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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Visual Quality Score Assessment of Large White Goods in Remanufacture with Multi-View Deformable-DETR

Remanufacturing large white goods is essential for a circular economy, yet visual quality assessment remains a manual bottleneck for training and pricing. Conventional detection methods require extensive annotation and struggle with small defects in high-resolution multi-view data. We present a multi-view framework based on Deformable-DETR for automated quality scoring that aggregates information across redundant views to extract fine-grained features. To enhance robustness with limited labels, we employ self-supervised pretraining followed by supervised fine-tuning on expert-annotated scores. Additionally, a linear projection over frozen feature maps identifies regions of interest to explain model decisions. Evaluated on an industrial multi-view dataset, our approach delivers precise quality assessments while reducing reliance on manual annotation and per-part customization, enabling scalable and transparent inspection for remanufacturing lines.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Rotational Vacuum Friction of Nonabsorbing Particles

arXiv:2606.24723v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A nonabsorbing particle rotating in vacuum can lose angular momentum only by converting mechanical energy into electromagnetic radiation. Here, we develop a quantum theory of rotational vacuum friction for small lossless particles and show that axial symmetry qualitatively changes the leading dissipation channel. At zero temperature, the frictional torque scales as $M\propto\Omega^7$ with rotation frequency $\ Omega$ in anisotropic particles due to the emission of correlated photon pairs whose frequencies sum to $2\Omega$, while a contribution to the torque linear in $\ Omega$ is found at finite temperature. In contrast, axisymmetric particles are protected against photon-assisted friction regardless of temperature.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

PRISM: A 3D Probabilistic Neural Representation for Interpretable Shape Modeling

arXiv:2602.11467v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding how anatomical shapes evolve in response to developmental covariates - and quantifying their spatially varying uncertainties - is critical in healthcare research. Existing approaches typically rely on global time-warping formulations that ignore spatially heterogeneous dynamics. We introduce PRISM, a novel framework that bridges implicit neural representations with uncertainty-aware statistical shape analysis. PRISM models the conditional distribution of shapes given covariates, providing spatially continuous estimates of both the population mean and covariate-dependent uncertainty at arbitrary locations. A key theoretical contribution is a closed-form Fisher Information metric that enables efficient, analytically tractable local temporal uncertainty quantification via automatic differentiation. Experiments on three synthetic datasets and one clinical dataset demonstrate PRISM's strong performance across diverse tasks - from modeling shape evolution to personalized shape prediction and anomaly detection - within a unified framework, while providing interpretable and clinically meaningful uncertainty estimates.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

GeoNatureAgent Benchmark: Benchmarking LLM Agents for Environmental Geospatial Analysis Across Frontier and Open-Weight Foundation Models

arXiv:2606.12821v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Environmental scientists spend disproportionate effort on data wrangling rather than analysis, and AI agents that automate geospatial workflows remain unvalidated: no benchmark evaluates agents operating through structured tool calling against real APIs. We introduce the GeoNatureAgent Benchmark, the first benchmark for environmental analysis agents that operate via structured tool calls to a production-style geospatial API. It comprises 93 tasks across 18 categories, covering municipality analysis, multi-turn conversation, spatial reasoning, cross-indicator synthesis, error handling and recovery, ranking, comparison, multilingual understanding, habitat analysis, and task rejection. Tasks are evaluated against an open, self-hostable API serving three environmental indicators across Spain and Portugal via sixteen tools. We evaluate seven LLMs (Claude Sonnet 4, DeepSeek V3.2, GLM-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Qwen3-235B, GPT-OSS-120B, Llama 4 Scout) under three temperature-1.0 seeds, reporting capability and per-case cost as orthogonal axes. We find: (1) Claude Sonnet 4 leads at 60.8% +/- 0.8%, followed by DeepSeek V3.2 at 56.3% +/- 3.1%, with no other model above 51%; (2) the cost-accuracy Pareto frontier is occupied mostly by open-weight models, with DeepSeek V3.2 offering 93% of Claude's capability at 11x lower cost ($0.011/case); (3) comparison tasks remain universally unsolved (0% on close-value comparisons), exposing systematic reasoning limits; and (4) structured tool calling against a real API is more discriminative than general-purpose GIS benchmarks, with accuracies 25-35 points lower. We further show extensibility by integrating BigEarthNet V2 land cover for Portugal alongside Spanish CO2 and erosion indicators. The benchmark, harness, and self-hostable API are publicly available.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

