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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Muse Spark Safety & Preparedness Report

arXiv:2606.12429v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Muse Spark is the latest large language model developed by Meta. In this report, we first present evaluations for catastrophic risk domains under Meta's Advanced AI Scaling Framework, along with the evidence that informed our launch decision. We then discuss additional considerations, such as Muse Spark's broader content safety and behavioral profile, that are relevant to overall safety but fall outside the catastrophic risk domains governed by the Framework. Our preparedness results covering Chemical and Biological, Cybersecurity, and Loss of Control risks assess Muse Spark's deployment within Meta AI as presenting acceptable levels of residual risks under our Advanced AI Scaling Framework. We conducted a broad set of evaluations targeting dual-use and high-risk capabilities across these catastrophic risk domains. Those evaluations identified elevated risks prior to mitigations, with Chemical and Biological capabilities assessed as likely reaching the "high risk" category under the Advanced AI Scaling Framework before safeguards were applied. We have implemented a multi-layered set of mitigations that address the identified risks, and Muse Spark demonstrates state-of-the-art refusal across a range of benchmarks related to hazardous workflows in chemistry and biology. We therefore release Muse Spark as the underlying model of Meta AI.

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

Learning a Sampling-Free Variational DNN Plugin from Tiny Training Sets to Refine OOD Segmentation With Uncertainty Estimation

Deep neural networks (DNNs) frequently fail to generalize to out-of-distribution (OOD) medical images because of variations in scanners and acquisition protocols. Retraining DNN models to address these distribution shifts is often impractical due to the high cost of acquiring and annotating new medical datasets. To address this, we introduce VarDeepPCA, a novel lightweight variational DNN framework designed to restore/refine degraded segmentation maps by leveraging intrinsic geometric priors. Unlike existing approaches that require target-domain data or extensive pre-training, our VarDeepPCA explicitly learns a distribution of valid anatomical geometries using only small in-distribution (ID) datasets. Theoretically, our novel variational learning framework leverages a reinterpretation of the softmax mapping to implicitly perform exact distribution modeling, thereby enabling computationally efficient, sampling-free learning and inference. This also enables VarDeepPCA to provide uncertainty estimates associated with its restored segmentation maps. We empirically validate our framework across 4 distinct clinical applications, using 14 publicly available datasets, involving segmentation of the myocardium, neuroretinal rim, prostate, and fetal head. Comparisons against 15 existing methods demonstrate that VarDeepPCA consistently restores segmentation maps produced by the existing methods on OOD data to (i) significantly improve anatomical plausibility of geometries and clinical utility of the segmentations, and (ii) significantly reduce errors, without needing any more training data than that used by existing methods.

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

RedactionBench

Large Language Models are increasingly applied to sensitive domains that require redaction of personally identifiable information (PII). While redacting PII is a data cleaning prerequisite, existing benchmarks conflate extraction mechanics with privacy semantics. A public phone number is not equivalent to a phone number in a medical record. Whether information constitutes a violation depends heavily on who holds it, why, and in what context, fundamentally differentiating redaction from simple entity recognition. Grounded in contextual integrity, we introduce RedactionBench, a manually annotated benchmark comprising 200 diverse documents across 11 domains, mostly seeded from real-world sources. We also introduce R-Score, a novel character-level metric that treats semantically similar redactions equally and nullifies shallow formatting choices, such as varying masking styles for phone numbers. Evaluations across Named Entity Recognition models, entity extraction Small Language Models, and frontier models equipped with agentic tools demonstrate that contextual redaction remains an unsolved problem. A human evaluation with over 80 users on RedactionBench reveals a stark dichotomy in privacy perceptions. Annotators show consensus with target labels for mandatory redactions (89.4 percent) and safe text preservations (94.1 percent), but fail to agree on contextual redactions (47.7 percent). This variance demonstrates the subjective nature of contextual privacy and motivates R-Score, which decouples contextual ambiguity from strict precision. We compare 35 models across families and report their performance in redacting PII. Finally, we release RedactionBench to establish a baseline for future privacy-preserving systems, hoping to inspire efficient model design and standardized evaluations.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

