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02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Managing Task Execution for Unknown Workloads in Batteryless IoT: A Hardware-Agnostic Evaluation

Authors:
Samer Nasser↗Henrique Duarte Moura↗Ritesh Kumar Singh↗Maarten Weyn↗Jeroen Famaey↗

arXiv:2606.24340v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm has been shifting toward batteryless, energy-harvesting architectures. Sustaining reliable operation in these systems requires intelligent management of highly volatile stored energy. As edge applications grow in complexity, traditional energy-aware schedulers struggle with unpredictable workloads due to their reliance on static execution thresholds or pre-measured, hardware-specific task profiles. To overcome this, we propose two novel, hardware-agnostic dynamic scheduling strategies treating applications as a "black box," requiring no prior energy information: a model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent and an on-the-fly Approximated Prediction (AP) method. We evaluate these methods against an adaptive task rate approach (AsTAR) and optimized static thresholds using a custom-built, physically accurate simulation framework driven by real-world solar data and dynamic LoRa transmission profiles. Rather than claiming universal superiority, our analysis exposes the distinct operational trade-offs of each method: the AP approach delivers lightweight, near-oracle task throughput; the RL agent provides tunable survival-execution balancing; and AsTAR excels at execution pacing across long energy gaps. Finally, we demonstrate that while these advanced strategies provide critical resilience for severely constrained systems with small capacitors, devices with larger energy buffers can efficiently rely on simpler, less computationally expensive static policies.

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03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Entanglement preservation and Clauser-Horne nonlocality in electromagnetically induced transparency quantum memories

Authors:
Po-Han Tseng↗Yong-Fan Chen↗

arXiv:2507.15453v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Entanglement preservation in noisy quantum memories represents a central challenge in quantum information science. While experiments have shown that electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) memories can store entangled photons, a quantitative theoretical analysis of whether nonlocal quantum correlations can survive storage loss induced by ground-state decoherence remains limited. Here we combine the dark-state polariton formalism with a reduced density-operator treatment to derive an EIT-specific effective pure-loss description for the retrieved photonic state in the ground-state-decoherence-limited regime. The analysis reveals that decoherence transforms an initially pure Bell state into a mixed state with a vacuum component and predicts a protocol-dependent storage-efficiency benchmark of 89.7% for violating the chosen unconditional Clauser-Horne (CH) inequality. Above this benchmark, the retrieved photonic state violates the CH inequality without post-selection, whereas below it, this unconditional CH violation is no longer obtained. This framework provides a quantitative theoretical description of entanglement retention, retrieved photonic density operators, and protocol-dependent Bell-test benchmarks in EIT quantum memories.

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04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

HeteRo-Select: Informativeness as the Participation Driver in Heterogeneous Federated Learning

Authors:
Md. Akmol Masud↗Md Abrar Jahin↗Mahmud Hasan↗

arXiv:2508.06692v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated learning systems typically allocate gradient compression by link speed. This is sensible when bandwidth and data informativeness align. However, under non-IID data, these signals often decorrelate or invert. A bandwidth-driven allocator then risks compressing the most informative gradients hardest. We propose HeteRo-Select, a framework that replaces bandwidth with a per-client informativeness score as the primary driver of compression. The score jointly governs three decisions per round: client selection, compression ratio, and server aggregation weight, with bandwidth retained only as a hard ceiling. Score-proportional selection provably reduces the effective heterogeneity of the chosen subset; score-proportional compression provably lowers aggregate top-$k$ error at fixed traffic. Under the exact FedCG simulation protocol, HeteRo-Select delivers a $1.78\times$ speedup and an $18.2\%$ reduction in traffic on CIFAR-10. The same configuration, unchanged, scales from a $7{,}850$-parameter logistic regression to an $11.27$M-parameter ResNet-18, hitting the accuracy target on three of four benchmarks. When bandwidth and informativeness are deliberately anti-correlated, the method still achieves the target accuracy with less traffic than the normal-bandwidth run.

