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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Irresponsible AI: big tech's influence on AI research and associated impacts

Authors:
Alex Hernandez-Garcia↗Alexandra Volokhova↗Ezekiel Williams↗Dounia Shaaban Kabakibo↗M\'elisande Teng↗

arXiv:2512.03077v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The accelerated development, deployment and adoption of artificial intelligence systems has been fuelled by the increasing presence of big tech in the AI field. This trend has been accompanied by growing ethical concerns and intensified societal and environmental impacts. This position paper argues that irresponsible AI development is strongly driven by big tech's influence and involvement in the field. First, we examine the growing and disproportionate influence of big tech in AI research and argue that its drive for scaling and general-purpose systems is fundamentally at odds with the responsible, ethical, and sustainable development of AI. Second, we review key current environmental and societal negative impacts of AI and trace their connections to big tech's influence. Third, we discuss the underlying economic forces driving big tech's actions. Finally, as a call to action, we invite AI researchers to counter big tech's influence in irresponsible AI development through strategies that build on the responsibility of implicated actors and collective action.

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02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

QualiaNet: An Experience-Before-Inference Network

Authors:
Paul Linton↗

Human 3D vision involves two distinct stages: an Experience Module, where stereo depth is extracted relative to fixation, and an Inference Module, where this experience is interpreted to estimate 3D scene properties. Paradoxically, although stereo vision does not provide us with absolute distance information, it nonetheless affects our inferences about distance. We propose the Inference Module exploits a natural scene statistic: near scenes produce vivid disparity gradients, while far scenes appear comparatively flat. QualiaNet implements this two-stage architecture computationally: disparity maps simulating human stereo experience are passed to a CNN trained to estimate distance. The network can recover distance from disparity gradients alone, validating this approach.

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03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Age as a moderator of a brief alcohol intervention among injury patients in Northern Tanzania

Authors:
Mwita↗W. C↗Nickenig Vissoci↗J. R. C↗de Souza↗J. V. P↗Phillips↗A. J↗Moshi↗Madundo↗Muro↗F. J↗…

Background: Alcohol use is a leading modifiable risk factor for injury in sub-Saharan Africa. In Tanzania, young people ([≤]24 years) experience greater alcohol-related harm despite drinking less frequently than adults. Punguza Pombe kwa Afya Yako (PPKAY) is a culturally adapted, brief intervention for injury patients in Tanzania. This study examined whether age moderates its effectiveness. Methods: We conducted an exploratory secondary analysis of baseline and 3-month data from the PPKAY randomized trial among injury patients aged [≥]18 years at Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre, Tanzania. Eligible participants reporting alcohol use before injury, AUDIT [≥]8, or positive breathalyzer were randomized to usual care or PPKAY with SMS boosters. The primary outcome was binge drinking days. Count outcomes were analyzed using negative binomial regression with robust SEs and continuous outcomes using mixed-effects models. Effect modification was assessed using a three-way interaction (Time x intervention x Age). Results: Among 543 participants (mean age 36.8 years; 16.2% aged 18–24), age moderated the intervention effect for drinking days (IRR = 0.27, 95% CI 0.07 – 0.98; p = 0.046) and drinks consumed (IRR = 0.17, 95% CI 0.04 – 0.77; p = 0.021). The intervention reduced 4 drinking days (95% CI -7.1 to -0.8) and 27.5 drinks (95% CI -42.8 to -12.2) among young people, while adults showed reductions in both arms, without intervention-specific effect. Conclusion: The effects of ED-based brief alcohol interventions are not uniform, varying across both age groups and alcohol-related outcomes. We found a greater responsiveness in drinking frequency and quantity reported among young people.