HarnessX: A Composable, Adaptive, and Evolvable Agent Harness Foundry

arXiv:2606.14249v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agent performance depends critically on the runtime harness, comprising the prompts, tools, memory, and control flow that mediate how a model observes, reasons, and acts. Yet today's harnesses remain largely hand-crafted and static: each new model or task still demands bespoke scaffolding, and the rich traces produced during execution are rarely distilled back into systematic improvement. We introduce HarnessX, a foundry for composable, adaptive, and evolvable agent harnesses. HarnessX assembles typed harness primitives via a substitution algebra, adapts them through AEGIS, a trace-driven multi-agent evolution engine grounded in an operational mirror between symbolic adaptation and reinforcement learning, and closes the harness-model loop by turning trajectories into both harness updates and model training signal. Across five benchmarks (ALFWorld, GAIA, WebShop, tau^3-Bench, and SWE-bench Verified), HarnessX yields an average gain of +14.5% (up to +44.0%), with gains largest where baselines are lowest. These results suggest that agent progress need not come from model scaling alone: composing and evolving runtime interfaces from execution feedback is an actionable and complementary lever. The complete codebase will be open-sourced in a future release.

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

MoVerse: Real-Time Video World Modeling with Panoramic Gaussian Scaffold

We present MoVerse, a real-time video world model that creates an interactively navigable scene from a single narrow-field-of-view image. This setting is challenging because the input observes only a small fraction of the environment, while interactive roaming requires a complete surrounding world, persistent geometry, controllable camera motion, and temporally coherent high-fidelity observations. MoVerse addresses this problem by separating world construction from observation rendering. It first expands the input into a gravity-aligned 360$^\circ$ panorama with topology-aware diffusion, closing the missing field of view before 3D reasoning. It then lifts the panorama into a persistent 3D Gaussian scaffold using panoramic geometry-aware residual prediction, yielding a dense and directly renderable spatial memory. Finally, a Gaussian-conditioned video renderer translates scaffold renderings along user-specified camera trajectories into photorealistic video. To make this renderer practical for interaction, we train a bidirectional diffusion teacher for high-quality conditional rendering and distill it into a causal autoregressive student for bounded-latency streaming. This design combines the controllability and long-range consistency of explicit 3D representations with the perceptual quality of generative video models. MoVerse supports real-time scene roaming at 8~FPS on a single NVIDIA RTX~4090 GPU, demonstrating a practical path toward single-image world creation with interactive video output.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

FORGE: Foundational Optimization Representations from Graph Embeddings

arXiv:2508.20330v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Combinatorial optimization problems are ubiquitous in science and engineering. Still, learning-based approaches to accelerate combinatorial optimization often require solving a large number of difficult instances to collect training data, incurring significant computational cost. Existing learning-based methods require training dedicated models for each problem distribution, for each downstream task, severely limiting their scalability and generalization. We introduce Forge: Foundational Optimization Representations from Graph Embeddings, a framework that pre-trains a vector-quantized graph autoencoder on a large, diverse collection of mixed-integer programming (MIP) instances in an unsupervised manner, without relying on optimization solvers or optimal solutions. Vector quantization produces discrete code assignments that serve as a vocabulary for representing optimization instances. We evaluate Forge in both unsupervised and supervised settings. In the unsupervised setting, Forge embeddings effectively cluster unseen instances across problem domains and sizes. In the supervised setting, we fine-tune Forge embeddings and show that a single pre-trained model helps predicting both the integrality gap for cut-generation and variable hints for search guidance across multiple problem and size distributions. In both tasks, we improve the performance of a commercial optimization solver and outperform state-of-the-art learning-based methods. Finally, we open-source our training code, pre-trained Forge weights, and embeddings for multiple MIP distributions to foster further research in representation learning for optimization problems https://skadio.github.io/forge/

