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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Entanglement Detection by Approximate Entanglement Witnesses

Authors:
Samuel Dai↗Ning Bao↗

arXiv:2402.14755v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The problem of determining whether a given quantum state is separable is known to be computationally difficult. We develop an approach to this problem based on approximations of convex polytopes in high dimensions. By showing that a convex polytope constructed from a finite number of hyperplanes approximates the Euclidean ball arbitrarily well in high dimensions, we find evidence that a finite set of approximate entanglement witnesses is potentially sufficient to determine the entanglement of a state with high probability.

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02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Power-law hypothesis and (un)fairness of PageRank on undirected multi-type PAMs

Authors:
Christian Borgs↗Florian Henning↗Remco van der Hofstad↗Nelly Litvak↗

arXiv:2606.19583v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The preferential attachment model (PAM) describes the sequential growth of a network based on the "rich-get-richer" principle. Several versions of it have become established for modeling, e.g., citation networks, capturing a power-law degree distribution. Directed versions of the preferential attachment model where the edges are directed from the new to the old vertices have been the subject of extensive research. They have been shown to exhibit remarkable properties such as heavier tails for the limiting graph-normalized PageRank than for the in-degrees. By contrast, for the undirected version, we recently showed that PageRank has similar tails as the degree. In the present paper, we discuss the PageRank asymptotics for a multi-type version of the undirected PAM (here vertices have different colors), complementing previous results of Antunes, Bhamidi, Banerjee and Pipiras on the asymptotics of PageRank on similar directed multi-type or colored PAMs. Our studies are motivated by the aim to go beyond the rigid rule of edge orientation in directed preferential attachment models. As the main result, for the case of a finite set of colors, we show that the power-law hypothesis for PageRank is fulfilled also for the colored undirected PAM, where, by contrast to the directed case, the power-law exponent is color-dependent for some choices of the initial color distribution and the attractiveness function. For the specific case of a two-type model, we discuss implications of our results on fairness in sampling underrepresented nodes from the network.

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

Disagreement-Based Cross-Model Routing for Implicit Video Question Answering

Authors:
Durga Sandeep Saluru↗

We study multiple-choice video question answering on the ImplicitQA benchmark, where the correct answer is never explicitly shown but must be inferred from off-screen events, line-of-sight cues, causal structure, and cross-shot spatial layout. On this benchmark a single frontier video LLM already operates near its accuracy ceiling, and we observe that conventional self-consistency strategies – majority voting across repeated samples of the same model – can hurt rather than help, because the model's errors on hard questions are correlated. We propose disagreement-based cross-model routing, a pure inference-time procedure that requires no labels and no training. We triple-sample a native-video model (Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview) at temperature zero, exploit the genuine sample-to-sample variance of its video-processing pipeline to identify the roughly 20% subset of questions where the three samples disagree, and route only that subset to a second model from a different family (Claude Opus 4.8) that consumes uniformly sampled frames with adaptive thinking. On the 1001-question validation set with public ground truth – our main evaluation – the method improves AvgAcc by +1.43 over the best single sample of the primary model, with per-category gains concentrated on Motion & Trajectory (+5.49), Inferred Counting (+3.45), and Vertical Spatial Reasoning (+1.82) – the categories most dependent on cross-shot reference resolution. The same pipeline applied to the held-out 172-question CVPR 2026 ImplicitQA challenge test set achieves 82.03 AvgAcc / 79.71 MacroAvgAcc (+1.81 over the best single sample of the primary model), confirming the validation result on an independent split.

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04.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-20

Ribosomes are covered by a coat of flexible protein fragments

Authors:
McGrath↗Kvasnovsky↗Kolar↗

Ribosomal proteins contain flexible terminal regions that are averaged out during electron density reconstructions, rendering them absent from experimental models derived by X-ray crystallography or cryogenic electron microscopy. These flexible protein fragments (FPFs) collectively form an invisible coat on the ribosome surface whose presence has been systematically overlooked. Here we analysed FPFs from 36 ribosomes spanning bacteria, eukaryotes, and mitochondria. We found that mitoribosomes harbour the most numerous and longest FPFs. Structural predictions confirmed that FPFs are predominantly disordered across all ribosome classes. Comparison of FPF amino acid composition against proteome-wide background frequencies revealed strong and domain-specific compositional biases. The balance between arginine and lysine content tracks the cardiolipin content of the membrane each ribosome class contacts. The arginine enrichment in mitoribosomal FPFs may additionally reflect selection arising from the RNA-rich environment of mitochondrial RNA granules, membraneless condensates where mitoribosomes are assembled. FPFs are uniformly depleted in aromatic residues, arguing against protein-driven liquid–liquid phase separation propensity. Our findings suggest that the flexibly tethered coat is a highly functional intrinsic part of all ribosomes.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Toward Human-Centered AI-Assisted Terminology Work

