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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

(Non)-hyperuniformity of perturbed lattices

Authors:
David Dereudre↗Daniela Flimmel↗Martin Huesmann↗Thomas Lebl\'e↗

arXiv:2405.19881v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We ask whether a stationary lattice in dimension $d$ whose points are shifted by identically distributed but possibly dependent perturbations remains hyperuniform. When $d = 1$ or $2$, we show that it is the case when the perturbations have a finite $d$-moment, and that this condition is sharp. When $d \geq 3$, we construct arbitrarily small perturbations such that the resulting point process is not hyperuniform. As a side remark of independent interest, we exhibit hyperuniform processes with arbitrarily slow decay of their number variance.

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02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

FactoryLLM: A Safe and Open-Source AI Playground for Evaluating LLMs in Smart Factories

Authors:
Yash Pulse↗Yong-Bin Kang↗Abhik Banerjee↗Abdur Forkan↗Prem Prakash Jayaraman↗

arXiv:2606.14119v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fault diagnostics and recovery in smart factories is challenging because critical information is dispersed across manuals of multiple machines which are interconnected through the manufacturing process. Large Language Models (LLMs) can provide a promising approach. In this paper, we propose FactoryLLM, a safe and open-source AI playground designed for evaluating different LLM-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) models by analysing documents from multiple machines across the manufacturing process. FactoryLLM enables the user to configure the LLM, and assess performance when reasoning over multiple documents, through a dual evaluation setup using both RAGAS and NVIDIA's LLM-as-a-Judge metrics. FactoryLLM is safe because it allows users to run local or open-source LLMs without sharing sensitive industrial data, providing a controlled environment for experimentation. We demonstrate the efficacy of FactoryLLM through a case study which involves an Autonomous Intelligent Vehicle and its Mobile Planner software, evaluating three LLMs across 30 maintenance queries derived from approximately 600 pages of cross-machine documentation. The results suggest that FactoryLLM is effective in cross-machine document reasoning: every model achieved a groundedness score above 0.88. The full code and documentation for community to test FactoryLLM with their manufacturing specific scenarios are publicly available.

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

Your Privacy My Cloak: Backdoor Attacks on Differentially Private Federated Learning

Authors:
Xiaolin Li↗Ning Wang↗Ninghui Li↗Wenhai Sun↗

arXiv:2606.17035v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prior research suggests that differential privacy (DP) inherently enhances the robustness of federated learning (FL) against backdoor attacks. In this paper, we challenge this assumption. Through an empirical analysis of two baseline attack strategies, we uncover a fundamental tension in DP-FL: while bypassing DP allows state-of-the-art defenses to detect and filter malicious updates, complying with DP inadvertently masks their distinguishing statistical characteristics. Consequently, existing defenses become ineffective as DP reduces the raw backdoor signal. Building on this masking effect, we propose RING, a novel attack that explicitly exploits DP to conceal malicious contributions while maximizing attack impact. By collaboratively crafting adversarial perturbations, compromised clients reconstruct a strong backdoor signal during aggregation without triggering anomaly detection. RING operates as a perturbation layer that is agnostic to the underlying backdoor technique, making it broadly applicable and composable with existing attacks – a property that significantly amplifies the threat it poses to DP-FL. Extensive evaluations across four image and text datasets under non-iid distributions show that RING achieves an average attack success rate of 90.3% against six state-of-the-art defenses under a moderate privacy budget, an improvement of up to 26.08x over baseline strategies. Finally, we evaluate potential countermeasures and find that mitigating this threat incurs significant utility trade-offs, exposing a fundamental security gap in the deployment of differentially private FL.