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

MeshLoom: Feed-Forward Non-Rigid Registration of Mesh Sequences

We present MeshLoom, a feed-forward registration network that directly reconstructs vertex deformations across mesh sequences. Our approach advances non-rigid registration beyond existing models, which are typically constrained by costly per-instance optimization, narrow object categories, pairwise-only inputs, or merely intermediate outputs. The network is simple and efficient, registering multiple meshes within seconds. At its core lies a topology-aware encoder–decoder design. Specifically, we first introduce a topology-aware point representation that encodes the anchor (reference) mesh's topology into its per-vertex features. This representation strengthens the network's understanding of the anchor-mesh geometry and disambiguates points that are Euclidean-close yet geodesically distant. We then propose a multi-modal encoder that fuses this anchor-mesh representation with complementary cues from each frame, such as shape latents and image features. These multi-source signals are compressed into a compact global motion embedding that captures dense inter-frame correspondence. A lightweight decoder then queries this global embedding with the anchor-mesh point representation, retrieving per-vertex deformations at target timestamps. Through extensive experiments across diverse motions and object categories, we show that MeshLoom achieves state-of-the-art results on non-rigid registration. In addition, we find that our global embedding-then-query paradigm naturally enables the network to generate deformations at intermediate timestamps, which extends MeshLoom to motion interpolation and mesh morphing. Project page: https://meshloom.github.io/ .

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Information-Theoretic Measures in AI: A Practical Decision Guide

arXiv:2604.23716v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Information-theoretic (IT) measures are ubiquitous in artificial intelligence: entropy drives decision-tree splits and uncertainty quantification, cross-entropy is the default classification loss, mutual information underpins representation learning and feature selection, and transfer entropy reveals directed influence in dynamical systems. A second, less consolidated family of measures, integrated information (Phi), effective information (EI), and autonomy, has emerged for characterizing agent complexity. Despite wide adoption, measure selection is often decoupled from estimator assumptions, failure modes, and safe inferential claims. This paper provides a practical decision framework for all seven measures, organized around three prescriptive questions for each: (i) what question does the measure answer and in which AI context; (ii) which estimator is appropriate for the data type and dimensionality; and (iii) what is the most dangerous misuse. The framework is operationalized in two complementary artifacts: a measure-selection flowchart and a master decision table. We cover both AI/ML and decision-making agent application domains per measure, with standardized Bridge Boxes linking IT quantities to cognitive constructs. Three worked examples illustrate the framework on concrete practitioner scenarios spanning representation learning, temporal influence analysis, and evolved agent complexity.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Thermodynamics of quantum processes: An operational framework for free energy and reversible athermality

arXiv:2510.12790v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We explore the thermodynamics of quantum processes (quantum channels) by axiomatically introducing the free energy for channels, defined via the quantum relative entropy with an absolutely thermal channel whose fixed output is in equilibrium with a thermal reservoir. This definition finds strong support through its operational interpretations in designated quantum information and thermodynamic tasks. We construct a resource theory of athermality for quantum processes, where free operations are Gibbs preserving superchannels and golden units are unitary channels with respect to absolutely thermal channel having fully degenerate output Hamiltonian. We exactly characterize the one-shot distillation and formation of quantum channels using hypothesis-testing and max-relative entropy with respect to the absolutely thermal channel. These rates converge asymptotically to the channel free energy (up to a multiplicative factor of half the inverse temperature), establishing its operational meaning and proving the asymptotic reversibility of the athermality. We show the direct relation between the resource theory of athermality and quantum information tasks such as private randomness and purity distillation, and thermodynamic tasks of erasure and work extraction. Our work connects the core thermodynamic concepts of free energy, energy, entropy, and maximal extractable work of quantum processes to their information processing capabilities.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