Authors:
Antonio San Martin↗

Generative AI is likely to transform terminology work by creating new opportunities for automation. At the same time, it raises concerns about the future of terminologists and terminological resources, as efficiency pressures may encourage excessive automation based on the perception that human expertise can be replaced by AI. However, large language models remain unreliable for terminological purposes due to errors, hallucinations, and various forms of bias, making terminologists indispensable for ensuring the accuracy and reliability of terminological data. This paper argues that human-centered AI, an approach that emphasizes that AI's primary goal should be to contribute to human well-being, provides a framework for maximizing the benefits of generative AI while mitigating its risks. It contends that high levels of automation and meaningful human control are compatible and desirable, and that AI should enhance terminologists' capabilities while preserving their agency and decision-making authority. The implications of AI-assisted terminology work are examined through three interrelated dimensions: the augmented terminologist, ethical AI, and human-centered design. In particular, the paper examines how AI integration reshapes the role of the terminologist, affects professional values and working conditions, requires the management of AI-generated bias, and calls for the design of AI tools around the terminologist's needs. The paper concludes that a human-centered orientation is necessary to ensure that AI strengthens, rather than undermines, the essential role of terminology work in supporting specialized communication and the accurate transmission of knowledge across languages and cultures.

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06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Multi-omics data fusion reveals divergent molecular signatures of intra-articular micro-fragmented adipose tissue and hyaluronic acid treatment in inflammatory-phenotype knee osteoarthritis

Authors:
Primorac↗Molnar↗Brlek↗Bulic↗Jelec↗Prosenc Zmrzljak↗Klaric↗Lauc↗Malod-Dognin↗Przulj↗

Knee osteoarthritis (KOA) affects an estimated 374 million people worldwide and has no approved disease-modifying treatment. Intra-articular micro-fragmented adipose tissue (MFAT) outperformed hyaluronic acid (HA) on patient-reported outcomes in our recent double-blind randomized trial (ISRCTN88966184), yet the molecular basis of this differential efficacy is unknown, and the two interventions have not previously been compared at the level of their in vivo molecular response in human KOA. Here we apply an interpretable artificial-intelligence data-fusion framework, based on non-negative matrix tri-factorization, to longitudinally collected plasma from this cohort, integrating proteomics, N-glycomics, miRNA transcriptomics and patient genetics with prior protein-protein and miRNA-gene regulatory networks at baseline, one and six months. The framework jointly decomposes all data modalities at each timepoint into shared, interpretable factors, from which we derive data-driven pathways of genes and of miRNAs and recover new patient-gene and patient-miRNA associations. These pathways were biologically coherent, showing significant enrichment in Gene Ontology Biological Process and Reactome Pathway annotations. By six months, the two treatments left clearly distinct molecular signatures: HA remained dominated by canonical OA pathogenic processes, including cartilage-degrading effectors such as MMP13 and LIMK2 and markers of synovial inflammation, whereas MFAT shifted the systemic landscape toward chondroprotection, anti-inflammatory signalling and bone-cartilage homeostasis, with prioritized effectors including SIRT7 and NDUFC1. To our knowledge, these are the first systems-level molecular data directly comparing the in vivo response to the two treatments in human KOA, providing initial evidence that MFAT acts as a disease-modifying intervention and demonstrating the value of interpretable data fusion for uncovering treatment mechanisms in small translational cohorts.

