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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

REDACT: A Systematically Controlled Multilingual Benchmark for Personal Information Detection

Benchmark infrastructure for personally identifiable information (PII) detection remains limited: existing corpora cover few entity types, use ad hoc generation conditions, and do not show which surface conditions cause detector failures. We present REDACT, a systematically controlled multilingual PII benchmark with 13,427 records, 324,078 entity annotations, 51 entity types, 4,127 surface-form patterns, and 25 languages across 9 scripts. A strength-2 covering-array sampler controls nine generation axes: domain, format, difficulty, length, density, code-switching, language, adjacency, and co-occurrence. Three entity-level metadata fields (disclosure status, disclosure form, and a GDPR-aligned sensitivity tier) enable stratified evaluation beyond aggregate or per-type F1. From the full benchmark, we evaluate five detectors (Presidio, GLiNER, the OpenAI Privacy Filter, GPT-4.1, and Claude Sonnet 4.6) on a locked, language-stratified sample of 1,000 records. Aggregate F1 masks an architecture-dependent failure structure: the rule-based detector performs poorly on the highest-stakes data, including HIGH-sensitivity categories (recall 0.07) and non-verbatim disclosure forms, while the LLM detectors remain more robust, with the HIGH tier as their strongest sensitivity slice. A three-model reference-free LLM-as-judge assessment corroborates that sensitivity-tier assignment is the task's hardest axis. We release the benchmark, schema, prompts, and stratified evaluation harness.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Rethinking Cross-lingual Gaps from a Statistical Viewpoint

Any piece of knowledge is usually expressed in one or a handful of natural languages on the web or in any large corpus. Large Language Models (LLMs) act as a bridge by acquiring knowledge from a source language and making it accessible when queried using target languages. A cross-lingual gap is a drop in accuracy incurred when querying knowledge in a target language rather than the source language. Existing research focused on modeling or training failures leading to cross-lingual gaps. In this work, we take an alternative view to characterize the nature of cross-lingual error, and hypothesize that the variance of responses in the target language is a key cause of this gap. For the first time, we formalize the cross-lingual gap in terms of biased and unbiased errors. We empirically validate our hypothesis through multiple inference-time interventions that control variance and reduce the cross-lingual gap. We demonstrate a few test-time ensemble methods that reduce response variance, and thereby improve source-target transfer scores by up to 12 absolute points yielding relative gains of 8% to over 50% across various LLMs.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

HistoRAG: Embedding Historical Methodology in Retrieval-Augmented Generation Through Critical Technical Practice

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is the prevailing architecture for grounding language model outputs in external evidence, yet its dominant evaluation paradigms and default configurations remain oriented toward factual question-answering. For interpretive disciplines such as historical studies, RAG embeds assumptions that conflict with scholarly practice. We introduce HistoRAG, a framework that translates historiographical principles into concrete architectural interventions. Separated retrieval and generation decouples source discovery from interpretation, temporal windowing enforces balanced source representation across the research period as a methodological requirement of historical inquiry, and LLM-as-judge evaluation makes relevance judgments transparent and contestable. We evaluate these interventions using SPIEGELragged, applied to 102,189 articles from Der Spiegel (1950-1979). Each intervention addresses a measurable deficiency in standard RAG: era-specific vocabulary retrieves zero chunks from the 1950s when using 1970s terminology, evidence of the temporal skew that motivates windowing; vector similarity and LLM-assessed relevance correlate only weakly (Spearman rho = 0.275), motivating post-retrieval evaluation; and keyword-based and semantic retrieval surface largely disjoint source pools, motivating an architecture in which both operate as complementary retrieval layers under a shared LLM evaluation filter. We also introduce the concept of Zwischentexte (intermediate texts that function as interpretive proposals rather than findings) as a framework for responsible integration of LLM-generated text into scholarly practice. The architecture offers a model for how domain-specific epistemological commitments can be translated into RAG design decisions, and may transfer to other interpretive disciplines working with large corpora.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Rule2Text: A Framework for Generating and Evaluating Natural Language Explanations of Knowledge Graph Rules

