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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Towards Leveraging AutoML for Sustainable Deep Learning: A Multi-Objective HPO Approach on Deep Shift Neural Networks

arXiv:2404.01965v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep Learning (DL) has advanced various fields by extracting complex patterns from large datasets. However, the computational demands of DL models pose environmental and resource challenges. Deep shift neural networks (DSNNs) offer a solution by leveraging shift operations to reduce computational complexity at inference. Following the insights from standard DNNs, we are interested in leveraging the full potential of DSNNs by means of AutoML techniques. We study the impact of hyperparameter optimization (HPO) to maximize DSNN performance while minimizing resource consumption. Since this combines multi-objective (MO) optimization with accuracy and energy consumption as potentially complementary objectives, we propose to combine state-of-the-art multi-fidelity (MF) HPO with multi-objective optimization. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, resulting in models with over 80\% in accuracy and low computational cost. Overall, our method accelerates efficient model development while enabling sustainable AI applications.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

A New k-Space Model for Non-Cartesian Fourier Imaging

For the past several decades, it has been popular to reconstruct Fourier imaging data using model-based approaches that can easily incorporate physical constraints and advanced regularization/machine learning priors. The most common modeling approach is to represent the continuous image as a linear combination of shifted "voxel" basis functions. Although well-studied and widely-deployed, this voxel-based model is associated with longstanding limitations, including high computational costs, slow convergence, and a propensity for artifacts. In this work, we reexamine this model from a fresh perspective, identifying new issues that may have been previously overlooked (including undesirable approximation, wrap-around, and nullspace characteristics). Our insights motivate us to propose a new model that is more resilient to the limitations (old and new) of the previous approach. Specifically, the new model is based on a Fourier-domain basis expansion rather than the standard image-domain voxel-based approach. Illustrative results, which are presented in the context of non-Cartesian MRI reconstruction, demonstrate that the new model enables improved image quality (reduced artifacts) and/or reduced computational complexity (faster computations and improved convergence).

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Loss Landscape Diagnosis for Gradient-Based Gray-Scott System Inversion: Disentangling the Roles of PINN Components

作者:

arXiv:2606.11258v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Gradient-based inversion of reaction-diffusion systems is typically approached via surrogate models or physics-informed neural networks (PINNs), while the most direct route, backpropagation through the PDE's structure itself, has largely been avoided. We pursue this direct route as a diagnostic probe, backpropagating a steady-state loss through unrolled Gray-Scott simulation to recover its parameters, with no surrogate or neural-network augmentation. Optimization fails to converge, and plotting the landscape directly locates the failure in its geometry – flat plateaus with no gradient signal, bounded by sharp cliffs that align with bifurcation boundaries – a structure that recurs across loss functions and is inherited however the gradients are routed to parameters. Reading this minimal setup as an ablation of PINN, we disentangle each component's role: with the neural network fixed, the residual loss is quadratic in the PDE parameters and yields a smooth landscape, so it alone already avoids the pathology, by implicitly encoding the full PDE dynamics across all initial conditions. The neural network, for its part, cannot repair an ill-posed parameter subspace, and so serves only to complete the observed data – a division of labor not previously made explicit. These findings carry concrete design implications for PINN-type methods and a broader heuristic on when added dimensions actually help.

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

Query-Efficient Video Adversarial Attack with Stylized Logo on Service Computing

In service computing, video classification has become fundamental to many intelligent applications. While Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have demonstrated excellent performance in recognizing video content, recent studies have shown that DNNs are highly vulnerable to adversarial examples. Thus, understanding adversarial attacks can better respond to emergency situations. In order to improve attack performance, many style-transfer-based attacks and patch-based attacks have been proposed. However, the global perturbation of the former will bring unnatural global colors, while the latter is difficult to achieve success in targeted attacks due to the limited perturbation space. Moreover, compared to a plethora of methods targeting image classifiers, video adversarial attacks remain relatively underexplored. Therefore, to generate adversarial examples with a low budget and to provide them with a higher verisimilitude, we propose a novel black-box video attack framework, called Stylized Logo Attack (SLA). SLA is conducted through three stages. The first stage involves building a style reference set for logos, which can not only make the generated examples more natural, but also carry more target class features in targeted attacks. Then, Reinforcement Learning is employed to determine the style reference and position parameters of the logo within the video, which ensures that the stylized logo is placed in the video with optimal attributes. Finally, perturbations are optimized in a step-by-step manner so as to improve the fooling rate. Experimental results indicate that SLA can achieve better performance than state-of-the-art methods and still maintain good deception effects when facing various defense methods. We believe SLA can raise awareness among the security community about the reliability and security of video classification systems and serve as a memorandum of possible attack methods.