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07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Universality for Products of Random Matrices with i.i.d. Entries and the Fuss–Catalan Number

Authors:
Yanjin Xiang↗Kun Chen↗Zhihua Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.14450v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Let \((w_{ij})_{i,j\ge1}\) be a single infinite array of independent identically distributed real- or complex-valued entries of mean zero, variance \(\sigma^2\), and finite fourth moment. Set \(W_n=(w_{ij})_{1\le i,j\le n}\) and \(X_n=n^{-1/2}W_n\). For every fixed \(k\ge1\), we identify the almost sure limiting operator norm of several fixed products built from this family. Define the \(k\)-th freeness coefficient by \[ \gamma_k:=\sqrt{\frac{(k+1)^{k+1}}{k^k}}. \] Then we prove \[ \|X_n^k\|\to\sigma^k\gamma_k \qquad almost surely. \] The same limit holds for products sampled with replacement from any fixed finite pool of independent copies of \(X_n\); in particular, it holds for the product of \(k\) independent copies. Thus, the freeness coefficient captures the non-commuting characteristic between large random matrices %powers and independent or fixed-pool sampled products under the finite fourth moment assumption. The improvement of the classical Bai–Yin-type power estimate from the scale \(\sigma^k(k{+}1)\) to \(\sigma^k \sqrt{k{+}1}\) is a direct corollary of our result. The main technical challenge is to prove the upper bound using a high-moment expansion of %the upper bound is proved by a high-moment expansion of \(\E\Tr((X_n^kX_n^{*k})^m)\). The leading zero-defect trace words are tree-like and are counted by the Fuss–Catalan number \[ F_{k,m}= \frac1{km+1}\binom{(k+1)m}{m}. \] The combinatorial tool helps to devise a defect-sensitive global enumeration: if \(L=km\) and \[ r=(L+1-v)+(L-q), \] then the number of admissible word classes with defect \(r\) is at most \(F_{k,m}(Cm)^{Dr}\). This polynomial-in-\(m\) loss, with degree proportional to the defect, is summable in the logarithmic moment range.

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08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Complementary Attention Head Pruning for Efficient Transformers

Authors:
Yaniv Livertovsky↗Shahar Somin↗Gonen Singer↗

arXiv:2606.19150v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The remarkable success of Transformer-based models in natural language processing stems from architectural scaling, which leads to a large number of parameters and hinders deployment in resource-constrained environments. While structured pruning offers a pathway to compression, existing state-of-the-art methods often rely on gradient-based importance ranking or stochastic gating, which suffer from instability, structural degeneration, and the need for extensive manual hyperparameter tuning. In this paper, we introduce CAHP (Complementary Attention Head Pruning), a novel post-hoc framework that redefines head selection as a global graph-theoretical problem. Rather than evaluating heads in isolation, CAHP utilizes graph-based clustering combined with information-theoretic distance measures to identify and preserve a topologically diverse subset of complementary attention heads. Without requiring a predefined sparsity level or pruning ratio, the framework automatically determines the number of selected attention heads across layers by identifying a diminishing marginal performance curve, where pruning additional heads leads to a sharp degradation in performance, as determined by the chosen polynomial degree. Extensive evaluations on the SST-5 and MNLI benchmarks, across different Transformer model scales, demonstrate that CAHP consistently outperforms competitive baselines, particularly in high-compression regimes. Furthermore, our structural analysis shows that CAHP avoids the "proximity bias" of gradient-based pruning methods, which tend to preserve heads mainly in layers close to the output, and instead retains a functionally critical set of attention heads in the model's intermediate layers.

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

Approximate Structured Diffusion for Sequence Labelling

Authors:
Nicolas Floquet↗Joseph Le Roux↗Nadi Tomeh↗

Sequence labelling, a core task of Natural Language Processing (NLP), consists in assigning each token of an input sentence a label. From a Machine Learning point of view, sequence labelling is often cast as a Linear-Chain Conditional Random Field (CRF) parametrised by a neural network. While this approach gives good empirical results, CRFs assume a finite decision span (eg label bigrams) which can limit their expressivity and hurt performance when long-range dependencies are required. We show we can leverage diffusion to train a CRF conditioned on an entire label sequence, with the caveat that the condition is on a noisy version of labels. We show experimentally that this method, in conjunction with approximate CRF inference, improves label accuracy with a 16.5% error reduction for POS-tagging.

