Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

Nature (Science) 2026-06-17 DOI: HASH:d4cc74ca53d780ce0135bd64f678bc55

The EU needs to back its ambition to end animal testing with cash

Authors: Unknown Author

The European Union has declared that it wants to stop using animals in chemical safety testing. Its goal will need a timeline and a serious funding commitment. The European Union has declared that it wants to stop using animals in chemical safety testing. Its goal will need a timeline and a serious funding commitment.

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02.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2502.17748

FinP: Fairness-in-Privacy in Federated Learning by Addressing Disparities in Privacy Risk

Authors:

Tianyu Zhao↗Mahmoud Srewa↗Salma Elmalaki↗

arXiv:2502.17748v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) inherently mitigates mass data centralization risks; however, its privacy protections are not equally distributed - leaving vulnerable individuals disproportionately exposed to sophisticated privacy attacks. Crucially, statistical heterogeneity in human-centric FL environments often results in an inequitable distribution of privacy risks, particularly affecting those whose sensitive attributes or behaviors make them outliers. To address this critical gap, we introduce FinP, a novel framework designed to formalize and enforce fairness-in-privacy by mitigating disproportionate client vulnerability to Source Inference Attacks (SIA). FinP operationalizes a two-pronged defense strategy that tackles both the symptoms and root causes of privacy disparity, ensuring that no group of clients bears an excessive privacy burden. It combines a server-side adaptive aggregation mechanism, which dynamically weights client contributions based on their estimated privacy risk, with a client-side regularization technique to curb localized overfitting that drives unique data memorization. Extensive empirical evaluations on FEMNIST, Human Activity Recognition (HAR), and CIFAR-10 datasets demonstrate that FinP effectively aligns privacy fairness with primary task utility. Notably, FinP successfully mitigates SIA risks and reduces disparities in privacy exposure, establishing that strong fairness-in-privacy guarantees need not compromise model utility. Ultimately, FinP establishes equitable privacy protections by reducing vulnerability disparities by up to 57.14%, while preserving global model utility within a marginal +/- 1.75% of standard federated baselines.

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03.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13486

CRAFTIIF: Cross-Resolution Analytic Four-Type Interpretable Isolation Forest for Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection

Authors:

William Smits↗

arXiv:2606.13486v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Anomaly detection in multivariate time series is challenged by four structurally distinct anomaly types – point (isolated spikes), distributional (level shifts), temporal (rhythm changes), and collective (inter-sensor correlation breakdowns) – each requiring different feature representations. Most unsupervised methods target only one or two types and provide limited interpretability. We present CRAFTIIF (Cross-Resolution Analytic Four-Type Interpretable Isolation Forest), a fully unsupervised framework targeting all four types without dataset-specific tuning. CRAFTIIF generates K=500 random analytic wavelet feature draws across four families (Morlet, DOG, Haar, Coiflet), each targeting a specific anomaly type, feeding five structured Isolation Forests – one per type plus a meta-IF for compound anomalies. An adaptive Otsu/MAD threshold calibrates detection automatically across anomaly rates from 0.1% to 69.2%. Because each IF is trained exclusively on type-specific features, branch firing provides direct anomaly-type attribution by construction, without post-hoc explanation. Evaluated on all 19 datasets of the mTSBench benchmark (Zhou et al., TMLR 2026), CRAFTIIF achieves mean F1=0.228 (all 19 datasets) and F1=0.322 (13 detectable datasets), ranking first among all 25 evaluated methods on VUS-PR (0.463 vs. previous best 0.329, +40.7%). A diagnostic framework – oracle F1, detectability limits, and branch separation ratios – identifies 6 of 19 datasets as fundamentally undetectable by any unsupervised method. Ablation over 11 conditions confirms adaptive thresholding (+38% F1), four-branch structure (+20%), and meta-IF (+23%) are each essential. Code: https://github.com/smitswil/craftiif

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04.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2601.08392

On-chip semi-device-independent quantum random number generator exploiting contextuality

Authors:

Maddalena Genzini↗Caterina Vigliar↗Mujtaba Zahidy↗Hamid Tebyanian↗Andrzej Gajda↗Klaus Petermann↗Lars Zimmermann↗Davide Bacco↗Francesco Da Ros↗

arXiv:2601.08392v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present a semi-device-independent quantum random number generator (QRNG) based on the violation of a contextuality inequality, implemented by the integration of two silicon photonic chips. Our system combines a heralded single-photon source with a reconfigurable interferometric mesh to implement qutrit state preparation, transformations, and measurements suitable for testing a KCBS contextuality inequality. This architecture enables the generation of random numbers from the intrinsic randomness of single-photon interference in a complex optical network, while simultaneously allowing a quantitative certification of their security without requiring entanglement. We observe a contextuality violation exceeding the classical bound by more than 10{\sigma}, unambiguously confirming non-classical behavior. From this violation, we certify a conditional min-entropy per experimental round of Hmin = 0.077 +- 0.002, derived via a tailored semidefinite-programming-based security analysis. Each measurement outcome therefore contains at least 0.077 +- 0.002 bits of extractable genuine randomness, corresponding to an asymptotic generation rate of 21.7 +- 0.5 bits/s. These results establish a viable route towards general-purpose, untrusted quantum random number generators compatible with practical integrated photonic quantum networks.

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05.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2603.08001

Amortizing Maximum Inner Product Search with Learned Support Functions

Authors:

Theo X. Olausson↗Jo\~ao Monteiro↗Michal Klein↗Marco Cuturi↗

arXiv:2603.08001v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Maximum inner product search (MIPS) is a crucial subroutine in machine learning, requiring the identification of a vector taken within a database (the keys) that best aligns with a given query. We propose amortized MIPS: a regression-based approach that trains neural networks to directly predict MIPS solutions, amortizing the cost of repeatedly solving MIPS for queries drawn from a known distribution over a fixed key database. Our key insight is that the MIPS value function is the support function of the set of keys, a well-studied convex function whose gradient yields the optimal key. This motivates two complementary amortized models: SupportNet, an input-convex neural network trained to regress the support function, and KeyNet, a vector-valued network that directly regresses the optimal key. SupportNet can serve as a cluster router, steering queries toward relevant database partitions, while KeyNet can be used as a drop-in replacement for the original query, fed directly to off-the-shelf indexing pipelines. Our experiments on the BEIR benchmark show that, for document embeddings, learned \SupportNet{}s and \KeyNet{}s significantly improve IVF match rates when accounting for compute effort, whether measured in FLOPs, number of probes, or wall-clock time. Our code is available at: https://github.com/apple/ml-amips.

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06.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15303

Inverted Dirac oscillator

Authors:

Mustapha Maamache↗

arXiv:2606.15303v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Dirac oscillator is obtained from the Dirac Hamiltonian $H^{\mathrm{D}} = \left( c\vec{\alpha}\cdot \vec{p} + mc^{2}\beta \right)$ by modifying the momentum through a non-Hermitian substitution $\overrightarrow{p} \rightarrow \overrightarrow{p} \pm i\omega \beta \overrightarrow{q}$. Despite the non-Hermitian nature of this momentum operator, the full Hamiltonian remains Hermitian due to the presence of the Dirac matrix $\vec{\alpha}$. However, if one instead introduces a Hermitian modification of the form $\vec{p} \rightarrow \vec{p} \pm \omega \beta \overrightarrow{q}$, the resulting Hamiltonian is no longer Hermitian. In this case, the system corresponds to an inverted Dirac oscillator $H^{\mathrm{r}}$, where the potential becomes unbounded from below, the energy spectrum becomes continuous, and the eigenfunctions fail to be square-integrable, leading to normalization difficulties. We show that the Hamiltonian $H^{\mathrm{r}}$ is a pseudo-$\mathcal{PT}$-symmetric operator, and we introduce an unbounded, non-unitary transformation that establishes a connection between $H^{\mathrm{r}}$ and $H^{\mathrm{D}}$. The purpose of this work is to analyze this relativistic quantum system – known as the Dirac inverted oscillator – which, despite its various applications, admits an exact analytical solution

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07.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17861

GameCraft-Bench: Can Agents Build Playable Games End-to-End in a Real Game Engine?