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05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Neural Bayesian Anomaly Mitigation: A Robust Loss that Doubles as an Unsupervised Contamination Classifier

Authors:
S. A. K. Leeney↗W. J. Handley↗H. T. J. Bevins↗E. de Lera Acedo↗

arXiv:2606.16524v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Engineered robust losses such as Huber, Student-$t$, and generalised cross-entropy make supervised models tolerant of contamination but cannot answer which observations are corrupted. We introduce Neural Bayesian Anomaly Mitigation (NBAM), a general-purpose drop-in loss derived from a Bayesian latent-switch mixture model: the marginal likelihood defines a robust supervised loss, and the associated posterior defines an unsupervised contamination classifier. Like Huber or Student-$t$, NBAM can replace the standard training loss in any supervised pipeline; unlike them, it additionally learns a structured contamination model and returns a calibrated per-sample contamination posterior. A learned input-dependent prior $\pi_\phi(x)$ captures the spatial locality of contamination, so that samples near known corruptions are more likely to be flagged, while an Occam penalty emerges automatically and regularises against over-flagging. On CIFAR-10 with asymmetric label contamination, NBAM recovers the structure of the corruption process without supervision: the contamination posterior separates clean from corrupted samples, and the learned anomaly head identifies the direction of every label-flip pair. Alongside these capabilities, NBAM outperforms the four robust-loss baselines considered here at contamination rates 0.2-0.6.

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

Region-Adaptive Sampling for Diffusion Transformers

Authors:
Ziming Liu↗Yifan Yang↗Chengruidong Zhang↗Yiqi Zhang↗Lili Qiu↗Yang You↗Yuqing Yang↗

Diffusion models (DMs) have become the leading choice for generative tasks across diverse domains. However, their reliance on multiple sequential forward passes significantly limits real-time performance. Previous acceleration methods have primarily focused on reducing the number of sampling steps or reusing intermediate results, failing to leverage variations across spatial regions within the image due to the constraints of convolutional U-Net structures. By harnessing the flexibility of Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) in handling variable number of tokens, we introduce RAS, a novel, training-free sampling strategy that dynamically assigns different sampling ratios to regions within an image based on the focus of the DiT model. Our key observation is that during each sampling step, the model concentrates on semantically meaningful regions, and these areas of focus exhibit strong continuity across consecutive steps. Leveraging this insight, RAS updates only the regions currently in focus, while other regions are updated using cached noise from the previous step. The model's focus is determined based on the output from the preceding step, capitalizing on the temporal consistency we observed. We evaluate RAS on Stable Diffusion 3 and Lumina-Next-T2I, achieving speedups up to 2.36x and 2.51x, respectively, with minimal degradation in generation quality. Additionally, a user study reveals that RAS delivers comparable qualities under human evaluation while achieving a 1.6x speedup. Our approach makes a significant step towards more efficient diffusion transformers, enhancing their potential for real-time applications.

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

Not All Skills Help: Measuring and Repairing Agent Knowledge

Authors:
Yixuan Wang↗Yiyang Zhou↗Yiming Liang↗Congyu Zhang↗Fuxiao Liu↗Jiawei Zhou↗Huaxiu Yao↗

LLM agents can improve without weight updates by accumulating natural-language skills from experience, but current systems entrust every decision about which skills to keep and how to apply them to LLM judgment alone. We argue that this conflates two distinct roles: generating a skill from experience is a creative act that judgment handles well, while deciding whether that skill actually helps requires empirical evidence across many tasks. Measuring per-skill causal contributions via randomized masking, we find that skill libraries exhibit pervasive causal heterogeneity: individual skills routinely help on some task types while hurting on others, yet their opposing effects cancel in aggregate, making them invisible to global curation methods. We propose ASSAY, a framework that separates generation from curation: it computes a per-skill causal attribution on a small development set, restructures the library offline, and suppresses skills with negative predicted effect for each test task. Across seven base models spanning four providers and two benchmarks (AppWorld and tau-bench), ASSAY consistently improves over prior skill-curation approaches. On AppWorld's hardest split, DeepSeek-V3 achieves 69.3% task-goal completion (47.4% relative improvement), a new state of the art among all published methods including weight-tuned approaches. On tau-bench retail, GPT-4.1 improves by 8.7% relative, advancing past o4-mini, o1, and GPT-4.5 on the public leaderboard without any weight modification. Ablation traces the dominant gain to per-task masking, confirming that the bottleneck is matching skills to tasks at inference time, not removing bad skills globally. Code is available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/assay.