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

The FID Lottery: Quantifying Hidden Randomness in Generative-Model Evaluation

Authors:
Nicolas Dufour↗Alexei A. Efros↗Patrick P\'erez↗

The Frechet Inception Distance (FID) is the de facto arbiter of image generation, yet most papers report just a single number from a single trained model using a single sampling seed. How reproducible is that number if we retrain the model, or merely resample from it? In this paper, we treat FID as a random variable on a two-axis panel of training and generation seeds, and measure its variance directly on several hundred SiT networks trained on class-conditional ImageNet 256x256. We report surprising findings: (a) Retraining the model using the same recipe with a different seed moves FID 3.2x more (in Inception feature space) than redrawing samples from a fixed network. (b) That gap is driven by three factors: random initialisation, data ordering, and the per-step Gaussian noise of the flow-matching loss. (c) Increasing compute or model size barely tightens the spread, holding the FID coefficient of variation (CoV) inside a 1-2% band. (d) Per-cell classifier-free-guidance tuning halves the spread but reshuffles which seeds work best, and a lucky training seed reaches the same FID with up to 2x less compute than an unlucky one. Based on these findings, we recommend a new FID evaluation protocol: evaluate under per-cell optimal guidance, treat any FID gap below the empirically measured ~1.3% CoV as inconclusive, and report an error bar over several training seeds rather than a single FID number.

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

Tacit Coordination of Large Language Models

Authors:
Ido Aharon↗Emanuele La Malfa↗Michael Wooldridge↗Sarit Kraus↗

arXiv:2601.22184v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in multi-agent settings that require coordination without communication, from human-AI interaction to safety-critical scenarios. Humans often overcome the absence of communication through focal points: salient solutions that naturally stand out to all participants. We present the first large-scale evaluation of how, when, and why focal points emerge in LLMs, comparing their behaviour with humans across cooperative and competitive games, including realistic search and rescue scenarios, demonstrating when focal points enable effective coordination. Across more than 20 open- and closed-source models, we find that LLMs exhibit a remarkable ability to coordinate without communication, often matching or outperforming humans. However, the same models consistently fail in tasks requiring numerical common sense or culturally nuanced notions of salience. We additionally evaluate simple learning-free strategies that substantially improve coordination both among LLMs and between humans and LLMs. Our results reveal striking coordination capabilities, as well as social limitations in modern LLMs, and offer new insight into the latent notions of salience encoded within them. Our findings caution against assuming that LLMs share humans' cultural and perceptual substrate when deployed in coordination settings.

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

Human-like autonomy emerges from self-play and a pinch of human data

Authors:
Daphne Cornelisse↗Julian Hunt↗Zixu Zhang↗Wa\"el Doulazmi↗Kevin Joseph↗Jaime Fern\'andez Fisac↗Eugene Vinitsky↗

arXiv:2606.19370v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-play reinforcement learning has recently emerged as a way to train driving policies without any human data. It uses cheap, large-scale simulations to substitute expensive, large-scale human driving demonstrations. A key limitation of this approach is that policies trained through pure self-play can learn effective but alien driving conventions incompatible with people. Previous works attempt to mitigate such behavioral misalignments through extensive reward engineering and domain randomization, which are brittle and labor-intensive. Instead of completely discarding human demonstrations, our method treats them as a regularization objective on top of a minimal safe goal-reaching reward. Like the spice in a good stew, we find that a little human data goes a long way: our method uses only 30 minutes of human demonstrations, 2500x fewer than comparable imitation learning approaches. Resulting policies coordinate with held-out human trajectories and complete training in 15 hours on a single consumer-grade GPU. Videos and full source code are available at https://spiced-self-play.com/.

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13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Incremental costs of transitioning from four to eight WHO-recommended antenatal care visits in Uganda: A costing analysis from a societal perspective

Authors:
Atuhumuza↗E. B↗Atukunda↗E. C↗Musiimenta↗Mugyenyi↗G. R↗Haberer↗Obua↗Siedner↗M. J↗Matthews↗…

