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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Constraining the outputs of ReLU neural networks

Authors:
Yulia Alexandr↗Guido Mont\'ufar↗

arXiv:2508.03867v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce a class of algebraic varieties naturally associated with ReLU neural networks, arising from the piecewise linear structure of their outputs across activation regions in input space, and the piecewise multilinear structure in parameter space. By analyzing the rank constraints on the network outputs within each activation region, we derive polynomial equations that characterize the functions representable by the network. We further investigate conditions under which these varieties attain their expected dimension, providing insight into the expressive and structural properties of ReLU networks.

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02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Noise-induced shallow circuits and absence of barren plateaus

Authors:
Antonio Anna Mele↗Armando Angrisani↗Soumik Ghosh↗Sumeet Khatri↗Jens Eisert↗Daniel Stilck Fran\c{c}a↗Yihui Quek↗

arXiv:2403.13927v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Motivated by realistic hardware considerations of the pre-fault-tolerant era, we comprehensively study the impact of uncorrected noise on quantum circuits. We first show that in the task of estimating observable expectation values any noise truncates most quantum circuits to effectively logarithmic depth. We then prove that quantum circuits under any non-unital noise do not exhibit barren plateaus for cost functions composed of local observables. However, by using the effective shallowness, we also design an efficient classical algorithm to estimate observable expectation values within any constant additive accuracy, with high probability over the choice of the circuit, in any circuit architecture. Taken together, our results establish that, unless we carefully engineer quantum circuits to take advantage of the noise, noisy quantum circuits are unlikely to offer an advantage over shallow ones for algorithms that output observable expectation value estimates, such as many variational quantum machine learning proposals.

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03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Large deviations for marked sparse random graphs with applications to interacting diffusions

Authors:
Rangel Baldasso↗Roberto I Oliveira↗Alan Pereira↗Guilherme Reis↗

arXiv:2204.08789v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider the empirical neighborhood distribution of marked sparse Erdős-Rényi random graphs, obtained by decorating edges and vertices of a sparse Erdős-Rényi random graph with i.i.d. random elements taking values on Polish spaces. We prove that the empirical neighborhood distribution of this model satisfies a large deviation principle in the framework of local weak convergence. We rely on the concept of BC-entropy introduced by Delgosha and Anantharam~(2019) which is inspired on the previous work by Bordenave and Caputo~(2015). Our main technical contribution is an approximation result that allows one to pass from graph with marks in discrete spaces to marks in general Polish spaces. As an application of the results developed here, we prove a large deviation principle for interacting diffusions driven by gradient evolution and defined on top of sparse Erdős-Rényi random graphs. In particular, our results apply for the stochastic Kuramoto model. We obtain analogous results for the sparse uniform random graph with given number of edges.

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

REFLEX: Reflective Evolution from LLM Experience

Authors:
Pan Wang↗

Large multimodal language models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for guiding evolutionary search toward interpretable programmatic policies. However, existing frameworks rely on a monolithic model call to simultaneously interpret visual behavioral evidence and synthesize corrective code. This diagnosis-repair entanglement creates an opaque feedback loop, obscuring the rationale behind mutations and preventing the retention of algorithmic insights across independent runs. To achieve auditable and efficient policy search, we argue that visual diagnosis must be structurally decoupled from code generation. We present REFLEX, a train-free evolutionary framework that operationalizes this decoupling. In REFLEX, a vision-enabled Critic first distills task-specific behavioral evidence into structured, auditable diagnoses. Subsequently, a text-optimized Actor synthesizes child policies using these diagnoses alongside a persistent, self-evolving Skill Memory of reusable code snippets. This architecture not only provides transparent mutation traces but also enables cross-run programmatic knowledge transfer. Extensive evaluations across control benchmarks (Lunar Lander, Acrobot, Pendulum) and a 36-dimensional antenna array synthesis task demonstrate exceptional sample efficiency. Notably, REFLEX solves Acrobot and Pendulum in under 10 LLM calls and reaches a best Normalized Weighted Score of 1.092 on Lunar Lander, achieving highly competitive final performance while significantly accelerating the early-stage discovery of transparent policies.

