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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Contextual Bandits for Maximizing Stimulated Word-of-Mouth Rewards

Authors:
Ahmed Sayeed Faruk↗Elena Zheleva↗

arXiv:2606.15146v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Stimulated word-of-mouth is a strategy that promotes information sharing through prompts or incentives. Optimizing stimulated word-of-mouth through social networks requires identifying and targeting connected users who are most susceptible to spillover, a phenomenon where the influence of recommendations extends beyond the immediate audience to impact their connected users. The probability of spillover varies across individuals, and their connections, leading to heterogeneity. Understanding and accurately estimating the spillover probabilities among users in social networks is crucial for improving the effectiveness of stimulated word-of-mouth. To address this, we present a novel contextual multi-armed bandit framework that learns individual spillover probabilities and ranks connected users to maximize rewards from stimulated word-of-mouth. Experiments on real-world network datasets demonstrate that accounting for spillover heterogeneity enhances the targeting precision of top-$k$ connected users, boosting rewards and outperforming baseline methods that do not learn individual spillover effects.

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

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

Authors:
Himanshu Badhani↗Dhanuja G. S↗Siddhartha Das↗

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

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03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Fun with Graph States: Nonlocal Bell Pairs and the Arf Invariant

Authors:
Bartlomiej Czech↗Yichen Feng↗Xianlai Wu↗Minjun Xie↗

arXiv:2606.06582v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study inner products and partial amplitudes of graph states–a commonly employed class of quantum states, which are specified by graphs. We find that the magnitudes of these quantities are simply related to the rank of the adjacency matrix of the graph over F_2 while the phase is determined by the Arf invariant of its quadratic refinement. These facts motivate a nonlocal tensor factorization of the Hilbert space, with respect to which all graph states are products of Bell pairs with unentangled ancillae. These results may illuminate the quantum advantage in the framework of Measurement-Based Quantum Computation and suggest that graph states can be usefully visualized in the language of algebraic topology. In addition, we develop a specialized technique for computing expectation values of qubit-wise permutations in graph states, which is useful for calculating multi-invariants.

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04.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-08

Assessing the inference of single-cell phylogenies and population dynamics from CRISPR lineage recordings

Authors:
Julia Pilarski↗

by Julia Pilarski, Tanja Stadler, Sophie Seidel Multicellular organisms develop from a single cell by repeated rounds of cell division, differentiation, and death, which can be represented as a single-cell phylogenetic tree. Genetic lineage tracing allows us to investigate this development by tracking the ancestry of individual cells as populations grow and change over time. However, accurate reconstruction of the cell phylogeny and quantification of the corresponding phylodynamic parameters – cell division, differentiation, and death rates – from this tracking data remains challenging and needs to be systematically evaluated. We perform simulations and assess, using the Bayesian framework, the joint inference of time-scaled cell phylogenies and phylodynamic parameters from CRISPR lineage recordings with random or sequential edits. Principally, we characterize the inference improvements as the recorder capacity increases. We observe more accurate phylogenetic reconstruction from sequential compared to random recordings, but no substantial improvement in phylodynamic inference when using the additional information contained in the order of edits. Overall, we find that CRISPR lineage recordings carry a strong signal on the rates of cell division when appropriate models are used. However, we detect biases in the inferred rates of cell division and death under phylodynamic model misspecification, i.e., when fitting classic memoryless birth-death processes to synchronous cell divisions. Moreover, for scenarios when cells differentiate into distinct types, we demonstrate that Bayesian phylodynamic analysis of sparse end-point measurements can resolve these cell differentiation trajectories by lineage and time. Under prototypical dynamics, we recover cell type-specific division and death rates, and cell type transition rates in over 80% of simulations. Overall, this simulation study explores how much information on cellular development can be extracted from state-of-the-art genetic lineage tracing data using phylogenetic and phylodynamic methodology.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Your Mouse and Eyes Secretly Leak Your Preference: LLM Alignment using Implicit Feedback from Users

