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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Pathwise structure of the three-dimensional attractive one-point interaction diffusion

Authors:
Barkat Mian↗

arXiv:2606.08008v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the pathwise behavior of the three-dimensional attractive one-point interaction diffusion whose law was constructed by Cranston, Koralov, Molchanov and Vainberg, corresponding to the singular Schrödinger Hamiltonian \[ \frac12\Delta+\frac{\beta}{2}\delta_0, \qquad \beta>0. \] We identify a local stochastic differential equation satisfied by the process away from the origin and use it to construct a natural submartingale whose increasing component in the Doob-Meyer decomposition is supported on the set of times at which the process visits the origin. In particular, we show that the process visits the origin with positive probability and that the law conditioned on avoiding the origin is three-dimensional Wiener measure.

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

EM-NeSy: Expectation Maximization for Neurosymbolic Learning

Authors:
Annegret Seibt↗Luc De Raedt↗Giuseppe Marra↗

arXiv:2606.14463v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neurosymbolic (NeSy) models integrate neural networks and symbolic reasoning for robust and interpretable AI. State-of-the-art NeSy models require that the symbolic component is expressed in a differentiable way, often complicating the use of approximate inference. We propose EM-NeSy which casts probabilistic NeSy learning as an instance of the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. In the expectation step, we compute the posterior over the neurally predicted symbols conditioned on the label via probabilistic inference. In the maximization step, we update the neural parameters based on this posterior using gradient descent only through the neural component. This formulation unlocks the full potential of the EM algorithm for NeSy learning. It allows NeSy to extend naturally to approximate reasoning without any additional modifications or differentiability requirements of the symbolic component. Furthermore, it recovers the standard end-to-end gradient-based NeSy setting under exact inference. Our experimental results demonstrate the scalability and computational efficiency of EM-NeSy.

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03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Stochastic Dimension Implicit Functional Projections for Global Integral Conservation in High-Dimensional PINNs

Authors:
Zhangyong Liang↗Huanhuan Gao↗

arXiv:2603.29237v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Enforcing prescribed global integral constraints in mesh-free neural PDE solvers is challenging in high-dimensional domains. Existing projection methods for spatial integrals are often tied to fixed grids or uniform quadrature, which can conflict with randomly sampled physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) and scale poorly with dimension. High-order differential operators also increase reverse-mode automatic differentiation memory costs. We propose Stochastic Dimension Implicit Functional Projection (SDIFP), a quadrature-level framework for enforcing prescribed first and second spatial moments. SDIFP replaces tensor-product nodal projection by a global affine correction of the neural-network output, with two scalar coefficients determined from a weighted quadrature rule. Under positive target variance and nonzero empirical raw variance, this correction is the nearest-point projection, in the weighted quadrature norm, onto the empirical two-moment constraint set. Thus, the prescribed moments are exact for the selected quadrature rule, while continuum errors are quadrature errors of the corrected field. For decomposable high-dimensional linear operators, SDIFP combines affine moment correction with stochastic operator-subset sampling. With independent residual and derivative sampling and conditionally unbiased coefficient-gradient estimation, the resulting estimator is unbiased for the specified quadrature-based residual objective; the shared-subset fast mode is biased in general. SDIFP avoids tensor-product quadrature for moment enforcement, separates forward quadrature evaluation from the reverse-mode graph, and retains pointwise inference efficiency once the affine coefficients are fixed or precomputed.

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04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Hidden Anchors in Multi-Agent LLM Deliberation

Authors:
Apurba Pokharel↗Ram Dantu↗

arXiv:2606.19494v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent LLM deliberation, where agents exchange and revise answers over several rounds, is increasingly used to improve reasoning and accuracy, yet how and why it works is rarely modelled. Such deliberation mirrors how humans reach decisions. As social animals we are pulled both by the group, the herd effect that classical opinion-dynamics models such as DeGroot and Friedkin–Johnsen capture, and by our own internal belief, which they do not. We model multi-agent deliberation as a closed-loop dynamical system in which each agent carries a hidden internal belief, its anchor, that continually pulls its opinion regardless of its neighbours. We show this anchor can be recovered from the deliberation alone, and that it explains a behaviour classical consensus rules forbid: an agent's confidence in the correct answer can climb past where any agent started, escaping the space (convexhull) formed by the initial beliefs. Checking whether the recovered anchor also predicts held-out runs (generalizes) gives a simple test for when a model is truly driven bysuch an anchor. Across three open-weight model families this is a spectrum, not all-or-nothing. All anchors' influence are about equally strongly, but they differ in where the anchor sits, and only when it sits far from the initial opinions does deliberation escape the hull and need the full closed-loop model.