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

A Perception vs. Distortion Perspective on Score-Based Generative Channel Estimation

Authors:
Marco Skocaj↗Lukas Eller↗Mate Boban↗

arXiv:2606.16815v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Driven by their remarkable success in computer vision and inverse problem solving, score-based models are increasingly applied to wireless communications, where they show promise across a range of physical-layer tasks. However, despite this growing interest, the current literature often lacks a rigorous analysis of when score-matching offers a tangible advantage over traditional discriminative learning. This paper aims to address this gap through the use-case of channel estimation, a fundamental inverse problem in wireless systems. We present a theoretically grounded interpretation of score-based channel estimation through the lens of the perception-distortion tradeoff, identifying the conditions where score matching excels as well as its key limitations. In particular, by modeling downstream wireless tasks (e.g., capacity maximization) as functionals of the channel estimation process, we quantify the excess risk incurred by standard distortion-minimization approaches. Extensive numerical results show that under high predictive uncertainty, the large excess risk gap can be offset by score-based estimation, enabling near Bayesian-optimal precoding via the learned posterior, whereas in the low predictive uncertainty regime, discriminative distortion-minimization approaches are preferable due to lower complexity and more efficient use of model capacity.

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09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Experimental Tabletop Petz recovery of a photonic qubit

Authors:
Hui Li↗Jinyan Chen↗Yue Pan↗Liang Xu↗Minjeong Song↗Valerio Scarani↗Lijian Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.12020v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The quantum information lost in open evolutions cannot be fully recovered, but partial recovery is possible. The Petz recovery map guarantees almost optimal recovery, notably if the chosen reference state is close to the real one. This map has been widely used in theoretical studies, but has been the object of only a handful of experimental realisations, typically under a single fixed noise model. In this work, we describe and implement the Petz recovery map for a versatile class of qubit channels with tunable decoherence and dissipation. The setup we realize is also the first experimental example of ``tabletop reversibility'': for a good range of choices of the reference state, the Petz recovery map can be implemented with the same devices as the forward dissipative evolution, whose effect it is partially undoing. Our results demonstrate that the Petz recovery map can be resource-efficiently realized without requiring complex ancillary resources, providing a feasible pathway for mitigating information loss in quantum systems.

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

Synthetic Counteradaptation: A Principle of Human-AI Co-evolution

Authors:
Ivar Frisch↗Jackie Kay↗Philip Moreira Tomei↗

arXiv:2606.15503v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we introduce the concept of synthetic counteradaptation, a process where human and AI systems co-evolve by adapting to each other's strategies and behaviors. Synthetic counteradaptation occurs when AI systems develop novel strategies or social protocols, prompting humans to extract insights and adapt their own behaviors in response, leading to the emergence of new agent interaction dynamics. To illustrate these dynamics, we analyze examples from various contexts, including the game of Go, mixed-motive social interactions, and geopolitical simulations. By exploring these cases, we demonstrate how synthetic counteradaptation provides a framework for understanding the recursive and co-evolutionary nature of human-AI interactions in multi-agent environments.

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11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

The Impact of Pregnant Womens Dietary Behavior on the Physiological Adaptation Paradox and Maternal-Fetal Resource Conflict in Conflict Settings: A Predictive Analytical Study