Knowledge graphs (KGs) can be enhanced through rule mining; however, the resulting logical rules are often difficult for humans to interpret due to their inherent complexity and the idiosyncratic labeling conventions of individual KGs. This work presents Rule2Text, a comprehensive framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to generate natural language explanations for mined logical rules, thereby improving KG accessibility and usability. We conduct extensive experiments using multiple datasets, including Freebase variants (FB-CVT-REV, FB+CVT-REV, and FB15k-237) as well as the ogbl-biokg dataset, with rules mined using AMIE 3.5.1. We systematically evaluate several LLMs across a comprehensive range of prompting strategies, including zero-shot, few-shot, variable type incorporation, and Chain-of-Thought reasoning. To systematically assess models' performance, we conduct a human evaluation of generated explanations on correctness and clarity. To address evaluation scalability, we develop and validate an LLM-as-a-judge framework that demonstrates strong agreement with human evaluators. Leveraging the best-performing model (Gemini 2.0 Flash), LLM judge, and human-in-the-loop feedback, we construct high-quality ground truth datasets, which we use to fine-tune the open-source Zephyr model. Our results demonstrate significant improvements in explanation quality after fine-tuning, with particularly strong gains in the domain-specific dataset. Additionally, we integrate a type inference module to support KGs lacking explicit type information. All code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/idirlab/KGRule2NL.

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

One Transit Is All You Need: Detecting Exoplanets Through Learned Stellar Behaviour with EXOVEIL

arXiv:2606.02778v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: I present EXOVEIL, a transit detection system that learns what a star's brightness should look like and flags when reality disagrees. Unlike existing systems that require phase-folded input, EXOVEIL operates on raw flux time series and can detect planets that transit only once.A Transformer world model, trained on 16,499 Kepler light curves with transit-masked self-supervised learning, predicts expected stellar flux. A matched-filter detector with variance weighting extracts transit signals from the prediction residuals. A learned classifier (XGBoost) separates planets from false positives, achieving AUC 0.938 on Kepler DR25. Applied to single-transit injection-recovery, EXOVEIL recovers 32% of transits at 1000 ppm depth a task where all classification-based systems score 0% by construction. A blind search of 3,737 Kepler stars yields 179 new transit-like signals not present in the DR25 TCE catalogue, including 46 monotransit candidates. Applied withoutretraining to 47 confirmed TESS planets in the PLATO LOPS2 field, EXOVEIL achieves 100% recovery, demonstrating zero-shot cross-mission transfer. At PLATO's 25-second cadence, detection reaches 100 ppm – approaching the Earth-analog regime. I provide the first application of conformal prediction to transit detection (95.9% empirical coverage) and release the system as pip install exoveil with pretrained weights and a candidate catalogue.

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

Moebius: 0.2B Lightweight Image Inpainting Framework with 10B-Level Performance

While 10B-level industrial foundation models have pushed the boundaries of image inpainting, their prohibitive computational costs severely hinder practical deployment. Constructing a highly optimized task-specific specialist offers a promising solution; however, extreme structural compression inevitably triggers a severe representation bottleneck. To conquer this, we propose Moebius, a highly efficient lightweight inpainting framework. We systematically reconstruct the diffusion backbone by introducing the Local-$\lambda$ Mix Interaction ($L\lambda MI$) block. Comprising Local-$\lambda$ and Interactive-$\lambda$ modules, it elegantly summarizes spatial contexts and global semantic priors into fixed-size linear matrices, preserving complex latent interactions while drastically shedding parameters. Furthermore, to unlock the full representational capacity of this highly compact architecture, we synergistically pair it with an adaptive multi-granularity distillation strategy. Operating strictly within the latent space to avoid expensive pixel-space decoding, this strategy dynamically balances multiple gradient-based losses to achieve high-fidelity alignment. Extensive experiments across natural and portrait benchmarks demonstrate that this optimal synergy enables Moebius to rival or even surpass the generation quality of the 10B-level industrial generalist FLUX.1-Fill-Dev. Remarkably, Moebius achieves this using less than 2\% of the parameters (0.22B vs. 11.9B) while delivering a $>15\times$ acceleration in total inference time, setting a new efficiency standard for high-fidelity inpainting. Project page at https://hustvl.github.io/Moebius.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Bounding Boxes as Goals: Language-Conditioned Grasping via Neuro-Symbolic Planning

