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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

A Physics-Informed Fourier-Wavelet Transformer for Multiscale Computational Fluid Dynamics Surrogate Modeling

arXiv:2606.24696v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Physics-informed surrogate models can accelerate computational fluid dynamics simulations. However, many existing methods reproduce global flow patterns more reliably than localized multiscale structures. This study presents a physics-informed Fourier-wavelet transformer for next-step velocity-field reconstruction in real-world flow benchmarks. The proposed formulation combines hybrid Fourier-wavelet spectral encoding with physics-biased self-attention based on partial differential equation residual diagnostics. It also uses self-supervised pretraining through Masked Physics Prediction and Equation Consistency Prediction. The experiments are conducted on two real benchmark cases: cylinder-wake flow and fluid-structure interaction. All approaches are evaluated under a shared local protocol and compared with spectral, transformer-based, operator-learning, and physics-informed neural-network baselines. On the cylinder-wake benchmark, the proposed model achieves the best aggregate accuracy, with an all-channel normalized mean-squared error of 0.05875 and an all-channel Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.97019. On the fluid-structure-interaction benchmark, it gives the lowest all-channel normalized mean-squared error of $2.70 \times 10^{-4}$, compared with $4.02 \times 10^{-4}$ for the strongest baseline. Component-wise field comparisons and scale-separated diagnostics further show stronger recovery of localized wake structures, including near-body, wake-core, and far-wake features. The results demonstrate improved real-world flow reconstruction while maintaining a practical accuracy-cost tradeoff.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Memory Contagion: Cross-Temporal Propagation of Evaluator Bias via Agent Memory

Authors:

Large Language Model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on memory systems to maintain long-term coherence. Recent work shows that agent memories degrade during continuous consolidation. However, existing research assumes memories are derived from unbiased experiences. In this work, we identify and formalize a novel phenomenon: Memory Contagion – the cross-temporal propagation of evaluator bias through agent memory. We show that when agents are trained or guided by biased evaluators, their experiences become biased; when these trajectories are stored and consolidated into memory, the bias propagates to future agents retrieving from the same memory store, even when consolidation is perfect (oracle). Across two bias types (length preference, authority bias) and four experimental phases, we demonstrate: (1) Memory Contagion occurs for length bias even with perfect consolidation on older models (Gamma_A = 13.18, DeepSeek V4-Chat), while newer models (V4-Pro, Claude) are immune, proving both that biased input is a sufficient cause and that contagion is model-generation-dependent; (2) authority bias fails to propagate in all 15 controlled multi-seed experiments (Gamma_A = 0.00), revealing that not all evaluator biases can cross temporal boundaries through current memory architectures; (3) No observed safe threshold: length bias propagation is detected at contamination rates as low as p=0.2. Our findings expose a critical but contingent vulnerability in current agent memory designs and provide formal tools for measuring cross-temporal bias propagation.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Measurable Majorities Are Not Finitely Axiomatizable

arXiv:2606.25954v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This theoretical note studies the finite axiomatizability of strict majority reasoning in finite social decision frames. Moss and Pedersen (2026) introduce a coherence criterion that characterizes exactly when qualitative majority judgments are representable by a finitely additive measure. The question addressed here is whether that coherence criterion can be replaced, in the finite setting, by any bounded finite fragment. We prove that it cannot. For every $k\ge 1$, we construct a maximal standard frame whose shortest coherence violation has length exactly $2k+2$. Hence there is no uniform finite bound on the incoherence index of social decision frames, resolving Conjecture 5.7 stated by Moss and Pedersen (2026). The construction is geometric, in the sense that it proceeds via orthogonality and dimension in rational vector spaces, and self-contained: it isolates a symmetric family of half-sized voting blocs and extends it to a maximal frame in which every shorter balanced obstruction is excluded. Along the explicit infinite sequence of universe sizes obtained in the construction, this also establishes the middle-layer family predicted by Conjecture B.25 by Moss and Pedersen (2026). Together with the soundness and completeness theorem for the Moss-Pedersen minimal logic for strict majorities, this establishes that measurable social decision frames are not finitely axiomatizable in that language.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Is Variational Monte Carlo Robust? Sharp Moment Thresholds and Heavy-tailed Stochastic Optimization

