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

Multi-Modal Contrastive Learning for Implicit Earth Embeddings via Location Tying

Authors:
Jonathan Hecht↗Lukas Arzoumanidis↗Ziyue Li↗Youness Dehbi↗

arXiv:2606.20167v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spatial prediction tasks are often limited by a lack of high-quality labelled ground-truth observations. To overcome this challenge, self-supervised pre-training is a possible solution, with contrastive learning dominant for location encoders. Those approaches usually align geographic coordinates with just one additional modality. We propose two multimodal contrastive learning architectures: Multimodal Embedding via Location Tying (MELT) and Sequential Alternating Location Training (SALT). These architectures expand this framework beyond two modalities by utilising unpaired geospatial data. Both methods are technically viable and match the performance of the strongest two-modality baseline (SATCLIP) across four downstream tasks. However, increasing the number of modalities does not consistently improve performance, suggesting that the chosen location encoder is the main limitation - the contrastive objective reaches its peak early, regardless of modality diversity or pre-training volume. MELT provides more stable training than SALT and presents a stronger foundation for future scaling.

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02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

A Definition of Good Explanations and the Challenges Explaining LLM Outputs

Authors:
Louis Mahon↗Elliot Ford↗Callum Hackett↗

arXiv:2606.14838v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: How to define a good explanation is a long-standing philosophical debate which has found recent renewed interest in the context of AI outputs. Explainability is crucial for AI adoption in many contexts, but in order to produce good explanations of AI systems, we must first have an understanding of what good explanations are. In this paper we propose a definition inspired by the notion of counterfactual explanations, however we argue that one must also take into account the interlocutor's prior beliefs in each fact that could be offered in an explanation. We explore the ramifications of this definition for AI explainability and, in particular, why LLM outputs are difficult to produce good explanations for.

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03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

From Architecture to Output: Structural Origins of Hallucination in Large Language Models and the Amplifying Role of Data

Authors:
Md. Rejaul Korim Sadi↗Toufiqur Rahman Tasin↗Golam Mostofa Naeem↗

arXiv:2606.07537v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models hallucinate–producing fluent, confident, factually wrong outputs–with a consistency that persists across generations and scales. Existing taxonomies classify hallucination by output type, distinguishing intrinsic from extrinsic failures and faithfulness from factuality divergence. These frameworks are descriptively rigorous but do not identify which internal mechanism produced a given instance. This paper analyses hallucination as a structural consequence of three architectural decisions that together form a compound failure system. Self-attention's co-occurrence learning substitutes statistical proximity for semantic meaning and produces entity confusion, fact misattribution, and semantic drift. The maximum likelihood estimation training objective optimises next-token probability without factual constraint, rewarding statistically plausible outputs regardless of their truth value. Autoregressive decoding's permanent left-to-right commitment under exposure bias ensures that a single wrong token cascades forward through the entire output sequence without revision. Dataset pathologies–long-tail deficiencies, training bias, and synthetic pollution–amplify these vulnerabilities but do not independently cause them. We make three contributions. First, we map each mechanism to a specific output category in the Alansari and Luqman taxonomy, locating intrinsic hallucination in self-attention, extrinsic hallucination in MLE, and logical inconsistency in autoregressive decoding. Second, we show that each commonly cited dataset pathology exploits one of these mechanisms rather than originating hallucination independently. Third, we identify the diagnostic limitation of output-type-only classification and contrast it with inference-layer mitigation approaches.

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

ShoppingBench: A Real-World Intent-Grounded Shopping Benchmark for LLM-based Agents

Authors:
Jiangyuan Wang↗Kejun Xiao↗Qi Sun↗Huaipeng Zhao↗Tao Luo↗Jian Dong Zhang↗Xiaoyi Zeng↗

Existing benchmarks in e-commerce primarily focus on basic user intents, such as finding or purchasing products. However, real-world users often pursue more complex goals, such as applying vouchers, managing budgets, and finding multi-products seller. To bridge this gap, we propose ShoppingBench, a novel end-to-end shopping benchmark designed to encompass increasingly challenging levels of grounded intent. Specifically, we propose a scalable framework to simulate user instructions based on various intents derived from sampled real-world products. To facilitate consistent and reliable evaluations, we provide a large-scale shopping sandbox that serves as an interactive simulated environment, incorporating over 2.5 million real-world products. Experimental results demonstrate that even state-of-the-art language agents (such as GPT-4.1) achieve absolute success rates under 50% on our benchmark tasks, highlighting the significant challenges posed by our ShoppingBench. In addition, we propose a trajectory distillation strategy and leverage supervised fine-tuning, along with reinforcement learning on synthetic trajectories, to distill the capabilities of a large language agent into a smaller one. As a result, our trained agent achieves competitive performance compared to GPT-4.1.

