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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Tractable Reasoning and Conjunctive Query Answering for Defeasible DL-Lite under Rational Closure

arXiv:2606.24279v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In Description Logics (DLs), reasoning under Rational Closure (RC) is a well-known and widely accepted non-monotonic formalism to handle defeasible knowledge. In this paper, we study the application of RC to the core and horn variants of the DL-Lite family of lightweight description logics. We analyze both entitlement (instance checking) and Conjunctive Query (CQ) answering under RC. Our main contribution is providing a plug-in architecture that builds upon existing standard classical reasoners, establishing that reasoning and CQ answering under RC for DL-Lite can be done efficiently with minimal computational overhead.

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

One-Step Generalization Ratio Guided Optimization for Domain Generalization

arXiv:2606.16301v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Domain Generalization (DG) aims to train models that generalize to unseen target domains but often overfit to domain-specific features, known as undesired correlations. Gradient-based DG methods typically guide gradients in a dominant direction but often inadvertently reinforce spurious correlations. Recent work has employed dropout to regularize overconfident parameters, but has not explicitly adjusted gradient alignment or ensured balanced parameter updates. We propose GENIE (Generalization-ENhancing Iterative Equalizer), a novel optimizer that leverages the One-Step Generalization Ratio (OSGR) to quantify each parameter's contribution to loss reduction and assess gradient alignment. By dynamically equalizing OSGR via a preconditioning factor, GENIE prevents a small subset of parameters from dominating optimization, thereby promoting domain-invariant feature learning. Theoretically, GENIE balances convergence contribution and gradient alignment among parameters, achieving higher OSGR while retaining SGD's convergence rate. Empirically, it outperforms existing optimizers and enhances performance when integrated with various DG and single-DG methods.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

A Marketplace for AI-Generated Adult Content and Deepfakes

arXiv:2601.09117v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Generative AI systems increasingly enable the production of highly realistic synthetic media. Civitai, a popular community-driven platform for AI-generated content, operates a monetized feature called Bounties, which allows users to commission the generation of content in exchange for payment. To examine how this mechanism is used and what content it incentivizes, we conduct a longitudinal analysis of all publicly available bounty requests collected over a 14-month period following the platform's launch. We find that the bounty marketplace is dominated by tools that let users steer AI models toward content they were not trained to generate. At the same time, requests for content that is "Not Safe For Work" are widespread and have increased steadily over time, now comprising a majority of all bounties. Participation in bounty creation is uneven, with 20% of requesters accounting for roughly half of requests. Requests for "deepfake" - media depicting identifiable real individuals - exhibit a higher concentration than other types of bounties. A nontrivial subset of these requests involves explicit deepfakes despite platform policies prohibiting such content. These bounties disproportionately target female celebrities, revealing a pronounced gender asymmetry in social harm. Together, these findings show how monetized, community-driven generative AI platforms can produce gendered harms, raising questions about consent, governance, and enforcement.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Search Discipline for Long-Horizon Research Agents

arXiv:2606.11522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autoresearch agents now propose, evaluate, and select scientific candidates against a metric, and that metric is usually an aggregate reduced over a heterogeneous space of regions, slices, or cohorts. We show that when scientific validity lives in that disaggregated structure, the aggregate can rank the wrong candidate first. The headline number improves while the structure underneath inverts, so a decision made on the number accepts a candidate that quietly breaks the model. The failure is not domain-specific. It appears wherever a candidate's validity is multi-dimensional but its verifier is a single reduction. We demonstrate the inversion on a fire-model task in the Ecosystem Demography model. The highest-scoring candidate and a slightly lower one are within noise of each other on global score, yet the top-scoring one collapses the protected boreal regions while the other preserves them. What separates them is the per-region behavior, not the headline number. This decision should not be left to the agent that produced the candidates. The agent optimizing the score is the last party likely to catch the score being wrong, and a prompt has no remaining turn once the agent has stopped. We move the decision to an external control loop that audits each candidate on its disaggregated behavior and acts after the agent has decided. It can demote a candidate the agent would have accepted, and it can reopen a run the agent had declared finished. Our contribution is the inversion finding itself, and a search-discipline protocol that decides on reviewable candidate-effect evidence instead of the score.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