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05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Genetic and Shared Environmental Influences on Cancer Risk and Cross-Cancer Associations in Nordic Twins

Authors:
Harris↗J. R↗Clemmensen↗S. B↗Adami↗H.-O↗Mucci↗L. A↗Kaprio↗Hjelmborg↗J. v. B↗

The relative contributions of genetic and shared environmental influences to cancer risk and cross-cancer associations remain poorly understood. We analyzed data from 222,530 same-sex twins from Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden in the Nordic Twin Study of Cancer, including 43,060 incident cancers over a median follow-up of 41.6 years. Using a target trial framework, biometric modeling, and competing-risk adjustment, we estimated familial risk, heritability, and shared environmental contributions across 35 cancer sites. Lifetime cancer risk was 36.5%, increasing to 51.4% in monozygotic (MZ) twins and 45.3% in dizygotic (DZ) twins with an affected co-twin. Overall cancer risk was explained by heritable (28%) and shared environmental (40%) influences. Heritability was highest for prostate (42%), non-melanoma skin (24%), and breast (18%) cancers. Cross-cancer analyses revealed extensive overlap in the genetic and shared environmental factors across sites, consistent with widespread pleiotropy and shared environmental susceptibility. Prostate cancer exhibited the strongest genetic overlap with rectum/anus (12%) and kidney (11%) cancers, whereas co-shared environmental influences were most pronounced for breast-lung (11%), prostate-bladder (11%), and prostate-lung (12%) cancers. These findings show pervasive genetic overlap across cancers at different sites and emphasize the importance of incorporating familial shared environmental exposures into cancer risk prediction and prevention strategies.

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06.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Uncertainty Quantification of Engineering Structures by Polynomial Chaos Expansion and Multivariate Active Learning

Authors:
Qitian Lu↗Jafar Jafari-Asl↗Panagiotis Spyridis↗Lukas Novak↗

arXiv:2606.17233v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In many engineering applications, a single high-fidelity model produces multiple quantities of interest (QoIs) under the same input parameters, e.g. finite element models of complex physical systems. To alleviate the high computational cost of direct model evaluations, surrogate models are widely used to construct efficient approximations of model responses. Naturally, the accuracy of surrogates strongly depends on the quality of the experimental design (ED). However, a single ED may not provide an adequate representation for all outputs simultaneously, especially when different outputs exhibit varying sensitivities to the input variables. A straightforward solution is to perform separate sampling for each output, but this results in increased sampling complexity and computational cost. From a statistical perspective, such an approach also ignores potential correlations among all outputs and may compromise data consistency. To address this issue, an adaptive sequential sampling method for constructing polynomial chaos expansion surrogate models is generalized for vector valued QoIs. The method sequentially selects new samples from a candidate pool based on their local contribution to the output variance, while balancing distance-based exploration of the input space and exploitation of aggregated variance information across all outputs. Its performance is compared with non-sequential Latin Hypercube Sampling through several numerical examples from engineering problems. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed strategy improves both surrogate accuracy and stability, and provides a more reliable estimation of second-order statistics.

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

Efficient reduction of stellar contamination and noise in planetary transmission spectra using neural networks

Authors:
David S. Duque-Casta\~no↗Lauren Flor-Torres↗Jorge I. Zuluaga↗

arXiv:2602.10330v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Context: The characterization of exoplanetary atmospheres has been transformed by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), whose infrared sensitivity enables transmission spectroscopy at unprecedented precision. However, stellar heterogeneities (e.g., spots and faculae) remain a dominant source of contamination that can bias atmospheric retrievals if not properly corrected. Aims: We present a methodology for reducing stellar contamination and instrument-specific noise from exoplanet transmission spectra using neural networks, in particular the so-called Denoising AutoEncoders (DAE). Our goals are to enable fast, accurate corrections that improve the reliability of atmospheric parameter retrievals and to promote the use of unsupervised algorithms for efficient data processing. Methods: We designed and trained DAE architectures using large synthetic datasets of terrestrial (TRAPPIST-1e analogues) and sub-Neptune (K2-18b analogues) planets. Atmospheric retrieval experiments were then performed on contaminated spectra in order to compare our deep-learning approach against standard correction methods in terms of accuracy and computational cost. Results: Our autoencoders successfully reconstruct uncontaminated spectra, preserving essential molecular features even in low-S/N regimes. In retrieval tests, the denoising autoencoder pre-processing reduces bias in retrieved abundance parameters compared to uncorrected observations. Notably, our method matches the accuracy of simultaneous stellar-contamination fitting while maintaining a much lower computational cost, typically one order of magnitude smaller. Conclusions: These results demonstrate that DAEs outperform conventional correction methods in computational efficiency while maintaining high accuracy, paving the way for their integration into future atmospheric characterization pipelines for both rocky and giant exoplanets.