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

Who Pays the Price? Stakeholder-Centric Prompt Injection Benchmarking for Real-world Web Agents

Authors:
Zihao Wang↗Yiming Li↗Yutong Wu↗Zheyu Liu↗Kangjie Chen↗Fok Kar Wai↗Pin-Yu Chen↗Vrizlynn L. L. Thing↗Bo Li↗Dacheng Tao↗Tianwei Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.13385v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Web agents driven by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world environments, where they operate over untrusted web content and execute actions with direct consequences. This makes them vulnerable to prompt-injection attacks, in which seemingly benign content embeds adversarial instructions that manipulate agent behaviour. Existing security benchmarks adopt an attack-centric perspective, focusing on the technical feasibility of injections while overlooking the nuanced distribution of resulting harms. In practice, however, prompt-injection risk is victim-dependent: a single exploit can produce asymmetric consequences for different stakeholders, and the same attack pattern may exhibit substantially different effectiveness depending on whom it targets. To capture these properties, we introduce \sysname, a stakeholder-centric benchmark to systematically categorize and attribute harm in real-world web agent systems. It distinguishes between affected entities (e.g., user, seller, platform), decomposes the attacks into concrete objectives, and evaluates each case with complementary outcome- and process-level metrics. Our results reveal substantial and heterogeneous vulnerabilities: not a single attack objective is reliably resisted by current agents, and failures distribute across qualitatively distinct modes ranging from stealthy parasitism (attack succeeds without disrupting the user's delegated task) to misaligned disruption (task disrupted without attack success) and compounded failure (both adversarial objective and task integrity simultaneously violated). These patterns are missed by conventional evaluation, highlighting the need for stakeholder-aware assessment of LLM-based agents in real-world deployments. Benchmark is available at https://github.com/StakeBench/SBC.

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

EvidenceLens: A Claim-Evidence Matrix for Auditing Financial Question Answering

Authors:
Fengchen Gu↗Xiaotian Ren↗Zhengyong Jiang↗Zhilu Zhang↗\'Angel F. Garc\'ia-Fern\'andez↗Angelos Stefanidis↗Mian Zhou↗Huakang Li↗Jionglong Su↗

Large language models are increasingly used to answer questions over annual reports, earnings decks, and analyst notes, yet their outputs remain difficult to verify in high-stakes financial workflows. A fluent answer can blend directly grounded statements, weak synthesis, and unsupported claims across narrative text, tables, and charts. We present EvidenceLens, a visual analytics prototype that treats financial question answering as a claim-evidence alignment problem. The system decomposes an answer into atomic claims, summarizes support composition and confidence, support gaps, and coordinates claim-level inspection with source passages, table cells, and chart regions. Its core visual representation is a multimodal claim-evidence matrix that makes coverage, contradiction, and modality imbalance immediately visible. To support reproducibility, we also specify a JSON-based artifact schema, a lightweight multimodal alignment pipeline, and a deterministic review-priority ranking that maps backend signals into an auditable visual structure. Through representative report-auditing scenarios, we show how EvidenceLens helps analysts distinguish grounded claims from overconfident synthesis that conventional chat interfaces flatten.

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07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Epipolar Geometry Improves Video Generation Models

Authors:
Orest Kupyn↗Th\'eo Uscidda↗Marta Tintore Gazulla↗Fabian Manhardt↗Federico Tombari↗Christian Rupprecht↗

Video generation models have advanced significantly through the latent diffusion transformers trained with rectified flow techniques. Yet these models still struggle with geometric inconsistencies, unstable motion, and visual artifacts that break the illusion of realistic 3D scenes. 3D-consistent video generation could significantly impact numerous downstream applications in generation and reconstruction tasks. We explore how epipolar geometry constraints improve modern video diffusion models. Despite using massive training data, these models fail to capture fundamental geometric principles. We align diffusion models using pairwise epipolar geometry constraints via preference-based optimization, directly addressing unstable trajectories and geometric artifacts through mathematically principled geometric enforcement. Our approach efficiently enforces geometric principles without requiring end-to-end differentiability. Evaluation demonstrates that classical geometric constraints provide more stable optimization signals than modern learned metrics. Training on static scenes with dynamic cameras ensures metric quality while the model generalizes to various dynamic scenes. By bridging data-driven learning with classical computer vision, we reduce epipolar error by 31% and improve human-rated consistency from 54% to 72% without compromising visual quality.