For robotics to be effectively integrated into household or industrial environments, machines must adapt to natural-language prompts in real time. Although Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have enabled zero-shot generalization in robot task and motion planning (TAMP), current state-of-the-art approaches often remain computationally "heavyweight" or require extensive training on thousands of demonstrations. We present GRASP (Grounded Reasoning and Symbolic Planning), a framework designed as a step toward open-vocabulary tabletop manipulation. Our approach leverages a pretrained VLM to translate natural-language queries into neuro-symbolic goal states, grounded in the physical world via a bounding-box detection pipeline. Unlike methods that rely on fixed color lists or hard-coded coordinates, GRASP enables robots to interpret abstract spatial concepts such as "top shelf" and execute tasks without additional fine-tuning. We achieve 73.3% overall success across 90 real-robot trials at three difficulty levels, requiring no task-specific training.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Grouped Query Experts: Mixture-of-Experts on GQA Self-Attention

arXiv:2606.20945v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Self-attention is central to Transformer performance and is often the most expensive part of the Transformer at long context lengths because its pairwise token interactions scale quadratically with sequence length. Standard dense attention also applies the same set of attention heads to every token regardless of token difficulty or information content. This uniform activation can waste compute, especially as sequences grow longer and attention cost increases rapidly. We propose Grouped Query Experts (GQE), a mixture-of-experts layer on top of grouped-query attention (GQA). Within each GQA group, a router selects k query-head experts per token while all key-value (KV) heads remain dense and unchanged. Thus, GQE keeps the KV cache benefits of GQA and reduces only the active query-head computation. On a fixed 30B token budget at the 250M parameter scale, GQE matches the all-active GQA baseline in downstream accuracy while activating half the query heads per token.

09.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Light slows down carbon nanotubes in water

Water-suspended carbon nanotubes move more slowly in green light, suggesting that excited electrons in the tubes couple to the water through ‘quantum friction’. Water-suspended carbon nanotubes move more slowly in green light, suggesting that excited electrons in the tubes couple to the water through ‘quantum friction’.

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

LM-SPT: LM-Aligned Semantic Distillation for Speech Tokenization

With the rapid progress of speech language models (SLMs), discrete speech tokens have emerged as a core interface between speech and text, enabling unified modeling across modalities. Recent speech tokenization approaches aim to isolate semantic information from low-level acoustics to better align with language models (LMs). In particular, previous methods use self-supervised learning (SSL) teachers such as HuBERT to extract semantic representations, which are then distilled into a semantic quantizer to suppress acoustic redundancy as well as capture content-related latent structures. However, these tokenizers often operate at relatively high frame rates, producing token sequences significantly longer than their textual counterparts and hindering seamless integration with pretrained LMs. Although recent methods attempt to reduce the token rate by applying uniform average pooling to SSL features, this can over-smooth content-bearing regions and dilute the structural information, thereby potentially limiting the LM alignment. To address this, we propose LM-SPT, an LM-aligned speech tokenization method based on semantic speech-resynthesis distillation. Instead of directly matching teacher and student features via pooling, LM-SPT resynthesizes speech from semantic tokens only and minimizes the discrepancy between representations extracted from the original and resynthesized waveforms using a frozen, LM-aligned speech encoder. This indirect supervision avoids rigid temporal alignment and encourages dedicated semantic units that are more semantically aligned with LMs under reduced frame rates. Experimental results show that the proposed LM-SPT consistently outperforms previous semantic-enhanced speech tokenizers when applied to SLMs for the tasks of automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech, even without compromising the speech reconstruction fidelity at the codec level.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

