Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

AcademicHub aggregates real-time literature from top journals and preprint platforms. Build your personal research radar and let large language models compile cross-disciplinary analysis briefings automatically.

01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantum Algorithm for Open-System Battery Cathodes by Modeling Multiple Strongly Coupled Holstein Polarons with Chain-Mapped Caldeira-Leggett Dynamics

arXiv:2606.16017v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cathode lithiation occupies a chemical regime of tightly localized orbitals, narrow bandwidths, and strong electron-lattice coupling. The defining electrochemical observables (open-circuit voltage and differential capacity) are open-system, reservoir-equilibration quantities that closed-Hamiltonian quantum simulation cannot produce, set by exchange with electron, Li$^+$, and phonon baths. We present a fault-tolerant quantum algorithm that recovers them through a unitary chain-mapped Caldeira-Leggett embedding, rendering the baths Trotterizable. The resulting fourth-order Trotter step has a T-gate count polynomial in system size, validating its open-system dynamics against hierarchical equations of motion (HEOM) at strong coupling and the Lindblad limit at weak coupling. For single-carrier olivine LiFePO$_4$, a single voltage anchor on an otherwise DFT-fixed Hamiltonian places the differential-capacity peak within the $\pm5$ mV reproducibility of the experimental plateau. For multi-carrier spinel LiMn$_2$O$_4$, whose $1{:}1$ Mn$^{3+}$/Mn$^{4+}$ filling makes the inter-site Coulomb repulsion dynamically active, the same kernel yields a two-plateau voltage curve with a $125$ mV split, within $17\%$ of the observed $150$ mV. We deliver an end-to-end fault-tolerant resource estimate for such a multi-carrier, three-reservoir observable: $368$ logical qubits and $\sim3\times10^5$ T-gates per step, or $\sim1.7\times10^{12}$ T-gates for a full voltage curve (parallelizable over $\sim10^3$ trajectories), leaving the production-scale dynamical run as a milestone for future hardware. The same kernel reproduces macroscopic quantum coherence, two-band superconductivity, and the Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein resonance without modification, placing dynamical battery chemistry and similar Hamiltonians within scope for fault-tolerant quantum simulation.

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

Prediction of Alzheimer's Disease Risk Factors from Retinal Images via Deep Learning: Development and Validation of Biologically Relevant Morphological Associations in the UK Biobank

The systemic, metabolic, lifestyle factors have established associations with Alzheimer's Disease (AD) through epidemiologic and AD-specific biomarker studies. Whether colored fundus photography (CFP) contains retinal structural signatures corresponding to these AD-related risk domains remains unclear. To determine whether deep learning (DL) models can predict 12 AD-related risk factors from CFP and to characterize the retinal structures underlying these predictions, thereby assessing whether CFP reflects pathways to AD vulnerability. Using 62,876 CFPs from 44,501 unique participants from the UK Biobank, DL models were trained to predict 12 factors linked to AD incidence: 6 categorical (sex, smoking, sleeplessness, economic status, alcohol use, depression) and 6 continuous (age, age at completing education, BMI, systolic, diastolic blood pressure, HbA1c). Model performance, model saliency, and saliency-derived scores (CAM-Score) were evaluated and compared to retinal morphometry. The scores were also compared between incident-AD cases (average 8.55 years before onset) and matched controls. Performance of DL ranged from AUROC= 0.5654-0.9480 for categorical and R2=-0.0291-0.7620 for continuous factors, outperforming most of the morphometry-machine learning models. Saliency-based score consistently highlighted biologically meaningful regions, particularly the optic nerve head and retinal vasculature. It also aligned with present morphometric variations. Several saliency-based scores differed significantly between incident AD and matched controls, suggesting potential overlap between retinal correlates of risk factors and preclinical AD-associated changes. CFP encodes retinal signatures linked to AD risk factors. Although not diagnostic, DL-derived retinal representations may uncover biologically meaningful risk-related structural changes mirroring the potential AD vulnerability.

