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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Digital self-efficacy as a potential intermediary between vision impairment and daily internet use among older adults: A cross-sectional analysis of HINTS 2024

Background: Older adults with vision impairment often experience barriers to using digital technology. The indirect associations between vision impairment and digital access and skills via digital self-efficacy and frustration among older adults remain largely unknown. Objective: This study aimed to 1) explore factors associated with digital access, skills, self-efficacy, and frustration among older adults with vision impairment; 2) examine associations between vision impairment and digital access, skills, self-efficacy, and frustration among older adults; and 3) examine whether digital self-efficacy and frustration may help explain associations between vision impairment and digital access and skills among older adults. Methods: This was a cross-sectional study using nationally representative data from the Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS) 2024. Respondents aged 60 and older were included. Vision impairment was assessed using a self-reported item. Outcomes included self-reported digital access, skills, self-efficacy, and frustration. Survey-weighted multivariable logistic regression and generalized structural equation modeling were conducted, adjusting for age, sex, race/ethnicity, education, and the number of comorbidities. Results: Among 3,149 older adults (mean [SD] age, 70.7 [10.0] years; 45.6% female), 7.1% (n=223) reported vision impairment. Among older adults with vision impairment, 65.6% (95% CI, 53.5% to 75.9%) used the internet daily, and 79.5% (95% CI, 66.8% to 88.2%) used a smartphone in the past 12 months. In multivariable logistic regression analyses among older adults with vision impairment, older age was associated with lower odds of daily internet use (OR, 0.84; 95% CI, 0.79 to 0.90), smartphone use (OR, 0.85; 95% CI, 0.75 to 0.97), wearable device use (OR, 0.88; 95% CI, 0.79 to 0.97), and using the internet to send a message to a healthcare provider (OR, 0.87; 95% CI, 0.80 to 0.93). Older adults who self-identified as racial and ethnic minority groups (e.g., Black/African American, Hispanic) had lower odds of daily internet use (OR, 0.15; 95% CI, 0.05 to 0.50) and using the internet to send a message to a healthcare provider (OR, 0.17; 95% CI, 0.04 to 0.73) compared with Non-Hispanic White older adults. Vision impairment was associated with lower odds of daily internet use (OR, 0.60; 95% CI, 0.37 to 0.99) and digital self-efficacy (OR, 0.53; 95% CI, 0.32 to 0.86). Digital self-efficacy was associated with higher odds of daily internet use (OR, 2.95; 95% CI, 2.04 to 4.26). Generalized structural equation modeling identified an indirect association between vision impairment and daily internet use via digital self-efficacy (coefficient, -0.68; 95% CI, -1.24 to -0.12). Conclusions: Findings suggest that reduced digital self-efficacy may help explain the observed association between vision impairment and daily internet use among older adults. Interventions targeting digital self-efficacy, including accessible interface designs, personalized coaching, and peer support, may help bridge the digital divide among older adults with vision impairment.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Arbitrarily Loss-Tolerant Quantum Position Verification in a Single Execution

arXiv:2606.25037v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum position verification (QPV) seeks to certify the spatial location of an untrusted prover, but is challenged fundamentally by entanglement-based attacks and experimentally by photon loss. Both issues were addressed separately in different works and were simultaneously resolved for sequentially repeated protocols in Phys.\ Rev.\ Lett.\ 135,~260801 via a commitment-based modification that renders security independent of transmission losses. However, single-execution protocols are preferable in practice, and the original techniques do not extend to the parallel setting due to their reliance on sequential structure. We overcome this by utilizing different techniques based on no-signalling correlations, lifting the commitment modification to the parallel regime while preserving the security guarantees of the underlying QPV protocol. Applying this to a BB84-based QPV protocol suitable for near-term implementation and secure against bounded-entanglement adversaries, we prove that fixing a threshold~$k$ on the number of successfully committed qubits yields an adversarial acceptance probability that decays exponentially in~$k$. The resulting protocol maintains robustness to noise levels of up to~$3.7\%$ and remains secure under arbitrarily slow quantum communication, as does the original protocol. This yields the first fully loss-tolerant single-shot QPV protocol secure against entangled attackers, making QPV feasible over arbitrary distances. Finally, we refine the sequential analysis and obtain improved quantitative parameters for experimental implementations.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Understanding Scam Trends and Rail Paths from Reddit Self-Disclosure Narratives