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08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Federated Causal Inference from Multi-Site Observational Data via Propensity Score Aggregation

Authors:
R\'emi Khellaf↗Aur\'elien Bellet↗Julie Josse↗

arXiv:2505.17961v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Causal inference typically assumes centralized access to individual-level data. Yet, in practice, data are often decentralized across multiple sites, making centralization infeasible due to privacy, logistical, or legal constraints. We address this problem by estimating the Average Treatment Effect (ATE) from decentralized observational data via a Federated Learning (FL) approach, allowing inference through the exchange of aggregate statistics rather than individual-level data. We propose a novel method to estimate propensity scores via a federated weighted average of local scores using Membership Weights (MW), defined as probabilities of site membership conditional on covariates. MW can be flexibly estimated with parametric or non-parametric classification models using standard FL algorithms. The resulting propensity scores are used to construct Federated Inverse Propensity Weighting (Fed-IPW) and Augmented IPW (Fed-AIPW) estimators. In contrast to meta-analysis methods, which fail when any site violates positivity, our approach exploits heterogeneity in treatment assignment across sites to improve overlap. We show that Fed-IPW and Fed-AIPW perform well under site-level heterogeneity in sample sizes, treatment mechanisms, and covariate distributions. Theoretical analysis and experiments on simulated and real-world data demonstrate clear advantages over meta-analysis and related approaches.

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09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Linear-Time Encodable and Decodable Quantum Error-Correcting Codes

Authors:
Adam Wills↗Ting-Chun Lin↗Rachel Yun Zhang↗Min-Hsiu Hsieh↗

arXiv:2603.04543v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent years have seen rapid development in the subject of quantum coding theory, with breakthroughs on many exciting classes of codes, including quantum LDPC codes, quantum locally testable codes, and quantum codes with interesting transversal gates. However, a natural class of quantum codes, which has been well-studied classically, has not yet been treated: those which can be quickly encoded and decoded. This problem concerns the channel capacity setting, where a noise channel sits between perfect encoding and unencoding/decoding operations; this is the setting that is relevant for communication between fault-tolerant quantum computers. In this work, we construct asymptotically good quantum codes that can be encoded and unencoded by quantum circuits of logarithmic depth and consisting of a linear total number of gates. The classical decoding algorithms also run in logarithmic depth and use $\mathcal{O}(n \log n)$ gates, or alternatively a linear number of gates but with higher depth. We further construct explicit and asymptotically good quantum codes whose encoding, unencoding and decoding all use a linear number of gates, and additionally whose encoding and unencoding may be run in logarithmic depth.

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11.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-12

Daily briefing: How Venus flytraps snap shut

Authors:
Flora Graham↗

Softening cells enable flytraps to shut with astonishing speed. Plus, the cutting-edge science happening at the World Cup and why scientists shouldn’t ignore the Pope’s AI message. Softening cells enable flytraps to shut with astonishing speed. Plus, the cutting-edge science happening at the World Cup and why scientists shouldn’t ignore the Pope’s AI message.

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

Rarity-Gated Context Conditioning for Offline Imitation Learning-Based Maritime Anomaly Detection

