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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Small LLMs for Biomedical Claim Verification: Cost-Effective Fine-Tuning, Structural Dataset Shortcuts, and Cross-Domain Generalization

Authors:
Gaurav Kumar↗

Large Language Models such as GPT-4o and GPT-5 achieve strong zero-shot performance on biomedical claim verification, but cost and opacity limit scalable use. We fine-tune three small LLMs: Phi-3-mini (3.8B), Qwen2.5-3B, and Mistral-7B, via QLoRA on SciFact and HealthVer, providing the first study of QLoRA models against GPT-4o and fine-tuned BioLinkBERT encoders. Mistral-7B QLoRA surpasses both GPT-4o and GPT-5 (up to 12% F1 gain) at a fractional cost using just 1,008 training examples. We conduct extensive in-domain and cross-domain evaluation: models trained on SciFact tested on HealthVer and vice versa, at matched sizes to isolate dataset structure from data quantity. We identify a previously unreported structural artifact in SciFact that inflates in-domain scores, and show through bidirectional out-of-domain evaluation that training on structurally sound data enables robust cross-domain transfer. We plan to release all code and adapter checkpoints.

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

What Do Safety-Aligned LLMs Learn From Mixed Compliance Demonstrations?

Authors:
Sihui Dai↗Mann Patel↗

arXiv:2606.20508v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prior work has shown that in-context demonstrations can jailbreak language models, but it remains unclear how models interpret different types of compliance demonstrations. We study this by mixing benign compliance demonstrations (non-harmful request, helpful response) with harmful compliance demonstrations (harmful request, helpful response) and testing three hypotheses about how demonstration composition drives harmful compliance. Across four models, we find that benign and harmful demonstrations are not interchangeable: benign demonstrations can either reduce or increase harmful compliance depending on the model. We further show that preference optimization is the critical training stage that prevents benign demonstrations from increasing harmful compliance, that demonstration ordering exhibits strong recency bias, and that models differ in how refusal interacts with in-context learning: some adopt demonstrated formatting even when refusing, while others override all in-context signals upon refusal. Taken together, this work moves beyond showing that demonstration-based jailbreaking works to characterizing how it works: what models extract from compliance demonstrations depends on demonstration content, ordering, and training methodology.

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

Dummy Backdoor as a Defense: Removing Unknown Backdoors via Shared Internal Mechanisms for Generative LLMs

Authors:
Kazuki Iwahana↗Masaru Matsubayashi↗Takuma Koyama↗Toshiki Shibahara↗Kenichiro Omintato↗Akira Ito↗

Backdoor attacks pose a serious threat to the safety and reliability of Large Language Models (LLMs), as they cause models to behave normally on clean inputs while producing attacker-specified responses when hidden triggers are present. Removing such unknown backdoors is particularly challenging when the defender does not know the backdoor attack types or the internal mechanisms formed through backdoor training. In this work, we propose a simple but effective backdoor removal method based on shared internal mechanisms across different backdoors. First, we show that different backdoors with the same task (attack objective) induce similar trigger-activated changes in the internal activations. Motivated by this observation, our method intentionally embeds a backdoor with a known trigger (dummy backdoor) and then removes it through further fine-tuning on dummy-triggered inputs paired with clean responses. Since the dummy backdoor and the unknown backdoor can rely on shared internal mechanisms, removing the dummy backdoor also reduces the effect of the unknown backdoor. We evaluate our method on three backdoor attack types across multiple model families. Experimental results show that our method substantially reduces the attack success rate of the unknown backdoor while preserving model utility, outperforming representative existing defense methods in both backdoor removal effectiveness and utility preservation. These findings suggest that a defender-controllable backdoor can serve as a helpful proxy for mitigating unknown backdoors in generative LLMs.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Schrödinger's Navigator: Imagining an Ensemble of Futures for Zero-Shot Object Navigation

Authors:
Yu He↗Da Huang↗Zhenyang Liu↗Zixiao Gu↗Qiang Sun↗Guangnan Ye↗Yanwei Fu↗Yu-Gang Jiang↗

