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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-09

Daily briefing: Trial to ‘de-age’ cells treats first person

Authors:
Flora Graham↗

The gene-therapy trial aims to treat glaucoma by rejuvenating cells in the optic nerve. Plus, the mystery of how things freeze and encouragement to go out into the sunlight. The gene-therapy trial aims to treat glaucoma by rejuvenating cells in the optic nerve. Plus, the mystery of how things freeze and encouragement to go out into the sunlight.

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02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Finite-Shot Sensitivity for Moment Estimation in Quantum Metrology

Authors:
Shaowei Du↗Shuheng Liu↗Weidong Li↗Luca Pezz\`e↗Augusto Smerzi↗Qiongyi He↗

arXiv:2606.25920v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The quantum Cramér-Rao bound can be saturated only asymptotically and does not specify how many measurements are needed for a concrete estimator to approach it. We develop a finite-measurement theory for method-of-moments estimation, where the parameter is inferred from the sample mean of a calibrating observable rather than from the full likelihood. For general quantum statistical models, the expansion is written in terms of the calibration curve and the central moments of the measured observable. Nonlinear calibration curves make the usual moment estimator biased at finite measurement number; we construct a bias-corrected estimator with bias $O(\nu^{-3})$. This gives sensitivity corrections beyond the leading error-propagation term of the chosen moment protocol. We identify a general density-matrix condition under which the full $1/\nu^2$ correction vanishes. In unitary examples, the leading residual correction appears at order $1/\nu^3$, is governed by calibration curvature, and can be reduced or cancelled by higher-rank components of the same measured observable. The resulting thresholds quantify how many measurements are needed before the asymptotic sensitivity of a moment-estimation protocol is operationally visible.

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03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Reinforcement Learning Improves Traversal of Parametric Knowledge in LLMs

Authors:
Renfei Zhang↗Manasa Kaniselvan↗Rylan Schaeffer abd Niloofar Mireshghallah↗

Reinforcement learning (RL) is often credited with improving language model reasoning at the expense of knowledge. We challenge this narrative by showing that reasoning models consistently outperform their instruction-tuned versions on pure knowledge recall tasks. These gains do not reflect newly acquired information, but rather an improved procedural skill in navigating and searching existing knowledge hierarchies within the model parameters. Structured prompting, which explicitly guides models through hierarchical traversal – recovers most of the instruct-reasoning gap across five model families. A controlled RL experiment on unseen, non-extractable facts improves recall of held-out frequent but previously inaccessible facts, ruling out simple data exposure. On depth-stratified retrieval tasks, reasoning models exhibit superior traversal as retrieval depth grows. Layerwise activation analysis further shows that while factual representations maintain high cosine similarity between instruct and reasoning models, query representations diverge noticeably, indicating that reasoning primarily reshapes how models traverse knowledge rather than the knowledge representation itself. Finally, we find that distilled models often fail to match reasoning models on knowledge recall because they imitate self-correction without acquiring the exploratory behavior needed for hierarchical navigation. Together, these findings suggest that improving factual recall in LLMs depends not only on expanding what models know but also on teaching them to navigate it – motivating future post-training methods that optimize traversal.

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04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

ERTS: Adversarial Robustness Testing of Ethical AI via Semantic Perturbation in a Bounded Consequence Space

Authors:
Pratyush Chaudhari↗

arXiv:2606.13282v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As AI systems are deployed in high-stakes ethical contexts such as healthcare triage, autonomous vehicle control, and employment screening, formal methods for evaluating their robustness against adversarial manipulation of ethical reasoning remain underdeveloped. This paper introduces the Ethical Robustness Testing System (ERTS), a closed-pipeline framework that: (1) encodes ethical dilemmas into a 22-dimensional Ethical Consequence Space (ECS) grounded in established ethical theory; (2) applies 17 semantic perturbation functions subject to 6 validity constraint classes including a novel semantic coherence constraint; (3) measures decision deviation via a 4-component Ethical Instability Index (EII); and (4) produces domain-adaptive pre-deployment robustness assessment verdicts. We evaluate 4 structured baseline models and 2 production LLMs (Gemini 2.0 Flash and Llama 3.2) across 50 ethical scenarios spanning 8 deployment domains, generating 1,500 adversarial test cases. Results demonstrate that only 33% of models achieve assessment clearance, with the local Llama-3.2 model proving particularly vulnerable to fairness corruption and information degradation attacks (ERS = 0.737). To the best of our knowledge, no existing framework combines a bounded ethical consequence space, semantic coherence constraints, and domain-adaptive assessment in a single adversarial testing pipeline.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