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

When Probing Accuracy Saturates, Fragility Resolves: A Complementary Metric for LLM Pre-Training Analysis

Standard linear probing declares a property "encoded" when a classifier on hidden states achieves high accuracy. The protocol works well on a snapshot but breaks across pre-training: probe accuracy saturates within the first few thousand steps, leaving most of training invisible to the instrument. We introduce fragility, a complementary per-layer metric defined as the activation-noise level at which probe accuracy collapses. Fragility is sensitive to both the margin of separability and the redundancy of representation, both of which keep evolving long after accuracy plateaus. Applied to open-checkpoint language models, fragility recovers structure that accuracy alone cannot see. Moralized representations emerge along a lexical $\to$ compositional gradient: lexical moral detection first, compositional moral encoding later. Because probe accuracy on its own tracks how lexically separable a dataset is, we establish the compositional encoding directly, by showing it transfers across construction types that share no contrast tokens. A layer-depth robustness gradient develops monotonically across training while accuracy stays flat. And matched fine-tuning corpora that produce identical probing accuracy leave distinct fragility fingerprints, showing that data curation reshapes probe robustness without changing probe accuracy. In every comparison we test, where probing accuracy returns a flat answer, fragility returns a structured one.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

The Slop Paradox: How Synthetic Standardization Erodes Clinical Uncertainty and Cross-Modal Alignment in AI-Rewritten Radiology Reports

Authors:

AI-assisted clinical documentation tools increasingly summarize, standardize, and reformat radiology reports using large language models (LLMs). We present a controlled measurement of the resulting information degradation. Using 450 chest X-ray reports from the Indiana University dataset, we generate synthetic versions via three realistic LLM rewriting tasks: EHR summarization, standardized rewriting, and teaching case preparation. We measure entity erosion (via medical NER), hedging collapse (loss of clinical uncertainty language), and cross-modal alignment degradation (via BiomedCLIP image-text similarity). Our central finding is a dissociation between information loss and cross-modal fidelity. EHR summarization is the most destructive at the content level, eroding 51.4% of clinical entities and 43.7% of hedging language, yet it preserves image-text alignment almost entirely (a 2.5% drop). The two tasks meant to produce cleaner training data, standardized rewriting and teaching case preparation, do the reverse: they preserve more entities (26.8% and 29.3% eroded) but cause 14.9-16.5% alignment drops, six to seven times those of EHR summarization. We term this the slop paradox: rewriting that makes clinical text look cleaner for multimodal training is precisely what pulls it away from the image. Contrary to our pre-specified hypothesis, rare pathologies were not preferentially degraded: across nine rare-versus-common comparisons, no difference survived multiple-comparison correction, and nominal differences ran in the opposite direction (common > rare), so contamination is invisible to condition-specific monitoring. The dominant determinant of degradation is the type of AI rewriting task, not the clinical content. These findings bear on multimodal medical AI dataset construction and the governance of AI-assisted clinical documentation.

05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Delta-Epsilon-Common Knowledge and Quantitative Agreement Theorems

arXiv:2606.11902v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Aumann defined common knowledge mathematically and established his now famous Agreement Theorem. We present a novel approach to quantifying how close individuals are to commonly knowing events, $(\delta,\epsilon)$-common knowledge, which is defined for any (and not just countable) probability spaces, and provide quantitative versions of the key results in this field. Specifically, we do this for Aumann's Agreement Theorem and Nielsen's extension thereof to random variables, as well as for the setting in which posteriors are communicated back and forth between individuals. Our results apply in particular to noisy communication settings.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Mucosal and Systemic Antibodies Associated with Clinical Protection in a Pertussis Controlled Human Infection Model