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

Agentic Discovery of Non-Canonical Antimicrobial Peptides with AMPGAN v3

Authors:
Jay Jung↗Xiaohan Zhang↗Shenghan Song↗Mahmoud Sayedahmed↗Chijian Xiang↗Yunong Xu↗Ahmed AbdelKhalek↗Severin T. Schneebeli↗Matthew J. Wargo↗Jianing Li↗Safwan Wshah↗

arXiv:2606.17127v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Antimicrobial resistance causes to over a million deaths annually. Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are a promising solution, but generative AMP models are not yet ready to design peptides with non-natural amino acids and/or chemical modifications, which are essential for real-world peptide drugs. We present AMPGAN v3, a multi-objective conditional GAN that expands the generative vocabulary to D-amino acids and N/C-terminus modifications such as amidation. By separating adversarial and activity-aware supervision across two specialized discriminators, AMPGAN v3 substantially improves training stability and outperforms prior generative AMP models on external classifiers. We validated five candidates spanning three structural classes in vitro; two showed activity against Gram-positive strains, with the best candidate reaching MIC 8 {\mu}g/mL against B. subtilis. To support downstream curation, we further present PepCraft, a multi-agent framework for end-to-end AMP discovery in which a Planning Agent orchestrates specialized executors for generation, filtering, and verification. Its prioritization recommendations align with our in vitro outcomes. Together, these contributions let us examine, on a small but real scale, how generative and agentic AI compose in therapeutic peptide discovery. Code: https://github.com/marszzibros/AMPGANv3

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05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

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

Authors:
Octave Oliviers↗Glenn Vinnicombe↗

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

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

Understanding Sample Efficiency in Predictive Coding

Authors:
Gaspard Oliviers↗Elene Lominadze↗Rafal Bogacz↗

arXiv:2605.11911v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Predictive Coding (PC) is an influential account of cortical learning. Much of recent work has focused on comparing PC to Backpropagation (BP) to find whether PC offers any advantages. Small scale experiments show that PC enables learning that is more sample efficient and effective in many contexts, though a thorough theoretical understanding of the phenomena remains elusive. To address this, we quantify the efficiency of learning in BP and PC through a metric called ``target alignment'', which measures how closely the change in the output of the network is aligned to the output prediction error. We then derive and empirically validate analytical expressions for target alignment in Deep Linear Networks. We show that learning in PC is more efficient than BP, which is especially pronounced in deep, narrow and pre-trained networks. We also derive exact conditions for guaranteed optimal target alignment in PC and validate our findings through experiments. We study full training trajectories of linear and non-linear models, and find the predicted benefits of PC persist in practice even when some assumptions are violated. Overall, this work provides a mechanistic understanding of the higher learning efficiency observed for PC over BP in previous works, and can guide how PC should be parametrised to learn most effectively.

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07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

FloatDoor: Platform-Triggered Backdoors in LLMs

Authors:
Nils Loose↗Jonas Sander↗Felix M\"achtle↗Thomas Eisenbarth↗

arXiv:2606.19535v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in sensitive settings such as software engineering, where their outputs directly shape downstream artifacts. Recent work has shown that an identical model can produce measurably different outputs depending on the deployment platform, a consequence of non-associative floating-point arithmetic and divergent kernel implementations. We study the security implications of this platform-dependent variability and uncover a novel attack surface on LLM deployments. We introduce FloatDoor, the first input-independent, platform-triggered backdoor attack against generative LLMs. The compromised model exhibits adversary-chosen behavior when served on a target platform and is otherwise benign. FloatDoor is realized through two lightweight LoRA adapters, one that amplifies inter-platform numerical divergence and one that binds the resulting platform signature to a malicious downstream task, while leaving aggregate model utility largely intact. FloatDoor exploits a pronounced time-of-check, time-of-use gap between model auditing and serving. We demonstrate FloatDoor on Qwen3-4B across a broad range of deployment targets, including NVIDIA GPUs, Google TPUs, AWS Graviton, and Alibaba Yitian-710. As a final case study, we show that FloatDoor reliably induces exploitable code vulnerabilities on a chosen target platform. Our results establish a new class of attacks on LLM deployments and underscore the pressing need for trusted model supply chains in sensitive, LLM-powered applications.