Zero-shot object navigation (ZSON) requires robots to find target objects in unseen environments without task-specific fine-tuning or pre-built maps, a key capability for general-purpose service robots. Yet methods that perform well in simulation often degrade in cluttered real-world scenes with severe occlusion and latent hazards, where large unseen regions make single-scene inference brittle and unsafe. We propose Schrödinger's Navigator, a belief-aware framework that reasons at inference time over multiple trajectory-conditioned imagined 3D futures. Given candidate paths, a trajectory-conditioned 3D world model predicts hypothetical observations and maintains a superposition of plausible scene realizations rather than committing to one map. An adaptive occluder-aware sampler directs imagination to uncertainty-critical regions, while a Future-Aware Value Map (FAVM) aggregates imagined futures for robust, proactive action selection. Experiments in simulation and on a physical Go2 quadruped show that Schrödinger's Navigator outperforms strong ZSON baselines, improving hidden-target discovery and risk-aware waypoint selection in occlusion-heavy navigation scenarios. These results highlight imagined 3D futures as a scalable and generalizable strategy for zero-shot navigation in uncertain real-world environments.

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06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Sequential Deep Learning to Predict Non-Central to Central Geographic Atrophy Progression from OCT Imaging

Authors:
Siraz↗Kamanda↗Nabil↗A. S↗Gholami↗Rao↗N. T↗Ong↗S. S↗Alam↗

Purpose: To develop and validate a temporal deep learning framework for predicting geographic atrophy (GA) progression across multi-year horizons using longitudinal optical coherence tomography (OCT) sequences. Design: Retrospective longitudinal cohort study. Subjects, Participants, and/or Controls: A total of 91 patients with dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD) were identified from Wake Forest University School of Medicine (2013-2023), yielding 455 OCT volumes. Two prediction cohorts were defined: 32 patients with no GA (NGA) at baseline who subsequently developed GA, and 35 patients whose earliest GA manifestation was non-central GA (NCGA). Non-progressing patients served as negative controls. Methods: OCT B-scan volumes were encoded into visit-level feature representations using three pretrained architectures (ResNet-18, ResNet-50, ViT-B/16). Chronologically ordered visit embeddings, optionally augmented with inter-visit time intervals ({Delta}t), were processed through recurrent neural networks (RNN), long short-term memory networks (LSTM), and Transformer encoders to model longitudinal disease trajectories. Models were trained and evaluated independently for prediction horizons of 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 years using patient-level stratified splits (80/20). Performance was assessed across five random seeds. Main Outcome Measures: Area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC-AUC), F1-score, and accuracy for predicting two clinically critical transitions: NGA to GA onset and NCGA to central GA (CGA) involvement. Results: For NGA to GA prediction, models achieved ROC-AUC of 0.84-0.94 at 2-4 years and 1.00 at 5-6 years. For NCGA to CGA prediction, Transformer-based models achieved peak AUC of 0.95 at 4 years and 0.96 at 5 years. Longer input sequences (8 visits vs. 4 visits) consistently improved NCGA to CGA performance at extended horizons. Temporal interval encoding improved stability in several LSTM configurations.

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

The Answer Lies Within: Self-Derived Rewards Enable Explainable Relation Extraction

Authors:
Xinyu Guo↗Zhengliang Shi↗Minglai Yang↗Mihai Surdeanu↗

Despite the remarkable reasoning capabilities of large language models, they still struggle with one-shot relation extraction without predefined relation labels. We identify two pitfalls: models are often misled by irrelevant tokens instead of relation-conveying semantics, and they often fail to align with the abstraction level human annotators expect. We introduce a novel framework that closes this gap with two components: (1) COGRE, a cognitively-inspired reasoning framework that structures RE into a series of processes mimicking human text-processing; and (2) HIT@DICT, a reinforcement learning intermediate reward strategy that encourages reasoning to align with relational labels by rewarding relation-relevant phrases in reasoning. The reward is derived on a credit dictionary automatically extracted from correct predictions. Our experiments show that our framework improves both accuracy and explanation quality by addressing these two pitfalls. For example, COGRE with Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct on One-shot NYT29 achieves 24.65% F1, surpassing prior reasoning-based designs. Optimizing this approach with RL using HIT@DICT further improves performance by +23.46% points. Finally, human evaluation shows that our best model generates relational phrases closely aligned with gold labels, increasing human explanation quality ratings by 54% (relative).

