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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Order statistics for edge eigenvectors of Wigner matrices

Authors:
Zhigang Bao↗Teodor Bucht↗Kevin Schnelli↗

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

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02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Oranits: Mission Assignment and Task Offloading in Open RAN-based ITS using Metaheuristic and Deep Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Ngoc Hung Nguyen↗Nguyen Van Thieu↗Quang-Trung Luu↗Anh Tuan Nguyen↗Senura Wanasekara↗Nguyen Cong Luong↗Fatemeh Kavehmadavani↗Van-Dinh Nguyen↗

arXiv:2507.19712v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we explore mission assignment and task offloading in an Open Radio Access Network (Open RAN)-based intelligent transportation system (ITS), where autonomous vehicles leverage mobile edge computing for efficient processing. Existing studies often overlook the intricate interdependencies between missions and the costs associated with offloading tasks to edge servers, leading to suboptimal decision-making. To bridge this gap, we introduce Oranits, a novel system model that explicitly accounts for mission dependencies and offloading costs while optimizing performance through vehicle cooperation. To achieve this, we propose a twofold optimization approach. First, we develop a metaheuristic-based evolutionary computing algorithm, namely the Chaotic Gaussian-based Global ARO (CGG-ARO), serving as a baseline for one-slot optimization. Second, we design an enhanced reward-based deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework, referred to as the Multi-agent Double Deep Q-Network (MA-DDQN), that integrates both multi-agent coordination and multi-action selection mechanisms, significantly reducing mission assignment time and improving adaptability over baseline methods. Extensive simulations reveal that CGG-ARO improves the number of completed missions and overall benefit by approximately 7.1% and 7.7%, respectively. Meanwhile, MA-DDQN achieves even greater improvements of 11.0% in terms of mission completions and 12.5% in terms of the overall benefit. These results highlight the effectiveness of Oranits in enabling faster, more adaptive, and more efficient task processing in dynamic ITS environments.

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03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Noise-Adaptive Predictive Dynamical Decoupling

Authors:
Ali Abu-Nada↗Subhashish Banerjee↗Lian-Ao Wu↗

arXiv:2606.15769v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protecting quantum coherence against realistic environmental noise remains one of the fundamental obstacles to scalable quantum technologies. We develop a noise-adaptive dynamical decoupling framework that combines analytical open-quantum-system modeling with machine-learning-based forecasting for a qubit interacting with random telegraph noise. Unlike conventional dynamical decoupling protocols based on fixed pulse schedules, the proposed approach continuously forecasts short-time coherence evolution and adaptively applies control pulses according to the instantaneous noise dynamics. We investigate stationary and non-stationary environments spanning both Markovian and non-Markovian regimes. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the machine-learning-assisted adaptive control strategy substantially outperforms conventional periodic dynamical decoupling while using a comparable number of control pulses. The improvement becomes particularly pronounced in non-Markovian and non-stationary regimes, where memory effects, coherence revivals, and temporally evolving noise strongly limit the effectiveness of static pulse protocols. These results establish predictive machine-learning-assisted dynamical decoupling as a promising and scalable framework for adaptive quantum control in realistic noisy quantum devices.

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04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Scalable and Interpretable Representation Alignment with Ordinal Similarity

Authors:
Diogo Soares↗Pankhil Gawade↗Andrea Dittadi↗Ewa Szczurek↗

arXiv:2606.16379v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating representation similarity is fundamental to representation learning. However, existing metrics suffer from significant limitations: they lack interpretability due to shifting baselines, lack robustness to outliers, and are computationally intractable for large datasets, forcing reliance on heuristic approximations. To address this, we develop an ordinal-similarity framework, instantiated by the Triplet (TSI) and Quadruplet (QSI) Similarity Indices, which measure alignment by quantifying the consistency of ordinal relationships. We theoretically demonstrate this formulation is inherently interpretable, robust to outliers, and computationally efficient. Finally, we establish a formal equivalence between TSI and local neighborhood alignment, measured by Mutual Nearest Neighbors. Empirically, we validate these properties and show that ordinal similarity offers a scalable approach to measuring alignment, enabling practitioners to better understand and design representations.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

TerraTransfer: Learning End-to-End Driving Policies Without Expert Demonstrations

Authors:
Zikang Xiong↗Weixin Li↗Zhouchonghao Wu↗Akshay Rangesh↗Saarth Bonde↗Grantland Hall↗Chen Tang↗Yihan Hu↗Wei Zhan↗