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04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

A Guide to Estimating Conditional Average Treatment Effects in Competing Risks Settings

Authors:
Daniel Klippert↗Sarah Friedrich↗Markus Pauly↗

arXiv:2606.18281v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conditional average treatment effects (CATEs) are central to treatment decision-making in personalized medicine. In competing risks settings, estimating CATEs from survival data allows for patient-specific assessments of treatment effectiveness for a specific event of interest while properly accounting for alternative event types. This distinction is essential in the presence of comorbidities, where competing causes of death may otherwise confound the therapeutic benefit. Focusing on right-censored survival times with binary treatment, we examine CATEs defined as covariate-conditional differences in the absolute risk for the event of interest at a fixed time. To this end, we study meta-learners which adapt machine learning algorithms for CATE estimation in competing risks scenarios. We systematically compare six meta-learners, combining Cox regression or random survival forests for risk modeling with elastic net regression or random forests for direct CATE modeling. To provide practical guidance on model selection, we evaluate their performance in multiple simulation settings, that differ in hazard complexity, treatment heterogeneity, treatment assignment, event type distribution and censoring. To facilitate applied use, we provide the R package, crsurvlearners, which implements all considered approaches.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Can professional translators identify machine-generated text?

Authors:
Michael Farrell↗

This study investigates whether professional translators without prior specialized training can reliably identify short stories generated in Italian by artificial intelligence (AI). Sixty-nine translators took part in an in-person experiment, where they assessed three anonymized short stories - two written by ChatGPT-4o and one by a human author. For each story, participants rated the likelihood of AI authorship and provided justifications for their choices. While average results were inconclusive, a statistically significant subset (16.2%) successfully distinguished the synthetic texts from the human text, suggesting that their judgements were informed by analytical skill rather than chance. However, a nearly equal number misclassified the texts in the opposite direction, often relying on subjective impressions rather than objective markers, possibly reflecting a reader preference for AI-generated texts. Low burstiness and narrative contradiction emerged as the most reliable indicators of synthetic authorship, with unexpected calques, semantic loans and syntactic transfer from English also reported. In contrast, features such as grammatical accuracy and emotional tone frequently led to misclassification. These findings raise questions about the role and scope of synthetic-text editing in professional contexts.

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

Semantically-Aware Diver Activity Recognition Framework for Effective Underwater Multi-Human-Robot Collaboration

Authors:
Sadman Sakib Enan↗Junaed Sattar↗

Effective multi-human-robot collaboration is essential for expanding human-led operations in the challenging and high-risk underwater environment. For autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to become true teammates, they must be able to comprehend their surroundings and recognize a diver's activities to offer assistance and ensure safety. Towards this goal, we introduce DAR-Net, a novel transformer-based framework that analyzes complex underwater scenes to classify diver activities. Our contribution lies in a semantically guided learning formulation that couples transformer-based temporal reasoning with pixel-level scene supervision. This multi-loss training strategy explicitly aligns global activity recognition with local human-robot interaction semantics, which is particularly critical in low-visibility underwater conditions. To address the significant challenge of data scarcity in this domain, we present the first-ever Underwater Diver Activity (UDA) dataset, a foundational resource containing over 2,600 annotated images with pixel-level masks. Through rigorous experimental evaluations in a controlled environment, we demonstrate that DAR-Net achieves promising accuracy in recognizing six distinct diver activities, outperforming state-of-the-art models. While this dataset provides a crucial baseline, our work serves as a pioneering step, laying the groundwork for future research and facilitating the development of more intelligent, collaborative underwater robotic systems.

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

From Frames to Temporal Graphs: In-Context Egocentric Action Recognition with Vision-Language Models

Authors:
Bessie Dominguez-Dager↗Francisco Gomez-Donoso↗Miguel Cazorla↗Marc Pollefeys↗Daniel Barath↗Zuria Bauer↗

Action reasoning in egocentric video requires capturing fine-grained transitions of hand-object interactions, a task where general-purpose Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often struggle when operating directly on raw pixels. We propose to decouple visual perception from symbolic reasoning by converting videos into Temporal Action Graphs. In a multi-stage prompting pipeline, we first generate dense natural language narratives over short temporal windows as a semantic bottleneck, then formalize them into structured, open-vocabulary graph representations. On the EGTEA and Epic-Kitchens-100 datasets, the symbolic representation unlocks efficient in-context learning: few-shot graph demonstrations yield substantial accuracy gains over zero-shot frame and graph-based inference alike. Even in the zero-shot setting, graph-based reasoning remains competitive with pixel-based inference despite potential pretraining contamination favoring the latter. Across 11 open-weight VLMs from 6 model families ranging from 2B to 235B parameters, our findings indicate that current VLMs are more effective as symbolic reasoners than as direct visual observers. By projecting video into the language domain, we provide a scalable, fine-tuning-free alternative to end-to-end approaches that better leverages these models' latent reasoning strengths. The code will be made public.