Authors:
Al-Wesabi↗M. M↗Eskander↗N. A↗

This scientific study aims to assess the level of awareness, nutritional knowledge, and actual behavioral practices among pregnant women in the Capital District of Sanaa, Republic of Yemen, and to determine their impact on the health and clinical indicators of the mother and fetus under complex conflict conditions. The study employed a descriptive-analytical approach based on a simple random sample of 200 pregnant women attending government-run hospitals and specialized medical centers in the Capital District. Field data were collected during December 2025 using a structured and validated questionnaire consisting of 42 items measuring demographic variables, awareness, practices, barriers, and health outcomes. The results of the statistical analysis using SPSS software showed a high level of nutritional awareness (87%) and healthy dietary practices (80%) among the sample participants. Simple and multiple linear regression tests revealed a statistically significant effect of awareness and practices in explaining 20.2% of the variance in the health status of the mother and fetus (R{superscript 2}= 0.204, p < 0.001). The study demonstrated that actual behavioral practices have greater predictive power ({beta}=0.316, p=0.001) compared to theoretical cognitive awareness ({beta}=0.232, p=0.005) in determining clinical outcomes for the mother and fetus, highlighting the widening gap between knowledge and behavior under structural pressures. "Morning sickness" (80%) and the deterioration of "family economic status" (71%) emerged as the greatest physiological and material barriers to proper nutrition. With their inferential impact established as an extension of the maternal-fetal resource allocation conflict in a physiologically and economically challenging environment, the study also identified significant differences in nutritional behavior and health outcomes in favor of housewives and mothers who are more educated and have higher incomes, while no significant differences were recorded attributable to obstetric variables such as stage or order of pregnancy. The study offers a unique theoretical and practical contribution by formulating an integrated causal model that demonstrates that the fetus acts as a biological drain on the mothers cellular and mineral reserves in a war environment, which necessitates directing antenatal care and support programs toward effective behavioral empowerment and nutritional support to overcome the structural and material barriers faced by pregnant women.

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12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Temperature driven false vacuum decay in coherently coupled Bose superfluids

Authors:
Paniyanchatha Moolayil Sivasankar↗Franco Dalfovo↗Alessio Recati↗Arko Roy↗

arXiv:2602.03834v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The relaxation of a quantum field from a metastable state (false vacuum) to a stable one (true vacuum), also known as false vacuum decay, is a fundamental problem in quantum field theory and cosmology. We study this phenomenon using a two-dimensional interacting and coherently coupled Bose-Bose mixture, a platform that has already been employed experimentally to investigate false vacuum decay in one dimension. In such a mixture, it is possible to define an effective magnetization that acts as a quantum field variable. Using the Stochastic Gross-Pitaevskii equation (SGPE), we prepare thermal equilibrium states in the false vacuum and extract decay rates from the magnetization dynamics. The decay rates show an exponential dependence on temperature, in line with the thermal theory of instantons. Since the SGPE is based on complex scalar fields, it also allows us to explore the behavior of the phase, which turns out to become dynamic during decay. Our results confirm the SGPE as an effective tool for studying coupled magnetization and phase dynamics and the associated instanton physics in ultracold quantum gases.

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

HAMON: Passive Optical Sequence Mixing for Long-Horizon Forecasting

Authors:
Alper Y{\i}ld{\i}r{\i}m↗

arXiv:2606.17028v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Simple linear and frequency-domain models remain surprisingly competitive in long-horizon time-series forecasting, and recent mechanistic evidence suggests that standard forecasting benchmarks may not require the dense superposed representations that make transformers powerful in other domains. This raises a substrate-level question: if the core forecasting operator is often low-complexity and approximately linear, does it need to be implemented as learned digital temporal mixing? We introduce HAMON, a passive diffractive optical forecasting core in which historical values are encoded onto an optical aperture, future positions are left dark, and cascaded trainable phase masks with free-space diffraction shape the forecast directly in the output field. At inference, prediction is performed by a single passive optical propagation pass with no trainable digital sequence-mixing layer. Across standard benchmarks, HAMON outperforms the strongest digital baselines considered on ETTm2 at all horizons and on ETTh2 at all but the longest horizon, improving MSE by up to 14\% and doing so consistently across horizons rather than at isolated points. It is competitive on Weather and trails the strongest baselines on the remaining ETT settings and on the high-channel-count Traffic and Electricity datasets. Phase encoding, intensity-compatible readout, and phase-scrambling ablations, together with a TorchOptics cross-simulator check, indicate that the forecasts arise from the data-bearing optical field rather than from a digital forecasting head. Because the passive core uses standard Fourier optics, HAMON defines a concrete target for optical hardware and for passive physical sequence mixing.