MDForge: Agentic Molecular Dynamics Pipeline Design under Sparse Simulator Feedback

Authors:
Zehong Wang↗Yijun Ma↗Connor R. Schmidt↗Tianyi Ma↗Weixiang Sun↗Ziming Li↗Xiaoguang Guo↗Chuxu Zhang↗Matthew J. Webber↗Yanfang Ye↗

Molecular dynamics (MD) is the canonical in-silico method for atomistic molecular science, simulating molecular behavior from first-principle physics. Designing an MD pipeline for a new system requires substantial expert knowledge: running it on even one molecule is expensive, ruling out trial-and-error. We automate this expert pipeline-design process with an LLM agent. Unlike existing MD agents that orchestrate a predefined tool set, we treat pipeline design as open-ended code generation in which the agent's behavior is reshaped online by verbal reward. Specifically, we build MDForge, an LLM agent whose in-context update rule densifies the sparse reward via a multi-agent debate among physics experts. On three SAMPL host-guest binding free-energy benchmarks, MDForge automatically designs MD pipelines competitive with human experts. Deployed on a library of unseen candidate guests, its CB[7] pipeline discovers a novel binder that wet-lab competition NMR confirms is a high-affinity, picomolar CB[7] binder. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/Zehong-Wang/MDForge.

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06.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

GeroEngine: Generative single-cell aging trajectories reveal a bidirectionally traversable identity core and direction-specific inflammatory remodeling

Authors:
Bhak↗Jeon↗

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) maps aging tissues at high resolution but is destructive, preventing longitudinal tracking; dropout and zero-inflation artifacts, amplified by shift-invariant linear simulations, confound age-associated variability. We developed GeroEngine, a technical-artifact-aware framework combining VAE-based trajectory simulation, LOPO cross-validation, linear baselines, reverse traversal, and reverse-directed network inference. In microglia and HSCs, the VAE reduced technical-artifact carryover while preserving trajectory heterogeneity and improving alignment to artifact-reduced reference manifolds. Consensus GeroTargets and GeroRegulators defined tissue-specific GeroNetworks organized into three pillars: lineage/replication identity collapse, a sex-dimorphic endocrine/stress core, and inflammatory remodeling. Forward and reverse simulations aligned to the common young[->]old aging axis revealed a sign-coherent, direction-specific program: identity/replication targets were bidirectionally recovered, whereas MHC/NF-{kappa}B inflammatory programs were preferentially forward-recovered. These results support identity collapse as a deep traversable core of aging and nominate upstream homeostatic restoration over downstream inflammatory suppression.

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

MPK: A Compiler and Runtime for Mega-Kernelizing Tensor Programs

Authors:
Xinhao Cheng↗Zhihao Zhang↗Yu Zhou↗Jianan Ji↗Jinchen Jiang↗Zepeng Zhao↗Ziruo Xiao↗Zihao Ye↗Yingyi Huang↗Ruihang Lai↗Hongyi Jin↗Bohan Hou↗…

arXiv:2512.22219v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce Mirage Persistent Kernel (MPK), the first compiler and runtime system that automatically transforms multi-GPU model inference into a single high-performance mega-kernel. MPK introduces an SM-level graph representation that captures data dependencies at the granularity of individual streaming multiprocessors (SMs), enabling cross-operator software pipelining, \rev{fine-grained overlap of computation and communication, and other optimizations that are infeasible under the conventional kernel-per-operator execution model}. The MPK compiler lowers tensor programs into optimized SM-level task graphs and generates fast CUDA implementations for each task, while the MPK in-kernel parallel runtime executes these tasks within a single persistent mega-kernel using decentralized scheduling across SMs. Together, these components provide end-to-end kernel fusion with minimal developer effort, while preserving the flexibility of existing programming models. Our evaluation shows that MPK significantly outperforms existing kernel-per-operator LLM serving systems, achieving up to 1.7$\times$ lower end-to-end inference latency and pushing LLM inference performance close to the limits of the underlying hardware. MPK is publicly available at https://github.com/mirage-project/mirage.

