Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2510.24679

Kemeny's constant minimization for reversible Markov chains via structure-preserving perturbations

Authors:

Fabio Durastante↗Miryam Gnazzo↗Beatrice Meini↗

arXiv:2510.24679v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Kemeny's constant measures the efficiency of a Markov chain in traversing its states. We investigate whether structure-preserving perturbations to the transition probabilities of a reversible Markov chain can improve its connectivity while maintaining a fixed stationary distribution. Although the minimum achievable value for Kemeny's constant can be estimated, the required perturbations may be infeasible. We reformulate the problem as an optimization task, focusing on solution existence and efficient algorithms, with an emphasis on the problem of minimizing Kemeny's constant under sparsity constraints.

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02.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2605.23243

Are Frontier LLMs Ready for Cybersecurity? Evidence for Vertical Foundation Models from Dual-Mode Vulnerability Benchmarks

Authors:

Vivek Dahiya↗Sunny Nehra↗Vipul Dholariya↗Bhavik Shangari↗Chandra Khatri↗

arXiv:2605.23243v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We evaluate whether frontier LLMs are ready for cybersecurity through a dual-mode benchmark: white-box function-level vulnerability detection (VulnLLM-R, across C/Java/Python) and black-box web application security testing (five production-style applications with 118 ground-truth vulnerabilities across 20+ CWE families, which we will open-source). We test six frontier models (GPT-5.4, Codex~5.3, Claude Opus~4.6, Sonnet~4.6, Gemini~3.1~Pro and Gemini~3~Flash) and two domain-specialized models across four testing paradigms. Our findings are sobering: (1)~every frontier model produces 10-50% false positive rates in white-box detection, systematically over-predicting vulnerabilities; (2)~in black-box testing, frontier models achieve only 4-8% ground-truth coverage, improving to just 10-19% even with external security tools (Playwright MCP, Burp Suite MCP); (3)~structured penetration-testing methodology encoded in domain-specialized agents raises per-family detection above 50%, demonstrating that methodology, not scale, is the primary lever; and (4)~a domain-specialized defense model achieves the highest precision (0.904) and lowest false positive rate (9.7%) among all models, on a single GPU. We identify the absence of structured security testing traces end-to-end request/response sequences, failure-heavy data, and multi-step attack chains as the fundamental training data bottleneck, and propose self-play security testing as a data generation strategy. Our results make the case for vertical foundation models purpose-built for cybersecurity.

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03.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2602.01801

Fast Autoregressive Video Diffusion and World Models with Temporal Cache Compression and Sparse Attention

Authors:

Dvir Samuel↗Issar Tzachor↗Matan Levy↗Michael Green↗Gal Chechik↗Rami Ben-Ari↗

Autoregressive video diffusion models enable streaming generation, opening the door to long-form synthesis, video world models, and interactive neural game engines. However, their core attention layers become a major bottleneck at inference time: as generation progresses, the KV cache grows, causing both increasing latency and escalating GPU memory, which in turn restricts usable temporal context and harms long-range consistency. In this work, we study redundancy in autoregressive video diffusion and identify three persistent sources: near-duplicate cached keys across frames, slowly evolving (largely semantic) queries/keys that make many attention computations redundant, and cross-attention over long prompts where only a small subset of tokens matters per frame. Building on these observations, we propose a unified, training-free attention framework (FAST-AR) for FAST-AutoRegressive diffusion, consisting of three components: TempCache compresses the KV cache via temporal correspondence to bound cache growth; AnnCA accelerates cross-attention by selecting frame-relevant prompt tokens using fast approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) matching; and AnnSA sparsifies self-attention by restricting each query to semantically matched keys, also using a lightweight ANN. Together, these modules reduce attention, compute, and memory and are compatible with existing autoregressive diffusion backbones and world models. Experiments demonstrate up to x5 - x10 end-to-end speedups while preserving near-identical visual quality and, crucially, maintaining stable throughput and nearly constant peak GPU memory usage over long rollouts, where prior methods progressively slow down and suffer from increasing memory usage.