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

OdysSim: Building Foundation Models for Human Behavior Simulation

Large language models are increasingly deployed as human simulators for interactive evaluation and social simulation. Yet helpfulness-driven post-training pulls them toward a homogeneous, overly agreeable assistant register, creating a behavioral Sim2Real gap. We present OdysSim, the largest open systematic investigation of behavioral foundation models, i.e., models trained to simulate human behavior at scale. We propose SOUL, a taxonomy of five capability axes (CONV, SS, COG, ROLE, EVAL) that unifies 62 datasets and 23 benchmark tasks under one framework. Specifically, we curate the OdysSim corpus (21.4M interactions, 10B tokens, retrofitted with back-generated social contexts), construct the SOUL-Index benchmark, and develop an end-to-end training recipe combining midtraining, task-specific RL, and expert distillation. The resulting open 8B OSim model ranks first or tied-first on 8 of 23 tasks, outperforming any individual frontier model by this count, with the strongest gains on conversational and social tasks. Its outputs are also more human-like in length, formatting, and word choice, and it transfers zero-shot to out-of-distribution user simulation on $\tau$-bench, nearly matching real users on reaction alignment (93.2 vs. 93.5). We further show that LLM-as-judge RL induces reward-hacking patterns, and that our detectors can mitigate them during post-training. Together, our findings suggest that behavioral foundation models require rethinking the LLM training paradigm. We release all artifacts to support future research.

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

SEDULity: A Proof-of-Learning Framework for Distributed and Secure Blockchains with Efficient Useful Work

arXiv:2512.13666v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The security and decentralization of Proof-of-Work (PoW) have been well-tested in existing blockchain systems. However, its tremendous energy waste has raised concerns about sustainability. Proof-of-Useful-Work (PoUW) aims to redirect the meaningless computation to meaningful tasks such as solving machine learning (ML) problems, giving rise to the branch of Proof-of-Learning (PoL). While previous studies have proposed various PoLs, they all, to some degree, suffer from security, decentralization, or efficiency issues. In this paper, we propose a PoL framework that trains ML models efficiently while maintaining blockchain security in a fully distributed manner. We name the framework SEDULity, which stands for a Secure, Efficient, Distributed, and Useful Learning-based blockchain system. Specifically, we encode the template block into the training process and design a useful function that is difficult to solve but relatively easy to verify, as a substitute for the PoW puzzle. We show that our framework is distributed, secure, and efficiently trains ML models. We further demonstrate that the proposed PoL framework can be extended to other types of useful work and design an incentive mechanism to incentivize task verification. We show theoretically that a rational miner is incentivized to train fully honestly with well-designed system parameters. Finally, we present simulation results to demonstrate the performance of our framework and validate our analysis.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Multifidelity-Augmented Gaussian Process Inputs for Surrogate Modeling from Scarce Data

arXiv:2603.22050v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Supervised machine learning describes the practice of fitting a parameterized model to labeled input-output data. Supervised machine learning methods have demonstrated promise in learning efficient surrogate models that can (partially) replace expensive high-fidelity models, making many-query analyses, such as optimization, uncertainty quantification, and inference, tractable. However, when training data must be obtained through the evaluation of an expensive model or experiment, the amount of training data that can be obtained is often limited, which can make learned surrogate models unreliable. In many engineering and scientific settings, cheaper low-fidelity models may be available, for example arising from simplified physics modeling or coarse grids. These models may be used to generate additional low-fidelity training data. The goal of multifidelity machine learning is to use both high- and low-fidelity training data to learn a surrogate model which is cheaper to evaluate than the high-fidelity model, but more accurate than any available low-fidelity model. This work proposes a new multifidelity training approach for Gaussian process regression which uses low-fidelity data to define additional features that augment the input space of the learned model. Similarly to cokriging estimators, the proposed approach conditions the high-fidelity surrogate model on the predictions of all available low-fidelity surrogate models, while benefiting from the computational efficiency of autoregressive estimators. Numerical experiments on several test problems demonstrate both increased predictive accuracy and reduced computational cost relative to the state of the art.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

A Deep Hypergraph Learning Model for Predicting Antimicrobial Combination Effects Across Bacterial Targets