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

LLMpedia: A Transparent Framework to Materialize an LLM's Encyclopedic Knowledge at Scale

Authors:
Muhammed Saeed↗Simon Razniewski↗

Benchmarks like MMLU suggest flagship language models approach factuality saturation above 90\%. LLMpedia shows this picture is incomplete. We materialize ${\sim}$1.3M encyclopedia articles entirely from parametric memory across three model families, then audit every claim against Wikipedia and curated web evidence. For \texttt{gpt-5-mini}, the verifiable true rate is 68.4\% on Wikipedia-covered subjects - more than 21\,pp below MMLU - and the gap is driven by unverifiability (30.5\%), not refutation (1.2\%). Beyond Wikipedia, frontier articles audited against curated web evidence reach 57.6\%; Wikipedia covers only 56.7\% of model-surfaced subjects, and three model families overlap in just 7.3\% of subject choices. In a retrieval-trap benchmark inspired by prior analysis of Grokipedia, LLMpedia is more factual at roughly half the textual similarity to Wikipedia. Every prompt, article, and verdict is released. Data, code, interface: https://llmpedia.net.

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

Privacy-Preserving Text Sanitization for Distributed Agents Collaboration via Disentangled Representations

Authors:
Xuan Liu↗Hefeng Zhou↗Sicheng Chen↗Chao Yang↗Xingcheng Xu↗Jingjing Qu↗Jiong Lou↗Jie LI↗Xia Hu↗

When distributed agents exchange text across organizational boundaries, privacy leakage arises not only from explicit identifiers but also from distributional signatures such as formatting conventions, vocabulary choices, and syntactic patterns. We propose DiSan(Disentangled Sanitization), a privacy-preserving sanitization framework and a built-in component of Intern-Shannon for multi-agent collaboration. DiSan uses a two-stream encoder to factorize text into a source-invariant role subspace that preserves task semantics and a source-identifying style subspace that remains local. Federated proto-type alignment and adversarial regularization enable joint training without centralizing raw text. Experiments show that identifier-level masking is insufficient: masking 19.2% of tokens reduces TF-IDF stylometric attribution by only 18.6%. By contrast, DiSan reduces answer-level PII exposure by 20 times while maintaining 83% answer faithfulness on a distributed multi-agent RAG benchmark, and lowers Enron stylometric attribution by 73.2% under TF-IDF and 70.6% under a neural probe.

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10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Adapting Prithvi-EO for Fallow Detection for Food-Water Nexus: ViT-Adapter Necks and Parameter-Efficient Backbone tuning of Geospatial Foundation Model

Authors:
Sk Muhammad Asif↗Orhun Aydin↗

Understanding spatial distribution of fallow land is important for optimizing the food-water (FW) nexus, given fallowing's role in crop rotation and water conservation. Fallow is a low accuracy class in USDA Cropland Data Layer (CDL). Geospatial foundation model (GFM), Prithvi-EO has shown strong transferability across computer vision tasks. However, its Vision Transformer (ViT) backbone produces features at a single spatial scale that are ill-suited for the multi-scale features required by object detection heads. Existing approaches synthesise multi-scale pyramids through scaling of single stride tokens, sacrificing spatial heterogeneity, and full backbone fine-tuning is computationally prohibitive for GFMs. We evaluate a fallow detection pipeline combining two parameter-efficient fine tuning (PEFT) schemes: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and a hybrid PEFT, with three neck designs: pseudo multi-scale, Lite ViT-Adapter, and Full ViT-Adapter. Our best configuration, Lite ViT-Adapter with a one-stage head, achieves a mAP@50 of 0.9479 with the Diou loss, suggesting the effectiveness of center-aware localization for irregular fallow field detection. ViT-Adapter free one-stage detection under LoRA improves the adapter-free anchor-based approach by 6.42%, and the best configuration improves baseline adapter-free anchor-based approach by 25.70%. These results demonstrate that lightweight spatial prior fusion and selective backbone unfreezing enable Prithvi-EO to capture local fallow patterns more effectively, outperforming approaches that rely on reshaped single-stride ViT tokens.