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08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Understanding Sample Efficiency in Predictive Coding

Authors:
Gaspard Oliviers↗Elene Lominadze↗Rafal Bogacz↗

arXiv:2605.11911v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Predictive Coding (PC) is an influential account of cortical learning. Much of recent work has focused on comparing PC to Backpropagation (BP) to find whether PC offers any advantages. Small scale experiments show that PC enables learning that is more sample efficient and effective in many contexts, though a thorough theoretical understanding of the phenomena remains elusive. To address this, we quantify the efficiency of learning in BP and PC through a metric called ``target alignment'', which measures how closely the change in the output of the network is aligned to the output prediction error. We then derive and empirically validate analytical expressions for target alignment in Deep Linear Networks. We show that learning in PC is more efficient than BP, which is especially pronounced in deep, narrow and pre-trained networks. We also derive exact conditions for guaranteed optimal target alignment in PC and validate our findings through experiments. We study full training trajectories of linear and non-linear models, and find the predicted benefits of PC persist in practice even when some assumptions are violated. Overall, this work provides a mechanistic understanding of the higher learning efficiency observed for PC over BP in previous works, and can guide how PC should be parametrised to learn most effectively.

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09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-25

Localized Centered Second-Chaos Operator

Authors:
Guangqian Zhao↗

arXiv:2606.26065v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove a localized continuous-frequency operator estimate for centered Gaussian chaoses of order two. The result applies to operator-valued centered second chaoses, including Wick-centered same-family variants, between Hilbert spaces. In the model, two Gaussian frequency legs at scale $N$, an input leg at scale $Q$, and an output leg at scale $M$ are coupled through a soft incidence kernel; non-orthogonal Gaussian profiles are represented by covariance synthesis maps. The proof combines four oriented flattenings, rectangular non-commutative Khintchine inequalities, soft-incidence Schatten bounds, and Sobolev–Besov dyadic summation. The time lift gives $L^p$ operator convergence, while a Galerkin stabilization hypothesis gives pathwise full-cutoff convergence by the first Borel–Cantelli lemma. Under $\mathcal G(N)\lesssim N^{-\Gamma}$ one obtains the window \[ \Gamma>\frac d2, \qquad s

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10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

A Drug-Specific, Half-Life-Adjusted Framework for Classifying CNS-Active Systemic Therapy Exposure During and After Radiotherapy

Authors:
Pari Mitre↗Drapkin↗Dohopolski↗

Clinical oncology datasets often store systemic therapy as a regimen label with a start date and an end date. Those records are clinically recognizable but can be analytically incomplete when the research question concerns whether a patient was exposed to a concurrent CNS-active drug (cCNS-aD) or an adjuvant CNS-active drug (aCNS-aD) around radiotherapy. Contemporary CNS-oncology studies usually define CNS activity by empiric drug lists and define concurrency by fixed calendar windows, although the literature shows substantial heterogeneity across both concepts. This paper proposes a generalizable framework for converting raw systemic therapy records into reproducible cCNS-aD and aCNS-aD variables, useful in subgrouping for clinical studies. The framework uses a transparent CNS scoring model based on three clinical evidence components: intracranial objective response rate, consensus CNS endorsement, and intrathecal route of administration. It then defines a pharmacokinetic exposure proxy as the recorded end date plus five half-lives. Concurrent exposure is classified by overlap with the radiotherapy interval, while post-radiotherapy exposure is classified by overlap with a prespecified post-RT attribution window. The framework separately identifies post-RT pharmacokinetic persistence and post-RT treatment initiation, allowing investigators to distinguish continued exposure from true adjuvant initiation. This is a methodological framework and reference implementation. Implementation audits and endpoint-specific sensitivity analyses remain necessary before use as a definitive exposure classifier