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) creates an urgent need for efficient strategies to identify effective antibacterial combinations. Combination therapy, including antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) paired with conventional antibiotics, is a promising approach, but exhaustive experimental screening across drug pairs and bacterial targets is impractical. This study introduces a hybrid GCN-based hypergraph neural network (HGNN) for predicting antimicrobial-agent combination outcomes against bacterial targets. Each antimicrobial-agent-antimicrobial-agent-bacterium triplet is represented as a ternary hyperedge, enabling the model to learn context-dependent interaction patterns. The framework integrates SMILES-derived molecular graph embeddings for antimicrobial agents, including conventional antibiotics and AMPs, with taxonomy-derived bacterial representations. The prediction task was formulated as a three-class classification problem: synergy, antagonism, and non-interaction. The non-interaction class included experimentally verified indifferent records and synthetic presumed non-interaction triplets generated by negative sampling. Model development used drug-pair-grouped splitting, five-fold grouped cross-validation within the training/validation partition, and final evaluation on a held-out test set. On the held-out three-class test set, the selected GCN-based HGNN achieved an accuracy of 0.83, weighted F1-score of 0.84, macro F1-score of 0.80, and ROC-AUC of 0.95. Per-class evaluation showed accuracies of 0.80 for synergy, 0.92 for antagonism, and 0.85 for non-interaction. Pair-type analysis showed strong performance across AMP-AMP, AMP-conventional antibiotic, and conventional antibiotic-conventional antibiotic combinations. These findings suggest that hypergraph-based representation learning can support computational prioritization of antimicrobial combinations for experimental follow-up. Further studies will be needed to improve model interpretability and to perform prospective validation of predicted synergistic combinations.

09.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-13

Testing the reliability of AI-generated protein structures

Although AlphaFold2 and its competitors have demonstrated remarkable abilities to predict protein structure, more work is needed to explore the limitations of these methods. Here we investigated the reliability of AlphaFold2 and ColabFold by creating a set of realistic but false protein sequences, using ColabFold to predict their structure, and then asking how often the program produces a high-scoring structure for a sequence that does not represent a protein. We determined that AlphaFold2 has a very small but non-zero false positive rate, estimated here at approximately 1 in 435 if one uses a threshold pLDDT score of 70 to define positive predictions. We also discovered, serendipitously, that some high-scoring sequences in the human genome were not false positives, but instead were previously unknown and un-annotated pseudogenes. These latter findings indicate that some well-established human annotations of protein-coding genes may have incorrectly extended the 5-prime untranslated regions too far. They also suggest that the false positive rate of AlphaFold2 is low enough that almost any high-scoring structure, even in a noncoding region, is worthy of further investigation.

10.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Better data, better trees: GenBank-GISAID deduplication and source-specific artifact masking in viral genomics

GenBank and GISAID are the primary repositories for viral genomic data, but integrating records across them remains a challenge. The same sequence could be made available in both databases without any cross-reference linking the two entries. Consequently, there is no systematic way to identify this redundancy, which compromises the compilation of representative, non-redundant large-scale datasets. In parallel, the growth of viral genomic data has increased the risk of systematic technical artifacts introduced during sequencing or assembly. These artifacts can inflate substitution rate estimates and degrade temporal signal, biasing evolutionary rate estimates. To address both challenges, here we present a formal, reproducible workflow integrating two newly developed complementary tools: G2G matcher for cross-repository harmonization and Lab-Specific Bias FILTer (LSBFILT) for masking of laboratory-specific artifacts. Using the Eastern/Central/South African (ECSA) chikungunya virus lineage as a proof-of-concept, we demonstrate that our integrated workflow restores temporal signal and provides a robust, curated dataset for downstream phylodynamic analyses. Critically, restricting masking of homoplastic sites to specific sequences reduces the substitution rate estimate from an inflated 8.517 x 10e-4; to 5.078 x 10e-4; substitutions/site/year and increases the coefficient of determination (R2) of the root-to-tip regression analysis from 0.353 to 0.677. By enabling systematic cross-repository harmonization and source-specific artifact masking, we provide the molecular epidemiological community with scalable tools to reconcile fragmented genomic data and reduce technical biases, fostering more accurate and reproducible phylogenetic analysis. G2G matcher is available at https://github.com/andrezaleite/G2G-Matcher, and LSBFILT at https://github.com/khourious/LSBFILT.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