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08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Towards Direct Latent-Space Synthesis for Parallel Branches in LLM-Agent Workflows

Authors:
Shikun Liu↗Mufei Li↗Dongqi Fu↗Haoyu Wang↗Yinglong Xia↗Hong Li↗Hong Yan↗Pan Li↗

Large language models increasingly serve as execution engines for agentic systems, yet they still consume context through a sequential text interface. This creates a mismatch with modern structured agent workflows, in which independent branches explore subtasks, retrieve evidence, or generate candidate solutions before a final synthesis step. Existing systems typically merge these branches by concatenating their textual outputs, which discards the parallel structure and incurs redundant prefill computation. In this work, we introduce Parallel-Synthesis, a plug-and-play framework that enables a synthesizer to directly consume the KV caches produced by parallel worker agents. Parallel-Synthesis combines a cache mapper that calibrates independently generated branch caches with a fine-tuned synthesizer adapter that enables generation from this non-sequential cache interface. We train Parallel-Synthesis using data that exposes the synthesizer to parallel cache contexts, teaches aggregation across cached branches, and distills reasoning behavior from standard text-concatenation-based synthesis. Across nine downstream datasets spanning math, science QA, code generation, GAIA, and multi-agent database diagnosis, Parallel-Synthesis matches or outperforms text-based synthesis on seven datasets and remains close on the other two. It also reduces time-to-first-token by 2.5x-11x, suggesting that direct cache-based synthesis is a promising interface for more native and efficient synthesis over parallel agent branches.

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09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Optimal Impulse Control for Cyber Risk Management

Authors:
Caroline Hillairet↗Thibaut Mastrolia↗Wissal Sabbagh↗

arXiv:2410.17706v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We explore an optimal impulse control problem wherein an electronic device owner strategically calibrates protection levels against cyber attacks. Utilizing epidemiological compartment models, we qualitatively characterize the dynamics of cyber attacks within the network. We determine the optimal protective measures against effective hacking by formulating and solving a stochastic control problem with optimal switching. We demonstrate that the value function for the cluster owner constitutes a viscosity solution to a system of coupled variational inequalities associated with a fully coupled reflected backward stochastic differential equation (BSDE). Furthermore, we devise a comprehensive algorithm alongside a verification procedure to ascertain the optimal timing for network protection across various cyber attack scenarios. Our findings are illustrated through numerical approximations employing deep Galerkin methods for partial differential equations (PDEs). We visualize the optimal protection strategies in the context of two distinct attack scenarios: (1) a constant cyber attack, (2) an exogenous cyber attack strategy modeled with a Poisson process.

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10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

CineDance: Towards Next-Generation Multi-Shot Long-Form Cinematic Audio-Video Generation

Authors:
Yuheng Chen↗Teng Hu↗Yuji Wang↗Qingdong He↗Zhucun Xue↗Qianyu Zhou↗Jason Li↗Lizhuang Ma↗Jiangning Zhang↗Dacheng Tao↗

The fidelity and structural diversity of training datasets fundamentally determine the capabilities of video generation models. While commercial systems showremarkableabilitytogeneratecinematicnarratives, the progress of open-source models remains limited by the scarcity of high-quality training data. To bridge this gap, we introduce CineDance-1M, a large-scale, open research Text-to-Audio-Video (T2AV) dataset designed specifically for multi-shot, long-form joint audio-video generation. Averaging 92.8 seconds and 24.2 continuous shots per video, it provides configurable, structured annotations for both audio and video modalities. This exceptional quality is achieved through a rigorous three-stage curation pipeline: i) diverse sourcing and comprehensive cleansing, ii) film-theory-inspired narrative parsing, and iii) hierarchical dual-modal captioning. For a comprehensive assessment, we propose CineBench, featuring a diverse prompt suite and a six-dimensional, human-aligned metric system tailored for complex narrative audio-video evaluation. Furthermore, we adapt LTX-2.3 into CineDance, which demonstrates exceptional single-modality quality alongside precise audio-video alignment and robust subject and environment consistency, effectively validating our curation strategy and the high quality of CineDance-1M. We anticipate that this work will serve as a solid foundation for accelerating future research in multi-shot, long-form joint audio-video generation. Our project page is available at https://aliothchen.github.io/projects/CineDance/.