End-to-end autonomous driving has achieved state-of-the-art performance on benchmarks and real-world deployments. Its standard training recipe, however, is expensive across all stages: collecting and labeling millions of driving frames is costly, and closed-loop RL on images is bottlenecked by the per-step cost of photorealistic rendering plus a forward pass through a large vision backbone. Self-play in vectorized simulators changes the economics: millions of rollout steps per second, and a state distribution naturally rich in collisions, near-misses, and recoveries that no driving log contains. Our approach exploits this asymmetry by decoupling learning to drive from learning to see. We pretrain a single policy by self-play, then align its latent space with a pretrained vision backbone, through the action KL divergence and a batch-relational low-rank structural loss. The action target comes from the self-play policy, so alignment never supervises against a logged trajectory: a paired dataset of (image, scene-state) frames suffices, with no need for the curated expert demonstrations that imitation pretraining is built on. On photorealistic 3D Gaussian splatting closed-loop scenarios, the resulting end-to-end policy matches or exceeds prior end-to-end methods.

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

Laplace–Fisher Gate Identities for Optimal Matrix-Gated Blended Score Estimation

Authors:
Alois Duston↗Tan Bui Tanh↗

arXiv:2606.25169v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sampling from an unnormalized target by reversing an Ornstein–Uhlenbeck diffusion requires the score of each noise-perturbed marginal. Tweedie's identity and a target-score identity give unbiased finite-reference estimators for this score. Scalar blends can reduce variance, but are too rigid for singular or strongly anisotropic targets. We cast blended score estimation as conditional risk minimization over matrix-valued blending coefficients, or gates, and derive the variance-optimal gate [ \Gstar(y,t)=\alphat^2\bigl(\alphat^2 I_d+\gammat,\E[H_0(X_0)\mid Y_t=y]\bigr)^{-1},\qquad H_0=-\nabla^2\log p_0 . ] Here (\alphat=e^{-t}) and (\gammat=1-e^{-2t}). We call this formula the Laplace–Fisher Gate Identity (\operatorname{LFGI}{}). Since the Tweedie–TSI disagreement has conditional mean zero, the gate changes estimator variance without changing its expected value. We give the Gaussian special case and prove finite-reference consistency and stability bounds for estimating the gate from weighted reference samples. We apply the finite-reference LFGI estimator to normalized density evaluation for Bayesian inverse problems. When MCMC pilot samples and derivative information are available, LFGI uses these byproducts to construct a normalized posterior-density surrogate. The surrogate enables posterior-energy evaluation, model-evidence estimation, and density-based diagnostics beyond those available from samples alone. On a PDE-constrained inverse-problem benchmark, LFGI improves posterior-density calibration and sampling diagnostics relative to the other tested score-estimator classes, and known-evidence experiments check absolute calibration in Gaussian and non-Gaussian settings.

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07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

DroneShield-AI: A Multi-Modal Sensor Fusion Framework for Real-Time Autonomous Drone Threat Detection, Behavioral Intent Classification, and Swarm Intelligence in Contested Airspace

Authors:
Marius Bayizere↗

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) threats have emerged as a defining security challenge of the 21st century. This paper presents DroneShield-AI, a unified open framework integrating six processing layers: RF signal classification, acoustic motor-signature detection, YOLOv8-based visual detection, evidence-weighted sensor fusion, a Behavioral Intent Classification Engine (BICE), and a Graph Neural Network Swarm Intelligence Module (GNN-SIM). BICE introduces the first systematic six-class threat taxonomy for drone flight patterns, enabling predictive operator alerts with a 30-second advance-warning horizon. GNN-SIM is the first open framework for adversarial multi-drone formation analysis using Graph Attention Networks. Evaluated on three publicly available real-world datasets, the fused pipeline achieves 96.1% detection accuracy, 3.2% false alarm rate, AUC-ROC: 0.981, and 142ms end-to-end latency on commodity CPU-class hardware at approximately $500-$780 USD total system cost. All code, model weights, and simulation datasets are publicly released at submission.