FreeStory: Training-Free Character Consistency for Free-Form Visual Storytelling

Visual storytelling aims to generate image sequences that are both aligned with narrative prompts and consistent in character appearance across images. Recent training-free methods improve character consistency by reusing attention features, but rely on structured prompts where full character descriptions are repeated in every prompt. This assumption simplifies the task but deviates from natural storytelling, where characters are typically introduced once and later referred to using pronouns or type-based expressions. We propose FreeStory, a training-free framework that reformulates character consistency under free-form prompts as entity-grounded feature reuse. Our method associates reference mentions with their corresponding character descriptions and combines dynamic character masks, correspondence-aware feature matching, key-value injection, and query blending to preserve identity while retaining generation diversity. We also introduce FreeStoryBench, a benchmark for this setting that includes both single- and multi-character stories. Experiments show that FreeStory achieves state-of-the-art performance among training-free methods on structured benchmarks and stronger overall consistency over baselines under free-form prompts.

06.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-25

The relationship between the transition functions of the labeled and unlabeled versions of the infinitely-many-neutral-alleles diffusion model

作者:

arXiv:2606.06739v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The transition function of the unlabeled infinitely-many-neutral-alleles diffusion model, as expressed by Zhou (2015), is derived from the transition function of the labeled infinitely-many-neutral-alleles diffusion model, slightly simplifying the derivation by Feng (2010).

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

HiT-JEPA: A Hierarchical Self-supervised Trajectory Embedding Framework for Similarity Computation

The representation of urban trajectory data plays a critical role in effectively analyzing spatial movement patterns. Despite considerable progress, the challenge of designing trajectory representations that can capture diverse and complementary information remains an open research problem. Existing methods struggle in incorporating trajectory fine-grained details and high-level summary in a single model, limiting their ability to attend to both long-term dependencies while preserving local nuances. To address this, we propose HiT-JEPA (Hierarchical Interactions of Trajectory Semantics via a Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture), a unified framework for learning multi-scale urban trajectory representations across semantic abstraction levels. HiT-JEPA adopts a three-layer hierarchy that progressively captures point-level fine-grained details, intermediate patterns, and high-level trajectory abstractions, enabling the model to integrate both local dynamics and global semantics in one coherent structure. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets for trajectory similarity computation show that HiT-JEPA's hierarchical design yields richer, multi-scale representations. Code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/HiT-JEPA.

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Mixing Times for the Facilitated Exclusion Process

arXiv:2402.18999v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The facilitated simple exclusion process (FEP) is a one-dimensional exclusion process with a dynamical constraint. We establish bounds on the mixing time of the FEP on the segment, with closed boundaries, and the circle. The FEP on these spaces exhibits transient states that, if the macroscopic density of particles is at least $1/2$, the process will eventually exit to reach an ergodic component. If the macroscopic density is less than $1/2$ the process will hit an absorbing state. We show that the symmetric FEP (SFEP) on the segment $\{1,\ldots,N\}$, with $k>N/2$ particles, has mixing time of order $N^{2}\log(N-k)$ and exhibits the pre-cutoff phenomenon. For the asymmetric FEP (AFEP) on the segment, we show that there exists initial conditions for which the hitting time of the ergodic component is exponentially slow in the number of holes $N-k$. In particular, when $N-k$ is large enough, the hitting time of the ergodic component determines the mixing time. For the SFEP on the circle of size $N$, and macroscopic particle density $\rho \in(1/2,1)$, we establish bounds on the mixing time of order $N^{2}\log N$ for the process restricted to its ergodic component. We also give an upper bound on the hitting time of the ergodic component of order $N^{2}\log N$ for a large class of initial conditions. The proofs rely on couplings with exclusion processes (both open and closed boundaries) via a novel lattice path (height function) construction of the FEP.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

