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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Investigating naming error patterns after non-invasive brain stimulation and language treatment in persons with aphasia

Authors:
Sydnor↗M. J↗Johnson↗M. A↗Lammers↗Murter↗J. L↗Lindquist↗Sebastian↗

Abstract Background: Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) paired with behavioral language therapy can improve naming in persons with aphasia (PWA), yet naming errors persist. Little is known about how naming error patterns change after non-invasive brain stimulation is combined with language treatment. Aims: To examine whether right cerebellar tDCS plus computerized aphasia therapy changes the types of naming errors in people with chronic aphasia across timepoints, and to determine whether effects differ by cerebellar tDCS polarity (anode vs. cathode). Methods and Procedures: In a randomized, double-blind, sham-controlled, within-subject crossover study, we retrospectively analyzed behavioral data from 24 individuals with post-stroke aphasia. Each participant completed two 15-session intervention periods (3-5 sessions/week) with active cerebellar tDCS + computerized aphasia therapy and sham + computerized aphasia therapy, separated by a two-month washout. General linear models (GLMs) assessed longitudinal changes in six error types (semantic, phonological real word, phonological nonword, no response, mixed, unrelated) on an untrained picture naming task (Philadelphia Naming Test; PNT) and a trained task (Naming 80; N80). Additional GLMs evaluated polarity effects with 2 (Group: anode vs. cathode) x 2 (Treatment) interactions, and treatment-order effects with 2 (Group: tDCS-first vs. sham-first) x 2 (Treatment) interactions. Outcomes and Results: Active cerebellar tDCS did not significantly change error types for trained items (N80). For untrained items (PNT), active tDCS reduced several error types relative to sham, with the clearest and most durable reduction in phonological nonword errors; more moderate reductions occurred for phonological real word and unrelated errors. Mixed errors showed a marginally opposite pattern, tending to increase after tDCS and decrease after sham. Polarity analyses indicated broadly similar effects across anodal and cathodal stimulation overall, but only the anode group showed a reliable treatment effect for phonological nonword errors on the PNT. Treatment-order analyses revealed no significant order effects. Conclusions: Our results indicate a shift in naming error types, particularly after tDCS treatment for the untrained naming task (PNT). These findings may help guide the course of treatment approaches of those with aphasia and what error naming pattern types may show changes post stroke when combining non-invasive brain stimulation and computerized aphasia therapy. Clinical Trial Registration: Cerebellar Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation and Aphasia Treatment [NCT02901574] Keywords: aphasia, naming errors, non-invasive brain stimulation, cerebellar tDCS, computerized aphasia treatment

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02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Co-occurring associated retained concepts in Diffusion Unlearning

Authors:
Miso Kim↗Georu Lee↗Yunji Kim↗Hoki Kim↗Jinseong Park↗Woojin Lee↗

Unlearning has emerged as a key technique to mitigate harmful content generation in diffusion models. However, existing methods often remove not only the target concept, but also benign co-occurring concepts. As illustrated in Fig.1, unlearning nudity can unintentionally suppress the concept of person, preventing a model from generating images with person. We define these undesirably suppressed co-occurring concepts that must be preserved CARE (Co-occurring Associated REtained concepts). Then, we introduce the CARE score, a general metric that directly quantifies their preservation across unlearning tasks. With this foundation, we propose ReCARE (Robust erasure for CARE), a framework that explicitly safeguards CARE while erasing only the target concept. ReCARE automatically constructs the CARE-set, a curated vocabulary of benign co-occurring tokens extracted from target images, and leverages this vocabulary during training for stable unlearning. Extensive experiments across various target concepts (Nudity, Van Gogh style, and Tench object) demonstrate that ReCARE achieves overall state-of-the-art performance in balancing robust concept erasure, overall utility, and CARE preservation.

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03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Exceptional by Design: Long-Range Hopping as a Knob for Exceptional Point Control