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08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Spin-imbalanced fermion on a dynamic lattice

Authors:
Jie Liu↗Xiaofan Zhou↗Suotang Jia↗

arXiv:2606.25411v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We investigate the magnetic order of a one-dimensional spin-1/2 fermion dynamical lattice, where itinerant fermions are coupled to bond-centered localized spins via an Ising-like spin dependent hopping. The model provides an anisotropic dynamical extension of conventional spin-1/2 fermion systems, in which the motion of itinerant fermions is directly modulated by the configuration of localized spins. Using density matrix renormalization group simulations, we map out the ground state phase diagram in various parameter spaces. Depending on the interplay among the hopping dependent on localized spins, the longitudinal field, and the external Zeeman field, two distinct phases are obtained: a paramagnetic phase and a spin-density-wave phase. Most notably, in the partially spin-polarized fermion phase, the spin-density wave ordering wave vector exhibits two distinct phenomena, corresponding respectively to the nesting vectors $2k_{F\uparrow}$ and $2k_{F\downarrow}$ of the spin-resolved Fermi surfaces. We further demonstrate that the two spin-density wave phases are robust against the repulsive Hubbard interaction between itinerant fermions. Our results reveal a novel route for tuning magnetic modulations in one-dimensional correlated systems and enrich the microscopic understanding of dynamical lattice magnetism.

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09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Exploring Starts Are Not Enough: Counterexamples and a Fix for Monte Carlo Exploring Starts

Authors:
Octave Oliviers↗Glenn Vinnicombe↗

arXiv:2606.15247v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The asymptotic behaviour of Monte Carlo Exploring Starts (MCES) is a long-standing open question in reinforcement learning, even in the tabular setting. We investigated the convergence properties of tabular MCES by constructing examples in which the algorithm converges to suboptimal solutions. This paper presents new counterexamples for both initial-visit and first-visit MCES and gives a convergence-restoring modification for the initial-visit case. We show that stable suboptimal solutions may exist for initial-visit MCES with sample-average updates even when greedy actions are updated more often than non-greedy actions on average. However, by scaling learning rates inversely to update frequencies on a state-by-state basis, convergence to optimality is guaranteed. Unlike previous uniformisation methods, this modification is applicable to large-scale problems that require approximating the estimated value function. We then extend the example to show that sample-average first-visit MCES may also converge to suboptimal solutions. This largely settles a fundamental open problem and shows that exploring starts alone do not guarantee convergence to optimality. More broadly, these results highlight that convergence depends critically on the relative size and frequency of updates applied to different actions, making the choice of learning rates and the balance between exploration and exploitation central to the analysis of MCES and the implementation of scalable Monte Carlo control methods.

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

A Model-Free Universal AI

Authors:
Yegon Kim↗Juho Lee↗

arXiv:2602.23242v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In general reinforcement learning, all established optimal agents, including AIXI, are model-based, explicitly maintaining and using environment models. This paper introduces Universal AI with Q-Induction (AIQI), the first model-free agent proven to be asymptotically $\varepsilon$-optimal in general RL. AIQI performs universal induction over distributional action-value functions, instead of policies or environments like previous works. Under a grain of truth condition, we prove that AIQI is strong asymptotically $\varepsilon$-optimal and asymptotically $\varepsilon$-Bayes-optimal. We also apply our novel proof techniques to show asymptotic $\varepsilon$-optimality of Self-AIXI without any ad-hoc assumptions. Our results significantly expand the diversity of known universal agents.

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11.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-23

Multi-omics biomarkers of endothelial dysregulation preceding chronic lung allograft dysfunction: A prospective cohort study

Authors:
Giulia Iacono↗

by Giulia Iacono, Christina Begka, Bailey Cardwell, Carmel Daunt, Roxanne Chatzis, Celine Pattaroni, Alana Butler, Matthew Macowan, Bronwyn Levvey, Gregory I. Snell, Glen P. Westall, Benjamin J. Marsland Background Long-term survival of lung transplant recipients remains limited by chronic lung allograft dysfunction (CLAD). CLAD is only diagnosed following a persistent and substantial decline in lung function, after which irreversible damage to the lungs has occurred, limiting opportunities to effectively intervene at an early stage. There is a critical need for earlier detection prior to its clinical manifestation. The immunological drivers of CLAD remain unclear, limiting the development of predictive biomarkers and new therapies. Methods and findings In this hypothesis-generating, prospective cohort study, we profiled the microbial, metabolic, lipidomic, and gene expression dynamics of longitudinally collected broncho-alveolar lavages (BALs) from 56 CLAD-free lung transplant recipients up to 30 months post-transplant, and compared BALs from 13 CLAD-free patients to BALs from 13 patients who developed CLAD. In CLAD-free patients, the first 6 months post-transplant were hallmarked by diminished microbial diversity and increased abundance of Staphylococcus and Candida, coupled with upregulated innate and adaptive immune responses, and elevated nitric oxide metabolism (FDR 