Background In 2016, the World Health Organization revised its antenatal care (ANC) recommendation from four to eight visits. For low- and middle-income countries like Uganda, where achieving even four visits remains a challenge, this transition has significant cost implications for both the health system and households. This study estimated the incremental costs of adopting the eight-visit model from a societal perspective. Methods The study was conducted in six government health facilities in southwestern Uganda. A micro-costing approach estimated health facility costs (personnel, equipment, consumables, and overhead). Costs incurred at patients end (transport, ultrasound, medical expenses, and time) were collected from 785 women using a questionnaire, with all costs in 2025 USD. Results For an average of 4.3 visits, total cost per woman was $100.1: facility costs $43.7 (43.7%), and patient costs $56.4 (56.3%). Transitioning to eight visits would increase total cost by $57.8 (57.8%), of which $36.4 (63.0%) would fall on households, equivalent to 68.8% of average monthly household income. Total costs would rise by 55.4% ($115.5 to $179.5) at Health Center IVs and 64.3% ($102.3 to $168.1) at Health Center IIIs, with facility costs up 43.4% and 62.9% and patient costs up 61.2% and 65.7%, respectively. Conclusion Transitioning to eight ANC visits would impose a large financial burden on households, with the incremental patient cost equivalent to more than two-thirds of average monthly household income. Equitable implementation requires improving availability of medicines and diagnostics, subsidizing transport, exploring telemedicine or community-based models, and improving efficiency at lower-tier health centers.

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14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Dehaze-GaussianImage: Zero-Shot Dehazing via Efficient 2D Gaussian Splatting Representation

Authors:
Yuhan Chen↗Wenxuan Yu↗Guofa Li↗Kunyang Huang↗Ying Fang↗Yicui Shi↗Wenbo Chu↗Keqiang Li↗

Existing single image dehazing methods are often constrained by computational redundancy in pixel-level optimization and the lack of physical interpretability in implicit neural networks. These limitations hinder the balance between representation efficiency and reconstruction fidelity. To address these issues, we propose Dehaze-GaussianImage, the first zero-shot framework that introduces 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS) into the image dehazing domain to break the traditional pixel-grid processing paradigm. Distinct from static convolutional neural networks (CNNs) or Transformers, our approach models hazy images as continuous and dynamically evolvable anisotropic Gaussian fields. Specifically, we propose a novel reconstruction-decoupling zero-shot learning strategy that embeds the atmospheric scattering model into the Gaussian parameter space. This strategy drives Gaussian primitives to adaptively split, clone, and prune during optimization, achieving geometric-level decoupling of the transmission medium and clear textures. Furthermore, explicit structure-preserving constraints are introduced to suppress artifacts commonly caused by traditional physical priors. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in a fully unsupervised manner with minimal parameters, highlighting the potential of explicit Gaussian representation for low-level vision tasks.

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15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

N(CO)$^2$: Neural Combinatorial Optimization with Chance Constraints to Solve Stochastic Orienteering

Authors:
Anas Saeed↗Marcos Abel Zuzu\'arregui↗Stefano Carpin↗

arXiv:2606.18514v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural combinatorial optimization (NCO) offers a promising alternative to traditional heuristic-based methods for solving complex graph optimization problems by proposing to learn heuristics through data. This class of problems frequently arises in automation, as it can be used to model a variety of applications. While NCO has been extensively studied for deterministic combinatorial optimization problems, there are only a few works that aim to solve stochastic combinatorial optimization problems. In this work, we present N(CO)$^2$: Neural Combinatorial Optimization with Chance cOnstraints to solve the Stochastic Orienteering Problem (SOP) without the use of hand-crafted heuristics. By integrating a reinforcement learning (RL) framework, the model optimizes path selection under uncertainty, effectively balancing exploration and exploitation. Empirical results demonstrate that our method generalizes well across diverse SOP instances, achieving competitive performance compared to the state-of-the-art mixed-integer linear program (MILP) for the task. The proposed approach reduces human effort in heuristic design while enabling adaptive and efficient decision-making in uncertain environments.