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05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Breaking the Ice: Analyzing Cold Start Latency in vLLM

Authors:
Huzaifa Shaaban Kabakibo↗Animesh Trivedi↗Lin Wang↗

arXiv:2606.07362v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As scalable inference services become popular, the cold start latency of an inference engine becomes important. Today, vLLM has evolved into the de facto inference engine of choice for many inference workloads. Although popular, due to its complexity and rapid evolution, there has not been a systematic study of its startup latency. With major architectural innovations such as the V1 API and the introduction of torch.compile, this paper presents the first detailed performance characterization of vLLM startup latency. We break down the startup process into six foundational steps and demonstrate that it is predominantly CPU bound. Each step exhibits consistent and interpretable scaling trends with respect to model-level and system-level parameters, enabling fine-grained attribution of latency sources. Building on these insights, we develop a lightweight analytical model that accurately predicts vLLM startup latency for a given hardware configuration, providing actionable guidance for resource planning in large-scale inference environments. All benchmarking datasets, analysis tools, and prediction scripts are open sourced at https://github.com/upb-cn/vllm-startup-profiler.

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

TRACE: Learning to Compute on Circuit Graphs

Authors:
Ziyang Zheng↗Jiaying Zhu↗Jingyi Zhou↗Qiang Xu↗

arXiv:2509.21886v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning to compute, the ability to model the functional behavior of a circuit graph, is a fundamental challenge for graph representation learning. Yet, the dominant paradigm is architecturally mismatched for this task. This flawed assumption, central to mainstream message passing neural networks (MPNNs) and their conventional Transformer-based counterparts, prevents models from capturing the position-aware, hierarchical nature of computation. To resolve this, we introduce TRACE, a new paradigm built on an architecturally sound backbone and a principled learning objective. First, TRACE employs a Hierarchical Transformer that mirrors the step-by-step flow of computation, providing a faithful architectural backbone that replaces the flawed permutation-invariant aggregation. Second, we introduce function shift learning, a novel objective that decouples the learning problem. Instead of predicting the complex global function directly, our model is trained to predict only the function shift, the discrepancy between the true global function and a simple local approximation that assumes input independence. We validate this paradigm on various circuits modalities, including Register Transfer Level graphs, And-Inverter Graphs and post-mapping netlists. Across a comprehensive suite of benchmarks, TRACE substantially outperforms all prior architectures. These results demonstrate that our architecturally-aligned backbone and decoupled learning objective form a more robust paradigm for the fundamental challenge of learning the functional behavior of a circuit graph.

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

Phishing Email Detection Using Large Language Models

Authors:
Najmul Hasan↗Prashanth BusiReddyGari↗Haitao Zhao↗Yihao Ren↗Jinsheng Xu↗Shaohu Zhang↗

arXiv:2512.10104v2 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Email phishing is one of the most prevalent and globally consequential vectors of cyber intrusion. As systems increasingly deploy Large Language Models (LLMs) applications, these systems face evolving phishing email threats that exploit their fundamental architectures. Current LLMs require substantial hardening before deployment in email security systems, particularly against coordinated multi-vector attacks that exploit architectural vulnerabilities. This paper proposes LLMPEA, an LLM-based framework to detect phishing email attacks across multiple attack vectors, including prompt injection, text refinement, and multilingual attacks. We evaluate three frontier LLMs (e.g., GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet 4, and Grok-3) and comprehensive prompting design to assess their feasibility, robustness, and limitations against phishing email attacks. Our empirical analysis reveals that LLMs can detect the phishing email over 90% accuracy while we also highlight that LLM-based phishing email detection systems could be exploited by adversarial attack, prompt injection, and multilingual attacks. Our findings provide critical insights for LLM-based phishing detection in real-world settings where attackers exploit multiple vulnerabilities in combination.