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

Your "Pro" LLM Subscription May Actually Be "Free": Exposing Fingerprint Spoofing Risks in LLM Inference Services

Authors:
Jiahao Zhang↗Xiuyu Li↗Suhang Wang↗

As Large Language Model (LLM) APIs become ubiquitous, users increasingly rely on black-box fingerprinting to verify that providers are serving the advertised premium models. However, these methods may overlook adversarial providers who manipulate model weights to cheat the fingerprint process. We introduce a novel threat termed fingerprint spoofing, where a malicious provider stealthily serves a weaker model that has been parameter-efficiently fine-tuned to mimic a stronger model, thereby evading user-side fingerprinting. We first formally prove that user-side resource constraints (i.e., finite query budgets and weak fingerprinting classifiers) make current fingerprinting vulnerable to fingerprint spoofing. Guided by this theoretical analysis, we propose GhostPrint, a cost-effective attack framework leveraging surrogate modeling, reward-ranked fine-tuning, and knowledge distillation. Extensive evaluations in both static and continual fingerprinting settings demonstrate that GhostPrint allows weak models to consistently bypass representative fingerprint methods while maintaining utility at a low fine-tuning cost, exposing a critical vulnerability in current LLM fingerprinting pipelines.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

AlignDrive: Aligned Lateral-Longitudinal Planning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

Authors:
Yanhao Wu↗Haoyang Zhang↗Fei He↗Rui Wu↗Yanhu Shan↗Congpei Qiu↗Liang Gao↗Wei Ke↗Tong Zhang↗

Practical autonomous driving requires models that generalize by reasoning through spatial-temporal possibilities to exclude unsafe outcomes. While state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods use parallel planning architectures, they fail to explicitly couple speed decisions with agent behavior along the driving path, leading to suboptimal coordination. To address this, we propose a cascaded framework that transforms longitudinal planning from an independent prediction task into a path-conditioned reasoning process. On the model side, we introduce an anchor-based regression design that conditions longitudinal prediction on the lateral drive path, and reformulate longitudinal planning as 1D displacement prediction along the path. This reduces geometric uncertainty and sharpens the model's focus on interaction-driven dynamics. On the data side, we introduce a planning-oriented data augmentation strategy that simulates rare safety-critical events by programmatically inserting agents and relabeling longitudinal targets to enforce collision avoidance. Evaluated on the challenging Bench2Drive benchmark, our method achieves SOTA performance with a driving score of 89.07 and a success rate of 73.18%, demonstrating significantly improved coordination and safety. Further evaluation on Fail2Drive confirms strong generalization to rare edge cases where parallel formulations typically fail. Project page:https://yanhaowu.github.io/AlignDrive/.

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14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

$\mu$VLA: On Recurrent Memory for Partially Observable Manipulation in VLA Models

Authors:
Egor Cherepanov↗Nikita Kachaev↗Daniil Zelezetsky↗Aydar Bulatov↗Artem Pshenitsyn↗Yuri Kuratov↗Alexey Skrynnik↗Aleksandr I. Panov↗Alexey K. Kovalev↗

arXiv:2606.12497v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models predict chunks of future actions from the current observation, an assumption that fails under partial observability, where decisions depend on information no longer visible. Existing memory-augmented VLAs simultaneously introduce recurrence, retrieval, compression modules, auxiliary objectives, hierarchical memory, or task-specific architectural changes, so the contribution of recurrence itself remains entangled with surrounding machinery. We present a controlled isolation study of recurrence in a strong pretrained VLA backbone. Our formulation augments the transformer with a small set of learnable memory tokens carried across timesteps and updated through self-attention, trained end to end with truncated backpropagation through time, with no auxiliary losses and no architectural changes. We instantiate this as $\mu$VLA, a family of OpenVLA-OFT variants parameterized by memory width m, TBPTT length K, and the memory update rule (cross-step gradients or a detached EMA), so that recurrence is the only varying factor. On MIKASA-Robo, $\mu$VLA improves average success rate on five training tasks from 0.42 to 0.84 at the strongest setting and reaches 0.23 on held-out tasks with the same memory structure versus 0.07 for the memoryless baseline. On tasks requiring different memory structure, performance remains near baseline. On LIBERO, the strongest recurrent variant achieves 96.2% average success, indicating no regression under full observability. We interpret these results as a calibration of the capability envelope of minimal in-backbone recurrence, identifying the regime in which it is sufficient and the regime where additional memory structure is required. Demos and videos can be found in https://avanturist322.github.io/mu-vla/.