Authors:
Carolina Martinez-Strasser↗Dario Bercioux↗Nico Leumer↗

arXiv:2606.24705v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Exceptional points are degeneracies unique to non-Hermitian systems, where eigenvalues and eigenvectors coalesce, rendering the Hamiltonian defective. We investigate the exceptional-point structure and topological properties of a generalized non-Hermitian Rice-Mele model with balanced gain and loss, as well as next-nearest-neighbor hopping. The system hosts only second-order exceptional points under both periodic and open boundary conditions. Under periodic boundary conditions, the exceptional points in parameter space lie on lines and ellipses that are independent of the next-nearest-neighbor hopping, since the latter enters the bulk Hamiltonian only as an identity contribution. Under open boundary conditions, this independence is broken: the next-nearest-neighbor hopping not only shifts the energy of existing exceptional points but also generates new ones, with a specific condition signaling a topological gap closing observed only in the open-boundary spectrum. At special parameter points, multiple simultaneous second-order exceptional points yield degenerate configurations whose degeneracy grows with system size. Exceptional point locations are identified numerically via the condition number of the eigenvector matrix and confirmed by Jordan decomposition. The topological phase diagram, computed via a winding number framework for non-Hermitian systems without symmetry protection, reveals sectors with zero, one, and two edge states; the bulk-boundary correspondence is confirmed, and the non-Hermitian skin effect is absent.

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04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

RetailBench: Benchmarking long horizon reasoning and coherent decision making of LLM agents in realistic retail environments

Authors:
Linghua Zhang↗Jun Wang↗Jingtong Wu↗Zhisong Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.15862v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents have made rapid progress on short-horizon, well-scoped tasks, yet their ability to sustain coherent decisions in dynamic long-horizon environments remains uncertain. We introduce RetailBench, a data-grounded simulation benchmark for evaluating tool-using LLM agents in single-store supermarket operation. RetailBench models retail management as a partially observable decision process and is designed to support thousand-day-scale simulations. In this environment, agents must manage pricing, replenishment, supplier selection, shelf assortment, inventory aging, customer feedback, external events, and cash-flow constraints. We evaluate seven contemporary LLMs under representative agent frameworks over a 180-day evaluation horizon and compare them with a privileged oracle policy. Results show substantial variation across models: only a small subset survives the full evaluation horizon, and even the strongest LLM runs remain substantially behind the oracle policy in final net worth and sales outcomes. Behavioral analysis attributes these gaps to incomplete evidence acquisition, surface-level decision making, and the lack of a consistent long-horizon policy. RetailBench provides a controlled testbed for studying reliable autonomy in economically grounded long-horizon decision-making.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Illumination-Robust Camera-Based Heart-Rate Estimation for Physiological Sensing in Robots

Authors:
Zhi Wei Xu↗Torbj\"orn E. M. Nordling↗

Physiological awareness is important for service, social, and assistive robots that interact with humans in everyday environments. Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) enables non-contact heart-rate (HR) estimation from an RGB camera, making it a promising sensing modality for robot-mounted vision systems. However, illumination variation remains a major barrier to robust deployment. This paper presents an end-to-end spatial-temporal transformer framework for remote HR estimation on a new dataset with varied illumination. Our estimator integrates PRNet-based 3D face alignment, clip-level illumination augmentation, the Residual Temporal Standardization Module, and controlled hybrid temporal-frequency supervision. The training objective combines a Soft-Shifted Pearson waveform loss with a spectral Kullback-Leibler divergence loss, where a tuned weight ($\mathbf{\beta}$) controls the contribution of frequency-domain heart-rate guidance. Experiments on a static all-level mix protocol covering three illumination levels show that $\mathbf{\beta}=5$ provides the strongest result among the tested beta settings, achieving a best-run HR mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.79 bpm and an HR correlation of 0.982. Compared with the PhysFormer baseline evaluated on our dataset, our estimator reduces HR MAE by 93.6 %, while increasing HR correlation from 0.088 to 0.982, making it usable when illumination varies.

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

Erased but Not Forgotten: How Backdoors Compromise Concept Erasure

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

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

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07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Function-Vector Heads Are Two Populations: Writers and Cancellers in In-Context Learning

Authors:
Han-yu Wang↗

Function-vector (FV) heads are identified by the magnitude of their causal contribution to in-context rule tasks, and the resulting top set is treated as a single functional class. We show this hides a sign structure. Under a sign-preserving criterion (refined direct logit attribution, validated head by head with path patching) the FV population splits into two opposing groups: writers push the rule-correct logit up, cancellers push it down, and ablating both together moves the readout less than the sum of the two. The split is causal and reproducible. It holds in all but two of the fifteen (model, task) cells we test, spanning three architectures and six Pythia scales, and a sign-shuffle null rejects the single-class account in all but one of the six main cells. It is also invisible to magnitude-only ranking, which surfaces whichever group locally dominates and misses the other, so any function vector or ablation built that way silently averages a promoting and a suppressing mechanism. Cancellers are not attention sinks, induction heads, or copy-suppression heads, and their causal effect is larger than that of magnitude-matched non-FV controls. Zero-ablating them recovers $+0.13$ to $+0.29$ nats on the correct label in every main cell, and shifts accuracy by $+2$ to $+7$ pp in the same direction.