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

SGFormer++: Semantic Graph Transformer for Incremental 3D Scene Graph Generation

Authors:
Mengshi Qi↗Changsheng Lv↗Zijian Fu↗Xianlin Zhang↗Huadong Ma↗

In this paper, we propose SGFormer++, a novel Semantic Graph Transformer for 3D scene graph generation (SGG), which aims to parse point cloud scenes into semantic structural graphs, where nodes denote detected object instances and edges encode their pairwise relationships, with the core challenge lying in modeling complex global scene structure. While existing graph convolutional network (GCN)-based methods suffer from over-smoothing and limited receptive fields, SGFormer++ leverages Transformer layers as its backbone to enable global message passing. Specifically, we introduce two key components tailored for 3D SGG: (1) a Graph Embedding Layer++ that efficiently integrates edge-aware global context with linear computational complexity, and (2) a Semantic Injection Layer++ that enriches visual features with linguistic priors from large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs), boosting semantic representation without introducing extra trainable parameters. To further address the practical challenge of incremental SGG (I-SGG), where new relationship categories arrive sequentially, we equip SGFormer++ with a novel Spatial-guided Feature Adapter, which calibrates predicate features using subject-object spatial geometry to counter scale variation, and a Cascaded Binary Prediction Head that mitigates catastrophic forgetting via task-incremental classifier expansion and logit distillation. Extensive experiments on the 3DSSG benchmark demonstrate that SGFormer++ achieves state-of-the-art performance in both standard and incremental settings: it yields a significant 4.49% absolute improvement in Predicate A@1 under the incremental setting. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/Andy20178/SGFormer.

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

Towards Data-Efficient Cross-Device Generalization of Grad-Shafranov Equilibria via Transfer Learning Neural Operator

Authors:
Jay Phil Yoo↗William Howes↗Yashika Ghai↗Kazuma Kobayashi↗Souvik Chakraborty↗Syed Bahauddin Alam↗

arXiv:2606.15512v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real-time reconstruction of magnetohydrodynamic equilibria is essential for plasma shaping, stability assessment and feedback control in magnetic confinement fusion. However, Grad-Shafranov equilibrium calculations remain largely device-specific and iterative, limiting their use in latency-constrained control settings. Existing neural approaches can accelerate individual equilibrium predictions, but they do not generally provide reusable models across changing plasma boundaries or tokamak geometries. Here we show that equilibrium reconstruction can be recast as a cross-device operator learning problem. We develop a domain-specific neural operator framework that maps geometry and profile parameters directly to the poloidal flux field, replacing repeated solve-on-demand computation with amortized operator inference. Using the analytically tractable Solov'ev family as a controlled Grad-Shafranov testbed, we generate equilibria across eight geometrically distinct tokamak-like configurations and benchmark five neural operator architectures under four transfer-learning strategies. Single-geometry pretraining gives poor transfer to unseen devices, whereas multi-geometry pretraining enables data-efficient adaptation. The Wavelet Neural Operator gives the strongest cross-geometry performance, reaching mean relative L2 errors below 4% with 100 labelled target equilibria and below 2% with full fine-tuning. The predicted magnetic fields satisfy the divergence-free constraint to numerical precision, and four architectures achieve millisecond or sub-millisecond inference. These results identify neural operator pretraining as a route towards reusable, real-time equilibrium inference across fusion device configurations.