From Spectral Singularities to Multipartite Entanglement Scaling at Higher-Order Exceptional Points

arXiv:2606.24205v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Exceptional points (EPs) are non-Hermitian spectral singularities exhibiting fractional-power responses, yet their implications for multipartite entanglement of interacting quantum many-body systems remain largely unexplored. Here we develop a general framework that links higher-order non-Hermitian degeneracies to the scaling behavior of genuine multipartite entanglement in interacting identical-qubit systems. Permutation symmetry of the identical qubits decomposes the exponentially large Hilbert space into independent irreducible-representation sectors, thereby constraining the maximal EP order of $N$ qubits to $N+1$ rather than $2^N$. Near an $n$th-order EP, genuine multipartite entanglement inherits the spectral response and generically exhibits a fractional-power scaling under weak perturbations. Explicit examples show that conventional two-body interactions support third- and fourth-order EPs with the corresponding entanglement responses, whereas higher-order EPs with genuine multipartite-entangled coalesced states require additional independent interaction channels, such as three-body interactions. Our results establish a fundamental connection among non-Hermitian degeneracies, multipartite entanglement, and symmetry, extending higher-order EP physics from spectral singularities to genuine many-body quantum correlations.

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

In-Context Learning Is Provably Bayesian Inference: A Generalization Theory for Meta-Learning

arXiv:2510.10981v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper develops a finite-sample statistical theory for in-context learning (ICL), analyzed within a meta-learning framework that accommodates mixtures of diverse task types. We introduce a principled risk decomposition that separates the total ICL risk into two orthogonal components: Bayes Gap and Posterior Variance. The Bayes Gap quantifies how well the trained model approximates the Bayes-optimal in-context predictor. For a uniform-attention Transformer, we derive a non-asymptotic upper bound on this gap, which explicitly clarifies the dependence on the number of pretraining prompts and their context length. The Posterior Variance is a model-independent risk representing the intrinsic task uncertainty. Our key finding is that this term is determined solely by the difficulty of the true underlying task, while the uncertainty arising from the task mixture vanishes exponentially fast with only a few in-context examples. Together, these results provide a unified view of ICL: the Transformer selects the optimal meta-algorithm during pretraining and rapidly converges to the optimal algorithm for the true task at test time.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

The use of Peres lattices in periodically driven systems

arXiv:2606.20009v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We demonstrate the strength of the method of Peres lattices in periodically driven quantum systems. The method, which has previously been used mostly in stationary systems, enables us to efficiently detect resonances in the driven system, to monitor the onset of chaos, and to recognize critical properties of the Floquet modes. It also allows quick comparisons of the spectra of Floquet modes for various driving Hamiltonians and transparent tests of the iterative approximation techniques based on effective stationary Hamiltonians.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

MetaPlate: Counterfactual-Guided RAG-LLM Tool for Personalized Food Recommendation and Hyperglycemia Prevention

arXiv:2606.10120v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Postprandial hyperglycemia is a key risk factor for metabolic disorders; however, existing dietary guidance is often static, impractical, and insufficiently personalized, providing recommendations that are difficult to follow or not impactful. While recent advances leverage continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) and machine learning to predict glycemic responses, these approaches are largely predictive and lack actionable guidance. Moreover, recommendation systems are often misaligned with user goals and require extensive input. We present MetaPlate, a counterfactual explanation (CF) guided, context-aware decision-support framework that generates personalized meal recommendations to mitigate postprandial glucose excursions in healthy adults. MetaPlate integrates multimodal data, including CGM readings, wearable-derived physiological signals, and user-provided meal inputs from $25$ individuals to model pre-meal context. A machine learning model predicts glucose response, while a CF optimization module adjusts meal composition modifying macronutrient amounts to maintain glucose levels within a target range ($\leq 140$ mg/dL). An LLM-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) layer enhances interpretability by producing human-readable recommendations using constrained search of the USDA food database. We evaluate MetaPlate via a structured expert-in-the-loop assessment with registered dietitians (RDs), comparing performance before and after prompt refinement. Results show improvements in meal realism, portion suitability, and recommendation likelihood, with expert feedback indicating a shift from clinically implausible outputs to actionable, contextually appropriate recommendations. Our findings emphasize the importance of domain knowledge and structured constraints in LLM-driven systems and highlight the potential of MetaPlate as a real-time personalized dietary decision-support tool.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Efficient Implementation of a Single-Qutrit Gate Set via Coherent Control