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04.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.23978

Offline Reinforcement Learning for Warehouse SLAM Throughput Control

Authors:

Tina Dongxu Li↗Mouhacine Benosman↗Rajat Kumar↗Kevin Tan↗Ken Meszaros↗Trevor Dardik↗

arXiv:2606.23978v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present an offline reinforcement learning (RL) framework for optimizing SLAM throughput control in a warehouse fulfillment environment. SLAM (Scan/Label/Apply/Manifest) throughput directly influences system congestion and operational efficiency. Our RL-based control approach dynamically recommends SLAM throughput settings that adaptively balance throughput maximization with downstream stability through intelligent adjustment of throttling behavior. We include a history-informed state representation, action space abstraction for delayed-impact control, and a reward function that captures both upstream and downstream operational metrics. Our approach is algorithm-agnostic, enabling integration of multiple offline RL methods under a unified architecture. We instantiate our framework with three state-of-the-art offline RL algorithms, and trained the models offline using de-identified historical operational logs from a large-scale warehouse. Policy performance is evaluated using a comprehensive multi-method strategy. These include model-free approaches including immediate reward estimation via regression models and long-horizon Fitted Q Evaluation (FQE), as well as model-based Deep Koopman dynamics evaluation. Empirical results reveal that the CQL policy consistently outperforms alternatives, improving system health by 22.97% and reducing average throttling duration by 3.18%. These findings demonstrate the potential of offline RL for safe and scalable warehouse throughput control optimization.

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05.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2512.02080

The 4/$\delta$ Bound: Designing Predictable LLM-Verifier Systems for Formal Method Guarantee

Authors:

Pierre Dantas↗Lucas Cordeiro↗Youcheng Sun↗Waldir Junior↗

arXiv:2512.02080v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The integration of Formal Verification tools with Large Language Models (LLMs) offers a path to scale software verification beyond manual workflows. However, current methods remain unreliable: without a solid theoretical footing, the refinement process acts as a black box that may oscillate, loop, or diverge. This work bridges this critical gap by developing an LLM-Verifier Convergence Theorem, providing the first formal framework with provable guarantees for termination in multi-stage verification pipelines. We model the interaction not as a generic loop, but as a sequential absorbing Markov Chain comprising four essential engineering stages: \texttt{CodeGen}, \texttt{Compilation}, \texttt{InvariantSynth}, and \texttt{SMTSolving}. We prove that for any non-zero stage success probability ($\delta > 0$), the system reaches the \texttt{Verified} state almost surely. Furthermore, because of the sequential nature of the pipeline, we derive a precise latency bound of $\mathbb{E}[n] \leq 4/\delta$. We stress-tested this prediction in an extensive empirical campaign comprising over 90,000 trials. The results match the theory with striking consistency: every run reached verification, and the empirical convergence factor clustered tightly around $C_f\approx 1.0$, confirming that the $4/\delta$ bound accurately mirrors system behavior rather than serving as a loose buffer. Based on this data, we identify three distinct operating zones – marginal, practical, and high-performance – and propose a dynamic calibration strategy to handle parameter drift in real-world environments. Together, these contributions replace heuristic guesswork with a rigorous architectural foundation, enabling predictable resource planning and performance budgeting for safety-critical software.

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06.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15 DOI: HASH:0efee22e896d007187f998cdafed6089

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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07.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.23694

ModTGCN: Modularity-aware Graph Neural Networks for Text Classification

Authors:

Rajarshi Misra↗Aditya Sharma↗Vinti Agarwal↗Hari Om Aggrawal↗

Graph-based text classification models typically rely on local neighborhood aggregation and overlook global community structure, despite semantic document graphs exhibiting strong class-consistent clustering. Ignoring this can blur class boundaries and lead to over-smoothing. We propose ModTGCN, a modularity-aware graph neural network for text classification that jointly optimizes cross-entropy and a modularity-based auxiliary objective to promote class-coherent document communities while preserving discriminative representations. The modularity term is computed on a document-document similarity graph derived from transformer embeddings (pretrained or fine-tuned). To improve scalability, we decouple the original heterogeneous TextGCN graph into separate document-word and word-word components, achieving 2x-10x faster training. We further study graph construction strategies, label-aware edge reweighting, and supervision choices for modularity optimization. Experiments on five benchmarks show consistent gains, with larger improvements on complex, low homophily datasets such as Ohsumed and 20NG.

