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01.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-17

Why large-scale randomized trials of live-attenuated shingles vaccination for dementia prevention are urgently needed

Authors:
Pascal Geldsetzer↗

In my view, we have never had as robust a body of evidence from observational data on an intervention for dementia as we do for live-attenuated shingles vaccination. Both a recent US National Institutes of Health expert workshop and an international expert consensus on Alzheimer’s disease drug repurposing identified large-scale randomized trials of shingles vaccination for dementia prevention as the crucial next step for the field.

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02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

MedRLM: Recursive Multimodal Health Intelligence for Long-Context Clinical Reasoning, Sensor-Guided Screening, Evidence-Grounded Decision Support, and Community-to-Tertiary Referral Optimization

Authors:
Aueaphum Aueawatthanaphisut↗

Real-world clinical decision support requires reasoning over heterogeneous and longitudinal patient information rather than answering isolated medical questions. However, current medical large language models and retrieval-augmented generation systems often rely on single-step prompting or retrieval, which can be fragile when clinical evidence is distributed across long electronic health records, medical images, sensor streams, guidelines, and referral constraints. This paper proposes MedRLM, a Recursive Multimodal Health Intelligence framework for long-context clinical reasoning, sensor-guided screening, and community-to-tertiary referral support. Instead of compressing all patient information into one prompt, MedRLM treats the patient case as an external clinical environment that can be recursively inspected, decomposed, retrieved, verified, and synthesized. The framework coordinates specialized agents for clinical text, longitudinal EHR, medical imaging, physiological sensor signals, guideline retrieval, uncertainty auditing, and referral planning. It further introduces a Clinical Evidence Graph Memory to connect patient-specific observations with retrieved evidence, standardized definitions, sensor-derived biomarkers, and referral criteria. A sensor-guided recursive triggering mechanism activates deeper reasoning when abnormal physiological or behavioral patterns are detected, while uncertainty-gated refinement supports clinician review for high-risk or low-confidence cases. We also outline a real-data evaluation design using public and credentialed clinical datasets spanning EHR, radiology, ECG, ICU time series, and referral-proxy outcomes. MedRLM aims to move medical AI from static question answering toward auditable, multimodal, and workflow-aware clinical decision support.

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

SorryDB: Can AI Provers Complete Real-World Lean Theorems?

Authors:
Austin Letson↗Leopoldo Sarra↗Auguste Poiroux↗Oliver Dressler↗Paul Lezeau↗Dhyan Aranha↗Frederick Pu↗Aaron Hill↗Miguel Corredera Hidalgo↗Julian Berman↗George Tsoukalas↗Lenny Taelman↗…

arXiv:2603.02668v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present SorryDB, a dynamically-updating benchmark of open Lean tasks drawn from 78 real world formalization projects on GitHub. Unlike existing static benchmarks, often composed of competition problems, hillclimbing the SorryDB benchmark will yield tools that are aligned to the community needs, more usable by mathematicians, and more capable of understanding complex dependencies. Moreover, by providing a continuously updated stream of tasks, SorryDB mitigates test-set contamination and offers a robust metric for an agent's ability to contribute to novel formal mathematics projects. We evaluate a collection of approaches, including generalist large language models, agentic approaches, and specialized symbolic provers, over a selected snapshot of 1000 tasks from SorryDB. We show that current approaches are complementary: even though an agentic approach based on Gemini Flash is the most performant, it is not strictly better than other off-the-shelf large-language models, specialized provers, or even a curated list of Lean tactics.

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

A Multi-Level Architecture for Reusable Materials Ontologies – The OntoCrafter Ceramics Ontology (OCO) as Reference Implementation