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08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Incremental costs of transitioning from four to eight WHO-recommended antenatal care visits in Uganda: A costing analysis from a societal perspective

Authors:
Atuhumuza↗E. B↗Atukunda↗E. C↗Musiimenta↗Mugyenyi↗G. R↗Haberer↗Obua↗Siedner↗M. J↗Matthews↗…

Background In 2016, the World Health Organization revised its antenatal care (ANC) recommendation from four to eight visits. For low- and middle-income countries like Uganda, where achieving even four visits remains a challenge, this transition has significant cost implications for both the health system and households. This study estimated the incremental costs of adopting the eight-visit model from a societal perspective. Methods The study was conducted in six government health facilities in southwestern Uganda. A micro-costing approach estimated health facility costs (personnel, equipment, consumables, and overhead). Costs incurred at patients end (transport, ultrasound, medical expenses, and time) were collected from 785 women using a questionnaire, with all costs in 2025 USD. Results For an average of 4.3 visits, total cost per woman was $100.1: facility costs $43.7 (43.7%), and patient costs $56.4 (56.3%). Transitioning to eight visits would increase total cost by $57.8 (57.8%), of which $36.4 (63.0%) would fall on households, equivalent to 68.8% of average monthly household income. Total costs would rise by 55.4% ($115.5 to $179.5) at Health Center IVs and 64.3% ($102.3 to $168.1) at Health Center IIIs, with facility costs up 43.4% and 62.9% and patient costs up 61.2% and 65.7%, respectively. Conclusion Transitioning to eight ANC visits would impose a large financial burden on households, with the incremental patient cost equivalent to more than two-thirds of average monthly household income. Equitable implementation requires improving availability of medicines and diagnostics, subsidizing transport, exploring telemedicine or community-based models, and improving efficiency at lower-tier health centers.

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

Beyond Predefined Schemas: TRACE-KG for Context-Enriched Knowledge Graph Generation

Authors:
Mohammad Sadeq Abolhasani↗Yang Ba↗Yixuan He↗Rong Pan↗

arXiv:2604.03496v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Knowledge graph generation typically relies either on predefined ontologies or on schema-free extraction. Ontology-driven pipelines enforce consistent typing but require costly schema design and maintenance, whereas schema-free methods often produce fragmented graphs with weak global organization, especially in long technical documents with dense, context-dependent information. We propose TRACE-KG (Text-dRiven schemA for Context-Enriched Knowledge Graphs), a framework that jointly constructs a context-enriched knowledge graph and an induced schema without assuming a predefined ontology. TRACE-KG captures conditional relations through structured qualifiers and organizes entities and relations using a data-driven schema that serves as a reusable semantic scaffold while preserving full traceability to the source evidence. Experiments show that TRACE-KG produces structurally coherent, traceable knowledge graphs and offers a practical alternative to both ontology-driven and schema-free construction pipelines.

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10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

HEad and neCK TumOR (HECKTOR) 2025: Benchmark of Segmentation, Diagnosis, and Prognosis in Multimodal PET/CT

Authors:
Numan Saeed↗Salma Hassan↗Shahad Hardan↗Lishan Cai↗Xinglong Liang↗Moona Mazher↗Abdul Qayyum↗Yansong Bu↗Mengye Lyu↗Yue Lin↗Mingyuan Meng↗Chuanyi Huang↗…

Head and neck cancers (HNC) represent a significant global health burden, with accurate tumor delineation being essential for effective radiotherapy planning. The complexity of the oropharyngeal anatomy, combined with the heterogeneous appearance of tumors on imaging, makes manual segmentation time-intensive and subject to inter-observer variability. Beyond segmentation, predicting long-term clinical outcomes, such as recurrence-free survival (RFS), and determining human papillomavirus (HPV) status from noninvasive imaging, remain challenging yet clinically valuable goals. The HECKTOR 2025 challenge addresses these needs by establishing a comprehensive benchmark for automated HNC analysis using multimodal PET/CT imaging and electronic health records. Building on previous editions (2020-2022), this challenge features an expanded multi-institutional dataset comprising over 1,100 patients from 10 centers worldwide. Participants were tasked with three complementary objectives: (1) segmenting primary gross tumor volumes (GTVp) and metastatic lymph nodes (GTVn), (2) predicting recurrence-free survival, and (3) classifying HPV status. The challenge attracted 35 registered teams, with 15 final submissions evaluated on a held-out test set. Top-performing algorithms achieved a mean Dice similarity coefficient of 0.75 for segmentation, a concordance index of 0.66 for survival prediction, and a balanced accuracy of 0.56 for HPV classification. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the submitted methodologies, evaluates their performance across different lesion characteristics, and discusses their implications for clinical translation in automated oncology workflows and decision support systems.