Authors:
Haw-Shiuan Chang↗Jeffrey Gomez↗Mehul Patwari↗Aryan Sajith↗Hamed Zamani↗

To align a Large Language Model (LLM), most existing methods collect explicit human feedback and train a reward model to predict the human preference based on the response text. These existing methods have two key limitations. First, the users rarely provide explicit feedback for LLM responses, which makes the high-quality preference annotation expensive to collect. Second, the methods do not leverage implicit human feedback, which has proven vital to the economic moats of Internet giants. To quantify the value of implicit feedback, we build a new dataset called IFLLM, which collects 1336 multi-turn questions from the 59 Mechanical Turk workers, their mouse trajectories, and eye gazing points to the LLMs' responses from their webcams. IFLLM shows that the users have very diverse types of gazing behavior and mouse trajectories. Our reward model based on the implicit user feedback boosts the accuracy of the text-based reward model from 55% to 64% and nearly triples the relative response quality improvements after applying the DPO to eight LLMs, demonstrating the value of implicit feedback in the wild. Our data collection website, dataset, and codes can be found at https://github.com/themehulpatwari/llm-implicit-feedback/.

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

YTClickbait21K: Human-Annotated Multimodal Dataset for YouTube Clickbait Detection Across Diverse Channels and Content Categories

Authors:
Md. Minhazul Islam↗Md. Tanbeer Jubaer↗Amith Khandakar↗Shovon Sarker↗Sumaiya Rahman↗Md. Masum Mia↗Mohamed Arselene Ayari↗Hamed Noori↗

Clickbait content on video-sharing platforms poses a significant challenge to information reliability, yet progress in automated detection has been constrained by the lack of large-scale, high-quality multimodal datasets. We present YTClickbait21K, a human-annotated YouTube clickbait dataset comprising 21,238 videos collected from 40 channels across 29 countries, covering diverse content categories such as news, entertainment, education, and gaming. Each sample includes structured metadata (title, description, engagement statistics) along with associated thumbnail images, enabling comprehensive multimodal analysis. To ensure annotation quality, every video was independently labeled by three annotators using a standardized decision framework that incorporates textual, visual, and cross-modal consistency cues, with final labels determined through majority voting. The dataset exhibits substantial inter-annotator agreement (k=0.65), confirming reliable labeling despite the inherent subjectivity of clickbait detection. By combining scale, annotation rigor, and multimodal richness, this dataset provides a robust benchmark for developing and evaluating machine learning models, facilitating research in cross-modal semantic understanding, and advancing automated content moderation systems.

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07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Raw-Curve Quantum Fingerprints: A Mahalanobis Authentication Framework with Drift Early Warning and Adversarial Detection

Authors:
Geyuyan Ma↗Xiangdong Meng↗Yangyang Fei↗Zhiqiang Fan↗Hanshi Zhao↗Chenhui Wang↗Haoran Yang↗Weilong Wang↗Zheng Shan↗

arXiv:2606.11644v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum cloud platforms are poised to deliver powerful computing capabilities, but users have no direct means to verify which physical device executes their workload. This lack of transparency enables hardware substitution attacks, where a malicious adversary could redirect a job to a substituted or inferior processor. We present a general authentication framework that addresses this problem by constructing multi-dimensional quantum fingerprints from raw measurement data. Without any curve fitting, we directly concatenate the raw statistics of complementary experiments into a high-dimensional feature vector that preserves subtle device-specific information. A Mahalanobis nearest-neighbor classifier achieves 100\% benign authentication accuracy on three superconducting processors over a three-week chronological split. The classifier naturally yields an authentication confidence $C_{\mathrm{claimed}}$ which reveals device-specific safety margins and motivates per-device alert thresholds. We assess the framework's robustness under two distinct scenarios. Under additive isotropic Gaussian noise, $C_{\mathrm{claimed}}$ decays predictably at a rate explained by inverse covariance traces, enabling an early warning mechanism. Against white-box adversarial perturbations, the same confidence threshold detects $L_2$ targeted attacks with near-perfect success and reveals device-dependent empirical thresholds for $L_\infty$ attacks, while untargeted and sparse attacks are ineffective. The proposed framework thus unifies fingerprint extraction, drift-resilient authentication, proactive health monitoring, and adversarial defense, offering a practical step toward trustworthy quantum cloud computing.