Authors:
Thomas Pannek↗Wolfgang Grond↗

arXiv:2606.14814v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Materials Science and Engineering ontology landscape is fragmented along multiple axes simultaneously. Horizontally: a recent survey identified 94 ontologies of which over 40 are structurally incompatible; each new application domain – ceramics, polymers, batteries, smart materials – typically restarts ontology design from scratch. Vertically: EU regulation (CSRD, CSDDD, PPWR, CBAM, R2R, AI Act, ESPR) forces material, manufacturing, supply-chain, and lifecycle data into integrated digital product passports, leaving ontologies that only address horizontal fragmentation incomplete for any contemporary consumer. And mechanistically: a vocabulary that records that BNT-BT has $d_{33} \approx 580$ pC/N stores a fact but cannot surface why – Bi-6s$^2$ lone-pair stereo-activity, anomalous Born effective charges, soft modes, defect chemistry – without a systematic explanation skeleton. We propose a multi-level modular architecture with two independent classification axes – level of abstraction (L0 bridges, L1 material-agnostic laboratory-notebook, L2 material-class-specific, L3 categorical reasoning) and consumer audience (material vs. compliance) – in which the material-specific level is internally organised by a seven-tier mechanistic-explanation skeleton (Symmetry, Energy/DFT, Thermo/CALPHAD, Kinetics, Microstructure, Defect chemistry, Bonding) applicable to any crystalline ionic oxide. The level-and-audience modularity dissolves the horizontal fragmentation, the compliance audience absorbs the vertical regulation pressure, and the seven-tier organisation of Level 2 delivers the mechanistic explanation depth. We instantiate the architecture as the OntoCrafter Ceramics Ontology (OCO v0.94): 5,196 classes across 44 modules; 167,348 OWL axioms (40,454 logical); 1,674 properties; 829 cross-ontology bridge mappings; 1,172 SHACL shapes; 163 published competency questions.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

A2SG:Adaptive and Asymmetric Surrogate Gradients for Training Deep Spiking Neural Networks

Authors:
Yechan Kang↗Yongjin Kweon↗Mingyeong Seo↗Sohee Park↗Yeonguk Jeon↗Jongkil Park↗Hyun Jae Jang↗Jaewook Kim↗YeonJoo Jeong↗Suyoun Lee↗Seongsik Park↗

Training deep spiking neural networks (SNNs) remains challenging due to sharp loss landscapes and temporal inconsistency caused by surrogate gradients. To address these challenges, we propose a unified framework: adaptive and asymmetric surrogate gradients A2SG. The adaptive gradients adjust an effective window for spatio-temporal adaptation, reducing spatial gradient variation and maintaining directional consistency of gradients over time. The asymmetric gradients reflect neuronal dynamics by assigning larger gradients to neurons with higher membrane potentials, and we prove that they yield lower variation than symmetric surrogates. Our analysis further establishes a direct connection between local gradient variation and the curvature of the loss landscape, providing a principled explanation for how A2SG promotes convergence to flatter minima and improves generalization. We conduct extensive experiments on diverse models, including CNN-based and Transformer-based SNNs, across various tasks such as image classification using both static and neuromorphic datasets, as well as segmentation. The results demonstrate that A2SG consistently improves accuracy and energy efficiency, establishing it as a general and reliable solution for training deep SNNs. Our code is available at https://github.com/KIST-NCL/A2SG.git.

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

LoComposition: Terrain-Adaptive Energy-Efficient Quadruped Locomotion without Gait Priors

Authors:
Loukas Kordos↗Leonard T. Franz↗Simon Rappenecker↗Oliver Hausdoerfer↗Angela P. Schoellig↗Pavel Kolev↗Georg Martius↗

arXiv:2606.15896v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning-based quadrupedal locomotion typically relies on complex reward formulations that entangle task specification, operational limits, gait preference, and terrain adaptation within a single optimization objective. We instead treat these functions through distinct mechanisms: rewards for task specification, constraints for operational limits, energy minimization for gait preference, and exteroceptive perception for adapting energy use to terrain difficulty. We show that these components jointly enable efficient, terrain-adaptive locomotion, and that removing each component exposes a distinct failure mode. Our formulation removes explicit gait priors (including air-time, contact-count, and foot-clearance targets) in favor of emergent behavior. Compared to a conventional complex-reward baseline, our formulation achieves comparable terrain traversal while reducing cost of transport by 56% and operational-limit violations by 96%. The resulting policies transfer zero-shot to a physical Unitree Go2 using LiDAR-based elevation mapping. Project website with videos: https://tinyurl.com/locomposition.