MentalMARBERT: Domain-Adaptive Pre-training and Two-Stage Fine-Tuning for Arabic Mental Health Disorders Detection

Detecting mental health disorders from Arabic social media text remains challenging due to dialectal variation, informal language, limited high-quality annotated resources, and severe class imbalance. While English mental health natural language processing (NLP) has progressed substantially, Arabic multi-class disorder classification remains insufficiently studied. This study proposes a two-phase framework for Arabic mental health text classification. In phase 1, three Arabic pre-trained language models, AraBERT, CAMeLBERT, and MARBERT, undergo Domain-Adaptive and Task-Adaptive Pretraining (DAPT and TAPT) using a large-scale corpus of unlabeled Arabic mental health tweets. The adapted models are evaluated under a unified protocol to identify the most effective backbone model. In phase 2, the selected model is assessed across four configurations combining single-stage and hierarchical two-stage classification architectures with full fine-tuning and Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). To support this study, we constructed a novel annotated Arabic mental health dataset comprising 50,670 tweets across six categories, with strong inter annotator agreement (Krippendorff's Alpha = 0.733, average pairwise agreement = 0.797). Experimental results show that the domain-adapted MARBERT (MentalMARBERT) achieves statistically significant improvements over baseline models in both accuracy and macro-F1. The hierarchical two-stage architecture combined with full fine-tuning achieves the best overall performance, reaching a macro-F1 of 0.861 and an accuracy of 0.877. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of domain-specific adaptive pretraining and hierarchical classification for Arabic mental health disorder detection.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

On the Geometry of On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2606.07082v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) is increasingly used to improve large language model reasoning, but its training dynamics remain poorly understood. We characterize the trajectory of OPD updates in parameter space and compare it with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). A suite of parameter-space diagnostics consistently places OPD in a relaxed off-principal regime: compared with SFT, its updates affect fewer weights and avoid principal directions more strongly, while compared with RLVR, they remain less tightly constrained. Beyond this static localization, OPD exhibits subspace locking: its cumulative updates rapidly enter a narrow low-dimensional channel. Constraining training to the update subspace formed early in training preserves OPD performance but substantially degrades SFT, indicating that the locked subspace is functionally sufficient for OPD. Control experiments further show that sparsifying the update tokens and shifting rollout generation off-policy preserve the rank dynamics, whereas mixing the OPD objective with RLVR changes them. Overall, these results suggest that OPD is not merely an intermediate point between SFT and RLVR, but induces its own update geometry in parameter space.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Waning protection of long-acting RSV monoclonal antibodies in infants: a Bayesian analysis of clesrovimab and nirsevimab trial data

Clesrovimab and nirsevimab are long-acting monoclonal antibodies used to prevent respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) disease in infants, but waning protection in the first year of life is incompletely characterised. We applied a published Bayesian inference framework to clesrovimab and pooled nirsevimab trial data to estimate time-varying efficacy against medically attended RSV lower respiratory tract infection (LRTI) and RSV-associated hospitalisation, accounting for differences in placebo-arm event timing between trials. Estimated clesrovimab efficacy declined from 60.7% (95% CrI: 46.3-72.6) shortly after dosing to 38.3% (8.6-52.9) at six months against medically attended RSV LRTI, and from 87.1% (71.2-96.2) to 49.6% (10.4-70.7) against RSV-associated hospitalisation. For nirsevimab, corresponding estimates declined from 86.9% (75.4-95.0) to 53.8% (27.4-69.7) against LRTI, and from 77.5% (52.6-91.8) to 49.7% (15.7-68.3) against hospitalisation. After accounting for differences in RSV exposure timing and LRTI endpoint definitions between trials, we found no evidence of a difference in efficacy or waning between clesrovimab and nirsevimab.