arXiv:2606.26009v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Variational Monte Carlo (VMC) is a central algorithm in electronic structure theory and has gained renewed importance through modern neural-network ansätze such as FermiNet. At its core, VMC seeks ground states by minimizing the Rayleigh quotient by stochastic optimization. In this work, we show that the resulting stochastic optimization problem is intrinsically governed by the nodal geometry of the underlying wave function. More precisely, we establish that properties of the nodal set determine the integrability of the local energy and gradient estimators that drive VMC. For broad and practically relevant ansatz classes, including Slater-Jastrow wave functions with variable-exponent Slater-type orbitals, we prove that these estimators are generically heavy-tailed and fail to admit higher moments. At the same time, for general analytic ansätze, we prove weak moment bounds for the relevant estimators and identify precise low-moment regimes, showing how generic and degenerate nodal structures lead to different integrability thresholds. Building on this analysis, we introduce a new robust variant of VMC $\unicode{x2013}$ coined PS-Clip-VMC $\unicode{x2013}$ which is based on clipping both the local energy and the gradient random variable. We prove that PS-Clip-VMC converges both in expectation and with high probability in the weak moment regime of VMC. Preliminary experiments for training FermiNet on Atoms with up to 18 electrons suggest that PS-Clip-VMC is significantly more robust than standard methods.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Generalised Eigenvalue Geometry of Semantic Adversarial Attacks

arXiv:2606.19212v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent empirical work shows that semantically equivalent paraphrases can fool financial sentiment classifiers: although a paraphrase remains close to the original under a strong reference embedding, it may shift the target model's representation enough to change the predicted class. Existing robustness theory either assumes a single-model threat model or focuses mainly on empirical attack algorithms. We develop a continuous local model of semantic paraphrase perturbations that captures this two-model structure. We show that the worst-case local displacement of the target representation, subject to a proxy-model budget, is governed by the largest generalised eigenvalue of a matrix pencil $(A,B)$ constructed from the Jacobians of the two embedding maps. The resulting attackability index $\lambda^*(x)$ is intrinsic to the local paraphrase geometry and the chosen embedders, yields a closed-form prediction-flip condition for affine readouts, and supports conservative population and finite-sample attackability certificates. For uniform control over classes of affine readouts, we derive a distribution-free VC bound for binary attackability indicators and a scale-sensitive margin bound based on an attackability-adjusted margin that subtracts a local geometric penalty from the standard classifier margin. We also connect the continuous theory to discrete paraphrase search, identify an asymmetry between successful and unsuccessful finite searches, and give a covering condition under which the discrete and continuous settings agree. Finally, we propose an empirical verification framework using soft-token relaxations and generated paraphrase sets to assess the local eigenvalue geometry, prediction-flip condition, and finite-search approximation on a deployed financial-text classifier.

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

Multi-Scale Separable Fourier Neural Networks for Solving High-Frequency PDEs

arXiv:2605.31027v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a novel neural network architecture, termed Multi-Scale Separable Fourier Neural Networks (MS-SFNN), for the accurate and efficient solution of linear and nonlinear high-frequency partial differential equations (PDEs). MS-SFNN exploits a separable representation: given a $d$-dimensional input, it employs $d$ independent subnetworks – each acting on a single coordinate – and constructs basis functions via element-wise multiplication of their outputs. The PDE solution is approximated as a linear combination of these basis functions, with coefficients determined by least squares. Critically, all network weights and biases are randomly initialized once, from a uniform distribution with unit variance, and remain fixed thereafter. To enhance expressivity, a tunable scaling factor is introduced in each subnetwork to modulate the frequency content of the resulting basis functions. Fourier features are explicitly embedded through cosine activations, endowing the method with strong spectral approximation capabilities. To mitigate the memory bottleneck associated with dense collocation in high-frequency or three-dimensional problems, we replace automatic differentiation with analytically derived basis function derivatives and develop a memory-efficient batched QR decomposition algorithm for solving large-scale least-squares systems. Numerical experiments demonstrate that MS-SFNN achieves unprecedented accuracy across a range of challenging PDEs, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods such as Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINN) and Separated-Variable Spectral Neural Networks (SV-SNN).