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08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Adapting Reinforcement Learning with Chain-of-Thought Supervision for Explainable Detection of Hateful and Propagandistic Memes

Authors:
Mohamed Bayan Kmainasi↗Mucahid Kutlu↗Ali Ezzat Shahroor↗Abul Hasnat↗Firoj Alam↗

Hateful and propagandistic memes exploit the interplay between images and text to convey harmful intent that neither modality reveals alone. Although thinking-based multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have advanced vision-language understanding, their application to meme content moderation remains underexplored. We propose a reinforcement learning-based post-training method that improves classification performance and reference-based explanation quality in thinking-based MLLMs via task-specific rewards and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Concretely, we (i) conduct a systematic empirical study of off-the-shelf MLLMs for hateful and propagandistic meme understanding across English and Arabic benchmarks, (ii) extend existing meme datasets with weakly supervised chain-of-thought (CoT) rationales via distillation and multi-LLM fine-grained propaganda annotations, (iii) introduce a GRPO-based objective with thinking-length regularization that jointly optimizes classification accuracy and explanation quality, and (iv) investigate self-supervised GRPO on unlabeled memes using consensus-based pseudo-labels. Experiments on the Hateful Memes and ArMeme benchmarks show that our approach improves over previously reported results on FHM accuracy (up to +2.1%, from 79.9% to 82.0%) and on ArMeme macro-F1 (up to +7.6 points, from 0.536 to 0.612 with explanations; +6.1 compared to the original ArMeme benchmark), while also generating natural-language explanations. On ArMeme, sequence-classification baselines remain stronger in terms of raw accuracy, whereas our approach provides more balanced per-class performance along with explanations. We publicly release our code, data extensions, and evaluation resources.

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

On Local Population-Risk Certificates

Authors:
Mingzhi Song↗

arXiv:2606.19147v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper develops local certificates for population-risk increments around a current model. For a local candidate set \(\mathcal D\), the certificate is a two-sided confidence band for \(P({\ell_{\theta+v}-\ell_\theta})\) over \(v\in\mathcal D\). As an application, the upper endpoint of this band yields a risk-controlled update rule: an update is accepted only when its certified upper endpoint is nonpositive; otherwise the current model is retained.

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

Sustainable Materials Discovery in the Era of Artificial Intelligence

Authors:
Sajid Mannan↗Rupert J. Myers↗Rohit Batra↗Rocio Mercado↗Lothar Wondraczek↗N. M. Anoop Krishnan↗

arXiv:2601.21527v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed materials discovery, enabling rapid exploration of chemical space through generative models and surrogate screening. Yet current generative AI models for materials discovery, which now drive exploration of vast chemical and structural spaces, optimize candidates exclusively for structural stability and functional properties, with no integration of environmental assessment at any stage of the design loop. Prospective and ex-ante life cycle assessment methods exist and have been applied to emerging technologies, but they operate as standalone downstream analyses, not as active constraints within generative or active-learning pipelines. The result is that environmental feedback, even when produced, arrives after design decisions have been made rather than informing them. The disconnect between atomic-scale design and lifecycle assessment (LCA) reflects fundamental challenges: (i) data scarcity across heterogeneous sources, (ii) scale gaps from atoms to industrial systems, (iii) uncertainty in synthesis pathways, and (iv) the absence of frameworks that co-optimize performance with environmental impact. In this Perspective, we propose integrating upstream ML-assisted materials discovery with downstream LCA into the ML-LCA framework, comprising five components: information extraction for building materials-environment knowledge bases, harmonized databases linking properties to sustainability metrics, multi-scale models bridging atomic properties to lifecycle impacts, ensemble prediction of manufacturing pathways with uncertainty quantification, and uncertainty-aware optimization enabling simultaneous performance-sustainability navigation. Case studies spanning polymers, glass, photoresists, and cement demonstrate both necessity and feasibility while identifying material-specific integration challenges.