Authors:

Tongxu Luo↗Rongsheng Wang↗Jiaxi Bi↗Chenming Xu↗Zhengyang Tang↗Jianlong Chen↗Juhao Liang↗Ke Ji↗Shuqi Guo↗Yuhao Du↗Fan Bu↗Wenyu Du↗…

Game generation is an emerging application of coding agents, requiring models to transform natural-language specifications into playable interactive systems. Unlike traditional coding tasks, game generation takes place within a game engine, where scripts, scenes, assets, rendering, and runtime interactions must jointly produce coherent gameplay. We formalize end-to-end game generation as the problem of producing a complete game artifact that realizes a specification through observable player-game interaction in a target environment. We argue that evaluating this setting requires three desiderata: Engine Grounding, Artifact Completeness, and Interactive Verification. We propose an interaction-grounded evaluation framework that assesses executable gameplay through replayed demonstrations and rubric-guided multimodal judging. We instantiate this framework as GameCraft-Bench, a benchmark comprising 140 Godot tasks across 15 game families. Evaluations of frontier coding agents show that end-to-end game generation remains highly challenging: the strongest agent achieves only 41.46%, and most agents score below 40%. Further analysis reveals that while agents often implement recognizable mechanics, they struggle to deliver complete games with sufficient content, functional visual feedback, and coherent presentation. See https://tongxuluo.github.io/gamecraft-bench-website for demos, code, and data.

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08.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.13827

Approximating Whittle-Matern Fields over Discretized Manifolds

Authors:

Srinivas Nambirajan↗

arXiv:2606.13827v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Markovian Whittle-Matérn fields have been convergently approximated by discrete Gauss Markov Random Fields (GMRFs) with sparse precision matrices using a Finite Element approximation of the two-parameter family, \[ (\kappa^2 - \Delta)^{\alpha/2} u = \mathcal{W}, \;\; \kappa \in \mathbb{R}, \; \alpha \in \mathbb{N}. \] of SPDEs. Using recent developements in the analysis of Discrete Exterior Calculus (DEC), we present a different, yet closely related, convergent GMRF approximation to these Matérn fields over complete, boundaryless Riemannian manifolds discretized as well-centered simplicial complexes. This convergent method (i) is agnostic to $\alpha, \kappa$ and thus allows a universal approximation scheme for the precision and covariance matrices of the entire $(\alpha, \kappa)$-family of GMRFs, so they may be inferred rather than guessed. (ii) inherently models pointwise and piecewise-smoothed measurements of a random field and approximates both equally well (iii) is computationally independent of the interpolants used - it suffers no overhead if one convergent interpolant were replaced with another suitable interpolant over the same mesh. Furthermore, we show that, on discretizations that are well-connected in a precise sense, and volume-concentrated, the precision matrices are spectral functions of a graph-laplacian. We provide a low rank approximator to the family of such Matérn GMRFs and mention a use case: reducing the number of measurements needed to model the GMRF by compressed-sensing.

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09.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12918

MAStrike: Shapley-Guided Collusive Red-Teaming on Multi-Agent Systems

Authors:

Chejian Xu↗Zhaorun Chen↗Jingyang Zhang↗Freddy Lecue↗Avni Kothari↗Sarah Tan↗Wenbo Guo↗Bo Li↗

arXiv:2606.12918v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hierarchical multi-agent systems (MAS) are rapidly being deployed in high-stakes workflows across domains such as finance and software engineering. In these systems, safety and security are inherently distributed across role-specialized agents, significantly expanding the attack surface, particularly under coordinated adversarial behaviors such as privilege escalation and cross-agent collusion. Existing red-teaming approaches for MAS remain limited: they rely on heuristic selection of target agents and perturb isolated message streams, leaving critical questions unanswered as which agents are most responsible for system safety, and how compromised agents can coordinate to bypass defenses. We propose MAStrike, a closed-loop framework for collusive red-teaming in hierarchical MAS. We propose the first agent-level Shapley value analysis for MAS, quantifying each agent's marginal contribution to system robustness under task-specific distributions. GGuided by this attribution, MAStrike identifies vulnerable agent coalitions and generates coordinated, role-aware adversarial manipulations. These attacks are iteratively refined through structured causal diagnosis, attributing failure cases to uncompromised agents that block adversarial attempts. We further build a comprehensive MAS red-teaming benchmark and controllable environments spanning diverse hierarchical topologies and domains, including finance, software engineering, and CRM. Extensive experiments across MAS built on multiple frontier models show that MAStrike substantially outperforms heuristic baselines. Our analysis further uncovers non-trivial Shapley value distributions and higher-order interaction structures among agents, revealing critical vulnerabilities and coordination patterns that are overlooked by prior single-agent or template-based methods.