12.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Gene ancestries reveal diverse microbial associations during eukaryogenesis

The origin of eukaryotes remains a central enigma in biology1. Continuing debates agree on the pivotal role of a symbiosis between an alphaproteobacterium and an Asgard archaeon2,3. However, the nature, timing and contributions of other potential bacterial partners4–6 and the role of interactions with viruses7–9 remain contentious. To address these questions, we used advanced phylogenomic approaches and comprehensive datasets spanning the known diversity of cellular life and viruses. Our analysis provided a revised reconstruction of the last eukaryotic common ancestor (LECA) proteome, in which we traced the phylogenetic origin of each protein family. We found compelling evidence for multiple waves of horizontal gene transfer from diverse bacterial donors, with some likely to have preceded mitochondrial endosymbiosis. We inferred plausible traits of the major donors and their functional contributions to the LECA. Our findings support a contribution of horizontal gene transfers to shaping the proteomes of pre-LECA ancestors and suggest a facilitating role of Nucleocytoviricota viruses. Taken together, our results suggest that ancient eukaryotes may have originated within complex microbial ecosystems through a succession of diverse associations that left a footprint of horizontally transferred genes. Phylogenomic reconstruction of the proteome of the last eukaryotic common ancestor sheds light on the origin of eukaryotes, indicating an important role of horizontal transfer of genes from diverse bacterial and viral donors.

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

A Dual-Branch Collaborative Framework for Joint Optimization of Underwater Image Enhancement and Object Detection

Due to wavelength dependent light absorption and scattering, underwater images usually suffer from color distortion and blurred details, which limits underwater object detection performance. Existing underwater image enhancement methods mainly focus on visual quality improvement, while it is still difficult to balance enhancement quality, processing efficiency, and downstream detection performance. Therefore, this paper proposes an efficient dual-branch underwater image enhancement framework for object detection. The detail enhancement branch improves brightness and local contrast to recover texture details in dark regions. The color restoration branch uses adaptive compensation to reduce color distortion and improve color gradation. By combining the complementary outputs of the two branches, the proposed framework provides clearer and more informative images for object detection. On the UIEB and EUVP datasets, the proposed method achieves UIQM scores of 2.249 and 2.576. When applied to the YOLOv8 detection task on the URPC dataset, the proposed method improves mAP50 by 2.1\% compared with the baseline. Extensive experiments show that our method improves object detection in complex underwater scenes, while balancing enhancement quality and processing efficiency.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

JustDiag!: A Diagnostic Justification Engine for Accountable Root Cause Analysis

arXiv:2606.19407v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models can produce fluent root cause analyses, but fluent final answers alone are insufficient evidence for accountability in high-stakes operations. In real incident response, engineers need to know what evidence supported a diagnosis, which alternatives were considered, where contradictions remained, and whether the system resolved the case or preserved uncertainty. We address this gap with JustDiag, a diagnostic justification engine for RCA that maintains an explicit process state over evidence, findings, competing hypotheses, conflicts, and next checks. We evaluated the system on 66 real-world incidents using a two-layer protocol that separately scores final-answer quality and process quality. Relative to a matched control without diagnostic justification, JustDiag achieved stronger outcome and process scores, while accepting slightly lower terminal completion due to more calibrated non-closure. These results suggest that accountable RCA requires explicit diagnostic justification artifacts and process-aware evaluation, not only fluent final answers.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