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08.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15695

When Generator Replay Degrades: Projected Rehearsal Orchestration for Heterogeneous Federated Class-Incremental Learning

Authors:

Thinh T. H. Nguyen↗Khoa D. Doan↗Binh T. Nguyen↗Danh Le-Phuoc↗Kok-Seng Wong↗

arXiv:2606.15695v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated class-incremental learning (FCIL) becomes substantially harder when clients observe different label subsets, progress through tasks at different stages, and provide uneven supervision for the same semantic concepts. Existing FCIL methods often preserve old knowledge through input-space synthesis, but they can be fragile under heterogeneous task streams and difficult to transfer across modalities. To alleviate such issues, we propose PRO, a framework that replaces synthetic input replay with projected rehearsal orchestration. To remove external pretraining, we evaluate all methods under the same warmup. After this, PRO maintains compact class-level projected memories on the server and allows clients perform balanced pseudo multi-task training over current examples and old projected memories. To handle stronger representation drift, we further introduce PRO-MAX, which augments PRO with neighborhood-weighted memory alignment while preserving the same server-light principle that the server only aggregates model updates and memory statistics. Across image, text, and graph benchmarks, PRO and PRO-MAX improve retention and final utility under heterogeneous streams while remaining competitive in homogeneous FCIL. Even when baselines are given expanded replay budgets, they degrade under supervision imbalance and stage misalignment, indicating that replay quantity alone does not resolve replay-quality failures. Additional weak-task diagnostics further show that larger replay mismatch is associated with larger downstream degradation, while our method keeps projected memories better aligned with the evolving representation.

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09.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11627

When Context Returns: Toward Robust Internalization in On-Policy Distillation

Authors:

Xun Wang↗Ruishuo Chen↗Zhuoran Li↗Yu Chen↗Longbo Huang↗

arXiv:2606.11627v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work has shown that on-policy distillation can internalize privileged context, such as system prompts or task hints, into a student model so that the context is no longer needed at inference time. Although this approach successfully improves the student's no-context performance, we identify an interesting and previously unstudied phenomenon: in many settings, reintroducing the original privileged context to the distilled student actually degrades its performance, even on instances it already solves correctly without context. We term this context-induced degradation and argue that robust internalization demands not only matching the teacher's context-conditioned behavior, but also remaining stable when the context is reintroduced, a property we call context removability. Motivated by this observation, we propose a lightweight consistency regularizer that first anchors the student's no-context output via stop-gradient, then penalizes the context-conditioned output for deviating from it via forward KL divergence. This simple addition requires only one extra forward pass per training step, yet it effectively mitigates context-induced degradation and, in many cases, even improves no-context performance. Across 12 configurations spanning diverse domains and model families, our method improves context-conditioned accuracy in the majority of settings, reduces context-induced harm in 11 out of 12 settings, and effectively eliminates response-length inflation. A mechanistic case study further confirms that context removability is achieved at the representation level, with hidden states remaining nearly identical regardless of whether the context is present.

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10.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2606.25267

Rapid and robust laser-frequency auto-locking using Bayesian-optimization and discrete-wavelet-transformation algorithms

Authors:

Min Jiang↗Xiao-Li Chen↗Si-Bin Lu↗Jia-Hao Fu↗Zhan-Wei Yao↗Shao-Kang Li↗Min Ke↗San-Ming Song↗Run-Bing Li↗Jin Wang↗Ming-Sheng Zhan↗

arXiv:2606.25267v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Rapid and robust laser-frequency auto-locking is essential for the field deployment of quantum communications, quantum computing, and precision-measurement technologies; however, achieving this remains a considerable challenge. Here, we propose and demonstrate an auto-locking scheme employing Bayesian optimization and discrete biorthogonal wavelet transformation. First, the reference is rapidly sought by making intelligent use of historical observations, eliminating the inherent blindness of the traditional parameter-scanning method. Second, the frequency reference is robustly identified by pinpointing transition signals with the discrete biorthogonal wavelet transformation and analyzing their immutable frequency differences and relative magnitudes, which are determined by the inherent atomic structure and remain resistant to environmental disturbances. This proposed approach achieves a fivefold acceleration in reference searching compared to conventional scanning methods in the case where the laser frequency drifts far away from the reference. Crucially, it achieves an identification accuracy of more than 99.5 %, even under severe 50 % laser-intensity fluctuations, $9.95^\circ$ photodiode misalignment, and $18^\circ$C Rb cell temperature elevation. Finally, locking the laser frequency to the identified reference with a lead zirconate titanate-current double-servo loop narrows the linewidth to 20 kHz. We believe that this rapid, robust, and high-performance auto-locking technique will be pivotal towards the deployment of the next generation of practical quantum technologies in demanding field environments.