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11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Climatic Drivers of Malaria risk in Children Under Five: A Large-Scale Analysis of individual-level data for 350,000 children in 26 Sub-Saharan African Countries

Authors:
Martellini O Nocentini↗Pandey↗Olivetti↗Defilippo↗Wybrant↗Worou↗Mazzoleni↗Quiros-Roldan↗Byakika↗Torti↗Magnusson↗Gasparrini↗…

Background Malaria risk is influenced by climatic conditions, and children under five are particularly vulnerable due to their limited acquired immunity. We investigate the association between climatic factors and malaria risk in 350,000 children aged 5-59 months in sub-Saharan Africa over 18 years. Methods We included children aged 5-59 months with malaria tests from Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) in 26 sub-Saharan African countries between 2006 and 2023. We linked these data to high-resolution climate exposures: temperature, precipitation, soil moisture, actual evapotranspiration and specific humidity. We fitted a mixed-effect logistic regression model incorporating Distributed Lag Non-linear Models (DLNM) over 1-6 month lag window for each exposure, controlling for seasonality and long-term trends. We examined effect modification by maternal education, household wealth, residential type, water source, sanitation facility, child age and sex, use of insecticide-treated bed nets (ITNs), and the age of the household head. Results Malaria prevalence was 19.5%. Malaria risk was highest at 24 degrees (OR: 1.45, 95% CI: [1.36, 1.54]), followed by a decline at higher temperatures. This elevated risk was mainly driven by short-term exposures (1-2 months). Precipitation increased risk up to 59 ~ 120 mm (1.10, [1.07, 1.12]), after which heavier rainfall reduced risk, particularly at short- to medium-term lags (1-4 months). Soil moisture was associated with increasing risk up to ~80 mm (1.11, [1.08, 1.14]), with a plateau at higher levels. Evapotranspiration showed a strong, near-linear positive association with malaria risk. Higher specific humidity levels (>14 g/kg) presented a lower risk, reaching a 45% reduction at 17 g/kg (0.55, [0.49, 0.61]), with the strongest protective effects at short-term lags (1-2 months). Elevated malaria risk at low and moderate average temperatures was particularly evident among children who did not sleep under an ITN net. Conclusion Malaria risk in children under five is strongly shaped by climatic factors, with complex and delayed associations. The findings provide evidence to guide targeted interventions and early-warning strategies for vulnerable populations.

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

Pixel-Level Residual Diffusion Transformer: Scalable 3D CT Volume Generation

Authors:
Zhenkai Zhang↗Markus Hiller↗Krista A. Ehinger↗Tom Drummond↗

Generating high-resolution 3D CT volumes with fine details remains challenging due to substantial computational demands and optimization difficulties inherent to existing generative models. In this paper, we propose the Pixel-Level Residual Diffusion Transformer (PRDiT), a scalable generative framework that synthesizes high-quality 3D medical volumes directly at voxel-level. PRDiT introduces a two-stage training architecture comprising 1) a local denoiser in the form of an MLP-based blind estimator operating on overlapping 3D patches to separate low-frequency structures efficiently, and 2) a global residual diffusion transformer employing memory-efficient attention to model and refine high-frequency residuals across entire volumes. This coarse-to-fine modeling strategy simplifies optimization, enhances training stability, and effectively preserves subtle structures without the limitations of an autoencoder bottleneck. Extensive experiments conducted on the LIDC-IDRI and RAD-ChestCT datasets demonstrate that PRDiT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models, such as HA-GAN, 3D LDM and WDM-3D, achieving significantly lower 3D FID, MMD and Wasserstein distance scores.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Tac-DINO: Learning Vision-Tactile Features with Patch Alignment

Authors:
Hong Li↗Yankang Dong↗Yue Xu↗Yihan Tang↗Mingzhu Li↗Jiamin Qiu↗Qihang Yao↗Xing Zhu↗Yujun Shen↗Nan Xue↗Yong-Lu Li↗