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

TEDD: Robust Detection of Unstable Temporal Features

Authors:
Ricardo Ribeiro Pereira↗Bruno Casal Lara\~na↗N\'adia Soares↗Miguel Ara\'ujo↗

arXiv:2606.12643v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When working with real-world temporal data, it is common to encounter features whose distribution is changing over time. The naive employment of Machine Learning models on this unstable data might lead to rapidly degrading performance, especially if the new distribution is much different from what was previously seen during training. In order to cope with this problem, it is critical to automatically identify features that are changing over time. With these features detected, data scientists and other practitioners will be able to mitigate the issue (for instance, by applying data transformations), deploying more robust models that retain high performance for longer periods of time. In this paper, we describe which temporal changes a feature should not suffer from, and propose TEDD, a technique to a) identify when a dataset might lead to an unstable Machine Learning model and b) automatically detect which features cause such lack of robustness. In order to achieve it, we leverage a regression model to highlight which features contribute to a good prediction of an instance's timestamp. We compare our approach to other methods in real and synthetic data, testing their detection capability on all simple change patterns. We show that our method: detects all types of basic changes, both for numerical and categorical features; can detect multivariate drifts; returns a comparable value measuring the amount of change of each feature; requires no parameter tuning; and is scalable both on number of features and instances of the dataset.

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17.
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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18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Beyond Uniform Token-Level Trust Region in LLM Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Renjie Mao↗Xiangxin Zhou↗Lvfang Tao↗Yixin Ding↗Yu Shi↗Yongguang Lin↗Yuheng Wu↗Honglin Zhu↗Qian Qiu↗Wenxi Zhu↗

arXiv:2606.10968v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become standard for improving LLM reasoning. However, existing PPO-style trust-region mechanisms remain position-agnostic by enforcing uniform thresholds across all tokens independently. This pointwise treatment conflicts with autoregressive generation in two critical ways. First, uniform thresholds ignore autoregressive asymmetry. Early-stage deviations produce compounding sequence-level drift, causing static thresholds to under-regulate early divergence and excessively constrain late-stage exploration. Second, evaluating token-level divergence in isolation overlooks cumulative prefix drift, granting the same divergence allowance regardless of how far the conditioning history has already deviated from the rollout policy. To address this limitation, we propose CPPO (Cumulative Prefix-divergence Policy Optimization), a token-level masking rule that aligns updates with a finite-horizon policy-improvement bound via two coupled mechanisms. First, a position-weighted threshold imposes stricter limits at early positions whose effects persist longer, relaxing constraints for late-stage tokens. Second, a cumulative prefix budget tracks historical deviations, dynamically restricting further token-level deviation to prevent compounding errors along the prefix. Empirically, CPPO enhances training stability and significantly improves reasoning accuracy across various model scales.

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

Calibrated Triage, Not Autonomy: Confidence Estimation for Medical Vision-Language Models

Authors:
Reza Khanmohammadi↗Kundan Thind↗Mohammad M. Ghassemi↗

A vision-language model can answer a question about a medical image fluently and confidently while barely using the image, leaning instead on language priors. In medicine this is the failure that matters most, because the answer looks trustworthy and is not, and the only protection is a confidence score reliable enough to tell the system when to abstain. We ask a deployment question rather than an accuracy one: how much imaging work a model can safely handle alone, and which confidence signal makes that possible. We evaluate seven confidence estimators across five open-weight LVLMs and three medical visual-question-answering datasets spanning broad clinical imaging, radiology, and pathology, with every probe trained only on natural images and applied without adaptation. Recast as bounded selective prediction (automate a case only when confidence clears a threshold, defer the rest), the comparison is cautionary. The standard metrics are poor guides: discrimination barely separates the methods, and the weak calibration of a cheap self-report is cheaply removed by off-domain temperature scaling without changing deployable yield. What distinguishes a usable estimator is the high-confidence region a clinician acts on: the weakest baselines are confidently wrong on 41 to 45 percent of their errors against 1 to 4 percent for the best probe, and no estimator is reliably best across domains or models. Safe handoff is governed at two levels: base-model competence sets a ceiling, so a well-calibrated score recovers roughly a third of radiology cases at a 20 percent error tolerance but almost none of pathology; the confidence layer then decides how much of that ceiling is reachable. The usable role today is calibrated triage, not autonomy: automate the cases a calibrated score marks safe, route the rest to a clinician. We release all outputs, correctness judgments, and confidence scores, with code.