Online scam behavior is inherently multi-stage, and the lifecycle includes temporally ordered rails and events rather than isolated signals. Existing works analyze characteristics of scam types and rails, but they do not track scam trends across years. Moreover, the work on the relations between rails is hampered due to the lack of open-source datasets with annotations and coverage of different scam types. To address these gaps, we build a dataset to analyze the yearly trend of scam characteristics and rail paths using Reddit self-disclosure narratives from 2023 to 2025. We collect 21,304 posts from scam-related subreddits with at least one rail among identity, communication, platform, and payment for trend analysis by heuristic annotation. Then, we label 1,800 posts containing explicit or recoverable scam chains by an LLM-assisted method for scam path analysis. The method is evaluated with human annotation. Lastly, we run a topic model on the comments of the posts to analyze the community support behavior. The results reveal that scam processes are predominantly multi-rail. Across years, different scam types and rail components dominate. Different scam types vary systematically in path complexity. Reddit support behaviors have become more detailed over time. This work supports synthetic scam chain data simulation and AI-related scam risk assessment, though findings may not generalise to other platforms.

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

TaFD: Threat-Aware Frequency Decoupling for Adversarial Robustness against Heterogeneous Attacks

Multi-threat robustness remains a fundamental challenge in deep learning. Although joint adversarial training (JAT) is widely adopted, it suffers from negative transfer under heterogeneous threats, particularly between $\ell_p$-bounded and semantic attacks. Through first-order gradient analysis, we formalize this as gradient incompatibility and theoretically establish the necessity of decoupled optimization. We further reveal that these conflicting threats exhibit separable spectral characteristics in the frequency domain. Motivated by this observation, we propose Threat-aware Frequency Decoupling (TaFD), a two-stage defense framework that reformulates JAT as a frequency-domain divide-and-conquer paradigm. TaFD first discovers latent threat domains via unsupervised clustering of attack spectral prototypes and trains a lightweight classifier for inference-time threat domain identification. Conditioned on the prediction, TaFD employs a Frequency-Conditional Convolution that learns threat-domain-specific spectral masks and routes each sample to the corresponding expert, enforcing structural parameter separation and alleviating optimization conflicts. We validate TaFD on three representative image-classification benchmarks (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny-ImageNet) and on two representative architectures (the convolutional ResNet and the hybrid-transformer MobileViT). Extensive results demonstrate that TaFD achieves more balanced robustness against heterogeneous attacks than existing JAT and frequency-domain baselines, improving average robust accuracy by approximately 11\% over the strongest baseline while maintaining leading clean accuracy.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Trainable Photonic Measurement for Physics-Informed PDE Learning

arXiv:2606.18713v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Photonic quantum machine learning offers a route to trainable physical representations built from phase, interference and measurement. However, its role in scientific machine learning remains largely unexplored. Physics-informed neural fields provide a natural setting, because differential equations require trial spaces that preserve phase, frequency and derivative structure. Here we introduce a photonic quantum neural field in which coordinates become trainable optical phases, are mixed by multi-photon Fock-space interference and are decoded from photon-number measurements. The photonic circuit is optimized as the neural-field representation itself, not as a fixed feature map or hardware accelerator. Photonic measurement is therefore a trainable representation on which the physics-informed residual is minimized. Across seven elliptic, wave, nonlinear dispersive and inverse PDE benchmarks, we observe a phase-complexity transition: classical coordinate and Fourier-feature networks suffice in smooth regimes, whereas the photonic field is most accurate when residual derivatives amplify phase mismatch. In the hardest regimes it gives the lowest errors, with margins reaching an order of magnitude and about one quarter of the trainable parameters of classical baselines. Frozen and shuffled controls, together with noise stress tests, attribute this gain to learned interference and stable Fock-probability readout under compound perturbations. These results identify photonic quantum measurement as a representation-learning principle for scientific machine learning.