pFedUL: Layer-Aware Federated Unlearning for Personalized Federated Learning

arXiv:2606.16304v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated unlearning (FU) enables the removal of specific data contributions from federated learning (FL) models to comply with regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). However, most existing FU methods are designed for the FedAvg paradigm, where all clients share a single global model. In practice, personalized federated learning (pFL) methods such as FedPer, FedRep, Ditto, and FedBN have become widely adopted due to their superior handling of non-IID data. These methods decompose the model into shared global layers and client-specific personalized layers, fundamentally altering the semantics of unlearning, yet this setting has received little attention. We formalize FU under the pFL paradigm, identifying a tension between unlearning completeness on shared layers and personalization preservation for remaining clients. We then propose pFedUL, a layer-aware selective unlearning framework comprising three components: (1) gradient-based layer-wise contribution attribution that separately quantifies the target client's influence on shared and personalized parameters, (2) adaptive selective unlearning that applies differentiated forgetting strategies across layer types, and (3) a lightweight recalibration protocol enabling remaining clients to restore personalization with minimal overhead. We further introduce two new metrics, Personalization Preservation Score (PPS) and Cross-client Fairness Index (CFI), to evaluate pFL-specific unlearning quality. Experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and FEMNIST under varying non-IID settings indicate that pFedUL achieves unlearning effectiveness comparable to full retraining while maintaining an average of 97.3\% personalized accuracy for remaining clients. Compared with six state-of-the-art FU methods adapted to the pFL setting, pFedUL consistently achieves superior personalization preservation.

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

FM-Agent: Scaling Formal Methods to Large Systems via LLM-Based Hoare-Style Reasoning

arXiv:2604.11556v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM-assisted software development has become increasingly prevalent, and can generate large-scale systems, such as compilers. It becomes crucial to strengthen the correctness of the generated code. However, automated reasoning for large-scale systems remains challenging due to code complexity. Hoare logic offers an approach to decomposing a large system into smaller components and reasoning about them separately (i.e., compositional reasoning). However, existing works still struggle to scale, because Hoare logic requires writing formal specifications for each function, imposing a heavy human burden. The problem is exacerbated when code is generated by LLMs, as developers lack a deep understanding of each function's expected behavior. This paper presents FM-Agent, the first framework that realizes automated compositional reasoning for large-scale systems. Leveraging LLMs, FM-Agent introduces a top-down paradigm to automatically generate function-level specifications. Specifically, FM-Agent derives the specification of a function from how its callers expect the function to behave, so the generated specifications can reflect the developer's intent of a function even if the implementation is buggy. Developers' intent is usually expressed in natural language, while existing verifiers only support formulas. Therefore, FM-Agent generalizes Hoare-style inference to reason about functions against natural-language specifications. Finally, to confirm bug existence and explain bug causes, FM-Agent automatically generates test cases to trigger potential bugs. In our evaluation, FM-Agent successfully reasons about large-scale systems within 2 days, each of which has up to 143k LoC. These systems have already been tested by their developers, but FM-Agent still finds 522 newly discovered bugs. These bugs can cause serious consequences, including system crashes and incorrect execution results.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

County Year Informatics Model for Annual and Cumulative Unique Lung Cancer Screening Eligibility in Maryland, 2026 to 2045

Purpose: Population-level lung cancer screening programs require denominators that reflect age, smoking history, geography, and changing eligibility over time. We estimated annual prevalent and 20-year cumulative unique low-dose computed tomography screening eligibility for Maryland residents under alternative screening criteria. Methods: We built a deterministic cohort-cell stock-flow simulation using Maryland county-equivalent jurisdiction projections by age, sex, and race/ethnicity, with ACS socioeconomic/nativity covariates and smoking-history priors for ever-smoked status, pack-years, and quit-years. Scenarios included USPSTF 2013 legacy, USPSTF 2021, ACS 2023/2024, a risk-model-expanded sensitivity, and ever-smoked-only capacity stress tests. Cumulative unique eligibility counted people once at first eligibility rather than summing annual prevalent person-years. Results: Under USPSTF 2021, an estimated 238,346 Maryland residents were eligible in 2026 and 245,326 in 2045. The 20-year cumulative unique denominator was 768,668, whereas naively summing annual prevalent counts produced 4,850,735 person-years, a 6.31-fold overcount. ACS 2023/2024 expanded annual eligibility to 314,616 in 2026 and cumulative unique eligibility to 902,796 by adding remote former smokers. Ever-smoked-only adult eligibility was 1,957,699 in 2026 and 3,383,683 cumulative unique over 20 years. Conclusion: A Maryland statewide screening initiative should plan from cumulative unique eligibility and county-equivalent jurisdiction-specific burden rather than annual prevalence alone. Explicit pack-year and quit-year modeling materially changes statewide and county allocation compared with current-smoking proxy models.