FloatDoor: Platform-Triggered Backdoors in LLMs

arXiv:2606.19535v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in sensitive settings such as software engineering, where their outputs directly shape downstream artifacts. Recent work has shown that an identical model can produce measurably different outputs depending on the deployment platform, a consequence of non-associative floating-point arithmetic and divergent kernel implementations. We study the security implications of this platform-dependent variability and uncover a novel attack surface on LLM deployments. We introduce FloatDoor, the first input-independent, platform-triggered backdoor attack against generative LLMs. The compromised model exhibits adversary-chosen behavior when served on a target platform and is otherwise benign. FloatDoor is realized through two lightweight LoRA adapters, one that amplifies inter-platform numerical divergence and one that binds the resulting platform signature to a malicious downstream task, while leaving aggregate model utility largely intact. FloatDoor exploits a pronounced time-of-check, time-of-use gap between model auditing and serving. We demonstrate FloatDoor on Qwen3-4B across a broad range of deployment targets, including NVIDIA GPUs, Google TPUs, AWS Graviton, and Alibaba Yitian-710. As a final case study, we show that FloatDoor reliably induces exploitable code vulnerabilities on a chosen target platform. Our results establish a new class of attacks on LLM deployments and underscore the pressing need for trusted model supply chains in sensitive, LLM-powered applications.

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

RE4: Transformation-aware Imitation of Object Interactions Using Manipulation Modes

arXiv:2606.24403v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Object interaction tasks have been a focus of advances in imitation learning. End-to-end methods, dominated by diffusion and flow-based variants have shown leaps in performance while sacrificing interpretability. Object-centric and pose-informed variants have had a role in learning from demonstration in manipulation tasks. In this paper, we revisit a few modern imitation learning benchmarks for object interactions, with the aim of composing a framework that repurposes principled theories of manipulation, preserving both performance and interpretability. For image observations, lightweight training is proposed for model-free pose estimation of the target object, using self-supervision over the demonstration data available for imitation learning. This information is then used to inform a manipulation mode-aware retrieval of a demonstration, a mode-aware transformation, a replan step that connects to the retrieval point while preserving mode constraints, and finally rolling out the transformed demonstration. These compose four key steps of the proposed RE4 framework, evaluated over state-based and image-based benchmarks in Push-T and Robomimic. An adversarial benchmark that evaluates sparse data regions of image-based Push-T showcases the robustness, further bolstered by indications from low-data regime experiments. The current work shows promise in using simple interpretable building blocks to learn manipulation skills.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Order statistics for edge eigenvectors of Wigner matrices

arXiv:2606.17425v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we establish a general comparison theorem for the order statistics of the edge eigenvectors for generalized Wigner matrices. Consequently, we derive the Gumbel law for the maximal edge eigenvector component and prove the universality of the Gaussian fluctuations of the order statistics in an intermediate regime close to the maximum. In addition, our comparison result also implies a quantitative first order estimate for moderately small order statistics.

14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Small moments of the sensitivity of polynomial threshold functions

arXiv:2606.16004v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In the first version of Chang, Slote, Volberg, and Zhang's paper [BSA_of_PTF], the authors modify a nice recursive approach due to Kane in [Correct_exponent_for_AS] where he bounded the average sensitivity of polynomial threshold functions. In [BSA_of_PTF] Kane's argument was adopted to estimate the boolean surface area of polynomial threshold function. The bridge is a combinatorial averaging lemma considering all balanced partitions. The lemma serves as a substitute for an additive property of average sensitivity. With the lemma, one can apply a Kane-type algorithm to derive a recurrence. Solving the recurrence then gives an upper bound of $e^{C_d \sqrt{\log n}}$ for the boolean surface area. In the second version of the same paper, the authors derive a polylog upper bound for BSA of PTFs. The difference is that they use a tail estimate for the sensitivity function. With the help of a polynomial restriction lemma in [poly_restriction] they sharpen the upper bound. It is noteworthy that when applying the polynomial restriction, each coordinate is put into each part independently with equal probability. As a result, a partition does not necessarily have equal-size blocks. In other words, it may not be balanced. In this note, we first investigate the effect of different partitioning. Second, we use the recursive method in the first version to derive a polylog upper bound for $\mathbb E[s(x)^{\eta}]$ where $\eta < 1/2$. It is interesting to note the phase transition that happens at $\eta=1/2$ in both versions of the proof (but in a completely different form). Section [PhaseTr-s] treats that.