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08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Quantization Robustness of Monotone Operator Equilibrium Networks

Authors:
James Li↗Philip H. W. Leong↗Thomas Chaffey↗

arXiv:2603.10562v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Monotone operator equilibrium networks are implicit-layer models whose output is the unique equilibrium of a monotone operator, guaranteeing existence, uniqueness, and convergence. When deployed on low-precision hardware, weights are quantized, potentially destroying these guarantees. We analyze weight quantization as a spectral perturbation of the underlying monotone inclusion. Convergence of the quantized solver is guaranteed whenever the spectral-norm weight perturbation is smaller than the monotonicity margin; the displacement between quantized and full-precision equilibria is bounded in terms of the perturbation size and margin; and a condition number characterizing the ratio of the operator norm to the margin links quantization precision to forward error. MNIST experiments confirm a phase transition at the predicted threshold: three- and four-bit post-training quantization diverge, while five-bit and above converge. The backward-pass guarantee enables quantization-aware training, which recovers provable convergence at four bits.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Echoes of the Prior: A Computational Phenomenology of Forgetting

Authors:
Gege Gao↗Bernhard Sch\"olkopf↗Andreas Geiger↗

Memory is not merely the storage of data; it is the scaffolding of reality. When biological memory fades, the world does not simply turn black; it regresses into an unrecognizable chaos. Echoes of the Prior is an interactive installation that attempts to visualize this subjective phenomenology of forgetting. By inducing controlled synaptic decay within a Feed-Forward 3D Reconstruction model, we create an artistic analogy for the erosion of the brain's predictive priors. We position the Neural Network not as a tool for engineering, but as a cognitive proxy - a silicon brain whose structural degeneration evokes the disorienting, poetic, and terrifying experience of losing one's grip on the world. Ultimately, we offer this framework as a catalyst, inviting the wider community to explore the uncharted potential of neuromorphic aesthetics in visualizing the fragility of intelligence. Interactive demo see https://decart-4d.github.io/.

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10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Formalizing and Mitigating Structural Distortion in LLM Attention for Zero-Shot Graph Reasoning

Authors:
Donald Loveland↗Puja Trivedi↗Ari Weinstein↗Edward W Huang↗Danai Koutra↗

arXiv:2606.15633v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise for reasoning over Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs). However, applying LLMs to graphs requires linearizing their structure into sequences, introducing distortion rooted in the graph bandwidth problem. While this distortion has been shown to degrade performance, it is often attributed to prompt design or model scale, leaving the underlying mechanism unclear. In this work, we show how rotary positional embeddings turn graph linearization into bandwidth-dependent attention decay, suppressing attention between graph-adjacent nodes that are forced far apart in the serialized sequence. This shifts the focus of LLM-based graph reasoning from prompt engineering and scaling toward correcting attention misalignment. Motivated by this analysis, we propose Graph-aligned Language Attention (GaLA), a lightweight, inference-time modification for LLMs. GaLA biases attention toward graph-adjacent nodes while preserving the LLM's sequential inductive biases. Across TAG benchmarks, GaLA improves performance with negligible overhead, demonstrating that distortion is a correctable bottleneck in LLM-based graph reasoning.

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11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Population-scale genomics reveals divergent pathogenicity of variant classes across paralogous collagen IV genes