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

Adaptive Inference-Time Scaling via Early-Step Latent Verification for Image Editing

Instruction-based image editing has made notable progress with recent advances in generative models. However, the quality of the edited result is still influenced by the randomly sampled initial noise, particularly in complex editing scenarios. An unsuitable initial noise may lead to unsatisfactory editing results. Recent inference-time scaling methods address this issue by sampling multiple initial noises and selecting better candidates. Nevertheless, most of them follow a decode-then-verify scheme which introduces an efficiency-accuracy trade-off. When decoding is performed after limited inference steps, the decoded images often remain too noisy for reliable assessment, whereas sufficiently denoised images require much higher computational cost. To address this issue, we propose VeriLatent, a plug-and-play adaptive inference-time scaling framework with early-step latent verification for image editing. Specifically, we propose a novel verifier that scores each initial noise through a latent-space editing activation map at an early stage. It identifies promising candidates by assessing whether they can induce an effective edit in the correct region. This enables efficient early pruning without decoding latents into images. Building on this, we further develop an adaptive search strategy for inference-time scaling. It allocates inference budgets according to editing difficulty, thereby reducing the number of function evaluations (NFE). Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks and different base models demonstrate that VeriLatent consistently improves both editing performance and inference-time scaling efficiency.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Random Projections for Multi-Copy Quantum Algorithms

arXiv:2606.20238v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Estimating nonlinear properties of quantum states is a central task in quantum information science. Multivariate traces, $\mathrm{tr}(\rho_1 \cdots \rho_K)$, and nonlinear observables such as $\mathrm{tr}(\rho^K)$, for integer $K$, can be accessed through collective measurements on multiple state copies, but standard protocols based on swap tests require coherent operations on the full Hilbert space and become experimentally unfeasible for large systems. In this work, we introduce a framework for multi-copy measurements based on random projections onto lower-dimensional subspaces prior to the collective measurement, which is then performed only on the reduced Hilbert space. This procedure yields a tunable tradeoff between coherent quantum resources and statistical sampling overhead, allowing the amount of coherent processing to be matched to the capabilities of the underlying hardware. We derive explicit formulas relating the Haar-averaged projected moments to multivariate traces of the original states and analyze the sampling overhead induced by the projection procedure. Specifically, after compressing an $n$-qubit state to a reduced $q$-qubit subspace, estimating $\mathrm{tr}(\rho^K)$ requires approximately $O(2^{(n-q)(K-1)})$ copies of $\rho$, with each qubit projected out increasing the sampling cost by a factor of $2^{K-1}$. Our results establish how coherent multi-copy operations can be traded for additional state copies, enabling multi-copy quantum protocols to be optimized for the available hardware resources.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

AIGS-Net: Compact Illumination Field Modeling via 2D Gaussian Splatting for Fast Low-Light Image Enhancement

Existing low-light image enhancement methods often face a bottleneck between the representation capacity of illumination-field modeling and computational complexity. To address this issue, this paper proposes an Adaptive Illumination Gaussian Splatting Network (AIGS-Net), an ultra-lightweight architecture for fast low-light enhancement. Unlike conventional static priors, AIGS-Net constructs an input-adaptive 2D Gaussian Splatting illumination field. The opacity of Gaussian basis functions is dynamically modulated by relative luminance statistics of the input image, and spatially varying illumination compensation is rendered through ordered alpha compositing. To guide adaptive illumination compensation efficiently, a zero-parameter nonlinear multiscale contextual encoding module is introduced to extract low-frequency structures and local contrast cues without additional convolutional weights. To suppress noise amplification and sensor-induced color bias, AIGS-Net integrates noise-mask estimation, locked single-channel Gamma mapping, cross-channel consistency regularization, and target color-alignment constraints. Experiments on LOL and LSRW benchmarks show that AIGS-Net improves detail recovery and color fidelity while requiring only approximately 40 learnable parameters, achieving an effective trade-off between enhancement quality and extreme inference efficiency.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

A welding penetration prediction model for laser welding process based on self-supervised learning using physics-informed neural networks