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

In-Context Environments Induce Evaluation-Awareness in Language Models

Authors:
Maheep Chaudhary↗

Humans often become more self-aware under threat, yet can lose self-awareness when absorbed in a task; we hypothesize that language models exhibit environment-dependent evaluation awareness. This raises concerns that models could strategically underperform, or sandbag, to avoid triggering capability-limiting interventions such as unlearning or shutdown. Prior work demonstrates sandbagging under hand-crafted prompts, but this underestimates the true vulnerability ceiling. We introduce a black-box adversarial optimization framework treating the in-context prompt as an optimizable environment, and develop two approaches to characterize sandbagging: (1) measuring whether models expressing intent to underperform can actually execute it across different task structures, and (2) causally isolating whether underperformance is driven by genuine evaluation-aware reasoning or shallow prompt-following. Evaluating Claude-3.5-Haiku, GPT-4o-mini, and Llama-3.3-70B across four benchmarks (Arithmetic, GSM8K, MMLU, and HumanEval), optimized prompts induce up to 94 percentage point (pp) degradation on arithmetic (GPT-4o-mini: 97.8\%$\rightarrow$4.0\%), far exceeding hand-crafted baselines which produce near-zero behavioral change. Code generation exhibits model-dependent resistance: Claude degrades only 0.6pp, while Llama's accuracy drops to 0\%. The intent – execution gap reveals a monotonic resistance ordering: Arithmetic $

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

Adaptive Multi-Resolution Procedural Knowledge Compression for Large Language Models

Authors:
Changyue Wang↗Weihang Su↗Qingyao Ai↗Yichen Tang↗Runzhong Qiao↗Xuancheng Li↗Min Zhang↗Yiqun Liu↗

Large language models (LLMs) are widely used to tackle complex tasks with autonomous workflows. Recently, reusable natural language skills have emerged as a popular paradigm to inject procedural knowledge into LLM applications. Since popular skills are often invoked repeatedly, placing their full text in every context significantly increases prefill cost and latency. While text compression techniques have the potential to solve this problem, most existing methods are designed to compress factual knowledge in documents instead of procedural knowledge, making them insufficient for skill compression. In this paper, we argue that an effective skill compression method should: 1) preserve logical dependencies among workflows and tool protocols, 2) enable lightweight, offline compression for frequently updated community skills, and 3) be adaptable to varying complexities across skills. To address this, we present SKIM (SKIll coMpression), an adaptive multi-resolution soft token compression framework for procedural skills. Depending on the complexity of each skill, SKIM creates different numbers of soft tokens that not only improve the efficiency of LLM inference, but also preserve the effectiveness of skill usage. Experiments indicate that SKIM compresses skills to 30 to 60 percent of their original token length while preserving task performance better than existing compression methods.We have released our code at https://github.com/bebr2/SKIM .

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13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

MentalMARBERT: Domain-Adaptive Pre-training and Two-Stage Fine-Tuning for Arabic Mental Health Disorders Detection

Authors:
Fatimah Almalki↗Areej Alhothali↗Lulwah Alharigy↗Abdulrahman Aladeem↗

Detecting mental health disorders from Arabic social media text remains challenging due to dialectal variation, informal language, limited high-quality annotated resources, and severe class imbalance. While English mental health natural language processing (NLP) has progressed substantially, Arabic multi-class disorder classification remains insufficiently studied. This study proposes a two-phase framework for Arabic mental health text classification. In phase 1, three Arabic pre-trained language models, AraBERT, CAMeLBERT, and MARBERT, undergo Domain-Adaptive and Task-Adaptive Pretraining (DAPT and TAPT) using a large-scale corpus of unlabeled Arabic mental health tweets. The adapted models are evaluated under a unified protocol to identify the most effective backbone model. In phase 2, the selected model is assessed across four configurations combining single-stage and hierarchical two-stage classification architectures with full fine-tuning and Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). To support this study, we constructed a novel annotated Arabic mental health dataset comprising 50,670 tweets across six categories, with strong inter annotator agreement (Krippendorff's Alpha = 0.733, average pairwise agreement = 0.797). Experimental results show that the domain-adapted MARBERT (MentalMARBERT) achieves statistically significant improvements over baseline models in both accuracy and macro-F1. The hierarchical two-stage architecture combined with full fine-tuning achieves the best overall performance, reaching a macro-F1 of 0.861 and an accuracy of 0.877. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of domain-specific adaptive pretraining and hierarchical classification for Arabic mental health disorder detection.