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Acquisition state behaves as a structured, measurable variable governing lung-nodule AI: kernel-driven measurement instability and noise-driven detection fragility, invisible to DICOM metadata

AI governance for medical imaging is formalizing: the 2026 ACR-SIIM Practice Parameter recommends local acceptance testing and ongoing drift monitoring, and the ACR Assess-AI registry monitors AI outputs using DICOM metadata for context. We argue that a necessary, currently unmonitored layer sits beneath output metrics: whether incoming studies remain within the acquisition envelope a model was validated on. Using a LUNA16-trained MONAI RetinaNet lung-nodule detector, we test whether acquisition state behaves as a structured, measurable variable. On real paired CT differing only in reconstruction kernel (NLST B30f vs B80f), kernel alone shifted AI-measured diameter and flipped a Fleischner size category in 5.2% (8 of 155) of nodules at fixed patient and acquisition, while detection confidence was unchanged (Wilcoxon p=0.22). Under controlled LIDC-IDRI perturbations the effects dissociated by axis: the noise axis degraded detection confidence (p=5.9e-32, concentrated in nodules under 6 mm) but not measurement, while the frequency/kernel axis corrupted measurement (p=8.6e-13) but not detection. A 4-feature pixel fingerprint recovered reconstruction identity (patient-level AUC about 0.95 on real CT, 0.995 on a QIBA phantom) where the ConvolutionKernel DICOM tag was uninformative (identical labels across reconstructions). The kernel axis transported across four manufacturers (leave-one-vendor-out AUC 0.94-0.98, matching the within-vendor ceiling). Acquisition state thus maps to distinct AI failure modes, frequency content to measurement reliability and noise to detection sensitivity, and is not recoverable from metadata. Acquisition-aware, input-side validation is the missing layer for the acceptance-testing and drift-monitoring requirements now entering imaging-AI accreditation.

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

SpheriCity: Designing Trustworthy Conversational AI for Sustainability Decision Support

arXiv:2606.13854v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present SpheriCity, an expert-grounded conversational prototype designed to support trustworthy knowledge sensemaking from sustainability reports. City-level circularity assessment reports contain rich information about materials, infrastructure, and policy interventions, yet their length and heterogeneous structure make cross-document synthesis and comparison difficult for practitioners and researchers working on circular economy initiatives. While large language models (LLM) promise faster knowledge access and synthesis, their opaque reasoning, hallucinations, and lack of source transparency introduce risks for trust and interpretability, and require verification in high-stakes sustainability contexts. SpheriCity addresses these challenges through a provenance-first conversational agent that foregrounds evidence traceability, structured synthesis, and interaction scaffolds to support exploratory querying and cross-document synthesis across sustainability reports. We conducted a formative expert review with six sustainability experts using representative queries spanning cross-city comparison, policy summarization, and recommendation-oriented tasks. Experts evaluated responses across dimensions and provided qualitative reflections on the system's usefulness for sustainability knowledge work. Our results reveal that transparent sourcing, contextual explanation, interpretability, and alignment with expert workflow strongly shape expert trust and judgments of system usefulness. This work contributes (1) a conversational prototype for sustainability knowledge sensemaking, (2) an expert-grounded evaluation framework for assessing AI responses in high-stakes knowledge domains, and (3) design insights into how provenance, uncertainty communication, and integration in workflow influence expert users' trust in AI assistance for sustainability decision support.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Can Aggregate Invariants Accelerate Continuous Subgraph Matching? Limits, Laws, and a Dynamic Spectral Index