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

TacCoRL: Integrating Tactile Feedback into VLA via Simulation

Authors:
Siyu Ma↗Yuqi Liang↗Chang Yu↗Yunuo Chen↗Hao Su↗Yixin Zhu↗Yin Yang↗Chenfanfu Jiang↗

arXiv:2606.11743v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models provide strong visual, language, and action priors for robot manipulation, but visual observations alone often miss the local contact state required for contact-rich tasks. We present TacCoRL, a scalable framework that injects Tactile feedback into VLA policies and improves them through sim-real Co-training and simulation-based reinforcement learning (RL), without requiring large-scale tactile pretraining or extensive real-world contact exploration. The key idea is not only adding touch as an input, but learning how contact readings should modulate action responses in near-failure states that are rare in demonstrations and risky to collect on hardware. We use a real-aligned simulator as a closed-loop training environment for contact interaction. Mixed simulated and real trajectories first warm-start tactile-conditioned actions in the pretrained policy. Reinforcement learning with verifiable task rewards then optimizes the policy using simulated contact rollouts. It reinforces tactile-conditioned actions that lead to task completion, while a supervised objective on real trajectories keeps the refined policy anchored to deployment visual, tactile, and action distributions. The resulting policy transfers directly to the real robot without privileged simulation state or online real-world RL. Across four bimanual contact-rich tasks, the final visuo-tactile policy achieves an average success rate of 72.5%, compared to baseline of 50.0%. Result videos and more details are available at https://tac-corl.github.io/

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15.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-09

Don’t compete, collaborate: why collective funding applications are the future

Authors:
Sajedeh Rasti↗

Scientists with disparate expertise writing grants together can identify knowledge gaps and drive progress — but systems must change to incentivize them. Scientists with disparate expertise writing grants together can identify knowledge gaps and drive progress — but systems must change to incentivize them.

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16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Is ChatGPT Fair for Recommendation? Evaluating Fairness in Large Language Model Recommendation

Authors:
Jizhi Zhang↗Keqin Bao↗Yang Zhang↗Wenjie Wang↗Fuli Feng↗Xiangnan He↗

The remarkable achievements of Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to the emergence of a novel recommendation paradigm – Recommendation via LLM (RecLLM). Nevertheless, it is important to note that LLMs may contain social prejudices, and therefore, the fairness of recommendations made by RecLLM requires further investigation. To avoid the potential risks of RecLLM, it is imperative to evaluate the fairness of RecLLM with respect to various sensitive attributes on the user side. Due to the differences between the RecLLM paradigm and the traditional recommendation paradigm, it is problematic to directly use the fairness benchmark of traditional recommendation. To address the dilemma, we propose a novel benchmark called Fairness of Recommendation via LLM (FaiRLLM). This benchmark comprises carefully crafted metrics and a dataset that accounts for eight sensitive attributes1 in two recommendation scenarios: music and movies. By utilizing our FaiRLLM benchmark, we conducted an evaluation of ChatGPT and discovered that it still exhibits unfairness to some sensitive attributes when generating recommendations. Our code and dataset can be found at https://github.com/jizhi-zhang/FaiRLLM.

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

CoRe-MoE: Contrastive Reweighted Mixture of Experts for Multi-Terrain Humanoid Locomotion with Gait Adaptation

Authors:
Kailun Huang↗Zikang Xie↗Yanzhe Xie↗Panpan Liao↗Fanghai Zhang↗Yanheng Mai↗Wenhao Xu↗Yunheng Wang↗Renjing Xu↗Haohui Huang↗Chenguang Yang↗

arXiv:2606.04718v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Humans primarily rely on walking and running to traverse complex terrains. Similarly, humanoid robots should be able to smoothly transition between walking and running while maintaining natural and stable locomotion. However, unifying gait transition and multi-terrain adaptation within a single policy remains challenging due to gradient interference between tasks and the distribution shift caused by terrain variations. Although Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures can mitigate multi-skill interference, direct joint training often fails to achieve clear expert specialization. To address these challenges, we propose CoRe-MoE, a two-stage reinforcement learning framework that decouples gait generation from terrain adaptation. In the first stage, a stable locomotion policy is learned to produce natural walking and running behaviors with smooth transitions. In the second stage, a terrain-aware MoE branch is introduced, and the gating network is trained with a contrastive objective to learn structured terrain representations and promote expert specialization. The final action is obtained through weighted fusion of the base gait policy and the terrain-aware branch, enabling the policy to preserve stable locomotion while adapting to complex terrains. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms baseline approaches in terms of success rate, locomotion stability, and multi-terrain adaptability. Furthermore, zero-shot deployment on a Unitree G1 humanoid robot validates the effectiveness of our framework, achieving robust walking and running across stairs, slopes, steps, obstacles, and unstructured outdoor terrains while maintaining accurate foothold control and dynamic stability.