Touch is the primary medium through which humans interact with the environment. Currently, tactile learning mainly focuses on image-level pretraining or alignment. However, tactile signals correspond to local object contact, while research into scale alignment and holographic matching remains limited and proper datasets and benchmarks also lack. To bridge this gap, we first construct a data collection system to acquire a large-scale tactile dataset, with over 20 K tactile contacts from 505 real-world objects. Building on this dataset, we design a Vis-Tac Holographic Matching Benchmark to evaluate vision-tactile local-to-global alignment ability. Then we propose Vision-Tactile Patch Alignment (VTPA) methods for vision-tactile representation learning. Experiments demonstrate that these exceed the performance of methods without alignment and align with whole-object images.

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14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Theory of uncertain probability: can we derive the probability density function of uncertain random experiments with continuously changing conditions?

Authors:
Xiaolin Gong↗

arXiv:2606.20169v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper aims to explore the formation mechanism of probability distribution in situations where the differences among random experiments are distinguishable, and these differences continue to evolve along with the dynamic changes in conditions and their mechanisms of action. To this end, we are motivated to devise a new theoretical system – theory of uncertain probability (TUP) with Kolmogorov's system and nonlinear theories as special cases. TUP develops a novel model that integrates probability and uncertainty as well as the known and unknown to more accurately depict numerous typical random phenomena under more realistic assumptions, and thus provides appropriate tools for greater variety of real needs. It also allows for pioneering interpretation of the causal mechanisms underlying many important distributional characteristics and incorporation of pathwise property to distribution model.

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

Compositional Skill Routing for LLM Agents: Decompose, Retrieve, and Compose

Authors:
Xueping Gao↗

LLM agents increasingly rely on external skills – reusable tool specifications – but real-world tasks often require composing multiple skills, not just selecting one. We formalize this as the Compositional Skill Routing problem: given a complex user query and a large skill library, decompose the query into atomic sub-tasks, retrieve the appropriate skill for each sub-task, and compose an executable plan. We present SkillWeaver, a decompose-retrieve-compose framework combining an LLM task decomposer, a bi-encoder skill retriever with FAISS indexing, and a dependency-aware DAG planner. To support evaluation, we introduce CompSkillBench, a benchmark of 300 compositional queries over 2,209 real MCP server skills spanning 24 functional categories, sourced from the public MCP ecosystem. Our experiments reveal that task decomposition quality is the primary bottleneck: standard LLM decomposition reaches only 34.2% category recall at the step level. To address this, we propose Iterative Skill-Aware Decomposition (SAD), a retrieval-augmented feedback loop that iteratively aligns decomposition with available skills. SAD improves decomposition accuracy from 51.0% to 67.7% (+32.7%, Wilcoxon p < 10^-6) in a single iteration; DA-conditioned analysis confirms that correct granularity is the prerequisite for effective retrieval (CatR@1 rises from 34% to 41% when DA=1). SkillWeaver reduces context window consumption by over 99%, and transfer experiments confirm generalization (+35.6% relative DA gain even when target categories are absent from the retrieval pool).

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

On-Demand Coherent Mapping of Telecom Optical States onto Erbium Hyperfine Spins

Authors:
Zongfeng Li↗Mahdi Hosseini↗

arXiv:2606.15009v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Optical quantum memories operating directly at telecom wavelengths are a key enabling technology for long-distance quantum networks, yet on-demand storage onto long-lived ground-state spins in this spectral region has remained elusive due to the challenge of coherently transferring optical excitations to hyperfine spin states. Here we demonstrate spin-wave storage in $^{167}$Er$^{3+}$:Y$_2$SiO$_5$ at 0.8 K and 1.1 T, establishing the core operational primitive required for on-demand telecom quantum memories. Using classical optical control pulses, we coherently transfer collective optical excitations to erbium hyperfine states with transfer efficiency exceeding 12%, enabling on-demand retrieval. We measure a hyperfine population lifetime of 25 s and demonstrate spin-wave storage for up to 25 $\mu$s. By identifying hyperfine inhomogeneous broadening as the dominant present limitation, our measurements define a clear pathway toward second-scale storage through improved spectral tailoring and dynamical decoupling. The results highlight the application of erbium-based solid-state memories for scalable fiber-compatible quantum repeater architectures.