Background The engagement of mucosal and systemic immunity in preventing Bordetella pertussis colonization and infection in humans, the impact of prior vaccination on host immunity and protective outcomes, and the dynamics of the host response following exposure remain poorly understood. Methods Healthy adults were challenged with increasing colony-forming units (CFUs) doses, 106-108, of B. pertussis D420 intranasally (NCT05136599). Shedding (PCR and culturing) and symptom development were monitored up to 21 days post-challenge. Serum and nasal wash IgA and IgG were measured before challenge (baseline) and up to 6 months post-challenge. Findings Antibodies increased post-challenge only in infected individuals, primarily nasal IgA. Participants who remained uninfected had higher baseline levels of filamentous hemagglutinin (FHA)- specific mucosal IgA and IgG, and higher serum IgA against fimbriae 2/3 (FIM). FHA was negatively associated with bacterial load and was a key discriminator between shedders and non-shedders, up to one week post-challenge. By day 14 post-challenge, pertussis toxin (PT) IgG and FIM IgA in both serum and mucosal samples were negatively associated with bacterial colonization. The majority (96.7%) of acellular pertussis (aP) vaccine recipients (n=23, median age 2.0 years) became infected, compared to 69.4% of those who received whole-cell pertussis vaccine (n=36; median age 32.0 years), and their antibody responses remained distinct following infection. Interpretation Nasal FHA antibodies emerged as early predictors of protection against pertussis infection, while PT IgG and FIM IgA antibodies may reflect clearance after infection. aP-primed individuals were more susceptible to infection, despite their younger age and more recent vaccination. Funding CDC Contract #75D30122C15467 and CDC IPA Agreement #24IPA2417512 Disclaimer: The findings and conclusions in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, US Department of Health and Human Services.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

T Cell Receptor repertoire analysis reveals antigenic convergence and immunotherapeutic opportunities in Prostate Cancer

Background: The T-cell receptor {beta} (TCR{beta}) repertoire reflects antigen-driven adaptive immune responses and provides insight into tumor-immune interaction. In prostate cancer (PCa), the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment limits effective T-cell activation, and the antigenic drivers shaping intratumoral TCR repertoires remains poorly defined. This study aimed to characterize matched tumor and peripheral TCR{beta} repertoires from treatment-naive PCa patients and to identify shared clonotypes and antigenic specificities associated with disease severity. Methods: Next-generation sequencing was used to profile TCR{beta} repertoires from matched tumor biopsies and peripheral blood mononuclear cells obtained from treatment-naive PCa patients. Repertoires clonality, diversity, and was assessed using established metrics. Antigenic convergence was evaluated using GLIPH2 to identify shared CDR3{beta} motifs and predicted tumor-associated antigen (TAA) recognition, followed by functional validation using IFN-{gamma} ELISpot and T-cell expansion assays. Results: Tumor-derived TCR{beta} repertoires displayed reduced richness and increased clonality compared with peripheral blood mononuclear cells, consistent with local antigen-driven expansion. High-grade tumors demonstrated greater interpatient clonotype sharing and motif-level convergence, indicative of recognition of common TAAs. GLIPH2 analysis associated expanded clonotypes with epitopes derived from prostate-specific G-protein coupled receptor (PSGR), prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA), and prostate-specific antigen (PSA). Functional validation confirmed that peptide pools containing PSGR- and PSMA-derived epitopes induced IFN-{gamma} production and antigen-specific T-cell proliferation in vitro. Conclusions: These findings reveal an oligoclonal, antigen-driven intratumoral TCR{beta} landscape and identify PSGR and PSMA as immunogenic, potentially actionable targets. Integration of TCR profiling with antigen discovery pipelines may support the development of TCR-based biomarkers and precision immunotherapeutic strategies in prostate cancer.