arXiv:2507.06860v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Qutrits offer the potential for enhanced quantum computation by exploiting an enlarged Hilbert space. However, the synthesis of high-fidelity and fast qutrit gates, particularly for single qutrits, remains an ongoing challenge, as it involves overcoming intrinsic constraints in quantum platforms. Here, we develop a novel framework for the efficient implementation of a single-qutrit gate set via coherent control, leveraging SU(3) dynamics while obviating platform-specific constraints such as those arising from the selection rule. As a proof-of-principle demonstration, we realize 35-ns qutrit Hadamard and X gates using a superconducting transmon, achieving an average fidelity of 99.5\%, as verified by randomized benchmarking. We further demonstrate two paradigmatic quantum circuits, which can be naturally extended to scalable qudit algorithms for phase estimation and parity check. In addition, we propose an SU(3)-based decomposition strategy for an arbitrary single-qutrit gate and numerically demonstrate its substantial efficiency improvement over conventional SU(2)-based protocols. By addressing the challenge of efficiently implementing single-qutrit gates, our protocol paves the way for realizing high-performance qutrit processors in diverse quantum platforms.

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

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

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.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Efficient and simple Gibbs state preparation of the 2D toric code via duality to classical Ising chains

arXiv:2508.00126v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce the notion of polynomial-depth duality transformations, which relates two sets of operator algebras through a conjugation by a poly-depth quantum circuit, and make use of this to construct efficient Gibbs samplers for a variety of interesting quantum Hamiltonians as they are poly-depth dual to classical Hamiltonians. This is for example the case for the 2D toric code, which is demonstrated to be poly-depth dual to two decoupled classical Ising spin chains for any system size, and we give evidence that such dualities hold for a wide class of stabilizer Hamiltonians. Additionally, we extend the above notion of duality to Lindbladians in order to show that mixing times and other quantities such as the spectral gap or the modified logarithmic Sobolev inequality are preserved under duality.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

TCIA Radiology Image Processing for AI and Radiomics

We developed a standardized, reproducible preprocessing framework for computed tomography (CT) imaging data from multi-institutional repositories such The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA), enabling consistent radiomics and artificial intelligence (AI) analyses. Imaging data from TCGA-KIRC patients available on TCIA were used as a representative heterogeneous dataset characterized by variation in acquisition protocols, inconsistent metadata, and differing image quality. The proposed modular pipeline includes series filtering, DICOM-to-NIfTI conversion, orientation harmonization to a canonical coordinate system, voxel spacing normalization, intensity clipping and normalization, segmentation integration, and metadata validation, and is implemented in a reproducible, notebook-based framework compatible with common radiomics and deep learning workflows. This pipeline standardizes imaging data into analysis-ready volumes with consistent geometry, intensity distributions, and spatial alignment, reducing non-biological variability that can adversely affect radiomic feature stability and model performance. The modular design enables task-specific adaptation of individual preprocessing steps while maintaining overall consistency. Although demonstrated on TCIA, this framework is generalizable to other heterogeneous imaging datasets and provides a foundation for robust, large-scale computational imaging studies.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Rotational Symmetry based Object Pose Estimation from Point Clouds in the Absence of Known 3D Models

Object pose estimation is crucial to many industrial applications, with one example being automated spray painting using a robot. However, confidentiality concerns often limit access to high-quality 3D models, posing a significant challenge for point-cloud-based pose estimation. In such scenarios, rotational symmetry, a readily accessible characteristic of many industrial objects, can provide valuable prior information to facilitate pose estimation.In this paper, we propose a method that leverages the rotational symmetry commonly found in industrial objects to address the challenge caused by the absence of 3D models. The object pose is jointly estimated with point cloud refinement through an iterative optimization process. This optimization relies on a rotational symmetry constraint loss. To construct this loss, each 3D point is rotated according to the currently estimated pose, and multiple correspondences are identified using nearest-neighbor search by exploiting the rotational symmetry property. These correspondences are then used to compute the rotational symmetry constraint loss, which iteratively refines both the pose and the point cloud.By explicitly incorporating rotational symmetry into the optimization process, the proposed method achieves robust pose estimation and generalizes well across diverse object types. The proposed method is evaluated on a dataset specifically created for point clouds without known 3D models, consisting of four categories of synthetic objects and one real wheel hub collected from a production line. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves performance comparable to methods that rely on known 3D models.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Nickel and Dimed: How a Common Earth Element is Short-Changing Our Health