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10.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2506.04097

Unveiling coherent dynamics in non-Markovian open quantum systems: exact expression and recursive perturbation expansion

Authors:

Alessandra Colla↗Heinz-Peter Breuer↗Giulio Gasbarri↗

arXiv:2506.04097v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a systematic framework to derive the effective Hamiltonian governing the coherent dynamics of non-Markovian open quantum systems. By applying the minimal dissipation principle, we uniquely isolate the coherent contribution to the time-local generator of the reduced dynamics. We derive a general expression for the effective Hamiltonian and develop a recursive perturbative expansion that expresses it in terms of system-bath interaction terms and bath correlation functions. This expansion provides a systematic tool for analyzing energy renormalization effects across different coupling regimes. Applying our framework to paradigmatic spin systems, we reveal how environmental correlations influence energy shifts and eigenbasis rotations, offering new insights into strong-coupling effects and non-Markovian quantum thermodynamics.

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11.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14209

Detecting undisclosed LLM-generated content in parliamentary texts

Authors:

Minerva Suvanto↗Andrea McGlinchey↗Peter J. Barclay↗Mattias Wahde↗

In this paper, we evaluate the extent of undisclosed LLM-generated content in texts from the parliaments of the United Kingdom and Sweden. In many areas, such as in journalism or in academic writing, there are often requirements to clearly disclose whether AI tools, such as LLMs, have been used. In the case of parliamentary texts, the guidelines on disclosure of AI use are more vague. However, in order to maintain transparency and retain public trust, it is generally recommended that parliamentarians should state whether or not they have used AI when writing texts, such as parliamentary motions. Here, we train an interpretable (glass-box) text classifier using pre-LLM parliamentary texts and LLM-generated versions of such texts. We then apply the classifier to a test set containing recent parliamentary texts, finding a steady increase in undisclosed LLM use, in both parliaments, from 2022 onwards.

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12.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2504.21072

Erased but Not Forgotten: How Backdoors Compromise Concept Erasure

Authors:

Tobias Braun↗Jonas Henry Grebe↗Marcus Rohrbach↗Anna Rohrbach↗

arXiv:2504.21072v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The expansion of text-to-image diffusion models has raised concerns about harmful outputs, from fabricated depictions of public figures to sexually explicit imagery. To mitigate such risks, prior work has proposed concept erasure methods that aim to sever unwanted concepts from the model via fine-tuning, yet it remains unclear whether these approaches truly remove all links to the harmful concept or merely conceal superficial connections. In this work, we reveal a critical vulnerability, the Erasure Evasion Backdoor (EEB): an adversary binds a backdoor trigger to a concept slated for removal, and this malicious link survives subsequent erasure. We show that both black-box and white-box adversaries can instantiate this threat. Across six state-of-the-art erasure methods, including robust ones that explicitly search for alternative representations of the target concept, EEB consistently exposes harmful content: up to 82% success against celebrity-identity unlearning, up to 94% for object erasure, and up to 16 times amplification of explicit-content exposure. While EEB uncovers a blind spot in current erasure methods, it also provides a diagnostic tool for stress-testing future concept erasure techniques.

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13.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2605.21629

Faster Completion, Less Learning: Generative AI Reduced Study Time on Math Problems and the Knowledge They Build

Authors:

Sina Rismanchian↗Hasan Uzun↗Jeffrey Matayoshi↗Eric Cosyn↗Eyad Kurd-Misto↗

arXiv:2605.21629v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: How much have students' ordinary learning processes shifted in response to generative AI, and how does that affect their durable learning outcomes? Self-report surveys show little change, while small-scale behavioral studies report widespread AI use without the scale or duration to measure learning consequences. We address both questions using a ten-year panel of $3.2$ million ALEKS learning interactions for investigating time-on-task, complemented by ALEKS PPL placement-assessment data for examining proctoring and learning outcomes, with a quasi-experimental design exploiting variation in tasks that are more susceptible to AI (text-based word problems) and less susceptible to AI (interactive graph-based problems). Learning time on AI-susceptible problems declines $2.8\%$ per quarter among college students after ChatGPT's release, cumulating to $26.9\%$ over eleven quarters; high-schoolers show $31.3\%$, middle-schoolers $9.0\%$, and Grade 5 students no detectable change. Among college students, the post-ChatGPT divergence vanishes entirely under proctoring, ruling out broad efficiency gains as the likely explanation. Logistic fixed-effects models on randomly assigned proctored retention items yield a $25\%$ cumulative decline in odds of correct response; the same estimator on non-proctored assessment produces a large opposite-signed increase – inconsistent with any platform, cohort, or curriculum explanation. These results are among the first large-scale behavioral and outcome evidence that generative AI has altered how students study and the knowledge they build – the population-level indicator of cognitive surrender, with direct implications for educational research, assessment governance, and AI policy.