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

SVoT: State-aware Visualization-of-Thought for Spatial Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.11770v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spatial reasoning remains a challenge for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), as it requires reliable multi-hop inference over both intermediate states and state transitions. Current studies often leave intermediate states unverified and treat state transitions as implicit processes, which limits reliability in multi-hop spatial reasoning. To address this, we propose State-aware Visualization-of-Thought (SVoT), a reinforcement learning framework that generates interleaved, verifiable intermediate states and visualizations. SVoT integrates transition reasoning chains into the generation processes, enabling the model to verify action preconditions and effects through interleaved textual and visual reasoning. We train SVoT via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), instantiating verification through reward design and evaluating the efficacy of different fine-grained rewards. As existing benchmarks reduce state transitions to single-variable updates, substantially simplifying the problems, we establish five domains by extending classical environments and introducing two novel domains, Pacman and Gather, that require multi-object interactions and numerical reasoning. These domains support systematic evaluation of multi-hop spatial reasoning with quantitative verification of generated intermediate states and transition reasoning. SVoT with transition-aware supervision achieves state-of-the-art performance across the introduced domains, yielding up to a 65% absolute accuracy gain on out-of-distribution test sets.

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

How to Score Experts for One-Shot MoE Expert Pruning: A Unified Formulation and Selection Principle

arXiv:2606.15716v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models reduce per-token computation through sparse expert activation, yet deployment still requires storing the full expert pool, making one-shot expert pruning a practical approach for reducing memory usage. Although effective, existing criteria are largely heuristic, and no single criterion is universally optimal. Thus, establishing a principle for selecting pruning criteria suited to different deployment objectives remains an important yet largely underexplored problem in one-shot expert pruning. To this end, we introduce a unified formulation for one-shot MoE expert pruning organized around three factors: routing frequency, gate weighting, and activation strength. The formulation yields a criteria selection principle: task-agnostic pruning should favor routed-token-averaged, gate-free activation-based criteria, whereas task-specific pruning can benefit from retaining routing-frequency and gate-weight information. Beyond this principle, the formulation also provides a systematic view of existing heuristic criteria and gives rise to two new task-agnostic criteria, Mean Activation Norm (MAN) and Mean Squared Activation Norm (MSAN). Across four representative MoE models and 16 diverse benchmarks, MAN and MSAN are consistently strong in the task-agnostic setting, obtain the top-two average ranks, and improve average performance by up to 8.8 points over the strongest baseline.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Accounting for uncertainty in the expected treatment effect substantially increases the sample size required for randomised trials: implications for the feasibility of clinical trials in anaesthesia and critical care

Background Multicentre trials in anaesthesia and critical care report low rates of statistically significant differences. This finding may partly reflect conventional sample size methods, which assume a fixed treatment effect. Assurance methods use a design prior to represent uncertainty in the expected treatment effect, which may provide a more realistic way of estimating sample sizes. Methods We calculated power curves across a range of effect sizes, design priors, and sample sizes using frequentist and Bayesian assurance methods and compared the sample sizes required to achieve 80% and 90% power to the conventional method. We standardised the design priors across effect sizes using the coefficient of variation. We derived a theoretical limit for achievable power. We validated a normal approximation to the Bayesian posterior distribution. Results Frequentist and Bayesian assurance methods produced similar power curves across all scenarios. At a coefficient of variation of 0.5 - reflecting realistic prior uncertainty in the expected effect size - both methods required sample sizes that were approximately 1.5 to 3.5 times larger than the conventional method. The theoretical power limit depends only on the coefficient of variation of the design prior and holds true across all effect sizes. The normal approximation to the Bayesian posterior distribution matched the results obtained from Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling. Conclusions Incorporating clinical uncertainty in the expected effect size substantially increases the sample size required to achieve adequate power, which has important implications for the feasibility of randomised trials in anaesthesia and critical care.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