Authors:
Yongmin Kim↗ByeongHoon Jeon↗Sungil Kim↗

arXiv:2606.13311v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Contextual anomaly detection aims to identify abnormal behavior conditional on context variables, but practical deployments often face highly imbalanced context distributions where rare regimes can be critical information. Under such frequency bias, context-conditioned models can produce unstable decisions and excessive false alarms in rare contexts. We propose Rarity-Gated Feature-wise Linear Modulation (RGFiLM), a rarity-aware conditioning module that combines feature-wise modulation (i.e., context-conditioned scaling and shifting of hidden features) with a gate controlled by a data-driven rarity score. The rarity score is estimated from the empirical distribution of context variables and regulates how strongly context modulates intermediate representations: the gate becomes more decisive under rare contexts while remaining conservative under frequent contexts. We evaluate RGFiLM on maritime trajectory anomaly detection using AIS motion sequences with ERA5 environmental context in an environment-sensitive detour scenario. When instantiated in a sequential anomaly scoring pipeline, RGFiLM achieves the best mean F1–False Positive Rate (FPR) trade-off among the compared context-agnostic and context-conditioned methods. These results suggest that explicitly accounting for context rarity is an effective approach for reducing false alarms in context-sensitive anomaly detection.

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

Dual-Network PINNs for Optimal Control: A Reproducible Benchmark on the Mass-Spring-Damper System

Authors:
Abdeladhim Tahimi↗Rinaldo Vieira da Silva Junior↗

arXiv:2606.15271v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work presents a transparent and reproducible benchmark study of a direct dual-network Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) formulation for the optimal control of a mass-spring-damper system. The classical linear-quadratic optimal control problem is solved by two independent classical methods – Pontryagin's Minimum Principle with single shooting, and direct transcription through trapezoidal collocation – and recast as a constrained optimization problem solved by two feedforward neural networks: a state network whose boundary conditions are enforced exactly through a composite cubic-and-mask ansatz, and an unconstrained control network. The composite loss combines the physics residual at the collocation points with a trapezoidal approximation of the cost functional, weighted by a single scalar hyperparameter. On the benchmark considered, the PINN reproduces the classical optimal cost to four significant digits, satisfies the terminal state constraints exactly by construction, and produces pointwise state and control errors that fall within the spread of the two classical references. Training is approximately two orders of magnitude slower than classical shooting on this benchmark, which is honestly reported. The contribution is methodological clarity rather than methodological novelty: the formulation and the accompanying Google Colab implementation are intended to lower the barrier to entry for practitioners exploring PINN-based optimal control without prior exposure to adjoint methods or two-point boundary value problems.

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14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Theoretical Grounding of Out-Of-Distribution Detection With Reinforcement Learning Optimizer

Authors:
Salimeh Sekeh↗Xin Zhang↗

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection in dynamic open-world environments requires a model to continually adapt to evolving data distributions while generalizing to covariate-shifted inputs and rejecting semantic-shifted OOD examples. Most existing OOD detection methods optimize only the current-step objective and do not explicitly account for how post-deployment environment changes affect future OOD behavior. In this paper, we establish a theoretical grounding for dynamic OOD detection using a reinforcement learning (RL)-guided optimizer that explicitly favors updates that reduce the semantic OOD false positive rate over time. We develop a novel augmented optimizer that uses an RL-guided correction term on top of standard gradient descent (GD) and show its improvement over both future-domain generalization and semantic-OOD rejection. We analyze temporal error decomposition in terms of model-change and environment-change generalization errors and develop a new theoretical framework for comparing the generalization errors under both GD and RL-guided optimizers.

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

Flow Matching with In-Context Priors for Out-of-Distribution Brain Dynamics

Authors:
Sam Gijsen↗Micha{\l} {\L}ukomski↗Marc-Andr\'e Schulz↗Kerstin Ritter↗

arXiv:2606.11833v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Flow matching and diffusion models enable conditional generation across domains ranging from images to proteins, with recent extensions to out-of-distribution contexts. Yet generative models of neural time series have largely remained restricted to categorical conditioning, precluding compositional and zero-shot generalization. In this work, we propose a per-timestep conditioned diffusion transformer for generating realistic fMRI brain dynamics during unseen cognitive tasks by injecting both compositional language and optional spatial priors in-context. Such zero-shot generation could enable counterfactual neuroscience by supporting in-silico design and evaluation of novel cognitive experiments before empirical validation. Leveraging this model, we evaluate across hundreds of held-out task conditions and characterize predictive performance in relation to the training manifold. From language alone, the model recovers region-specific recruitment across tasks and held-out spatial activation patterns. Spatial priors, when available, complement the text pathway by anchoring generation in regions of task space where language alone degrades, while retaining the compositional structure needed for counterfactual task specification. To our knowledge this is the first generative model of whole-cortex fMRI dynamics for unseen cognitive tasks, advancing counterfactual neuroscience and data-driven experimental design.