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

Imperfect Visual Verification for Code Edition : A Case Study on TikZ

Authors:
Charly Reux↗Mathieu Acher↗Djamel Eddine Khelladi↗Cl\'ement Quinton↗Olivier Barais↗

arXiv:2606.15693v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLMs have significantly advanced code generation, enabling the synthesis of functional programs. While recent systems achieve strong performance on many coding benchmarks, tasks involving programs such as TikZ that generate visual artifacts remain challenging, in particular on visual code customization. Unlike generation from scratch, customization requires localized, semantics-preserving edits: the model must locate relevant code, modify it according to the instruction, and preserve the remaining structure and rendering. Approaches based on post-hoc iterative refinement/correction where a verifier provides feedback to guide corrections, have shown promise. However, in the case of programs with a visual outcome such as in TikZ, where correctness is harder or likely impossible to formalize and evaluate automatically, deterministic verifiers do not exist. Hence, developers can only rely on imperfect verifiers. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study to answer:to what extent can iterative refinement remain effective when the verifier itself is unreliable?} We use TikZ as a focused case study that isolates the core difficulties of the problem (weak code structure, fine-grained visual semantics, and difficult feature localization) in a controlled and challenging setting. We define visual code customization as an iterative editing problem with an imperfect oracle, and introduce a framework for analyzing such iterative refinements. We conduct a large-scale study and evaluate multiple LLM-based and tool-augmented visual verifiers within iterative refinement pipelines, and perform extensive manual annotation of refinement trajectories to assess verifier behavior and feedback quality. Our findings show that even imperfect verifiers can determine with moderate accuracy whether visual instructions are applied to code, achieving F1-scores up to 0.815. Feedback improves iterative refinement, especially for weaker models, adding 11–20 perfect customizations for Qwen3-vl-30b-a3b-Instruct, while stronger models like Gemini-3 gain fewer improvements (+5) but benefit more from accurate verification that prevents premature acceptance. Feedback is effective only when it precisely identifies image issues, provides actionable guidance, addresses all relevant problems, and remains grounded in the original instruction.

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18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Observation of Non-Gaussian Magnon Dynamics in a Two-Dimensional Long-Range XY Model

Authors:
S. -A. Guo↗J. -Y. Tan↗J. Ye↗Y. Jiang↗L. Zhang↗Y. -X. Chen↗H. -J. Chen↗H. -Y. Hu↗W. -X. Guo↗B. -X. Qi↗L. He↗Z. -C. Zhou↗…

arXiv:2606.13499v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Non-Gaussian evolution of high-order spin correlations characterizes important properties of quantum many-body systems. In practice, decoherence, statistical fluctuation and miscalibration of experimental parameters all hinder the witness of non-Gaussian dynamics. Here we demonstrate the crossover between Gaussian and non-Gaussian dynamics on a two-dimensional XY model with long-range and spatially structured interaction using a trapped ion quantum simulator. We prepare different initial densities of magnon excitations and verify the dynamics of single-spin observables for the engineered Hamiltonian. Then we compare the high-order spin correlations with the mean-field solution and the Holstein-Primakoff approximation, and demonstrate the non-Gaussian behavior in a way independent of the calibration errors. Our work provides a verifiable path from classically simulatable dynamics to regimes where quantum advantage may emerge.