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

Learning to Decide with AI Assistance under Human-Alignment

Authors:
Nina Corvelo Benz↗Eleni Straitouri↗Manuel Gomez-Rodriguez↗

arXiv:2605.12646v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: It is widely agreed that when AI models assist decision-makers in high-stakes domains by predicting an outcome of interest, they should communicate the confidence of their predictions. However, empirical evidence suggests that decision-makers often struggle to determine when to trust a prediction based solely on this communicated confidence. In this context, recent theoretical and empirical work suggests a positive correlation between the utility of AI-assisted decision-making and the degree of alignment between the AI confidence and the decision-makers' confidence in their own predictions. Crucially, these findings do not yet elucidate the extent to which this alignment influences the complexity of learning to make optimal decisions through repeated interactions. In this paper, we address this question in the canonical case of binary predictions and binary decisions. We first show that this problem is equivalent to a two-armed online contextual learning problem with full feedback, and establish a lower bound of $\Omega (\sqrt{|H| \cdot |B| \cdot T} )$ on the expected regret any learner can attain, where $H$ and $B$ denote the sets of human and AI confidence values. We then demonstrate that, under perfect alignment between AI and human confidence, a learner can attain an expected regret of $O(\sqrt{|H| \cdot T\log T})$ and, when $\sqrt{|H|} = O(\log T)$ and $B$ is countable, a non-trivial generalization of the Dvoretzky-Kiefer-Wolfowitz inequality improves the regret bound to $O(\sqrt{T\log T})$. Taken together, these results reveal that alignment can reduce the complexity of learning to make decisions with AI assistance. Experiments on real data from two different human-subject studies where participants solve simple decision-making tasks assisted by AI models show that our theoretical results are robust to violations of perfect alignment.

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

Order Is Not Control

Authors:
Gareth Seneque↗Lap-Hang Ho↗Nafise Erfanian Saeedi↗Jeffrey Molendijk↗Tim Elson↗

AI alignment, interpretability, steering, and neural perturbation studies identify order-inducing objects. We argue that order is not control. Control requires a receiver-gated response law: a denominator-indexed operator mapping material state, action/drive, bath, and receiver state to response displacement, sinks, effort, and basin projection. We identify it across biological, LLM, adapter, and stochastic-operator panels. The laws are local: an intervention can be admitted, saturated, sign-changing, leaky, or overdriven depending on medium, bath, receiver state, action port, and comparator. Control is assigned when finite effort moves a target or outcome-readout class under the same denominator while damage, null/evasive, invalid format, overdrive, and unnecessary effort stay bounded. Mouse ALM, C. elegans, and zebrafish panels provide physical response-operator evidence while excluding coordinate identity and controller conclusions. LLM panels show generated-output response laws: across four material conditions, response vectors are predictable at 72.8-73.7% component-sign accuracy, rising to 84.3-84.8% on nonzero components; held-out observers predict system-effect and target/oracle families at 93.6% and 91.7% accuracy. Constitution-conditioned adapters reshape susceptibility as prepared media, and stochastic-operator panels separate measured opportunity from deployable action policies. This gives a driven-dissipative response-system account at the mesoscopic control level: drives act through prepared media, baths, and receivers, producing admitted movement, impedance, sinks, or overdrive. The evidence supports local admitted control and measurable stochastic response operators, while leaving deployable pre-generation control, hidden/logit causal sufficiency, biological-to-LLM coordinate identity, and literal thermodynamic quantities outside scope.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

QualiaNet: An Experience-Before-Inference Network

Authors:
Paul Linton↗

Human 3D vision involves two distinct stages: an Experience Module, where stereo depth is extracted relative to fixation, and an Inference Module, where this experience is interpreted to estimate 3D scene properties. Paradoxically, although stereo vision does not provide us with absolute distance information, it nonetheless affects our inferences about distance. We propose the Inference Module exploits a natural scene statistic: near scenes produce vivid disparity gradients, while far scenes appear comparatively flat. QualiaNet implements this two-stage architecture computationally: disparity maps simulating human stereo experience are passed to a CNN trained to estimate distance. The network can recover distance from disparity gradients alone, validating this approach.