The laser welding full-penetration is of critical importance, as it constitutes one of the fundamental factors in achieving defect-free welded joints. Accurate prediction of the penetration state is therefore essential for ensuring weld quality. To this end, this paper introduces SimPhysNet, a novel algorithm that achieves high classification accuracy in laser welding penetration prediction using only a limited number of labelled images. This approach effectively overcomes the limitations of supervised learning classification algorithms, which are hindered in industrial applications by their dependence on extensive, high-quality labelled data. The core of SimPhysNet is a unique self-supervised learning paradigm that embeds physical priors into a contrastive learning framework. By incorporating a physics-informed neural network (PINN), the model is guided to extract physically meaningful features of the molten pool and keyhole from a large set of unlabelled data, while three image augmentation tasks further enhance its generalization capabilities. Subsequently, a few-shot learning strategy, based on prototypical networks, enables robust classification by constructing class representations from a minimal set of labelled images. Experimental results demonstrate that SimPhysNet achieves a classification accuracy of 96.06% using only 200 labelled images (approximately 5% of the total labelled dataset), which is comparable to the performance of conventional supervised learning algorithms that utilize the entire labelled dataset. This work presents a new, efficient, and highly accurate method, providing the way for the intelligent automation of laser welding.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Communicability-Inspired Positional Encoding (CIPE)

arXiv:2606.25293v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Positional encodings (PEs) are essential for Transformers. Yet designing effective PEs for non-Euclidean graphs remains challenging. Such encodings should ideally induce an Attention-Compatible Geometry for self-attention: not merely describing graph structure, but defining a geometry whose inner products reflect meaningful structural relatedness. To realize this geometry, we propose Communicability-Inspired Positional Encoding (CIPE), built from communicability, a measure between pairs of nodes that aggregates contributions from paths of all lengths. By construction, CIPE inner products recover communicability, converting global multi-path connectivity into an attention-ready similarity geometry. For practical Transformer training, we introduce dimensionality alignment, mapping graph-size-dependent CIPE representations to prescribed dimensions while faithfully preserving the induced geometry. Empirically, CIPE improves structure-agnostic Transformers by 35.5% on average across seven benchmarks, outperforming representative PEs; it also consistently improves structure-biased graph Transformers, where competing PEs often yield only marginal benefits. These results position CIPE as a principled framework for attention-compatible graph positional encodings.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

L-Proto: Language-Aware Episodic Prototypical Training for Multilingual Speaker Verification

arXiv:2606.17416v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual speaker verification remains challenging because language-dependent acoustic variability causes speaker identity to become entangled with linguistic characteristics, degrading generalization across languages. In multilingual training, embeddings often encode language cues with speaker identity, causing speakers to form language-specific clusters. We propose L-Proto, a language-aware episodic prototypical training strategy that constructs language-consistent episodes. By sampling speakers from a single language per episode, L-Proto reduces language-driven variation during training and encourages embeddings to focus more directly on speaker identity. Experiments on the TidyVoice Challenge benchmark demonstrate consistent performance improvements over conventional fine-tuning and random episodic sampling across multiple backbone architectures.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Counterexample Guided Learning in the Large using Reasoning Agents

arXiv:2606.11521v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLMs and LLM agents should improve when given feedback, but identifying when they are able to do so is difficult: feedback is heterogeneous, domain-specific, and difficult to control. We approach this challenge by asking LLMs to perform regular-expression induction, a classical symbolic learning problem where precise mechanisms for feedback exist in the form of counterexamples. In counterexample-guided learning, a learner (LLM) proposes candidate regular expressions from positive/negative-labeled strings, and the teacher (verifier) returns counterexamples showcasing the difference between the candidate and target languages. We identify novel counterexample-guided refinement strategies that enable effective regex learning, such as regularization and symbolic counterexample clusters. We also explore agentic strategies such as reflection and repair loops. Empirically, we find that verifier feedback substantially improves sample efficiency on challenging regex-induction tasks, reducing the number of labeled examples required and enabling learning of complex target expressions where standard prompting fails. For example, on the hardest task groups, our counterexample-guided framework improves success from 3.2% to 38.1% and from 38.9% to 74.1% on two different regex domains. These results suggest that LLMs can benefit from rich feedback beyond treating it as additional data, opening the door for robust verifier-guided methods for LLM-based program synthesis and formal reasoning.