Authors:
Tzoumkas↗Doctor↗G. T↗Sadeghi-Alavijeh↗Gale↗D. P↗

Monoallelic pathogenic or likely pathogenic variants in COL4A3 and COL4A4 occur in approximately 1 in 106 individuals, yet whether these paralogous genes confer equivalent pathogenicity for the same variant classes has not been tested at population scale. Using whole-genome sequencing data from the UK Biobank (UKB; n = 500,000), with replication in the All of Us Research Program (n = 414,000), we performed per-variant association testing, gene-based collapsing analyses and phenome-wide association studies (PheWAS) across haematuria, proteinuria and chronic kidney disease. We identified 64 COL4A3 and 92 COL4A4 rare variants significantly associated with haematuria or proteinuria, generating a quantitative allelic series for clinical variant interpretation. Glycine substitutions within collagenous domains conferred similar risks in both genes. In contrast, truncating and non-collagenous domain (NC1) missense variants were strongly associated with haematuria and proteinuria in COL4A4 carriers but showed substantially attenuated or absent associations in COL4A3 carriers despite comparable carrier frequencies and predicted pathogenicity scores. These findings were independently replicated in All of Us. Genome-wide association analysis identified the COL4A3/COL4A4 locus as the dominant genetic determinant of haematuria, with the signal attributable to the aggregate effects of rare coding variants and no evidence of independent common variant or trans-acting modifier effects. These findings demonstrate substantial gene-specific differences in tolerance to truncating and NC1 variants between COL4A3 and COL4A4, challenging assumptions of equivalent pathogenicity across paralogous collagen IV genes. Gene identity and not variant class alone, should inform risk stratification, variant interpretation and genetic counselling in individuals carrying collagen IV risk genotypes.

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

PRISM: Prosody-Integrated Multi-Agent Reasoning Framework for Empathetic Spoken Dialogue

Authors:
Wen Zhang↗Xiaocui Yang↗Zhuoyue Gao↗Shi Feng↗Daling Wang↗Yifei Zhang↗

Empathetic spoken dialogue systems require not only semantically appropriate responses but also emotionally aligned prosodic expression. However, cascade pipelines often discard acoustic cues during speech-to-text conversion, while end-to-end speech models lack interpretable control over emotion and knowledge integration. To address these challenges, we propose PRISM, a multi-agent framework for empathetic spoken dialogue that decouples speech perception, response generation, and speech synthesis into coordinated components. PRISM introduces a prosody-to-language translation mechanism to stabilize large language model reasoning and enables on-demand invocation of external knowledge tools for empathetic dialogue generation. Experimental results demonstrate that PRISM achieves consistent improvements in empathy, prosodic appropriateness, and text response generation quality across objective and subjective metrics. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Bxzfrm/PRISM.

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

An Empirical Study on Learning Latent Representations for Emotional Speech Synthesis

Authors:
Vinh Dang Quang↗Huy Ngo Quang↗

For the last couple of years, the field of speech synthesis has improved dramatically thanks to deep learning. There are more and more deep learning-based TTS systems developed to make it possible to produce voices with high intelligibility and naturalness. Meanwhile, controlling the expressiveness is yet a big deal, generating speech in different styles or manners has received a lot of attention from community recently. This paper aims to give our solutions to deal with the task emotional speech synthesis (ESS) at VLSP 2022 which allows to generate humanlike natural-sounding voice from a given input text with desired emotional expression. By integrating speaker embedding, prosody bottleneck into FastSpeech 2, our systems can promisingly generate emotional speech of a single speaker (Sub-task 1), transfer speaking styles from another speaker to the target speaker with neutral non-expressive data while retaining the target speaker's identity (Sub-task 2).

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14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

An integrative multi-omics framework identifies epigenetic dysregulation of HAND2 as a potential primary driver of impaired enteric neural crest cell differentiation in Hirschsprung Disease

Authors:
Mellein↗Paramasivam↗Gu↗Roeth↗Mederer↗Kuzan↗Roessler↗Scheuerer↗Lasitschka↗Schwab↗Sahm↗Hamelmann↗…

Hirschsprung disease (HSCR) is a congenital neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by segmental aganglionosis due to impaired developmental processes of enteric neural crest cells (NCCs). Despite being the leading genetic cause of functional intestinal obstruction in early childhood, HSCR represents a paradigmatic challenge in precision medicine: its multifactorial etiology, complex gene-environment interactions and limited resolution of single-modality analyses have long hindered mechanistic understanding and therapeutic translation. Here, we applied an integrative multi-omics approach combining genetic, phenotypic, epigenomic and transcriptomic analyses of matched ganglionic and aganglionic formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) patient tissues, complemented by patient-specific in vitro models. Beyond established genetic contributors, our integrative approach reveals novel regulatory pathways predominantly affecting enteric NCC differentiation, with convergent evidence pointing to epigenetic dysregulation as a primary disease mechanism. Notably, we identified over 1,300 differentially methylated positions between ganglionic and aganglionic FFPE samples, with HAND2 emerging as a key candidate due to multiple hypermethylated sites and consistently reduced expression levels in aganglionic tissues and in vitro models, suggesting a potential role in HSCR pathophysiology. We propose that our multi-omics approach offers a powerful and comprehensive framework for dissecting disease mechanisms. Beyond advancing biological understanding, this strategy holds promise for paving the way for molecularly informed patient stratification and supporting the development of personalized treatment and postoperative management strategies.