TwinBI: An Agentic Digital Twin for Efficient Augmented Interactions with Business Intelligence Dashboards

arXiv:2606.13731v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Business intelligence (BI) increasingly combines dashboard interaction with LLM-based assistance, but these two modes often fall out of sync during multi-step analysis. As users switch between direct dashboard manipulation and natural-language queries, it becomes difficult to preserve a consistent analytical state across filters, hierarchies, metrics, and chart context. We present TwinBI, an agentic digital-twin framework that couples an LLM-based agent system with an executable BI dashboard state. TwinBI unifies conversational interaction, dashboard manipulation, semantic grounding, and provenance tracking through a shared analytical state reconstructed from a unified interaction log. It also exposes artifacts such as schema views, SQL, logs, and an /insights command for state-grounded analytical summaries. We evaluate TwinBI in two complementary ways. In a controlled A/B benchmark with the same backbone agent, TwinBI improves exact-match accuracy from 43.3% to 63.3%, partial-credit accuracy from 48.3% to 70.8%, and substantially reduces timeout rate from 40.0% to 10.0% relative to Dashboard alone. In a usability study, participants benefited from the integrated dashboard-and-chat workflow, with high task accuracy, moderate workload, and favorable ratings for state-aware interaction mechanisms. These results suggest that TwinBI improves both agent-level analytical reliability and user-facing analytical support by turning visible dashboard state into richer actionable context. Our dataset and source code are available at: https://github.com/simonjisu/TwinBI

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Scalable Pairwise Kernel Learning with Stochastic Vec Trick

arXiv:2606.16979v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pairwise learning is a specialized form of supervised learning that focuses on predicting outcomes for pairs of objects. In this work, we introduce SPaiK, a new scalable kernel learning method tailored for pairwise settings. Our approach preserves the expressive power of kernel methods while substantially reducing computational and memory requirements. The key innovation is the stochastic generalized vec trick (sGVT), a stochastic extension of the sparse Kronecker product multiplication algorithm, which enables efficient large-scale training with pairwise kernels. By incorporating sGVT, SPaiK makes it possible to apply kernel-based pairwise learning to datasets of a size previously out of reach. We evaluate the performance of SPaiK on seven real-world drug-target affinity datasets and compare the results with state-of-the-art methods in pairwise learning.

06.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

On McDiarmid's Inequality under Dependence via Approximate Tensorization of Entropy

arXiv:2606.12720v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We argue that dependent versions of McDiarmid's inequality are a useful but underutilized tool in mathematical statistics, learning theory and theoretical computer science. To make this point, we first highlight that approximate tensorization of entropy (ATE) implies McDiarmid's via the Entropy Method. Second, we derive McDiarmid's inequality for non-isotropic Gaussian random vectors $X \sim \mathcal N(\mu, \Sigma)$ through ATE with a constant of the order of the condition number of $\Sigma$. We both independently obtain this ATE through a simple application of stochastic localization and also discuss how a more general ATE for the Gibbs sampler due to Ascolani et al., 2026 generalizes McDiarmid's-like concentration to strongly log-concave and log-smooth probability measures. We then apply the resulting concentration inequalities to resolve a question on the concentration of $\operatorname{sign}(X)$ posed by Simone Bombari, investigate Erdős-Rényi graphs under dependence and prove a Dvoretzky-Kiefer-Wolfowitz-type inequality for observations from a joint measure fulfilling ATE and continuous marginal CDFs. For the class of strongly log-concave and log-smooth measures, this result improves upon a prior Dvoretzky-Kiefer-Wolfowitz-type inequality for non-i.i.d. observations due to Bobkov and Götze, 2010, by establishing the expected $1/\sqrt{n}$-rate of convergence under weak dependence instead of $n^{-1/3}$.

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

WorldOlympiad: Can Your World Model Survive a Triathlon?