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08.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-11

A zero-parameter first-principles gate framework for full-length TP53 missense variant interpretation

Authors:
Masamichi Iizumi↗

by Masamichi Iizumi Missense variant interpretation often achieves useful predictive performance but remains mechanistically opaque, particularly in proteins that combine structured domains with intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs). We developed Gate & Channel, a zero-parameter, first-principles framework for full-length TP53 missense variant analysis in which each prediction is generated by explicit IF-THEN gates derived from physicochemistry, geometry, structural constraints, and polymer physics rather than fitted weights. Variants are evaluated across independent channels representing distinct physical failure modes; a variant is predicted disruptive if any gate closes. A second hierarchical layer (“Geta”) encodes physically grounded post-closure exceptions, allowing sensitivity and specificity to be improved on disjoint variant populations. The v18 framework consists of 12 channels and 2 Getas spanning structured domains and IDRs, capturing DNA-contact disruption, Zn coordination, burial-dependent packing, secondary-structure compatibility, post-translational modification chemistry, short linear motif disruption (including a multi-partner coupled-folding face), proline-directed kinase recognition, and IDR-specific proline and glycine backbone constraints. Across 1,369 TP53 missense variants, the framework achieved 84.5% sensitivity and 89.1% positive predictive value, with 90.9% sensitivity preserved in the DNA-binding core and all 9/9 hotspot mutations captured. A post hoc audit of discordant IDR calls indicated that many apparent false positives had plausible molecular rationales, consistent with a distinction between molecular mechanism disruption and clinical penetrance. Applied to KRAS, TDP-43, and BRCA1, the same channels capture the dominant pathogenic mechanisms in each protein as a proof of principle, while residual missed variants name specific gates yet to be written. The framework is distributed as the open-source Python package pathogenicity-gates (v0.5.1, MIT). These results show that a substantial fraction of full-length TP53 missense variation can be resolved through explicit, auditable physical gates that carry meaning beyond TP53, with each remaining failure naming the next rule to be written.

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09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Hierarchical Advantage Weighting for Online RL Fine-Tuning of VLAs from Sparse Episode Outcomes

Authors:
Tongyan Fang↗Siyuan Huang↗Naiyu Fang↗Ganlong Zhao↗Zhongjin Luo↗Jianbo Liu↗Xiaogang Wang↗Ying Dong↗Hongsheng Li↗

arXiv:2606.17043v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When pretrained VLA policies are fine-tuned through online RL, each rollout episode produces only a single binary outcome (success or failure), yet the actor update requires per-transition supervision. Existing approaches commonly reduce this sparse outcome to a single scalar reward or advantage signal, which conflates distinct forms of transition-level feedback and provides limited guidance once basic task success becomes achievable. First, a single scalar signal conflates the two objectives of viability and efficiency; once basic success is achieved, the binary label provides no gradient to distinguish efficient completions from slow ones. Second, real-world rollouts mix autonomous and intervention segments; naively assigning episode outcomes across these boundaries introduces incorrect credit assignment. To address these issues, we propose Hierarchical Advantage-Weighted Behavior Cloning (HABC), which trains separate critic heads for these two objectives on different data subsets and combines their outputs with a state-adaptive balance. A state-adaptive gate $g_t$ merges their one-step advantages, prioritizing viability when success is uncertain and shifting to efficiency only when viability is high, and converts the result into per-transition weights on the actor loss. Intervention-aware credit assignment further restricts outcome labels to segments executed by the current policy, preventing supervision from leaking across intervention boundaries. In real-robot experiments on three contact-rich bimanual tasks, HABC raises success from supervised fine-tuning (SFT) baselines of 36%, 44%, and 12% to 92%, 88%, and 38%.

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10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

A polarity-aware multi-relational model for the signed interaction prediction in biological networks

Authors:
Ziye Zhou↗Meijie Wang↗Lun Yu↗

arXiv:2407.07357v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Predicting signed interactions in biological networks is crucial for understanding drug mechanisms and facilitating drug repurposing. While deep graph models have demonstrated success in modeling complex biological systems, existing approaches often fail to distinguish between positive and negative interactions, limiting their utility for precise pharmacological predictions. In this study, we propose a novel deep graph model, PAMR (polarity-aware multi-relational model), designed to predict both polar (e.g., activation, inhibition) and non-polar (e.g., binding, affect) chemical-gene interactions. Our model integrates graph convolutional networks with tensor decomposition to enhance feature representation and incorporates a conflict-aware sampling strategy to resolve polarity ambiguities. We introduce new evaluation metrics, polarity discrimination score (PDS) and CP@100, to assess the model's ability to differentiate interaction types. Experimental results demonstrate that PAMR outperforms baseline models, achieving superior classification accuracy and improved discrimination of polar edges. Specifically, PAMR-CL attains a Macro AUROC of 0.9072 and CP@100 of 0.974, surpassing RGCN, GraphSAGE, TransE, and BioNet baselines. A case study on nicotine further identifies two novel chemical-gene suppression links, S100A6 and SPP1, that are corroborated by independent experimental literature. Furthermore, we analyze the impact of subgraph components on predictive performance, revealing that additional network structures do not always enhance accuracy. These findings highlight the importance of polarity-aware modeling in drug discovery and network pharmacology, providing a scalable computational framework for polarity-aware chemical-gene interaction prediction and network pharmacology analysis.