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

ESBMC-PLC: Formal Verification of IEC 61131-3 Ladder Diagram Programs Using SMT-Based Model Checking

Authors:
Pierre Dantas↗Lucas Cordeiro↗Waldir Junior↗

PLCs execute safety-critical programs across industrial sectors. The dominant PLC notation, ladder diagram (LD) per IEC 61131-3, remains absent from formal verification: SMT-based model checkers cannot process LD's rung-and-coil graphics. This paper presents ESBMC-PLC, the first open-source formal verifier with native LD support (PLCopen XML format), implemented as a new ESBMC frontend. ESBMC-PLC translates LD rungs to GOTO IR, models the PLC scan cycle as a while(true) loop with nondeterministic inputs, and checks safety properties via SMT-based bounded model checking or k-induction. A five-property YAML language (mutual_exclusion, invariant, absence, response, reachability) avoids temporal logic. A survey of 22 studies (2020-2026) identifies four research gaps; ESBMC-PLC closes two of them. Evaluation on 13 benchmarks (6 domains, 3 sources - including deployed CONTROLLINO PLCs and MathWorks Simulink PLC Coder) shows correct classification across 61 properties: all 9 author-constructed programs (Categories A/B) as expected, all 4 vendor programs (Category C) correctly unlabeled, with 8 bugs found (actionable counterexamples), 7 unbounded k-induction proofs, all runs under 60ms on Apple Silicon. Feature comparison with PLCverif shows that ESBMC-PLC is the only open-source tool that combines native LD, k-induction, and SMT bit-vector semantics.

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14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

ChildGuard: A Specialized Dataset for Combatting Child-Targeted Hate Speech

Authors:
Gautam Siddharth Kashyap↗Mohammad Anas Azeez↗Rafiq Ali↗Zohaib Hasan Siddiqui↗Jiechao Gao↗Usman Naseem↗

Mental health industry faces growing concerns regarding hate speech directed at children's on social media, as exposure to such content can contribute to adverse psychological outcomes during critical stages of development. Current hate speech datasets and detection systems provide limited support for child-focused applications because they are primarily designed for adults and lack dedicated representations of age-specific characteristics associated with hate speech directed at children's. To address this gap, we introduce ChildGuard, a large-scale English dataset for child-targeted hate speech containing 351,877 annotated instances collected from X (formerly Twitter), Reddit, and YouTube. The dataset covers three age groups such as younger children's (under 11), pre-teens (11-12), and teens (13-17). ChildGuard contains two subsets such as a contextual subset (157K) and a lexical subset (194K). Evaluation using recent transformer-based models and LLMs achieves a best Macro-F1 of 82.07%, decreasing to 79.41%, 79.24%, 76.04%, and 74.88% on younger children's, contextual, implicit hate, and cross-subset settings, respectively.

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15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Multipartite synchronization residuals in driven-dissipative spin networks

Authors:
Jatin Ghildiyal↗Shubhrangshu Dasgupta↗Asoka Biswas↗

arXiv:2606.24360v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a phase-space measure of quantum synchronization that quantifies relative phase localization for two-qubit and three-qubit systems. This measure is built from the first angular moments of phase distributions obtained from Husimi-Q quasiprobability functions. Using this framework, we formulate a new class of synchronization residuals, motivated by subadditivity-type hierarchies of information-theoretic measures. We investigate these residuals in a driven-dissipative quantum Rabi network in the dispersive adiabatic regime. We show that, for two qubits, collective synchronization remains bounded by single-qubit contributions yielding a non-negative bipartite residual. The three-qubit nonequilibrium steady state exhibits a negative tripartite residual, which indicates collective phase synchronization, which cannot be described by pairwise decomposition. The corresponding entropy-based residuals, however, remain non-negative in both cases. Our results therefore, underscore that phase-sensitive synchronization measures and entropic correlation measures probe distinct aspects of open-system dynamics.

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

MambaRaw: Selective State Space Modeling for Efficient 4K Raw Image Reconstruction

Authors:
Peize Li↗Fanhu Zeng↗Tongda Xu↗Xingguo Xu↗Xinjie Zhang↗Xingtong Ge↗Haotian Zhang↗Yan Wang↗