From Period Finding to Lattice Sampling: Experimental Insights into Shor's and Regev's Factoring Algorithms

arXiv:2606.17647v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum algorithms for integer factorization represent one of the most prominent applications of quantum computation, with far-reaching implications for modern cryptography. While Shor's algorithm provides a polynomial-time solution in the ideal quantum model, its practical implementation is severely constrained by the limitations of current noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) hardware. These constraints have motivated the exploration of alternative factoring algorithms with different structural and resource trade-offs. In this work, we present an experimental study of Regev's quantum factoring algorithm, implemented on real quantum hardware, and compare its behavior with that of Shor's algorithm under analogous conditions. Focusing on the case N = 15, we execute both algorithms on the QMIO quantum computer at the Centro de Supercomputacion de Galicia (CESGA) and contrast the results with one of IBM's open-access quantum computers and ideal simulations. This parallel execution enables a low-level comparison of the two algorithms, highlighting how their respective quantum implementations interact with hardware noise, limited circuit depth, and finite sampling. Our analysis emphasizes the different ways in which Shor's and Regev's algorithms encode arithmetic structure into quantum states through Fourier sampling in one and higher dimensions, respectively, and how these differences manifest in experimental outcomes. Although neither algorithm demonstrates a practical advantage in the small N regime, the results provide insight into their relative robustness and failure modes on contemporary quantum devices. This study illustrates the value of experimental benchmarking of alternative quantum factoring algorithms as a means of understanding the practical implications of algorithmic design choices in the NISQ era.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Multi-fidelity aerodynamic data fusion by autoencoder transfer learning

arXiv:2512.13069v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate aerodynamic prediction often relies on high-fidelity simulations; however, their prohibitive computational costs severely limit their applicability in data-driven modeling. This limitation motivates the development of multi-fidelity strategies that leverage inexpensive low-fidelity information without compromising accuracy. Addressing this challenge, this work presents a multi-fidelity deep learning framework that combines autoencoder-based transfer learning with a newly developed Multi-Split Conformal Prediction (MSCP) strategy to achieve uncertainty-aware aerodynamic data fusion under extreme data scarcity. The methodology leverages abundant Low-Fidelity (LF) data to learn a compact latent physics representation, which acts as a frozen knowledge base for a decoder that is subsequently fine-tuned using scarce HF samples. Tested on surface-pressure distributions for NACA airfoils (2D) and a transonic wing (3D) databases, the model successfully corrects LF deviations and achieves high-accuracy pressure predictions using minimal HF training data. Furthermore, the MSCP framework produces robust, actionable uncertainty bands with pointwise coverage exceeding 95%. By combining extreme data efficiency with uncertainty quantification, this work offers a scalable and reliable solution for aerodynamic regression in data-scarce environments.

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

A Perception vs. Distortion Perspective on Score-Based Generative Channel Estimation

arXiv:2606.16815v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Driven by their remarkable success in computer vision and inverse problem solving, score-based models are increasingly applied to wireless communications, where they show promise across a range of physical-layer tasks. However, despite this growing interest, the current literature often lacks a rigorous analysis of when score-matching offers a tangible advantage over traditional discriminative learning. This paper aims to address this gap through the use-case of channel estimation, a fundamental inverse problem in wireless systems. We present a theoretically grounded interpretation of score-based channel estimation through the lens of the perception-distortion tradeoff, identifying the conditions where score matching excels as well as its key limitations. In particular, by modeling downstream wireless tasks (e.g., capacity maximization) as functionals of the channel estimation process, we quantify the excess risk incurred by standard distortion-minimization approaches. Extensive numerical results show that under high predictive uncertainty, the large excess risk gap can be offset by score-based estimation, enabling near Bayesian-optimal precoding via the learned posterior, whereas in the low predictive uncertainty regime, discriminative distortion-minimization approaches are preferable due to lower complexity and more efficient use of model capacity.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Improving Code-Switching ASR with Code-Mixing Guided Synthetic Speech

arXiv:2606.19381v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Code-switch (CS) Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) remains challenging due to limited availability of high quality CS text-speech pairs for training. Although synthetic data augmentation via Text-to-speech (TTS) has been explored, existing CS TTS approaches primarily optimise reconstruction fidelity and do not explicitly enforce language-boundary consistency, thereby limiting their effectiveness for CS ASR augmentation. This paper proposes a code-mixing guided preference-learning framework that steers synthetic speech generation toward improved code-switching fidelity using the Code Mixing Index (CMI). Experiments on the SEAME Mandarin-English conversational corpus demonstrate that the proposed method enhances the utility of synthetic data for ASR fine-tuning. Specifically, when fine-tuning Whisper Large, the proposed approach reduces Mixed Error Rate (MER) from 12.1%/17.8% to 8.9%/14.2% on the DevMAN and DevSGE sets, respectively.