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10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Through the PRISM: Preference Representation in Intermediate States of Video Diffusion Models

Authors:
Haoxuan Wu↗Lai Man Po↗Mengyang Liu↗Kun Li↗Hongzheng Yang↗Wei Liu↗

Evaluating video generation with clean, pixel-based reward models disconnects evaluation from the noisy diffusion process and incurs massive VAE decoding costs. In this paper, we challenge this paradigm by asking a fundamental question: Can a powerful video generator inherently discriminate preferences directly from noisy latents? To answer this, we introduce PRISM (Preference Representation in Intermediate States of Diffusion Models). PRISM employs a lightweight Query-based Aggregation head with a frozen video diffusion backbone to decode preference signals from noisy latents. Surprisingly, PRISM not only achieves SOTA preference accuracy but also unlocks strong noise-robustness, which enables early-stage Best-of-$N$ sampling. This allows for filtering suboptimal candidates at the very beginning of denoising, drastically reducing computation while boosting video quality. We also reveal a strong positive correlation between a backbone's generative performance and its inherent evaluative power, enabling self-improving video backbones.

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11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Speech-Driven End-to-End Language Discrimination towards Chinese Dialects

Authors:
Fan Xu↗Jian Luo↗MingWen Wang↗GuoDong Zhou↗

Language discrimination among similar languages, varieties, and dialects is a challenging natural language processing task. The traditional text-driven focus leads to poor results. In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of speech-driven features towards language discrimination among Chinese dialects. First, we systematically explore the appropriateness of speech-driven MFCC features towards CNN-based language discrimination. Then, we design an end-to-end speech recognition model based on HMM-DNN to predict Chinese dialect words. We adopt attention to extract the discriminative words related to different Chinese dialects. Finally, through a CNN, we combine the word-level embedding and the MFCC-based features. Evaluation of two benchmark Chinese dialect corpora shows the appropriateness and effectiveness of the proposed speech-driven approach to fine-grained Chinese dialect discrimination compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

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

Green AI Carbon Optimizer: Carbon-Efficient Training Location Recommendation and Global AI Energy Demand Forecasting

Authors:
Yuxin Chen↗Hao Gao↗Chujie Zou↗

arXiv:2606.14707v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI training and deployment consume substantial electricity, but carbon outcomes remain weakly integrated into routine model development decisions. This paper presents Green AI Carbon Optimizer with two primary contributions: (i) a carbon aware cloud region recommendation method for training workloads, and (ii) a power law forecasting pipeline for global AI energy demand. For location recommendation, we combine regional grid carbon intensity, renewable share, and data center Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) into a unified scoring model across 100+ regions from major cloud providers. For a reference workload (8*A100, 100h), estimated emissions in our sampled regions range from 7.74kg to 272.00kg CO2. Selecting the best region instead of the worst corresponds to a 97.2% reduction relative to the worst case. Ablation shows that ranking by renewable share alone can select regions with higher CO2 emissions than rankings that include grid carbon intensity. For forecasting, we fit a power law relation between parameter count and training energy using 26 anchor models. We combine this fit with scenario assumptions on model growth, hardware efficiency, and training frequency, and evaluate sensitivity to inference ratio and ecosystem scaling. Across scenarios, projected 2030 demand ranges from 7TWh to 1,436TWh under the stated assumptions, highlighting the importance of deployment choices, model scaling discipline, and transparent energy reporting.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

AI SciBrief as a Gateway to Research: A Framework for Onboarding Students into New Research Areas

Authors:
Andrei Lazarev↗Dmitrii Sedov↗

Students at all levels of higher education face a significant barrier in the form of information overload, which often paralyzes the initial stages of the research process and suppresses motivation. In response, this article introduces a pedagogical framework that leverages AI SciBrief, a platform powered by a Large Language Model (LLM) designed to automatically generate digests of scientific trends. We describe how this multidisciplinary tool - with initial coverage in finance, medicine, and education - can be integrated into the curriculum to overcome this "entry barrier." The framework provides concrete methodologies for utilizing these digests to facilitate topic selection for term papers, accelerate literature reviews for dissertations, and enable postgraduate students to continuously monitor emerging trends. We conclude that AI SciBrief functions as a "gateway to research" effectively reducing students' cognitive load and empowering them to transition more rapidly from information searching to knowledge creation.