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

Rel-Zero: Harnessing Patch-Pair Invariance for Robust Zero-Watermarking Against AI Editing

Authors:
Pengzhen Chen↗Yanwei Liu↗Xiaoyan Gu↗Xiaojun Chen↗Wu Liu↗Weiping Wang↗

Recent advancements in diffusion-based image editing pose a significant threat to the authenticity of digital visual content. Traditional embedding-based watermarking methods often introduce perceptible perturbations to maintain robustness, inevitably compromising visual fidelity. Meanwhile, existing zero-watermarking approaches, typically relying on global image features, struggle to withstand sophisticated manipulations. In this work, we uncover a key observation: while individual image patches undergo substantial alterations during AI-based editing, the relational distance between patch pairs remains relatively invariant. Leveraging this property, we propose Relational Zero-Watermarking (Rel-Zero), a novel framework that requires no modification to the original image but derives a unique zero-watermark from these editing-invariant patch relations. By grounding the watermark in intrinsic structural consistency rather than absolute appearance, Rel-Zero provides a non-invasive yet resilient mechanism for content authentication. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Rel-Zero achieves substantially improved robustness across diverse editing models and manipulations compared to prior zero-watermarking approaches.

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15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Structuring The Future: Diffusion LLM Speculative Decoding via Calibrated Draft Graphs

Authors:
Sudhanshu Agrawal↗Risheek Garrepalli↗Raghavv Goel↗Christopher Lott↗Fatih Porikli↗Mingu Lee↗

Diffusion LLMs (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a powerful alternative to autoregressive LLMs (AR-LLMs) with the potential to operate at significantly higher token-generation rates. To unlock this potential, we present Spiffy, a speculative decoding algorithm to accelerate dLLM inference while provably preserving the model's output distribution. This work addresses the unique challenges involved in applying ideas from speculative decoding of AR-LLMs to dLLMs. Spiffy performs auto-speculation to eliminate the overheads of an independent draft model, structuring draft states in the form of a novel directed draft graph to take advantage of the bidirectional, blockwise nature of dLLM generation. These draft graphs are calibrated offline to maximize acceptance rates and are dynamically pruned during inference for improved computational efficiency. We present a detailed formulation of Spiffy and demonstrate its ability to accelerate LLaDA, Dream, and SDAR models in combination with KV caching and threshold-based dynamic unmasking leading to up to $8.6\times$ reduction in model inferences and $6.3\times$ acceleration in token rate.

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16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

One Jailbreak, Many Tongues: Learning Language-Insensitive Intention Representations for Multilingual Jailbreak Detection

Authors:
Shuyu Jiang↗Kaiyu Xu↗Xingshu Chen↗Hao Ren↗Rui Tang↗Yi Zhang↗Tianwei Zhang↗Hongwei Li↗

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in applications for global multilingual users, yet safety training remains concentrated in dominant languages and has not progressed in parallel with multilingual capability, creating exploitable gaps for jailbreak attacks. Current jailbreak defenses are largely developed and evaluated in dominant languages, and their effectiveness is limited by the scarcity of aligned multilingual supervision and representations dispersion caused by language variation. To address this issue, we propose MLJailDe, a multilingual jailbreak detection framework designed to improve both multilingual robustness and cross-lingual generalization. MLJailDe first introduces a multilingual back-translation data augmentation algorithm to construct a semantically consistent and functionally effective dataset spanning 11 languages, consisting of 2,232 benign and 1,239 jailbreak samples. On this basis, MLJailDe employs relative-distance constraints to reduce cross-lingual representation dispersion and encourage jailbreak prompts with similar intent to form consistent clusters across languages, while an imbalance-aware classification objective is further used to alleviate class imbalance and learn more reliable multilingual decision boundaries. Experimental results show that MLJailDe outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across multiple languages, achieving an F1 score of 98.5\%, and obtains an average F1 score of 97.1\% on unseen languages, demonstrating strong effectiveness and cross-lingual generalization.