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15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

Children's DNA Methylation and Family Dynamics in a Congo Basin Subsistence Community: Links with Parental Conflict and Fathers' Caregiving

Authors:
Chan↗M. H.-M↗Merrill↗S. S↗Zhuang↗B. C↗Lin↗D. T. S↗Macisaac↗J. L↗Miegakanda↗Lew-Levy↗…

Family environments may contribute to children's long-term health through biological processes, including epigenetic regulation such as DNA methylation (DNAm). However, most studies in this area focus on Euro-American populations while also rarely including fathering data. The current study investigated children's blood DNAm associations with positive (father caregiving) and negative (parental conflict) family dynamics in a smaller-scale subsistence society living in the Congo Basin rainforest. We measured DNAm from dried blood spots of 54 children (mean age=8.48 years) and conducted three epigenome-wide association studies aimed at discovering differential co-methylated regions (CMRs) associated with family dynamics. Via path models, we investigated the health implications and shared contribution of family factors of the identified CMRs. Differential DNAm associated with family dynamics was localized to genes related to stress, immunology, development, and aging, thus possibly linking to children's physical health and were simultaneously connected to other family factors such as number of siblings. Our findings suggested similarities in biological embedding of family factors across socio-ecologically diverse contexts.

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

Towards Engineering Scaling Laws with Pretraining Data Composition

Authors:
Jan-Lucas Uslu↗Kevin Greif↗Daniel Whiteson↗Benjamin Nachman↗

arXiv:2606.19781v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural scaling laws describe how model performance improves as a power law in compute, model size, and dataset size. While well-established for large language models, these relationships are emerging for large models in particle physics. As with language, empirical studies show that the performance scales as a power law. However, unlike natural language or image domains, fundamental physics has high-fidelity simulators that produce synthetic data cheaply. This favors scaling regimes where additional data is cheaper than additional parameters, and allows the pretraining dataset itself to be engineered to influence the scaling. For the task of classifying hadronic jets produced in collisions of high-energy particle beams, we show that the scaling behavior can be engineered towards requiring more data rather than larger models by inclusion of pretraining data which is more diverse and better aligned with the downstream classification task.

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18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Resource theory of interactive quantum instruments

Authors:
Chung-Yun Hsieh↗Armin Tavakoli↗Huan-Yu Ku↗Paul Skrzypczyk↗

arXiv:2603.27676v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum instruments describe both the classical outcome and the updated quantum state in a measurement process. To do this in a non-trivial way, instruments must have the capability to interact coherently with the state that they measure. Here, we develop a resource theory for instruments. We consider a relevant quantifier of the separation between interactive and non-interactive instruments and show that it admits three distinct operational interpretations in terms of quantum information tasks. These concern (i) the preservation of maximally entangled states after a local measurement, (ii) the average ability to preserve random states after measurement, and (iii) the ability to recover the classical information generated from measuring half of a maximally entangled state. We also introduce a natural set of allowed operations and show that the third task fully characterises the resource content of instruments. Our general framework reproduces as special cases established resource theories for channels and measurements.

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

Are LLMs Bad at Moral Reasoning?

Authors:
Menghang Zhu↗Seth Lazar↗

arXiv:2606.11635v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For highly capable AI systems to operate safely in dynamic, open-ended environments, they must be able to identify, understand, and respond to moral reasons for action, and constrain their behaviour accordingly. A growing body of research aims to evaluate this capacity – moral competence – in today's most capable AI systems, recently reaching broadly pessimistic conclusions. One of the most ambitious such papers collects gold-standard human-authored rubrics for evaluating moral reasoning in 1,000 cases, and benchmarks frontier AI models against those rubrics, with underwhelming results. In this paper, we argue that the MoReBench dataset can be redeployed to give a much more optimistic picture of LLMs' moral reasoning (an essential part of moral competence). We show that if, instead of scoring LLMs' responses to these cases against these rubrics, we instead give the LLMs the same task given to humans – to generate scoring rubrics for the moral analysis of particular cases – the rubrics they generate are both better calibrated to the human rubrics than their open-ended responses, and, where they differ, plausibly reflect nothing more than the vast dimensionality of most moral problems, as well as highlighting some human departures from the "rubric for creating rubrics". Taking these points into consideration, the MoReBench dataset suggests that LLMs are significantly more capable at moral reasoning than was previously believed.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