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14.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15822

TrustedARI: Towards Trust-Native Agentic Routing Infrastructure for Agentic AI

Authors:

Qi Li↗Zhenhua Zou↗Shuo Li↗Mingwei Xu↗Zhuotao Liu↗

arXiv:2606.15822v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents increasingly access external models, tools, and services through Agentic Routing Infrastructure (ARI) to manage the overhead of heterogeneous interfaces and fragmented subscriptions. Yet, the architecture of ARI introduces fundamental trust risks: it obtains plaintext access to agent queries and service responses, while leaving agents unable to verify that their queries are routed to intended service providers or that requests and responses remain untampered. To address this problem, we present TrustedARI, the first trust-native agentic routing infrastructure for agentic AI. Architecturally, TrustedARI is built upon three core innovations: (i) an ARI-adapted three-party TLS handshake that enables the agent and ARI to jointly authenticate the service provider through role-specific distribution of TLS key materials; (ii) a privacy-preserving query-construction protocol that allows the agent and ARI to collaboratively construct well-formed queries without exposing their respective private inputs; and (iii) a verifiable billing protocol that supports fair usage-based settlement while preserving the integrity and confidentiality of service responses. We implemented and extensively evaluated a prototype of TrustedARI to validate its performance. Experiments confirm that TrustedARI is highly efficient: our ARI-adapted handshake protocol reduces communication overhead by 39.34% compared to the existing three-party TLS handshake. Furthermore, the privacy-preserving query-construction protocol imposes negligible overhead-averaging 0.19 seconds in computation time and 0.58 MB in communication costs-while the verifiable billing protocol speeds up proof generation by 28.20x. Crucially, TrustedARI is readily deployable without any modification to the service providers.

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15.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12422

Creating and Evaluating K-12 GenAI Assessment Graders Through Context Engineering

Authors:

Zewei Tian↗Alex Liu↗Lief Esbenshade↗Michael Xiao↗Zachary Zhang↗Yulia L\'apicus↗Thomas Han↗Kevin He↗Min Sun↗

arXiv:2606.12422v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The integration of large language models (LLMs) into educational assessment represents a transformative shift in classroom grading practices. While automated scoring systems and machine learning techniques have existed for decades, generative AI (GenAI) now enables educators to implement standards-based grading (SBG) with unprecedented efficiency and scale. This paper examines the theoretical foundations and evaluates an LLM grader that uses commercially available foundation models with context and prompt engineering to score student work against a rubric. Drawing on an empirical interrater agreement study using Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) data, we observed the Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK) and Proportional Reduction in Mean-Squared Error (PRMSE) across mathematics, science, and ELA, using Claude Sonnet 4, Haiku 4.5, GPT-5, and GPT-5 Mini. The results demonstrate that LLM graders, especially when based on foundational models with more parameters, achieve substantial agreement with human raters in mathematics and science assessments, while the performances vary in ELA, suggesting generic foundation models can be effective at scoring in given contexts. Additional analysis of teacher and student feedback reveals strong acceptance of AI-generated narrative feedback but skepticism toward numerical scores, suggesting that LLMs function most effectively as formative tools rather than summative evaluators. Our findings indicate that thoughtfully designed hybrid models that combine AI efficiency with teacher judgment can reduce workload, enhance feedback quality, and support equitable assessment practices without displacing professional expertise.

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16.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14679

Optimal Hidden-Target Learning for Online Inventory Optimization on General Convex Sets

Authors:

Anthony Pineci↗Yunzong Xu↗

arXiv:2606.14679v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Online inventory optimization (OIO) is online convex optimization with physical memory: inventory carryover makes the feasible action set depend on the past. A natural principle, used in stochastic inventory learning and recently in OIO under a single linear capacity constraint, is to maintain a hidden target chosen by an online learner and implement its projection onto the currently feasible order-up-to set. We prove that this simple principle is optimal for OIO on arbitrary bounded convex capacity sets. With online gradient descent as the base learner, the method improves the best known regret guarantee for OIO on general convex sets from inverse to inverse-square-root dependence on the common-demand probability, and we prove a matching lower bound. The same principle gives the first polylogarithmic regret guarantee for strongly convex losses and the first dynamic regret guarantee adapting to Euclidean path variation on general convex capacity sets. The analysis introduces a norm alignment principle: the right state variable is the distance from the hidden target to the feasible set, measured in the same norm as the projection. Under norm alignment, this distance evolves pathwise as a scalar queue, with target movement as arrival and common demand as service. This reduction to one-dimensional queue control resolves the state dependence and extends the guarantees to general convex capacity sets, beyond the reach of prior productwise approaches. Experiments on synthetic and real-world inventory data corroborate the theory.