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08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Modelling magnetic material properties with uncertainty-aware neural networks

Authors:
Clemens Wager↗Heisam Moustafa↗Alexander Kovacs↗Qais Ali↗Harald Oezelt↗Hayate Yamano↗Masao Yano↗Noritsugu Sakuma↗Hyuga Hosoi↗Akihito Kinoshita↗Tetsuya Shoji↗Akira Kato↗…

arXiv:2606.11870v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine learning is increasingly applied to accelerate the discovery of novel materials by exploring large compositional and structural design spaces. Yet, the scarcity of high-quality data and the frequent need for out-of-distribution prediction introduce substantial uncertainty, making the assessment of model reliability essential. In this work, we investigate uncertainty quantification as a means to evaluate model confidence in the context of permanent magnet research. In a first study, we benchmark classical and modern machine learning models for predicting intrinsic magnetic properties, focusing on the quality of their uncertainty estimates. We apply Gaussian negative log-likelihood loss and dropout-based Bayesian approximation as practical strategies for estimating predictive uncertainty. In a second study, we transfer these architectural features for uncertainty estimation to a more complex task: predicting coercivity from microstructural information using a graph neural network. Together, these studies demonstrate that uncertainty quantification not only enhances the trustworthiness of predictions but is also transferable across different modeling tasks.

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09.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

The mutational landscape of STING-induced immunity

Authors:
Bing Zhang↗

Stimulator of interferon genes (STING) is an evolutionary conserved immune signalling protein with key roles in host defence, cancer, senescence and inflammation1–3. Downstream of STING, type I interferon, inflammatory cytokine signalling and non-canonical autophagy are governed by a multilayered mechanism integrating ligand-induced structural transitions, protein–protein interactions and coordinated intracellular trafficking4–13. Despite its central role in immunity and relevance as therapeutic target14, the sequence elements that govern STING (in)activation in cells remain incompletely understood. Here we developed a massively parallel assay to systematically chart the sequence-function landscape of STING. Profiling thousands of single amino-acid variants, we identified structural and functional determinants that shape the immunostimulatory capacity of STING and its ability to translate ligand recognition into distinct signalling outputs. Cryogenic-electron microscopy structures of select STING hyperactive variants revealed new regulatory principles dictating conformational transition from inactive to signalling-competent states of STING. Mutational effects are widespread across the functional landscape and can sensitize STING towards the natural ligand 2′3′-cGAMP15–18 or decouple interferon induction from non-canonical autophagy, demonstrating a diversity of possible responses that can be accessed through single point substitutions. Finally, our data showed the clinical and evolutionary relevance of naturally occurring STING protein variants. Collectively, these findings define molecular principles that tune STING activity and chart the landscape of its functional potential across immune contexts. A massively parallel assay systematically charts the sequence-function landscape of the STING signalling protein, and the findings define molecular principles that tune STING activity and show its functional potential across immune contexts.

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

AI for Maritime Security: Comparative Evaluation of CNN and Vision Transformer Architectures for Maritime Object Detection

Authors:
Ismet Gocer↗Zakirul Bhuiayn↗Shakeel Ahmad↗Raza Hasan↗

This study aims to enhance maritime security by using advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Computer Vision (CV) techniques. For this purpose, it was designed and assessed intelligent object detection systems that can detect the presence of ships on the sea surface under different real-time environments. To achieve this goal, a maritime image dataset with 6,468 images was used, covering different weather conditions like cloudy, foggy, rainy, and sunny environments. Six deep learning architectures were evaluated, including a base Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model, four transfer learning models (Xception, VGG16, MobileNetV2, and EfficientNetV2L), and a Vision Transformer (ViT) model. The models were compared using multiple performance indicators, including accuracy, Type I and Type II errors, model size, and video processing time. The results show that model performance varies depending on computational constraints and deployment conditions. While lightweight architectures are suitable for resource-limited devices, the ViT achieved the best overall performance, reaching 100% accuracy with the lowest error rates and the fastest video processing time. The findings highlight the potential of AI-driven computer vision systems for maritime surveillance, border protection, and autonomous navigation.