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

Robustness of Mixtures of Experts to Feature Noise

Authors:
Dong Sun↗Rahul Nittala↗Rebekka Burkholz↗

arXiv:2601.14792v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Despite their practical success, it remains unclear why Mixture of Experts (MoE) models can outperform dense networks beyond sheer parameter scaling. We study an iso-parameter regime where inputs exhibit latent modular structure but are corrupted by feature noise, a proxy for noisy internal activations. We show that sparse expert activation acts as a noise filter: compared to a dense estimator, MoEs achieve lower generalization error under feature noise, improved robustness to perturbations, and faster convergence speed. Empirical results on synthetic data and real-world language tasks corroborate the theoretical insights, demonstrating consistent robustness and efficiency gains from sparse modular computation.

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

RoVE: Rotary Value Embeddings Attention for Relative Position-dependent Value Pathways

Authors:
Alejandro Garc\'ia-Castellanos↗Maurice Weiler↗Erik J Bekkers↗

arXiv:2606.11275v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE) make attention scores position-relative but leave the value pathway position-blind: the message sent by a value token is the same regardless of its distance from the query. We propose RoVE, a parameter-free modification that makes values position-sensitive by rotating them simultaneously with keys, and show that it turns RoPE attention into attentive convolution. This new perspective unifies several independent formulations of the same operation across computer vision, robotics, and modern LLM architectures. Trained 124M and 354M GPT-2 models show consistent empirical gains over RoPE on few-shot in-context learning, out-of-distribution perplexity, and long-context retrieval, with the clearest improvements on tasks that require long-range aggregation.

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

SegmentAnyTreeV2: Scaling Transformer-Based Tree Instance Segmentation Across Sensors, Platforms, and Forests

Authors:
Maciej Wielgosz↗Stefano Puliti↗Rasmus Astrup↗

We present SegmentAnyTreeV2, a sensor- and platform-agnostic framework for semantic and instance segmentation of forest point clouds. The model combines a serialization-based Point Transformer v3 backbone with a lightweight semantic head and a tree-focused cross-attention mask decoder. Semantic predictions restrict instance decoding to tree-class voxels, while instance-aware query initialization, one-to-many seed supervision, and asymmetric mask scoring improve separation in dense and structurally complex stands. We further introduce FOR-instance v3, an expanded benchmark comprising 427 scenes and 26,496 annotated trees across diverse biomes, forest structures, and LiDAR platforms. On the FOR-instanceV2 test split, SegmentAnyTreeV2 achieves 90.5% precision, 80.2% recall, 85.0% F1, 90.7% coverage, and 87.6% semantic mIoU, outperforming previous learning-based methods in both instance detection and mask completeness. Zero-shot evaluation on independent sites further demonstrates strong cross-domain generalization.

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19.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

Biological meaning in protein embedding space is resolution-dependent

Authors:
Zong↗Ren↗Li↗Finn↗R. D↗Wang↗

Protein language model embeddings are increasingly used to organise biological sequences, yet how biological meaning is encoded within embedding neighbourhoods remains poorly understood. Using two independent hierarchical enzyme systems, carbohydrate-active enzymes and peptidases, we investigated how biological interpretation changes across embedding organisations aligned to different levels of biological hierarchy. Different embedding organisations give rise to distinct neighbourhood semantics. When aligned to membership-boundary resolution, embeddings robustly separated artefacts and unrelated proteins from members of the target category. However, embeddings aligned to functional-grouping resolution maintained compositional neighbourhood structure for multi-domain proteins spanning more than one functional or catalytic group. Finally, embeddings aligned to local-family resolution recovered compact family-like neighbourhoods, including families withheld from training, while weakening broader membership-boundary and functional-grouping relationships. Moreover, embeddings optimised toward the same level of biological organisation retain different biological relationships depending on optimisation trajectory employed. Together, our results show that proximity in protein embedding space has no fixed biological interpretation. Instead, biological meaning emerges across embedding resolutions through selective preservation of different forms of biological organisation.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

SkillMoV: Mixture-of-View Routing with Prototype-Conditioned Gating for Unified Multi-View Proficiency Estimation