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17.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2602.17587

Asymptotically Optimal Sequential Testing with Markovian Data

Authors:

Alhad Sethi↗Kavali Sofia Sagar↗Shubhada Agrawal↗Debabrota Basu↗P. N. Karthik↗

arXiv:2602.17587v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study one-sided and $\alpha$-correct sequential hypothesis testing for data generated by an ergodic, finite-state Markov chain. The null hypothesis is that the unknown transition matrix belongs to a prescribed set $P$ of stochastic matrices, and the alternative corresponds to a disjoint set $Q$. We establish a non-asymptotic instance-dependent lower bound on the expected stopping time of any valid sequential test under the alternative, which is asymptotically tight. Our novel analysis improves the existing lower bounds, which are either asymptotic or provably sub-optimal in this setting. Our lower bound incorporates both the stationary distribution and the transition structure induced by the unknown Markov chain. We further propose an optimal test whose expected stopping time matches this lower bound asymptotically as $\alpha \to 0$. We illustrate the usefulness of our framework through applications to sequential detection of model misspecification in Markov Chain Monte Carlo and to testing structural properties, such as the linearity of transition dynamics, in Markov decision processes. Our findings yield a sharp and general characterization of optimal sequential testing procedures under Markovian dependence.

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18.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2510.13293

Cross-modal Consistency Guidance for Robust Emotion Control in Auto-Regressive TTS Models

Authors:

Yizhou Peng↗Yukun Ma↗Chong Zhang↗Yi-Wen Chao↗Chongjia Ni↗Bin Ma↗Eng Siong Chng↗

While Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems enable emotional control via natural-language instructions, expressiveness, naturalness, and speech quality degrade when the target emotion conflicts with the textual semantics. We propose a Cross-modal Consistency Guided Classifier-Free Guidance (CCG-CFG) method with dynamic scales based on the degree of inconsistency between the text emotion and the explicit speech emotion, replacing the dropout condition with the text emotion. We also distill the CCG-CFG guidance signal using a hard-sample mining strategy, improving the TTS model's emotional alignment capability. Evaluations on five emotional corpora and two TTS benchmarks show that our approaches applied to CosyVoice2 achieve up to a 12% absolute improvement in emotion-recognition accuracy and a 10% relative improvement in subjective scores, outperforming baselines including HierSpeech++, Qwen3-TTS, and original CosyVoice2, while preserving intelligibility, naturalness, and high speech quality.

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19.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14 DOI: HASH:60bcf59fb58e0ecbc19dbae469e9c280

Generative design of antigen-specific T-cell receptor sequences with a conditional diffusion model

Authors:

Zhang↗Liang↗Xu↗Witney↗Rossjohn↗Su↗Purcell↗A. W↗Wang↗Song↗

T cell receptor (TCR)-based immunotherapy holds immense potential for treating cancers and infectious diseases, where highly antigen-specific TCR recognition is crucial for adaptive immunity against tumors and pathogens. Engineering or de novo generation of the complementarity-determining region 3 (CDR3) loops of TCRs using artificial intelligence offers a powerful alternative to designing reactive TCRs rather than laborious experimental screening. However, current in silico approaches are constrained by weak conditional guidance, limited flexibility, and a lack of rigorous functional validation. To address these limitations, we introduce TCRDiff, a generative diffusion framework for designing antigen-specific TCRs conditioned on peptide-MHC (pMHC) targets and germline-encoded variable genes. By leveraging pre-trained knowledge from massive T-cell repertoires and TCR-pMHC recognition data, TCRDiff generates CDR3{beta} sequences with state-of-the-art fidelity to native binding TCRs through a denoising diffusion process. Furthermore, incorporating the interface geometry features generated TCR-pMHC complexes with superior structural plausibility. As a proof of concept, we deployed TCRDiff in a systematic pipeline to design candidate TCRs for immunotherapy. In vitro activation assays validated that TCRDiff-generated TCRs specifically recognize the MAGE-A3 epitope with minimized off-target cross-reactivity. Together, TCRDiff establishes a powerful, validated computational paradigm to accelerate the development of TCR-based immunotherapies.