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14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Can Vision-Language Models See the Vital Signs? Benchmarking and Fine-Tuning for Intraoperative Monitor Reading

Authors:
Gao↗Wang↗Zhao↗Yang↗Zhang↗Feng↗He↗

Background Vital-sign deterioration is a leading contributor to preventable perioperative death, yet manual monitor reading is intermittent, error-prone, and subject to alarm fatigue. Automating this perceptual step could enable continuous surveillance, but existing solutions depend on device-specific hardware integration or cloud-hosted vision-language models (VLMs), which raise privacy, cost, and connectivity barriers in resource-limited healthcare facilities. Methods We constructed a benchmark of 200 in-the-wild intraoperative monitor photographs (spanning multiple vendors, angles, and illumination conditions) annotated for eight vital-sign parameters: heart rate, SpO2, ETCO2, respiratory rate, systolic/diastolic/mean blood pressure, and temperature. We evaluated an optical character recognition (OCR)-based pipeline, nine instruction-tuned VLMs (four commercial, five open-weight ranging from [≤]4B to 31B parameters) under two prompting regimes, and a compact open model (Qwen3.5-9B) adapted via low-rank fine-tuning (LoRA, 0.46% of parameters updated). Results Under a domain-aware prompt, frontier VLMs reached 0.98-0.997 exact-match accuracy zero-shot, whereas the OCR pipeline and [≤]4B model scored approximately 0.20 lower, defining a 9B-class usable floor. LoRA fine-tuning Qwen3.5-9B on 80-120 images raised accuracy from 0.953 to 0.994 (statistically indistinguishable from the best commercial model) and reduced the critical-error rate fivefold (0.0313 [->] 0.0063). Ablations showed that performance saturated at 80 training images and rank-8 adapters. Conclusion Monitor reading is a solved perception problem for VLMs above the 9B scale. A lightweight fine-tuned open model achieves frontier accuracy while running entirely on local hardware, preserving data privacy, offline capability, and near-zero marginal cost. Residual errors stem from blood-pressure source ambiguity and are addressable with explicit disambiguation logic.

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

Top-Theta Attention: Sparsifying Transformers by Compensated Thresholding

Authors:
Konstantin Berestizshevsky↗Renzo Andri↗Lukas Cavigelli↗

We present Top-Theta (Top-$\theta$) Attention, a training-free method for sparsifying transformer attention during inference. Our key insight is that static, per-head thresholds can be calibrated to retain the desired constant number of significant elements per attention row. This approach enables content-based sparsity without retraining, and it remains robust across data domains. We further introduce compensation techniques to preserve accuracy under aggressive sparsification, establishing attention thresholding as a practical and principled alternative to top-k attention. We provide extensive evaluation on natural language processing tasks, showing that Top-$\theta$ achieves 3-10x reduction in V-cache usage and up to 10x fewer attention elements during inference while degrading no more than 1% in accuracy.

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

CloudCons: A Comprehensive End-to-End Benchmark for Cloud Resource Consolidation

Authors:
Xiaobin Zhang↗Lefei Shen↗Mouxiang Chen↗Zhuo Li↗Hongkai Li↗Han Fu↗Jianling Sun↗Xiaoxue Ren↗Chenghao Liu↗

arXiv:2606.13513v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Driven by conservative over-provisioning to guarantee service reliability, resource utilization in cloud data centers remains at low levels. To mitigate this, the forecast-then-optimize paradigm has emerged to optimize consolidation by anticipating future demands. While emerging time series foundation models promise to enhance this paradigm through zero-shot generalization, existing benchmarks focus solely on prediction error metrics. The actual decision utility of these advanced models remains unverified, rendering their practical value for downstream tasks uncertain. To bridge this gap, we propose CloudCons, a comprehensive end-to-end benchmark designed to evaluate forecasting models within the specific context of cloud resource consolidation. We build high-quality datasets that cover diverse workloads from Huawei Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Google Borg, capturing distinct service characteristics ranging from synchronized diurnal rhythms to stochastic, pulse-like bursts and high-frequency noise. We conduct an extensive evaluation of statistical, deep learning, and foundation models. Our experiments reveal a pivotal finding: while foundation models demonstrate superior zero-shot forecasting accuracy, this advantage does not inherently translate into better decision utility. Of practical significance, we systematically analyze how the selection of predictive quantiles acts as a critical lever. We provide actionable guidelines for calibrating these selections to balance the trade-off between resource efficiency and service reliability, offering vital insights for real-world deployment decisions.