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11.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Functional central limit theorems for non-local branching Markov processes

Authors:
Christopher B. C. Dean↗Emma Horton↗

arXiv:2502.19382v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The aim of this paper is to study the fluctuations of a general class of supercritical branching Markov processes with non-local branching mechanisms. We establish functional central limit theorems and show that the limiting behaviour falls into three regimes, determined by the size of the spectral gap associated with the first-moment semigroup of the branching process. The main novelty is to develop a unified functional fluctuation theory for spatial branching Markov processes with non-local reproduction, allowing a general finite-dimensional spectral structure for the first-moment semigroup, including non-simple leading eigenvalues and nilpotent Jordan-type components. In doing so, we extend the classical small, critical and large fluctuation trichotomy beyond the finite-type and local spatial settings, and obtain limiting processes that capture the covariance structure induced by non-local offspring displacement.

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12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Fully Geometric Multi-Hop Reasoning on Knowledge Graphs with Transitive Relations

Authors:
Fernando Zhapa-Camacho↗Robert Hoehndorf↗

arXiv:2505.12369v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-hop logical reasoning on knowledge graphs requires faithfully mapping the logical semantics to latent space. Current geometric embedding methods show to be useful on this task by mapping entities to geometric regions and logical operations to latent transformations. While a geometric embedding can provide a direct interpretability framework for query answering, current methods have only leveraged the geometric construction of entities, failing to map logical operations to pure geometric transformations and, instead, using neural components to learn these operations. On the other hand, purely neural-based methods outperform geometric methods, but they lack interpretability in the latent space. We introduce GeometrE, a geometric embedding method for multi-hop reasoning, that maps every logical operation to a purely geometric operation in the latent space. Additionally, we introduce a transitive loss function and show that, unlike existing methods, it can preserve the logical rule for all a,b,c: r(a,b) and r(b,c) -> r(a,c). Our experiments show that GeometrE outperforms current state-of-the-art geometric methods and remains competitive with existing neural-based methods on standard benchmark datasets.

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13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

The Integrator Advantage: Controlled Agentic AI for Small and Medium-Sized Companies

Authors:
Christopner Koch↗Joshua A. Wellbrock↗

arXiv:2606.16649v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic AI marks a new phase of enterprise automation. Unlike traditional automation or conversational AI, agentic systems can interpret goals, plan multi step tasks, access tools, interact with enterprise systems, and execute workflows with varying degrees of autonomy. For small and medium sized companies, this creates potential to reduce administrative burden, accelerate routine processes, and improve the use of organizational knowledge. This paper argues that the near term value of Agentic AI does not lie in full autonomy or workforce reduction, but in controlled partial autonomy for simple and medium complexity business processes. It proposes an integration framework covering use case suitability, autonomy levels, technical integration, governance, security, employee enablement, and measurable impact. The paper concludes that Agentic AI can become a productivity lever when implemented as a human centered capability with responsibility and accountability retained by people.

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

HanDyVQA: A Video QA Benchmark for Fine-Grained Hand-Object Interaction Dynamics

Authors:
Masatoshi Tateno↗Gido Kato↗Hirokatsu Kataoka↗Yoichi Sato↗Takuma Yagi↗

Hand-object interaction (HOI) inherently involves dynamics where human manipulations produce distinct spatio-temporal effects on objects. However, existing semantic HOI benchmarks focused either on manipulation or on the resulting effects at a coarse level, lacking fine-grained spatio-temporal reasoning to capture the underlying dynamics in HOI. We introduce HanDyVQA, a fine-grained video question-answering benchmark that comprehensively covers both the manipulation and effect aspects of HOI. HanDyVQA comprises six complementary question types (Action, Process, Objects, Location, State Change, and Object Parts), totalling 11.1K multiple-choice QA pairs. Collected QA pairs recognizing manipulation styles, hand/object motions, and part-level state changes. HanDyVQA also includes 10.3K segmentation masks for Objects and Object Parts questions, enabling the evaluation of object/part-level reasoning in video object segmentation. We evaluated recent video foundation models on our benchmark and found that even the best-performing model, Gemini-2.5-Pro, reached only 73% average accuracy, which is far from human performance (97%). Further analysis shows the remaining challenges in spatial relationship, motion, and part-level geometric understanding. We also found that integrating explicit HOI-related cues into visual features improves performance, offering insights for developing future models with a deeper understanding of HOI dynamics.