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

Sub-Poissonian Statistics and Quantum Non-Gaussianity from High-Harmonic Generation

arXiv:2602.10882v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum technologies are powered by platforms to generate complex non-classical states of matter or light to realize applications. We investigate the non-classical properties of high-harmonic generation in semiconductors, an emerging photonic platform. Measuring the click statistics of three double-digit orders, we evaluate witness operators to certify the non-classicality of the generated states. We show that higher-order harmonics driven by a coherent laser are squeezed and entangled. The properties of the emission are well retrieved with an entangled Gaussian state model, obtained by numerical state optimization to multiple observables. Additionally, we perform inter-order heralded measurements to engineer the quantum state of the emission. The heralded states have distinct properties, showing sub-Poissonian photon statistics. Further, we witness the generation of a quantum non-Gaussian state, a resource highly relevant for quantum information. With this, we establish high-harmonic generation as a platform for generating quantum optical resources.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Before the Labels: How Dataset Construction Shapes Suicidality Detection in Clinical Text

Clinical NLP increasingly relies on electronic health record (EHR) data to detect suicidal behaviors, treating clinical documentation as more reliable ground truth than social media. We argue that this framing obscures how EHR-based suicidality datasets encode a particular operationalization of suicidality, shaped by who authors the data, how episodes are bounded, and how ambiguity is resolved. We ground this argument in a case study of the ScAN dataset, built over MIMIC-III clinical notes. We show how governance constraints, ICD-based cohort selection, single-annotator labeling, and hospital-stay-level aggregation produce labels that reflect clinician-documented judgments, treat suicidality as a bounded episode, and assume that intent can be reliably inferred from documentation. A linguistic analysis demonstrates that identical labels subsume heterogeneous clinical framings differing in temporality, negation, and uncertainty. We argue that clinical NLP should examine the assumptions embedded in suicidality datasets before interpreting their labels as ground truth.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Exploration Structure in LLM Agents for Multi-File Change Localization

arXiv:2606.11976v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Software engineering tools increasingly rely on LLM based agents to localize files to change to resolve a software issue. Most AI agents explore repositories linearly, that is, visiting one directory or file per step. We postulate that this is a structural mismatch for changes that span several subsystems. We compare linear sequential exploration against non-linear, domain-scoped parallel agentic exploration. Using SWE Bench Pro as initial benchmark, we focus on ansible as an exemplar. We construct an approach for persistent-session evaluation of GitHub issues anchored at a single base commit. We compare our non-linear domain-agent file traversal system against a base LLM without direct repository access, a single agent Recursive Language Model (RLM) baseline with a persistent Python REPL and an external CLI baseline using Codex 5.5 High. Domain scoped parallel agent spawning with a small Haiku-class model achieves the highest micro F1 among Haiku class models by a large margin. Domain-agents is the second highest behind only the much larger Codex 5.5 High on our own expanded benchmark including over more recent PRs from 2025 and 2026. On the original, curated, 2020 SWE-bench Pro benchmark, a larger Sonnet plain LLM baseline attains higher micro F1 by predicting few files, leading to higher precision, but at significantly lower all gold recall. We also present three additional findings. First, documentation evolution is a latent dependency unresolved by any approach. Second, naive file system access can degrade localization driven by test-file over prediction. Lastly, forced multi-agent consultation does not measurably help and raises token cost substantially.