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

Tying the Loop – Tied Expert Layers in Mixture-of-Experts Language Models

Authors:

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures efficiently scale Large Language Models (LLMs) by activating only a small fraction of their experts per token, yet the full parameter count - dominated by the expert parameters - must be held in training and inference memory. To address this, we introduce Expert Tying, an architectural modification that shares expert parameters across consecutive transformer layers while preserving independent, layer-wise routing and attention. We evaluate this approach across common, state-of-the-art architectures, including OLMoE, Qwen3, and DeepSeek-style MoEs. Our pretraining experiments demonstrate that tying experts can reduce memory footprint by almost 2x at virtually no degradation in perplexity or downstream quality. By exploiting the parameter redundancy inherent in MoE pathways, our method provides a highly favorable compute-to-memory trade-off, advancing efficient training and scaling of next-generation LLMs.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

CODEBLOCK: Learning to Supervise Code at the Right Granularity

arXiv:2606.18286v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Supervised fine-tuning of code LLMs typically applies uniform cross-entropy loss to all response tokens, implicitly assuming that every token provides equally useful learning signal. Recent token-level selection methods challenge this assumption in natural-language SFT by supervising only high-value tokens. However, directly transferring token-level masking to code can break syntactically and semantically coherent program units, because code depends on structural completeness and definition-use relations. We therefore propose CodeBlock, a structure-aware sparse supervision framework that selects structure-complete code evidence rather than isolated tokens. CodeBlock first selects high-quality instruction-response pairs, then partitions code responses into syntactically coherent coding items, estimates their utility by aggregating generalized cross-entropy over core logic tokens, and reranks them with data-flow reach and bridge signals to prioritize blocks that propagate or connect important program dependencies. During training, the full response remains available as context, while loss is applied only to selected code items and informative natural-language tokens. Experiments on six code-generation benchmarks show that CodeBlock achieves stronger average pass@1 than full-token SFT and competitive selection baselines, while using only 1.9% of supervised response tokens.

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

Phantoms and Disclosures: a Causal Framework for Auditing Synthetic Data

arXiv:2606.16952v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid adoption of generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) has spurred interest in synthetic data as a privacy-preserving alternative to sensitive real-world datasets. However, generating high-utility synthetic data often carries the risk of memorizing and regurgitating private information from the training corpus. In this work, we present a customizable empirical auditing framework designed to detect and explain such data disclosures. Our framework introduces a mechanism to distinguish between "true disclosures"-where the system directly reproduces a user's information-and "phantom disclosures''-where the system incidentally generates a user's data. By partitioning input data into training and holdout sets and applying rigorous statistical hypothesis testing, we determine if observed disclosures are consistent with strict privacy baselines, such as zero-learning or specific Differential Privacy (DP) bounds. Crucially, this approach requires no model access, no canary insertion, and no reference model training -only the synthetic output and a held-out control set. We demonstrate that this framework effectively functions as a membership inference attack, providing empirical lower bounds on privacy leakage that are tighter than prior data-based auditing methods. Our approach is model-agnostic, applies to any synthetic data generation mechanism, and requires orders of magnitude fewer computational resources than shadow-model or canary-based alternatives.