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11.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2601.18863

Tame Complexity of Effective Field Theories in the Quantum Gravity Landscape

Authors:

Thomas W. Grimm↗David Prieto↗Mick van Vliet↗

arXiv:2601.18863v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Effective field theories consistent with quantum gravity obey surprising finiteness constraints, appearing in several distinct but interconnected forms. In this work we develop a framework that unifies these observations by proposing that the defining data of such theories, as well as the landscape of effective field theories that are valid at least up to a fixed cutoff, admit descriptions with a uniform bound on complexity. To make this precise, we use tame geometry and work in sharply o-minimal structures, in which tame sets and functions come with two integer parameters that quantify their information content; we call this pair their tame complexity. Our Finite Complexity Conjectures are supported by controlled examples in which an infinite Wilsonian expansion nevertheless admits an equivalent finite-complexity description, typically through hidden rigidity conditions such as differential or recursion relations. We further assemble evidence from string compactifications, highlighting the constraining role of moduli space geometry and the importance of dualities. This perspective also yields mathematically well-defined notions of counting and volume measures on the space of effective theories, formulated in terms of effective field theory domains and coverings, whose finiteness is naturally enforced by the conjectures.

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12.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24157

The Geometry Behind Diffusion and Flow Matching: Gradient Flows and Geodesics in Wasserstein Space

Authors:

Yian Yao↗Weiwei Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.24157v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The space $\mathcal{P}_2(\mathbb{R}^d$) of probability measures with finite second moment carries a natural geometry: the quadratic Wasserstein distance W_2 makes it a complete metric space and, following Otto, a (formal) Riemannian manifold whose geodesics are the optimal-transport interpolations. On this manifold, the gradient flow of the free energy F(rho) = KL(rho || \pi) is exactly the Fokker-Planck equation, and its implicit-Euler discretization is the JKO scheme. This is the geometry underlying diffusion models: the forward process descends the free energy, and each denoising step realizes one JKO step, which recovers DDPM, DDIM, NCSN/SMLD, and Energy Matching; this is one scheme, not separate theories. The same manifold supports a second variational principle. Its geodesics - the minimum-action curves of the Benamou-Brenier formula - are precisely the optimal-transport paths that Flow Matching learns. Fixing both endpoints and following the geodesic, generation becomes a deterministic ODE along a straight line, hence far fewer sampling steps. Placing both families of models on one manifold makes their relationship exact: diffusion follows a free-energy gradient flow, an initial-value problem; optimal-transport Flow Matching follows a Wasserstein geodesic, a boundary-value problem. The two reach the same endpoints along different paths.

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13.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24586

EERLoss: A Novel Loss Function for Training Deep Biometric Models. A Case Study in Keystroke Dynamics

Authors:

Nahuel Gonzalez↗Marta Robledo-Moreno↗Ivan DeAndres-Tame↗Ruben Vera-Rodriguez↗Ruben Tolosana↗

Deep learning approaches to biometric verification are commonly trained by optimizing indirect objectives, creating a misalignment between the optimization process and the primary evaluation metric, typically the Equal Error Rate (EER). This paper introduces EERLoss: a subdifferentiable, arbitrarily accurate approximation to EER for training deep biometric models. Furthermore, this framework has the potential to be adapted to optimize any specific operating point on the DET curve, enhancing its generalizability. To validate this approach, EERLoss is evaluated on a particularly demanding behavioral biometric modality: keystroke dynamics verification. This task is characterized by its high intra-class and low inter-class variability. Experiments are conducted on the large-scale KVC-onGoing benchmark, incorporating data from over 185,000 subjects across different scenarios. A comprehensive ablation study initially demonstrates the superiority of EERLoss in comparison to existing state-of-the-art loss functions. It also converges substantially faster compared to other losses, reducing the overall training cost. Additionally, a comparison is made between the proposed loss and the KVC-winning architecture by re-training it with EERLoss, demonstrating that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the original SoTA, achieving a relative EER reduction of up to approx. 30\%. This improvement on a challenging, large-scale benchmark validates the effectiveness of EERLoss as a task-aligned training objective specifically suited for high-variance biometric traits.