arXiv:2606.24421v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spectral filtering recently delivered substantial pruning for static subgraph matching: Laplacian interlacing rejects candidates whose neighborhoods cannot host the query. We study whether such aggregate structural tests can accelerate continuous subgraph matching (CSM) over dynamic graphs, and answer in three parts. First, lazily maintained spectral bounds are infeasible exactly where spectral pruning has value: we characterize the tightest safe rule over a formalized perturbation relaxation and show that even it loses essentially all pruning power within four touching updates. Second, exact maintenance is affordable when selective: pruning utility and recomputation cost are anti-correlated across vertices – hubs provably never prune – so recomputing small-neighborhood spectra on touch sustains exact local spectra at microseconds per update, complete by construction. Third, integrated into a decoupled CSM benchmark against an identical-minus-spectra control, the tests remove up to $51\%$ of candidates or safely skip up to $47\%$ of update enumerations, yet enumeration intermediates remain unchanged – beyond the gates' skipped first-level bindings, typically zero – across two engines, four real graphs, two stream types, and $77$ solved queries; a constructed radius-stratified workload confirms the instrument detects the exception when one exists ($-99.9\%$ intermediates, $748\times$ faster). Aggregate tests accelerate what scales with candidate sets – construction, list scans – never adjacency-guided exploration. We distill an intermediate-invariance methodology for evaluating CSM filters and release a reusable dynamic local-spectra index.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

How Pragmatics Shape Articulation: A Computational Case Study in STEM ASL Discourse

Most state-of-the-art sign language models are trained on interpreter or isolated vocabulary data, which overlooks the variability that characterizes natural dialogue. However, human communication dynamically adapts to contexts and interlocutors through spatiotemporal changes and articulation style. This specifically manifests itself in educational settings, where novel vocabularies are used by teachers, and students. To address this gap, we collect a motion capture dataset of American Sign Language (ASL) STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) dialogue that enables quantitative comparison between dyadic interactive signing, solo signed lecture, and interpreted articles. Using continuous kinematic features, we disentangle dialogue-specific entrainment from individual effort reduction and show spatiotemporal changes across repeated mentions of STEM terms. On average, dialogue signs are 24.6%-44.6% shorter in duration than the isolated signs, and show significant reductions absent in monologue contexts. Finally, we evaluate sign embedding models on their ability to recognize STEM signs and approximate how entrained the participants become over time. Our study bridges linguistic analysis and computational modeling to understand how pragmatics shape sign articulation and its representation in sign language technologies.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

The African Language Tax: Quantifying the Cost, Latency, and Context Penalty of Tokenizing African Languages in Frontier LLMs

Commercial large language models bill, scale latency, and budget context per token. Yet tokenizers assign more subword tokens to the same meaning in some languages than in others, so speakers of languages with high token-fertility pay a structural penalty before a model is ever invoked. This penalty is documented for multilingual settings in general, but it has not been measured systematically for African languages at the level of enterprise deployment economics and cognitive context capacity. We measure it across 20 African languages spanning five language families and three scripts (Latin, Ge'ez/Ethiopic, N'Ko; 19 appear in the primary FLORES-200+ corpus, with Nigerian Pidgin measured via MAFAND-MT only), using parallel corpora so that the language effect is isolated from content. Across 11 frontier and open tokenizers on FLORES-200+, every African language carries a tokenization premium above English (median 1.88x on GPT-5 / o200k_base, up to 8.92x for N'Ko); the penalty is largest for Ethiopic and N'Ko scripts (reaching 7-9x) and is near-invariant across corpora (FLORES vs SIB-200 Pearson r = 0.9998). Translated into deployment terms, this results in up to 8.9x inference cost and an equivalent generation-latency multiplier (N'Ko vs English on GPT-5; 7.4x for Amharic), and as little as 11% of English's effective context window. The best currently available tokenizer for African languages, Gemma 4, reduces the mean premium from 3.31x (cl100k_base) to 2.38x, but no tokenizer eliminates the penalty. We release an open measurement tool (afri-fertility), a public leaderboard, a results dataset, and mitigation guidance for African builders. The penalty falls hardest on the languages whose speakers can least afford it, a digital divide encoded directly into the subword vocabulary.

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

Strategic Decision Support for AI Agents

arXiv:2606.12587v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Traditionally, decision support studies how humans use machine learning models to make better decisions. In modern agentic systems, this division of roles is increasingly reversed: AI agents act on behalf of users, while humans and tools becomes support mechanisms around them. This role reversal brings reliability concerns to the forefront, since agentic errors can be consequential and agent behavior must remain aligned with human goals and constraints. Departing from the classical view of decision support, we revisit its two basic principles, the cost–value tradeoff of seeking support and the role of uncertainty quantification, in a setting where AI agents are the central actors. We propose a framework for strategic decision support for AI agents through an optimization problem that minimizes support usage subject to controlling a counterfactual missed-support error: the probability that the agent acts alone on instances where support would have materially improved its output. At the population level, we show that the optimal policy is a threshold rule on the value of support. Building on this structure, we develop an online algorithm that adaptively thresholds such a score and uses randomized exploration to control missed-support error without distributional assumptions. We further introduce a calibration-on-the-fly method that reduces unnecessary support calls online. We instantiate this framework across diverse scenarios, including information gathering, human–AI collaboration, and tool use, showing how each can be modeled through the same strategic decision-support lens. Experiments across these settings show that our method reliably controls the target error while substantially reducing support usage in practice.