In-camera JPEG previews are ubiquitous in raw image formats and provide an sRGB reference at negligible storage cost. Although existing metadata-based reconstruction frameworks can exploit this side information when recovering raw images, their context models often become computationally expensive especially at high resolution, eg, 4K raw image, given that attention mechanisms scale quadratically with feature maps, hindering its practical application. To address these limitations, we propose MambaRaw, a JPEG-conditioned metadata-based raw image reconstruction framework that uses State Space Models (SSMs) to estimate entropy parameters efficiently. Our key contribution comprises a Spatial-Energy Coupled Context Modeling mechanism with two lightweight modules: (1) TileMambaBlock, which performs Mamba-style selective scanning only on information-dense tiles to improve the efficiency; and (2) Energy-Aware Refinement (EAR), an identity-initialized residual module that enhance feature representation to match the long-tail energy distribution of raw signals. Extensive experiments on three camera datasets (Sony, Olympus, Samsung) show consistent improvements over strong metadata-based baselines and set a new state of the art for JPEG-guided raw reconstruction with great efficiency. Notably, at low metadata bitrates, MambaRaw increases PSNR by 1.2–1.4 dB and reduces end-to-end coding latency by about 9%. Code is released at https://github.com/Peizeli1/MambaRaw.

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17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Learning Dynamical Systems from Multiple Sparse Datasets: A Hierarchical Bayesian Modeling Approach

Authors:
Cristian Brugnara↗Lea Multerer↗Marco Forgione↗Laura Azzimonti↗

arXiv:2606.24966v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Estimating parameters of dynamical systems from sparse, noisy, and irregularly sampled data is often severely ill-conditioned. When multiple related datasets are available, they provide additional information if the shared structure and variability are properly modeled. We propose a hierarchical Bayesian framework for probabilistic meta-learning in dynamical systems, modeling dataset-specific parameters as draws from a shared population distribution. A numerical ODE solver is embedded within gradient-based MCMC to enable efficient posterior inference of the shared population and dataset-specific parameter distribution. Experiments show improved predictive performance over unpooled methods, highlighting the potential for data-efficient system identification in settings with sparse data.

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18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Overcoming the Incentive Collapse Paradox

Authors:
Qichuan Yin↗Ziwei Su↗Shuangning Li↗

arXiv:2603.27049v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI-assisted task delegation is increasingly common, yet human effort in such systems is costly and typically unobserved. Recent work by Bastani and Cachon (2025); Sambasivan et al. (2021) shows that accuracy-based payment schemes suffer from incentive collapse: as AI accuracy improves, sustaining positive human effort requires unbounded payments. We study this phenomenon in a budget-constrained principal-agent framework with strategic human agents whose output accuracy depends on unobserved effort. Our first contribution is a general impossibility result showing that incentive collapse is not merely a limitation of simple linear payments, but arises for any payment rule based only on observed task accuracy.To overcome this barrier, we propose a sentinel-auditing payment mechanism that enforces a strictly positive and controllable level of human effort at finite cost, independent of AI accuracy. Building on this incentive-robust foundation, we develop an incentive-aware active statistical inference framework that jointly optimizes (i) the auditing rate and (ii) active sampling and budget allocation across tasks of varying difficulty to minimize the final statistical loss under a single budget. Experiments demonstrate improved cost-error tradeoffs relative to standard active learning and auditing-only baselines.

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19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Body composition subphenotypes, cardiometabolic risk and incident outcomes: validation in the population-based NAKO and UK Biobank imaging cohorts

Authors:
Grune↗Haueise↗von Itter↗M.-N↗Jung↗Bamberg↗Bibi↗Friedrich↗C. M↗Fromherz↗Kauczor↗H.-U↗…