Authors:
Edoardo Bianchi↗Antonio Liotta↗

Estimating human proficiency from video is a key challenge for automated skill assessment, with applications in sports coaching, music pedagogy, surgical training, and workplace learning. Existing approaches often focus on individual scenarios or rely on shared multi-view aggregation, limiting their ability to adapt to heterogeneous camera viewpoints and activity domains. We introduce SkillMoV, a unified, parameter-efficient framework for multi-scenario proficiency estimation from synchronized multi-view video. At its core, SkillMoV introduces a Mixture-of-View Projector (MoVP), which adapts the mixture-of-experts paradigm to camera-specific view features. MoVP is composed of four stages: (i) a Mixture-of-View soft router with twelve expert MLPs that learns view-dependent expert preferences without camera-identity supervision; (ii) cross-view attention to align synchronized cameras; (iii) learnable prototype anchoring to condition the representation on class-level reference vectors; and (iv) a prototype-conditioned gated projection that produces the final skill embedding. We evaluate SkillMoV on EgoExo4D across six skill domains and three separately trained view configurations: Ego, Exos, and Ego+Exos. SkillMoV reaches 50.17% overall accuracy in the Exos setting with a single model trained jointly across all scenarios, surpassing the strongest reported Exos result among the compared methods by 3.57 percentage points. In Ego+Exos, SkillMoV remains close to the best reported result in that setting (47.63% versus 48.20%). Ablations on the selected Exos configuration validate each component: MoV routing contributes +6.61 pp over attentive aggregation, cross-view attention +4.92 pp, prototype anchoring +4.07 pp, and stochastic view dropout +3.90 pp. Through LoRA adaptation, SkillMoV trains only 23.32% of its parameters and adds limited measured overhead relative to a LoRA-only baseline.

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

Beyond Uniform Forgetting: A Study of Sequential Direct Preference Optimization Across Preference Settings

Authors:
Pranav Bhandari↗Nicolas Fay↗Amitava Datta↗Usman Naseem↗Mehwish Nasim↗

Aligning language models with human preferences often requires optimising multiple behavioural objectives. A practical approach is to apply these objectives sequentially using preference optimisation methods such as Direct Preference Optimisation (DPO), but it remains unclear whether later training uniformly degrades preferences learned earlier or whether the effect depends on the relationship between objectives. We study sequential DPO across four preference settings covering distributional conflict, multi-attribute interaction, strong safety signal, and compatible response-quality objectives. Using Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct with LoRA adapters, we evaluate all objectives after every stage with a fixed base-model reference. We find that sequential DPO does not produce a single forgetting pattern; preference change ranges from partial degradation to stability, pair-level redistribution, or positive transfer depending on objective relationship, signal strength, and training order. Pair-level analysis using length-normalised policy margins shows that aggregate metrics can mask heterogeneous changes across preference pairs, whereas quartile decomposition reveals that high-confidence pairs can either degrade or improve depending on the setting. Mechanistic diagnostics show that Stage~2 gradients and adapter updates are near-orthogonal to the previous objective across all settings, providing little evidence that direct gradient opposition is the primary driver. These findings suggest that future sequential alignment pipelines should account for objective compatibility and signal strength, rather than assuming that later objectives affect earlier preferences uniformly.

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22.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-08

Climate change and non-communicable diseases: An invisible syndemic

Authors:
Gokul Parameswaran↗

by Gokul Parameswaran, Sadeer Al-Kindi, Sanjay Rajagopalan Climate change accelerates non-communicable diseases (NCDs) through cascading environmental disruptions and is attributed to driving increased NCD-related mortality. Yet this syndemic remains invisible and underfunded. We detail why addressing the climate-NCD intersection is critical for improving health. In this Perspective, Sanjay Rajagopalan and colleagues discusses how climate change accelerates non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and exacerbates NCD-related mortality, and calls for greater visibility and funding to address this syndemic and improve human health.