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

BioAutoML-NAS: An End-to-End AutoML Framework for Multimodal Insect Classification via Neural Architecture Search on Large-Scale Biodiversity Data

Insect classification is important for agricultural management and ecological research, as it directly affects crop health and production. However, this task remains challenging due to the complex characteristics of insects, class imbalance, and large-scale datasets. To address these issues, we propose BioAutoML-NAS, the first BioAutoML model using multimodal data, including images, and metadata, which applies neural architecture search (NAS) for images to automatically learn the best operations for each connection within each cell. Multiple cells are stacked to form the full network, each extracting detailed image feature representations. A multimodal fusion module combines image embeddings with metadata, allowing the model to use both visual and categorical biological information to classify insects. An alternating bi-level optimization training strategy jointly updates network weights and architecture parameters, while zero operations remove less important connections, producing sparse, efficient, and high-performing architectures. Extensive evaluation on the BIOSCAN-5M dataset demonstrates that BioAutoML-NAS achieves 96.81% accuracy, 97.46% precision, 96.81% recall, and a 97.05% F1 score, outperforming state-of-the-art transfer learning, transformer, AutoML, and NAS methods by approximately 16%, 10%, and 8% respectively. Further validation on the Insects-1M dataset obtains 93.25% accuracy, 93.71% precision, 92.74% recall, and a 93.22% F1 score. These results demonstrate that BioAutoML-NAS provides accurate, confident insect classification that supports modern sustainable farming.

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

Indexed Bellman Information Complexity

作者:

arXiv:2606.11171v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We develop indexed Bellman information complexity, a representation-level theory of interactive decision making centered on information indices and reference histories. The representation strips away problem-specific syntax and retains only the ingredients needed for dynamic programming and information accounting, thereby unifying the earlier framework of indexed algorithmic information ratios (AIR). On the upper-bound side, regret is controlled by Bellman supersolutions or potential identities whose gradient bracket is paid for by indexed information. Upper-confidence-bound (UCB), estimation-to-decision/decision-estimation-coefficient (E2D/DEC), and adaptive-minimax-sampling or exploration-by-optimization (AMS/EBO) methods appear as three relaxations of this same identity. On the lower-bound side, the posterior-reference trajectory supplies both the information telescope and the ghost quantile of small-regret trajectories. The resulting critical radius in the lower bound is an effective-dimension-scale quantity, as in Fano and local-prior-mass lower bounds, rather than the constant radius of a two-point Le Cam argument. The examples show that DEC is best viewed as a one-step relaxation of indexed Bellman information complexity, not as a universally tight conversion mechanism. We illustrate the framework through several applications, with particular emphasis on kernel bandits. In this setting, the active action marginal provides a concrete basis for comparing UCB, E2D, and AMS/EBO.

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

EgoSAT: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Egocentric Streaming Interaction Understanding

We introduce EgoSAT, the first comprehensive benchmark for egocentric video reasoning in streaming settings, designed to evaluate the capabilities of modern vision-language models (VLMs). The benchmark targets streaming interaction understanding, where video frames arrive sequentially and models must continuously interpret evolving visual context. EgoSAT unifies several previously distinct tasks within a single streaming framework. In this formulation, queries about completed events correspond to retrospective reasoning, queries about ongoing activities require online understanding, and queries about future actions involve prospective anticipation. This unified setting requires models to reason about the past, present, and future while operating under the constraint that only previously observed frames are available. EgoSAT contains 1,997 unique videos spanning 165 hours of egocentric footage and around 4,800 high-quality question-answer pairs, carefully designed to probe reasoning across varying temporal contexts. Using this benchmark, we evaluate a diverse set of both open-weight and closed-weight VLMs, providing a systematic assessment of their ability for streaming interaction understanding. By distinguishing answerability and conducting diagnostics on confidence of models, we find existing models not only struggle with prospective and retrospective modeling, but also exhibit severe mis-calibration: confidence often fails to track inherent answerability, leading to dangerous "confidently wrong" behaviors. Project page: https://leiyj23.github.io/EgoSAT/