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14.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16076

Phys-JEPA: Physics-Informed Latent World Models for Multivariate Time-Series Forecasting

Authors:

Weizhi Nie↗Weichao Liu↗Honglin Guo↗Yuting Su↗

arXiv:2606.16076v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multivariate forecasting in physical systems requires models that predict coupled temporal variables while preserving meaningful state evolution. Deep forecasters can fit temporal correlations, and physics-informed models can regularize predictions with scientific constraints, but these directions are often connected only at the decoded-output level. As a result, the hidden predictive state that generates future trajectories may remain statistically useful but physically unstructured. We introduce Phys-JEPA, a physics-informed joint-embedding predictive architecture for multivariate time-series forecasting. Phys-JEPA learns a latent world model in which predictive states are decomposed into physical and residual components, and physical consistency is imposed directly on latent states and latent transitions rather than only on decoded forecasts. This formulation uses known physical variables to organize the representation space while retaining residual capacity for unresolved dynamics. On Jena Climate 2009–2016, Phys-JEPA reduces aggregate MSE from 0.12482 to 0.12273 and temperature MSE from 0.01892 to 0.01831 at H=24. On Traffic, full Phys-JEPA improves aggregate MSE over the supervised baseline across all tested horizons, reducing H=192 MSE from 0.800784 to 0.773873. On Electricity, the best variant depends on horizon: static latent consistency is strongest at H=24 and H=48, while full Phys-JEPA gives the best aggregate and target-variable MSE at H=192. These initial results suggest that moving physics-informed learning from output space to latent predictive state space is a promising direction for interpretable temporal world models.

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15.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-23 DOI: HASH:d59bfc475c2cc9e4f385a59f7a31d228

EnrichViz: An Interactive R Shiny Application for Visualization of Pathway Enrichment Results from Omics Data

Authors:

Garcia-Milian↗

Pathway and functional enrichment analysis is a cornerstone of omics data interpretation, enabling researchers to map differentially expressed proteins or genes onto curated biological processes, signaling cascades, and molecular functions. While tools such as Ingenuity Pathway Analysis (IPA), g:Profiler, and Enrichr are widely used to generate ranked enrichment results, translating these tabular outputs into clear, publication-ready figures remains a time-consuming step that typically requires custom scripting and familiarity with visualization libraries, a significant barrier for researchers without a computational background. Here we present EnrichViz, a self-contained, browser-based R Shiny application that enables interactive, code-free visualization of pathway and functional enrichment results from quantitative proteomics, transcriptomics, and metabolomics experiments. EnrichViz accepts three standard CSV files as input, a normalized abundance matrix, a sample annotation or metadata file, and enrichment results from any platform that exports tabular output, and produces six complementary, publication-ready visualizations: bar and bubble plots for ranking enriched terms by significance, chord diagrams for exploring pathway-molecule connectivity, clustered heatmaps for displaying Z-score normalized expression patterns across experimental groups, and boxplots or violin plots for examining the abundance distribution of individual proteins, genes, or metabolites. The application supports both raw p-values and pre-transformed -log10(p) values through automatic detection, and all plot parameters are adjustable in real time through a graphical sidebar. Every figure can be exported as a high-resolution PNG file at 300 dpi. EnrichViz is implemented in R using the Shiny, ggplot2, pheatmap, and circlize packages, and is freely available at https://rgmilian.shinyapps.io/EnrichViz/

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16.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2510.09468

Geodesic Calculus on Implicitly Defined Latent Manifolds

Authors:

Florine Hartwig↗Josua Sassen↗Juliane Braunsmann↗Martin Rumpf↗Benedikt Wirth↗

arXiv:2510.09468v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Latent manifolds of autoencoders provide low-dimensional representations of data, which can be studied from a geometric perspective. We propose to describe these latent manifolds as implicit submanifolds of some ambient latent space. Based on this, we develop tools for a discrete Riemannian calculus approximating classical geometric operators. These tools are robust against inaccuracies of the implicit representation often occurring in practical examples. To obtain a suitable implicit representation, we propose to learn an approximate projection onto the latent manifold by minimizing a denoising objective. This approach is independent of the underlying autoencoder and supports the use of different Riemannian geometries on the latent manifolds. The framework in particular enables the computation of geodesic paths connecting given end points and shooting geodesics via the Riemannian exponential maps on latent manifolds. We evaluate our approach on various autoencoders trained on synthetic and real data.