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

Task-Instructed Causal Routing of Vision Foundation Models for Multi-Task Learning

Authors:
Donghyun Han↗Yuseok Bae↗Jung Uk Kim↗Hyung-Il Kim↗

Vision foundation models (VFMs) have demonstrated strong robustness and transferability across a wide range of visual tasks. However, each model typically encodes strong inductive biases shaped by its pre-training objective and data domain, resulting in fragmented yet complementary visual knowledge. As a result, a single model often struggles to capture the diverse visual representations required across multiple dense prediction tasks. To address this limitation, we propose TIGER (Task-Instruction-Guided Expert Routing), a framework that coordinates multiple heterogeneous VFMs for multi-task dense prediction. Instead of naively aggregating expert features, TIGER leverages natural-language task instructions to guide a routing network that assigns token-level expert weights conditioned on task semantics, enabling adaptive integration of complementary expert features. TIGER further introduces a counterfactual loss that aligns routing decisions with each expert's causal contribution by measuring prediction changes when experts are excluded, encouraging more reliable and interpretable routing. We evaluate TIGER on two multi-task dense prediction benchmarks, NYUD-v2 and Pascal Context, where it consistently outperforms recent multi-task learning baselines while keeping all VFMs frozen. These results demonstrate that combining instruction-guided expert routing with counterfactual causal alignment enables effective coordination of heterogeneous vision foundation models.

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12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

IntSeqBERT: Learning Arithmetic Structure in OEIS via Modulo-Spectrum Embeddings

Authors:
Kazuhisa Nakasho↗

arXiv:2603.05556v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Integer sequences in the OEIS span values from single-digit constants to astronomical factorials and exponentials, making prediction challenging for standard tokenised models that cannot handle out-of-vocabulary values or exploit periodic arithmetic structure. We present IntSeqBERT, a dual-stream Transformer encoder for masked integer-sequence modelling on OEIS. Each sequence element is encoded along two complementary axes: a continuous log-scale magnitude embedding and sin/cos modulo embeddings for 100 residues (moduli $2$–$101$), fused via FiLM. Three prediction heads (magnitude regression, sign classification, and modulo prediction for 100 moduli) are trained jointly on 274,705 OEIS sequences. At the Large scale (91.5M parameters), IntSeqBERT achieves 95.85% magnitude accuracy and 50.38% Mean Modulo Accuracy (MMA) on the test set, outperforming a standard tokenised Transformer baseline by $+8.9$ pt and $+4.5$ pt, respectively. An ablation removing the modulo stream confirms it accounts for $+15.2$ pt of the MMA gain and contributes an additional $+6.2$ pt to magnitude accuracy. A probabilistic Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT)-based Solver converts the model's predictions into concrete integers, yielding a 7.4-fold improvement in next-term prediction over the tokenised-Transformer baseline (Top-1: 19.09% vs. 2.59%). Modulo spectrum analysis reveals a strong negative correlation between Normalised Information Gain (NIG) and Euler's totient ratio $\varphi(m)/m$ ($r = -0.851$, $p < 10^{-28}$), providing empirical evidence that composite moduli capture OEIS arithmetic structure more efficiently via CRT aggregation.

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

Facial Affect Analysis for Service-Oriented Systems: Advances, Challenges, and Future Visions

Authors:
Spyridon Georgiou↗Aggelos Psiris↗Thomas Lagkas↗Vasileios Argyriou↗Panagiotis Sarigiannidis↗Iraklis Varlamis↗Georgios Th. Papadopoulos↗

Facial Affect Analysis (FAA) is evolving from a stand-alone recognition task into a reusable perception capability for Service-Oriented Software Ecosystems (SoSE). This paper preserves the FAA methodological core while reframing recent advances through systems-engineering requirements for composable and dependable services. We review representative progress in static and dynamic expression analysis, action-unit and micro-expression modeling, and modern CNN, Transformer, graph, and hybrid architectures, then interpret these advances by their operational fit in edge, cloud, and hybrid service pipelines. The synthesis emphasizes SoSE concerns that determine deployability: service contracts for uncertainty-aware outputs, latency and availability envelopes, lifecycle monitoring and recalibration, governance-aware integration, and interoperability across independently evolving components. Our analysis shows that benchmark gains alone are insufficient for SoSE readiness; robustness under shift, intervention stability, fairness, privacy posture, and runtime guarantees are equally critical. We conclude with a roadmap for treating FAA as an operational service component with explicit interfaces, measurable quality attributes, and accountable lifecycle management.