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

From Prompts to Tokens: Internalizing Causal Supervision in Vision-Language Model for Multi-Image Causal Reasoning

Authors:
Haoping Yu↗Yuanxi Li↗Jing Ma↗

Visual causal reasoning is essential for understanding and intervening in the physical world, requiring identification of causal variables from visual inputs and reasoning over intervention effects. Despite recent progress, large vision–language models (VLMs) remain brittle at such tasks, especially for interventional and counterfactual queries over multi-image inputs. Most existing explorations inject causal knowledge via textual prompts, leaving causal mechanisms external to model execution and limiting reliable control during inference. To address this problem, we propose BridgeVLM, which internalizes visual causal reasoning by inducing a causal graph from multi-image inputs and converting it into structured Causal Tokens executed by RAMP layers injected into the LLM decoder for causal message passing. We further introduce a unified training interface M3S for fine-grained causal supervision from different granularities (local/global level). BridgeVLM achieves 54.4% accuracy on intervention tasks on CausalVLBench (vs. 33.2% with prompt-level supervision), improves results on Causal3D from 43.6% to 49.0%, and substantially improves causal structure learning on CausalVLBench ($F_1$: 33.4% $\rightarrow$ 75.1%).

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

ArFake: A Robust Framework for Multi-Dialect Arabic Speech Spoofing Detection Benchmark

Authors:
Mohamed Elsetohy↗Alhassan Ehab↗Ali Mekky↗Besher Hassan↗Shady Shehata↗

With the rise of generative text-to-speech models, distinguishing between real and synthetic speech has become challenging, especially for Arabic that have received limited research attention. Most spoof detection efforts have focused on English, leaving a significant gap for Arabic and its many dialects. In this work, we introduce the first multi-dialect Arabic spoofed speech dataset. To evaluate the difficulty of the synthesized audio from each model and determine which produces the most challenging samples, we aimed to guide the construction of our final dataset either by merging audios from multiple models or by selecting the best-performing model, we conducted an evaluation pipeline that included training classifiers using two approaches: modern embedding-based methods combined with classifier heads; classical machine learning algorithms applied to MFCC features; and the RawNet2 architecture. The pipeline further incorporated the calculation of Mean Opinion Score based on human ratings, as well as processing both original and synthesized datasets through an Automatic Speech Recognition model to measure the Word Error Rate. Our results demonstrate that FishSpeech outperforms other TTS models in Arabic voice cloning on the Casablanca corpus, producing more realistic and challenging synthetic speech samples. However, relying on a single TTS for dataset creation may limit generalizability.

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17.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

<i>HoloBio</i>: A holographic microscopy tool for quantitative biological analysis

Authors:
Waira Mona↗

by Waira Mona, Maria J. Gil-Herrera, Emanuel Mazo, Daniel Córdoba, Sofia Obando-Vasquez, Maria J. Lopera, Rene Restrepo, Carlos Trujillo, Ana Doblas, Raul Castaneda Holographic imaging in microscopy enables label-free quantitative information of biological specimens and has found applications across a wide range of biomedical studies, from cell morphology to particle dynamics; yet its widespread adoption is often limited by the lack of accessible and standardized analysis software. We present HoloBio, an open-source, Python-based graphical user interface developed to address this issue. This software offers two primary operational modes: a Real-Time mode that enables live processing of holograms at video frame rates, and an Offline mode designed for post-processing previously recorded holograms. HoloBio is compatible with holograms recorded using both lens-based and lensless systems, supporting off-axis architectures in telecentric and non-telecentric configurations, as well as slightly off-axis and in-line optical setups. The software incorporates tools for cell tracking, phase profiling, thickness estimation, and morphological analysis, including cell counting and object area quantification. HoloBio is designed to be accessible for users without coding expertise, offering a reproducible, high-throughput environment tailored for researchers in biology, biophotonics, and biomedical imaging.