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

Knowledge-Based Zero-Replay Debugging of Multi-Agent LLM Traces

Authors:
Dong Ho Kang↗Hyeonjeong Cha↗Daein Weon↗

arXiv:2606.14805v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reliable operation of multi-agent large language model (LLM) systems depends on debugging long execution traces, where the few causally decisive events are buried in unstructured logs of messages, routes, memory writes, and tool calls. The standard tool is counterfactual replay (rewind, edit, and re-run the trajectory to measure each event's effect), but its cost grows linearly with the number of candidate events, making exhaustive replay infeasible at scale. We frame trace debugging as a knowledge-based decision-support problem. Each trace is compiled into a structured event knowledge graph over routing, memory, tool-use, uncertainty, and latent evidence, and a calibrated predictor decides where a scarce replay budget should be spent. We do not propose a new replay oracle; we propose a method to predict its results without paying the replay cost. We formulate zero-replay counterfactual-effect prediction: given a trace under a fixed budget, predict which events the oracle would mark high-effect before any replay is performed. BranchPoint-Latent is a lightweight predictor over observable, structural, uncertainty, and latent features of the knowledge graph. Calibrated against a deterministic replay oracle across 37 trace families, a single learning-to-rank gradient-boosted predictor raises per-trace localization (Branch Recall@5) from 0.73 to 0.93 on held-out families at zero oracle-replay cost. Rather than claiming universal dominance, we characterize when cheap graph centrality suffices and when learned evidence is necessary. The result is an auditable, cost-efficient decision-support system for AI-reliability debugging, positioned explicitly on the cost-accuracy frontier with reproducible artifacts.

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20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Designing AI-Supported Focus Groups: A Role x Modality Playbook

Authors:
Zhiqing Wang↗Steven Dow↗

arXiv:2606.11835v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Collecting participants' lived experiences is central to design research. Focus groups are uniquely valuable because participants not only share individual accounts but also respond to one another, surfacing comparison, disagreement, and collective sensemaking. However, focus groups are resource-intensive and highly sensitive to facilitation: moderators must probe for specificity, balance participation, manage topic flow, and sustain psychological safety, and subtle facilitation choices can shape what becomes salient. Recent HCI work and commercial meeting tools show that generative AI can scaffold live conversation through prompting, turn regulation, thematic mapping, and real-time summarization. Yet UXR teams lack a clear map of what these capabilities mean in focus groups and what methodological risks they introduce. We synthesize AI supports for live conversation and translate them into a focus-group-specific playbook organized by AI role (tool, co-host, host) and modality (text, voice, embodied).We synthesize prior work on AI-supported live conversation and propose a focus-group-specific playbook of AI supports organized by role (tool, co-host, host) and modality (text, voice, embodied). We characterize interactional trade-offs and identify open questions for evaluating AI-supported focus groups as methodological configurations.

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21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Wildfire pollution exposure during childhood adversely affects cognitive and neural development

Authors:
Judd↗kievit↗

Air pollution has well-documented negative cardiovascular and respiratory consequences. However, the impact of particulate matter pollution (PM2.5) on brain development is unclear. Animal studies suggest that exposure to early-life PM2.5 can cause adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes, but in vivo human work has been hampered by cross-sectional designs and heavily confounded PM2.5 exposure measures. Here we use an innovative natural experimental design to isolate the effects of wildfire pollution on neurocognitive development in a large cohort of children (N>9000, 4 waves, age 9-16). Doing so, we find that greater wildfire PM2.5 exposure is robustly associated with slower brain development and shallower cognitive improvement across early adolescence. Our study underscores the urgent public health concern that wildfire PM2.5 poses for childhood development.

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

Representing Piecewise-Linear Functions by Functions with Minimal Arity

Authors:
Christoph Koutschan↗Anton Ponomarchuk↗Josef Schicho↗

arXiv:2406.02421v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Any continuous piecewise-linear function $F\colon \mathbb{R}^{n}\to \mathbb{R}$ can be represented as a linear combination of $\max$ functions of at most $n+1$ affine-linear functions. In our previous paper [``Representing piecewise linear functions by functions with small arity'', AAECC, 2023], we showed that this upper bound of $n+1$ arguments is tight. In the present paper, we extend this result by establishing a correspondence between the function $F$ and the minimal number of arguments that are needed in any such decomposition. We show that the tessellation of the input space $\mathbb{R}^{n}$ induced by the function $F$ has a direct connection to the number of arguments in the $\max$ functions.