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18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Expressivity of Quantum Reservoir Computers

Authors:
Nils-Erik Sch\"utte↗Niclas G\"otting↗Hauke M\"untinga↗Meike List↗Daniel Brunner↗Christopher Gies↗

arXiv:2501.15528v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Using Hamiltonian encoding to inject an input into parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs), the output of the PQC can be written as truncated Fourier series. In recent years, the expressivity of PQCs was established as the number of frequencies contained in this Fourier series. While this concept has also been applied to other quantum machine learning (QML) paradigms, a clear notion of expressivity for temporal information processing with quantum systems is still lacking. Here, we introduce such a notion to the field of quantum reservoir computing (QRC). We analytically derive an expression for the readouts showing that the output of a QRC can be interpreted as a multi-dimensional Fourier series. We give a formula for the growth of expressivity induced by the sequential information injection, which we corroborate with numerical simulations, calculating explicitly the number of multi-dimensional output functions which can be generated from the readouts. Our results show that the specific interplay between system size, input encoding, and memory time gives rise to a boundary on the system size beyond which it is obstructive to further increase the reservoir size in extreme scrambling systems. We propose a recipe for determining this maximal system size for a given QRC setup.

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

When to Trust, How to Distill: Multi-Foundation Model Guidance for Lightweight, Robust Scientific Time Series Forecasting

Authors:
Rupasree Dey↗Abdul Matin↗Nathan Orwick↗Yao Zhang↗Shrideep Pallickara↗Sangmi Lee Pallickara↗

arXiv:2606.19363v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The deployment of Time-Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) in physical sciences is hindered by a critical trade-off: while these models encode rich, universal temporal dynamics, they suffer from severe distributional misalignment when applied zero-shot to specific scientific domains, and their computational cost prohibits deployment in edge-computing sensor networks. We address a fundamental challenge: How can we extract latent structural knowledge from misaligned foundation models (FM) to train lightweight, specialized forecasters? We propose Gated Uncertainty-Aware Routing for Distillation (Guard), a novel framework that reframes multiteacher distillation as an instance-wise decision process with two adaptive mechanisms: (1) a Contextual Router that dynamically selects the most relevant teacher based on local input statistics, exploiting complementarity across diverse foundation models; and (2) an Uncertainty-Gated Temperature mechanism that acts as a "circuit-breaker," automatically attenuating distillation strength when teacher confidence diverges from domain reality. We evaluate our proposed lightweight framework on four climate-critical domains: meteorology, ecosystem carbon flux, soil moisture, and energy grids. Our method significantly reduces RMSE relative to a fixed-weight multi-teacher distillation baseline, successfully distilling knowledge from pretrained FMs (teachers) even when they exhibit suboptimal zero-shot accuracy due to distribution shift between the original and target data domains. We demonstrate that these domain-misaligned teachers can still serve as critical correctives, outperforming the globally superior FMs on 28.5% of the hardest instances. Ultimately, this enables high-precision scientific forecasting suitable for resource-constrained edge deployment. Code is available at https://github.com/RupasreeDey/GUARD-KDD2026.

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20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

From Parameters to Feature Space: Task Arithmetic for Backdoor Mitigation in Model Merging

Authors:
Zhenqian Zhu↗Yamin Hu↗Yiya Diao↗Weixiang Li↗Haodong Li↗Wenjian Luo↗

arXiv:2606.12498v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model merging (MM) has gained significant attention as a cost-effective approach to integrate multiple task-specific models into a unified model. However, recent work reveals that MM is highly susceptible to backdoor attacks. Existing defenses based on task arithmetic often fail to eliminate backdoors without substantially degrading clean-task performance, owing to their reliance on direct parameter-space editing. To address this gap, we propose Linear Feature Path Minimization (LFPM), a backdoor mitigation framework for model merging, which introduces an anti-backdoor task vector into the backdoored merged model. Unlike prior approaches, LFPM formulates the backdoor robustness of the merged model from a unified feature-space perspective under the Cross-Task Linearity (CTL) framework, which leverages the approximate linearity of features across tasks. This perspective guides the optimization of the anti-backdoor task to suppress backdoors while preserving clean-task performance. Furthermore, we introduce an effective optimization mechanism based on gradient accumulation and loss path-integral, ensuring robust backdoor suppression along the interpolation path. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LFPM consistently exhibits strong robustness against backdoor attacks in both full fine-tuning and Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) settings.