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

Montreal Forced Aligner and the state of speech-to-text alignment in 2026

Authors:
Michael McAuliffe↗Kaylynn Gunter↗Michael Wagner↗Morgan Sonderegger↗

The Montreal Forced Aligner (MFA) was released in 2016 and has since become the most widely used tool for forced alignment in research and industry. In the decade since, MFA has undergone substantial development, including expanded coverage across more languages and dialects using larger open-source datasets, harmonized IPA dictionaries, model adaptation, cross-language phone remapping, and support utilities. This paper documents MFA 3.0's developments since version 1.0 and evaluates MFA's performance across English, Japanese, and Korean, benchmarked against classic and neural forced aligners. MFA 3.0 achieves state-of-the-art or near state-of-the-art performance across all four benchmark datasets with mean boundary errors below 15 ms. Adaptation and cross-language remapping are effective for languages outside MFA's training distribution, and pronunciation probability modeling and phonological rules provide gains in specific conditions.

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

The Hidden Evolution of Disguised Visual Context inside the VLM

Authors:
Wish Suharitdamrong↗Tony Alex↗Muhammad Awais↗Sara Atito↗

arXiv:2606.20077v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual tokens enter Large Language Models (LLMs) as raw, foreign signals. How they are transformed into meaningful representations and interact with the language space depends entirely on the integration architecture. Whether by treating visual tokens as in-context prompts within the input sequence or injecting them directly into the LLM's intermediate layers. A controlled comparison and understanding of how these architectural choices affect visual information and its internal transformation to integrate with the LLM remains underexplored. We provide a fair comparison by evaluating in-context and layer-wise injection VLM integration paradigms under identical training conditions across single image, multi-image, and video benchmarks. In doing so, we uncover a hidden evolution where visual tokens enter the LLM as disguised visual context, raw representations lacking linguistic structure, but are progressively reshaped depending on the integration paradigm, each capturing fundamentally different frequency characteristics of the visual signal. We show that this evolution inside the LLM determines what visual features the VLM can utilize effectively, how visual representations align with the language space, and ultimately how each paradigm performs across different tasks. We further demonstrate that attention allocation alone is insufficient, and that performance is driven by the quality of visual representations at each layer.

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

On the Residual Scaling of Looped Transformers: Stability and Transferability

Authors:
Shaowen Wang↗Bingrui Li↗Ge Zhang↗Wenhao Huang↗Shen Yan↗Jian Li↗

arXiv:2606.18524v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Looped (weight-tied) Transformers apply a shared residual block $N$ times ($h \leftarrow h + \varepsilon\,f(h)$, same $f$ at each step), increasing effective depth without adding parameters. Prior depth-scaling analyses prescribe $\varepsilon = 1/\!\sqrt{L}$ for depth-$L$ residual networks. We show that this is insufficient for looped architectures: weight sharing makes residual updates correlated across iterations, requiring the stronger scaling $\varepsilon = 1/N$. For multi-layer blocks ($L$ unique layers looped $N$ times), we derive a factored parameterization $\varepsilon = \lambda/(N\!\sqrt{L})$ that separates the two sources of growth: $1/N$ controls the within-layer loop correlation, and $1/\!\sqrt{L}$ controls the across-layer variance. A key consequence is that the optimal learning rate depends only on the number of unique layers $L$, not on the loop count $N$, enabling direct hyperparameter transfer from small to large $N$ without retuning. Experiments on looped Transformers confirm that $1/N$ scaling improves trainability and yields better loss than $1/\!\sqrt{N}$ scaling across loop counts.