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14.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-22

Differences in tuberculosis prevalence by sex in low- and middle-income countries over 1993–2025: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Authors:
Nicole A. Swartwood↗

by Nicole A. Swartwood, Nanki Singh, Seyed Alireza Mortazavi, Melike Hazal Can, Hening Cui, Do Kyung Ryuk, Peter MacPherson, Katherine C. Horton, Nicolas A. Menzies Background Global and national initiatives to combat tuberculosis (TB) have expanded over recent years. Despite this, the TB burden remains high in some population groups, with men recognized as having elevated TB risks. Summary measures of sex differences in TB prevalence were last estimated in 2016. Since then, many additional prevalence surveys have been conducted, including in the highest TB burden countries. We conducted a systematic review of sex-stratified TB prevalence survey data published over 1993–2025, to provide updated estimates of male-to-female (M:F) TB prevalence ratios and determine whether sex-related disparities in TB burden have closed over time. Methods and findings We identified surveys reporting community-representative, sex-stratified estimates of pulmonary TB prevalence in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), including surveys from an earlier review (covering January 1993–March 2016) and a new systematic review (covering 1st December 2015–13th October 2025). This review was prospectively registered with PROSPERO (CRD42024503853) and included searches of PubMed, Embase, Global Health, the Cochrane Library, Africa Index Medicus, LILACS, and SciELO. We extracted data on bacteriologically confirmed and smear-positive TB prevalence among adults (aged ≥ 15 years), stratified by sex. Risk of bias was evaluated using eight criteria specific to prevalence surveys. We fit multi-level Bayesian regression models with study- and country-level random effects to estimate the M:F ratio of TB prevalence (male prevalence divided by female prevalence), overall and for key subgroups. In meta-regression analyses, we estimated how prevalence ratios varied over time and according to known TB risk factors and TB case definitions.We identified 10,124 publications and extracted data from 100 eligible studies representing 102 unique prevalence surveys and 4,658,310 participants (45.6% male) in 33 LMICs. TB prevalence was higher in men than women in 90/102 of the included surveys, with a pooled M:F prevalence ratio of 2.02 (95% credible interval (CrI): 1.71, 2.34) for bacteriologically confirmed TB and 2.38 (95% CrI: 1.91, 2.90) for smear-positive TB. Time trend analyses showed a 2.0% (95% CrI: −0.2, 4.5%) average annual change in the M:F ratio of bacteriologically confirmed TB over the study period. The M:F prevalence ratio was estimated to be higher for countries with greater excess HIV prevalence among men, and countries with greater gender equity (as measured by the United Nation’s Gender Development Index). The estimated M:F prevalence ratio was also higher for surveys that did not restrict testing to individuals reporting TB symptoms. Study limitations include heterogeneity in survey methods and definitions, as well as limited data from the Americas, Eastern Mediterranean, and Europe WHO world regions and post-COVID-19 period. Conclusions Men in LMICs consistently experience TB at a higher prevalence than women. Time trend estimates are uncertain, but consistent with widening sex differences in TB prevalence over the last three decades, despite efforts to address the risk factors underlying this excess TB burden.

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15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Subliminal Learning Is Steering Vector Distillation

Authors:
Camila Blank↗Agam Bhatia↗Senthooran Rajamanoharan↗Arthur Conmy↗Neel Nanda↗

arXiv:2606.00995v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Subliminal learning refers to a student language model acquiring a teacher's traits (e.g. a system-prompted preference for owls) when fine-tuned on the teacher's outputs, despite the outputs being semantically unrelated to those traits. It remains poorly understood how data without semantic meaning can transfer specific semantic traits. In this work, we show that subliminal learning is mediated by a single steering vector, i.e. a vector added to the model's activations. Across two open-source models, we find that the teacher's system prompt is well approximated by a steering vector, and that the student's behavior is driven by learning an aligned vector over fine-tuning. System prompts that are not well approximated by steering vectors are not subliminally learned. This is a special case of steering vector distillation, in which a student trained on the outputs of a steered teacher learns to imitate that steering. We demonstrate steering vector distillation on a range of semantic and random vectors. Adding a semantic vector to a model's activations can have both model-independent and model-specific (i.e. non-semantic) effects on its behavior, so generated data that is non-semantic can transmit a vector with semantic effects, enabling subliminal learning. This also explains why subliminal learning does not transfer between models. We find that adaptive optimizers are necessary for subliminal learning in language models: activation gradients on steered data carry a small but consistent component along the steering direction, and non-adaptive optimizers impede this by allowing outlier gradients to dominate.