We introduce WorldOlympiad, a benchmark for diagnosing video-based world models across physical faithfulness, geometric consistency, and interaction fidelity. While existing benchmarks often focus on visual quality, semantic alignment, or short-term temporal coherence, they provide limited insight into whether generated videos obey physical rules, preserve coherent 3D structure, and sustain controllable interactions over long horizons. To address this gap, WorldOlympiad decomposes world-model evaluation into three complementary dimensions. The physical track uses object segmentation and MLLM-as-judge to assess whether generated videos follow interpretable rules in mechanics, thermal phenomena, and material properties. The geometry track reconstructs generated videos with Gaussian splatting and evaluates structural consistency, cross-view coherence, and camera-trajectory alignment. The interaction track assesses whether generated rollouts follow complex action prompts and maintain smooth, coherent transitions across consecutive video chunks. WorldOlympiad further covers three major downstream scenarios, including gaming, robotics, and general real-world videos, capturing diverse challenges from interactive control and embodied manipulation to open-domain motion and camera dynamics. Together, these tracks and scenarios form a scalable and interpretable evaluation suite that exposes failure modes beyond generic video quality. Experiments on state-of-the-art models reveal substantial gaps in physical reasoning, 3D consistency, and long-horizon interaction, underscoring the need for more structured evaluation protocols for generative world models.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

DSP-SLAM++: A Unified Framework for Multi-Class, High-Fidelity Object SLAM in the Wild

Existing object-aware SLAM systems force a trade-off between real-time performance, multi-class support, and the generation of high-fidelity, semantically coherent object models. To address this trade-off, we present DSP-SLAM++, which extends the DSP-SLAM framework with an asynchronous mapping pipeline for real-time performance and dedicated sensor fusion adaptations for a monocular fisheye-LiDAR suite. Experiments demonstrate that our system generates fine-grained, geometrically-complete shapes for multiple object classes while eliminating severe mapping thread bottlenecks by reducing maximum object processing latency by up to 70\% compared to the state-of-the-art baseline, enabling robust, real-time performance on a challenging 25 Hz multi-class datasets. This work makes high-fidelity, multi-class object SLAM more practical for real-world applications like autonomous driving and robotic manipulation by enabling its use on platforms with common fisheye-LiDAR sensor setups. The open-source code is available at: [github.com/AUBVRL/DSP-SLAMpp].

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

From 2D Grids to 1D Tokens: Reforming Shared Representations for Multimodal Image Fusion

Multimodal image fusion aims to integrate complementary information from different modalities into a fused image that preserves rich local details while maintaining globally consistent appearance. Existing approaches build shared representations on 2D feature grids, which excel at modeling local structures but offer limited leverage over image-level global appearance factors. To balance these objectives, we introduce a compact 1D token interface based on a frozen pretrained image tokenizer for modeling non-local appearance/base factors. Rather than using the tokenizer as a reconstruction backbone, our design uses the 1D token space as a global carrier while retaining the 2D spatial pathway for local structure restoration. Specifically, we introduce Selective Token Editing (STE), which sparsely updates/replaces a small set of critical tokens, providing a lightweight mechanism to steer global appearance coherence while keeping the fusion backbone unchanged and avoiding extra losses. Experiments on four commonly used benchmarks show that our method achieves the best overall performance, with consistent, multi-metric improvements in both global coherence and local fidelity. Project page: https://zju-xyc.github.io/1D-Fusion-Project-Page/