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

Identifying Structural Biases from Causal Mechanism Shifts

Authors:
Praharsh Nanavati↗Jilles Vreeken↗David Kaltenpoth↗

arXiv:2606.18834v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Causal discovery methods commonly assume that all data is independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.) and that there are no unmeasured variables affecting the system. In practice, these assumptions are often violated, leading to inaccurate inference. In this paper, we study how to identify hidden confounding and selection biases from causal mechanism shifts. In particular, we show that structural biases lead to dependent mechanism shifts. That is, by considering for which variables the mechanisms change given data from different environments, we can tell which variables are unbiased, which are subject to hidden confounding, and which are undergoing selection bias. We formalize this into an empirically testable criterion based on mutual information, and show under which conditions it identifies structural biases. To tell which nodes are subject to what kind of bias, we introduce the StruBI algorithm. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data show that StruBI works well in practice, accurately recovering affected variable sets and types of biases, outperforming the state-of-the-art by a wide margin.

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19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

The Safety-Aware Denoiser for Text Diffusion Models

Authors:
Amman Yusuf↗Zhejun Jiang↗Mijung Park↗

arXiv:2605.08116v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent work on text diffusion models offers a promising alternative to autoregressive generation, but controlling their safety remains underexplored. Existing safety approaches are geared toward autoregressive models and typically rely on post-hoc filtering or inference-time interventions. These are inadequate for effectively addressing safety risks in text diffusion models. We propose the Safety-Aware Denoiser (SAD), a safety-guidance framework in text diffusion models. The SAD modifies the iterative denoising process such that the text sample at the final denoising step is steered toward provably safe regions of the text space. This inference-time method can integrate safety constraints into the denoiser, avoiding computationally expensive retraining of the underlying diffusion model and enabling flexible, lightweight safety guidance. We evaluate the safety of the generated text using the SAD, with respect to hazard taxonomy, memorization, and jailbreak. Experimental results show that SAD substantially reduces unsafe generations while preserving generation quality, diversity, and fluency, outperforming existing methods. These results demonstrate that our safety guidance during denoising provides an effective and scalable mechanism for enforcing safety in text diffusion models.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Motion-Focused Latent Action Enables Cross-Embodiment VLA Training from Human EgoVideos

Authors:
Runze Xu↗Yiluo Zhang↗Jian Wang↗Yu Wang↗Jincheng Yu↗

Training generalist Vision-Language-Action(VLA) models typically requires massive, diverse robotic datasets with high-fidelity action annotations. While egocentric human manipulation videos are abundant and capture significant environmental diversity, the absence of action labels makes them difficult to use in conventional training paradigms. To address this, we propose a latent-action-based framework designed to extract general action priors from unlabeled human videos. The architecture features a Hybrid Disentangled VQ-VAE that decouples motion dynamics from environmental backgrounds through physical masks, enabling the construction of a cross-embodiment action codebook. By pre-training on human videos with the codebook, the VLM backbone learns deep representations of action intent. For adaptation to specific embodiments, we introduce an intent-perception decoupling strategy where the VLM predicts the action intent while a separate frozen visual encoder provides state-specific features to the action expert, thereby reducing action hallucinations. Results in simulation and real-world environments show that our method, pre-trained exclusively on unlabeled human videos, performs competitively with state-of-the-art VLA models trained on massive annotated datasets, requiring only 50 trajectories for downstream adaptation.

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21.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-09

Good recycling starts at home — and benefits the world

Authors: Unknown Author

New research supports the value of household-level waste separation. But policies must also carefully consider consumer behaviours to maximize the quality of material collected. New research supports the value of household-level waste separation. But policies must also carefully consider consumer behaviours to maximize the quality of material collected.

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

How Task Structure Limits Multi-Agent Success: An Information-Theoretic Analysis

Authors:
Shi Pan↗Ming Luo↗

arXiv:2606.13733v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-agent systems (MAS) were expected to overcome the limitation of single-agent systems (SAS) through collaboration. However, under typicality conditions on the task's constraint graph and bounded inter-agent communication, we prove that the success probability of a MAS is closely tied to the connectivity of task constraints, where each agent has limited information-processing capacity. Specifically, the success probability decays exponentially with an information bottleneck that emerges from partitioning the task's constraint graph among agents. We define this quantity as the minimum cut cost $C_{\min}$ of the potential constraint graph of each task. This information-theoretic bound applies to both open systems with external feedback and closed systems without. We validate our theory on both synthetic experiments and real-world empirical data from SWE-bench submissions. From our framework, effective MAS design should incorporate task-inherent constraints alongside engineering optimization, and when $\Cmin$ is high, practitioners should restructure tasks rather than simply scaling agents or communication.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Shopping Reasoning Bench: An Expert-Authored Benchmark for Multi-Turn Conversational Shopping Assistants