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11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

An Empirical Study on Predictive Maintenance for Component X in Heavy-Duty Scania Trucks

Authors:
Valeriu Dimidov↗Sasan Jafarnejad↗Rapha\"el Frank↗

arXiv:2606.12486v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Condition-based Predictive Maintenance (PdM) for truck fleets has gained momentum in recent years. This maintenance strategy aims to minimize unplanned downtimes and reduce costs by monitoring the health status of vehicles and taking proactive action based on their condition. However, the implementation of condition-based PdM systems is challenging due to the large volume of data generated by the trucks, the inherent complexity of detecting failures through sensor data and the difficulties in finding cost-effective trade-offs in the solution's implementation. In this paper, we define and validate a condition-based PdM methodology built on the assumption that the wear-and-tear state of the monitored component can be represented as a monotonically non-decreasing time series. It involves selecting only the most recent observations from the time series and transforming them into a tabular format for classification using machine learning (ML) models designed for tabular data. Our results indicate that the proposed methodology reduces costs on the Scania Component X dataset compared to current state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches, while also simplifying the modeling process through AutoML.

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

Visual Generation in the New Era: An Evolution from Atomic Mapping to Agentic World Modeling

Authors:
Keming Wu↗Zuhao Yang↗Kaichen Zhang↗Shizun Wang↗Haowei Zhu↗Sicong Leng↗Zhongyu Yang↗Qijie Wang↗Sudong Wang↗Ziting Wang↗Zili Wang↗Hui Zhang↗…

Recent visual generation models have made major progress in photorealism, typography, instruction following, and interactive editing, yet they still struggle with spatial reasoning, persistent state, long-horizon consistency, and causal understanding. We argue that the field should move beyond appearance synthesis toward intelligent visual generation: plausible visuals grounded in structure, dynamics, domain knowledge, and causal relations. To frame this shift, we introduce a five-level taxonomy: Atomic Generation, Conditional Generation, In-Context Generation, Agentic Generation, and World-Modeling Generation, progressing from passive renderers to interactive, agentic, world-aware generators. We analyze key technical drivers, including flow matching, unified understanding-and-generation models, improved visual representations, post-training, reward modeling, data curation, synthetic data distillation, and sampling acceleration. We further show that current evaluations often overestimate progress by emphasizing perceptual quality while missing structural, temporal, and causal failures. By combining benchmark review, in-the-wild stress tests, and expert-constrained case studies, this roadmap offers a capability-centered lens for understanding, evaluating, and advancing the next generation of intelligent visual generation systems.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Do as I Do: Dexterous Manipulation Data from Everyday Human Videos

Authors:
Bhawna Paliwal↗Haritheja Etukuru↗William Liang↗Pieter Abbeel↗Nur Muhammad Mahi Shafiullah↗Jitendra Malik↗

How can we scalably generate data for robotic manipulation, especially on human-like platforms such as dexterous multi-fingered hands? Learning from human videos has recently emerged as a likely answer to this question. However, difficulties in estimating hand-object interaction and crossing the human-to-robot embodiment gap have hindered the adoption of abundant monocular RGB-only human videos as the primary source of robot manipulation data. In this work, we present DO AS I DO, an algorithm to reconstruct and retarget monocular RGB human videos to multi-fingered dexterous robotic hands. DO AS I DO reconstructs hand-object interactions from various egocentric and exocentric in-the-wild video sources. The algorithm then retargets these hand-object interaction estimates into a sequence of actions executable in the real world, yielding robot-complete manipulation data from disparate human videos. Overall, DO AS I DO outperforms previous state of the art in estimating hand-object interactions and extracting dexterous manipulation trajectories from RGB videos, as we show in experiments on datasets with ground truths and on a dataset of video clips collected online. Our experiments enable us to propose an efficacy playbook for practitioners collecting human data for manipulation.

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14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Lifelong In-Context Learning with Transformers Requires Parametric Forms of Attention

Authors:
Luke McDermott↗Robert W. Heath jr↗Rahul Parhi↗

arXiv:2606.25342v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Lifelong continual learning remains an obstacle on the path to human-like intelligence. Modern transformers show sparks of intelligence with in-context learning. The quadratic nature of attention, however, prohibits transformers from performing this process on arbitrarily long sequences. In this work, we argue that extending in-context learning to lifelong settings is a practical solution for continual learning in AI agents. In particular, we argue that parametric forms of attention are needed to understand a lifetime of context with transformers on a fixed hardware budget. These attention mechanisms learn the relationship between keys and their associated values at test-time with parametric regression. Our generalization of parametric approaches (linear attention, state-space models, fast weight programmers, and test-time training layers) contrasts with nonparametric counterparts like softmax attention. They replace the ever-growing key-value cache with an online-trainable neural network, maintaining a constant memory footprint. We highlight how parametric attention currently fall short of lifelong learning due to limited memory capacity or costly online updates. To address these issues, we pose a set of open questions with novel insights to guide the field toward long-horizon agents.