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

High-Fidelity Synthetic Transmission Electron Microscopy Image Generation Using Diffusion Probabilistic Models for Data-Limited Semiconductor Metrology

Authors:
Johannes Boehm↗Bappaditya Dey↗

Advanced semiconductor nodes drastically increased demand for Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM), yet destructive sample preparation, slow imaging and high costs severely limit the availability of diverse datasets needed for downstream machine learning (ML). Synthetic data generation is becoming essential, but current generative models often miss TEM-specific noise, structural detail, and stochastic variability crucial for evaluation. We present a Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) framework for synthetic TEM image generation under extreme data scarcity. A progressive patch-based training strategy scales from low-resolution patches to full images, enabling from-scratch training with only 15 samples. We integrate a custom TrivialAugment adaptation, cross-process domain transfer, classifier guidance, and RePaint-style inpainting, culminating in full-image generation that preserves global structural and spatial relationships in compliance with FAB metrology requirements. Beyond synthesis, we repurpose DDPM feature representations for segmentation, partitioning encoder feature maps to obtain coherent region masks. Our synthetic images achieve up to MS-SSIM > 0.98 and qualitative expert assessment consistent with structural similarity results, facilitating downstream ML training for defect detection, segmentation, and metrology while preserving statistical and physical realism.

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

Lung-R1: A Knowledge Graph-Guided LLM for Pulmonary Diagnostic Reasoning

Authors:
Haoyang Zeng↗Yuanxi Fu↗Rongzhen Li↗Yuming Yang↗Xiao Sun↗Jingwang Huang↗Gujie Shao↗Guohui Xiang↗Quan Lu↗Dongfan Ye↗Xuetao Chen↗Jiang Zhong↗…

arXiv:2606.11675v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diagnosing pulmonary diseases requires integrating heterogeneous evidence amid phenotypic variability and cross-disease overlap. Although large language models (LLMs) have shown progress on pulmonary knowledge question answering (QA) and information-processing tasks, reliable pulmonary diagnosis requires patient-specific, relation-aware reasoning over electronic medical record (EMR) evidence rather than isolated knowledge recall. We define this gap between pulmonary knowledge and case-level diagnostic reasoning as the Pulmonary Knowledge-to-Diagnosis Gap. To address it, we introduce LungKG, the first structured pulmonary knowledge graph for diagnostic knowledge organization and record-grounded reasoning. LungKG contains 59,038 nodes and 164,308 edges across 15 entity types and 112 relation types, serving as both a reusable pulmonary knowledge resource and the foundation for LungKG-guided model adaptation. Built on LungKG, we propose Lung-R1, a LungKG-guided pulmonary LLM trained through KG-constrained reasoning-chain construction and KG-guided reinforcement learning. In a 20-system evaluation, Lung-R1-14B achieves state-of-the-art performance across Choice, Pulmonary-QA, and EMR Diagnosis, reaching an EMR Diagnosis score of 4.3583 and surpassing the strongest non-Lung-R1 baseline by 0.1476 points. These results demonstrate the value of LungKG-guided training for EMR-based pulmonary diagnosis.

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25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Demystifying Variance in Circuit Discovery of LLMs

Authors:
Frank Zhengqing Wu↗Francesco Tonin↗Volkan Cevher↗

arXiv:2606.16920v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Circuit discovery is a key technique in mechanistic interpretability to pinpoint the model components that are crucial for performing a given task. Although the current state-of-the-art method (EAP-IG) performs well on the metric of (un)faithfulness, it suffers from substantial variability. This includes resampling variance, where the circuit changes when we probe with a new batch of data from the same distribution; rephrasing variance, where the discovered circuit shifts when the prompts are rephrased; and sample-wise variance, where a circuit with low population unfaithfulness exhibits large fluctuations in unfaithfulness across individual samples. This paper studies the roots of these variances. We demonstrate that CEAP, our new circuit discovery method that improves upon EAP-IG with a theoretical guarantee, can substantially lessen resampling variance. We further show that rephrasing variance arises because prompts with different templates tend to activate different circuits in the model. This leads us to argue that it may be challenging to find a comprehensive circuit that explains and controls the model's behavior on a task, which can be expressed in countless templates, suggesting that LLMs may be inherently hard to steer. We show that sparsity, which has been claimed to form more compact and interpretable task circuits, fails to solve this problem. Regarding sample-wise variance, we argue that it is largely benign: extremely poor unfaithfulness scores often stem from how unfaithfulness is defined, rather than from defects in the measured circuits. We show that the magnitude of unfaithfulness is affected by selective contribution scaling, a neural mechanism that accounts for the extremely poor scores sometimes observed.

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