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

RedAct: Redacting Agent Capability Traces for Procedural Skill Protection

Authors:
Shuwen Xu↗Zhitao He↗Yi R. Fung↗

Users rely on execution traces to observe agent behavior, diagnose failures, and ensure accountability. These traces contain rich procedural detail, including tool invocations, intermediate decisions, and error-recovery logic. Yet this detail can expose private procedural skills, allowing downstream methods to recover key formulas, thresholds, and strategies without access to model weights or skill files. To quantify this risk and evaluate protection, we construct \textsc{CapTraceBench}, a benchmark of 75 specialized long-horizon tasks and 154 curated skills across seven domains. We also introduce \textsc{RedAct} https://github.com/XuShuwenn/RedAct, a protected trace release framework that localizes protected key information, rewrites traces while preserving verifier-critical evidence, and embeds behavioral watermarks for downstream provenance analysis. Across representative trace reuse methods, \textsc{RedAct} reduces normalized skill transfer (NST) from 44.7–67.1\% on raw traces to below the no-skill baseline, while preserving audit evidence. Its standalone behavioral watermarks reach 93.6–100.0\% true detection with a false alarm rate of at most 1.9\%. These results frame public agent traces as security interfaces and show that selective redaction can reduce procedural capability leakage without removing audit evidence.

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18.
Science (Express) 2026-05-21

Nodeless superconducting gap and electron-boson coupling in (La,Pr,Sm)3Ni2O7 films | Science

Authors: Unknown Author

The discovery of superconductivity in Ruddlesden-Popper (RP) bilayer nickelate films under ambient pressure provides an opportunity to directly investigate electronic energy scales of the superconducting state and the pairing mechanism. We report angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy measurements of superconducting (La,Pr,Sm) 3 Ni 2 O 7 thin films by developing an ultra-high vacuum cryogenic sample quenching and transfer technique. A superconducting gap of ~18 meV with coherence peaks is observed along the Brillouin zone diagonal. The finite gap persists across the entire Brillouin zone, revealing the absence of gap nodes. A kink is observed in the energy-momentum dispersion at ~70 meV below Fermi level, indicating an electron-boson coupling. The simultaneous observation of a nodeless superconducting gap and electron-boson coupling provides insight into the pairing symmetry and gluing mechanism in RP bilayer nickelates.

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

A Comprehensive Ecosystem for Open-Domain Customized Video Generation

Authors:
Jingxu Zhang↗Yuqian Hong↗Daneul Kim↗Kai Qiu↗Qi Dai↗Jianmin Bao↗Yifan Yang↗Xiaoyan Sun↗Chong Luo↗

Recent progress in video generation has shown impressive visual synthesis capabilities. However, open-domain customized video generation remains limited by the lack of large-scale, annotated datasets capturing diverse identity-specific attributes. To address this, we introduce PexelsCustom-1M, the first publicly available million-scale dataset for identity-preserving video generation, containing one million curated triplets across 8,000+ categories. Leveraging this, we propose CustoMDiT, a parameter-efficient framework that adapts a pretrained multimodal Diffusion Transformer into a customized video generator with only 8% additional learnable parameters. Our method surpasses prior state-of-the-art. However, benchmarks such as DreamBooth cover only 100 classes, which is insufficient for real-world applications. To overcome this, we construct OpenCustom, a new benchmark with 1,000+ categories, created via cross-dataset knowledge fusion from ImageNet and MS-COCO. Extensive experiments confirm the advantages of both our dataset and model. We will open-source the entire ecosystem–including dataset, pipeline, benchmark, and implementations–to support further research.