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

Acoustic Prompting via Stage-wise Modulation for Few-Shot Learning in Audio Language Models

arXiv:2606.15751v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio-Language Models (ALMs) have shown remarkable success in zero-shot audio classification by aligning audio waveforms with text. Recent efforts to improve downstream performance focus on learning optimal text prompts. However, previous approaches focus on the text encoder, leaving the potential of learnable prompts within the audio encoder unexplored. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that introduces trainable prompts into the audio encoder to capture task-specific acoustic features. We demonstrate that integrating audio-side prompt learning with existing text-side approaches enhances few-shot adaptation. Through extensive experiments across 11 datasets show that integrating our method as a plug-and-play module alongside existing text prompt tuning generally leads to performance improvements. These findings suggest that explicitly modulating the audio representation space effectively complements text-only prompting approaches. The code is available at https://github.com/hyebin-c/aspl.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Quantile-Free Uncertainty Quantification in Graph Neural Networks

arXiv:2605.04847v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Uncertainty quantification (UQ) in graph neural networks (GNNs) is crucial in high-stakes domains but remains a significant challenge. In graph settings, message passing often relies on strong assumptions such as exchangeability, which are rarely satisfied in practice, and achieving reliable UQ typically requires costly resampling or post-hoc calibration. To address these issues, we introduce Quantile-free Prediction Interval GNN (QpiGNN), a framework that builds on quantile regression (QR) to enable GNN-based UQ by directly optimizing coverage and interval width without requiring quantile inputs or post-processing. QpiGNN employs a dual-head architecture that decouples prediction and uncertainty, and is trained with label-only supervision through a quantile-free joint loss. This design allows efficient training and yields robust prediction intervals, with theoretical guarantees of asymptotic coverage and near-optimal width under mild assumptions. Experiments on 19 synthetic and real-world benchmarks show QpiGNN achieves average 22% higher coverage and 50% narrower intervals than baselines, while ensuring efficiency and robustness to noise and structural shifts.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Moving Beyond Diffusion: Hierarchy-to-Hierarchy Autoregression for fMRI-to-Image Reconstruction

Reconstructing visual stimuli from fMRI signals is a central challenge bridging machine learning and neuroscience. Recent diffusion-based methods typically map fMRI activity to a single neural embedding, using it as static guidance throughout the entire generation process. However, this fixed guidance collapses hierarchical neural information and is misaligned with the stage-dependent demands of image reconstruction. In response, we propose MindHier, a coarse-to-fine fMRI-to-image reconstruction framework built on scale-wise autoregressive modeling. MindHier introduces three components: a Hierarchical fMRI Encoder to extract multi-level neural embeddings, a Hierarchy-to-Hierarchy Alignment scheme to enforce layer-wise correspondence with CLIP features, and a Scale-Aware Coarse-to-Fine Neural Guidance strategy to inject these embeddings into autoregression at matching scales. These designs make MindHier an efficient and cognitively aligned alternative to diffusion-based methods by enabling a hierarchical reconstruction process that synthesizes global semantics before refining local details, akin to human visual perception. Extensive experiments on the NSD dataset show that MindHier achieves superior semantic fidelity, 4.67$\times$ faster inference, and more deterministic results than the diffusion-based baselines.