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

Sustainable Materials Discovery in the Era of Artificial Intelligence

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

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

A Unified Framework for Runtime Verification and Model-Based Diagnosis in LOLA

arXiv:2606.23720v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present an integrated framework that unifies runtime verification and model-based diagnosis within the stream specification language LOLA. By encoding system descriptions, component health states, and observations into a single stream-based formalism, the approach enables continuous, online fault localization directly alongside fault detection, without requiring separate toolchains. The framework supports both time-invariant and transient faults, and naturally accommodates nondeterministic observations.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Optimal Toffoli-Depth Multi-Controlled Toffoli Decomposition in 2D Qubit Layout

arXiv:2606.15113v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The multi-controlled Toffoli (MCT) gate is a key primitive in quantum arithmetic, oracle construction, and quantum cryptanalysis. Although recent work has established optimal Toffoli-depth MCT decompositions under all-to-all qubit connectivity, their realization on near-term quantum hardware with restricted qubit connectivity remains largely unexplored. While general-purpose quantum mappers can route arbitrary circuits, they do not explicitly exploit the repeated interaction patterns inherent in MCT decompositions. In our present paper, we study architecture-aware mappings of optimal Toffoli-depth MCT decompositions onto restricted two-dimensional qubit layouts. We begin with a structured geometric placements that preserve the parallelism of state-of-the-art Toffoli and MCT decompositions with no additional depth overhead. We further introduce a motif-based packing framework in which decomposition layers are represented by interaction motifs derived from basic Toffoli gates. By embedding these motifs vertex-disjointly into hardware graphs, we characterize the minimum-size topologies supporting the required qubit resources and derive explicit bounds on the resulting depth overhead under tight qubit budgets. Finally, we compare these bounds with routing-aware placement heuristics and empirically evaluate the effectiveness of embedding different motifs across a range of hardware topologies.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

StagePilot: Stage-Level Planning for Long-Horizon Dialogue Simulation in Cybergrooming

Cybergrooming is an evolving threat to youth, requiring proactive educational interventions. We address this by modeling dialogue progression as a structured planning problem over stage-wise interactions. We propose StagePilot, a dialogue framework that separates stage-level planning from response generation, in which the model selects the next stage under constrained transitions and generates responses conditioned on it, enabling coherent and realistic progression. Reinforcement learning is used to learn stage-level policies from offline data, optimizing for both emotional alignment and goal-consistent progression. Our empirical experiments show that StagePilot generates more structured, coherent dialogue trajectories and reduces conversational stagnation compared to baselines; notably, the IQL+AWAC variant reaches the final stage more often while maintaining over 70% positive or neutral responses, yielding a 43% relative improvement.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

LaGO: Latent Action Guidance for Online Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.24669v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong potential for planning and sequential decision-making, but prior work often relies on using them as direct controllers, which requires precise action generation and can be unreliable in practice. This paper proposes Latent Action Guidance for Online Reinforcement Learning (LaGO), a framework that uses a pretrained LLM as a latent action prior to softly guide online policy optimization, rather than treating the LLM as an explicit planner or controller. Experiments on both a discrete-control benchmark, CLEVR-Robot, and a continuous-control benchmark, Meta-World, demonstrate that LaGO consistently improves both reward and success rate over Vanilla PPO. In particular, LaGO increases the average success rate from 15.1% to 27.2% on CLEVR-Robot and from 2.7% to 15.2% on Meta-World. Our analysis further shows that stronger pretrained LLMs provide more effective guidance, suggesting that LLM knowledge can improve planning and online decision-making.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

How Does the ReLU Activation Affect the Implicit Bias of Gradient Descent on High-dimensional Neural Network Regression?