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17.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2606.24981

A Single Stepsize Suffices for Unprojected Linear TD(0): Simultaneous Robust and Fast Rates via Polyak–Ruppert Averaging

Authors:

Wei-Cheng Lee↗Francesco Orabona↗

arXiv:2606.24981v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study linear TD(0) under Markovian sampling, where data are generated along a single trajectory. We provide high-probability guarantees for a plain unprojected TD(0) algorithm with Polyak-Ruppert (PR) averaging, using a single stepsize schedule $\eta_t \propto \frac{1}{\tau_{\mathrm{mix}}\log(t)\sqrt{t}}$ that depends on the mixing time but requires no prior knowledge of the curvature parameter $\omega$. Our first result shows that such a choice of the stepsize guarantees that the TD(0) iterates are automatically and uniformly bounded with high probability, without projections and without any stability argument based on $\omega$. Building on this result, we establish a simultaneous high-probability convergence guarantee for the PR average: the same stepsize yields both a robust curvature-free $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}\!\left(\frac{\tau_{\mathrm{mix}}}{\sqrt{T}}\right)$ rate and a fast curvature-dependent $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}\!\left(\frac{\tau_{\mathrm{mix}}^2}{\omega T}\right)$rate, with the bound taking the minimum of the two. The core technical ingredient is a Poisson-equation toolkit for geometrically mixing Markov chains, which decomposes Markov noise into a martingale term plus a controlled remainder and enables a new self-bounding inductive argument for pathwise stability.

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18.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24636

CineCap: Structured Reasoning with Spatio-Temporal Anchors for Cinematographic Video Captioning

Authors:

Xinyu Mao↗Yuhui Zeng↗Xiaokun Liu↗Wenyu Qin↗Meng Wang↗Xin Tao↗Pengfei Wan↗Xiaohan Xing↗Max Meng↗

arXiv:2606.24636v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cinematographic captioning aims to describe how a video is filmed using professional film-language concepts such as camera movement, shot size, depth of field, composition, and shooting angle. This capability is important for fine-grained video understanding and controllable movie-quality video generation, yet remains underexplored in existing multimodal large language models. Unlike question-answering-based evaluation of cinematic understanding, cinematographic captioning requires a unified open-form description over multiple cinematographic dimensions. This task is challenging for two main reasons: the model must infer professional cinematographic concepts from subtle visual evidence, and it must generate captions that are both comprehensive and accurate. Accordingly, we propose CineCap, a framework that combines structured reasoning with spatio-temporal anchors and reinforcement learning with comprehensiveness, accuracy, and gated coverage rewards. The former grounds professional cinematographic descriptions in explicit visual evidence and organizes them into compact atomic reasoning for supervised fine-tuning, while the latter improves the balance between descriptive completeness and factual correctness. In addition, we construct CineCap Bench, a benchmark of 472 manually annotated video-caption pairs for systematic evaluation. Extensive experiments show that CineCap consistently outperforms strong proprietary and open-source baselines, establishing a new state of the art for cinematographic captioning. The code, model checkpoint, and benchmark are publicly available in https://github.com/Hectormxy/CineCap.git.

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19.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2602.06566

SPARC: Separating Perception And Reasoning Circuits for Test-time Scaling of VLMs

Authors:

Niccolo Avogaro↗Nayanika Debnath↗Li Mi↗Thomas Frick↗Junling Wang↗Zexue He↗Hang Hua↗Konrad Schindler↗Mattia Rigotti↗

Despite recent successes, test-time scaling – i.e., dynamically expanding the token budget during inference as needed – remains brittle for vision-language models (VLMs). Unstructured visual reasoning chains entangle perception and reasoning, leading to long, disorganized contexts where small perceptual mistakes may cascade into completely wrong answers. Reasoning also requires expensive reinforcement learning with hand-crafted rewards. Here, we introduce SPARC (Separating Perception And Reasoning Circuits), a modular framework that explicitly decouples visual perception from reasoning. Inspired by sequential sensory-to-cognitive processing in the brain, SPARC implements a two-stage pipeline where the model first performs explicit visual search to localize question-relevant regions, then conditions its reasoning on those regions to produce the final answer. This separation enables independent test-time scaling with asymmetric compute allocation (e.g., prioritizing perceptual processing under distribution shift), and supports selective optimization (e.g., improving the perceptual stage alone when it is the bottleneck for end-to-end performance). It also accommodates compressed contexts by running global search at lower image resolutions and allocating high-resolution processing only to selected regions, thereby reducing visual token count and compute. SPARC outperforms monolithic baselines and strong visual-grounding approaches across challenging visual reasoning tasks, such as improving Qwen3VL 4B on the $V^*$ VQA benchmark by 6.7 points and surpassing "thinking with images" by 4.6 points in an OOD setting with a $200\times$ lower token budget.