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

SSH-Net: A Deep Neural Network for Predicting Failure Time Distribution Functions under Competing Risks with Application to GPU Data

arXiv:2606.20451v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Competing risks are commonly observed in engineering fields and can bring challenges to time-to-event data modeling when the application scenarios are complicated. Recently, deep neural networks have received great attention for prediction with competing risks, due to their flexibility and high learning capability. However, the complexity of neural network structure brings extra difficulty in hyperparameter tuning based on different data inputs. Additionally, when an engineered system has complex physical structures with multiple hierarchical levels, treating all structural levels as a single group of inputs may fail to capture critical information. To address the issues, we propose a Structured Segmented Hazard Deep Neural Network (SSH-Net) for failure time prediction under cause-specific competing risks framework. Our approach associates neural network structure with data structures, and allows different covariate groups to impact the failure prediction through separate sub-networks. The neural network is constructed based on a cause-specific competing risks model. The SSH-Net outputs cause-specific hazard functions, and utilizes the penalized log-likelihood as the loss function. The prediction accuracy of SSH-Net is validated through simulation studies by evaluating the Brier score, the area under receiver operating characteristic curves (AUC), and the root mean square error (RMSE) of the predicted cause-specific cumulative incident function. We further demonstrate the model's ability to predict failure time distribution functions using the Titan GPU failure time data.

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

Understanding Cross-Modal Contributions in Continual Vision-Language Models: A Theoretical Perspective

Continual vision-language models are commonly addressed through sequential fine-tuning; however, although this paradigm enables adaptation to new environments (tasks), it inherently emphasizes the contribution of previously learned environments (tasks) at the expense of the stability required to preserve previously acquired knowledge. While existing approaches have adequately studied continual learning and catastrophic forgetting in vision-language models (VLMs), the theoretical understanding of modality-specific contributions across a sequence of environments remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we present a new theoretical perspective to understand the cross-modal (vision-language) contributions to consecutive environments. We empirically evaluate our theoretical findings on large VLMs and demonstrate their effectiveness in capturing environment-level cross-modal contributions. Our analysis provides deeper insights into continual VLMs, highlighting their contribution robustness to varying task orders and inter-task similarities, and their improved generalization performance.

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

LaTtE-Flow: Layerwise Timestep-Expert Flow-based Transformer

Recent advances in multimodal foundation models unifying image understanding and generation have opened exciting avenues for tackling a wide range of vision-language tasks within a single framework. Despite progress, existing unified models typically require extensive pretraining and struggle to achieve the same level of performance compared to models dedicated to each task. Additionally, many of these models suffer from slow image generation speeds, limiting their practical deployment in real-time or resource-constrained settings. In this work, we propose Layerwise Timestep-Expert Flow-based Transformer (LaTtE-Flow), a novel and efficient architecture that unifies image understanding and generation within a single multimodal model. LaTtE-Flow builds upon powerful pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to inherit strong multimodal understanding capabilities, and extends them with a novel Layerwise Timestep Experts flow-based architecture for efficient image generation. LaTtE-Flow distributes the flow-matching process across specialized groups of Transformer layers, each responsible for a distinct subset of timesteps. This design significantly improves sampling efficiency by activating only a small subset of layers at each sampling timestep. To further enhance performance, we propose a Timestep-Conditioned Residual Attention mechanism for efficient information reuse across layers. Experiments demonstrate that LaTtE-Flow achieves strong performance on multimodal understanding tasks, while achieving competitive image generation quality with around 6x faster inference speed compared to recent unified multimodal models.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

ROMPAR: Morphological Completion and Demographic Unlearning for Romanian-Accented Speech Recognition

Automated transcription of parliamentary proceedings faces significant hurdles due to demographic bias, dialectal variation, and technical artifacts such as utterance truncation during segmentation. This paper introduces the ROManian PARliamentary Speech Corpus (ROMPAR) dataset, a 17.80-hour corpus of Romanian and Moldavian parliamentary speech, featuring double-annotated ground truth and explicit labels for reconstructed word fragments. To build a robust ASR system, we propose a multi-task adversarial training framework that enforces demographic invariance across age, gender, and dialect. We address the inherent instability of adversarial objectives in generative architectures by introducing an exponential decay mechanism for the adversarial coefficients. Furthermore, we implement an LLM-guided decoding strategy with position-dependent weighting to facilitate morphological completion of truncated terminal words. Our results demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly reduces WER and achieves an F1-score of 96.6% in morphological reconstruction.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