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20.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-12

Social contact patterns in the United Kingdom following the COVID-19 pandemic: The Reconnect cross-sectional survey

Authors:
Lucy Goodfellow↗

by Lucy Goodfellow, Billy J. Quilty, Kevin van Zandvoort, W. John Edmunds Background Close-contact and respiratory infectious diseases are spread through social interactions. Measuring these interactions has transformed our ability to understand transmission and control these infections. Social contact patterns were disrupted during the COVID-19 pandemic and have been affected by wider demographic, cultural, and workplace changes since then. Methods and findings To estimate post-pandemic social contact patterns in the United Kingdom, we conducted a cross-sectional social contact survey from November 2024 to March 2025 on a nationally representative sample of participants. Interactions were captured by age, gender, and across socioeconomic status (SES) and ethnic groups. We calculated the mean number of daily contacts and contact matrices, stratified by variables of interest, using a negative binomial regression model weighted by age, gender, ethnic group, and weekday/weekend. 13,238 participants were recruited, 3,019 of whom were aged under 18 years old; survey response rates were 36% and 27% for adults and children, respectively. The mean number of daily contacts was 9.1 (95% confidence interval (CI): 8.7, 9.5); this figure was 13.8 (95% CI: 12.8, 14.9) for children, and 7.8 (95% CI: 7.4, 8.2) for adults. Higher numbers of contacts were positively associated with employment, household income, and educational qualifications held. Contact matrices showed high levels of age-assortativity, as well as inter-generational contacts in the home. Contacts were assortative between ethnic groups and SES in all settings; this effect was strongest between ethnic groups in the home, and between SES in the workplace. We constructed socially-stratified next-generation matrices for a novel respiratory pathogen, projecting that the majority White ethnic group would account for the largest share of new infections (76.7% (95% CI: 75.5, 77.9) of cases), but that per-capita infection risk would disproportionately affect minority ethnic groups, with the risk for the Black population being 2.27 (95% CI: 2.06, 2.51) times that of the White population. This study may be limited by the inherent recall biases and reporting fatigue involved with self-reporting contacts. Conclusions This study provides crucial data to inform post-pandemic mathematical models of infectious disease transmission, and allows ethnicity and SES to be incorporated in such models.

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21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

APEX: A Network-Native Time-Series Foundation Model for Forecasting and Anomaly Detection for Wireless Edge Operations

Authors:
Swadhin Pradhan↗Niloo Bahadori↗Peiman Amini↗

arXiv:2606.11553v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generic time-series foundation models transfer poorly to wireless network telemetry whose signals are bursty, zero-inflated, and coupled across protocol layers. We present APEX, a network-native, decoder-only transformer for forecasting enterprise AP telemetry, and evaluate it on DHCP degradation as a representative network task. APEX is pre-trained on 10-channel multivariate telemetry from ~4,500 production wireless networks (~100K AP time series, 34 metrics per AP), and is available as APEX-Large (269M, cloud) and APEX-Edge (10.5M, edge). On a 192-step (4-day) DHCP degradation benchmark, APEX-Large reduces MAE by 18% over the strongest foundation-model baseline (Toto) and 38% over SARIMA, with anomaly-detection F1 = 0.93, while APEX-Edge enables sub-second, privacy-preserving inference on AP-class edge hardware. These results suggest network-native pre-training is a practical foundation for proactive wireless operations.

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22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

World Engine: Towards the Era of Post-Training for Autonomous Driving

Authors:
Tianyu Li↗Li Chen↗Caojun Wang↗Haochen Liu↗Kashyap Chitta↗Zhenjie Yang↗Yuhang Lu↗Naisheng Ye↗Yihang Qiu↗Yufei Wang↗Luoxi Zou↗Jiaxin Peng↗…

Autonomous vehicles must operate safely in the real world, where errors can have severe consequences. Although modern end-to-end driving policies excel in routine scenarios, their reliability is limited by the scarcity of safety-critical ``long-tail'' events in real driving datasets. These rare interactions define the practical safety boundary of the learned policy, yet they are difficult to collect at scale in the real world. Here we show that this fundamental limitation can be addressed by post-training pre-trained driving models on synthesized high-stakes interactions. We introduce World Engine, a generative framework that reconstructs high-fidelity interactive environments from real-world logs and systematically extrapolates them into realistic safety-critical variations. This paradigm enables reinforcement-based post-training to align policies with safety constraints, circumventing the physical risks inherent in real-world exploration. On a public benchmark built on nuPlan, World Engine substantially reduces failures in rare safety-critical scenarios and yields significantly larger gains than scaling pre-training data alone. Furthermore, when deployed on a production-scale autonomous driving system, the resulting policy reduces simulated collisions and demonstrates measurable improvements in on-road testing, showing that post-training on synthesized, safety-critical interactions offers a scalable and effective pathway to safer autonomous driving. The full codebase suite, including training, is released to the public.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