arXiv:2603.04895v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Overparameterized ML models, including neural networks, typically induce underdetermined training objectives with multiple global minima. The implicit bias refers to the limiting global minimum that is attained by a common optimization algorithm, such as gradient descent (GD). In this paper, we characterize the implicit bias of GD for training a shallow ReLU model with the squared loss on high-dimensional random features. Prior work (Vardi and Shamir, 2021) showed that the implicit bias does not exist in the worst-case, or corresponds exactly to the minimum-$\ell_2$-norm interpolating solution under exactly orthogonal data (Boursier et al., 2022). Our work interpolates between these two extremes and shows that, for sufficiently high-dimensional random data, the implicit bias approximates the minimum-$\ell_2$-norm solution with high probability with a gap on the order $\Theta(\sqrt{n/||\lambda||_1})$, where $n$ is the number of training examples and $\lambda$ denotes the spectrum of the data covariance matrix. Our results are obtained through a novel primal-dual analysis that carefully tracks the evolution of predictions, data-span coefficients, as well as their interactions, and show that the ReLU activation pattern quickly stabilizes with high probability over random data.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Self-administered computerized cognitive training for cognitive deficits in individuals with metabolic syndrome: a randomized controlled trial

Background: Metabolic syndrome (MetS) has been associated with cognitive decline. Considering its increasing prevalence worldwide, the goal of this study was to evaluate the feasibility and efficacy of a short-term, self-administered computerized cognitive training programme in individuals with metabolic syndrome and low cognitive performances. Methods: Thirty six participants, aged 40-72 years (mean age: 57.8 years), were randomly assigned to the cognitive training or the passive control group. The cognitive training component of Long Lasting Memories (LLM) Care was used as an interactive software to enhance participants' cognitive functions. Up to 24 sessions, each lasting 45 minutes, were self-administered at home twice per week for 3 months. Thorough cognitive assessments with were performed at baseline (randomization), at the end of intervention, and 12 months after baseline. The primary outcome was performance at nine neuropsychological tests, and the secondary outcome was a self-reported questionnaire assessing everyday functional abilities. Primary analyses were performed employing mixed-effect models using the intention-to-treat principle. Results: Low adherence was observed in the study, as only 9 participants (50%) completed at least 8 sessions of the cognitive training programme (range 9-24 sessions, median 15 sessions). No statistically significant effect of the cognitive training programme on performance in neuropsychological tests or everyday functioning was found. At the end of the 3-month intervention programme, effect for visual memory enhancement in immediate ({beta} = 1.58, 95% CI = -1.84 to 4.99, Cohen's d = 0.39) and delayed recall ({beta} = 2.17, 95% CI = -1.68 to 6.01, Cohen's d = 0.45) was moderate in favour of the intervention group, and at 12-month follow-up, semantic verbal fluency gains for the intervention group were detected ({beta} = 2.78, 95% CI = -0.92 to 6.49, Cohen's d = 0.70), though with wide confidence intervals. Conclusions: Despite some small effects observed in memory and verbal fluency, cognitive training did not yield statistically significant improvements. The observed low adherence and limited benefits on mild cognitive deficits in mostly middle-aged individuals with MetS are likely associated with the self-administered and short-term nature of the computerized intervention. This highlights the need for more intensive and clinician-delivered approaches to enhance engagement. Registry: ClinicalTrials.gov, TRN: NCT05658354, Registration date: 08 December 2022. Keywords: Metabolic syndrome, cognitive deficits, cognitive training, computerized, adults

22.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Integrative Transfer Network: Deep Transfer Learning Across Populations and Prediction Targets

Authors:

Large-scale clinical and biomedical datasets increasingly contain both diverse subgroup attributes (e.g., demographic or clinical subgroups) and multiple prediction targets. Although various machine learning approaches can address subgroup differences or multi-target prediction, they often consider these aspects independently rather than jointly. To more effectively capture the shared and subgroup-specific information in such complex datasets, we propose the Integrative Transfer Network (ITN), a deep neural network designed to leverage data across subgroups and multiple related outcomes simultaneously. In extensive experiments, including time-to-event and classification tasks where demographic subgroups and multiple disease endpoints are prevalent, ITN demonstrates consistent improvements in subgroup-specific prediction by borrowing strength from other subgroups and outcomes. We envision ITN as a unified framework for learning from heterogeneous datasets where subgroup-specific insights are critical.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Spin-orbit coupling by design in quantum state engineering of atomically defined quantum dots

arXiv:2606.14487v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tuning spin-orbit coupling is essential in controlling both spin and charge in confined semiconductor nanostructures, yet it is rarely a truly controllable parameter. Here, we show control over the spin-orbit Hamiltonian in quantum dots and the resulting quantum states by tailoring the confinement potential with atomic-scale precision. Using scanning tunnelling microscopy and spectroscopy, we pattern individual Cs ions into designer quantum dot structures on the surface of indium antimonide, in which electrons from a two-dimensional electron gas are confined with chosen in-plane electric-field gradients. We then quantify the atomic level structure, both spatially resolving the orbital character of the electronic states and their magnetic-field evolution. We demonstrate that the level structure, including the induced zero-field splitting, can be tailored by the designed geometry of the local electric fields. These effects can be described using a Hamiltonian that allows consistent treatment of the confinement-induced spin-orbit coupling beyond the conventional Bychkov-Rashba description. This Hamiltonian is derived from a multiband k.p model and takes the energy dependence of the relevant physical parameters into account. Such precise control of spin-orbit coupling in semiconductor quantum dots is relevant to quantum and spintronic technologies.

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

Multi-Field Hybrid Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Maritime Accident Root Cause Analysis

arXiv:2606.13249v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Maritime accident adjudication reports contain critical tribunal findings for root cause analysis (RCA), yet retrieving relevant precedents and drafting consistent reports from decades of records remains labor-intensive. This paper proposes a multi-field hybrid retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework for automated maritime RCA, utilizing a comprehensive dataset of 13,329 Korea Maritime Safety Tribunal (KMST) reports (1971-2025). We transform raw adjudications into a structured knowledge base of "incident cards", indexing three distinct fields-Summary, Causes, and Disposition-alongside a hierarchical L1/L2 cause taxonomy. Our retrieval strategy employs a field-aware hybrid approach, fusing sparse and dense rankings via Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF). Given the lack of large-scale expert relevance labels, we evaluate retrieval performance using ceiling-normalized recall and nDCG based on a metadata-derived proxy relevance score. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed retrieval significantly outperforms baseline methods, improving NormRecall@100 from 0.18 to 0.55. Furthermore, grounding the generator on the retrieved precedents enhances RCA generation quality over an LLM-only baseline, increasing the LLM-as-a-judge score from 3.34 to 3.72. These findings suggest that field-aware RAG can substantially streamline maritime safety investigation workflows by enabling faster precedent search and more consistent, evidence-based RCA drafting.

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

Functional Equivalence in Attention: A Comprehensive Study with Applications to Linear Mode Connectivity

arXiv:2606.17830v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural network parameter spaces are inherently non-injective, as distinct parameter configurations can realize identical functions through functional equivalence. While this symmetry is well understood in classical fully connected and convolutional models, it becomes substantially more intricate in modern attention-based architectures. Existing analyses of multihead attention have largely focused on the vanilla formulation, overlooking positional encodings that fundamentally reshape architectural symmetries. In this work, we provide a formal study of functional equivalence in Transformers with positional encodings. Focusing on the two most widely used variants–sinusoidal and rotary positional encodings (RoPE)–we show that sinusoidal encodings preserve the equivalence structure of vanilla attention, whereas rotary encodings significantly reduce the symmetry group, thereby enhancing expressivity. This offers a principled explanation for the growing prominence of RoPE in practice. We further examine how positional encodings affect linear mode connectivity, and through an alignment algorithm, empirically demonstrate that the presence and variability of connectivity across Transformer settings crucially depend on the positional encoding.