TIMI: Training-Free Image-to-3D Multi-Instance Generation with Spatial Fidelity

Precise spatial fidelity in Image-to-3D multi-instance generation is critical for downstream real-world applications. Recent work attempts to address this by fine-tuning pre-trained Image-to-3D (I23D) models on multi-instance datasets, which incurs substantial training overhead and struggles to guarantee spatial fidelity. In fact, we observe that pre-trained I23D models already possess meaningful spatial priors, which remain underutilized as evidenced by instance entanglement issues. Motivated by this, we propose TIMI, a novel Training-free framework for Image-to-3D Multi-Instance generation that achieves high spatial fidelity. Specifically, we first introduce an Instance-aware Separation Guidance (ISG) module, which facilitates instance disentanglement during the early denoising stage. Next, to stabilize the guidance introduced by ISG, we devise a Spatial-stabilized Geometry-adaptive Update (SGU) module that promotes the preservation of the geometric characteristics of instances while maintaining their relative relationships. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method yields better performance in terms of both global layout and distinct local instances compared to existing multi-instance methods, without requiring additional training and with faster inference speed.

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

KeepLoRA++: Continual Learning with Layer-Scaled Residual Gradient Adaptation

Continual learning for pre-trained vision-language models requires balancing three competing objectives: retaining pre-trained knowledge, preserving knowledge from a sequence of learned tasks, and maintaining the plasticity to acquire new knowledge. This paper presents KeepLoRA++, balancing these objectives through a unified dual-dimensional knowledge retention mechanism. We analyze knowledge distribution of Transformer architecture from both inter-layer and intra-layer perspectives. The inter-layer perspective examines how retention is distributed across layers, while the intra-layer perspective focuses on the parameter space within each layer. Our analysis reveals a structural property: general transferable knowledge is mainly encoded in the shallow layers and the principal subspace of the parameters, while task-specific adaptations are localized in the deep layers and the residual subspace. Motivated by this insight, KeepLoRA++ introduces a layer-scaled residual gradient adaptation method. New tasks are learned by restricting LoRA parameter updates to the residual subspace, combined with a shallow-to-deep layer scaling, to prevent interference with previously acquired capabilities. Specifically, the gradient of a new task is projected onto a subspace orthogonal to both the principal subspace of the pre-trained model and the dominant directions of previous task features, while simultaneously assigning smaller update magnitudes to shallow layers and larger ones to deeper layers. Our theoretical analysis and empirical evaluations confirm that KeepLoRA++ successfully balances these three competing objectives, consistently outperforming representative baselines across image classification, visual question answering, and video understanding tasks.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Routing Codes: High-Rate Quantum LDPC Codes with Short, Parallel Non-Local Connectivity

arXiv:2606.25330v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes are promising candidates for realizing large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computing. Although many codes with favorable theoretical parameters have been developed, their practical adoption must take hardware implementability into account. For mainstream quantum platforms such as superconductors and neutral atoms, the connectivity, the length of non-local couplings, and the complexity of wiring or atom rearrangement are key factors that dictate the difficulty of hardware realization. Here, we propose a new family of qLDPC codes, termed routing codes. Within this family, we find explicit instances whose encoding rates are comparable to those of bivariate bicycle (BB) codes, while systematically reducing qubit connectivity, shortening the length of non-local couplings, and, crucially, making all non-local couplings mutually parallel. This parallelism fundamentally eliminates wiring crossings in superconducting multi-layer architectures and drastically simplifies the scheduling of atom movement in neutral-atom arrays. Under circuit-level simulation, the weight-7 routing codes reduce the physical qubit overhead by approximately a factor of 8, compared to surface codes achieving a same logical error rate. These results establish routing codes as a hardware-centric qLDPC family that bridges the gap between theoretical optimality and near-term physical feasibility.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Allure of Craquelure: A Variational-Generative Approach to Crack Detection in Paintings

Recent advances in imaging technologies, deep learning and numerical performance have enabled non-invasive detailed analysis of artworks, supporting their documentation and conservation. In particular, automated detection of craquelure in digitized paintings is crucial for assessing degradation and guiding restoration, yet remains challenging due to the possibly complex scenery and the visual similarity between cracks and crack-like artistic features such as brush strokes or hair. We propose a hybrid approach that models crack detection as an inverse problem, decomposing an observed image into a crack-free painting and a crack component. A deep generative model is employed as powerful prior for the underlying artwork, while crack structures are captured using a Mumford–Shah-type variational functional together with a crack prior. Joint optimization yields a pixel-level map of crack localizations in the painting.