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15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Conditional means, vector pricings, amenability and fixed points in cones

Authors:
Nicolas Monod↗

arXiv:2512.13829v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We develop a generalization of conditional probability for arbitrary ordered vector spaces. A related problem is that of assigning a numerical value to one vector relative to another. We characterize the groups for which these generalized probabilities can be stationary, respectively invariant. Our results deviate from the setting of classical probability and lead to a new criterion for amenability and for fixed points in cones.

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16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

LiAuto-GeoX: Efficient Grounded Driving Transformer

Authors:
Jiawei Lian↗Haoyi Sun↗Yang Wu↗Lifu Mu↗Siyuan Wang↗Le Hui↗Ning Mao↗Tao Wei↗Pan Zhou↗Kun Zhan↗Jian Yang↗

Dense 3D reconstruction has demonstrated immense potential for spatial understanding, yet its viability as a real-time, onboard representation for autonomous driving remains an open challenge. Existing large-scale visual geometry models typically require substantial computational resources and lack the long-range geometric fidelity, surround-view consistency, and real-time efficiency demanded by dynamic driving environments. To bridge this gap, we present LiAuto-GeoX, an efficient grounded driving transformer designed for deployable, ego-centric 3D scene understanding. Our approach begins by learning a high-capacity driving geometry model from large-scale surround-view data, utilizing sparse LiDAR priors to provide robust geometric grounding in distant, ambiguous, or structure-sparse regions. We then instantiate this capability into a highly compact 155M-parameter onboard model through a novel geometry-preserving distillation framework. This framework employs mask-guided depth-aware distillation to retain fine-grained metric structures by emphasizing geometrically informative regions, and relative-pose relational distillation to enforce cross-view spatial consistency through pose-induced geometric relations. Extensive evaluations reveal that LiAuto-GeoX runs at 220 FPS on KITTI while maintaining high-fidelity dense reconstruction, enabling real-time deployment. The learned geometry transfers seamlessly to downstream autonomy tasks, achieving 90.6 PDMS in trajectory prediction, 24.63 mIoU in occupancy prediction, and 47.67 IoU in future-frame prediction. These all demonstrate that efficient dense 3D reconstruction can transcend its traditional role as a perception target to serve as a scalable, foundational geometric representation for next-generation autonomous driving.

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

Quantum conditional entropies from convex trace functionals

Authors:
Roberto Rubboli↗Milad M. Goodarzi↗Marco Tomamichel↗

arXiv:2410.21976v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study geometric properties of trace functionals that generalize those in [Zhang, Adv. Math. 365:107053 (2020)], arising from a novel family of conditional entropies with applications in quantum information. Building on new convexity results for these functionals, we establish data-processing inequalities and additivity properties for our entropies, demonstrating their operational significance. We further prove completeness under duality, chain rules, and various monotonicity properties for this family. Our proofs draw on tools from complex interpolation theory, multivariate Araki–Lieb and Lieb–Thirring inequalities, variational characterizations of trace functionals, and spectral pinching techniques.

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

Evaluating and Combating the Impact of Concept Drift on the Performance of Machine Learning-Based Phishing Detection Systems

Authors:
Warren Fernando↗Nikos Komninos↗

arXiv:2606.11471v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The expansion of the digital domain has resulted in a substantial increase in digital communication, with email emerging as one of the most prominent channels. The proliferation of email communication is apparent in both professional and personal contexts, thereby creating numerous vulnerabilities for malicious actors to exploit. Spam emails, a form of unsolicited correspondence often bearing malicious intent towards recipients, have been an ongoing challenge for email users since the inception of email technology, and this problem has been exacerbated by the growth of the digital landscape. Email spam filters are integral components of email clients, engineered to identify potentially harmful messages and alert users to their malicious content. Phishing, frequently the initial phase of malware-based attacks, is evolving rapidly, with malware becoming increasingly sophisticated over time. A widely adopted approach for detecting malicious activity within malware and spam domains is the application of machine learning. Our aim is to assess the impact of the evolution within the spam email domain on these machine learning-based detection systems and to explore strategies for mitigating associated performance degradation.