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15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Flexible Catalysis

Authors:
M\'at\'e Weisz↗Sergii Strelchuk↗

arXiv:2510.01065v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In quantum information and computation, a central challenge is to determine which quantum states can be transformed into which others under restricted sets of free operations. While many transformations are impossible directly, catalytic processes can enable otherwise forbidden conversions: an auxiliary quantum state (the catalyst) facilitates the transformation while remaining unchanged. In this work, we introduce flexible catalysis, a generalization in which the catalyst is allowed to transform into a different auxiliary state, provided it remains a valid catalyst. We show that this framework subsumes both standard catalytic and multicopy transformations, and we analyse its advantages across several classes of free operations. In particular, we prove that when the free operations are local unitaries or permutation matrices, flexible catalysis enables state extractions that are unattainable with standard catalysis alone.

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16.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-13

Contribution of nosocomial transmission to <i>Klebsiella pneumoniae</i> neonatal sepsis in Africa and South Asia: An observational study of infection clusters inferred from pathogen genomics and temporal data

Authors:
Erkison Ewomazino Odih↗

by Erkison Ewomazino Odih, Jabir A. Abdulahi, Anne V. Amulele, Matthew Bates, Eva Heinz, Weiming Hu, Kajal Jain, Rindidzani Magobo, Courtney P. Olwagen, John M. Tembo, Tolbert Sonda, Jonathan Strysko, Caroline C. Tigoi, Kyle Bittinger, Jennifer Cornick, Ebenezer Foster-Nyarko, Wilson Gumbi, Steven M. Jones, Chileshe L. Musyani, Carolyn M. McGann, Ahmed M. Moustafa, Patrick Musicha, James C. L. Mwansa, Moreka L. Ndumba, Thomas D. Stanton, Donwilliams O. Omuoyo, Oliver Pearse, Laura T. Phillips, Paul J. Planet, Charlene M. C. Rodrigues, Fatou Secka, Kirsty Sands, Erin Theiller, Allan M. Zuza, Sulagna Basu, Grace J. Chan, Kenneth C. Iregbu, Jean-Baptiste Mazarati, Semaria Solomon Alemayehu, Timothy R. Walsh, Rabaab Zahra, Angela Dramowski, Sombo Fwoloshi, Appiah-Korang Labi, Lola Madrid, Noah Obeng-Nkrumah, David Ojok, Boaz D. Wadugu, Andrew C. Whitelaw, Anudita Bhargava, Atul Jindal, Ramesh K. Agarwal, Alexander M. Aiken, James A. Berkley, Susan E. Coffin, Nicholas A. Feasey, Nelesh P. Govender, Davidson H. Hamer, Shabir A. Madhi, Mari Jeeva Sankar, Kelly L. Wyres, Kathryn E. Holt Background Klebsiella pneumoniae is the leading cause of sepsis among neonates in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Africa and Asia, contributing substantially to the overall burden of antimicrobial-resistant infections and mortality among neonates globally. Pathogen sequencing has been used to investigate case clusters and confirm nosocomial transmission in a small number of neonatal units. Here we utilise pathogen sequence data to estimate the fraction of K. pneumoniae neonatal sepsis attributable to nosocomial transmission in African and South Asian countries. Methods and findings We estimated the proportion of invasive K. pneumoniae disease involved in nosocomial transmission clusters in a given neonatal unit, using single-linkage clustering based on pairwise temporal and genetic distances estimated from bacterial whole-genome sequences aggregated from 10 contributing studies. Analysing 1,523 K. pneumoniae isolates from 27 units in 13 countries in Africa and South Asia between 2013 and 2023, we inferred 156 nosocomial transmission clusters, ranging from 2 to 188 neonates each (83 of the clusters comprised ≥3 cases). Overall, we estimated that 1,035 neonatal infections (68.0%) were part of nosocomial transmission clusters. Excluding the first infection in each cluster as a potential index case, we estimate at least 879 (57.7%) infections were acquired via nosocomial transmission. Sensitivity analyses showed that results were robust to the choice of genetic distance estimation methods and thresholds used to define clusters, and cluster estimates were stable over temporal distance thresholds ranging from 2 to 8 weeks. Isolates were mostly extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL) producers (90.9%) and included 172 multi-locus sequence types (STs). Fourteen STs, including several globally recognised multidrug-resistant lineages, were associated with transmission clusters at multiple units, and these were collectively responsible for two-thirds of all infections. Carriage of carbapenemase genes (adjusted odds ratio, aOR = 2.08 [95% confidence interval, CI: 1.04, 4.14]; p = 0.04) and ESBL genes (aOR = 2.48 [95% CI: 1.26, 4.90]; p = 0.006) were significantly positively associated with transmission in a logistic regression model with site as a covariate. Limitations of this study include the lack of sufficient clinical data to allow high-resolution investigation of transmission dynamics and lack of facility-level data to investigate contributors to the observed differences in transmission burden across sites. Conclusions Nosocomial transmission contributes to a substantial proportion of K. pneumoniae sepsis in neonatal care units in Africa and South Asia. Reducing transmission within these settings through improved infection prevention and control and other measures could substantially reduce the neonatal sepsis burden. A high burden of transmission clusters is associated with the same drug-resistant lineages that are recognised as high-risk clones associated with hospital outbreaks in high-income countries, indicating global connectivity of the antimicrobial-resistant pathogen population.