17.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

A Graph-based QSAR Modeling Pipeline for Predicting In vitro PubChem Assays and In vivo Human Hepatotoxicity: Mechanistic Analysis of Caspase-3/7 Activation

Background: Caspase-3 and -7 are key effector caspases in the apoptotic pathway, a form of programmed cell death, and their activities serve as a well-established biomarker for evaluating environmental chemical toxicity and informing chemical risk assessment. Loss of mitochondrial membrane potential is a key event in the activation of Caspase-3/7 signaling and the subsequent induction of apoptosis. Therefore, simultaneous assessment of mitochondrial membrane potential and Caspase-3/7 activity enables elucidation of the mechanisms and pathways through which apoptosis is initiated. Rapid and accurate assessment of the potential toxicity of environmental chemicals and drugs remains a major challenge. Quantitative Structure Activity Relationship (QSAR) modeling have been widely used for toxicity prediction. Graph-based approaches encode compounds directly as molecular graphs, allowing structure-activity relationships to be learnt from molecular topology without the information loss in binary fingerprints. While advanced graph models such as graph transformers (GTs) have shown outstanding performance in many domains, they have not been fully leveraged in QSAR modeling on Caspase and mitochondrial toxicity. Methods: We propose a QSAR modeling pipeline that encompasses assay data preprocessing, feature representations (fingerprints and molecular graphs), and benchmarking machine learning (ML) models, including classic ML models, graph neural networks (GNNs), GTs, and their consensus ensembles. Based on in vitro Caspase and mitochondrial assays in PubChem, we applied the pipeline to predict Caspase-3/7 activation and mitochondrial membrane potential (MMP). Beyond in vitro assays, we also built in vivo QSAR modeling for FDA Drug-Induced Liver Injury (DILI) gold standard on human hepatotoxicity. Moreover, mechanistic analysis on Caspase-3/7 activation was conducted by comparing with MMP disruption to identify chemical substructures that may be responsible for dual activations. We also investigated cell-line-specific responses by identifying structural motifs that selectively induce Caspase-3/7 activation in individual cell lines.Results:Experimental evaluations show that GTs and GNNs outperformed classic ML models when the number of active compounds is large, such as MMP disruption, while classic ML models and GTs performed good for highly imbalance data with limited active compounds, such as Caspase-3/7 activation. For DILI prediction, the full consensus model achieved the highest AUC 0.69 and Graphormer had the highest F1 score 0.79, both surpassing the previous best model with AUC 0.63 and F1 0.65 with a large margin.Our mechanistic analysis shows that phenolic compounds bearing a para-hydroxyphenyl motif, as well as members of the lipophilic chain family with long alkyl chains can trigger the collapse of MMP, leading to the activation of caspases-3 and -7. Human embryonic kidney (HEK293) was the only cell line with a distinct structural motif: 1,1-dichloroethane and chlorobenzene. Human neuroblastoma (SK-N-SH) is uniquely impacted by an epoxide fragment and rat hepatoma (H-4-II-E) is uniquely impacted by a tetramethylcyclohexene motif and an acetaldehyde fragment.Conclusions:The proposed pipeline for QSAR modeling, including data preprocessing, feature representations, and incorporation of advanced graph ML approaches, is highly effective in predicting not only on Caspase-3/7 activation and membrane potential collapse, but also on FDA DILI human hetatotoxicity. As future research directions, we will leverage extra information, e.g., biological activity and findings in existing toxicity literature, and recent advances in large language models and agentic AI to further improve the predictive performance and enable a sensitive and specific framework for assessing human hepatotoxicity of environmental compounds.