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20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Wealth-Related Inequalities in Cesarean Section Utilization Among Facility-Based Births in Bangladesh: Evidence from Public and Private Healthcare Facilities

Authors:
Mahmud↗

Background Bangladesh has experienced a rapid increase in cesarean section (CS) utilization over the past two decades. While previous studies have documented socioeconomic disparities in CS use, evidence on how wealth-related inequalities differ between public and private healthcare facilities remains limited. This study assessed the magnitude and drivers of socioeconomic inequality in CS utilization among facility-based births in Bangladesh. Methods We analyzed data from 3,008 facility-based births reported in the 2022 Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey (BDHS). Survey-weighted multivariable logistic regression was used to identify factors associated with CS utilization. Wealth-related inequality was assessed using concentration curves and the Erreygers-corrected concentration index (ECCI). Regression-based decomposition of the standard concentration index was performed to quantify the contribution of socioeconomic, demographic, and healthcare-related factors to observed inequalities overall and separately for public and private facilities. Results Overall, 71.2% of facility-based births were delivered by CS, with substantially higher prevalence in private facilities (84.2%) than in public facilities (35.9%). Women delivering in private facilities had markedly higher odds of CS than those delivering in public facilities (adjusted odds ratio [AOR]: 9.07; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 7.17-11.47). Significant pro-rich inequality was observed overall (ECCI: 0.154; 95% CI: 0.117-0.191), with inequality substantially greater in public facilities (ECCI: 0.189; 95% CI: 0.114-0.264) than in private facilities (ECCI: 0.049; 95% CI: 0.014-0.084). Decomposition analysis showed that household wealth was the dominant contributor to inequality, particularly the richest wealth quintile, accounting for 81.5% of overall inequality, 63.8% in public facilities, and 109.7% in private facilities. Conclusions Wealth-related inequalities in CS utilization remain substantial in Bangladesh despite widespread use of the procedure. Although pro-rich inequality exists across both sectors, inequality is considerably greater in public facilities and is driven by different mechanisms across facility types. Policies should simultaneously improve equitable access to medically necessary CS and reduce unnecessary procedures, particularly within the private sector.

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21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Task-guided cross-subject latent alignment: a multi-encoder-decoder VAE

Authors:
Angeliki Papathanasiou↗Jascha Achterberg↗Thomas E. Nichols↗Rui Ponte Costa↗

arXiv:2606.15989v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Aligning neural activity across subjects offers the promise of discovering shared computational principles and generalizable decoders. However, traditional alignment methods require shared stimuli across subjects, a constraint that limits applicability to naturalistic paradigms with limited or non-overlapping data. We introduce a Multi-Encoder-Decoder Variational Autoencoder (MED-VAE) that achieves cross-subject alignment without shared stimuli by anchoring representations to a common scaffold provided by a pretrained ANN. Using the Natural Scenes Dataset, we show that MED-VAE creates common latent spaces with superior semantic organisation, achieving higher cross-subject alignment than common methods while maintaining robust generalisation to held-out stimuli where traditional methods degrade. Reconstructing from these common spaces back to each subject's original neural space, MED-VAE preserves equal stimulus-driven signal in its cross-subject latent space. Finally, we show that this superior alignment directly enables cross-subject neural prediction, as demonstrated via cross-subject image decoding. In summary, we introduce a framework to identify generalisable common subspaces for cross-subject predictions and downstream tasks, demonstrated here for visual cortex responses to static images.

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22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Out-of-Distribution (OOD) Detectors for Open-Set RF Fingerprinting

Authors:
Sudeepta Mondal↗Ganesh Sundaramoorthi↗

arXiv:2606.12718v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Radio-frequency (RF) fingerprinting systems must operate in open-world environments where signals from unknown transmitters and temporal drift introduce distribution shift at test time. Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection provides a natural framework for this problem, yet its application to RF fingerprinting (RFF) remains limited. A key barrier to their adoption is that most OOD detectors require auxiliary OOD data for parameter tuning, an assumption that is difficult to satisfy in RF environments where representative OOD data is impractical to collect. In this work, we introduce a promising set of OOD detection methods from the machine learning literature to open-set RFF domain. We present these methods within a unified mathematical framework based on information theory, which is a natural framework for communication systems. Our framework allows for the systematic analysis of methods and development of new methods. We further demonstrate the applicability of recent work on tuning OOD detectors without given OOD tuning data for open-set RFF. We evaluate on the POWDER RF fingerprinting dataset, showing that detectors tuned without any given OOD data achieve performance comparable to baselines with access to true OOD tuning data and greatly out-perform baseline approaches without access to true OOD tuning data, showcasing the practical viability for the RFF problem.