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20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Adverse Childhood Experiences and Growth Outcomes in Childhood: A Longitudinal EHR-Based Study

Authors:
Palmer↗Shyr↗Morley↗T. J↗Shelley↗Han↗Simmons↗J. H↗Bejan↗Walsh↗Ruderfer↗D. M↗…

Question Are adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) associated with altered growth trajectories in childhood? Findings In this cohort study of 412,549 children and adolescents, ACEs were associated with lower height throughout childhood, earlier pubertal timing, and shorter final stature. Height differences emerged approximately 2 years before ACE documentation and were greatest among those with earlier documentation. Meaning These findings suggest that early adversity affects physical growth in children and may serve as a measurable indicator of the biological consequences of early-life stress, especially in those with documentation of ACEs prior to the onset of typical pubertal growth. Importance Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are among the strongest risk factors for long-term mental and physical health complications, yet their impact on physical growth in childhood remains incompletely understood. Objective To determine the association of ACEs on childhood growth trajectories and growth dynamics. Design, Setting and Participants Retrospective cohort study using longitudinal electronic health record data. Data was collected from participants between February 1999 and August 2025. A large academic medical center biobank linked to deidentified electronic health records in the southeastern United States. A total of 412,549 individuals with at least 2 recorded height measurements between the ages of 2 and 20 were included in the primary analysis. Growth curve analyses were performed in a subset of 199,844 individuals with at least 3 height measurements spanning at least 2 years. Genetic analyses were performed in a subset of 10,114 individuals of primarily European ancestry. Exposure(s) Documented exposure to adverse childhood experiences before age 18 years identified through a natural language processing algorithm. Main Outcome(s) and Measure(s) Height-for-age z-scores across childhood, final attained height, and growth curve parameters estimated using SuperImposition by Translation and Rotation (SITAR) modeling. Results Among 412,549 participants, 18,502 (4.5%) had clinically documented ACEs during childhood. ACE documentation was associated with lower height-for-age z-scores throughout childhood and adolescence. Final attained height was significantly lower among ACE-documented individuals, with mean differences of -3.0 cm among males (174.0 cm vs 177.0 cm, p < 0.001) and -1.3 cm among females (161.8 cm vs 163.1 cm, p < 0.001). Height differences emerged approximately 2 years before clinical ACE documentation. Earlier age at first ACE documentation was associated with progressively shorter final attained height, with each year decrease in age at ACE documentation associated with a decrease in final height of -0.20 cm in females and -0.35 cm in males. Those with first ACE documented prior to pubertal age also showed the most pronounced growth dynamic differences, with males demonstrating a mean reduction in size of 5.25 cm (95% CI, -6.79 cm to -3.70 cm) and 1.26-year earlier pubertal timing (95% CI, -1.50 to -1.03 years), and females demonstrating a reduction in growth curve size of 3.62 cm (95% CI, -4.83 to -2.41 cm) and 1.14-year earlier pubertal timing (95% CI, -1.29 to -0.99 years). Conclusions and Relevance In this large clinical cohort, clinically documented ACEs were associated with time-dependent reductions in stature, earlier pubertal timing, and short final attained height. These findings suggest that early childhood adversity may have lasting effects on physical development and highlight growth trajectories as a potential marker of the biological consequences of early-life stress.

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21.
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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22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

A Layered Security Framework Against Prompt Injection in RAG-Based Chatbots

Authors:
Gulshan Saleem↗Nisar Ahmed↗Muhammad Imran Zaman↗Ali Hassan↗

Prompt injection is ranked as the most critical vulnerability in large language model (LLM) deployments by the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications, yet existing defenses operate at isolated pipeline stages and remain incomplete. Input filters cannot inspect retrieved documents, while output monitors cannot prevent malicious payloads from reaching the model. Consequently, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) chatbots remain vulnerable to indirect injection, where a poisoned knowledge-base document compromises every user whose query retrieves it. We present a three-layer framework that intercepts both direct and indirect prompt injection throughout the inference pipeline. Layer 1 screens user input using a rule-based pattern library and a fine-tuned semantic anomaly classifier. Layer 2 enforces a provenance-based instruction hierarchy during context assembly, preventing retrieved content from overriding operator policy. Layer 3 audits model output using a policy rule engine and semantic drift detector before delivery. A continuous audit loop aggregates structured logs and supports retraining to adapt the classifier to emerging attack patterns. The framework is model-agnostic and deploys as middleware without modifying the underlying LLM. Evaluation on 5,080 samples across GPT-4o, Llama 3, and Mistral 7B shows that the framework reduces Attack Success Rate (ASR) from 71.4\% to 11.3\%, outperforming the best single-layer baseline by 27.3 percentage points and a published guardrail system by 23.8 percentage points, while maintaining a 4.8\% false positive rate and a median latency overhead of 61.2 ms. Ablation studies confirm that all three layers provide complementary protection and that their combined effect exceeds the sum of individual contributions.