The Dynamics of Human and AI-Generated Language: How Semantics Fluctuates across Different Timescales

Authors:
Han-Jen Chang↗Yasir \c{C}atal↗Angelika Wolman↗Agust\'in Ib\'a\~nez↗David Smith↗I-Wen Su↗Kai-Yuan Cheng↗Georg Northoff↗

Spoken language, whether produced by humans or large language models (LLM), unfolds over time with varying semantic content. However, we still lack simple, interpretable time-series features that capture how generic versus specific content is distributed over time, and that can be used to compare human and AI-generated speech. We introduce a semantic-timescale analysis pipeline that turns word-level transcripts with timestamps into semantic time-series. For each spoken narrative, we compute (i) semantic specificity using WordNet-based word depth and (ii) contextual similarity using SBERT embeddings and quantify their temporal dependence using autocorrelation-window measures (ACW-0 and related metrics). We then compare original speech to multiple shuffled controls that selectively disrupt lexical identity, temporal order, and word duration. Across human-read autobiographical narratives, TTS readings, and LLM-generated texts rendered with TTS, we find that segments with longer ACW-0 in the semantic time-series tend to contain more generic vocabulary, whereas segments with shorter ACW-0 are enriched in more specific words. These associations are strongly attenuated or abolished when word order and timing are randomized, indicating that ACW-based measures capture non-trivial temporal organization of semantic content beyond static lexical distributions. Our results suggest that ACW-based semantic timescales are a useful family of features for analyzing and comparing the temporal structure of human and AI-generated speech.

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21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Ill-Posed by Design: Probing Evidence Use in VLMs

Authors:
Boaz Meivar↗Shaked Perek↗Shani Shvartzman↗Eli Schwartz↗Shai Avidan↗

Counterfactual analysis is widely used to study evidence use in vision-language models, but its diagnostic value is limited on well-posed tasks: when several cues independently support the same answer, removing one may not change the prediction. We propose monocular metric object-size estimation as an ill-posed diagnostic setting for evidence selection: because physical size cannot be determined from a single uncalibrated image, models must rely on imperfect cues category priors, target appearance, local context, apparent image size, and scene geometry. We assemble Metric VQA ($10{,}813$ dimension queries from Objectron and $331$ tape-measured in-the-wild scenes) and evaluate $12$ open-weight VLMs ($3$–$397$\,B parameters) with counterfactual analysis decomposing six visual and language evidence channels. Even the largest VLMs tested (Qwen3-VL-235B, Qwen3.5-397B, InternVL3.5-241B) trail a text-only frontier LLM on the in-the-wild split. The diagnostic analysis shows: target identity is the most load-bearing cue, target pixels and local context help only some models, apparent size shifts predictions without a directional readout, and global scene geometry is largely unused. We analyze LoRA fine-tuning as an actionable intervention specific to metric estimation: while the task is learnable, the models do not learn to leverage scene geometry.

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22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Learning Patient-Specific Disease Dynamics with Latent Flow Matching for Longitudinal Imaging Generation

Authors:
Hao Chen↗Rui Yin↗Yifan Chen↗Qi Chen↗Chao Li↗

Understanding disease progression is a central clinical challenge with direct implications for early diagnosis and personalized treatment. While recent generative approaches have attempted to model progression, key mismatches remain: disease dynamics are inherently continuous and monotonic, yet latent representations are often scattered, lacking semantic structure, and diffusion-based models disrupt continuity with random denoising process. In this work, we propose to treat the disease dynamic as a velocity field and leverage Flow Matching (FM) to align the temporal evolution of patient data. Unlike prior methods, it captures the intrinsic dynamic of disease, making the progression more interpretable. However, a key challenge remains: in latent space, Auto-Encoders (AEs) do not guarantee alignment across patients or correlation with clinical-severity indicators (e.g., age and disease conditions). To address this, we propose to learn patient-specific latent alignment, which enforces patient trajectories to lie along a specific axis, with magnitude increasing monotonically with disease severity. This leads to a consistent and semantically meaningful latent space. Together, we present $\Delta$-LFM, a framework for modeling patient-specific latent progression with flow matching. Across three longitudinal MRI benchmarks, $\Delta$-LFM demonstrates strong empirical performance and, more importantly, offers a new framework for interpreting and visualizing disease dynamics.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Cross-Modal Registration Between 3D and 2D Fingerprints via Pose-Aware Unwrapping and Point-Cloud Fusion