ForecastBench-Sim: A Simulated-World Forecasting Benchmark

Authors:
Jaeho Lee↗Nick Merrill↗Ezra Karger↗

Forecasting benchmarks for general-purpose AI systems usually inherit the constraints of the real world: outcomes resolve slowly, tail events are rare, and counterfactual questions are difficult to score. We introduce ForecastBench-Sim, a simulated-world forecasting benchmark built on game rollouts from Freeciv, a turn-based strategy game modelled on the Civilization series. Forecasters receive a fixed world report (a structured snapshot of the current game state) and answer questions about hidden future states; the benchmark then continues the simulation and scores forecasts. Because the world is simulated, the same setup can generate continuous or binary forecasting questions at arbitrary time horizons, paired intervention worlds for conditional or causal questions, and resolved examples of rare or disruptive outcomes. We describe the benchmark pipeline, question families, scoring protocol, and release artifacts, and report validation slices from model evaluations and an anonymized human pilot. ForecastBench-Sim is intended to complement real-world forecasting benchmarks by providing controlled, immediately resolvable tasks for studying probabilistic reasoning under dynamic world states.

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24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Consistency of sleep timing and duration are associated with more physical activity and favorable heart rate metrics in a naturalistic cohort

Authors:
Komilian↗Lee↗Goparaju↗Bianchi↗M. T↗

Background: Regularity of sleep patterns over time has increasingly gained traction as an important axis of sleep health. Since sleep habits are under some degree of behavioral control, understanding such patterns in naturalistic settings is particularly important. We quantified sleep variability and tested the hypothesis that regularity correlates with physical activity, resting heart rate (rHR), and heart rate variability (HRV). Methods: We analyzed real-world digital health data from over 81,000 participants (over 18 million nights) who provided informed consent to participate in the Apple Heart and Movement Study and elected to contribute sleep, activity, and heart rate data to the study. Variability was quantified using the standard deviation (SD) computed from total sleep time (TST), sleep start time (S-start), end time (S-end), and midpoint time (MP), as well as the Sleep Regularity Index (SRI). Results: The SD-based variability metrics correlated with one another (R values 0.74-0.92), and with the SRI metric (R values 0.62-0.64). More consistent sleep, by any metric, was associated with more activity and better rHR and HRV. The most consistent tertile for TST variability had higher median TST (6.9 vs 5.9 hours), more daily exercise (32.8 vs 20.4 minutes), lower rHR (62.4 vs 65.6 beats per minute), and higher HRV (40.6 vs 37.3), all p

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

EARS: Explanatory Abstention for Reliable Sub-Agent Modeling in Large-scale Multi-Agent Systems

Authors:
Shuang Xie↗Yunan Lu↗Han Li↗Lingyun Wang↗

In large-scale enterprise settings, centralized multi-agent systems (MAS) are increasingly adopted, in which a coordinator delegates user requests to lightweight, domain-specialized sub-agents. While this architecture improves modularity, scalability, and cost efficiency, its reliability depends not only on accurate routing but also on sub-agents' ability to calibrate their responses to capability constraints. In particular, sub-agents built on smaller fine-tuned models often struggle with such calibration, leading them to over-answer ambiguous, underspecified, misrouted, or unsupported requests and produce hallucinated outputs instead of actionable feedback. To address this challenge, we present EARS (Explanatory Abstention for Reliable Sub-Agent Modeling), a production-oriented framework that reframes sub-agent abstention as an inter-agent communication protocol: a sub-agent does not merely abstain, but exposes an actionable failure state to the coordinator. EARS curates human-agent interaction data using an ensemble of calibrated LLM-as-a-Judge models, producing structured abstention labels and rationales under a taxonomy of sub-agent failure modes. These data are used to fine-tune sub-agents to detect failure conditions and return rationales for coordinator-level clarification, rerouting, or fallback. We evaluate EARS in a large-scale production e-commerce assistant supporting enterprise business intelligence workflows. EARS improves the overall response pass rate from 68.5% to 78.9%, demonstrating that sub-agent-side explanatory abstention improves MAS reliability.

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