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

Digital Twin Driven Textile Classification and Foreign Object Recognition in Automated Sorting Systems

Authors:
Serkan Ergun↗Tobias Mitterer↗Hubert Zangl↗

The increasing demand for sustainable textile recycling requires robust automation solutions capable of handling deformable garments and detecting foreign objects in cluttered environments. This work presents a digital twin driven robotic sorting system that integrates grasp prediction, multi modal perception, and semantic reasoning for real world textile classification. A dual arm robotic cell equipped with RGBD sensing, capacitive tactile feedback, and collision-aware motion planning autonomously separates garments from an unsorted basket, transfers them to an inspection zone, and classifies them using state of the art Visual Language Models (VLMs). We benchmark nine VLM s from five model families on a dataset of 223 inspection scenarios comprising shirts, socks, trousers, underwear, foreign objects (including garments outside of the aforementioned classes), and empty scenes. The evaluation assesses per class accuracy, hallucination behavior, and computational performance under practical hardware constraints. Results show that the Qwen model family achieves the highest overall accuracy (up to 87.9 %), with strong foreign object detection performance, while lighter models such as Gemma3 offer competitive speed accuracy trade offs for edge deployment. A digital twin combined with MoveIt enables collision aware path planning and integrates segmented 3D point clouds of inspected garments into the virtual environment for improved manipulation reliability. The presented system demonstrates the feasibility of combining semantic VLM reasoning with conventional grasp detection and digital twin technology for scalable, autonomous textile sorting in realistic industrial settings.

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24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Uncertainty Estimation for Molecular Diffusion Models

Authors:
Paul Seij↗Christian A. Naesseth↗Stephan Mandt↗Metod Jazbec↗

arXiv:2606.13451v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion models have seen wide adoption for 3D molecular generation, yet they offer no principled signal of when a generated molecule is likely to be of low quality. We propose a post-hoc method for estimating per-sample uncertainty in pretrained molecular diffusion models. Building on a Laplace approximation of the denoising network, we measure the variability of the noise prediction across the generation trajectory. Empirically, we show that the resulting uncertainty score is informative of sample quality, exhibiting a negative correlation with established sample-level quality metrics. We further study how the proposed uncertainty score can be used to filter generated samples, improving model performance via test-time scaling.

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

Regulating the Machine Contributor: Governance and Policy Alignment in Open Source

Authors:
Jassem Manita↗Aziz Amari↗

arXiv:2606.14594v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI-assisted software development has moved from line-level autocomplete to agents that can plan changes, edit files, and submit pull requests with limited human supervision. Open-source software, however, evolves through a process designed for humans: contributor agreements, codes of conduct, and review norms all assume a legally accountable person who can attest to provenance and answer reviewer questions. Autonomous and semi-autonomous AI contributors strain those assumptions, and the 2025-2026 record of agent-driven incidents, AI-generated nuisance volume, and platform-level shutdowns shows that the gap is operationally consequential. Several open-source organisations have responded with contribution policies, but the result is fragmented, and its alignment with emerging AI governance frameworks (EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF with the UC Berkeley Agentic AI Profile, ISO/IEC 42001 and 23894) is unmapped at the contribution level. We compare policies across six organisations (SymPy, LLVM, matplotlib, OpenInfra, the Apache Software Foundation, and the Linux Foundation) using Most-Similar Systems Design with indicator-based coding and process tracing for SymPy and LLVM. From this we derive a six-dimensional taxonomy (disclosure, responsibility, human oversight, licensing, enforcement, maintainer workload), an ordinal Policy Maturity Score, and a mapping of documented agent incidents onto the dimensions each policy fails to govern. Aligning the dimensions with the regulatory frameworks above identifies overlapping gaps neither side currently closes, and we close by sketching the shape of a harmonised tiered framework and the empirical evaluation needed to calibrate it.

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