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

What Actually Works for Spacecraft Fault-Tolerant Control: An Honest Settled-Gate Benchmark of Learned and Classical Methods

Authors:
Alireza Shojaei↗

arXiv:2606.25374v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent learned fault-tolerant-control (FTC) work reports high success on spacecraft actuator faults, but often in simulation, on narrow fault sets, and with transient metrics that a trajectory need only touch once. We ask what recovers spacecraft pointing when success means holding it on faults never seen in training. We answer with a benchmark built around a settled gate, pointing held within 0.2 deg over a dwell window and scored on the true state, train/test splits disjoint in inertia, gain, sign pattern, and bias, Wilson intervals over n=500 episodes per cell, and one-command reproduction on a 6-DOF Basilisk testbed. Across classical, adaptive, learned end-to-end, and structured controllers, three findings stand out. Fault-unaware PD/PID and from-scratch end-to-end RL score 0%, so learning capacity alone is not the lever. Classical adaptive laws resolve sign faults but handle gain poorly at 55.2%, and a literature-faithful Nussbaum-gain law reaches 45.2% and 3.2%. A structured estimate-then-control design, with a learned recurrent module that infers actuator gain online and feeds an analytic law, wins on sign and gain faults at 97.8% and 94.4%, approaching the privileged oracle while unstructured methods remain at zero. The hard wall is constant additive bias, which is 0% for every controller including the privileged gain oracle, because an integral-free law cannot null a constant disturbance. We close it with a disturbance observer that recovers bias from the dynamics and is self-correcting for gain-estimate error. Composed with the gain estimate, it recovers 59.4% of held-out bias faults with no sign/gain regression, moving that class off zero. We classify sensor-fault regimes similarly, show that sensor bias is unobservable from the corrupted measurement alone and therefore requires fusion rather than an observer, and release the benchmark so the gate is shared.

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18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Real-Time Voice AI Hears but Does Not Listen

Authors:
Martijn Bartelds↗Federico Bianchi↗James Zou↗

Speech conveys information through both words and vocal delivery. We evaluate four leading production realtime voice systems-OpenAI's GPT Realtime 2, Google's Gemini 3.1 Flash Live, and Alibaba's Qwen3.5 Omni Plus and Omni Flash-on tasks where the words and the delivery patterns both convey meaningful information. Across three consequential scenarios, all four systems act on the words rather than the voice. They end calls with crying callers who insist nothing is wrong, approve wire transfers authorized in frightened voices, and enroll callers whose agreement is clearly sarcastic. Surprisingly, this is often not a failure of perception. When asked directly, three of the four systems reliably identify the distress, fear, or sarcasm they later ignore when making decisions. We observe a similar pattern when these realtime voice systems estimate accent and age, as their responses frequently follow the biases of the words rather than the acoustic properties of the speaker. We term this disconnect between perception and action the emotional intelligence gap of voice AI. Prompting systems to explicitly attend to vocal delivery improves performance only partially and inconsistently. Our findings show that current realtime voice AI systems often behave as if speech had been reduced to a transcript, suggesting that they should be used with caution in settings where the tone and emotion of delivery convey important information.