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19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Multipartite synchronization residuals in driven-dissipative spin networks

Authors:
Jatin Ghildiyal↗Shubhrangshu Dasgupta↗Asoka Biswas↗

arXiv:2606.24360v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a phase-space measure of quantum synchronization that quantifies relative phase localization for two-qubit and three-qubit systems. This measure is built from the first angular moments of phase distributions obtained from Husimi-Q quasiprobability functions. Using this framework, we formulate a new class of synchronization residuals, motivated by subadditivity-type hierarchies of information-theoretic measures. We investigate these residuals in a driven-dissipative quantum Rabi network in the dispersive adiabatic regime. We show that, for two qubits, collective synchronization remains bounded by single-qubit contributions yielding a non-negative bipartite residual. The three-qubit nonequilibrium steady state exhibits a negative tripartite residual, which indicates collective phase synchronization, which cannot be described by pairwise decomposition. The corresponding entropy-based residuals, however, remain non-negative in both cases. Our results therefore, underscore that phase-sensitive synchronization measures and entropic correlation measures probe distinct aspects of open-system dynamics.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Leveraging Audio-LLMs to Filter Speech-to-Speech Training Data

Authors:
Qixu Chen↗Satoshi Nakamura↗

Large-scale mined corpora provide abundant training data for end-to-end speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) but may contain noise, misalignment, and semantic errors. Filtering noisy data is crucial to maintain robust speech translation performance. We study how to train an audio-language model to make keep/drop decisions on paired speech directly from audio. To obtain reliable supervision without manual labels, we adopt a scalable two-stage Rank-to-Distill strategy. A lightweight ranker generates keep/drop pseudo-labels from noisy speech pairs, then trains an audio large language model to predict keep/drop directly from raw paired speech. The resulting model jointly captures acoustic fidelity and cross-lingual semantic consistency for the selection of speech-conditioned data. Experiments on CVSS-C and SpeechMatrix show consistent improvements over unfiltered training, yielding up to +1.4 ASR-BLEU for end-to-end S2ST.

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

Contrastive Regularization for Accent-Robust ASR

Authors:
Van-Phat Thai↗Aradhya Dhruv↗Duc-Thinh Pham↗Sameer Alam↗

arXiv:2605.03297v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: ASR systems based on self-supervised acoustic pretraining and CTC fine-tuning achieve strong performance on native speech but remain sensitive to accent variability. We investigate supervised contrastive learning (SupCon) as a lightweight, accent-invariant auxiliary objective for CTC fine-tuning. An utterance-level contrastive loss regularizes encoder representations without architectural modification or explicit accent supervision. Experiments on the L2-ARCTIC benchmark show consistent WER reductions across multiple pretrained encoders, with up to 25 – 29\% relative reduction under unseen-accent evaluation. Analysis using within-transcript cosine dispersion indicates that SupCon promotes more compact and stable representation geometry under accent variability. Overall, SupCon provides an effective and model-agnostic regularization strategy for improving accent robustness.

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22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Trivariate Hypergeometric Series Formulas for Pure Partition Functions of Multiple $3$-SLE$_\kappa$

Authors:
Dapeng Zhan↗

arXiv:2606.14038v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pure partition functions of multiple SLE are characterized by null-state partial differential equations, Möbius covariance, and boundary asymptotics. After quotienting by Möbius covariance, the case of three curves is the first genuinely multivariable one: the moduli space has three independent variables, naturally represented by the three unoriented cross-ratios of the three pairs of links. We solve this Möbius-normalized three-variable problem for the two basic link-pattern types of multiple \(3\)-SLE\(_\kappa\), namely the rainbow and neighbor patterns. Writing \(\beta=4/\kappa\), we construct explicit trivariate hypergeometric-series normal forms and identify them with the corresponding pure partition functions for all \(\beta>1/2\) in the rainbow case and all \(\beta\ge2/3\) in the neighbor case. Equivalently, these ranges are \(\kappa\in(0,8)\) and \(\kappa\in(0,6]\), respectively. The proof is analytic. The null-state PDEs and Möbius covariance yield recursion relations for the trivariate coefficient arrays. In the rainbow case, coefficient estimates give convergence and boundary regularity on the closed cube. In the neighbor case, Pfaff systems continue the local power series to a neighborhood of \([0,1)^3\), while side-face equations, regular normal estimates, and corner propagation give continuity on \([0,1]^3\) for \(\beta\ge2/3\). The endpoint \(\beta=2/3\), corresponding to \(\kappa=6\), requires a logarithmic normal term. The two-dimensional boundary degenerations are classical Appell \(F_1\) and Horn \(G_2\) functions. The probabilistic identification uses SLE martingale arguments and Itô calculus, together with positivity and boundary regularity. We also discuss boundary degenerations, including heuristic connections with boundary Green's functions.