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

CRC-Screen: Certified DNA-Synthesis Hazard Screening Under Taxonomic Shift

作者:

arXiv:2605.00074v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: DNA-synthesis providers screen incoming orders by searching the requested sequence against curated hazard lists. We show that this baseline collapses to a 100% false-flag rate when the hazardous sequence comes from a taxonomic family absent from the reference set: under Conformal Risk Control's certified miss-rate constraint, a low-discrimination signal forces the threshold below the entire test-benign mass. We compose three signals derived from a synthesis order's public annotation: $k$-mer Jaccard similarity to known toxins, the trimmed-mean score of a five-LLM judge panel, and cosine similarity to clustered embedding centroids. Fused under a monotone logistic aggregator and calibrated by Conformal Risk Control, the resulting screener certifies $\mathbb{E}[\mathrm{FNR}] \le \alpha + \mathrm{TV}$, where the additive term is the calibration-to-test distribution shift under family holdout (a certified ceiling of 24-49% across folds). Across ten leave-one-taxonomic-family-out folds at $\alpha=0.05$ on UniProt KW-0800 reviewed toxins, the calibrated screener achieves 0% empirical test miss rate on every fold and 0% test false-flag rate on nine of ten folds. The bound's finite-sample slack $1/(n_{\mathrm{cal}}+1)$ caps the certifiable miss rate at 1.77% on our 200-hazard subsample; reaching procurement-grade $\alpha=10^{-3}$ requires an $18\times$ larger calibration set, which the full reviewed UniProt KW-0800 corpus is large enough to deliver. The binding constraint on certifiable DNA-synthesis screening is calibration data, not algorithms. Code: https://github.com/najmulhasan-code/crc-screen

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Stability of Khintchine-type inequalities via log-monotonicity

arXiv:2606.19313v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate Khintchine-type inequalities for the weighted sums $S=\sum_ka_kX_k$ of independent copies of a symmetric random variable $X$. We show how log-monotonicity of the sequence $r_k(X)=k! \mathbb{E}[X^{2k}]/(2k)!$ implies sharp comparisons between the $L_p$ and $L_2$ norms of $S$ for every even integer $p\geq 2$, extending classic Khintchine-type inequalities and yielding new results in the log-convex setting. We also investigate the stability of our inequalities. Our first stability inequality sharpens the classic inequality by a deviation of the coefficient vector from the coordinate extremizers, while the second quantifies deviation from the Gaussian limit. Our results recover recent stability inequalities for random signs and apply to a broad class of distributions, including type-$\mathscr{L}$ random variables, ultra sub-Gaussian random variables and Gaussian mixtures.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Interpretable Alzheimer's Diagnosis via Multimodal Fusion of Regional Brain Experts

Accurate and early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is critical for effective intervention and requires integrating complementary information from multimodal neuroimaging data. However, conventional fusion approaches often rely on simple concatenation of features, which cannot adaptively balance the contributions of biomarkers such as amyloid PET and MRI across brain regions. In this work, we propose MREF-AD, a Multimodal Regional Expert Fusion model for AD diagnosis. It is a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework that models mesoscopic brain regions within each modality as independent experts and employs a gating network to learn subject-specific fusion weights. Utilizing tabular neuroimaging and demographic information from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), MREF-AD achieves competitive performance over strong classic and deep baselines while providing interpretable, modality- and region-level insight into how structural and molecular imaging jointly contribute to AD diagnosis. The source code is available at https://github.com/PennShenLab/mref-ad.