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

Proactive Systems in HCI and AI: Concepts, Challenges, and Opportunities

arXiv:2606.25149v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The last few years have seen a significant rise in interest in highly autonomous and proactive systems, fueled by advances in AI. Systems that anticipate user needs, take initiative, and act without explicit user input. Such systems span a wide range of applications, from smart lighting that adapts to user activity to assistive robots that plan actions in advance to intelligent thermostats that learn routines and adjust environments proactively. Despite this breadth, the concept of proactivity remains loosely defined and inconsistently applied across research and practice. Current usage of the term often conflates fundamentally different system behaviors. For instance, simple reminders or recommendation systems are frequently labeled as proactive, even though underlying mechanisms and intentions differ significantly. This conceptual ambiguity limits our ability to systematically design, compare, and evaluate proactive systems. Moreover, existing methodologies for design and evaluation are largely rooted in reactive interaction paradigms, failing to address the unique challenges posed by proactive behavior, including timing, appropriateness, user control, transparency, and trust. This multidisciplinary workshop aims to establish a clearer and more rigorous foundation for understanding proactive systems. We bring together researchers and practitioners from Human-Computer Interaction, AI, and related fields to (1) develop a shared conceptualization of proactivity, (2) identify gaps and limitations in current design and evaluation approaches, and (3) co-create human-centered guidelines and research directions for future systems. Through interactive discussions and collaborative activities, the workshop seeks to map key challenges and opportunities, ultimately advancing robust and consistent frameworks for designing and evaluating proactive technologies.

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

SAFE-Cascade: Cost-Adaptive Vision-Language Routing for Chart Question Answering

Vision-language models (VLMs) are powerful for chart question answering, but invoking a VLM for every query can be unnecessarily expensive when many questions are answerable from OCR text and lightweight language reasoning. We demonstrate SAFE-Cascade, an interactive system for cost-adaptive chart question answering. Given a chart image and a natural-language question, SAFE-Cascade first extracts chart text with OCR, obtains a provisional answer from a text-only language model, and then uses a learned router to decide whether to accept the text answer or escalate to a VLM. The demo exposes this decision process to users: OCR evidence, text-only answer, routing probability, escalation decision, final answer, estimated cost, and estimated latency are shown side by side. SAFE-Cascade is designed as a transparent interface for understanding when visual grounding is actually needed. Users can upload or select charts, ask questions, inspect the evidence used by each pathway, compare text-only and VLM answers, and adjust the escalation threshold to explore the accuracy-cost frontier. The system is implemented with Azure Document Intelligence for OCR, gpt-5-mini as the text-only model, gemini-2.5-flash-image as the VLM, and a Random Forest router trained on inference-time features. On a held-out ChartQA test split of 375 examples from a 2,500-example experiment, SAFE-Cascade achieves 69.1% unified accuracy with 73.1% VLM invocation, compared with 67.7% accuracy and 100% VLM invocation for the full-VLM baseline. The observed +1.4 percentage-point difference is statistically uncertain, so we interpret SAFE-Cascade as matching full-VLM performance while reducing VLM calls by 26.9% and estimated cost by 9.3%. The demonstration shows how selective modality routing can make multimodal knowledge systems more transparent, tunable, and cost-aware.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantum Energy Teleportation under Equilibrium and Nonequilibrium Environments

arXiv:2511.01518v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum energy teleportation (QET), implemented via local operations and classical communication, enables carrier-free energy transfer by exploiting quantum resources. While QET has been extensively studied theoretically and validated experimentally in various quantum platforms, enhancing energy output for mixed initial states, as the system inevitably interacts with environments, remains a significant challenge. In this work, we study QET performance in a two-qubit system coupled to equilibrium or nonequilibrium reservoirs. We derive an analytical expression for the energy output in terms of the system Hamiltonian eigenstates, enabling analysis of energy output for mixed states. Using the Redfield master equation, we systematically examine the effects of qubit detuning, nonequilibrium temperature difference, and nonequilibrium chemical potential difference on the energy output. We find that the energy output for mixed states often follows that of the eigenstate with the highest population, and that nonequilibrium environments can enhance the energy output in certain parameter regimes.