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

Bag of Dims: Training-Free Mechanistic Interpretability via Dimension-Level Sign Patterns

arXiv:2606.12629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We show that the standard basis of transformer hidden states already provides a training-free, architecture-general feature basis. Individual dimensions encode semantic content via their signs and confidence via their magnitudes, functioning as independent binary registers. We validate this Bag of Dims framework across three model families (Qwen 3.5-4B, Gemma 3-4B, Mistral 7B) through four progressive experiments. Sign patterns alone carry predictive content: replacing all magnitudes with unity achieves 72-93% top-5 next-token accuracy through the LM head, and pure Hamming scoring without any decoder reaches 80-90% top-4096. These sign patterns organize into semantic features: using a single-token type cache (one forward pass per vocabulary token, no context), we discover 175 categories via per-dimension sign consistency (mean AUC 0.80) from 50 anchors with zero training. A trained probe adds only +0.018 AUC and converges to axis-aligned weights, confirming negligible cross-dimension structure. This structure extends to attention: all 175 categories remain discoverable in K and V projections. On the write side, static FFN weight inspection links 20% of features to individual writer neurons (>0.70 agreement; random controls: 0%), with top-200 neuron coalitions achieving >0.70 agreement on 99.9% of prototypes via majority vote. Fully unsupervised discovery (random seeds, no labels) scales to 1500 features at 100% yield and 99% sparsity across all three models, with pairwise MI of 0.0014 bits confirming low inter-dimension coupling. These results establish that the standard basis already suffices for feature reading throughout the transformer compute pathway, requiring no training, no optimization, and no GPU-days beyond a single forward pass per vocabulary token.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

MedGenesis: Toward a World Model for Autonomous Clinical and Translational Research

Clinical research advances slowly because its core tasks, from evidence synthesis to mechanistic validation, remain fragmented. We present MedGenesis, a clinical artificial intelligence (AI) scientist built on a world-model reasoning loop that jointly updates a Latent Hypothesis Space and a Latent Action Space under expected information gain (EIG), uncertainty reduction (UR), and a safety prior P(safe), and integrates longitudinal electronic health records (EHRs) via the Virtual Clinical Trajectory and Observation Representation (ViCTOR) for cohort retrieval, trajectory stratification, and time-to-event analysis. On two benchmarks - ClinicalResBench (1,697 expert-curated questions) and ClinicalRepBench (40 paper-reproduction tasks) - MedGenesis outperformed frontier language models and biomedical AI systems while reducing hallucination. Across 1 million patient observations spanning five clinical evidence formats, it generated traceable outputs across meta-analysis, randomized controlled trials, real-world trajectories, case-control studies, and case reports, with one wet-lab-coupled run nominating a 3-hydroxybutyrate - neutrophil axis modulating antitumor immunity. These results compress hypothesis-to-evidence cycles from years to hours, creating a continuous clinical discovery process.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Probing PbTe-Pb nanowire devices with radio-frequency reflectometry

arXiv:2606.04544v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We report the implementation of radio-frequency (rf) reflectometry on selective-area-grown PbTe-Pb nanowire devices on a CdTe substrate. These nanowires are predicted to host Majorana zero modes. We demonstrate the compatibility of the rf technique, including both resistive and capacitive sensing, with these nanowires. The effect of dielectric loss from the CdTe substrate is quantitatively characterized. Furthermore, the feasibility of rf reflectometry is verified under finite magnetic fields where zero-energy modes can emerge. Our results establish the fast control of PbTe quantum devices, paving the way for their applications in topological quantum computation.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Structural ethnic inequities in maternal mortality between Indigenous and non-Indigenous women in Paraguay, 2014-2023: a national analysis of territorial, institutional, and preventable factors.