Authors:
Shuxian Fan↗Seonwoo Min↗Youna Hu↗Botao Xia↗Jayakrishnan Unnikrishnan↗Rowan Musselmann↗Yifan Gao↗Qingyu Yin↗Priyanka Nigam↗Bing Yin↗

Conversational shopping assistants now serve hundreds of millions of customers, yet no existing benchmark jointly evaluates the open-ended multi-turn reasoning, domain expertise, and criterion-level quality that real shopping conversations demand. Shopping reasoning is unique among language model applications. Unlike factual question answering or verifiable code generation, it requires balancing subjective preferences, budget constraints, and cross-product trade-offs across multi-turn dialogue, capabilities absent from previous e-commerce and general-purpose benchmarks. We introduce the Shopping Reasoning Bench, an expert-authored benchmark of 525 missions (232 single-turn, 293 multi-turn) with 10863 importance-weighted binary rubrics authored by retail domain experts. These criteria are organized under a taxonomy of five reasoning categories and fifteen subcategories covering diverse demands such as preference refinement, trade-off analysis, and compatibility assessment. An evaluation of nine models across three families (GPT, Claude, Gemini) shows that pass rates reach only 57–77% overall. On multi-turn missions, all models score 13–29 points lower on optional above-and-beyond criteria than on required ones, and performance degrades 4–18 points as conversations progress. These gaps show that current models handle basic shopping assistance but fall short of expert-level advice, making Shopping Reasoning Bench a challenging testbed for future shopping assistant development.

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24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Probing Many-Body Phenomena with Atomically Thin Nuclear Spin Layers in Diamond

Authors:
Philipp J. Vetter↗Christoph Findler↗Antonio Verd\'u↗Matthias Kost↗R\'emi Blinder↗Jens Fuhrmann↗Christian Osterkamp↗Johannes Lang↗Martin B. Plenio↗Javier Prior↗Fedor Jelezko↗

arXiv:2510.27374v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum simulation aims to recreate complex many-body phenomena in controlled environments, offering insights into dynamics that are otherwise difficult to model. Existing platforms, however, are often complex and costly to scale, typically requiring ultra pure vacuum or low temperatures. Here, we introduce a platform based on a thin, strongly interacting ${}^{13}C$ nuclear spin layer in diamond that allows controlled exploration of many-body dynamics at room temperature. Nearby nitrogen-vacancy centers enable polarization, readout, and, combined with radio-frequency fields, coherent control of the nuclear spins. We demonstrate strong, tunable interactions among the nuclear spins and use the system to probe discrete time-crystalline order across varying interaction ranges. By combining ease of use with operation at ambient temperatures, our work opens new opportunities for investigating strongly correlated many-body effects.

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

CaricHarmony: Contrastive Diffusion Paths for Identity-Preserving Caricature Synthesis

Authors:
Dongyu Wang↗Dar-Yen Chen↗Yi-Zhe Song↗

Sketch-based caricature synthesis suffers from a fundamental failure mode: when identity and shape conditions are combined in diffusion models, they create destructive interference that causes inevitable collapse toward either bland portraits or unrecognizable distortions. We identify the root cause as condition signal contamination – competing probability distributions in the denoising trajectory that make balanced generation impossible. We present CaricHarmony, the first training-free method that explicitly resolves this contamination through parallel uncontaminated diffusion paths. During inference, we maintain three paths: $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{i}}$ (pure identity), $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{s}}$ (pure shape), and $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{i+s}}$ (harmonized output). Novel energy functions operating on cross-attention features provide gradient guidance that steers $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{i+s}}$ toward optimal balance: $\mathcal{E}_{\mathrm{shape}}$ ensures sketch fidelity through layout and semantic alignment, while $\mathcal{E}_{\mathrm{id}}$ employs token-level correspondence matching robust to extreme distortions. Unlike DemoCaricature requiring 70 seconds per-identity fine-tuning or CaricatureBooth constrained to Bezier curves, CaricHarmony accepts any sketch format and generates in under 16 seconds. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance: 0.8615 shape CLIP score (vs. 0.8450) under comparable identity consistency score, with 7.81 overall user preference score (vs. 6.06). Our method fundamentally reconceptualizes the ID-shape conflict as conditioning signal contamination for diffusion models, enabling unprecedented creative control while preserving recognition.

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