwagala↗Miller↗T. R↗Zyambo↗Rizzo↗Achoki↗

Background: Alcohol affordability is a determinant of consumption and alcohol-related harm. In many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), informal production, variable alcohol strength, and non-standard packaging complicate conventional affordability measures, limiting evidence on the economic accessibility of alcohol and the cost of intoxication. Objective: To assess the affordability of intoxication in Uganda by estimating the cost of obtaining ethanol to reach intoxication across alcohol products, packaging types, and retail contexts. Methods: Data were collected on 824 alcoholic beverages from urban, rural, and urban-slum retail markets. Ethanol-standardized pricing (price per gram of alcohol) was calculated, and the cost of consuming 60 g of ethanol was estimated. Multivariate regression identified determinants of ethanol affordability. Results: Affordability varied by product type and packaging. Opaque beers and illicit spirits provided the cheapest pathways to intoxication, with median costs of UGX 1,200-1,500 per 60 g of ethanol. Plastic packaging was associated with lower ethanol costs than glass packaging. Ethanol prices differed across formal and informal markets (p < 0.01), while rural areas and urban informal settlements had 20-25% lower costs than urban areas. Regulatory status alone did not predict affordability. Conclusions: In Ugandas diverse alcohol market, affordability is driven by access to ethanol rather than beverage price alone. Low-cost, high-strength alcohol sold through informal channels enables intoxication at minimal expense, among disadvantaged populations. Implications: Alcohol policies should target ethanol content through minimum unit pricing, alcohol-content-based taxation, and regulation of informal markets and packaging practices to reduce harmful consumption and inequities.

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

HEPTv2: End-to-End Efficient Point Transformer for Charged Particle Reconstruction

Authors:
Siqi Miao↗Shitij Govil↗Jack P. Rodgers↗Mia Liu↗Javier Duarte↗Shih-Chieh Hsu↗Yuan-Tang Chou↗Pan Li↗

arXiv:2606.20437v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Charged-particle tracking – reconstructing trajectories from sparse detector measurements – is a fundamental high-energy-physics inference problem and a canonical example of learning under extreme combinatorial ambiguity. At the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC), tracking must remain accurate and efficient despite unprecedented collision densities. Graph neural networks perform strongly, but incur substantial costs from graph construction and processing, while transformer-based approaches rely on auxiliary stages that prevent end-to-end optimization. To address this, we present HEPTv2, an end-to-end point-transformer architecture that reconstructs tracks from detector hits in one trainable pipeline. HEPTv2 combines a locality-aware point encoder with a track decoder that predicts complete trajectories without graph-building, clustering, or filtering. The encoder uses locality-sensitive hashing in detector coordinate space to preserve tracking-relevant geometry while enabling efficient local attention. The decoder resolves ambiguities through sectorized decoding and direct hit-to-track prediction under joint encoder-decoder supervision, allowing the full pipeline to be optimized end-to-end. On TrackML, HEPTv2 achieves 98.6% double-majority tracking efficiency at a 0.8% fake rate, while requiring only $\sim$15~ms inference time and 0.4~GB peak memory per event on a NVIDIA A100 GPU. Latency and memory scale approximately linearly for events with up to $5\times10^5$ hits. HEPTv2 establishes a new state of the art in the accuracy-latency trade-off, improving efficiency by 4.5% over the strongest prior transformer and by 1.1–2.2% over optimized graph-based pipelines, while reducing latency by factors of 7 and 38–52, respectively. These results show end-to-end transformers can deliver the accuracy and efficiency required for real-time particle reconstruction at the HL-LHC.

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

FlexiBrain: Resolution-Agnostic Voxel-Level Encoding for Native fMRI

Authors:
Mo Wang↗Wenhao Ye↗Junfeng Xia↗Minghao Xu↗Hongkai Wen↗Quanying Liu↗

arXiv:2606.11500v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The success of large-scale deep learning models in neuroscience is fundamentally constrained by severe data heterogeneity. Native fMRI data aggregated from diverse sources exhibit substantial variation in both spatial and temporal resolutions. Consequently, most existing frameworks rely on lengthy, rigid preprocessing pipelines that enforce uniformity across datasets. This practice introduces two critical limitations: (1) potential degradation of subject-specific anatomical information; (2) significant computational overhead, often requiring hours of processing per subject. Here, we propose FlexiBrain, a resolution-agnostic voxel-level encoding framework for native fMRI based on Mamba-JEPA. FlexiBrain defines patch sizes in real-world physical units and employs a dynamic patch resizing, thereby bypassing destructive spatial standardization while enabling direct ingestion of data in native space. We instantiate the framework using an efficient Mamba-JEPA backbone to model high-dimensional 4D fMRI signals. Across five diverse downstream neuroscience tasks, FlexiBrain consistently outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods, achieving gains of up to 12 percentage points without external data augmentation. Importantly, FlexiBrain functions as a seamless plug-in module, substantially reducing preprocessing costs and accelerating the development of robust voxel-level fMRI foundation models. Code is available at https://github.com/OneMore1/FlexiBrain.

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