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19.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

TCRBinder: Unified pre-trained language model with paired-chain synergy for predicting T-cell receptor binding specificity

Authors:
Weihe Dong↗

by Weihe Dong, Qiang Yang, Long Xu, Xiaokun Li, Kuanquan Wang, Suyu Dong, Gongning Luo, Xianyu Zhang, Tiansong Yang, Xin Gao, Guohua Wang Deciphering how human T cells recognise peptide-HLA (pHLA) complexes underpins next-generation vaccines and personalised immunotherapies, yet extreme sequence diversity and paired-chains interdependence still hamper reliable in silico prediction of T-cell receptor (TCR) specificity. To overcome these hurdles, we built TCRBinder, a paired-chain-aware deep model with a multi-branch encoder that routes each molecular component through dedicated transformer-based modules to capture contextual signals in both HLA pseudo-sequences and antigenic peptides while simultaneously processing the TCR α and β chains. This design captures the synergistic interaction between paired chains to emulate peptide-HLA-TCR (PHT) interactions and expose residue-level contact motifs. Across PHT and peptide-TCR (pTCR) benchmarks, the model delivered state-of-the-art performance (AUC-ROC = 0.911, AUPR = 0.791 for the PHT task) and remained superior on multiple independent datasets. We tracked the dynamics of clonal expansion and, in a large SARS-CoV-2 repertoire containing completely unseen peptides, improved the AUC-ROC by up to 16.3% over the leading alternatives. Moreover, TCRBinder provided mechanistic insights by pinpointing contact hotspots and quantifying residue contributions to binding probability. These capabilities position TCRBinder as a versatile tool for rational antigen discovery, immunotherapy stratification, and neoantigen vaccine design.

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20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

EveLoad: Cognitive Workload Recognition from Event-Based Eye Movements

Authors:
Guorui Lu↗Shaohua Guan↗Zhen Xu↗Qinyu Chen↗

arXiv:2606.25177v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cognitive workload monitoring is important for adaptive rehabilitation and assistive interfaces, where task difficulty, pacing, and feedback should be adjusted according to the user's cognitive state to avoid overload and under-challenge. Emerging extended reality and robot-assisted rehabilitation environments provide controllable training tasks, but they require unobtrusive sensing methods that can capture rapid ocular dynamics during interaction. Existing eye-movement-based cognitive workload recognition methods mainly rely on frame-based eye trackers, which often suffer from limited temporal resolution and degraded robustness under rapid eye movements. In contrast, event cameras provide microsecond-level temporal resolution, high dynamic range and low latency, making them suitable for capturing fine-grained ocular dynamics. Many previous studies rely on free-viewing or similar paradigms, where gaze locations can vary across tasks. As a result, models may learn associations between gaze-location distributions and cognitive workload, rather than workload-related eye movement characteristics themselves. In this work, we introduce EveLoad, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first event-based eye-movement dataset with graded cognitive workload annotations, collected from 20 healthy participants under spatially constrained and task-driven conditions using a controlled N-back-guided fixation paradigm. Based on this dataset, we establish a benchmark for cognitive workload recognition with six workload levels and propose a learning framework that encodes spatiotemporal event representations. Experimental results show that our approach achieves an average subject-specific accuracy of 96.36% and 96.13% under mixed random split evaluation. These results suggest that event-based eye movements may provide a useful sensing pathway for future workload-aware rehabilitation.

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21.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-16

<b>Engineered heart muscle passes early clinical milestone</b>

Authors:
Karen O’Leary↗

Engineered heart muscle allografts derived from induced pluripotent stem cells show promising early outcomes in patients with treatment-refractory advanced heart failure with reduced left ventricular ejection fraction, in support of further clinical investigation. Engineered heart muscle allografts derived from induced pluripotent stem cells show promising early outcomes in patients with treatment-refractory advanced heart failure with reduced left ventricular ejection fraction, in support of further clinical investigation.

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22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Flux-Guard: Facial Identity Protection using diffusion models

Authors:
Jie Wang↗Tao Wang↗Ru Zhang↗Jianyi Liu↗

The widespread deployment of face recognition (FR) systems exposes personal images shared on social media and public platforms to identity linkage and privacy risks. Existing adversarial privacy protection methods can degrade unauthorized FR performance but are not compatible with generative face editing. Artificial intelligence-driven face editing tools are gaining popularity, which has significantly increased user demand for personalized portrait generation and social sharing. However, current editing methods often preserve identity features, making the edited images still susceptible to tracking by malicious FR systems. Thus, this paper proposes Flux-Guard, a privacy-preserving face editing framework based on adversarial attacks, which integrates face editing and privacy protection within a unified generative process. Specifically, we design a flow trajectory control method to align semantic manipulations with the generative process and introduce latent-space adversarial optimization with an adaptive perceptual-loss-driven weighting strategy, dynamically adjusting adversarial strength to maximize attack effectiveness while preserving visual quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Flux-Guard supports face editing while significantly improving attack success rates against cross-domain face recognition models on the CelebA-HQ and LADN datasets. Furthermore, evaluation results for commercial APIs have confirmed its effectiveness in real-world applications. The code is released at https://github.com/JLMWang/Flux-Guard.