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11.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

TMO: ASYMMETRIC CROSS-MODAL ATTENTION FOR LEARNINGCELL-STATE-DEPENDENT REGULATORY LAGS FROM SINGLE-CELL MULTIOMIC DATA

Authors:
Lopez-Delgado↗P. A↗Delgado-Carlo↗M. M↗

Abstract Background: Single-cell multi-omics technologies simultaneously measure chromatin accessibility (ATAC) and gene expression (RNA), providing a unique window into the temporal ordering of regulatory events during differentiation. However, most computational models treat the two modalities symmetrically, ignoring the directional relationship between chromatin and transcription, and existing lag-aware methods estimate a single global lag per gene, failing to capture cell-state-dependent dynamics. Methods and Results: We introduce Temporal Multi-Omics (TMO), a deep learning framework that learns signed, cell-state-conditional regulatory lags ({Delta}{tau}) using asymmetric cross-modal attention. TMO projects RNA and ATAC into 50 latent components each, tokenises each cell as a sequence of 100 tokens, and uses a two-pass transformer in which a data-driven lag prior - derived from a sliding-window cross-correlation function - directly biases attention asymmetrically. On four independent 10x Multiome datasets (mouse brain, human brain, mouse kidney, human PBMC), the asymmetric model achieves Lag Concordance Scores (LCS) of 0.988-0.999, compared to 0.048-0.108 for an architecturally identical symmetric baseline. A stratified 80/20 held-out experiment confirms that the learned component-lag ordering generalises to unseen cells (held-out LCS 0.85-0.99). Clustered {Delta}{tau} heatmaps show positive {Delta}{tau} (ATAC-led priming) in early pseudotime and negative {Delta}{tau} (RNA-led, activity-dependent regulation) in late pseudotime; the ATAC-RNA correlation heatmap exhibits a U-shaped pattern indicative of developmental decoupling. Components with the most positive {Delta}{tau} are enriched for chromatin organization and stem cell differentiation (FDR < 0.05), while those with the most negative {Delta}{tau} are enriched for synaptic signalling and immune activation. Ablating the cell-state information from the lag predictor reduces the LCS and collapses per-component temporal dynamics (KS p [&le;] 0.039 in all four tissues), proving that TMOs dynamic lag patterns depend on cell-state conditioning. Independent ChIP-seq validation for four transcription factors (PAX5, Pax6, ASCL1, Hnf4) confirms highly significant separation between target genes and expression-matched background (p < 10-4 in all cases). Two Multiome Perturb-seq screens provide causal validation: SMARCB1 knockout shows a directional trend (1.5-fold target shift, p = 0.056, n = 147 perturbed cells), and SMARCE1 knockout reaches statistical significance (p = 0.0089, n = 3,394 perturbed cells). Gene-level cross-correlation independently validates that the regulatory lag signal is present in the raw data, and TMO further identifies rare, statistically significant biphasic gene programs where the regulatory direction reverses across pseudotime. Conclusions: TMO is the first method to make regulatory lag a learnable, cell-state-conditional, and architecturally encoded parameter. It is scalable, interpretable, and open-source, providing a powerful tool for studying regulatory timing in development, disease, and perturbation screens.

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

Proact-VL: A Proactive VideoLLM for Real-Time AI Companions

Authors:
Weicai Yan↗Yuhong Dai↗Qi Ran↗Haodong Li↗Wang Lin↗Tao Jin↗Xing Xie↗Hao Liao↗Jianxun Lian↗

Proactive and real-time interactive experiences are essential for human-like AI companions, yet face three key challenges: (1) achieving low-latency inference under continuous streaming inputs, (2) autonomously deciding when to respond, and (3) controlling both quality and quantity of generated content to meet real-time constraints. In this work, we instantiate AI companions through two gaming scenarios, commentator and guide, selected for their suitability for automatic evaluation. We introduce the Live Gaming Benchmark, a large-scale dataset with three representative scenarios: solo commentary, co-commentary, and user guidance, and present Proact-VL, a general framework that shapes multimodal language models into proactive, real-time interactive agents capable of human-like environment perception and interaction. Extensive experiments show Proact-VL achieves superior response latency and quality while maintaining strong video understanding capabilities, demonstrating its practicality for real-time interactive applications.