Background Anthropometric measures do not adequately capture heterogeneity in body fat distribution and corresponding cardiometabolic risk, whereas magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) enables precise differentiation and quantification of adipose tissue compartments and ectopic fat. We aimed to validate previously derived MRI-based body composition subphenotypes and their cardiometabolic risk profiles in two independent European cohorts. Methods Using deep learning-based image analysis, we quantified bone marrow, visceral, subcutaneous, cardiac, renal sinus, hepatic, skeletal muscle, and pancreatic fat in the imaging substudies of two population-based cohorts: the German National Cohort (NAKO, N=29,314, age range 19-74 years) and the UK Biobank (N=36,109, age range 40-69 years). Body composition subphenotypes, previously identified by k-means clustering, were evaluated using a rigorous statistical cluster validation framework with method-based and results-based approaches. In NAKO, cross-sectional associations between subphenotypes and estimated cardiovascular disease risk scores were examined using linear regression. In UK Biobank, longitudinal associations between subphenotypes and incident cardiometabolic outcomes, ascertained through hospital record linkage, were analysed using Cox regression. Findings All five body composition subphenotypes were robustly validated across both cohorts, and showed distinct fat distribution patterns and cardiometabolic risk profiles: I "lean", II "average adiposity", III "bone and muscle adiposity", IV "hepato-abdominal adiposity", and V "general and pancreatic adiposity". Subphenotypes I-III showed progressive adipose tissue remodelling patterns likely reflecting ageing trajectories. The "hepato-abdominal adiposity" subphenotype showed highest risk of incident diabetes, whereas the "general and pancreatic adiposity" subphenotype showed highest overall cardiovascular disease burden and metabolic impairment. Interpretation MRI-derived body composition subphenotypes represent distinct fat distribution patterns that reflect ageing- and disease-related processes, which supports the potential of body composition phenotyping for improved cardiometabolic risk stratification and targeted prevention.

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

CropTrack: A Tracking with Re-Identification Framework for Precision Agriculture

Authors:
Md Ahmed Al Muzaddid↗Jordan A. James↗William J. Beksi↗

Multiple-object tracking (MOT) in agricultural environments presents major challenges due to repetitive patterns, similar object appearances, sudden illumination changes, and frequent occlusions. Contemporary trackers in this domain rely on the motion of objects rather than appearance for association. Nevertheless, they struggle to maintain object identities when targets undergo frequent and strong occlusions. The high similarity of object appearances makes integrating appearance-based association nontrivial for agricultural scenarios. To solve this problem we propose CropTrack, a novel MOT framework based on the combination of appearance and motion information. CropTrack integrates a reranking-enhanced appearance association, a one-to-many association with appearance-based conflict resolution strategy, and an exponential moving average prototype feature bank to improve appearance-based association. Evaluated on publicly available agricultural MOT datasets, CropTrack demonstrates consistent identity preservation, outperforming traditional motion-based tracking methods. Compared to the state of the art, CropTrack achieves significant gains in association accuracy and identification precision scores with a lower number of identity switches.

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21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Defense effectiveness across architectural layers: a mechanistic evaluation of persistent memory attacks on stateful LLM agents

Authors:
Jun Wen Leong↗

arXiv:2605.08442v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Persistent memory attacks against LLM agents achieve high attack success rates against open-source models. In these attacks, malicious instructions injected via RAG-retrieved documents are stored in persistent memory and executed in later sessions. However, no systematic evaluation of defense effectiveness against this attack class exists. We evaluate six defenses across four architectural layers against delayed-trigger attacks on nine open-source models (5,040 runs, N=40 per condition). Four defenses fail at approximately baseline attack success rate: input-level filtering (Minimizer, Sanitizer) and retrieval-level filtering (RAG Sanitizer, RAG LLM Judge) achieve 88-89% ASR, statistically indistinguishable from the undefended baseline of 88.6%. Prompt Hardening partially fails at 77.8% ASR, with the reduction driven by two models at 0%: one genuine defense effect and one model-level refusal independent of the defense. The architectural explanation holds: input-level defenses cannot observe RAG-injected content, and retrieval-level classifiers are defeated by compliance-framed semantic masking. One defense, tool-gating at the memory layer (Memory Sandbox), reduces ASR to 0% for eight of nine models by removing the recall capability the attack requires. The exception inverts the defense entirely: a reasoning model that achieves 0% ASR under no defense via execution refusal inverts to 100% ASR under Memory Sandbox, because removing explicit recall forces the model onto the RAG pathway where its refusal mechanism does not activate. Memory Sandbox imposes zero utility cost in the absence of attack (BTCR = 100% across all conditions). These results provide the first systematic characterization of why each defense class fails against persistent memory attacks, enabling informed defense investment decisions.