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

NeuroClaw Technical Report

Agentic artificial intelligence systems promise to accelerate scientific workflows, but neuroimaging poses unique challenges: heterogeneous modalities (sMRI, fMRI, dMRI, EEG), long multi-stage pipelines, and persistent reproducibility risks. To address this gap, we present NeuroClaw, a domain-specialized multi-agent research assistant for executable and reproducible neuroimaging research. NeuroClaw operates directly on raw neuroimaging data across formats and modalities, grounding decisions in dataset semantics and BIDS metadata so users need not prepare curated inputs or bespoke model code. The platform combines harness engineering with end-to-end environment management, including pinned Python environments, Docker support, automated installers for common neuroimaging tools, and GPU configuration. In practice, this layer emphasizes checkpointing, post-execution verification, structured audit traces, and controlled runtime setup, making toolchains more transparent while improving reproducibility and auditability. A three-tier skill/agent hierarchy separates user-facing interaction, high-level orchestration, and low-level tool skills to decompose complex workflows into safe, reusable units. Alongside the NeuroClaw framework, we introduce NeuroBench, a system-level benchmark for executability, artifact validity, and reproducibility readiness. Across multiple multimodal LLMs, NeuroClaw-enabled runs yield consistent and substantial score improvements compared with direct agent invocation. Project homepage: https://cuhk-aim-group.github.io/NeuroClaw/index.html

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Aligning Human-AI-Interaction Trust for Mental Health Support: Survey and Position for Multi-Stakeholders

Building trustworthy AI systems for mental health support is a shared priority across stakeholders from multiple disciplines. However, "trustworthy" remains loosely defined and inconsistently operationalized. AI research often focuses on technical criteria (e.g., robustness, explainability, and safety), while therapeutic practitioners emphasize therapeutic fidelity (e.g., appropriateness, empathy, and long-term user outcomes). To bridge the fragmented landscape, we propose a three-layer trust framework, covering human-oriented, AI-oriented, and interaction-oriented trust, integrating the viewpoints of key stakeholders (e.g., practitioners, researchers, regulators). Using this framework, we systematically review existing AI-driven research in mental health domain and examine evaluation practices for ``trustworthy'' ranging from automatic metrics to clinically validated approaches. We highlight critical gaps between what NLP currently measures and what real-world mental health contexts require, and outline a research agenda for building socio-technically aligned and genuinely trustworthy AI for mental health support.

12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Exact Label Recovery in Euclidean Random Graphs

arXiv:2407.11163v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we propose a family of label recovery problems on weighted Euclidean random graphs. The vertices of a graph are embedded in $\mathbb{R}^d$ according to a Poisson point process, and are assigned to a discrete community label. Our goal is to infer the vertex labels, given edge weights whose distributions depend on the vertex labels as well as their geometric positions. Our general model provides a geometric extension of popular graph and matrix problems, including submatrix localization and $\mathbb{Z}_2$-synchronization, and includes the Geometric Stochastic Block Model (proposed by Sankararaman and Baccelli) as a special case. We study the fundamental limits of exact recovery of the vertex labels. Under a mild distinctness of distributions assumption, we determine the information-theoretic threshold for exact label recovery, in terms of a Chernoff-Hellinger divergence criterion. Impossibility of recovery below the threshold is proven by a unified analysis using a Cramér lower bound. Achievability above the threshold is proven via an efficient two-phase algorithm, where the first phase computes an almost-exact labeling through a local propagation scheme, while the second phase refines the labels. The information-theoretic threshold is dictated by the performance of the so-called genie estimator, which decodes the label of a single vertex given all the other labels. This shows that our proposed models exhibit the local-to-global amplification phenomenon.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Sustainability assessment using multimodal AI agents

arXiv:2507.17012v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reducing the rapidly growing environmental impact of the computing industry requires assessing the emissions of electronics at scale. However, a traditional life cycle assessment (LCA) of an electronic device, which maps materials and processes to environmental impacts, often requires proprietary or unavailable data. Here, we reimagine conventional sustainability assessment by introducing a multimodal multi-agent AI system that emulates the collaborative process between LCA professionals and stakeholders (such as product managers and engineers) to automatically estimate the carbon footprint of electronic devices. The agents iteratively construct a complete life-cycle inventory by leveraging a structured data abstraction and software tools that mine information from the public internet, including repair communities and government regulatory databases. This reduces data gaps and data collection from weeks or months of expert time to under one minute. The system can calculate carbon footprint within 19% of expert LCAs with zero proprietary data (typical of the variation between human LCAs). We also show that by encoding domain-specific knowledge, environmental impact estimation can be reframed as a data-driven prediction task, in which both unknown products and emission factors are represented as weighted combinations of similar ones with known emissions.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Correct When Paired, Wrong When Split: Decoupling and Editing Modality-Specific Neurons in MLLMs