21.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-12

‘Student Geng’ ignites research-integrity scandal in China after calling out senior academics<b> </b>

作者:

Video blogger’s viral accusations of data manipulation in Nature journals have sparked intense debate and speedy institutional investigations. Video blogger’s viral accusations of data manipulation in Nature journals have sparked intense debate and speedy institutional investigations.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

sebis at CRF Filling 2026: A Two-Stage Local LLM Pipeline for Medical CRF Filling

The extraction of structured clinical information from unstructured EHR notes is a persistent bottleneck in healthcare informatics. While large language models (LLMs) offer high performance, their deployment in clinical settings is hindered by privacy risks, inference costs, and the tendency to hallucinate beyond textual evidence. We address these challenges for the CL4Health 2026 Case Report Form (CRF) filling task by proposing a fully local, domain-adapted pipeline using the MedGemma-27B model. Our two-stage architecture, which separates binary presence classification from value extraction, enforces strict adherence to textual evidence and ensures deterministic outputs for negated, uncertain, or unknown states. By leveraging item-specific, few-shot in-context learning without external API calls or fine-tuning, our approach achieves a macro-F1 score of 0.55 on the official English test track. This result secures second place among all locally-hosted, open-source submissions. Our work demonstrates that privacy-preserving, on-premise LLM pipelines can achieve near-competitive performance with proprietary frontier models, providing a practical, data-sovereign framework for clinical NLP.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Data- and Variance-dependent Regret Bounds for Online Tabular MDPs

arXiv:2602.01903v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This work studies online episodic tabular Markov decision processes (MDPs) with known transitions and develops best-of-both-worlds algorithms that achieve refined data-dependent regret bounds in the adversarial regime and variance-dependent regret bounds in the stochastic regime. We quantify MDP complexity using a first-order quantity and several new data-dependent measures for the adversarial regime, including a second-order quantity and a path-length measure, as well as variance-based measures for the stochastic regime. To adapt to these measures, we develop algorithms based on global optimization and policy optimization, both built on optimistic follow-the-regularized-leader with log-barrier regularization. For global optimization, our algorithms achieve first-order, second-order, and path-length regret bounds in the adversarial regime, and in the stochastic regime, they achieve a variance-aware gap-independent bound and a variance-aware gap-dependent bound that is polylogarithmic in the number of episodes. For policy optimization, our algorithms achieve the same data- and variance-dependent adaptivity, up to a factor of the episode horizon, by exploiting a new optimistic $Q$-function estimator. Finally, we establish regret lower bounds in terms of data-dependent complexity measures for the adversarial regime and a variance measure for the stochastic regime, implying that the regret upper bounds achieved by the global-optimization approach are nearly optimal.

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

An Empirical Investigation of Pre-Trained Deep Learning Model Reuse in the Scientific Process

arXiv:2603.13584v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep learning has achieved recognition for its impact within natural sciences, yet the prohibitive financial and technical cost of training models from scratch inhibit adoption. Following software engineering community guidance, natural scientists are reusing pre-trained deep learning models (PTMs) to amortize these costs. While prior works recommend PTM reuse patterns, we present the first empirical study of PTM reuse patterns in the natural sciences, quantifying the utilization and impact of PTM reuse within the scientific process across 17,718 peer reviewed, open access papers. Our results show that "Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology" has outpaced other natural scientific fields in PTM reuse, "adaptation" reuse is the most prevalent PTM reuse pattern identified across all natural science fields, and the "testing" stage of the scientific process has been most impacted by PTM integration.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Imitating What Works: Simulation-Filtered Modular Policy Learning from Human Videos

The ability to learn manipulation skills by watching videos of humans has the potential to unlock a new source of highly scalable data for robot learning. Here, we tackle prehensile manipulation, in which tasks involve grasping an object before performing various post-grasp motions. Human videos offer strong signals for learning the post-grasp motions, but they are less useful for learning the prerequisite grasping behaviors, especially for robots without human-like hands. A promising way forward is to use a modular policy design, leveraging a dedicated grasp generator to produce stable grasps. However, arbitrary stable grasps are often not task-compatible, hindering the robot's ability to perform the desired downstream motion. To address this challenge, we present Perceive-Simulate-Imitate (PSI), a framework for training a modular manipulation policy using human video motion data processed by paired grasp-trajectory filtering in simulation. This simulation step extends the trajectory data with grasp suitability labels, which allows for supervised learning of task-oriented grasping capabilities. We show through real-world experiments that our framework can be used to learn precise manipulation skills efficiently without any robot data, resulting in significantly more robust performance than using a grasp generator naively.