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20.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2504.17730

Bandstructure of a coupled BEC-cavity system: effects of dissipation and geometry

Authors:

David Baur↗Simon Hertlein↗Alexander Baumg\"artner↗Justyna Stefaniak↗Tilman Esslinger↗Gabriele Natale↗Tobias Donner↗

arXiv:2504.17730v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present a theoretical model for a transversally driven Bose-Einstein condensate coupled to an optical cavity. We focus on the interplay between different coherent couplings, which can trigger a structural phase transition, known as the superradiant phase transition. Our approach, based on band structure theory and a mean-field description, enables a comprehensive analysis of the nature of the system's excited modes, precursing the phase transitions. By incorporating dissipative couplings, intrinsic to these systems, we find non-Hermitian phenomena such as the coalescence of crossing precursor modes and the emergence of exceptional points (EPs). The general formulation of our model allows us to explain the role of an angle between transverse pump and the cavity deviating from $90^\circ$. This offers us a unified perspective on the plethora of different implementations of such systems.

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21.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17452

Optional Stopping for Superhedging Supermartingales

Authors:

Christian Bender↗Sebastian E. Ferrando↗

arXiv:2606.17452v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Superhedging supermartingales, introduced by the authors in previous work, are non-probabilistic processes defined via subadditive outer integrals that carry a purely financial interpretation in terms of superhedging cost. Building on the Leinert-König theory of non-lattice integration, the present paper establishes several results that are classical in probability theory but whose non-probabilistic proofs require fundamentally new arguments: (i) a tower inequality for the conditional outer integral \overline{\sigma}_j applied at stopping times, reducing to equality when the integrand is conditionally integrable; (ii) three versions of Doob's optional stopping theorem, organised by the class of supermartingale and the range of the stopping times; and (iii) Dubins' upcrossing inequality in both finite- and infinite-time horizons. A key structural result, property (K)-a.e., identifies conditions under which the two superhedging operators \overline{\sigma}_j and \overline{I}_j coincide on non-negative functions, extending the scope of all preceding results to the positive operator \overline{I}_j. None of the proofs invoke classical measure-theoretic tools; in particular, (classical) integrability and measurability are not assumed. The analogues of classical stochastic results acquire a purely financial interpretation and, in this way, gain depth and generality by providing a context that is independent of any a priori probabilistic structure.

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22.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12685

Multiple Topological Haldane Phases for Symmetry-Protected Quantum Information Processing

Authors:

Jo\~ao Pedro Gama D'Elia↗Irene D'Amico↗Thereza Paiva↗

arXiv:2606.12685v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Symmetry-protected topological phases have attracted significant interest at the fundamental level and as a potential platform for quantum information processing, owing to their protected edge states and resilience to perturbations. Applying these features for practical and efficient quantum computation is highly desirable, but remains an open challenge. Here, we demonstrate the partitioning into multiple independent Haldane phase subsystems of a single spin-1/2 ladder system and propose this as a scalable architecture for gate-based quantum computation, which takes advantage of the symmetry-protected topological order. We encode qubits in the two topological states of the $S^{z}=0$ sector of each subsystem. Finite-size effects, typically viewed as detrimental, instead provide a controllable energy splitting that enables single-qubit rotations using only local magnetic fields. An Ising-type interaction between neighboring subsystem edges generates entangling gates, enabling universal quantum computation driven by two control parameters that are easily accessible experimentally. Our results demonstrate how symmetry-protected topological phases can be directly harnessed for circuit-model quantum computation in realistic systems.

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23.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2603.05556

IntSeqBERT: Learning Arithmetic Structure in OEIS via Modulo-Spectrum Embeddings

Authors:

Kazuhisa Nakasho↗

arXiv:2603.05556v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Integer sequences in the OEIS span values from single-digit constants to astronomical factorials and exponentials, making prediction challenging for standard tokenised models that cannot handle out-of-vocabulary values or exploit periodic arithmetic structure. We present IntSeqBERT, a dual-stream Transformer encoder for masked integer-sequence modelling on OEIS. Each sequence element is encoded along two complementary axes: a continuous log-scale magnitude embedding and sin/cos modulo embeddings for 100 residues (moduli $2$–$101$), fused via FiLM. Three prediction heads (magnitude regression, sign classification, and modulo prediction for 100 moduli) are trained jointly on 274,705 OEIS sequences. At the Large scale (91.5M parameters), IntSeqBERT achieves 95.85% magnitude accuracy and 50.38% Mean Modulo Accuracy (MMA) on the test set, outperforming a standard tokenised Transformer baseline by $+8.9$ pt and $+4.5$ pt, respectively. An ablation removing the modulo stream confirms it accounts for $+15.2$ pt of the MMA gain and contributes an additional $+6.2$ pt to magnitude accuracy. A probabilistic Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT)-based Solver converts the model's predictions into concrete integers, yielding a 7.4-fold improvement in next-term prediction over the tokenised-Transformer baseline (Top-1: 19.09% vs. 2.59%). Modulo spectrum analysis reveals a strong negative correlation between Normalised Information Gain (NIG) and Euler's totient ratio $\varphi(m)/m$ ($r = -0.851$, $p < 10^{-28}$), providing empirical evidence that composite moduli capture OEIS arithmetic structure more efficiently via CRT aggregation.