Background: Indigenous women in Paraguay continue to experience disproportionately high maternal mortality despite national efforts to improve maternal health. Evidence on the structural factors underlying these disparities remains limited. Objectives: To analyze structural ethnic inequities in maternal mortality between Indigenous and non-Indigenous women in Paraguay, focusing on territorial patterns, institutional access, and potentially preventable causes of death. Design: National population-based study using maternal mortality records registered in Paraguay between 2014 and 2023. Maternal mortality ratios (MMRs), incidence rate ratios (IRRs), and absolute differences were estimated according to Indigenous status. Logistic regression models were used to assess associations with deaths occurring outside healthcare institutions and specific preventable causes of death. Results: A total of 907 maternal deaths were identified, including 112 among Indigenous women (12.3%). Indigenous women were overrepresented by a factor of 4.8 relative to their population share. Maternal mortality remained consistently higher among Indigenous women throughout the study period, with mortality ratios ranging from 317.7 to 773.6 per 100,000 live births, compared with 58.7 to 145.1 among non-Indigenous women. Absolute inequalities remained persistently high over time. Overall, 24.3% of maternal deaths occurred outside healthcare institutions, with a substantially higher proportion among Indigenous women (44.6% versus 21.5%). After adjustment for age and educational level, Indigenous women had more than three times greater odds of dying outside healthcare institutions (aOR = 3.41; 95% CI: 2.20-5.29). Potentially preventable causes accounted for 42.4% of maternal deaths. Obstetric hemorrhage was strongly associated with Indigenous status (aOR = 3.83; 95% CI: 2.31-6.37). Conclusion: Indigenous women in Paraguay experience a disproportionate burden of maternal mortality characterized by persistent ethnic disparities, higher occurrence of deaths outside healthcare institutions, and a substantial burden of preventable causes of death. These findings suggest the presence of enduring territorial, institutional, and healthcare access barriers that contribute to structural ethnic inequities in maternal health.

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

On the Smoluchowski-Kramers approximation for the hyperbolic $O(N)$ linear sigma model and its mean-field limit

arXiv:2606.15214v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the hyperbolic $O(N)$ linear sigma model, i.e. a system of $N$ interacting stochastic damped nonlinear wave equations (SdNLW) with coupled cubic nonlinearities, posed on the two-dimensional torus and indexed by a parameter $\varepsilon > 0$. We show that as $\varepsilon$ goes to zero (Smoluchowski-Kramers approximation) and $N$ goes to infinity (mean-field limit), each component of the solution to the SdNLW system converges to the solution to the stochastic nonlinear heat equation (SNLH) with a mean-field nonlinearity. We prove such convergence via two regimes: first with $\varepsilon$ going to zero to obtain the parabolic $O(N)$ linear sigma model, i.e. a system of $N$ coupled SNLH, and then with $N$ going to infinity; or first with $N$ going to infinity for each component to obtain the mean-field SdNLW and then with $\eps$ going to zero. As a result, we obtain a commutative diagram regarding the convergence from the hyperbolic $O(N)$ linear sigma model to the mean-field SNLH.

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

Bridging the Manifold Gap: Riemannian Residual Line Search for One-Step Image Editing

One-step diffusion editors are fast because they avoid inversion and iterative optimization, but a single transport update must be aggressive enough to realize the target prompt and conservative enough to preserve the source image–and no fixed update strength satisfies both demands across edit types. We treat this tension as a post-hoc candidate-selection problem on top of energy-field transport rather than as a new editing model. Our proposed method, Riemannian Residual Line Search, first builds a stronger edit by estimating the local time curvature of the prompt-delta field and projecting the corrected direction back onto the update norm of the original first-order energy-field transport estimation. It then forms a small residual path from the source image to this strong edit, retains the original first-order output as one candidate, and picks the final image by maximizing target-prompt CLIP alignment. On a 700-sample PIE-Bench++ evaluation across 10 edit type IDs, our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance among current one-step update algorithms.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

A Self Consistency Based Reranking for Narrative Question Answering

Narrative question answering (NQA) is a challenging task in natural language processing that requires models to understand long textual contexts, capture relationships across events, and generate coherent responses. Despite recent advances in pretrained language models, most existing approaches rely on a single decoding output during inference, making them sensitive to generation variability and often resulting in incomplete or inconsistent answers .To address this limitation, we propose a self-ensemble Self-Consistency-Based reranking framework for narrative question answering. The proposed method generates multiple candidate answers for each story-question pair and selects the final answer based on semantic agreement among the generated responses. This allows the model to explore diverse answer formulations while improving robustness through consensus-based selection without requiring modifications to the underlying architecture .The framework combines pretrained and fine-tuned language generation with multi-answer inference and similarity-based reranking. We evaluate the proposed approach on the NarrativeQA dataset using multiple models, including FLAN-T5 (Base and Small) and Pegasus-Large, under both baseline and fine-tuned settings .Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method consistently improves performance across all models. In particular, FLAN-T5-Base achieves the best overall performance, improving from 82.32% to 86.66% (+4.34%) when combined with self-ensemble inference. Additionally, the largest improvement is observed with Pegasus-Large, which increases from 72.50% to 87.07% (+14.57%), highlighting the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