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22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Vision-Reasoning-Guided Occlusion Removal from Light Fields

Authors:
Mohamed Youssef↗Oliver Bimber↗

Occlusion-robust scene recovery remains a major challenge in computational imaging, particularly in natural environments where dense foreground vegetation severely limits visibility. We propose a vision-reasoning-guided light field occlusion removal framework that combines the visibility recovery capability of light field integration (LFI) with the semantic reasoning capacity of vision-language models (VLMs). Multi-view observations are first integrated via LFI to suppress foreground occlusions and produce an initial visibility-enhanced representation. A VLM is then incorporated as a conditional semantic prior to restore degraded structures and recover fine details, guided by the observed measurements. To improve recovery consistency and reduce hallucination artifacts, we introduce a multi-sample fusion strategy that aggregates multiple generated hypotheses into a unified estimate. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, achieving the highest average SSIM across four synthetic light field benchmark scenes (4-Syn) and strong generalization across structured and unstructured acquisition settings. These results highlight the effectiveness of combining physical imaging constraints with vision-language reasoning for robust perception under severe occlusion, with applicability to search-and-rescue and exploratory robotic navigation.

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23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Beyond the Training Distribution: Evaluating Predictions Under Distribution Shift and Selection Bias

Authors:
Annie Ulichney↗Amanda Coston↗

arXiv:2606.14506v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding how a prediction model will perform in a new environment before deployment is essential to preventing harm when algorithms inform decision-making. Two common sources of model performance degradation are (i) covariate shift, where the target covariate distribution differs from the source, and (ii) selective labels, where the observability of outcomes depends on historical decisions. We study pre-deployment model evaluation under the joint presence of covariate shift and labeling of outcomes selectively based on observed features. In particular, we present a double machine learning procedure for estimating the target risk of an arbitrary black-box prediction model under a general loss function. We show identification of this estimand under standard assumptions and derive a bias-corrected estimator based on the influence function of the target risk. Finally, we evaluate our estimator through experiments using the eICU electronic health records database, showing that it tracks the true target risk more accurately than methods that address either selective labels or covariate shift alone, as well as baselines that combine standard plug-in approaches.

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24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

CKM-Driven Communication-Aware UAV Intelligent Trajectory Optimization for Urban Inspection

Authors:
Yang Xiaomeng↗Jia Ziye↗Zhu Qiuming↗Wu Qihui↗

arXiv:2606.24979v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly employed in urban inspection tasks, where reliable communication is critical but challenging due to the severe spatial channel heterogeneity. To address the issue, in this paper, we focus on the communication-aware path planning for multi-UAV tasks, and propose a channel knowledge map (CKM)-driven trajectory planning framework which integrates the channel modeling and trajectory decision-making. Specifically, we apply the diffusion model to construct a time-accumulated CKM and achieve the accurate perception with low flight overhead, which leverages the sparse observation data to reconstruct the high-fidelity global channel quality distribution. Based on the CKM, we propose a global-to-local graph attention network soft actor-critic algorithm. The graph attention network optimizes the complex combinatorial node ordering problem, generating an optimal and communication-aware sequence for the inspection targets. Subsequently, the soft actor-critic algorithm performs continuous action control to ensure the smoothness of the flight path and dynamically avoid communication attenuation areas. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method effectively guides UAVs through high-quality channel regions without dependence on real-time channel feedback, significantly improving both the trajectory efficiency and communication reliability.

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25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

UltraSketchLLM: Sub-1-Bit LLM Compression via Sketch and Hardware-Friendly Operators

Authors:
Sunan Zou↗Xueting Sun↗Ziyun Zhang↗Guojie Luo↗

arXiv:2506.17255v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) require larger GPU memory size these days, necessitating efficient and extreme weight compression methods. Existing compression methods are either theoretically limited by 1 bit per weight or face severe performance degradation and inefficiency. To deploy LLMs in resource-constrained scenarios, we introduce UltraSketchLLM, compressing LLMs with data sketch. It reduces peak GPU memory footprint with a high compression rate down to 0.5 bit per weight. Combined with hardware-friendly implementation, UltraSketchLLM keeps tolerable performance degradation and extremely low latency overhead with 14.9x speedup compared to naive sketch solution.

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