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

Active Reference Acquisition in Few-Shot Font Generation

Authors:
Shinnosuke Matsuo↗

Few-shot font generation aims to synthesize the remaining glyphs of a font given one or a few reference glyphs while preserving stylistic consistency, thereby supporting font designers in efficiently completing a typeface. Existing methods primarily focus on improving generation quality given a fixed reference set. However, when the current reference glyphs are insufficient to represent the target style, few-shot font generation may fail to produce satisfactory results. In practical scenarios, additional reference glyphs can often be obtained from the designer when necessary. Accordingly, we propose a new framework, Active Reference Acquisition in Few-Shot Font Generation, in which the model sequentially decides which character to acquire next as an additional reference. Furthermore, we propose a reference part-coverage-based acquisition function to efficiently query the designer. Motivated by the observation that font styles are well characterized by local structural parts, we represent each glyph using a histogram of local features and select query characters that maximize the expected part coverage of the reference set. By prioritizing characters that contain parts not yet covered by the current references, the proposed method progressively expands the diversity of visual parts in the reference set. As a result, generation quality is improved with fewer queries. Experiments on the Google Fonts dataset demonstrate that the proposed method achieves higher generation quality than random querying and reference-agnostic baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/matsuo-shinnosuke/ActiveRef-FontGen.

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14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Clifford disentanglers for entanglement reduction in molecular electronic structure simulations

Authors:
Longfei Chang↗Zibo Wu↗Yunzhi Li↗Haiqi Liu↗Jiajun Ren↗Mingpu Qin↗Zhendong Li↗Wei-Hai Fang↗

arXiv:2606.12056v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Entanglement is a key bottleneck limiting the efficiency of tensor-network and quantum simulations of molecular electronic structures. Here, we systematically assess and extend Clifford disentanglers as a structure-preserving approach to entanglement reduction: they can modify the entanglement structure of qubit wavefunctions while retaining the Pauli-string form of qubit Hamiltonians. To enable a practical search over Clifford transformations, we classify Clifford operators by their action on the Schmidt spectrum across a bipartition, reducing the two- and four-qubit search spaces to 20 and 91392 representatives, respectively. Embedded in an iterative Clifford-augmented matrix product state framework, these transformations reduce the energy errors at fixed bond dimension for the molecular test cases studied and mitigate the dependence on orbital orderings and fermion-to-qubit mappings. We further show that Clifford disentanglers can also benefit quantum simulations such as the shallow-circuit variational quantum eigensolver calculations. Together, these results establish Clifford disentanglers as a useful structure-preserving entanglement-engineering tool for tensor-network and quantum simulations of molecular electronic structure, while also clarifying their correlation dependence and motivating future developments.

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15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

TopoPult-SSL: Gland-Mask-Free Cross-Device Meibomian Gland Segmentation via Self-Distilled Weak Clinical Priors

Authors:
Nicol\`o Savioli↗Luca Del Tongo↗

Every new clinical imaging device creates a domain shift where dense gland masks are expensive yet cheap clinical signals – eyelid outlines, Pult grades, morphometric ratios – are routinely recorded. We present TopoPult-SSL, a two-stage framework for cross-device meibomian gland segmentation. Stage 1 adapts a source-trained model without target gland masks in the training loss, using four weak-prior anchors driven by target eyelid masks and clinical metadata only. Stage 2, when target gland masks are available, distils complementary Stage-1 teachers into a single compact student via supervised self-distillation. We develop and validate the technique on the public MGD-1k to CAMG research benchmark (1,000 to 100 images, different device), where the distilled model achieves Dice 0.716+/-0.006 (best 0.726), surpassing UA-MT (0.710) and the ensemble teacher (0.720) – with a single pass. The gland-mask-free Stage-1 variant reaches Precision 0.694 vs. 0.30-0.34 for SAM/MedSAM (p

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

Skills for the future software profession: beyond agentic AI!

Authors:
Sungmin Kang↗Baishakhi Ray↗Abhik Roychoudhury↗

arXiv:2606.21894v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As coding agents are rapidly changing software engineering, a natural question is: what are the core skills needed by future software engineers? To identify where software engineering is headed and thus what skills will be needed, we summarize the results of two round-tables with researchers and industrial practitioners, held in 2026 in New York and Singapore. One key finding is that verification and validation is increasing in importance as agents handle implementation, as highlighted by anecdotes from the events. From our observations, we identify the skills developers need in the agentic era of development, with implications for training and educating future software engineers in coming years.