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

Projected random forests and conformal prediction of circular data

arXiv:2410.24145v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We apply conformal prediction techniques to regression problems with circular responses, producing prediction sets with adaptive arc length and finite-sample coverage guarantees for any circular predictive model under the assumption of data exchangeability. Leveraging the high performance of existing predictive models designed for linear responses, we analyze a general projection procedure that converts any linear-response regression model into one suitable for circular responses. When random forests are used as base models in this projection procedure, we leverage the random forest out-of-bag mechanism to eliminate the need for a separate calibration sample in the construction of prediction sets. On synthetic and real datasets, the resulting projected random forest model produces more efficient out-of-bag conformal prediction sets, with shorter median arc length, than the split conformal prediction sets generated by two existing alternative models.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Exploring Exotic Spin-Dependent Interactions Beyond the Standard Model: Theoretical Foundations and Experimental Investigations

arXiv:2606.13318v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: New interactions mediated by novel particles propose solutions to several important questions in modern physics. Axions serve as examples of such particles; they are lightweight and interact weakly with ordinary matter. This category of particles, including those similar to axions-termed Axion-Like Particles (ALPs)-arises from diverse theoretical frameworks, such as the Peccei-Quinn mechanism addressing the strong CP problem, string theory, and spontaneous supersymmetry breaking. Given their light mass and weak coupling, ALPs are also possible candidates for cold dark matter. Introducing these new interactions mediated by novel particles not only tackles several challenges in modern physics but also raises a crucial question: Are there undiscovered interactions beyond the Standard Model? Many of the interactions predicted by these theories are spin-dependent, which is the primary focus of this review. In this review, we first outline the theoretical foundations for investigating exotic spin-dependent interactions, highlighting their importance in various models beyond the Standard Model. We examine the potential roles of new lightweight particles in mediating these interactions, which may enhance our understanding of dark matter. Relevant formulas derived from theoretical models are included to support experimental investigations. Following this theoretical framework, we conduct a detailed review of recent experimental efforts to detect these exotic interactions. A systematic review of current constraints on these interactions is presented, along with an assessment of various detection approaches.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

SkMTEB: Slovak Massive Text Embedding Benchmark and Model Adaptation

We introduce SkMTEB, the first comprehensive MTEB-style text embedding benchmark for Slovak, a low-resource West Slavic language, comprising 31 datasets across 7 task types – nearly 4$\times$ the depth of existing multilingual benchmark coverage for Slovak. Our evaluation of 31 embedding models reveals that large instruction-tuned multilingual models achieve the strongest performance, while existing Slovak-specific models trained for NLU tasks transfer poorly to embedding tasks. To address the need for efficient, locally-deployable Slovak embeddings, we develop \texttt{e5-sk-small} (45M parameters) and \texttt{e5-sk-large} (365M) by applying vocabulary trimming and fine-tuning to Multilingual E5 models. Despite size reductions of up to 62\%, our open-source models achieve competitive performance with proprietary APIs while remaining locally deployable for semantic search and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). We release the benchmark, models, datasets, and code openly, hoping our approach offers a replicable path for other under-resourced languages.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Coulomb crystallization of xenon highly charged ions in a laser-cooled Ca+ matrix

arXiv:2512.12266v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We report on the sympathetic cooling and Coulomb crystallization of xenon highly charged ions (HCIs) with laser-cooled Ca$^+$ ions. The HCIs are produced in a compact electron beam ion trap, then charge selected, decelerated, and finally injected into a cryogenic linear Paul trap. There, they are captured into $^{40}$Ca$^+$ Coulomb crystals, and co-crystallized within them, causing dark voids in their fluorescence images. Fine control over the number of trapped ions and HCIs allows us to realize mixed-species crystals with arbitrary ordering patterns. By investigating Xe$^{q+}$–Ca$^+$ strings, we confirm the HCI charge states, measure their lifetime and characterize the mixed-species motional modes. Our system effectively combines the established quantum control toolbox for Ca$^+$ with the rich set of atomic properties of Xe highly charged ions, providing a resourceful platform for optical frequency metrology, searches for signatures of new physics, and quantum information science.