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23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Direct Advantage Estimation for Scalable and Sample-efficient Deep Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Hsiao-Ru Pan↗Bernhard Sch\"olkopf↗

arXiv:2606.20411v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Direct Advantage Estimation (DAE) has been shown to improve the sample efficiency of deep reinforcement learning algorithms. However, its reliance on full environment observability limits its applicability in realistic settings, and its requirement to model transition probabilities incurs substantial computational overhead for high-dimensional observations. In the present work, we address both limitations. First, we extend the theoretical framework of DAE to partially observable domains with minimal modifications. Second, we reduce its computational complexity by introducing discrete latent dynamics models that efficiently approximate transition probabilities. We evaluate our approach on the Arcade Learning Environment and find that DAE scales effectively with function approximator capacity while retaining high sample efficiency.

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24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Auditing Demographic Bias in Facial Landmark Detection for Fair Human-Robot Interaction

Authors:
Pablo Parte↗Roberto Valle↗Jos\'e M. Buenaposada↗Luis Baumela↗

Fairness in human-robot interaction critically depends on the reliability of the perceptual models that enable robots to interpret human behavior. While demographic biases have been widely studied in high-level facial analysis tasks, their presence in facial landmark detection remains unexplored. In this paper, we conduct a systematic audit of demographic bias in this task, analyzing the age, gender, and race biases. To this end, we introduce a controlled statistical methodology to disentangle demographic effects from confounding visual factors. Our analysis demonstrates that visual confounders, particularly head pose and face resolution, heavily outweigh the impact of demographic attributes. Notably, after accounting for these confounders, performance disparities across gender and race vanish. However, we identify a statistically significant age-related bias, with higher localization errors for older individuals. This shows that fairness issues can emerge even in low-level vision components and can propagate through the HRI pipeline. We argue that auditing and correcting such biases is a necessary step toward trustworthy and equitable robot perception systems.

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25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Within-host pathogen population diversity predicts treatment response in tuberculosis

Authors:
Kulkarni↗Marin↗Mann↗Rawoot↗Goodwin↗Cesare↗Warren↗Jacobson↗Farhat↗

Background: Tuberculosis (TB) treatment outcomes remain suboptimal, and standard clinical diagnostics cannot reliably identify patients at high risk of treatment failure or relapse at the time of diagnosis. While within-host Mycobacterium tuberculosis genetic diversity is hypothesized to reflect the viable bacterial burden and adaptive capacity of the infection, its clinical prognostic value remains unknown. Methods: We conducted a prospective cohort study of 364 patients with newly diagnosed, rifampicin-susceptible pulmonary TB in South Africa. Patients received standard 6-month therapy and were monitored for up to two years to ascertain composite unfavorable outcomes (treatment failure, death, or relapse). To accurately detect low-frequency (unfixed) genetic variants and eliminate reference bias artifacts, we mapped medium to high depth short-read sequences against matched, patient-specific long-read assemblies. The association between baseline pathogen genetic diversity and clinical outcomes was evaluated using multivariable Cox proportional-hazards models. Results: After bioinformatic filtering, true unfixed variants were relatively rare but significantly enriched in genes mediating pathogen adaptation and drug tolerance, including transporter proteins and two-component regulatory systems. Within-host bacterial genetic diversity (i.e., the total number of unfixed variants) ranged from 0-20, with a median of 1 per patient. In survival analysis adjusting for known clinical risk factors–including HIV status, prior TB, baseline smear positivity, and radiographic lung involvement–baseline within-host genetic diversity emerged as a strong, independent predictor of unfavorable treatment outcomes. For patients with greater than 3 unfixed variants at diagnosis, each increase of 5 unfixed variants was associated with more than double the risk of a composite unfavorable outcome (adjusted Hazard Ratio, 2.36; 95% CI, 1.27 to 4.39; p=0.007). Conclusions: Baseline within-host pathogen genetic diversity is an independent predictor of unfavorable TB treatment outcomes. As sequencing becomes increasingly integrated into routine diagnostics, quantifying unfixed variants is an accessible approach that promises to risk-stratify patients and guide the duration of individualized regimens.

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