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

Deep Sleep Classification via EEG Signal Criticality: A Passive BCI Approach for Sleep-Improvement Neurofeedback

Authors:
Stanis{\l}aw Nar\k{e}bski↗Tomasz Komendzi\'nski↗Tomasz M. Rutkowski↗

arXiv:2606.13017v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated sleep staging is a fundamental application of passive Brain-Computer Interfaces (pBCI), decoding spontaneous neural states to enable closed-loop interventions independent of user intent. This study evaluates criticality features derived from Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA) for the specific identification of deep sleep (N3). We analyzed $347,232$ EEG epochs from $290$ older women using UMAP manifold learning to visualize state transitions. Subsequently, six classifiers were benchmarked via 10-fold cross-validation, using balanced accuracy to determine the optimal "state-sensing" engine for neurofeedback.Naive Bayes achieved the highest mean balanced accuracy ($87.17\% \pm 0.24\%$), significantly outperforming a fully connected deep neural network (FNN: $81.58\%$) and Random Forest ($80.97\%$). Linear models (LDA: $57.21\%$; SVM: $51.01\%$) performed poorly, indicating that DFA-derived criticality features reside on a distinct, non-linear manifold. Probabilistic decoding of EEG criticality provides a high-accuracy sensing mechanism for pBCIs. This robust classification pipeline supports the development of state-dependent neurofeedback, such as targeted auditory stimulation, to enhance cognitive recovery.

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17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

DIPHINE: Diffusion-based $\Phi$-ID Neural Estimator

Authors:
Simon Pedro Galeano Munoz↗Mustapha Bounoua↗Giulio Franzese↗Pietro Michiardi↗Maurizio Filippone↗

arXiv:2606.18997v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Uncovering the true informational architecture of real-world complex systems requires disentangling how their components uniquely store, redundantly share, and synergistically integrate information over time. Integrated Information Decomposition ($\Phi$ID) is a framework for decomposing the information dynamics of multivariate systems into sixteen non-overlapping atoms that characterize redundant, unique, and synergistic modes of information storage, transfer, and integration. Existing methods to compute $\Phi$ID are restricted to Gaussian or discrete systems, preventing its application to continuous non-Gaussian dynamical systems. We address this limitation by proposing DIPHINE (Diffusion-based $\Phi$-ID Neural Estimator), the first neural estimator that leverages score-based diffusion models to jointly estimate all the mutual information terms required by $\Phi$ID from a single amortized network, recovering the sixteen atoms through Möbius inversion. We provide a theoretical analysis of error propagation through the inversion, showing that the Jacobian of the mapping from mutual informations to atoms is integer-valued and that the synergy-to-synergy atom is provably the hardest to estimate. We demonstrate accurate recovery of ground-truth atoms on synthetic benchmarks, superior performance compared to established mutual information estimators, and the ability to extract physiologically interpretable information-dynamic structure on an application involving real data without any distributional assumptions.

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18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Train, Retrieve, or Both? A Four-Arm Head-to-Head for Correct Statutory Citation on the Ontario Residential Tenancies Act

Authors:
Ali Asaria↗Tony Salomone↗Deep Gandhi↗

arXiv:2606.20359v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-represented tenants, landlords, and help-desk staff need to be pointed at the provision of law that actually governs a question, with a correct statutory citation. We study this task on the Ontario Residential Tenancies Act, 2006 (RTA) and its core regulation, asking the operator's question empirically: is fine-tuning enough, or is hybrid retrieval needed? We run a four-arm head-to-head on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct (base zero-shot, LoRA SFT-only, RAG-only, and an SFT+RAG hybrid), scored on citation exact-match (section+subsection) over a small, human-verification-pending real eval set. The base model cannot cite the RTA and SFT-only mis-recalls sections; retrieval is essential and drives hallucination to zero by construction; and the SFT+RAG hybrid scores highest at 0.481 exact-match with zero hallucinated citations. Its edge comes from SFT making provision selection more robust to the higher-recall candidate sets that hurt zero-shot RAG. Notably, this cheap bge-small hybrid matches or beats a pipeline built on bigger, specialized retrieval models (a larger embedder and a cross-encoder reranker), and a larger/improved training set does not help either: strong statutory-citation performance here does not require specialized retrieval models or more data. The artifact zeroes hallucination and clears the lift-over-base bar but does not reach the aspirational 0.70 exact-match target. All results are on a small, human-verification-pending real eval set and are reported as preliminary.