BOUTEF: A Multilingual Corpus for FakeNews in North Africa – Language as a Weapon

The rapid spread of fake news on social media has become a major challenge, particularly in multilingual and under-resourced contexts such as North Africa. In this paper, we introduce BOUTEF, a large-scale multilingual corpus designed to study the propagation, characteristics, and impact of fake news in Algeria and Tunisia. The corpus integrates three complementary components: fake narratives, genuine narratives, and associated user-generated comments, along with verified debunking information. It covers a wide range of languages and linguistic varieties, including MSA, Algerian and Tunisian dialects, Arabizi, French, English, and code-switched language. Building on this resource, we conduct a comprehensive empirical analysis combining quantitative and qualitative approaches. We examine thematic distributions, linguistic and rhetorical strategies, sentiment patterns, and social engagement dynamics. Statistical analyses reveal significant associations between thematic categories and message veracity, as well as strong correlations between user engagement and the visibility of fake content. Our findings show that fake news relies heavily on emotionally charged narratives, sensational framing, and hybrid linguistic practices that enhance virality and audience engagement. In contrast, debunking content adopts a more factual and verification-oriented style. Furthermore, a comparative analysis between Algeria and Tunisia highlights both shared dynamics and country-specific characteristics shaped by sociopolitical contexts. The results emphasize the role of informal language practices in the diffusion and reception of misinformation. By providing a rich, annotated, and publicly available dataset, this work contributes to advancing research on fake news detection, low-resource language processing, and the understanding of information disorders in complex linguistic environments.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Supporting people to access social security payments through the Special Rules for End of Life: a qualitative study of the perspectives of patients, carers and health care professionals

Background: People living with terminal illness face a double financial burden from additional costs and loss of earning for themselves and their carers. Social security benefits are intended to help alleviate some of this financial pressure, and in the UK and other countries people are eligible for fast-tracked access to financial support via the Special Rules for End of Life. One in 3 people who are eligible miss out on this support, yet there is limited evidence on the reasons for this take-up deficit. Objectives: The aim of this study is to understand the barriers and facilitators to claiming benefits for terminally ill people from the perspectives of patients, carers, and health care professionals. Methods: This is a qualitative study combining i) focus groups with healthcare professionals recruited via professional networks and social media, and ii) interviews with patients and carers recruited in hospital and hospice settings. We analysed the data using Practical Thematic Analysis Results: Fifty-five multidisciplinary healthcare professionals participated in 11 focus groups, and we interviewed 10 patients and carers. We constructed five descriptive themes to summarise the data: Navigating priorities and uncertainty; positive impacts alongside a sense of shame and stigma; talking about money, difficulties and dividends; everybodys, yet nobodys, responsibility; and sticking points in the system. Conclusion: The themes reveal several challenges that may contribute to people not taking up this financial support. However, discussions about access to benefits were also seen as a core part of holistic care, a positive way to offer support and a gateway to other discussions about end-of-life care preferences and decisions. Recommendations for policy and practice include evaluating the adoption of a diagnostic rather than a prognostic eligibility criteria, integrating discussions about benefits into existing processes such as advance care planning, and improving education and support for clinicians.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Cumulative Metabolic Exposure to Hyperglycemia and Risk of Cardiovascular and Limb Events in Peripheral Artery Disease