MLLMs Get It Right, Then Get It Wrong: Tracing and Correcting Late-Layer Textual Bias

When vision contradicts text, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) consistently favor text, even when images provide clear evidence otherwise. This bias poses risks for applications requiring visual grounding, yet its cause remains unclear. In this paper, we uncover a surprising finding: models often get it right initially, forming correct vision-based predictions in their intermediate layers, before changing their minds and favoring text in the final output. We call this "late-layer textual override". The visual information is encoded, it simply does not survive to the output. More intriguingly, we find that how predictions change reveals whether they're correct: 85% of failures shift toward text, while 89% of successes shift toward vision. This directional signature enables a simple but powerful intervention: when we detect a confident visual prediction being suppressed, we restore it. We propose CALRD (Conflict-Aware Layer Reference Decoding), a training-free method that recovers overridden predictions at inference time. Experiments across five MLLMs of varying architectures demonstrate up to 9.4% absolute improvements on conflict benchmarks while largely preserving standard performance, without training or external knowledge. It recovers what the model already knew but failed to preserve.

24.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Negative index, matchings, and nonnegative eigenvalues of tridiagonal stochastic matrices

arXiv:2606.21122v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study negative eigenvalues of $n\times n$ stochastic matrices whose off-diagonal support is constrained by a sparse graph. The main tool is a matching-based inertia principle: if $G$ is bipartite with matching number $\mu(G)$, $S$ is a real symmetric matrix supported on $G$ with nonnegative diagonal entries and whose negative index (i.e. number of negative eigenvalues counted with their multiplicities) is denoted by $\nu_{-}(S) $, then \[ \nu_{-}(S)\leq \mu(G). \] In particular, every $n\times n$ nonnegative tridiagonal stochastic matrix $P$ satisfies $ \nu_{-}(P)\leq \left\lfloor \frac{n}{2}\right\rfloor. $ Consequently, after ordering the eigenvalues of $P$ in the decreasing order, we have $ \lambda_{\lceil n/2\rceil}(P)\geq0, \ and hence \ \lambda_2(P)\geq0, \mbox{ for } n\geq3. $ This gives an all-dimensional strengthening of the previously known $4\times4$ tridiagonal stochastic result. Next, we show that this tridiagonal bound is sharp in every dimension in both reducible and irreducible cases. Finally, we explore some possible extension and raise some open questions.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Probe-and-Refine Tuning of Repository Guidance for Coding Agents

arXiv:2606.20512v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based coding agents need higher-level operational knowledge about a repository (which files house which subsystems, how to run the test suite, which workflows have historically led to wrong fixes) that does not exist in the code itself. Engineers typically maintain \texttt{AGENTS.md} files to supply this context as instructions for coding agents, but whether they help is contested: recent studies disagree on whether LLM-generated guidance improves or harms agent performance. In this paper we show that how the guidance is produced is the decisive variable, and introduce probe-and-refine tuning: a procedure that uses synthetic bug-fix probes to iteratively diagnose and patch a repository's guidance file through single-shot LLM calls, with no agent loop or tool use during tuning. On SWE-bench Verified across four independent trials with Qwen3.5-35B-A3B at 200 steps, probe-and-refine achieves 33.0\,\% mean resolve rate vs.\ 28.3\,\% for the static knowledge base used to initialize it and 25.5\,\% for an unguided baseline ($p < 0.001$ for both probe-and-refine contrasts). The improvement comes from coverage rather than precision: refined guidance produces evaluable patches for 14.5 percentage points (pp) more instances while per-patch precision remains statistically constant ($\sim$59\,\%, $p = 0.119$), showing that improved guidance helps agents reach the correct file rather than improving the quality of the changes they make. Further, a step-budget experiment shows that guidance is what lets the agent use a larger step budget productively, and a cross-model experiment with NVIDIA-Nemotron-3-Nano-30B-A3B finds that the tuning loop degrades when the model cannot generate sufficiently diagnostic output, though per-patch precision remains constant even then.