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19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

A simple approach to the L{\o}kka-Zervos dichotomy for absolutely continuous dividend strategies

Authors:
Tommy Mastromonaco↗Nacer Fendri↗Jean-Fran\c{c}ois Renaud↗Clarence Simard↗

arXiv:2604.13302v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We revisit the optimization problem solved in L{\o}kka & Zervos (2008), i.e., the maximization of dividends, in a Brownian risk model, with the possibility (not the obligation) of making capital injections. Following the approach introduced in Alvarez & Shepp (1998), Renaud & Simard (2021), Renaud et al. (2023), we consider instead absolutely continuous (AC) dividend strategies with an affine bound on the payment rates, while singular capital injections are still allowed. In addition, we incorporate a parameter for the cost of ruin or, said differently, a penalty at ruin in the performance function. We show that the solution is a so-called L{\o}kka-Zervos dichotomy: the surplus is never ruined by making bail-out payments, or no capital is injected and bankruptcy can occur; in either case, dividends are paid at full rate when the surplus is above a threshold. Our framework allows us to provide explicit conditions to express the dichotomy, either using the cost of capital injections or the cost of ruin as a criterion, which also exposes the underlying structure of the solution. In particular, for some values of the parameters, we show that it is optimal to liquidate. Moreover, we perform a numerical analysis highlighting the range of values generated under this AC affine-bound structure.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Human-in-the-Loop Atlas-Based 3D Asset Segmentation for Interactive Content Workflows

Authors:
Paul Julius K\"uhn↗Saptarshi Neil Sinha↗Jakob Hansen↗Robin Horst↗

Segmenting 3D assets into meaningful regions remains challenging, especially when segmentation criteria are application-dependent and require user control. We present a human-in-the-loop pipeline for generating a segmented 2D parameterized atlas from a 3D model for interactive media, game, and XR content workflows. Our method first selects a compact set of rendered views using a greedy set cover strategy over sampled surface points, and then supports interactive segmentation of these views with SAM~2 and Label Studio. The resulting masks are back-projected onto the model's UV parameterization to produce a unified segmented atlas that supports downstream production tasks such as segment-wise material assignment, style transfer, and semantic labeling. We assess the pipeline through a demonstration-based technical evaluation on eight cultural heritage objects. The results show that the approach can generate usable segmented atlases across diverse geometries while revealing recurring sources of manual correction, particularly fine structures, cavities, and weak appearance boundaries.

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21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Sex-Specific TMPRSS2 Response and Reduced Peripheral RNA Concentration Following AstraZeneca COVID-19 Vaccination in Nigeria.

Authors:
Ekprikpo↗E. S↗Ken-Ezihuo↗S. U↗Echonwere-Uwikor↗B. E↗Jeremiah↗Z. A↗

Background: ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 remains a cornerstone COVID-19 vaccine in sub-Saharan Africa, yet population-specific molecular responses are understudied. We examined peripheral blood ACE2 and TMPRSS2 expression, total RNA concentration, and coagulation indices in Nigerians >=6 months post-vaccination. Methods: In a case-control study in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, 51 ChAdOx1-vaccinated adults and 51 age/sex-matched unvaccinated controls provided venous blood for RNA extraction, qRT-PCR, and coagulation assays. Multivariable linear models assessed effects of vaccination, sex, and age on molecular parameters. Results: Vaccinated participants had 37% lower total RNA concentration than controls (4.02 +/- 0.09 vs 6.38 +/- 0.14 ng/uL, p=6 months post-ChAdOx1, Nigerians show reduced peripheral blood RNA without sustained ACE2/TMPRSS2 upregulation. The sex-specific TMPRSS2 pattern suggests hormone and vaccine interactions previously unreported in African cohorts and highlights the need for sex-disaggregated molecular surveillance. Region-specific reference gene validation is recommended for Nigerian transcriptomic studies.