Although Knowledge Editing provides an efficient mechanism for updating the knowledge of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), we find that current paradigms still suffer from an important yet remain underexplored issue : editing decoupling failure, where entity-related knowledge can be updated when the model is triggered by multimodal inputs (text–image query pairs), however, it often reverts to outdated pre-edit facts when the paired inputs are split into unimodal ones. Our in-depth empirical analysis reveals that the entity knowledge in MLLMs is not stored as a unified representation, but is instead distributed across disentangled modality-specific pathways. As a result, updates biased toward multimodal queries fail to propagate effectively to unimodal circuits. To bridge this gap, we propose DECODE, which explicitly disentangles and localizes modality-specific neuron groups for targeted knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DECODE consistently achieves effective knowledge updates under different modality triggers, thereby mitigating editing decoupling failures.

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

Mitigating Anchoring Bias in LLM-Based Agents for Energy-Efficient 6G Autonomous Networks

arXiv:2606.18272v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents an autonomous agentic resource negotiation framework designed to enable zero-touch network slicing in 6G architectures using Large Language Model (LLM) agents. While LLMs offer powerful reasoning capabilities, we demonstrate that such agents inherently suffer from anchoring bias, rigidly adhering to initial heuristic proposals and causing severe network over-provisioning. To systematically mitigate this cognitive bias, we propose a novel randomized anchoring strategy modeled via a Truncated 3-Parameter Weibull distribution. This mathematically bounded approach seamlessly integrates with burst-aware Digital Twins (DTs) employing Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) to rigorously guarantee strict Service Level Agreement (SLA) tail-latencies. To validate our methodology, we introduce and prove the Bimodal Constraint-Avoidance Utility Theorem, demonstrating that while feasible negotiations follow classical convex bounds, highly constrained scenarios undergo a phase transition governed by an inverse rational decay envelope. Empirical results generated using a locally hosted 1B-parameter model (\texttt{otel-llm-1b-it}) confirm these dual-regime bounds. Our cognitive de-biasing successfully dismantles rigid negotiation patterns, forcing agents into active exploration to safely ride SLA boundaries and boost system energy savings up to 25\%. Crucially, the lightweight 1B LLM achieves sub-second inference latencies (0.95s mean), ensuring our multi-agent framework is compatible with the operational timescales of the O-RAN non-Real-Time RAN Intelligent Controller (non-RT RIC)\footnote{Our source code is available for non-commercial use at https://github.com/HatimChergui.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

IgG2 Galactosylation is related to higher antibody dependent enhancement for dengue in cross-reactive antibodies from Sars-CoV-2

Cross-reactive antibodies against dengue virus are known to cause antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE) of infection or disease severity under specific conditions. In our previous study, we showed that primary immunization with the COVID-19 vaccine induces induces cross-reactive IgG causing ADE against dengue. In the present study, we investigated the influence of IgG Fc-glycosylation (analyzed by LC-MS/MS) on ADE mediated by cross-reactive IgG against dengue from IgG against SARS-CoV-2. We found a clear correlation between anti-DENV2 E IgG2 galactosylation and the ADE capacity of cross-reactive IgG against dengue in individuals vaccinated against COVID-19. IgG2 sialylation increased over time; however, it was not correlated with ADE capacity. This phenomenon was restricted to IgG2, whereas anti-DENV2 E IgG1 Fc-glycosylation remained stable after COVID-19 vaccination.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Quantization Robustness of Monotone Operator Equilibrium Networks

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.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Tensorion: A Tensor-Aware Generalization of the Muon Optimizer