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

Coverage Guarantees for Pseudo-Calibrated Conformal Prediction under Distribution Shift

Authors:
Farbod Siahkali↗Ashwin Verma↗Vijay Gupta↗

arXiv:2602.14913v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Conformal prediction (CP) offers distribution-free marginal coverage guarantees under an exchangeability assumption, but these guarantees can fail if the data distribution shifts. We analyze the use of pseudo-calibration as a tool to counter this performance loss under a bounded label-conditional covariate shift model. Using tools from domain adaptation, we derive a lower bound on target coverage in terms of the source-domain loss of the classifier and a Wasserstein measure of the shift. Using this result, we provide a method to design pseudo-calibrated sets that inflate the conformal threshold by a slack parameter to keep target coverage above a prescribed level. Finally, we propose a source-tuned pseudo-calibration algorithm that interpolates between hard pseudo-labels and randomized labels as a function of classifier uncertainty. Numerical experiments show that our bounds qualitatively track pseudo-calibration behavior and that the source-tuned scheme mitigates coverage degradation under distribution shift while maintaining nontrivial prediction set sizes.

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

A Comparative Study of Pretrained Transformer Models for Quranic ASR: Speech Representations, Label Formats, and Dataset Composition

Authors:
Nabil Mosharraf Hossain↗Riasat Islam↗Unaizah Obaidellah↗

arXiv:2606.19747v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quran Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) aims to convert Quranic recitation into text, enabling applications such as aided memorisation tools and Quranic search engines. However, existing ASR models often exhibit high Word Error Rates (WER) on user-recited verses and lack full coverage of the Quranic corpus. This paper presents a systematic empirical study of domain-specific fine-tuning of pretrained Transformer-based models for Quranic ASR, using advanced speech feature extraction methods: Wav2Vec2.0, HuBERT, and XLS-R. These models apply self-supervised learning by masking portions of input audio and using Transformer architectures to learn context-aware speech features. The pretrained models are fine-tuned on a filtered Quranic dataset exceeding 870 hours of professional and user recitations. Through comprehensive ablation studies across feature extractors, output label formats, training strategies, and clip durations, we identify the key factors that affect transcription accuracy in this domain. Our best-performing configuration achieves a WER of 0.08 on the EveryAyah subset and 0.11 on the combined EveryAyah+Tarteel setting, representing roughly a five-percentage-point gain over the Citrinet baseline (WER = 0.163) while reducing combined-model training time from 140 hours to 40 hours. Arabic text without diacritics yields the best fine-tuning results, and Wav2Vec2-XLSR-53 provides the strongest overall representation. Future work includes improving dataset quality and developing phoneme-aware models to extract deeper speech feature representations for Tajweed-sensitive applications.

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

David vs. Goliath in Next Activity Prediction: Argmax vs. LSTM, Transformer, and LLM

Authors:
Hans Weytjens↗Ingo Weber↗

arXiv:2606.15868v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Next activity prediction (NAP) is a cornerstone of predictive process monitoring (PPM), enabling organizations to move from retrospective analysis to proactive process steering. The PPM field has progressed from classical machine learning through deep learning architectures such as LSTMs and Transformers to large language models (LLMs). Despite growing model complexity, no benchmark jointly compares LLMs, Transformers, LSTMs, and simple baselines in a direct sequence modeling setting for NAP. In this paper, we fill this gap with a systematic benchmark. We compare vocabulary-adapted LLMs, Transformers trained from scratch, LLM-distilled Transformers, and LSTMs against a simple counting-based argmax baseline across seven real-life event logs. Our results tell a David vs. Goliath story: pretraining confers no consistent improvement over training from scratch, model size shows little effect on performance, and on most datasets the argmax baseline matches or approaches the performance of billion-parameter LLMs.

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