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22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Communication-Efficient Neural Tangent Kernels for Heterogeneous Decentralized Federated Learning

Authors:
Li Xia↗

arXiv:2512.12737v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Decentralized federated learning (DFL) enables collaborative model training without a central server, but converges slowly under statistical heterogeneity. Recent work has shown that neural tangent kernel (NTK) methods achieve faster convergence than gradient-based updates in DFL, while momentum has proven effective for accelerating gradient-based FL. However, applying momentum to NTK updates can destabilize training under heterogeneous data. We propose SPARK, which addresses this instability with a stage-wise annealed soft-label regularizer evaluated on neighborhood-aggregated data, so that momentum can accelerate NTK updates stably. Under high heterogeneity, SPARK converges about 3$\times$ faster than baselines and lowers the total communication to a target accuracy by up to about 70\%, and it attains higher accuracy across heterogeneity levels. We further study random projection as an optional Jacobian-compression strategy for bandwidth-constrained settings. We validate the approach across multiple datasets, network topologies, and heterogeneity levels.

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23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Scalable Production Scheduling: Linear Complexity via Unified Homogeneous Graphs

Authors:
Jonathan Hoss↗Moritz Link↗Noah Klarmann↗

arXiv:2604.23841v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Efficiently solving the Job Shop Scheduling Problem in real-world industrial applications requires policies that are both computationally lean and topologically robust. While Reinforcement Learning has shown potential in automating dispatching rules, existing models often struggle with a scalability bottleneck caused by quadratic graph complexity or the architectural overhead of heterogeneous layers. We introduce a unified graph framework that employs feature-based homogenization to project distinct node roles into a shared latent space. This allows a standard homogeneous Graph Isomorphism Network to capture complex resource contention with linear complexity, ensuring low-latency inference for large-scale industrial applications. Our empirical results demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance while exhibiting consistent zero-shot generalization. We identify the job-to-machine ratio as the primary driver of policy effectiveness, rather than absolute problem size. Based on this, we propose a hypothesis of structural saturation, demonstrating that policies trained on critically congested instances ($\mathcal{J} \approx \mathcal{M}$) learn scale-invariant resolution strategies. Agents trained at this saturation point internalize invariant conflict-resolution logic, allowing them to treat massive rectangular instances as a sequential concatenation of saturated sub-problems. This approach eliminates the need for expensive scale-specific retraining and prevents overfitting to statistical shortcuts, providing a robust and efficient pathway for deploying RL solutions in dynamic production environments.

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24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Applications of quantum annealing to magnetic dipole hyperfine structure constants: First results beyond energies for atoms

Authors:
Boni Paul↗Subimal Deb↗Per J\"onsson↗J\"orgen Ekman↗Bhanu Pratap Das↗

arXiv:2606.20166v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We report the first results of the magnetic dipole hyperfine structure (HFS) constants of neutral $\mathrm{Li}$, Li-like $\mathrm{Be}$, neutral $\mathrm{Na}$, and Na-like $\mathrm{Mg}$ using a modified version of the Quantum Annealer Eigensolver (QAE) algorithm on D-Wave's quantum hardware. The results are benchmarked against relativistic configuration interaction with multiconfiguration Dirac Hartree-Fock (MCDHF) calculations using the General-purpose Relativistic Atomic Structure Package (GRASP), and simulated annealing. In our modified QAE, a zooming-and-sigma-annealing approach with a floating-point encoding scheme is adopted to estimate the ground-state eigenvalue and eigenvector of the relativistic Dirac-Coulomb Hamiltonian matrices ($H_{\mathrm{DC}}$) constructed from 11 or fewer configuration state functions (CSFs). For calculations with extended correlation orbital sets, we applied a CSF truncation scheme, retaining only CSFs (up to 12) that make significant contributions to the ground-state wavefunction. Our modified QAE precision is kept limited to three decimal places (up to 10 qubits). Hardware demonstrations on the D-Wave quantum processing unit (QPU) yielded results that were completely consistent with GRASP (at the chosen precision) in determining the magnetic dipole HFS constants, with accuracy varying across systems and $H_{\mathrm{DC}}$ matrix dimensions.

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25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

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

Authors:
Gabriel Diaz-Ireland↗Diego Prieto-Herr\'aez↗Mario Garc\'ia Peces↗Javier Vel\'azquez↗Devika Jain↗

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

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