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23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Characterizing Nash Equilibria in Zero-Sum Games: A Physics-Inspired, Parallelizable Approach with a Linear Number of Gradient Queries

Authors:
Taemin Kim↗James P. Bailey↗

arXiv:2507.11366v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study online optimization methods for zero-sum games, a fundamental problem in adversarial learning in machine learning, economics, and many other domains. Traditional methods approximate Nash equilibria (NE) using either regret-based methods (time-average convergence) or contraction-map-based methods (last-iterate convergence). We propose a new method based on Hamiltonian dynamics in physics and prove that it can characterize the set of NE in a finite (linear) number of iterations of alternating gradient descent in the unbounded setting, modulo degeneracy, a first in online optimization. Unlike standard methods for computing NE, our proposed approach can be parallelized and works with arbitrary learning rates, both firsts in algorithmic game theory. Experimentally, we support our results by showing our approach drastically outperforms standard methods.

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

Quantum Occam Learning: Sample-Supported Expressibility for Circuit-Based Quantum Learning

Authors:
Jeongho Bang↗Kyoungho Cho↗Jeongwoo Jae↗

arXiv:2606.12211v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A central principle in quantum machine learning is that an ansatz should be expressive enough to represent the quantum data of interest. Yet, the expressibility is statistically meaningful only insofar as it can be learned from finitely many copies of an unknown quantum state. In this work, we develop an information-theoretic Occam theory for quantum data generated by finite-size quantum circuits. For the class $S_{n,G}$ of $n$-qubit pure states preparable with at most $G$ two-qubit gates, a metric-entropy argument gives the realizable sample law $\widetilde{\Theta}(G/\epsilon^2)$ in the circuit-limited regime. For an arbitrary source $\hat{\rho}$, we introduce the best $G$-gate approximation error $d_G(\hat{\rho})$ and the approximate circuit complexity $C_\eta(\hat{\rho})$. We prove an agnostic quantum Occam theorem: with $M$ copies, one can learn up to the best $G$-gate approximation error plus a statistical penalty $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{G/M})$. We then remove the need to know $G$ in advance through an adaptive model-selection theorem whose oracle inequality selects the circuit complexity justified by the data. Matching lower bounds yield a sample-supported expressibility law: at trace-distance accuracy $\epsilon$, $M$ samples can support only $G_supported \simeq M\epsilon^2$ gates, up to logarithmic factors and tomography saturation at $2^n$. Thus, the circuit complexity becomes an adaptive statistical resource rather than a static promise. Our framework turns bounded circuit complexity into a model-selection principle for quantum machine learning.

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25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Certified Finite-Shot Operating Windows for Virtual Distillation and Symmetry Verification

Authors:
Vicenzo Scavino Alfaro↗

arXiv:2606.15464v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum error mitigation methods are usually compared through their infinite-shot bias, but on real devices the comparison is decided by finite sampling budgets, estimator instabilities, and per-shot resource costs. We develop a finite-shot operating-window theory that makes this comparison certifiable for virtual distillation (VD) and symmetry verification (SV): for each method we derive a mean-squared-error law with explicit, non-asymptotic remainder constants. For VD, the law captures the statistical bias and denominator instability of its quotient estimator, with a concentration certificate locating the sample size beyond which the quotient is trustworthy; for SV, it isolates the bias floor left by undetectable errors and the sampling penalty set by the acceptance probability. A selection trichotomy classifies any two-method comparison into a tie, uniform dominance, or a genuine tradeoff with a certified crossing window, including a self-consistency test that rejects spurious crossings. The theory makes falsifiable predictions – operating-window locations scaling as $p^{-2}$ or $p^{-1}$ in the noise rate, and the sign pattern of all pairwise comparisons – which exact white-box experiments confirm with fitted exponent $-1.97$ against the predicted $-2$ and with $300/300$ sign agreement, within a pre-registered analysis whose single failed gate, an over-strict all-instance criterion, is reported and audited in full. Gate-level simulation and archived runs on two IBM backends then test the windows under device conditions: idealized VD windows exist, but realistic interferometry overhead and denominator instability erase them, and calibrated SV is the practical winner in the tested QAOA instances. This absence of a universal winner is not a failure of mitigation; it is the regime structure that certified operating windows predict.

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