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24.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15 DOI: HASH:c131045963f935492e0aa6a4a3224c75

Neural Correlates of Human Food Memory link to Microbial, Homeostatic, and Hedonic Signals: Evidence from a Prebiotic Randomized Clinical Trial

Authors:

Jensen↗D. E. A↗Thieleking↗Medawar↗Reinicke↗Rolle-Kampczyk↗von Bergen↗Stumvoll↗Villringer↗Beyer↗Witte↗

Background Homeostatic and hedonic brain circuits regulate eating behavior but also shape how food memories are encoded and retrieved. Objective We examined neural correlates during food memory encoding and retrieval during functional MRI before and after a 14-day prebiotic intervention in a preregistered, double-blind crossover trial (NCT03829189). Design 55 healthy adults with overweight (19 females, age 28{+/-}6.5, BMI 25-30 kg/m2) underwent 3 Tesla task-based functional MRI before and after dietary intervention of prebiotic (30g inulin/day) or equicaloric placebo for 14 days. Peripheral metabolic, short-chain fatty acids (SCFA), and microbial markers using 16S rRNA analysis were assessed in fasting blood and feces. Results Food memory was enhanced by assigned reward value and engaged brain activity in hedonic regions, including the nucleus accumbens, orbitofrontal cortex, caudate, cingulate, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, and ventral tegmental area, as well as homeostatic and memory-related such as the hypothalamus and the hippocampus. Higher neural activations during food encoding were related to higher Actinobacteriota abundance, fecal SCFA acetate, and creatinine levels, and lower ghrelin levels. Activations in reward-related and homeostatic brain areas partially correlated with insulin, glucagon-like peptide-1, leptin, and thyroid-stimulating hormone levels. Neural activations related to food memory decreased after prebiotic intervention. The prebiotic supplementation induced decrease of hippocampal activity during food encoding related to changes in gut microbiota Firmicutes abundance. Conclusions This study indicates that neuronal food-related memory processes depend on homeostatic and hedonic brain signals modulated by the gut-brain axis. Our findings raise implications for the treatment of obesity and substance use disorder.

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25.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11562

GraphInfer-Bench: Benchmarking LLM's Inference Capability on Graphs

Authors:

Zhuoyi Peng↗Jingzhou Jiang↗Hanlin Gu↗Lixin Fan↗Yi Yang↗

Graph analysis underlies many applications whose answers cannot be looked up in a single record or retrieved along a path: laundering rings, drug repurposing, user preference, and scientific theme are all inferred from a node together with its neighbourhood. We introduce GraphInfer-Bench, a benchmark for whether LLMs can perform this graph inference: producing an open-ended answer that no single node supports and no path retrieves. Existing graph-QA protocols cannot test this capability: algorithm simulation, node classification, single-node description, KG-QA, and GraphRAG all admit answers retrievable from one node or along a path. GraphInfer-Bench defines five tasks along Description (what a region is) and Comparison (how regions differ), each constructed so the ground truth lives in no single node. The release contains 42,000 samples across six real-world graphs, produced automatically and screened by a four-layer quality-control protocol. We evaluate four method families against the same tasks: graph-token alignment models, zero-shot frontier closed-source LLMs, Graph2Text supervised fine-tuning, and plain GNNs as a structural reference. No method family closes the gap. Graph-token alignment partially handles description tasks (relational, theme) but collapses on comparison tasks. Frontier LLMs lead on outlier detection and community partition among LLM-based methods but lag on masked-node prediction. Graph2Text SFT is the strongest LLM-based method on the description side yet falls behind frontier LLMs on comparison. Across every task, plain GNNs match or beat the strongest LLM-based row, with the largest margin on community detection. GraphInfer-Bench surfaces graph inference as an open capability gap rather than a property of any one architecture.

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