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17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

InterleaveThinker: Reinforcing Agentic Interleaved Generation

Authors:
Dian Zheng↗Harry Lee↗Manyuan Zhang↗Kaituo Feng↗Zoey Guo↗Ray Zhang↗Hongsheng Li↗

Recent image generators have demonstrated impressive photorealism and instruction-following capabilities in single-image generation and editing. However, constrained by their architectures, they cannot achieve interleaved generation (text-image sequence), which has crucial applications in visual narratives, guidance, and embodied manipulation. Even the latest open-source Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) exhibit limited performance in this regard. In this paper, we introduce InterleaveThinker, the first multi-agent pipeline designed to endow any existing image generator with interleaved generation capabilities. Specifically, we employ a planner agent to organize the image-text input sequence, instructing the image generator on the required execution at each step. Subsequently, we introduce a critic agent to evaluate the generator's outputs, identify samples that deviate from the planned instructions, and refine the instructions for regeneration. To implement this pipeline, we construct the Interleave-Planner-SFT-80k and Interleave-Critic-SFT-112k to perform a format cold-start. Then we develop Interleave-Critic-RL-13k to reinforce the step-wise instruction correction capability within a generation trajectory using GRPO. Since a single interleaved generation trajectory may involve over 25 generator calls, optimizing the entire trajectory is computationally impractical. Therefore, we propose accuracy reward and step-wise reward, allowing single-step RL to effectively guide the entire generation trajectory. The results show that InterleaveThinker improves performance across various image generators. On interleaved generation benchmarks, it achieves performance comparable to Nano Banana and GPT-5. Surprisingly, it also significantly enhances the base model on reasoning-based benchmarks; for example, on 4-step FLUX.2-klein, we observe substantial gains on WISE and RISE.

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18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

User as Code: Executable Memory for Personalized Agents

Authors:
Bojie Li↗

arXiv:2606.16707v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A personalized AI agent needs a user memory: a persistent model of who the user is, built across many conversations and consulted on each new one. Today this memory is almost always stored as unstructured text, a knowledge graph, or a flat store of facts, and consulted by retrieval – fetching the entries most similar to the current request. Such "bag-of-facts" memory recalls individual facts well, but because storing a fact and acting on it are separate steps, it struggles to resolve contradictions, aggregate over many records, or enforce rules. We argue that user memory should instead be executable. We introduce User as Code (UaC), a paradigm in which an agent's model of a user is a living software project: typed Python objects hold the user's state and ordinary Python functions encode the rules that govern it, so representing and reasoning about the user happen in one medium an interpreter can run. The enabling mechanism is a two-phase pipeline: an append-only log that never discards a fact, periodically checkpointed into typed code. This changes what memory can do. On standard long-term conversation benchmarks, UaC matches both a full-context upper bound and the strongest prior memory systems on recall (78.8% on LOCOMO). Its advantage emerges where representation matters most. On aggregate questions over a user's history – "how many international trips did I take last year?" – retrieval-based memory collapses (6-43%) while UaC stays near-perfect (99%), because the answer is a one-line computation over typed state rather than a search over text. And because its rules execute deterministically whenever the state changes, UaC can surface unsolicited, safety-critical alerts – such as a newly prescribed drug that conflicts with an allergy recorded months earlier – a capability query-driven memory cannot provide.

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

Frequency-Multiplexed Millimeter-Wave Fault-Tolerant Superconducting Qubits Enabled by an On-Chip Nonreciprocal Control Bus

Authors:
Sajjad Taravati↗

arXiv:2512.17588v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scaling superconducting quantum processors is fundamentally limited by the escalating complexity of cryogenic wiring and the detrimental effects of microwave crosstalk and Purcell decay. This paper proposes a novel architecture based on frequency-multiplexed millimeter-wave superconducting qubits, integrating an on-chip cryogenic nonreciprocal space-time-periodic Josephson frequency multiplier as a universal control bus. The bus replaces multiple high-frequency XY drive lines with a single low-frequency input tone, which is parametrically converted into a comb of high-order harmonics, each resonantly addressing a distinct qubit. The nonreciprocal nature of the bus provides intrinsic isolation that suppresses Purcell decay and reduces coherent crosstalk by more than $98\%$ compared to a conventional reciprocal shared drive line. Full error-budget analysis demonstrates that the architecture can maintain gate errors below the fault-tolerance threshold for arrays exceeding 25 qubits, converting a crosstalk-dominated error budget into one primarily limited by intrinsic material coherence. Theoretical modeling based on a non-Markovian master equation further indicates that the engineered environment enables information backflow, offering a pathway to enhanced coherence. This integrated, frequency-multiplexed, and nonreciprocal control bus offers a compelling route toward dramatic I/O simplification, improved noise resilience, and scalable high-coherence superconducting quantum processors.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