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

Towards UAV Image Dehazing: A UAV Atmospheric Scattering Model, Benchmark, and Geometry-Aware Deep Unfolding Network

Authors:
Wenxuan Fang↗Jiangwei Weng↗Yu Zheng↗Junkai Fan↗Guangfa Wang↗Xiang Chen↗Jian Yang↗Jun Li↗

In UAV applications, haze significantly obscures distant details and weaken structural information, hindering the recovery of details. Current UAV scenarios still face two key challenges: (i) paired hazy/clean images from the real world are unobtainable, while the classical atmospheric scattering model is inadequate for modeling the spatially non-uniform haze in UAV imagery; (ii) existing dehazing methods struggle to remove the heavy haze accumulated in the upper regions of UAV images. To address these issues, we first propose a UAV Atmospheric Scattering Model (UASM), which explicitly incorporates flight altitude, viewing pitch, and extinction to characterize the non-uniform haze distribution in UAV imaging. Based on UASM, we develop a physics-driven dehazing framework, termed Geometry-aware Proximal Deep Unfolding Network (GP-DUN). Specifically, GP-DUN consists of three key modules: a Latent Geometry Estimator (LGE) that infers transmittance consistent with UAV imaging geometry, a Geometry-aware Gradient Descent Module (GeoGDM) that embeds UASM into the data-fidelity term and performs physics-consistent closed-form updates, and an Pooling-Expert Proximal Mapping Module (PE-PMM) that learns an implicit prior to restore textures and structures beyond the capability of explicit physical modeling. In addition, we further construct UASM-HazeSet, which provides controllable paired synthetic data together with 2,285 real UAV haze images for testing. Extensive experiments show that GP-DUN consistently outperforms existing methods on both UASM-HazeSet and real UAV haze benchmarks.

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24.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-13

On the evolution of the company we keep: Implications for infectious disease modeling

Authors:
Joël Mossong↗

by Joël Mossong Whom we meet shapes how infections spread. Where earlier focus of mathematical epidemiology was on incorporating age, more recent work has begun to reveal the importance of socioeconomic aspects for understanding and managing future epidemics. In this Perspective, Joël Mossong discusses the importance of understanding social contacts and how they have evolved for infectious disease modeling, and the need to factor in additional considerations such as ethic and socioeconomic backgrounds.

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

G2IA: Geometry-Guided Instance-Aware Retrieval and Refinement for Cross-Modal Place Recognition

Authors:
Xianyun Jiao↗Jingyi Xu↗Zhongmiao Yan↗Xieyuanli Chen↗Lin Pei↗

Cross-modal place recognition (CMPR) enables camera-only robots to localize against pre-built LiDAR maps in autonomous navigation scenarios. This image-to-point-cloud setting is challenged by two coupled ambiguities: the modality gap between perspective RGB appearance and sparse metric geometry, and perceptual aliasing among urban places with similar roads, facades, intersections, and object arrangements. Instead of treating CMPR as a single global descriptor matching problem, we argue that reliable retrieval requires both geometry-aware representation alignment and fine-grained candidate verification. In this paper, we propose G2IA, a geometry-guided instance-aware framework for image-to-point-cloud place recognition. In the retrieval stage, visual geometry priors from VGGT and instance features are integrated to construct place descriptors that are more compatible with LiDAR-derived map representations. In the refinement stage, the retrieved candidates are re-ranked by explicitly verifying whether local instance shapes and their relative spatial layouts are consistent across modalities. Experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate that G2IA consistently improves image-to-point-cloud place recognition under different localization thresholds, and exhibits strong cross-dataset generalization.

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