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21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Socioeconomic inequalities in smoking prevalence and intensity in Germany: A repeated cross-sectional analysis from 1998 to 2024

Authors:
Emmert-Fees↗K. M. F↗Meyer↗Laxy↗Hanselmann↗

Background: Smoking inequalities by socioeconomic status have widened consistently in Germany, but sex-specific trends after 2013 and inequalities in daily cigarette consumption among smokers (intensity) are unknown. We analyzed trends in absolute and relative socioeconomic inequalities in smoking prevalence and intensity among German adults across three decades. Methods: We used 14 waves (1998-2024) of population-representative cross-sectional data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to estimate sex-specific trends in smoking prevalence and intensity in adults aged 25-64. Inequalities were quantified across strata of education, occupation, and equivalized household income using the absolute and relative concentration index with 95% bootstrap confidence intervals. Results: Overall smoking prevalence declined from 35.05% (CI: [33.90%, 36.20%] in 1998 to 22.19% (CI: [21.15%, 23.24%]) in 2024, and mean intensity from 17.49 (CI: [17.09,17.90]) to 13.33 (CI: [12.88, 13.79]) cigarettes/day. Over this period sex-differences in both outcomes narrowed almost completely. Absolute and relative inequalities in smoking prevalence widened across all SES dimensions, particularly for education and occupation. By 2024, inequalities were larger among women than men driven by a stagnating or rising smoking prevalence among low-SES women at least until 2018 alongside continued declines in higher-SES women and for men. Inequalities in smoking intensity, particularly related to income, were generally smaller than those in prevalence. Conclusion: Socioeconomic smoking inequalities in Germany widened from 1998 to 2024 primarily driven by reductions among higher-SES groups and increases in low-SES women. However, recent reductions in low-SES women may indicate a new phase in the smoking epidemic. Health equity considerations should be integrated into a targeted German tobacco control strategy.

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22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

A Machine Learning Pipeline for Scalable Annotation of Patient-Ventilator Dyssynchrony from Bedside Ventilator Data

Authors:
Tlimat↗Mayampurath↗Safadi↗Kalehoff↗Seam↗Johnson↗R. B↗Morris↗Bodduluri↗Bhatt↗S. P↗Afshar↗…

Objective: Patient-ventilator dyssynchrony (PVD) is a common and clinically consequential problem in critically ill patients receiving invasive mechanical ventilation. Yet automated identification of PVD subtypes at scale remains an unmet clinical need, owing to the lack of large annotated bedside waveform datasets. Methods: We developed and validated a semi-supervised algorithm for automated annotation of PVD. In two medical ICUs at a tertiary academic center, bedside devices continuously collected airway flow and pressure waveforms from the ventilators. We developed a software interface with an information retrieval system that grouped similar breaths for expert human review, yielding 1,542,296 labeled breaths across eight categories: 2 labels for breath delivery mode, 5 labels for PVD subtypes, and 1 label denoting a normal breath. Two pulmonary physicians with expertise in ventilator training and education provided the expert reference labels. We trained an initial classification model on a model-derivation set of 771,148 breaths (divided into training and validation) and evaluated it on a hold-out test set of 771,149 breaths A semi-supervised approach was utilized to extend labeling to an additional 12,965,000 unlabeled breaths. Results: The supervised model performed well across all labels, with Macro-F1 scores between 0.96 and 1.00. Semi-supervised learning across 12 rounds expanded the training set from 771,148 to 8,563,995 breaths without significant performance degradation. Conclusion: We developed a practical and scalable system for automated PVD annotation that performed well across all subtypes. This work provides a reproducible foundation for automated PVD labeling to support the development of machine-learning-based clinical decision support systems for identifying patient-level asynchrony.