QIAS 2026: Overview of the Shared Task on Islamic Inheritance Reasoning

Authors:
Abdessalam Bouchekif↗Somaya Eltanbouly↗Samer Rashwani↗Shahd Gaben↗Mutaz Al-Khatib↗Heba Sbahi↗Emad Mohamed↗Mohammed Ghaly↗

This paper presents a comprehensive overview of the QIAS 2026 shared task, organized as part of the OSACT7 Workshop and co-located with LREC 2026. The shared task was designed to evaluate the ability of large language models to perform complex reasoning in the religious and legal domain of Islamic inheritance. Unlike conventional question-answering benchmarks, QIAS 2026 focuses on end-to-end reasoning from natural language cases, requiring systems to perform the full inheritance calculation process, from identifying the eligible heirs to assigning the correct share to each beneficiary. To support this evaluation, the task was based on the MAWARITH benchmark, a dataset of $12{,}500$ Arabic inheritance cases annotated with intermediate reasoning steps and final answers. System submissions were evaluated using MIR-E, a multi-step metric that measures performance across the main stages of inheritance reasoning. A total of $16$ teams participated in the shared task, investigating a range of approaches, including prompting-based methods, retrieval-augmented generation, and fine-tuning strategies. The results show that Islamic inheritance remains a highly challenging benchmark for current language models, especially in stages that require precise legal interpretation and structured numerical reasoning. This overview summarizes the task design, dataset, evaluation framework, participating systems, and main results.

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21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

GSPan: A Continuous Gaussian Primitive Representation for Arbitrary-Scale Pansharpening

Authors:
Fangyi Li↗Xiaoyuan Yang↗Yixiao Li↗Zongyang Sui↗Kangqing Shen↗Gemine Vivone↗

Pansharpening aims to generate high-resolution multispectral (HRMS) images by fusing low-resolution multispectral (LRMS) and panchromatic (PAN) observations. Most existing deep learning methods treat pansharpening as fixed-grid prediction, which limits scale adaptation. To address this, we propose GSPan, a framework that introduces 2D Gaussian Splatting (GS) into pansharpening. Instead of directly predicting pixels, GSPan represents band-wise residual details as continuous and learnable 2D Gaussian primitives. We design a Dual-Stream Hierarchical Interaction (DSHI) architecture with a Spatial-Spectral Interactive Attention (SSIA) module to estimate these primitives from complementary PAN and MS observations. The predicted primitives are rendered as a residual detail field and injected into the upsampled MS image. This continuous representation allows GSPan to render fused images on arbitrary target sampling grids without scale-specific retraining. It further enables a Scale-Decoupled Asymmetric Inference (SDAI) strategy, which estimates primitives at a reduced resolution and renders the fused image at the target resolution for efficient large-scene pansharpening. Experiments on QuickBird, GaoFen-2, WorldView-3, and WorldView-3-4K datasets show that GSPan delivers state-of-the-art fusion performance. Moreover, SDAI markedly accelerates inference, achieving a favorable trade-off between computational efficiency and fusion quality. Our results demonstrate the potential of continuous Gaussian residual representations as a flexible and scale-decoupled alternative to fixed-grid prediction.

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

Mixtures of Subspaces for Bandwidth Efficient Context Parallel Training

Authors:
Sameera Ramasinghe↗Ajanthan Thalaiyasingam↗Hadi Mohaghegh Dolatabadi↗Gil Avraham↗Violetta Shevchenko↗Yan Zuo↗Chamin Hewa Koneputugodage↗Alexander Long↗

arXiv:2606.16384v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pretraining language models with extended context windows enhances their ability to leverage rich information during generation. Existing methods split input sequences into chunks, broadcast them across multiple devices, and compute attention block by block which incurs significant communication overhead. While feasible in high-speed clusters, these methods are impractical for decentralized training over low-bandwidth connections. We propose a compression method for communication-efficient context parallelism in decentralized settings, achieving a remarkable compression rate of over 95\% with negligible overhead and no loss in convergence. Our key insight is to exploit the intrinsic low-rank structure of activation outputs by dynamically constraining them to learned mixtures of subspaces via efficient reparameterizations. We demonstrate scaling billion-parameter decentralized models to context lengths exceeding 100K tokens on networks as slow as 300Mbps, matching the wall-clock convergence speed of centralized models on 100Gbps interconnects.