Background: Although diabetes is a potent risk factor for the development of peripheral artery disease (PAD), the effect of cumulative metabolic exposure to hyperglycemia on risk of cardiovascular or limb events in patients with PAD remains unclear. Methods: The Peripheral Artery Disease: Long-term Survival (PEARLS) is a longitudinal registry of Veterans with newly diagnosed PAD identified using a natural language processing approach. Included patients had ankle brachial index [≤]0.9 or toe brachial index [≤]0.7, and no history of lower extremity revascularization or major amputation. Among patients with diabetes in this cohort, we assessed cumulative exposure to hyperglycema based on a 24-month rolling average of hemoglobin (Hgb) A1c values, categorized as [≤]7%, >7% to [≤]8%, and >8%. Multivariable Cox regression models evaluated the association between categories of HgbA1c, modeled as a time-varying exposure, and risk of cardiovascular (CV: myocardial infarction or stroke) and limb (chronic limb threatening ischemia [CLTI] or major amputation) events. Results: Among 45,109 patients with new diagnosis of PAD and pre-existing diabetes, the mean HgbA1c at baseline was 7.5%, with nearly one-third (30.4%) having HgbA1c >8%. The mean age was 70.4 years, 19.8% were Black and 4% were Hispanic. Patients with baseline HgbA1c >8% were younger and compared to those with HgbA1c [≤]7%, more likely to have coronary disease, kidney disease, and obesity. Over a median follow up of 4.2 years, 8,306 (18.4%) patients experienced a CV event, and 8,199 (18.2%) experienced a limb event. The adjusted association between HgbA1c and hazard of CV events was 12% higher in patients exposed to HgbA1c >7% to [≤]8% (HR 1.12; 95%CI: 1.05-1.18) and 38% higher in those exposed to HgbA1c >8% (HR 1.38; 95%CI: 1.30-1.46), compared to HgbA1c 7% to [≤]8% (HR 1.20; 95%CI: 1.13-1.28) and HgbA1c >8% (HR 1.60; 95%CI: 1.51-1.70), respectively when compared to HgbA1c [≤]7%. These findings were consistent in subgroups based on age and severity of PAD. Conclusions: Among diabetic patients with PAD, cumulatiave metabolic exposure to hyperglycemia is associated with a markedly increased risk of clinical events, especially limb events.

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

Block-wise Codeword Embedding for Reliable Multi-bit Text Watermarking

Recent multi-bit watermarking methods for large language models (LLMs) prioritize capacity over reliability, often conflating decoding with detection. Our analysis reveals that existing ECC-based extractors suffer from catastrophic false positive rates (FPR), and applying rejection thresholds merely collapses detection sensitivity (TPR) to random guessing. To resolve this structural limitation, we propose BREW (Block-wise Reliable Embedding for Watermarking), a framework shifting the paradigm to designated verification. BREW employs a two-stage mechanism: (i) blind message estimation via independent block voting, followed by (ii) window-shifting verification that rigorously validates the payload against local edits. Experiments demonstrate that BREW achieves a TPR of 0.965 with an FPR of 0.02 under 10% synonym substitution, demonstrating that the high-FPR issue is not an inherent trade-off of multi-bit watermarking, but a solvable structural flaw of prior decoding-centric designs. Our framework is model-agnostic and theoretically grounded, providing a scalable solution for reliable forensic deployment.

25.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-13

PertDiffBench: Benchmarking Diffusion Models for Single-Cell Perturbation Response Prediction

Diffusion models are increasingly used to predict transcriptional responses to perturbations, but whether they improve on simpler generative and representation-based baselines remains unclear. Existing evaluations often do not separate the effects of model architecture, input representation, biological context and metric choice, making it difficult to determine where diffusion-based methods are useful. Here we introduce PertDiffBench, a standardized benchmark for diffusion-based transcriptomic perturbation prediction across single-cell and bulk RNA-seq datasets. PertDiffBench evaluates diffusion-based models across three complementary evaluation settings: standard prediction in known single-cell contexts and bulk perturbation conditions, generalization to unseen cell types, species, drugs and intermediate time points, and stress tests of feature dimensionality, input representation, noise type and gene ordering. Across these settings, diffusion models did not show a consistent advantage. scGen remained a strong baseline in common prediction tasks, whereas scDiffusion was the most competitive diffusion-based method in several generalization settings. Temporal imputation showed a different pattern, with a simple DDPM operating directly in expression space outperforming more specialized models. Stress tests showed that performance was model dependent and sensitive to feature dimensionality, encoder choice, noise type and gene ordering. Pretrained encoders did not consistently improve performance, with the classical scVI representation slightly exceeding STATE in seen-condition and unseen-cell-type settings. These results indicate that diffusion-model performance in perturbation response prediction depends strongly on task design and representation choice. PertDiffBench provides a practical framework for evaluating these models under biologically varied and stress-tested conditions.