Nickel has been studied for a long time as an environmental contaminant but less so in its connection to population health. It does not announce itself as loudly as its transition metal brethren like mercury and cadmium, but its chemical properties permit it to be deleterious as a low-dose, chronic exposure, particularly among those with immune systems sensitized to it. There is a growing evidence base and vocabulary to discuss nickel's affect on health. However, in the U.S., there are not recent, reliable estimates of the share of the population with a nickel allergy, let alone how much nickel Americans are exposed to through their diet. This paper seeks to close this evidence gap by creating a new dataset of dietary nickel and other heavy metal exposure and assessing how high levels of dietary nickel exposure shape local demand for health care services. We use soil data from the U.S. Geological Survey and data on agricultural product transport from FoodFlows.org to create a county-level dietary nickel exposure index. We then use a large electronic health record database and double machine learning to estimate how demand for primary care services varies across levels of dietary nickel exposure. We find that counties with high nickel exposure experience an increase in the share of primary care office visits for symptoms highly suggestive of nickel poisoning. This result survives multiple hypothesis test corrections and placebo tests. Our research suggests that nickel has harmful effects on individual health whose exposure can be measured at a population level, and is shaping primary care across the U.S.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Exposing the Illusion of Erasure in Knowledge Editing for LLMs

arXiv:2606.23276v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Knowledge Editing (KE) has emerged as a frontier for updating specific facts in LLMs without costly retraining, but its reliability and underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. In this work, we examine KE from an adversarial elicitation perspective, revealing that edited knowledge is often not fully erased and continues to surface, with consistent failures observed across diverse model architectures. To explain this behavior, we conduct a mechanistic analysis of popular KE methods. We show that low-rank updates do not overwrite existing knowledge but instead redistribute it within the model's representation space. Furthermore, we find that these methods act as targeted suppression mechanisms that reduce the likelihood of expressing original facts, rather than removing them from the model. Analysis of the loss landscape reveals that edited knowledge lies in narrow, anisotropic regions that are highly sensitive to perturbations, making them highly vulnerable to indirect prompting and adversarial attacks. By exposing these profound architectural vulnerabilities, our work proves that KE algorithms are inherently bypassable and motivates a fundamental reevaluation of how we deploy post-hoc updates in several LLM applications.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

RedAct: Redacting Agent Capability Traces for Procedural Skill Protection

Users rely on execution traces to observe agent behavior, diagnose failures, and ensure accountability. These traces contain rich procedural detail, including tool invocations, intermediate decisions, and error-recovery logic. Yet this detail can expose private procedural skills, allowing downstream methods to recover key formulas, thresholds, and strategies without access to model weights or skill files. To quantify this risk and evaluate protection, we construct \textsc{CapTraceBench}, a benchmark of 75 specialized long-horizon tasks and 154 curated skills across seven domains. We also introduce \textsc{RedAct} https://github.com/XuShuwenn/RedAct, a protected trace release framework that localizes protected key information, rewrites traces while preserving verifier-critical evidence, and embeds behavioral watermarks for downstream provenance analysis. Across representative trace reuse methods, \textsc{RedAct} reduces normalized skill transfer (NST) from 44.7–67.1\% on raw traces to below the no-skill baseline, while preserving audit evidence. Its standalone behavioral watermarks reach 93.6–100.0\% true detection with a false alarm rate of at most 1.9\%. These results frame public agent traces as security interfaces and show that selective redaction can reduce procedural capability leakage without removing audit evidence.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

QALM: Escaping Local Minima via Interleaved Exploration and Exploitation in Quantum Circuit Optimization

arXiv:2606.16221v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum circuit optimizers face a fundamental limitation in how they tolerate temporary cost increases. At one extreme, greedy rule-based optimizers immediately apply any cost-reducing transformation, achieving high efficiency but quickly becoming trapped in local minima. At the other extreme, search-based optimizers accept cost-increasing moves to explore the circuit space and escape such minima. However, because search-based optimizers cannot determine within a reasonable time budget whether a given point is promising, that is, whether its neighborhood contains a deeper local minimum, they must blindly explore higher-cost regions. As a result, escaping the current basin to reach a promising point takes exponentially many steps. In this work, we show that this limitation can be overcome with a hybrid framework that interleaves the exhaustive exploration capabilities of search algorithms with the efficiency of rule-based optimization. We implement this framework as QALM, a novel optimizer designed to escape local minima without incurring the runtime penalties of pure search. Crucially, our results demonstrate that QALM does not merely strike a balance; it outperforms existing rule-based and search-based optimizers in circuit reduction rates while operating with the computational efficiency of rule-based systems. In a comprehensive evaluation across 248 circuits, QALM matches or exceeds the fidelity of the strongest baseline on 83.9% of these circuits, given the same time budget.

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

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

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

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

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

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.