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

RIDGECUT: Learning Graph Partitioning with Rings and Wedges

arXiv:2505.13986v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise for combinatorial optimization problems on graphs by learning heuristics that generalize across instances. However, effectively incorporating domain knowledge into RL frameworks for graph partitioning remains challenging, as existing approaches typically rely on unconstrained node-level actions that lead to large action spaces and inefficient exploration. In this paper, we propose RidgeCut, an RL framework that constrains the action space to enforce structure-aware partitioning in the Normalized Cut problem. Using transportation networks as a motivating example, we introduce a novel concept that leverages domain knowledge about urban road topology – where natural partitions often take the form of concentric rings and radial wedges. By transforming the graph into linear or circular representations, our method enables the use of transformer-based policies and efficient learning via Proximal Policy Optimization. The resulting partitions from RidgeCut are not only aligned with expected spatial layouts but also achieve lower normalized cuts compared to existing methods. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world traffic graphs demonstrate that RidgeCut consistently outperforms existing methods while exhibiting strong inductive generalization across graph sizes. Although motivated by road networks, RidgeCut provides a general mechanism for embedding structural priors into RL frameworks for graph partitioning.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Spin disorder competing with positional symmetry breaking governs the metal-insulator behavior in oxide paramagnets

arXiv:2606.14624v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Numerous transition-metal oxides have low-temperature antiferromagnetic (AFM) states and high-temperature paramagnetic (PM) phases, where the AFM state is usually insulating while the PM phase can be either insulating or metallic. Without involving strong correlation, we use symmetry-broken density-functional theory (DFT) to obtain the PM phases of insulating NaFeO3 vs the recently discovered metallic NaOsO3. We develop the understanding of insulating and metallic behaviors in paramagnetic oxides by analyzing the interactions between magnetic and positional symmetry breaking: The insulating gap is governed by the competition between the spin disorder that induces a distribution of different magnitudes of local magnetic moments and the polymorphous distribution of off-center atomic displacements. NaFeO3, on the other hand, has large positional displacement with small spin-disorder-induced moments distribution, leading to insulating PM phase, whereas NaOsO3 has a pronounced spin-disorder-induced moments distribution that forces the PM phase to become metallic. Our work identifies this symmetry-breaking competition as a general framework to bridge seemingly disparate metal-insulator behaviors in transition-metal oxides paramagnets without invoking strong correlation.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

CmdNeedle: Measuring the Incompleteness of Command Denylists for AI Agents

arXiv:2606.15549v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The adoption of AI agents is increasing rapidly. Terminal AI agents, i.e., AI agents that run in terminal environments, are a widely used type of AI agents. Terminal AI agents rely heavily on shell command execution to interact with the host systems. They adopt a three-list command-gating mechanism to mitigate security risks introduced by command execution, with denylists serving as the load-bearing component. However, modern operating systems often ship a large, ever-expanding set of shell commands with complex functionalities. Our observation is that even a built-in denylist of Claude Code, well-maintained by its developers, can overlook bypass commands that invalidate its effectiveness. Such negligence leads to fragile command denylists that cannot even block operations that practitioners expect them to block. This paper presents the first systematic characterization of command denylist fragility in terminal AI agents. The paper formalizes the command denylist fragility problem and proposes an LLM-driven pipeline, CmdNeedle, to detect such fragility. It prompts the LLM to propose possible bypasses and iteratively repairs them using feedback from a validator that executes them in a sandbox. In the evaluation, we applied CmdNeedle to 1,709 real-world command denylists (containing 13,332 denylist rules) collected from GitHub. The evaluation shows several key findings, including that 69.0–98.6% of the denylists are fragile, that this fragility occurs consistently across projects and agents, and the validity of several possible root causes for this fragility. Our pipeline and findings will hopefully facilitate future research and practice regarding the command denylists used by AI agents.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Detecting Lookahead Bias in LLM Forecasts