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23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Multi-Variable Stellar Parameter Estimation Using Residual Multitask Neural Networks

Authors:
Bruno Santos Meneses Barreto↗Marcio Eisencraft↗

arXiv:2606.13868v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present an end-to-end pipeline for estimating stellar parameters from Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 12 spectra using a fully connected multitask neural network with residual blocks, whose hyperparameters are tuned via Bayesian optimization. The preprocessing pipeline includes per-spectrum standardization, RobustScaler normalization of the target variables – effective temperature $T_{\mathrm{eff}}$, metallicity $[\mathrm{Fe/H}]$, and surface gravity $\log g$ – and data augmentation via Gaussian noise injection. On a held-out test set, the model achieved Mean Absolute Errors (MAE) of $59.76~\mathrm{K}$ for $T_{\mathrm{eff}}$, $0.103~\mathrm{dex}$ for $[\mathrm{Fe/H}]$, and $0.130~\mathrm{dex}$ for $\log g$. Normalized against the full-scale range of each parameter, these results represent range-normalized errors between $1\%$ and $3\%$, achieved with a highly efficient model complexity of approximately 540,000 trainable parameters. These results demonstrate that a compact residual multitask architecture, combined with principled signal preprocessing, provides a parameter-efficient solution for nonlinear parameter estimation in large-scale spectral datasets. In particular, the proposed model achieves competitive performance with substantially lower complexity than deeper neural network baselines.

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

Anomalous weak values in a generalized Mach-Zehnder interferometer extracted directly from intensity measurements

Authors:
Ismaele V. Masiello↗Hartmut Lemmel↗Andreas Dvorak↗Stephan Sponar↗Yuji Hasegawa↗

arXiv:2606.24798v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Weak values provide a powerful framework for characterizing quantum systems. Their experimental extraction conventionally relies on weak conditioned von Neumann measurements, involving weak interactions and meter states that increase experimental complexity and often limit measurement efficiency. Here we introduce a method to fully characterize path weak-values in a generalized Mach-Zehnder interferometer employing neither meter states nor weak interactions. We experimentally demonstrate the technique in matter-wave interferometry. We identify anomalous weak values and, equivalently, negative quasiprobability distributions, which reflect the nonclassical behavior of the quantum system. The approach relies uniquely on intensity measurements at the output ports of the interferometer combined with controlled relative phase shifts between the paths. The absence of meter states enables considerable simplification of the setup and shorter measurement times, while preserving full access to weak values with comparable or increased accuracy. The scheme is directly applicable to a broad class of experiments involving two-level quantum systems.

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25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Encoder Winners Do Not Reliably Transfer Across VLA Backbone Scale: A Frozen-Backbone Grafting Diagnostic

Authors:
Qingping Zeng↗Fei She↗

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies typically inherit their vision encoder from upstream VLM releases, but it is unclear whether an encoder choice validated on a small VLA transfers to a larger backbone. We introduce a frozen-backbone grafting diagnostic: the vision tower of a released VLA is replaced by a candidate encoder under a fixed protocol (adaptive average pooling, LayerNorm, and a single trainable linear projector), with the language model and action expert frozen. Across four encoders, two LIBERO suites, two backbones (SmolVLA-450M and $\pi_{0.5}$-3.3B), and two-to-three seeds per cell (40 main grafting runs plus native, LoRA, pooling, and zero-/shuffled-image controls, all scored by offline action MSE), the small-backbone winner does not reliably select the large-backbone top tier: SigLIP is best on SmolVLA across both suites, while on $\pi_{0.5}$ DINOv2-small leads the spatial suite and the object suite is a seed-sensitive near-tie band; three of the four backbone-suite comparisons (and 11 of 12 seed-level cells) support backbone-dependent rankings. The grafting wrapper is itself non-neutral with opposite sign across backbones (+45-56% MSE on the SmolVLA native tower, -50-52% on $\pi_{0.5}$), so all conclusions are conditional on the fixed grafting protocol. We position frozen grafting as a cheap target-backbone diagnostic to run before committing to an encoder at scale, not as a closed-loop deployment claim.

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