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20.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2604.16897

Ultrafast nonadiabatic dynamics of tetraphenylsubstituted nitrogen-based heterocycles

Authors:

Javier Hern\'andez-Rodr\'iguez↗Alberto Mart\'in Santa Dar\'ia↗Susana G\'omez-Carrasco↗Sandra G\'omez↗

arXiv:2604.16897v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Tetraphenylpyrazine (TPP) and 2,3,4,5-tetraphenyl-1H-pyrrole (TePP) are closely related heterocycles bearing four phenyl substituents, whose structural similarity makes them a useful pair for comparing how intramolecular flexibility influences excited-state relaxation and emission in the gas phase and in the solid state. TPP is a prototypical solid-state luminescence enhancement (SLE) emitter, exhibiting a markedly increased quantum yield upon molecular aggregation. In contrast, TePP displays similar quantum yields in solution and solid state, characteristic of dual-state emission (DSE). This behaviour indicates that intramolecular rotations are already significantly hindered in the isolated-molecule regime, consistent with our previous observations for TPP and other solid-state emitters (Hernández-Rodríguez et al., ChemPhysChem, 2024, 25, e202400563). To unravel the excited-state dynamics underlying this contrasting behaviour, we performed mixed quantum-classical trajectory simulations on a single molecule of TPP and TePP employing the surface-hopping method. Twelve singlet states were included at the TD-B3LYP-D3/def2-SVP level, which were previously benchmarked against coupled cluster methods. Simulated observables such as gas phase ultrafast electron diffraction (GUED) and time-resolved fluorescence (TR-FL) signals allow us to dissect the distinct deactivation pathways operating in both systems in the gas phase, while also providing mechanistic insight into how these pathways are expected to evolve in solution and solid-state environments.

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21.

Nature Medicine 2026-06-11 DOI: HASH:216b17e7c93a4f31701c149a481d216b

Microglia at a key inflection point in Alzheimer’s disease

Authors: Unknown Author

We analyzed brains from octogenarians and cognitively resilient centenarians to understand why some individuals with substantial Alzheimer’s disease pathology develop dementia whereas others remain cognitively intact. Spatial transcriptomics revealed gene expression changes in discrete tissue domains surrounding amyloid plaques and tau pathology that distinguish early, clinically silent, disease from later stages associated with cognitive decline.

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22.

PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-16 DOI: HASH:90aea8d024db29360f119f4a0bd368de

Evolution and the ultimatum game: An agent-based model with interbirth intervals and population structure

Authors:

Jeffrey C. Schank↗

by Jeffrey C. Schank, Matt L. Miller The ultimatum game (UG) is widely used to study mutually beneficial exchanges, fairness, and prosocial behavior across different societies. However, human behavior in UG experiments does not align with the game-theoretical prediction that proposers should offer the least positive amount and responders should accept such offers. Instead, proposers make generous offers that are greater than the minimum responders are willing to accept, resulting in generous offers with wide offer-acceptance gaps. Numerous evolutionary models of the UG have been created and studied to explain human behavior, particularly generous offers made in UG experiments. These models have recently faced criticism for lacking biological realism and not adequately explaining the data. Here, we present an agent-based model inspired by our hunter-gatherer ancestors and with a biologically more realistic selection process. We assume that (1) agents exist in group-structured and group-clustered populations, where reproduction (2) depends on resource accumulation, but (3) is limited by interbirth intervals. We ran simulations to assess whether this biologically more realistic model evolves patterns of behavior consistent with patterns in the data from meta-analyses of human behavior in the UG. For the proposed model, we show that generous offers robustly evolve, as well as the difficult-to-explain offer-acceptance gaps, only in group-structured populations with interbirth intervals. We demonstrate that these results are robust and may help explain variation in data across societies. We discuss how interbirth intervals interact with group structure to modulate offer and rejection costs, favoring the evolution of generous offers, offer-acceptance gaps, and other patterns in the data on human behavior in the UG. We also discuss why weak selection and/or high mutation rate models cannot explain all the patterns in UG experimental data. We discuss biological realism and conclude that group structure and interbirth intervals may be essential for explaining prosocial behavior across societies.

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23.

PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-09 DOI: HASH:caefce3b79aa0037ee2a254ab4fa84db

Retraction: Identification of Potent EGFR Inhibitors from TCM Database@Taiwan

Authors:

The PLOS Computational Biology Editors↗

by The PLOS Computational Biology Editors

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24.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.19152

AdsMind: A Physics-Grounded Multi-Agent System for Self-Correcting Discovery of Adsorption Configurations on Heterogeneous Catalyst Surfaces

Authors:

Zongmin Zhang↗Yuyang Lou↗Bowen Zhang↗Junwu Chen↗Ryo Kuroki↗Xuan Vu Nguyen↗Edvin Fako↗Lixue Cheng↗Philippe Schwaller↗

arXiv:2606.19152v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Identifying the lowest-energy surface-adsorbate configuration is critical for modeling heterogeneous catalysis, yet exhaustive exploration with ab initio calculations is computationally prohibitive. Machine-learning force fields (MLFFs) accelerate structural relaxation but leave the search over the vast configurational space a major bottleneck, and open-loop large language model (LLM) agents lack a physics-grounded feedback mechanism to correct erroneous initial guesses. We propose AdsMind (Adsorption configuration discovery with Machine intelligence and relaxation feedback), a closed-loop multi-agent framework that enables autonomous error correction through MLFF relaxation feedback. Across four LLM backends, AdsMind achieves consistently high search reliability, with success rates of 100% and 98.8% on the benchmarks AA20 and OCD-GMAE62. Relative to its single-pass (1-Shot) ablation it reduces cross-backend energy dispersion, and it uses only 4.11 and 4.67 MLFF relaxations per case, respectively – an approximately 14-fold reduction over heuristic enumeration baselines. Density functional theory (DFT) validation using VASP/PBE on six representative AA20 systems shows that the reported open-loop Adsorb-Agent outputs exhibit qualitative adsorption-energy sign errors for molecular adsorbates, whereas AdsMind preserves the correct sign in all tested cases with closer quantitative agreement. AdsMind thus delivers reliability, self-reflection, and interpretability simultaneously, supporting more DFT-informed autonomous chemistry workflows.

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25.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24 DOI: HASH:660c4180edd5d5d939b0eb19d25ade8b

Cognitive and Neuroimaging Biomarker Intra-Individual Variability in Alzheimer's Disease

Authors:

Teo↗M. H↗Taong↗M. R. Q↗Kan↗C. N↗Tan↗C. H↗

Background Greater cognitive intra-individual variability (IIV) reflects increased heterogeneous performance across cognitive domains and has been linked to a higher risk of Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, it remains unclear whether cognitive IIV is linked to heterogeneous dispersion of regional AD pathology. Hence, we aimed to examine the association between cognitive IIV and AD neuroimaging biomarker IIV. Methods This study included participants with normal cognition (CN) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative. Cognitive IIV was computed as the within-person standard deviation of five domain-specific neuropsychological test z-scores. Four neuroimaging biomarker IIV metrics were similarly derived using regional amyloid-{beta} (n = 1,021), tau (n = 719), cortical thickness (n = 2,148), and combined amyloid-tau-neurodegeneration (ATN, n = 258). Associations between cognitive IIV and each biomarker IIV were evaluated using linear regression models, adjusted for relevant covariates. Results Higher cognitive IIV was associated with greater biomarker IIV across amyloid-{beta} ({beta} = 0.039, SE = 0.014, p = .006), tau ({beta} = 0.196, SE = 0.033, p < .001), cortical thinning ({beta} = 0.036, SE = 0.008, p < .001), and ATN ({beta} = 0.176, SE = 0.043, p < .001). Interaction analyses revealed that the associations of cognitive IIV with tau IIV, cortical thickness IIV, and ATN IIV were stronger in MCI than CN individuals. Significant interactions between cognitive IIV and biomarker positivity status showed that the effect with amyloid-{beta} IIV was attenuated in A- ({beta} = 0.004, SE = 0.014, p = .78) but that the effect with tau IIV remained robust even in T- individuals ({beta} = 0.088, SE = 0.022, p < .001). Conclusion Elevated cognitive IIV is associated with greater heterogeneity in cortical dispersion of AD-related pathology, particularly in prodromal AD and in the presence of abnormal pathology. As a novel measure that captures variation in topographical scattering of AD pathological burden across the cortex, AD biomarker IIV may offer research and clinical utility beyond evaluating absolute biomarker load or thresholds.

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