arXiv:2512.23847v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We develop a statistical procedure to detect lookahead bias in economic forecasts generated by large language models (LLMs). Using a date-only recall query for a firm-date pair, we estimate the probability that the LLM has internalized information about the realized outcome, a statistic we term Lookahead Propensity (LAP). LAP is materially positive throughout the in-sample period and collapses essentially to zero right after the training-data cutoff. We show that a positive interaction between LAP and the LLM forecast in an accuracy regression indicates lookahead-bias contamination, and apply the test to two forecasting tasks: news headlines predicting stock returns and earnings call transcripts predicting capital expenditures. In both applications, the LLM forecast's predictive power is amplified on high-LAP firm-date pairs, and the interaction loses significance on post-training-cutoff samples. Our test provides a cost-efficient, diagnostic tool for assessing the validity and reliability of LLM-generated forecasts.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Discontinuous strong-to-weak symmetry breaking transition from thermal pure states

arXiv:2606.15062v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the nonequilibrium dynamics of strong-to-weak spontaneous symmetry breaking in many-body quantum systems undergoing decoherence from thermal pure states. For generic initial pure states with volume-law entanglement entropy, we show that the system undergoes a discontinuous dynamical phase transition at a critical time. This transition is accompanied by a singularity in the entropy of the system, which saturates to its maximum value at the same critical time. Through numerical simulations of the dephasing Ising and hard-core boson models, we establish the universality of this transition across different symmetries. Our results reveal that the dynamical emergence of a decohered mixed state from a highly entangled state is not a gradual asymptotic relaxation, but rather a sharp phase transition driven by a sudden collapse of global coherence.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

TS-ICL: A Flexible Time-Indexed Foundation Model for Time Series via In-Context Learning

arXiv:2606.05878v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Foundation models mark a profound paradigm shift in time series modeling, with task-specific models being superseded by general-purpose zero-shot models. Yet, current approaches primarily focus on forecasting, while real-world time series are often irregularly and partially observed, requiring models that can jointly forecast, impute missing values, and handle degraded sampling conditions. To address these challenges, we introduce TS-ICL, a novel probabilistic In-Context Learning encoder–regressor Transformer that unifies forecasting and imputation. TS-ICL formulates time series tasks as timestamp-aligned regression and naturally incorporates covariates by training on synthetic dependency structures generated from a novel causal data prior. Empirically, TS-ICL achieves a new state-of-the-art in imputation, while remaining competitive with leading forecasting foundation models across both univariate and covariate-aware benchmarks. It shows particularly strong performance in forecasting with partially observed look-back windows.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Vaccine introductions in the WHO African Region, 2023-26: a country-level ecological analysis by Gavi eligibility and conflict-affected status

Background. The Immunization Agenda 2030 (IA2030) tracks new and underused vaccine introduction as an access metric, and its mid-term review calls for stronger country ownership, prioritisation, data use and tailored support in conflict-affected and resource-constrained settings; however, national launch status does not measure recurrent financing, implementation, safety or equity. We examined how recent vaccine-introduction activity was distributed across the WHO African Region. Methods. We conducted a descriptive country-level ecological analysis of all 47 Member States from January 2023 to June 2026. The country was the unit of analysis and contributed one cumulative, unweighted count of nationally endorsed vaccine-introduction and programme-change events. Counts were linked to Gavi eligibility, World Bank FY26 conflict-affected status, broader fragile and conflict-affected situation status in sensitivity analysis, and concurrent system-performance indicators, and modelled with Poisson regression using HC1 robust standard errors. Two Expanded Programme on Immunization (EPI) manager survey waves were summarised at country level. Reporting followed STROBE and RECORD. Results. Seventy-two events were recorded across 38 of 47 Member States: 48 new-antigen introductions, 20 dose or schedule expansions and four combination-vaccine introductions; malaria vaccines accounted for 21. Gavi-eligible conflict-affected countries averaged 2.50 events per country versus 1.27 in both comparison groups. Gavi-eligible conflict-affected status was associated with a higher count (incidence rate ratio [IRR] 1.97, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.38-2.81; p