Common first-order optimizers, such as Adam, implicitly treat each parameter block as an unstructured vector, which disregards the multilinear weight structure present in many modern machine learning models. Recent work has shown that exploiting matrix structure can improve optimization dynamics. A notable example is Muon, which performs steepest descent under the spectral norm constraint. We take the next step and introduce Tensorion, a tensor-aware optimizer that extends Muon's constrained optimization perspective from matrices to higher-order tensors. Tensorion is built around a linear minimization oracle (LMO) over a tensor norm ball. The norm is carefully chosen to balance two objectives: tightly bounding the tensor spectral norm, while still keeping the LMO tractable. This LMO becomes computable because it reduces to operations on adaptively selected unfolding matrices. Notably, when restricted to order-2 tensors (i.e., matrices), Tensorion recovers Muon exactly. Experiments on tensor-based computer vision problems suggest that Tensorion can offer improved convergence behavior and more stable gradient updates compared with Adam-based and existing tensor-aware baselines in the evaluated settings.

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

Machine Learning-based Two-Stage Graph Sparsification for the Travelling Salesman Problem

arXiv:2604.20236v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: High-performance TSP solvers such as Lin-Kernighan-Helsgaun (LKH) search within a candidate graph – a small subset of edges pre-selected for the solver – rather than over the complete graph. The two leading sparsification heuristics, $\alpha$-Nearest and POPMUSIC, each fall short of the density-coverage balance: $\alpha$-Nearest is dense with stable recall, while POPMUSIC is sparser but its recall degrades with scale. Their union closes the recall gap while remaining far below the complete graph in density, leaving room for further reduction. Existing learning-based sparsifiers score edges on the complete graph, an approach that is expensive and largely limited to Euclidean instances. We propose a two-stage method that inverts this logic. Stage~1 takes the union of $\alpha$-Nearest and POPMUSIC, achieving near-perfect recall at ${\sim}6N$ edges. Crucially, the union annotates each edge with its source provenance – whether it was endorsed by $\alpha$-Nearest, POPMUSIC, or both. Stage~2 trains a lightweight classifier on these annotated edges and prunes the lowest-scoring ones. Because dual-source edges are almost always optimal, the learning problem reduces to filtering the single-source subset – a substantially easier task than classifying all $O(N^2)$ edges from scratch. Across four distance types, five spatial distributions, and problem sizes from 50 to 500, the pipeline reduces candidate-graph density by $37$-$47\%$ while retaining ${\geq}99.69\%$ of optimal-tour edges, and matches or exceeds the coverage of recent Euclidean-only neural sparsifiers at lower density at TSP500.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Preferences of a Voice-First Nation: Large-Scale Pairwise Evaluation and Preference Analysis for TTS in Indian Languages

Crowdsourced pairwise evaluation has emerged as a scalable approach for assessing foundation models. However, applying it to Text to Speech(TTS) introduces high variance due to linguistic diversity and multidimensional nature of speech perception. We present a controlled multidimensional pairwise evaluation framework for multilingual TTS that combines linguistic control with perceptually grounded annotation. Using 5K+ native and code-mixed sentences across 10 Indic languages, we evaluate 7 state-of-the-art TTS systems and collect over 120K pairwise comparisons from over 1900 native raters. In addition to overall preference, raters provide judgments across 6 perceptual dimensions: intelligibility, expressiveness, voice quality, liveliness, noise, and hallucinations. Using Bradley-Terry modeling, we construct a multilingual leaderboard, interpret human preference using SHAP analysis and analyze leaderboard reliability alongside model strengths and trade-offs across perceptual dimensions.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Reliability and construct validity of the Technology Device Interference Scale in a sample of children and parents

There is increasing interest in parent-child technoference: the interference with personal interactions caused by technology devices. This study examined the reliability and construct validity of the Technology Device Interference Scale (TDIS) to measure technoference in a sample of Canadian parents and children. Parents (n=883) and children (n=376) were recruited from clinical and community settings and completed the TDIS for their own and family member technoference over three timepoints (T1=2023, T2=2024, T3=2025). TDIS internal consistency, test-retest reliability, and construct validity were assessed using Cronbachs alpha, intraclass correlation coefficient, and confirmatory factor analysis, respectively. The TDIS showed good internal consistency and adequate to good construct validity when used by children to report on their own technoference (all >.70; CFI>.95, TLI>.95, RMSEA.70; CFI>.95, TLI>.90, RMSEA[≤].11). The TDIS had low to acceptable internal consistency and poor model fit for parent report of their own technoference ( range: .63 - .66; CFI