Authors:
Xiongjun Guan↗Jianjiang Feng↗Jie Zhou↗

Three-dimensional (3D) fingerprints preserve global finger geometry and local ridge structure while avoiding contact-induced deformation, but they remain difficult to integrate with legacy two-dimensional (2D) fingerprint systems. This paper addresses the intermediate stage between 3D acquisition and cross-modal matching, and presents a unified framework for 3D fingerprint preprocessing and registration across contactless and contact-based 2D modalities. The framework combines four components: 1) a nonparametric visualization and unwrapping method that converts a 3D fingerprint point cloud into a rolled-equivalent 2D representation without relying on a global finger-shape model; 2) a point-cloud fusion pipeline that registers and mosaics multiple partial 3D captures into a more complete fingerprint model; 3) an ellipse-based pose normalization method for canonical finger alignment; and 4) a pose-aware cross-modal registration strategy that improves compatibility between 3D fingerprints and both contactless and contact-based 2D fingerprints. Experiments on a self-collected multimodal fingerprint database containing 150 fingers show that the proposed framework achieves ridge-level 3D registration accuracy, robust pose estimation, and consistent gains in 2D compatibility. In particular, the 3D fusion error is concentrated around 0.09 mm, contactless 2D–3D registration reaches ridge-scale projection accuracy, and pose-aware unwrapping improves genuine matching scores relative to generic 3D unwrapping. These results support the use of 3D fingerprints as an effective geometric bridge across heterogeneous fingerprint modalities. The baseline implementation has been publicly released at https://github.com/XiongjunGuan/3DFpVisual.

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

U$^2$Mamba: A Two-level Nested U-structure Mamba for Salient Object Detection

Authors:
Junhui Li↗Jialu Li↗Youshan Zhang↗

Mamba-based models have emerged as a promising alternative for salient object detection (SOD), offering significant advantages in modeling long sequences. However, existing models often fail to explore contextual information and the depth of the entire architecture. This paper introduces U$^2$Mamba, a powerful and innovative U-structured network for salient object detection. We propose multiscale Mamba U-blocks (MMUBs) that enhance the model depth to improve local feature extraction capabilities. Our newly developed nested U-structure, incorporating MMUBs, enables the network to integrate various receptive fields from shallow and deep layers, thereby collecting richer contextual information and longer-range data without being constrained by resolution. Instead of using the traditional deep supervision scheme and top-level supervised training, we propose a hierarchical training supervision method where the loss is computed at each level during the training process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that U$^2$Mamba achieves highly competitive performance against state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/JL021/U2Mamba}.

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25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

LongSpike: Fractional Order Spiking State Space Models for Efficient Long Sequence Learning

Authors:
Xinrui He↗Qiyu Kang↗Xuhao Li↗Zheng-Jun Zha↗

arXiv:2606.12895v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are well-regarded for their biological plausibility and energy efficiency in processing sequential data. However, dominant SNN architectures typically rely on first-order Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs) to govern neuronal state transitions. This first-order assumption imposes a "memoryless" bottleneck, limiting the model's capacity to capture the complex, long-range dependencies inherent in long-sequence tasks. In this work, we propose LongSpike, a novel SNN framework that integrates fractional-order State-Space Modeling, or f-SSM, from control theory into the spiking domain. By extending traditional integer-order SSMs to the fractional-calculus regime, LongSpike enables the hierarchical integration of neuronal dynamics with long-memory kernels. To mitigate the computational overhead and parallelization challenges typically associated with fractional operators, we leverage a state-space formulation that supports efficient, parallel training. Empirical evaluations on challenging benchmarks, including Long Range Arena (LRA), large-scale WikiText-103, and Speech Commands, demonstrate that LongSpike outperforms state-of-the-art SNNs in accuracy while preserving sparse synaptic computation. The code is available at https://github.com/xinruihe389-commits/LongSpike.

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