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23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Towards Deep Learning Surrogate for the Forward Problem in Electrocardiology: A Scalable Alternative to Physics-Based Models

Authors:
Shaheim Ogbomo-Harmitt↗Cesare Magnetti↗Chiara Spota↗Jakub Grzelak↗Oleg Aslanidi↗

arXiv:2512.13765v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The forward problem in electrocardiology, computing body surface potentials from cardiac electrical activity, is traditionally solved using physics-based models such as the bidomain or monodomain equations. While accurate, these approaches are computationally expensive, limiting their use in real-time and large-scale clinical applications. We propose a proof-of-concept deep learning (DL) framework as an efficient surrogate for forward solvers. The model adopts a time-dependent, attention-based sequence-to-sequence architecture to predict electrocardiogram (ECG) signals from cardiac voltage propagation maps. A hybrid loss combining Huber loss with a spectral entropy term was introduced to preserve both temporal and frequency-domain fidelity. Using 2D tissue simulations incorporating healthy, fibrotic, and gap junction-remodelled conditions, the model achieved high accuracy (mean $R^2 = 0.99 \pm 0.01$). Ablation studies confirmed the contributions of convolutional encoders, time-aware attention, and spectral entropy loss. These findings highlight DL as a scalable, cost-effective alternative to physics-based solvers, with potential for clinical and digital twin applications.

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

A large-scale pipeline for LLM-assisted corpus annotation: variation and change in the English consider construction

Authors:
Cameron Morin↗Matti Marttinen Larsson↗

As natural language corpora expand at an unprecedented rate, manual annotation remains a significant methodological bottleneck in corpus linguistic work. We address this challenge by presenting a scalable pipeline for automating grammatical annotation in voluminous corpora using large language models (LLMs). Unlike previous supervised and iterative approaches, our method employs a four-phase workflow: prompt engineering, pre-hoc evaluation, automated batch processing, and post-hoc validation. We demonstrate the pipeline's accessibility and effectiveness through a diachronic case study of variation in the English evaluative consider construction (consider X as/to be/{\O} Y). We annotate 143,933 'consider' concordance lines from the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) via the OpenAI API in under 60 hours, achieving 98%+ accuracy on two sophisticated annotation procedures. A Bayesian multinomial GAM fitted to 44,527 true positives of the evaluative construction reveals previously undocumented genre-specific trajectories of change, enabling us to advance new hypotheses about the relationship between register formality and competing pressures of morphosyntactic reduction and enhancement. Our results suggest that LLMs can perform a range of data preparation tasks at scale with minimal human intervention, unlocking substantive research questions previously beyond practical reach, though implementation requires attention to costs, licensing, and other ethical considerations.

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

DIRECT: When and Where Should You Allocate Test-Time Compute in Embodied Planners?

Authors:
Jadelynn Dao↗Milan Ganai↗Yasmina Abukhadra↗Ajay Sridhar↗Mozhgan Nasr Azadani↗Katie Luo↗Clark Barrett↗Jiajun Wu↗Chelsea Finn↗Marco Pavone↗

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed as high-level planners for embodied agents, with an emerging strategy of scaling test-time compute to improve capability. However, we observe that doing so increases latency, token usage, and FLOPs while yielding uneven, often diminishing gains in downstream success, limiting where embodied agents can be deployed. We argue that choosing when and where to spend test-time compute is central to bringing frontier performance to the real world. We introduce DIRECT, a routing framework that uses multimodal scene context to allocate compute per prompt, improving the success–cost Pareto frontier over fixed model selection. Across three dominant scaling axes, namely chain-of-thought depth, model size, and memory history, our experiments on VLABench and RoboMME show that test-time compute is not a uniform lever: different axes yield qualitatively distinct capability gains. We validate these insights on a physical Franka arm in a DROID setup spanning zero-shot manipulation and long-horizon chaining, where our router matches or exceeds a stronger model's success rate at up to 65% lower average latency. Ultimately, our results show that naively scaling test-time compute is wasteful, and that DIRECT can provide frontier-level embodied planning in robotic systems at a fraction of the cost. Project page can be found at jadee-dao.github.io/direct/.

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