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Fundamental limit on the heralded single photons' spectral brightness

arXiv:2510.24439v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Heralded single photons (HSPs) are the versatile flying qubits in quantum communication and networks due to their ability to remove the randomness of arrival time and enhance the transmission reliability. As the generation rate of HSPs increases or their linewidth narrows, both of which are desirable for quantum information processing, the fundamental limit of spectral brightness (SB), defined as the generation rate per unit linewidth, remains unclear. To examine the existence and value of such a limit, we systematically studied the SB together with the cross-correlation function, or equivalently, the signal-to-background ratio (SBR). We ultimately derive an upper bound on SB that applies universally to all types of HSP sources. A newly defined quantity governs this limit, the quality factor, which is the product of SBR and effective SB. The quality factor indicates how closely an HSP source approaches an ideal noise-free source. Furthermore, by employing an HSP source based on hot atomic vapor, we achieved an SB of $(8.5\pm0.3)$$\times$$10^5$ pairs/s/MHz and a quality factor of $0.73\pm0.02$ under the single-photon criterion. Both values represent the highest reported performance to date among all HSP platforms. These results provide a unified benchmark for evaluating and optimizing HSP sources.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Privacy-Aware Visual Language Models

As Visual Language Models (VLMs) become increasingly embedded in everyday applications, ensuring they can recognise and appropriately handle privacy-sensitive content is thus essential to protect users. To this end, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of twelve state-of-the-art VLMs and identify limitations in their understanding of visual privacy. However, existing privacy-related datasets often suffer from label inconsistencies, limiting their reliability. To address this, we introduce two compact, high-quality benchmarks, PrivBench and PrivBench-H, that focus on commonly recognised visual privacy categories aligned with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Additionally, we present PrivTune, an instruction-tuning dataset specifically curated to improve privacy sensitivity. We obtain multiple Privacy VLMs by fine-tuning off-the-shelf VLMs on only a few hundred samples from PrivTune, which leads to substantial gains on all benchmarks, surpassing even GPT-4, while maintaining strong performance on other tasks. Our findings show that privacy-awareness in VLMs can be substantially improved with minimal data and careful dataset design, setting the stage for safer, more privacy-aligned AI systems.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Conflict-Aware Retriever Editing for Knowledge Injection Attacks on LLM-Based RAG Systems

arXiv:2606.18310v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Injecting malicious knowledge into retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems can manipulate retrieved evidence and mislead downstream generation, posing a serious security threat for AI applications. Existing RAG injection attacks mainly rely on manipulating external knowledge bases, such as crafting malicious corpus. However, the synthetic text crafted by such data-centric methods could be detectable, leading to the failure of attacks. Beyond corpus manipulation, open-source retrievers are increasingly exposing RAG systems to model-centric attacks. In this paper, we propose conflict-aware retriever editing, i.e., CAREATTACK, a model-centric retriever attack framework for malicious knowledge injection in RAG. Specifically, CAREATTACK consists two stages of conflict-aware retriever editing and attack-preserving anchor repair. Conflict-aware retriever editing adapts efficient closed-form parameter editing to the dense retrieval model, promoting malicious knowledge above benign competing passages and resolving potential parameter conflicts through graph-based conflict detection and parameter editing projection. Then, attack-preserving anchor repair performs lightweight calibration on the edited retriever to further eliminate the impact on non-target prompts while preserving the attack effectiveness for target prompts. We instantiate CAREATTACK on Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B and BGE-M3, and conduct evaluation on three benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate our method substantially promote malicious passages into the retrieved knowledge of RAG systems and can perform attacks for batches of target prompts and passages, given the access of retrieval model parameters. Since most RAG systems are built upon open-source retrieval models, this work reveals a practical attack surface in RAG systems. Codes are public accessible at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CareAttack-3F1C.